The Innocent Anthropologist

Author: Nigel Barley
Publisher: Waveland Press
ISBN: 1478631023
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 190

Book Description
When British anthropologist Nigel Barley set up home among the Dowayo people in northern Cameroon, he knew how fieldwork should be conducted. Unfortunately, nobody had told the Dowayo. His compulsive, witty account of first fieldwork offers a wonderfully inspiring introduction to the real life of a cultural anthropologist doing research in a Third World area. Both touching and hilarious, Barley’s unconventional story—in which he survived boredom, hostility, disaster, and illness—addresses many critical issues in anthropology and in fieldwork.

A Plague of Caterpillars

Author: Nigel Barley
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781780601519
Category : Cameroon
Languages : en
Pages : 312

Book Description
When local contacts tipped off Nigel Barley that the Dowayo circumcision ceremony was about to take place, he immediately left London for the village in northern Cameroon where he had lived as a field anthropologist for 18 months. The Dowayos are a mountain people that perform their elaborate, fascinating and fearsome ceremony at six or seven year intervals. It was an opportunity that was too good to miss, a key moment to test the balance of tradition and modernity. Yet, like much else in this hilarious book - the circumcision ceremony was to prove frustratingly elusive.This very failure, compounded by the plague of caterpillars of the book's title allows Nigel Barley to concentrate on everyday life in Dowayoland and the tattered remnants of an overripe French colonial legacy. In the meantime, witchcraft fills the Cameroonian air, a man is lied to by his own foot and an earnest German traveller shows explicit birth-control propaganda to the respectable tribespeople. Beneath the joy and shared laughter in this comic masterpiece lies skilful and wise reflection on the problems facing people of different cultures as they try to understand one another. A Plague of Caterpillars is the second in Barley's trilogy of anthropological journeys that began with The Innocent Anthropologist and ended with Not A Hazardous Sport (all published by Eland).

Noble Savages

Author: Napoleon A. Chagnon
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 0684855119
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 544

Book Description
Biography.

Around the World in 30 Years

Author: Barbara Gallatin Anderson
Publisher: Waveland Press
ISBN: 1478607726
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 190

Book Description
Ten cultures! Barbara Gallatin Anderson brings to life a range of cultures from the tribal Hmong to a United States military base. With humor and a precision born of hands-on familiarity with the regions involved, she draws the reader into startlingly real identification with other peoples worlds: France, Denmark, Thailand, India, Morocco, Japan, Corsica, China, Russia, and the United States. Every chapter gives us insight into the ways we identify with basic anthropological themes, the challenges of applied fieldwork, and the impact of change. To a surprising extent the reader becomes the anthropologistwith all the highs and lows that are part of life as a cultural anthropologist.

Adventures in a Mud Hut

Author: Nigel Barley
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780814908808
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 189

Book Description
Describes the misadventures of a novice anthropologist trying to study the culture of the Dowayo people of the Cameroons

Toraja

Author: Nigel Barley
Publisher: Monsoon Books
ISBN: 9814423475
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 192

Book Description
In 1985, Dr. Nigel Barley, senior anthropologist at The British Museum, set off for the relatively unknown Indonesian island of Sulawesi in search of the Toraja, a people whose culture includes headhunting, transvestite priests and the massacre of buffalo. In witty and finely crafted prose, Barley offers fascinating insight into the people of Sulawesi and he recounts the tale of the four Torajan woodcarvers he invites back to London to construct an Indonesian rice barn in The British Museum. Previously published as "Not a Hazardous Sport".

The Savage and the Innocent

Author: David Maybury-Lewis
Publisher: Beacon Press (MA)
ISBN:
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 340

Book Description

Stumbling Toward Truth

Author: Philip R. DeVita
Publisher: Waveland Press
ISBN: 1478608552
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 291

Book Description
The essayists in Stumbling Toward Truth are anthropologists who have paused to share personal experiences that uncover important truths theyve learned by living with and trying to understand others. The twenty-nine poignant fieldwork tales collected here reveal much about what anthropology can teach about others as well as ourselves, the spirit of the ethnographic enterprise, and issues of crosscultural humanity and humaneness. Readers will discover from these once-private stories from around the world that much of what anthropologists learn about themselves and others is totally unanticipated. Oftentimes, cultural truths and unexpected realities are stumbled upon. These lessons, none for which social science training offered adequate preparation, remain perhaps the most memorable and critical of fieldwork.

Purity and Danger

Author: Professor Mary Douglas
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136489274
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 202

Book Description
Purity and Danger is acknowledged as a modern masterpiece of anthropology. It is widely cited in non-anthropological works and gave rise to a body of application, rebuttal and development within anthropology. In 1995 the book was included among the Times Literary Supplement's hundred most influential non-fiction works since WWII. Incorporating the philosophy of religion and science and a generally holistic approach to classification, Douglas demonstrates the relevance of anthropological enquiries to an audience outside her immediate academic circle. She offers an approach to understanding rules of purity by examining what is considered unclean in various cultures. She sheds light on the symbolism of what is considered clean and dirty in relation to order in secular and religious, modern and primitive life.

The Bushmen of Southern Africa

Author: Sandy Gall
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 344

Book Description
Facing up to a shameful history, this book celebrates the culture and courage of the first people of Africa, the Bushmen, who, over the past 200 years, have been dispossessed and almost exterminated. In Botswana - miraculously saved by the Mandela government - they are now making their last stand.