such wholesale theoretical systems, like patches put on burst bicycle tires.
The overall example of Barth’s work is inspiring because, as Eriksen makes
very clear and as applies notably also to his own corpus of well-balanced
writings, Barth never joined any bandwagon. He was driven instead by a
variety of interests in different areas, by the challenges that eachfield-site
proved to present, and by an untiring pursuit of appropriate forms of
analysis and theory that could be attained precisely through attention to
the particular case. Eriksen surveys this point through a discussion of the
situation in the 1960s, when social anthropology was in an exciting phase
of growth (pp. 98 ff). He writes that Barth thought that Levi-Strauss’s
structuralism, with its primary object of elucidating the features of the
human mind, was“too intellectualizing and detached from ongoing social
process and tangible life-worlds”(p. 99). He felt the same about the
Oxford debates on the universality or otherwise of rationality, although
Eriksen points out that Barth’s own work on the importance of‘transac-
tions’as constitutive of social relationships implicitly depends on an
assumption of strategic rationality.
In addition, Eriksen reports that Barth was not taken with the resur-
gence of interest in Marxist theory within anthropology. This resurgence
came in two different forms, the American one based on cultural evolution
and the French one based on a combination of Marxism and
Structuralism. Characteristically, Barth did not bend his energies to any
formal engagement with, or refutation of, either Marxism or Structuralism
as such. His response was much more immediate and personal. Eriksen
writes that Barth found these approaches lacking in“the curiosity-driven
process of discovery which he considered to be science at its best”
(p. 102). Once he exclaimed that students following a Marxist line did
not need to go to thefield at all because before doing the empirical work
“they already knew all the answers”(p. 102).
There is much to be learned from these comments. Barth himself is
credited (or saddled, perhaps) with founding an -ism of his own, transac-
tionalism, but this is something of a misnomer. What Barth actually
proposed was that in understanding social processes the specific transac-
tions people make with one another are formative. The question then
becomes, what is a transaction? Is any social action a transaction? Not
quite. A transaction is an activity of exchange, premised on the idea that
values are established or altered by this means. The actors involved may be
attempting to maximize advantages and gain power from such transac-
tions, and the approach is therefore suitable to the analysis of some
9 AGAINST -ISMS 85