Fredrik Barth’s Saxon Ancestor and Anthropology of Europe

Abstract

Fredrik Barth, the editor of Ethnic Groups and Boundaries, was a descendant of a Saxon. This means that the act of crossing the ethnic boundary and the change of ethnic membership happened in his own ancestral family, amidst Norwegian society. Barth´s own ancestry thus contained potentially all that was necessary for analyses of the kind that form the core of paradigm-shifting work of Ethnic Groups and Boundaries. Barth and other authors of the volume, however, based their theoretical model of ethnic groups and relations on materials from faraway, typically non-Western societies, and thus confirmed anthropology as a science of exotic groups and peoples. By placing the venues of trans/formation of ethnic identities into exotic locales, the volume also conduced to “exoticization” of these processes. As a consequence, the volume contributed to dismissing of Europe as a proper place for anthropological fieldwork and discriminating against the anthropology of Europe as a relevant discourse. The author tries to decolonize social anthropology and promote the anthropology of Europe, by pointing out to the fact that the same phenomena may have been observed in Europe, in the very societies and strata, of which anthropologist are a part.