expressed in British social anthropology, for example, by Meyer Fortes and
by Edmund Leach, and in American anthropology by Roger Keesing, who
was influenced by these thinkers. Barth had just spent a year at the London
School of Economics and had met Leach there.
Barth used this distinction productively in much of his later work. He
concentrated on the social structure side of analysis and played it off
against culture. His groundbreaking analysis of Swat Pathan politics is
set into descriptions which take Pathan culture into account but look at
how individual leaders use these cultural forms to increase their power. In
his edited bookEthnic Groups and Boundaries( 1969 ) one of the themes is
how culture is used to maintain boundaries between identities, but can by
the same token become a mark of a new identity for individuals or house-
hold units if people cross over such boundaries.
The seeds of Barth’s later thought can therefore be seen in the Kurdish
study. Its sharp focus was apparently not appreciated by Barth’s Ph.D.
Committee, however. The Committee of senior people included Gutorm
Gjessing, Director of the Ethnographic Museum at the University of Oslo.
Barth had not got on well with Gjessing, whose vision of anthropology
seemed antiquated to Barth, as it was based on the idea that an anthro-
pologist could study any aspect of culture and should try to do so. (In
principle, we may note in passing, there is nothing intrinsically invalid
about this kind of holism as a theoretical stance, but as a recipe for the
practicalities offieldwork by a Ph.D. student, it was unproductive.) Barth,
by contrast, was influenced by British social anthropology of the time,
with its emphasis on contemporary social relations. In any case, his dis-
sertation seems to have appeared unduly precocious to his august com-
mittee, or at least Barth himself later speculates to that effect, because he
was only 23 years old at the time he submitted it. Eriksen (p. 22) notes
that no one on the Committee was in thefield of the new social anthro-
pology, and that this may explain why they decided to ask the Oxford-
based anthropologist, E. E. Evans-Pritchard, if the dissertation would be
given a pass mark in Oxford. Evans-Pritchard responded, it seems, by
saying that it would not, because it was based on less than a year’sfield-
work, which in Oxford was required, on grounds that it was necessary for
proper understanding of the society to observe a complete seasonal cycle
of community activities (a stipulation that is arbitrary in several ways,
including that social life is not always centered on a stable and recurring
seasonal round within a specified period of months or other units of time).
Barth later missed out on receiving the Curl Bequest essay prize of the
9 AGAINST -ISMS 83