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The Innocent Anthropologist
Nigel Barrie.
This book is an honest but funny account of the author’s experiences as an anthropologist on two occasions of fieldwork in the villages of the Dovayo people in Cameroon, Africa, and brings to life how anthropologists overcame tedium, disaster, illness, and hostility in a slap-stick account of real life in the field.
Unlike a typical anthropological research report, this is a hilarious anthropological notebook. Through the humorous tone, the reader sees how the anthropologist interacts with his research subjects, how he adjusts his academic preconceptions during the interaction, and how the minutiae of fieldwork affects the results of the subsequent research, the blind spots of the research, and the reflections. So whether one is a serious reader, a bored person who just wants to pass the time or a traveler who is dumbfounded by the exoticism of the primitive African tribes, Barrie’s book is definitely an interesting choice.
To be precise, 《The Golden Bough》 is a seminal work of modern anthropology. Since its inception, it has been challenged from all sides, but it has stood the test of time brilliantly. To this day, it remains the definitive work on the origins of witchcraft and religion.
《The Golden Bough》 is based on an ancient local custom: the priest of a temple is called the “King of the Forest”, but can be held by a fugitive slave, however, any other fugitive slave who can break a branch from one of the trees he guards day and night is qualified to fight him, and if he can kill him, then he can take his place.
The origin and existence of this ancient custom is highly doubtful, for this reason, the author has traveled all over the world, collected a wealth of information on the primitive beliefs of various peoples of the world, and used the comparative historical method to systematically sort them out, from which he extracted a set of rigorous system, and made a convincing explanation and outlook on the origin and development of witchcraft.
Are we civilized?: Human culture in perspective
by Lowie
Professor Lowe, who specializes in the study of the Plains Indians of North America and who has written several anthropological monographs in his lifetime, has described this book for “laymen” as “one of the most delightful” of them all, depicting and explaining the cultural history of human civilization in an easy-to-understand and insightful manner. The history of human civilization and culture is portrayed and explained in an understandable and insightful manner.
Prof. Lowe tries to be “correct and easy to understand”, neither putting on a face nor quoting from the classics, but simply presenting you with a list of amusing but solid facts. He “talks about everything from eating and dressing to playing the piano and writing, from the natives of Central Asia catching 89 lice a minute to the King of France sitting on the toilet to meet his guests, from the Marseillais honoring their guests with their wives to the living and the dead sleeping in the same bed in the hospitals of Paris, and so on up and down through the ages, all of them, and none of them is not wonderful.”
