Professor
Areas of Expertise
Afghanistan; Social anthropology; nomadic peoples
View Professor Barfield’s CV – September 2024
AboutÂ
Thomas Barfield is a social anthropologist who conducted ethnographic fieldwork among pastoral nomads in northern Afghanistan in the mid 1970s as well as shorter periods of research in Xinjiang, China and post-Soviet Central Asia. He is the author of The Central Asian Arabs of Afghanistan (1981), The Perilous Frontier: Nomadic Empires and China (1989) and Afghanistan: An Atlas of Indigenous Domestic Architecture (1991). After 2001 his research returned to Afghanistan, focusing on law, government organization and economic development issues on which he has written extensively. In 2006 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship that led to the publication of Afghanistan: A cultural and political history (2010). That book received an outstanding title award for American Library Association in 2011 and was republished in an expanded second edition in 2022 . He has served as President of the American Institute for Afghanistan Studies since 2005. His most recent book, Shadow Empires, explores how distinctly different types empires arose and sustained themselves as the dominant polities of Eurasia and North Africa for 2500 years before disappearing in the 20th century.
Selected Publications
- 2023. Shadow Empires: An alternative imperial history. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
- 2022. Afghanistan: A cultural and political history (2nd edition). Princeton: Princeton University Press.
- 1997. (executive editor) The dictionary of anthropology. Oxford and Malden, MA: Blackwell.
- 1989. The perilous frontier: Nomadic empires and China, 221 BC to AD 1757. Oxford: Blackwell.
Courses
- CAS AN 347/747 Afghanistan (Area)
- CAS AN 440/640 Shadow Empires
- CAS AN 240 Legal Anthropology