Download or read book The Innocent Anthropologist written by Nigel Barley and published by Waveland Press. This book was released on 2000-08-23 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book A Plague of Caterpillars written by Nigel Barley and published by . This book was released on 2018-11 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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).
Download or read book Island of Demons written by Nigel Barley and published by Monsoon Books. This book was released on 2009-08-01 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Many men dream of running away to a tropical island and living surrounded by beauty and exotic exuberance. Walter Spies did more than dream. He actually did it. In the 1920s and 30s, Walter Spies — ethnographer, choreographer, film maker, natural historian and painter — transformed the perception of Bali from that of a remote island to become the site for Western fantasies about Paradise and it underwent an influx of foreign visitors. The rich and famous flocked to Spies’ house in Ubud and his life and work forged a link between serious academics and the visionaries from the Golden Age of Hollywood. Charlie Chaplin, Noel Coward, Miguel Covarrubias, Vicki Baum, Barbara Hutton and many others sought to experience the vision Spies offered while Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, the foremost anthropologists of their day, attempted to capture the secret of this tantalizing and enigmatic culture. Island of Demons is a fascinating historical novel, mixing anthropology, the history of ideas and humour. It offers a unique insight into that complex and multi-hued world that was so soon to be swept away, exploring both its ideas and the larger than life characters that inhabited it.
Download or read book Noble Savages written by Napoleon A. Chagnon and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2014-02-18 with total page 544 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Biography.
Download or read book Stumbling Toward Truth written by Philip R. DeVita and published by Waveland Press. This book was released on 2000-05-09 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Around the World in 30 Years written by Barbara Gallatin Anderson and published by Waveland Press. This book was released on 1999-08-26 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Snow Over Surabaya written by Nigel Barley and published by Monsoon Books. This book was released on 2017-03-01 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Not many British schoolgirls have grown up to become revolutionary heroes of distant, eastern nations but Muriel Stewart Walker did just that. Under a multitude of different names – ‘K’tut Tantri’ and ‘Surabaya Sue’ being the best know – she joined in the struggle for Indonesian independence after the Second World War and broadcast its revolutionary message to the world on Rebel Radio. But she did more and smuggled arms, and probably drugs, to help finance the new Republic and experienced bloody battle in the British attack on Surabaya that some have seen as a war crime. She went on to become an intimate of the revolutionary leaders and finally lived to see Indonesia take its place amongst the free nations of the world. Glaswegian ‘Surabaya Sue’ is virtually unknown in the West and, even in Indonesia, there have always been doubts about her version of events that many have dismissed outright as a blatant mixture of outrageous fantasy and dishonest omissions. Snow over Surabaya happily embraces those doubts and brings a new, spirited account of her adventures in that tempestuous world.
Download or read book Toraja written by Nigel Barley and published by Monsoon Books. This book was released on 2013-09-01 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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".
Download or read book Adventures in a Mud Hut written by Nigel Barley and published by . This book was released on 1983 with total page 189 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Describes the misadventures of a novice anthropologist trying to study the culture of the Dowayo people of the Cameroons
Download or read book Dispatches from the Field written by Andrew Gardner and published by Waveland Press. This book was released on 2006-04-17 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Penned by advanced graduate students amidst their dissertation fieldwork, these provocative essays capture the challenges and intricacies of that anthropological rite of passage. The collections authors frankly portray the mistakes they made in the field, their struggle to analyze the events unfolding before their eyes, the psychological and emotional frustration seemingly endemic to doing ethnography, and the ethical complexities of researching living people. The authors present these essays not as models of ideal fieldwork or as a series of lessons about how to overcome potential hurdles one faces in the field, but rather as a window into the complexities of being an ethnographer in the contemporary world. Against a backdrop of subject populations increasingly informed about global relations of power and, more specifically, informed about the topography of American imperialism, these humanistic essays vividly reflect recent shifts in both the focus and methods of anthropological research, as well as the dilemmas underlying the construction of anthropological knowledge. They are meant to spark discussion and debate. While tailored to an audience relatively new to ethnographic fieldwork (and intended as a teaching tool), this collection should appeal to anthropologists and ethnographers at all points in their career.
Download or read book The Savage and the Innocent written by David Maybury-Lewis and published by Beacon Press (MA). This book was released on 1988 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco written by Paul Rabinow and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2016-08-05 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this landmark study, now celebrating thirty years in print, Paul Rabinow takes as his focus the fieldwork that anthropologists do. How valid is the process? To what extent do the cultural data become artifacts of the interaction between anthropologist and informants? Having first published a more standard ethnographic study about Morocco, Rabinow here describes a series of encounters with his informants in that study, from a French innkeeper clinging to the vestiges of a colonial past, to the rural descendants of a seventeenth-century saint. In a new preface Rabinow considers the thirty-year life of this remarkable book and his own distinguished career.
Download or read book Vagabond Dreams written by Ryan Murdock and published by Polyphemus Limited. This book was released on 2012 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Vagabond Dreams" is a true story of awakening among a cast of fascinating characters at the farthest margins of the map. At its heart is the uncompromising vision of rising beyond one's self-imposed limitations and truly living. This powerful map to Road Wisdom is for brave travelers determined to embrace personal freedom and create the life of their choice.
Download or read book Far Afield written by Vincent Debaene and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2014-04-04 with total page 415 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Anthropology has long had a vexed relationship with literature, and nowhere has this been more acutely felt than in France, where most ethnographers, upon returning from the field, write not one book, but two: a scientific monograph and a literary account. In Far Afield—brought to English-language readers here for the first time—Vincent Debaene puzzles out this phenomenon, tracing the contours of anthropology and literature’s mutual fascination and the ground upon which they meet in the works of thinkers from Marcel Mauss and Georges Bataille to Claude Lévi-Strauss and Roland Barthes. The relationship between anthropology and literature in France is one of careful curiosity. Literary writers are wary about anthropologists’ scientific austerity but intrigued by the objects they collect and the issues they raise, while anthropologists claim to be scientists but at the same time are deeply concerned with writing and representational practices. Debaene elucidates the richness that this curiosity fosters and the diverse range of writings it has produced, from Proustian memoirs to proto-surrealist diaries. In the end he offers a fascinating intellectual history, one that is itself located precisely where science and literature meet.
Download or read book The Trashing of Margaret Mead written by Paul Shankman and published by Univ of Wisconsin Press. This book was released on 2009-12-03 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1928 Margaret Mead published Coming of Age in Samoa, a fascinating study of the lives of adolescent girls that transformed Mead herself into an academic celebrity. In 1983 anthropologist Derek Freeman published a scathing critique of Mead’s Samoan research, badly damaging her reputation. Resonating beyond academic circles, his case against Mead tapped into important public concerns of the 1980s, including sexual permissiveness, cultural relativism, and the nature/nurture debate. In venues from the New York Times to the TV show Donahue, Freeman argued that Mead had been “hoaxed” by Samoans whose innocent lies she took at face value. In The Trashing of Margaret Mead, Paul Shankman explores the many dimensions of the Mead-Freeman controversy as it developed publicly and as it played out privately, including the personal relationships, professional rivalries, and larger-than-life personalities that drove it. Providing a critical perspective on Freeman’s arguments, Shankman reviews key questions about Samoan sexuality, the alleged hoaxing of Mead, and the meaning of the controversy. Why were Freeman’s arguments so readily accepted by pundits outside the field of anthropology? What did Samoans themselves think? Can Mead’s reputation be salvaged from the quicksand of controversy? Written in an engaging, clear style and based on a careful review of the evidence, The Trashing of Margaret Mead illuminates questions of enduring significance to the academy and beyond. 2010 Distinguished Lecturer in Anthropology at the American Museum of Natural History “The Trashing of Margaret Mead reminds readers of the pitfalls of academia. It urges scholars to avoid personal attacks and to engage in healthy debate. The book redeems Mead while also redeeming the field of anthropology. By showing the uniqueness of the Mead-Freeman case, Shankman places his continued confidence in academia, scholars, and the field of anthropology.”—H-Net Reviews
Download or read book Not a Hazardous Sport written by Nigel Barley and published by Eland Publishing. This book was released on 2019-01-17 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nigel Barley travels to Sulawesi in Indonesia to live among the Torajan people, known for their spectacular buildings and elaborate ancestor cults. At last he is following his own advice to students, to do their anthropological fieldwork 'somewhere where the inhabitants are beautiful, friendly, where you would like the food.' Barley explores the island on horseback and in buses jammed to the gunnels, and meets priests faithful to the old animist rituals. With his customary wit, he takes the reader deep into this complex but adaptable society. Reversing the habitual patterns of anthropology, Barley then invites four Torajan carvers to London to build a traditional rice barn at the Museum of Mankind. The observer becomes the observed. Now, it is Barley's turn to explain the absurdities of an English city to his bemused guests, in a glorious finale to a trilogy of anthropological journeys that began with The Innocent Anthropologist and continued with A Plague of Caterpillars (both published by Eland). A postscript, penned thirty years after these adventures had been concluded, confirms the rich arc of this story-line of role reversals.
Download or read book A Touch of Innocence written by Katherine Dunham and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1994-06 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An internationally known dancer, choreographer, and gifted anthropologist, Katherine Dunham was born to a black American tailor and a well-to-do French Canadian woman twenty years his senior. This book is Dunham's story of the chaos and conflict that entered her childhood after her mother's early death. In stark prose, she tells of growing up in both black and white households and of the divisions of race and class in Chicago that become the harsh realities of her young life. A riveting narrative of one girl's struggle to transcend the painful confusions of a family and culture in turmoil, Dunham's story is full of the clarity, candor, and intelligence that lifted her above her troubled beginnings. "A Touch of Innocence is an absorbing family chronicle written with a gift for physical detail sometimes too real for comfort. In quietly graphic prose the growing girl, the slightly older brother, the ambitious father and the kind stepmother are pictured in such human terms that when their lives get tied into harder and harder knots beyond their undoing, one can only continue to read helplessly as doom closes in upon the household."—Langston Hughes, New York Herald Tribune "A Touch of Innocence is one of the most extraordinary life stories I have ever read . . . . The content of this book is so heartbreaking that only the strongest artistic skills can keep it from leaking out into sobbing self-pity, but Katherine Dunham's art contains it, understands it and refuses to be overwhelmed by its terrors."—Elizabeth Janeway, New York Times "The first eighteen years of the famous dancer and choreographer's life are brought vividly to the reader in this first volume of her autobiography. She writes of what it is like to be a special, gifted young woman growing up in a racially mixed family in the American Middle West. A beautiful, touching and sometimes discomforting book."—Publishers Weekly "As writing it is honest, searing, graphic and touching, giving us a rather heartbreaking early view of the young American Negro who was later to make a name for herself as a dancer and choreographer."—Arthur Todd, Saturday Review
