The wittiest introduction to the life of a social anthropologist ever written. Studying in the Cameroons for his first experience of fieldwork, Barley discovers that the society of the Dowayo people refuses to conform to the rules of his new discipline. Although set amongst a little-known tribe in the Cameroons, this slim volume reaches out to a vast audience who would otherwise never look at a travel book about West Africa, let alone an anthropological field study. A seminal text for any student in search of a laugh. Witty, hilarious and unconventional, but also a remarkable intellectual achievement; Barley manages to turn the western science of anthropology on its head, so that for once the laugh is on the professional practitioners not the observed.

This very failure, compounded by the plague of caterpillars of the book s title allows Nigel Barley to concentrate on everyday life in Dowayoland and the tattered remnants of an overripe French colonial legacy. Witchcraft fills the Cameroonian air; add an earnest German traveller showing explicit birth?control propaganda to the respectable Dowayos, an interest in the nipple?mutilating practices of highlanders, unanswered questions of the link between infertility and circumcision and you have the ingredients of a comic masterpiece. But beneath all the joy and shared laughter there is a skilful and wise reflection on the problems of different cultures ever understanding one another. The Dowayos are a mountain people that perform their elaborate, fascinating and fearsome ceremony at six or seven year intervals. It was an opportunity that was too good to miss, a key moment to test the balance of tradition and modernity. Yet, like much else in this hilarious book the circumcision ceremony was to prove frustratingly elusive.

Nigel Barley travels to the island of Sulawesi in Indonesia to live among the Torajan people, known for their spectacular buildings and elaborate ancestor cults. At last he is following his own advice to students, to do their anthropological fieldwork `somewhere where the inhabitants are beautiful, friendly, where you would like the food and there are nice flowers. With his customary wit and delight in the telling detail, he takes the reader deep into this complex but adaptable society. The mutual warmth of his friendships allows Barley to reverse the habitual patterns of anthropology. He becomes host to four Torajan carvers in London, invited to build a traditional rice barn at the Museum of Mankind. The observer becomes the observed, and it is Barley s turn to explain the absurd complexities of an English city to his bemused but tolerant guests in a magnificent, self critical finale. Not a Hazardous Sport provides a magnificent end to a trilogy of anthropological journeys that began with The Innocent Anthropologist and A Plague of Caterpillars (both published by Eland). A postscript, penned thirty years after these adventures had been concluded, confirms the rich arc of this storyline of role reversals.

Many opposing theories have been elaborated by different anthropologists in an attempt to explain the nature of symbolism. In this work Nigel Barley uses a particular ethnographic case to examine the relevance and limitations of these existing theories and to develop a new alternative approach which draws on areas of linguistics and folkloristics at one time neglected by symbolic theorists. The book is a detailed study of the symbolic universe of the Dowayos of north Cameroon, as displayed in their ritual and beliefs. Considering matters as diverse as their oral literature, their material culture and their festivals, Dr Barley's analysis develops by unfolding sequentially a map of the symbolic structures that underlie Dowayo culture and shape their apperception of the world about them. This book will be particularly useful for students. It will also interest all anthropologists concerned with the study of symbolism and with the application to anthropology of models derived from linguistics and folklore.

In 1985, Dr. Nigel Barley, senior anthropologist at The British Museum, set off for the relatively unknown Indonesian island of Sulawesi in search of the Toraja, a people whose culture includes headhunting, transvestite priests and the massacre of buffalo. In witty and finely crafted prose, Barley offers fascinating insight into the people of Sulawesi and he recounts the tale of the four Torajan woodcarvers he invites back to London to construct an Indonesian rice barn in The British Museum. Previously published as "Not a Hazardous Sport."

Sir James Brooke was an extraordinary ‘eminent’ Victorian, whose life was the stuff of legend.His curious career began in 1841 when he was caught up in a war in Brunei which had started because a party of local Dayaks had refused to furl their umbrellas in the presence of the Sultan. Brooke was an opportunist who, with the Sultan’s backing, made war on the Dayaks tribespeople and eventually found himself ruling over Sarawak – a kingdom the size of England – as a result. How he achieved it is a romantic, sometimes horrifying story. Brooke is someone that George Macdonald Fraser would scarcely dare to invent. Errol Flynn wanted to play him in a movie, seventy years after his death and his dynasty is remembered throughout South-East Asia.