Fredrik Barth

Biography and major works

Barth was born in Leipzig, Germany to Thomas Barth, a professor of geology, and his wife Randi Thomassen. They also had a daughter. Barth and his sister grew up in Norway in an academic family. Their uncle was Edvard Kaurin Barth, a professor of zoology. Fredrik Barth developed an interest in evolution and human origins. When his father was invited to give a lecture at the University of Chicago, the younger man accompanied him and decided to attend the university, enrolling in 1946. He earned an MA in paleoanthropology and archaeology in 1949.

After receiving his MA, Barth returned to Norway, keeping a connection to Chicago faculty. In 1951 he joined an archaeological expedition to Iraq led by Robert Braidwood. Barth stayed on after the expedition was over, and conducted ethnographic population studies with the Kurdish population. He spent a year at the London School of Economics (LSE) writing up this data, and in 1953 published his first book, Principles of Social Organization in Southern Kurdistan.

Barth had originally planned to submit the manuscript of his Principles of Social Organization as his Ph.D. dissertation, but was unsuccessful in doing so. He continued graduate study, moving to Cambridge, England to study with Edmund Leach, whom he had previously worked with at the LSE. For his PhD, Barth conducted fieldwork in Swat, Pakistan; his completed dissertation was published in 1959 as Political Leadership among Swat Pathan. Shortly afterwards, he was part of a UNESCO study of pastoral nomadism which focused on the Basseri in what is now Iran. From this work, he published the 1961 monograph Nomads of South Persia.

In 1961, Barth was invited to the University of Bergen to create an anthropology department and serve as the chair. This important and prestigious position gave him the opportunity to introduce British-style social anthropology to Norway. The only other existing anthropology program, at the University of Oslo, was older and connected to the university's ethnographic museum (now the Museum of Cultural History). It was based in Victorian folklore and museum approaches. By founding the department at Bergen, Barth hoped to create a modern, world-class department with an approach similar to those found in England and the United States.

Barth remained at Bergen from 1961 to 1972. During this time his own work developed in two key ways. First, he developed research projects inside Norway (and published a study entitled The Role of the Entrepreneur in Social Change in Northern Norway in 1963). Second, he began writing more purely theoretical works that secured his international reputation within anthropology. These included Models of Social Organization (1966) and especially the small, edited volume, Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social Organization of Cultural Difference (1969). Barth's introduction to Ethnic Groups and Boundaries became his most well-known essay and "ended up among the top 100 on the social science citation index for a number of years.".

In 1974 Barth moved to Oslo, where he became professor of social anthropology and head of the city's Museum of Cultural History. During this period, anthropology was changing. Marxism and interpretive approaches were becoming more central while Barth's focus on strategy and choice was being taken up by economics and related disciplines. Barth shifted to studying meaning and ritual as developed in ethnic groups, and conducted research in Papua New Guinea, where he conducted fieldwork with the Baktaman. He published several works from these studies, namely the Ritual and Knowledge among the Baktaman of New Guinea (1975). He also continued studies in the Middle East, conducting fieldwork in Oman with his wife Unni Wikan. This resulted in his 1983 volume Sohar: Culture and Society in an Omani Town.

Barth received a state scholarship from the Norwegian government in 1985. He left the country to accept two positions in the United States—at Emory University from 1989 to 1996, and Boston University from 1997 to 2008. By this time, Barth and his wife "felt we had both done our share of physically strenuous fieldwork" and decided to begin an ethnographic project in Bali. He developed an interest in the anthropology of knowledge at around this time, an interest which he explored in his book Balinese Worlds (1993). More recently, he has also conducted research in Bhutan.

Barth was a member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters. In 1997 he was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.