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CAS
prof gives keynote address to international conference
Barth urges fellow anthropologists to recognize the power of individuals
By David J. Craig
As a young anthropologist living among indigenous New Guineans in 1968, Fredrik Barth posed questions that many social scientists might have asked: how are boys in the isolated tribe initiated as men? and, what cultural traditions get passed on from generation to generation?
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| Fredrik Barth Photo by Vernon Doucette |
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Simple queries, but Barth’s observations helped chart a new path
for anthropology. The meaning of male fertility varied substantially among
the tribe’s 180 people, Barth found, because elders improvised complex
male initiation rituals to make them colorful and compelling. His findings
challenged prevailing structuralist social theories, which saw cultural
knowledge as being transferred relatively smoothly between generations.
“I showed that people don’t simply act out their culture,
but make decisions that have important historical consequences,”
says Barth, a CAS professor of anthropology. “It would not have
been enough to simply draw a correlation between what appeared to be the
regular features of the tribe’s initiation rituals and its ideas
about fertility. By considering how people navigate and maneuver within
social structures, you can see how cultural history shifts and changes.”
Barth drove home that same message to some 4,000 colleagues last month
at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association in New
Orleans. Delivering the international conference’s prestigious keynote
address, Barth called on anthropologists to focus their research “on
the processes that happen between people, not abstract structures that
we extract from them.”
Among the people
While anthropology has moved away from “the gross structuralist
analyses” that dominated the field 40 years ago, Barth says, even
today too few anthropologists give proper attention to variations in social
processes because it is difficult to do without getting bogged down in
details. “It’s easier, and still considered proper,”
he says, “to do structuralist analyses.”
Barth certainly has the credentials to advise colleagues on how to approach
research: few anthropologists have conducted as much fieldwork or worked
in as many places. A native of Norway who built the anthropology department
at Norway’s University of Bergen from scratch in the 1960s, Barth
has written ethnographies based on his firsthand research in Iraq, Sudan,
Afghanistan, Iran, New Guinea, Oman, Bali, Bhutan, China, Norway, Britain,
and the United States. He is best known for his work on ethnicity: his
seminal 1969 book Ethnic Groups and Boundaries describes how dynamic group
identities tend to be.
And while many anthropologists give up field research to concentrate on
theoretical work upon receiving a senior academic post, Barth has barely
slowed down. “I’d rather be out on an adventure than building
up my authority in one area so that I can have my own turf to defend,”
says Barth, a warm, unassuming man who turns 75 this month. “I guess
I just have this curiosity about the world.”
So today he spends several months of the year in the isolated Himalayas
of Bhutan, which he says is “the last place in the world where the
traditional Buddhist monastic system is still fully in place and functional.”
His next book will focus on how Buddhist traditions are disseminated among
the society’s classes, including “very sophisticated monks,
illiterate people, and everybody in between.”
Barth lives in extremely primitive conditions during his two-to-three-month
stays in Bhutan, sleeping on wooden floors in small, unheated shacks,
and eating little more than dried meat and tea flavored with rancid butter.
He likes to work alone and brings no other researchers, except occasionally
his wife, the anthropologist Unni Wikan.
“The Bhutanese people, like many isolated people, are remarkably
hospitable,” Barth says when asked to describe the satisfactions
of his work. “I can arrive unannounced and unknown and just move
in with them. And then there is the kind of gambler’s thrill you
get in the field from knowing that at any point you can make a mistake
and end up collecting inadequate information. Sometimes it’s a matter
of making the right guesses to get what you need, and that’s exciting
to live with.”
Anthropological lessons
Barth’s prominence in anthropology results also from his theoretical
contributions, which were mostly developed early in his career. While
living with nomads in what today is southern Iran during the late 1950s,
for instance, he developed a complex theory of “generative processes”
to explain how populations of nomads fluctuate in accordance with the
availability of green pastures and other economic factors. The theory
was useful to social scientists who subsequently studied the demographics
of nomads in the Middle East.
In addition, Barth prides himself on being a spokesman for his field,
which he believes should contribute to public policy discussions. At BU,
where he has taught every fall since 1997, Barth encourages students to
extract lessons from their research that apply to current political issues
and to speak out. (When not in Boston, Barth splits his time between Bhutan
and Oslo, where his wife teaches.)
“I think anthropologists are in a unique position among social scientists
because our subjects aren’t numbers in a demographic chart or survey
respondents,” says Barth, who frequently gives public lectures and
writes op-ed pieces. “Rather, we live with them and learn their
problems, attitudes, and priorities.
“Anthropology has a tremendous amount to share because most people
know their own worlds and not other people’s worlds,” he continues.
“The challenge for anthropologists is to do fieldwork and come home
and not only write about it for other anthropologists. We need to identify
important policy debates going on and join them.”
13 December 2002
Boston University
Office of University Relations