Frederik Barth interviewed by Bob Anderson 5th June 2005
0:05:17 What drew you towards anthropology? As a boy interested in evolution and palaeontology; father a geo-chemist, went to Chicago at end of war and I went with him; became student in palaeontology and anthropology 1946; interest moved to social anthropology; Chicago a marvellous place at that time, students, ex-GI’s, mature and highly motivated; started in palaeontology with Bob Braidwood who took me to the Middle East as his bone man; Redfield was Chair at Chicago but a rather distant person; Sol Tax and Lloyd Warner there too; also sociologists, Erving Goffman was almost my contemporary
6:13:06 Took it for granted that I would do graduate study; pleasure at seeing tribal people and finding how accessible they are; Iraq on Braidwood’s Jerome excavations in 1951; Robert Adams was a fellow student on the same project for a few months; drawn towards the Kurdish area; did not know of Edmund Leach’s work in the area as he was not known to anyone then; came back to Norway, looking for a place to do a doctorate; decided to study with Raymond Firth for a year and went to the L.S.E.; Firth away in Tikopia for half the year but Leach was there; disappointed at the time as really wanted to be supervised by Firth, but after two hours of meeting with Leach realised his intellectual strength
10:07:20 Leach took over as supervisor; after that year submitted work for a doctorate at Oslo and was failed; examining committee had consulted Evans-Pritchard and been told of the Oxford regulations which required at least a year of fieldwork, which I didn’t have; as Oxford would not have given me a doctorate, Oslo did the same; managed to get a five-year stipend to try again; went to Pakistan to work on the Swat; transferred the model developed in first work to the Swat; Leach moved to Cambridge at that time and as I didn’t want to submit work to Oslo, registered as a doctoral student in Cambridge
13:50:20 Leach very welcoming; Cambridge a fine intellectual experience; many of my fellow students from Chicago were in England including Elizabeth Bott, at the L.S.E. and Tom Fallers in Oxford; returned from fieldwork with the Pathans in 1954; work with them confirmed my sense that political life is struggle with many people fighting for advantage; this dynamic comes about by thinking strategically, something the Swat were well aware of
17:41:18 This work done at time when Leach’s ‘Political Systems of Highland Burma’ was published but too late to influence me; marvellous book, but it was Leach’s presence which mattered; small group of fellow students at Cambridge, but interesting, including Jean La Fontaine, Bill Dunning, a Canadian, Southwold, and Nur Yalman came back in my second year; did not intend to stay in Cambridge as I wanted to bring anthropology to Norway
20:49:20 Bought this house in 1961, not far from father’s house; he didn’t stay on in Chicago but spent much of his time abroad as not much opportunity in Norway at that time; I was born in Germany; father went to Washington for five years, then returned to Norway for the duration of the war; own life follows similar pattern of participating in the world but Norway is home; have encouraged other Norwegian students to do the same, particularly during time in Bergen; influence of mother
24:47:13 Completed dissertation and turned it into a book which was published in 1959; came back to Oslo in 1957 directly after taking degree; climate not very receptive so lived by getting yearly stipends; Columbia invited me for a year’s visiting professorship in about 1961 which added to my reputation so that Bergen asked me to join them in about 1962; around 1953-4 met Robert Pehrson and we agreed to work together with an ecology/politics perspective, he went to Baluchistan and died in the field; I was given his material by his widow and used it as a lure to get some money to go back to Pakistan from the Wenner-Gren Foundation; went to Baluchistan and also revisited Swat in c1961-2; with luck the Baluch with whom Pehrson worked are bilingual in Pashto and Baluchi so able to communicate; the fact that he had died there opened the society for me and therefore possible to write a monograph on the basis of his material
29:05:14 The politics and ecology model anticipated by Leach in ‘Political Systems’; Firth’s interest in creating an economic anthropology compatible; ecological model aided by own knowledge of biology; in the ‘60’s this model was used to set up competing claims for where the real truth was; for me it has always been fundamental; this is the way I frame local life and seems uncontroversial; it has estranged me to the more structuralist kind of perspective, which tends to oversimplify; they are looking for fundamentals from something that is fortuitous and dynamic
34:33:01 Explanation of “A season is a stretch of country”; based on observations of the Basseri nomads and their negotiation of space and time; disappointed by Durkheim and Mauss on the subject as had already reasoned thus; use of concept of transactionalism; is evident in Leach’s thinking but not exploited; criticism of the idea of transactionalism as immoral; reciprocity and trust
42:37:55 Interest moved to the Pacific as would learn most in a new place; wanted to focus on ritual and meaning as it was topic of much anthropological work at the time; wanted to gather a primary body of materials; went to an untouched area of New Guinea to be able to look in detail at ritual to see how it is constructed; collected some myths that were Levi-Straussian but most of focus was on the imagery of ritual among the Baktamen
47:31:15 Described Basseri as having a poverty of ritual and New Guinea Highlands have abundance of ritual, Baktamen in between; too unsophisticated to question my interest in their cosmology; aged forty at that time, at Bergen building a department, took a year off for this fieldwork in 1968; politics not a significant factor among the Baktamen; it was violent as they fought all the time; found that more than a third of deaths in the total population were caused by physical violence; conflictual without a view of strategy as among the Pathan; my expectation is to be surprised so didn’t try to force what I found there into previously established mould
55:34:04 Have not been back recently but did go
back in c1970 when they found gold in the area; I learn more by going somewhere
else although changes in