An unpublished contribution to Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: ‘Interethnic relations in Toro’ by Axel Sommerfelt

Abstract

ABSTRACT One of the most cited anthropological books, Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social Organization of Culture Difference (Barth, Fredrik, ed. 1969a. Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social Organization of Culture Difference. Bergen: Universitetsforlaget) is an output of the symposium held in Bergen in 1967. Eleven participants took part in the symposium and eleven papers were discussed. The book, however, consists, apart from Barth's prodigious ‘Introduction’, of only seven chapters. Four papers remained unpublished. One of these unpublished contributions is ‘Inter-etniske relasjoner i Toro’ (‘Interethnic relations in Toro’) by Axel Sommerfelt. In 2019, the year of 50th anniversary of publishing Ethnic Groups and Boundaries, Sommerfelt's manuscript was disinterred from oblivion. The text presents an outline of a background of Sommerfelt's research in Western Uganda from 1958 to 1960, on which it is based, and a discussion of its terminological and conceptual point of view, with a special attention to key shift from ‘tribe’ to ‘ethnic group’. In the last part, a kind of counterfactual Ethnic Groups and Boundaries are presented, i.e. what Ethnic Groups and Boundaries might have looked like if Axel Sommerfelt's chapter had been included in the original book.