Fredrik Barth is one of the towering figures of twentieth-century anthropology. This intellectual history traces the development of Barth’s ideas and explores the substance of his contributions. In an accessible style, Thomas Hylland Eriksen’s biographical study reveals the magic of ethnography to professional anthropologists and non-practitioners alike.
Exploring his six decade career, it follows Barth from early ecological studies in Pakistan, to political studies in Iran, to groundbreaking fieldwork in Norway, New Guinea, Bali and Bhutan. Eriksen argues that Barth’s voracious appetite for fieldwork holds the key to understanding his remarkable intellectual development and the insights it produced. The book raises many of the same questions that emerge from Barth’s own work – of unity and diversity, of culture and relativism, of art and science.
Table of Content
List of Illustrations
Series Preface
Preface
Part I: A Man of Action
1. Watching and Wandering
2. The Power and the Glory
3. Nomadic Freedom
4. Entrepreneurship
5. The Global Theorist
6. Ethnic Groups and Boundaries
Part II: An Anthropology of Knowledge
7. Baktaman Vibrations
8. A New Kind of Complexity
9. Turbulent Times
10. Cultural Complexity
11. The Guru and the Conjurer
12. Between Art and Science
Notes
List of Works by Fredrik Barth
List of Other References
Index
About the author
Thomas Hylland Eriksen is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo and former President of the European Association of Social Anthropologists. He is the author of numerous classics of anthropology, including Small Places, Large Issues – 4th Edition (Pluto, 2015) and What is Anthropology? – 2nd Edition (Pluto, 2017).
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