[Kenneth and Elise Boulding]

This tape is raw footage of an interview with academics Kenneth and Elise Boulding. The topics include: and brief recollections of Albert Einstein.

00:00Copy video clip URL Tape begins abruptly. Footage of Kenneth and Elise putting on their microphones and setting up the interview shot.

06:28Copy video clip URL Interview begins informally, discussing current world events. They discuss trying to come out of the Cold War in regards to different relations with Russia, etc. Elise: “We’ve wasted 45 years in [the] Cold War when we could’ve been doing all this (heading off the problems the Soviet Union had then).” The conversation turns to helping the East Bloc countries vs. Third World countries, grass roots and individual politics, and non-governmental scientific organizations vs. governmental scientific organizations.

15:21Copy video clip URL Jim Sternfield adjusts the camera. He then asks them about their travels. Elise discusses her role as Secretary General for the International Peace Research Association. In this role, she tried to connect various activist organizations (peace, environmental, human rights, etc.) and scholars. Networking is the major aspect of her travels, as well as reporting them. Kenneth’s travels are mostly teaching-he was most recently in Tokyo. Both recently went to England, Kenneth for a economic conference, Elise to meet with an interdisciplinary scholar group for a peace movement action plan.

24:45Copy video clip URL The Bouldings discuss the celebration of their 50th wedding anniversary and their successful relationship in spite of their differing world views. They work on having separate activities as well as joint activities. This leads into comments on their retired life and aging. Kenneth: “I feel my seventies were the most creative decade of my life.” He still is teaching. Elise calls retirement “repatterning…One spends one’s time differently.” They’ve also downgraded to a small apartment from a house, making life simpler. Elise’s Secretary General post has just ended, and the next few months will be a time of “reflection, contemplation, reading, and some writing” at a mountain cabin they own.

32:19Copy video clip URL The Bouldings discuss the causes of our culture’s “youth obsession” and maturity. The Bouldings do not agree that having an identity crisis in later years is necessarily bad. However, they note poorer people in this stage of life don’t have as much freedom. Other than financial stability, they note freedom can come from other areas, such as freedom from compulsion and the pressures from growing up (having a family, job growth, etc.). Elise used to have her students visualize their own futures, and discusses how the concept of creating/creation needs to come back to modern life. Kenneth discusses his brush with prostate cancer. The ‘identity crisis’ idea is revisited.

50:52Copy video clip URL Sternfield readjusts the camera so he can get close-up shots and discusses the footage he wants to get.

51:35Copy video clip URL The Bouldings discuss their recollections of the beginnings of the anti-Vietnam War movement. Kenneth mentions the idea of teaching all night as a protest: “It was a nice example of conflict resolution.”

54:49Copy video clip URL The Bouldings discuss the nöosphere concept (de Chardin) and learning from failed experiments. Elise links the nöosphere concept to New Age thinking & Consciousness movements and its effects on optimism.

1:00:00Copy video clip URL The interview begins to come to an end. Kenneth talks about having an office directly below Einstein’s at Princeton. Unfortunately they never met: “I could feel the emanations coming through the floor.” He also discusses some of the work he was doing at the time.

1:02:32Copy video clip URL The Bouldings get up; Sternfield wants to film them moving in their apartment.

1:03:08Copy video clip URL End of tape.