The Innocent Anthropologist: Notes From A Mud Hut
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: Very good
Pages: Good
What happens when a freshly minted Oxford-trained anthropologist is dropped into the remote hills of Cameroon with little more than a notebook, good intentions, and a hopeless ignorance of what awaits him? The Innocent Anthropologist: Notes from a Mud Hut chronicles Nigel Barley's gloriously ill-fated fieldwork among the Dowayo people of northern Cameroon, presenting an account that is as self-deprecating as it is revelatory. With wry, unsparing honesty, Barley details the daily humiliations, bureaucratic absurdities, language catastrophes, and genuine moments of cross-cultural connection that defined his two years in the field. Far from a dry academic treatise, this memoir dismantles the myth of the infallible Western researcher, arguing instead that confusion and vulnerability are the true gateways to understanding another culture. Barley's prose is sharp, witty, and refreshingly candid — a style that earned the book its place as a beloved classic in both anthropological and popular reading circles. It stands as a singular work that illuminates the vast gulf between textbook theory and lived human experience, and leaves the reader wondering just how much any outsider can ever truly know about a world not their own.
Author: Nigel Barley
Format: Hardback
Genre: Anthropology
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: Very good
Pages: Good
What happens when a freshly minted Oxford-trained anthropologist is dropped into the remote hills of Cameroon with little more than a notebook, good intentions, and a hopeless ignorance of what awaits him? The Innocent Anthropologist: Notes from a Mud Hut chronicles Nigel Barley's gloriously ill-fated fieldwork among the Dowayo people of northern Cameroon, presenting an account that is as self-deprecating as it is revelatory. With wry, unsparing honesty, Barley details the daily humiliations, bureaucratic absurdities, language catastrophes, and genuine moments of cross-cultural connection that defined his two years in the field. Far from a dry academic treatise, this memoir dismantles the myth of the infallible Western researcher, arguing instead that confusion and vulnerability are the true gateways to understanding another culture. Barley's prose is sharp, witty, and refreshingly candid — a style that earned the book its place as a beloved classic in both anthropological and popular reading circles. It stands as a singular work that illuminates the vast gulf between textbook theory and lived human experience, and leaves the reader wondering just how much any outsider can ever truly know about a world not their own.