Thomas Fredrik Weybye Barth (22 December 1928 – 24 January 2016) was a Norwegian social anthropologist who published several ethnographic books with a clear formalist view. He was a professor in the Department of Anthropology at Boston University, and previously held professorships at the University of Oslo, the University of Bergen (where he founded the Department of Social Anthropology), Emory University and Harvard University. He was appointed a government scholar in 1985.
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. 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. 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. In 1997 he was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Personal life
Barth was married 1949–1972 to Mary ("Molly") Allee (27 April 1926 – December 1998), and he was married again 30 January 1974 to Unni Wikan, professor of social anthropology at the University of Oslo, Norway. and she was married again in 1963 to the Norwegian politician for the Conservative Party Vidkunn Hveding (1921–2001). Barth died in Norway on 24 January 2016 at the age of 87.
Main ideas and contributions
He was well known among anthropologists for his Transactionalism analysis of political processes in the Swat Valley of northern Pakistan, and his study of micro-economic processes and entrepreneurship in the area of Darfur in Sudan. The latter has been regarded as a classical example of formalist analysis in economic anthropology. During his long career, Barth has also published acclaimed studies based on field works in Bali, New Guinea, and several countries in the Middle East, thematically covering a wide array of subjects. As the editor of Ethnic Groups and Boundaries (1969), Barth outlined an approach to the study of ethnicity that focused on the ongoing negotiations of boundaries between groups of people. Barth's view was that such groups were not discontinuous cultural isolates, or logical a prioris to which people naturally belong.
Barth parted with anthropological notions of cultures as bounded entities, and ethnicity as primordial bonds. He focused on the interface and interaction between groups that gave rise to identities.