Initiating language training at Chicago under the National Defense Language Fellowships, I immersed myself in Lambton’s Persian Grammar (1953) and Persian Vocabulary (1954), which were regarded as the best learning tools available. No great student of language was I, but I was tickled to more or less master the Arabic alphabet in a day. (Many uninitiated see the Arabic alphabet as an insurmountable obstacle, when in fact it is the easiest step in acquiring Middle Eastern languages.) From then on, it was all downhill. Nonetheless, I muddled on with Persian, in Chicago and in Iran, and later while writing at McGill, particularly for Black Tents of Baluchistan, often referring to Lambton’s language books.

I shall not attempt here an overview of Lambton’s distinguished career, which has been reviewed in the obituaries in the British press, as well as offered in reflections by Lambton herself in 1988. Rather, I shall simply report on my academic dependence on her work and a couple of very tangential contacts I had with her.

Lambton’s Landlord and Peasant in Persia is a remarkable, detailed account of 459 pages, plus fold-out map. As Lambton states in the Preface, in her reports of contemporary Iran,

I have confined myself to describing those areas of which I have personal knowledge.… The material… was collected in Persia mainly between July 1948 and September 1949 [but also 1936-37 and 1939-45]. On all three occasions I travelled widely.

In short, Lambton conducted wide-ranging field research and collected much of her information from observation and face-to-face inquiry.

The results found in Landlord and Peasant are broad in scope of both issues and geography, and deep in detail and regional variation. But it is a survey focused on a particular topic in a variety of locales, and not a comprehensive account of ways of life. As such, it is rich and invaluable, but inevitably limited and frustrating. It is a resource that many of us have used repeatedly. Certainly in Black Tents of Baluchistan, I drew on this work to provide comparative data for my Baluchi case.

Neophyte though I was when Lambton’s Persian Land Reform appeared in 1969, I had the temerity and perhaps impudence to review it for the Middle East Journal (1969), and, worse, to write a “critical comment” on it in the Muslim World (1972). In the latter, I suggested that one of Lambton’s themes, the championing of land reform by the agricultural minister and the reluctance of “those who held the reins of power” “in high places,” was poorly developed and unconvincing. Her argument, implying that the Shah opposed real land reform, was vague and unsubstantiated, and alternative theories, such as a shifting of the ruler’s power base, were not considered.

My one other indirect contact with Lambton came as a result of a contract I had with a London publisher to republish General R. E. H. Dyer’s Raiders of the Sarhad, an account of his campaign during World War One against the Yarahmadzai of northern Iranian Baluchistan, the tribe that I studied in the 1960s and 1970s. Apparently, or so I was told, after the forthcoming reprint was publicized, Professor Lambton told the publisher it was not worth publishing, and it was subsequently cancelled by the publisher. Perhaps Lambton was correct, for Raiders is no great work of ethnography or scholarship. Yet it is a first-hand account—by an author later to become notorious as the instigator of the Amritsar massacre—of the wild and woolly free tribes of western Baluchistan before they came under the control of the Iranian state, and I drew on it in my historical chapters of Black Tents of Baluchistan.

Anthropologists are the amateurs of the socials sciences—the jacks of all trades and masters of none. We do psychology, politics, economics, ecology, medicine, and so on. Arguably the same could be said of our mastery of area studies: dicey language, dubious history, superficial literature. What we do manage to get, we get through the efforts and accomplishments of area specialists such as Ann K. S. Lambton, without whose instruction we would be even more hopeless than we usually are. For that, we owe a great debt.

Philip Carl Salzman is a member of MESH.