Royal Anthropological Institute in 1958, and he later surmised that he had
not been respectful enough of Evans-Pritchard’s work on the segmentary
political system of the Nuer in that essay (Evans-Pritchard 1940 ), and so
had been denied the prize. There is more than a tinge here of a feeling of
opposition between Cambridge, where Barth went to present his further
findings of hisfieldwork with the Swat Pathan people in Pakistan, and
Oxford, where Evans-Pritchard was Professor. In any case, Barth’s even-
tual Ph.D. dissertation at Cambridge was based on the Pathan study and
he was awarded the degree there in 1957. No doubt it helped him that
Edmund Leach, as well as Meyer Fortes, was there, and they were leading
exponents of the social anthropology approach. We see here a classic case
of swings and roundabouts that operate in academia: disfavored by some,
supported by others, Barth swiftly made his way to the fore, and he did so
in Anglophone contexts of publication, which were taking the place of the
German language previously used for dissertation-writing in Scandinavia
(Eriksen, p. 49), which probably also reflected an untheorized holism or
omnium-gatherum approach of the kind we noted above.
The structure of the argument in Barth’s Kurdish study was as we have
already remarked, the forerunner of his famous treatment of ethnicity in
Ethnic Groups and Boundaries( 1969 ). Here, too, he contrasted social
structures and cultures. Eriksen notes (p. 103) that Barth argued in this
volume that“ethnic differences do not correspond to cultural differ-
ences.”Instead what constitutes ethnic groups is the social boundaries
that they maintain and the mutual stereotypes of one another they develop
(p. 103) and maintain. They may actually be culturally similar, yet by
investing in social boundaries they keep separate in social terms, and
thus maintain separate identities. This innovative concentration on the
creation and maintenance of social boundaries gave a considerable boost
to the analytical understanding of ethnicity in many different places
around the world. Boundaries fall within the realm of social structure.
Of course, it remains true that cultural aspects are often put forward as
reasons for separate identities. But this holds only if some differences are
deliberately made into a discourse of reasons for separate identities, inter-
marriage often being a prime site of contestations in this sphere.
Barth’s early difficulties with his Ph.D. Committee reveal the site in
which paradigms are regularly reproduced or contested. Written in
broader forums, such processes show how‘-isms’themselves emerge, for
example, the trail of structural-functionalism, Marxism, and structuralism,
along with various‘posts’that have been applied to modify and update
84 BREAKING THE FRAMES