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THOMAS J. BARFIELD
Professor
of Anthropology at Boston
University, Barfield took his graduate training in both sociocultural anthropology
and archeology at Harvard University where he received his Ph.D. in 1978.
He then taught at Harvard before coming to serve as chairman at Boston University
in 1989. Barfield has conducted extensive fieldwork in among nomads in northern
Afghanistan as well as a shorter period of research on the cultural and economic
impacts of decollectivazation of the Kazaks in Xinjiang, China, and the problems
of economic change, ethnicity and nationalism in post-Soviet Uzbekistan.
His current research focuses on war reconstruction and economic development
in Afghanistan as well as its political reorganization.
Barfield's published work has focused largely on contemporary and historical
nomadic peoples of Eurasia. His doctoral thesis was published as The Central Asian Arabs of Afghanistan: Pastoral
Nomadism in Transition (Texas 1981); it examined the process
of economic change from subsistence pastoralism to cash ranching. This work
was followed by a historical study of the relations between Central Eurasian
nomadic empires and China over the course of 2000 years. Entitled The Perilous
Frontier: Nomadic Empires and China (Blackwell 1989), this book presented models of
political and economic organization that explained the rise and fall of powerful
nomadic empires, including the Mongols, and their complex relationship with
China. It also argued that the cycle of rule by native and foreign dynasties
in north China presented a regular pattern of replacement based on cycles
of centralization and decentralization. Cross-cultural research on pastoral
peoples then led to publication of a comparative study, The Nomadic
Alternative (Prentice-Hall
1993), an ethnographic and historical examination of nomadic pastoral societies
in Africa, the Near East, Iranian Plateau, and Central Eurasia. Professor
Barfield has also co-written Afghanistan: An Atlas of Indigenous Domestic
Architecture (Texas 1991) which was selected as an "Outstanding
Academic Book in Art and Architecture" for 1992 by the American Library Association.
Most recently, he has just completed editing The Dictionary of Anthropology (Blackwell
1997), a major reference work that includes 600 entries written by 125 contributors
with an extensive integrated bibliography of 3,500 separate references.
Profesor Barfield offers courses on nomadic pastoralism, history and anthropology,
and social theory.
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