Anthropologist Fredrik Barth will give the seventh Sidney W. Mintz Lecture at 8 p.m. on Thursday, Nov. 2, in Mudd Hall Auditorium, Homewood campus. The lecture is free and open to the public. His topic is "The Anthropology of Knowledge."

Barth, a research fellow at the Norwegian Ministry of Culture and a faculty member at Boston University, is probably best known for his analyses of societies whose political systems retain what he calls important "nonmodern" 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 to produce firsthand ethnography based on his work in Iraq, Pakistan, Iran, Sudan, Papua-New Guinea, Oman, Indonesia, Bhutan, China, Norway, the United Kingdom and the United States. He has twice been a visiting professor here in the Department of Anthropology.

This series honors professor emeritus Sidney W. Mintz for his contributions to the field of anthropology and to the department he helped to found at Hopkins in 1975.