Seite - 148 - in Mobile Culture Studies - The Journal, Band 2/2016

148 Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal 2 2o16 Peter Burke | Cultural displacements and intellectual moorings traditional historical training. It was very exciting to have these joint seminars with people in other disciplines, including sociology, but not anthropology: I was interested, but the anthropo- logists were not. They are more tribal, you know, the sociologists are more open to interlopers like myself from history. One day, I borrowed the book by Malinowski21 from the university library and I was walking along the path and met the anthropology professor. He looked at this book in my hand and he said, “We anthropologists don’t believe in this any more”. Which may be true, but although we were quite friendly, the subtext was “What are you doing, you’re invading my discipline”. You mention Sussex, which has been one of the young plate-glass universities and had a reputation of a radical atmosphere. How much did innovation depend on detachment from the ancient structures? A number of universities had an exciting first decade in which there was a lot of contact bet- ween teachers in different disciplines. That would go back to the new universities like Chicago and Johns Hopkins in the late 19th century, and in France it would include Strasbourg, when it became French, because it was composed of totally new people after 1919. In this favourable situation the sociologist Maurice Halbwachs went to history lectures and the historian Lucien Febvre went to sociology lectures. But you can’t keep this up when the university becomes bigger. Is this a plea for the “periphery”? The periphery can be a place of freedom. When the Soviet Union existed, Lotman22 being where he was, far from Moscow, it was possible for him to do things more freely and invent his version of semiotics in peace, in Tartu. I used to have a talk at the beginning of the year to my doctoral students and I used to say, this is a marvellous time to learn more languages and you will find the first half dozen are the most difficult, then you get used to it. And then there was a year when I had two students and they didn’t even smile. I eventually discovered that one was from Estonia, the other from Latvia. They knew eight languages each already, so of course they did not know what I was talking about. Only a million people speak Estonian, so they realise very quickly that if you want to communicate with the world, you learn other peoples’ languages because they aren’t going to learn yours. 21 Bronisław Malinowski. Argonauts of the western Pacific. An account of native enterprise and adventure in the archi- pelagoes of Melanesian New Guinea (Prospect Heights Ill: Waveland Press, 1984 (1922)) 22 Juri Lotman (1922–1993)