{"id":10214,"date":"2020-08-17T19:13:50","date_gmt":"2020-08-17T23:13:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/anthrop\/?post_type=profile&p=10214"},"modified":"2025-02-26T12:09:49","modified_gmt":"2025-02-26T17:09:49","slug":"thomas-barfield","status":"publish","type":"profile","link":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/anthrop\/profile\/thomas-barfield\/","title":{"rendered":"Thomas Barfield"},"content":{"rendered":"

Areas of Expertise<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Afghanistan; Social anthropology; nomadic peoples<\/em><\/p>\n

View Professor Barfield’s CV – September 2024<\/a><\/p>\n

About\u00a0<\/strong><\/h3>\n

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<\/em> (1981), The Perilous Frontier: Nomadic Empires and China<\/em> (1989) and Afghanistan: An Atlas of Indigenous Domestic Architecture<\/em> (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<\/em> (2010). That book received an outstanding title award for American Library Association<\/em> in 2011 and was republished in an expanded second edition in 2022 . He has served as President of the American Institute for Afghanistan Studies<\/em> since 2005. His most recent book, Shadow Empires<\/em>, 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.<\/span><\/p>\n

Selected Publications<\/strong><\/h3>\n
    \n
  • 2023. Shadow Empires: An alternative imperial history<\/em>. Princeton: Princeton University Press.<\/li>\n
  • 2022. Afghanistan: A cultural and political history<\/em> (2nd edition). Princeton: Princeton University Press.<\/li>\n
  • 1997. (executive editor) The dictionary of anthropology<\/em>. Oxford and Malden, MA: Blackwell.<\/li>\n
  • 1989. The perilous frontier: Nomadic empires and China, 221 BC to AD 1757<\/em>. Oxford: Blackwell.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n

    Courses<\/h3>\n
      \n
    • CAS AN 347\/747 Afghanistan (Area)<\/li>\n
    • CAS AN 440\/640 Shadow Empires<\/li>\n
    • CAS AN 240 Legal Anthropology<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"author":9123,"template":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/anthrop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/profile\/10214"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/anthrop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/profile"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/anthrop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/profile"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/anthrop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9123"}],"version-history":[{"count":19,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/anthrop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/profile\/10214\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16369,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/anthrop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/profile\/10214\/revisions\/16369"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/anthrop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10214"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}