The Innocent Anthropologist: Notes from a Mud Hut
Nigel Barley left the British Museum to spend two years living with the Dowayo people in the mountains of northern Cameroon, hoping to produce the kind of clean ethnography his graduate training promised. What he found instead was a comedy of visa officials, broken cars, ambiguous informants, dysentery, and his own vanity. In this now classic memoir he writes with dry British humor about the gap between anthropological theory and the everyday reality of trying to learn a language, feed himself, and understand people who did not particularly want to be studied. It punctures a lot of academic self importance without becoming cynical about the Dowayo or the discipline. It has become required reading in anthropology programs and a favorite of general readers who love smart travel writing.
What you might want to know about The Innocent Anthropologist: Notes from a Mud Hut
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
A young British anthropologist heads to Cameroon to study the Dowayo and discovers that fieldwork is mostly bureaucracy, disease, and bewilderment.
Yes. Lewis has named The Innocent Anthropologist as one of his favorite books, describing it as one of the funniest and most honest memoirs he has read and steering interviewers toward it.
No. The book assumes no background and works as a very funny travel memoir, though anthropology students often read it as a corrective to more romantic accounts of fieldwork.
The Innocent Anthropologist: Notes from a Mud Hut was written by Nigel Barley, published in 1983 by Waveland Press.
The Innocent Anthropologist: Notes from a Mud Hut is 190 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, The Innocent Anthropologist: Notes from a Mud Hut takes most readers 3 to 4 hours to finish.
The Innocent Anthropologist: Notes from a Mud Hut is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
