300123 Models of Social Organization in Social Anthropology: The work of Fredrik Barth (S) (WiSe 2024/2025)

Unlike cultural anthropologist, who love to refer to culture to explain human behavior, Barth always had his eyes on specific constellations or situations where the strategizing or just mutually adaptive behavior of the people involved could be seen as generating the social institutions and mutual expectations in question. He even argued that it might perhaps be better to abandon the notion of culture and its conflation with a particular people as the puppets dancing along with its demands all together and, instead, seek out the distribution and reproduction of knowledge and the evolution of variation within only loosely demarcated populations to account for the observed variety or homogeneity. Both theoretical moves should make us appreciate the inertia, diversity, and the potentials for innovation and social change in new ways and abandon the warmongering obsessions triggered of by todays academic love and praise of cultural identity. In this seminar we will study some of Barth´s theoretical essays and his more or less now classical ethnographies on nomads in Kurdistan and Iran, the Pakthun in the borderlands between north west Pakistan and Afghanistan, the very small group of the Baktaman of New Guinea, still living under stone-age conditions, when Barth was visiting them, the diverse and various arrangements that other anthropologists, with a bent for all covering cultural abstractions subsumed under the title of Balinese Culture, and the plural society of Sohar (Oman).

Bibliography

Everything published by Fredrik Barth.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-hrmGvMZAs