Announcement of the Presentation of the IUAES Commission on Nomadic Peoples 'Lifetime Achievement award' to Professor Fredrik Barth

Abstract

It is my happy office as Chair of the Awards Committee to announce that the IUAES Commission on Nomadic Peoples presents its first ever 'Lifetime Achievement Award' to Professor Fredrik Barth for his contributions to the study of nomadic peoples. Through this honorific presentation, the Commission, on behalf of all students of nomadic peoples, wishes to express its appreciation to Professor Barth for his astute, imaginative, and powerful portrayals and analyses of nomadic peoples, and for his ground-breaking theoretical conceptions and formulations about their lives and circumstances. Each student of nomadic peoples will have her or his own reasons for being grateful to Professor Barth; each will in her or his own way have a debt to his work. I am confident that my colleagues will share in my enthusiasm for honouring Professor Barth. However, in these remarks about Professor Barth's work, I speak for myself out of my own experience, and each colleague will have to add his or her own perspective of appreciation. It is quite true that Professor Barth's work on nomads strongly influenced and inspired subsequent ethnographers of nomadic peoples (although clearly not in the way suggested by Street 1990; cf. Salzman 1995). In the mid-1960s, when I was a graduate student, I read Nomads of South Persia and various of Professor Barth's articles, and drew on them explicitly and implicitly, consciously and unconsciously in my own research, as did my coevals and those who followed. Ecologie Relationships of Ethnic Groups in Swat , North Pakistan (1956), Nomads of South Persia (1961), The Land Use Patterns of Migratory Tribes of South Persia (1960), and Nomadism in the Mountain and Plateau Areas of South West Asia (1960), offered the reader enlightening accounts of several, groundbreaking themes: first, understanding nomadic peoples in terms of their ecological adaptation; second, appreciating the role of ethnicity in ecological specialisation; third, placing nomadic peoples within a wider social and political context, and especially in their participation in a complex society involving markets and state institutions. These works went farther, demonstrating the interplay between ecology, ethnicity, and complex society, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, social, political and economic organisation among nomadic peoples. At the time of this research and writing by Professor Barth, a particular image and a model of nomadic peoples dominated anthropology. This representation