The Long Walk V - Pastoral Nomads and Anthropology: An Interview with Fredrik Barth

Abstract

In 2000, Nomadic Peoples started a series of interviews with senior scholars who have worked on nomadism and among nomadic communities. Obviously, Fredrik Barth was on our list of interviewees right from the beginning. Two years earlier, he had also graciously accepted the 'Lifetime Achievement Award' presented to him by the IUAES Commission on Nomadic Peoples (cf. Salzman 1997). All interviewers in this series have either been students or colleagues of the scholars interviewed and indeed, in some cases, the editors of Nomadic Peoples approached the scholars through these 'middlemen'. In the case of Fredrik Barth, however, this did not happen. When I first contacted him on the telephone in late March 2000 and requested the interview on behalf of the journal, I also asked him to suggest someone whom he would like to be interviewed by. His response was perhaps typical of an approach that is familiar to us all from his ethnography--rational, rather than rule-based. He generously accepted to answer questions, but added that since I had, he felt, 'kept track' of his work over the years, I could do the interview myself, rather than look for someone else to do it. While I was honoured by the suggestion, I also had a problem--I simply could not 'keep track' of Prof. Barth spatially between Norway, the US and the many other places he was going to be in, over the next several months. So we decided to do it all by snail mail and fax, and by about the middle of 2001 we had got it all done with correspondence back and forth, in bits and pieces! We ultimately decided, however, to wait and include the interview in this special issue on Iran--whose nomadic peoples Fredrik Barth rediscovered in a way for anthropology, with his classic study of the Basseri. AR: This interview is partly biographical and partly more academic. So let us begin with the question of why you considered studying anthropology. Today, this is a subject taken up by many thousands of young people, but what was it like those days, especially in Norway, which did not have one of those typical colonial contexts? FB: Anthropology was a non-subject in Norwegian education when I became a student after World War II. We had an ethnographic museum--which I had never visited--and ethnography was only marginally taught at the university as a part of geography. But I had read some palaeontology, and was interested in the emergence of the human species. So when I had the chance to go to Chicago in 1946, I chose anthropology, to study human evolution. Starting with 'minors' in palaeontology, comparative anatomy and embryology I quickly passed through the 'five fields' of anthropology in the course of three scintillating years at the University of Chicago, and ended up wanting to be a social anthropologist. When I came home to Norway in 1949, I found half-a-dozen students of my cohort who had discovered that such a field existed--that was all. AR: Am I right that your first fieldwork was among a community which many would refer to today as 'peripatetic'--the Taters of eastern Norway. Could you tell us something about how and why you chose to study this community, at a time when most European anthropologists were going out to far away, 'exotic' places, in Africa or Oceania? FB: Well, there was no finance and no future, yet I wanted to test my own ability to do anthropological fieldwork, and maybe even get some publications out of it--on a shoestring. My first work was a community study in a Norwegian mountain valley. The Tater work was done by bicycle during two summers--it attracted me because here was an exotic and different lifestyle to get to know. AR: What prompted you to move on to the Middle East? What theoretical, personal or political motivations influenced your choice of this region--was it more an interest in specific forms of social organisation, such as marriage patterns, or more in forms of production, such as pastoral nomadism? …