The Innocent Anthropologist

Nigel Barley was a ‘new anthropologist’, one of the younger generation of academics whose learning and research had been acquired in institutes, research departments, from academic journals and university libraries. But after suffering years of gentle put-downs from leathery old field-workers, their ‘teeth permanently gritted from years of dealing with natives’, he was determined to gain his own experience. The two years he spent among the Dowayo people in the Cameroons (1978-80) produced a comic masterpiece of travel writing, The Innocent Anthropologist, which remains as honest, as funny and as compelling a read as when it was first penned – and a devastating critique of academics attempting to impose their rules and their order on West African life.