Bøger af Nigel Barley

Offers an introduction to the life of a social anthropologist.

Everyone has heard of The Great Escape. In March 1944, seventy-six mainly British and Commonwealth airmen tunnelled out of the PoW camp, Stalag Luft III, in Poland and escaped, triggering a vast manhunt throughout occupied Europe. Of the seventy-three subsequently recaptured, forty-one were shot by the SS in cold blood. The incident became an icon of British decency in the face of Nazi barbarity.Yet only a year later, seventy German prisoners of war, including SS officers, returned the compliment by using a very similar tunnel to escape from Island Farm PoW camp in Wales. The two cases, superficially so similar, could not have been more different. The complex ingenuities of British prisoners in Germany have been heavily documented whereas historical attention to the Welsh breakout has focused almost entirely on the very British search for the escapees that followed this event, a sort of cross between Dad's Army and an Ealing comedy, full of good intentions and pratfalls. This book tells both the before and after of the Welsh Great Escape, filling in the blanks of a strange and mostly forgotten story.

Arthur Grimsby is an ageing museum curator in 1960s Singapore. He fears Singapore's looming independence and his redundancy and tries to complete one final piece of work: the life story of an real-life eccentric 19th-century Englishman called Alexander Hare. Hare was a slave-owner, the epitome of masculine, colonial exploitation, and the creator of an Asian harem initially in Borneo and then on an uninhabited atoll that would become the Cocos-Keeling Islands.

The book is a detailed study of the symbolic universe of the Dowayos of north Cameroon.

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.

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).

When local contacts tipped off Nigel Barley that the Dowayo circumcision ceremony was about to take place, he immediately left London for the village in northern Cameroon where he had lived as a field anthropologist for 18 months.

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."

In 1942 Japanese-occupied Singapore, where violence and starvation stalk the streets, a bizarre tranquillity reigns between warring nations in the Singapore Botanic Gardens. This sensitive and humorous work of historical fiction explores a real, and complicated, chapter of Singapore's history in which British scientists avoided jail during WWII and worked with their Japanese counterparts in the pursuit of science, only to be accused of collaboration following the War.

Many men dream of running away to a tropical island and living surrounded by beauty and exotic exuberance. Walter Spies did more than dream. He actually did it. In the 1920s and 30s, Walter Spies - ethnographer, choreographer, film maker, natural historian and painter - transformed the perception of Bali from that of a remote island to become the site for Western fantasies about Paradise and it underwent an influx of foreign visitors. The rich and famous flocked to Spies' house in Ubud and his life and work forged a link between serious academics and the visionaries from the Golden Age of Hollywood. Charlie Chaplin, Noel Coward, Miguel Covarrubias, Vicki Baum, Barbara Hutton and many others sought to experience the vision Spies offered while Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, the foremost anthropologists of their day, attempted to capture the secret of this tantalizing and enigmatic culture. Island of Demons is a fascinating historical novel, mixing anthropology, the history of ideas and humour. It offers a unique insight into that complex and multi-hued world that was so soon to be swept away, exploring both its ideas and the larger than life characters that inhabited it.