News Release
Sidney W. Mintz Lecture Anthropologist Fredrik Barth (pictured at right), the seventh Sidney W. Mintz lecturer at The Johns Hopkins University, will give a talk, "The Anthropology of Knowledge," at 8 p.m., Thursday, Nov. 2, in Mudd Hall Auditorium on the university's Homewood campus. The lecture is free and open to the public. Barth, a research fellow at the Norwegian Ministry of Culture and faculty member at Boston University, is probably best known for his analyses of societies whose political systems retain what he calls important "non-modern" features. His writings on the Basseri of southern Iran and the Swat Pathans of Pakistan, for example, are widely studied and taught by anthropologists, sociologists and political scientists. But among anthropologists, Barth is perhaps even more famed for his extraordinary career as a fieldworker. While most cultural and social anthropologists forgo fieldwork after reaching their seniority in order to become theorists, Barth continues with unique persistence to produce firsthand ethnography. He has done serious fieldwork in countless societies, including Iraq, Pakistan, Iran, Sudan, Papua-New Guinea, Oman, Indonesia, Bhutan, China, Norway, the United Kingdom and the United States. Barth has twice been a visiting professor in the Department of Anthropology at Johns Hopkins. This lecture series honors anthropologist Sidney W. Mintz for his contributions to his field and to the Johns Hopkins Department of Anthroplogy, which he helped to found in 1975. Mintz is widely known for his work on the Caribbean region, on the relationship between ethnography and history and on the cultural expression of economic behavior. His most recent book, Tasting Food, Tasting Freedom (1996) explores the many-sided relationships between eating and cultural forms. Mintz's work has linked scholarly to social issues, and Mintz Lecturers often deal with these issues in their presentations.
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