Drawing Elias: Sketches from Four Interviews

Abstract

We explore below how the interviews below can shed light on a particular phase of Elias’s academic career. We argue that the interviews hold value not simply in terms of the responses Elias provides, but also in their presentation of different intellectual ‘sketches’ or ‘drawings’ of Elias in relation to what the interviewers considered to be the pressing social, cultural and political concerns of the day. This manner of treating the interviews as ‘relational clues’ stems from an approach to analysing documents as part and parcel of human figurations that we have been developing in our current work (see, again, Goodwin and Hughes 2011, and Hughes and Goodwin 2013).