Product Description

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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #228940 in Books
• Published on: 2000-09-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 190 pages

From the Publisher
Also by Nigel Barley and available from Waveland Press: Grave Matters: Encounters with Death around the World (ISBN 9781577664314). Additional titles of related interest from Waveland Press: Anderson, Around the World in 30 Years: Life as a Cultural Anthropologist (ISBN 9781577660576); DeVita, Stumbling Toward Truth: Anthropologists at Work (ISBN 9781577661252); Gardner-Hoffman, Dispatches from the Field: Neophyte Ethnographers in a Changing World (ISBN 9781577664512); and Grindal-Salamone, Bridges to Humanity: Narratives on Fieldwork and Friendship, Second Edition (ISBN 9781577664246).

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
"The prevalence of factual data in anthropological monographs stems . . . from an attitude of 'when in doubt, collect facts.' This is, in a sense, an understandable approach. So off I went every day, armed with my tobacco and notebooks and paced out the fields, calculated the yields, counted the goats in a flurry of irrelevant activity. This at least had the virtue of making my weird and inexplicable ways familiar to the Dowayos and I began to know them by name." (from Chapter 6)

Customer Reviews

Accesible anthropology
You've got to love this book. I'm an anthro type anyway, but if I wasn't this book would still be highly entertaining and a great experience.

It's about a self-deprecating British anthropologist who goes to Cameroon to do fieldwork among a little-known tribe called the Dowayo. While he's there, he encounters strange foods, a crazy old missionary, an impossible French-speaking Dowayo assistant, illness, personal injury, beer parties in the fields, paranoid Dowayo men, and a host of other things that will alternately make you wince and laugh out loud.

For anthropologists, this is an amusing look at what it's REALLY like in the field, with none of the "blood and guts" left out. For the lay reader, it's a look at what anthropologists actually do, and a highly educational one at that. If you think anthropology is all about dead white men condescending to attend a "native" ceremony now and then, this book's a kick in the head. I loved it.

Hilarious
This humorous and often hilarious account of Mr. Barley's time in Africa and the reality he experienced is very insightful. It dispelled the many inner inhibitions visitors often have about a new culture . True life in rural Africa can be boring, but there are many fascinating aspects about it if we have an open and curious mind. The works of Janvier Tisi and Chinua Achebe are other good books to read.

What a find
I had the good fortune to discover this book when it was first printed, and have since read it more than once. It is both informative and painfully hilarious. Mr. Barley's books are some of the few which I always retrieve, after loaning them away.