Search results for ""Author Nigel Barley""

A novel about eccentric 19th-century Englishman Alexander Hare: a trader and slave-owner in the East and a friend of Thomas Stamford Raffles, the founder of Singapore, but Hare’s chief claim to fame is as the creator of a harem of women from throughout Asia.

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Not many British schoolgirls have grown up to become revolutionary heroes of distant, eastern nations but Muriel Stewart Walker did just that. Under a multitude of different names - 'K'tut Tantri' and 'Surabaya Sue' being the best know - she joined in the struggle for Indonesian independence after the Second World War and broadcast its revolutionary message to the world on Rebel Radio. But she did more and smuggled arms, and probably drugs, to help finance the new Republic and experienced bloody battle in the British attack on Surabaya that some have seen as a war crime. She went on to become an intimate of the revolutionary leaders and finally lived to see Indonesia take its place amongst the free nations of the world. Glaswegian 'Surabaya Sue' is virtually unknown in the West and, even in Indonesia, there have always been doubts about her version of events that many have dismissed outright as a blatant mixture of outrageous fantasy and dishonest omissions. Snow over Surabaya happily embraces those doubts and brings a new, spirited account of her adventures in that tempestuous world.

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Nigel Barley travels to the island of Sulawesi in Indonesia to live among the Torajan people, known for their spectacular buildings and elaborate ancestor cults. At last he is following his own advice to students, to do their anthropological fieldwork `somewhere where the inhabitants are beautiful, friendly, where you would like the food and there are nice flowers. With his customary wit and delight in the telling detail, he takes the reader deep into this complex but adaptable society. The mutual warmth of his friendships allows Barley to reverse the habitual patterns of anthropology. He becomes host to four Torajan carvers in London, invited to build a traditional rice barn at the Museum of Mankind. The observer becomes the observed, and it is Barley s turn to explain the absurd complexities of an English city to his bemused but tolerant guests in a magnificent, self critical finale. 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). A postscript, penned thirty years after these adventures had been concluded, confirms the rich arc of this storyline of role reversals.

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Based on real people and true events, this historical fiction follows the adventures of the Flashmanesque Captain Lauterbach in the German navy in the First World War in Singapore and Indonesia, and his subsequent flight from the British through Asia to America and back to Germany.

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The wittiest introduction to the life of a social anthropologist ever written. Studying in the Cameroons for his first experience of fieldwork, Barley discovers that the society of the Dowayo people refuses to conform to the rules of his new discipline. Although set amongst a little-known tribe in the Cameroons, this slim volume reaches out to a vast audience who would otherwise never look at a travel book about West Africa, let alone an anthropological field study. A seminal text for any student in search of a laugh. Witty, hilarious and unconventional, but also a remarkable intellectual achievement; Barley manages to turn the western science of anthropology on its head, so that for once the laugh is on the professional practitioners not the observed.

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A study of the Torajan ricebarn, a traditional Indonesian structure where the rice crop is stored, and where the main social life of the village takes place. This paper was stimulated by the construction of a ricebarn for the Museum of Mankind at the British Museum in 1987.

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This very failure, compounded by the plague of caterpillars of the book s title allows Nigel Barley to concentrate on everyday life in Dowayoland and the tattered remnants of an overripe French colonial legacy. Witchcraft fills the Cameroonian air; add an earnest German traveller showing explicit birth?control propaganda to the respectable Dowayos, an interest in the nipple?mutilating practices of highlanders, unanswered questions of the link between infertility and circumcision and you have the ingredients of a comic masterpiece. But beneath all the joy and shared laughter there is a skilful and wise reflection on the problems of different cultures ever understanding one another. The Dowayos are a mountain people that perform their elaborate, fascinating and fearsome ceremony at six or seven year intervals. It was an opportunity that was too good to miss, a key moment to test the balance of tradition and modernity. Yet, like much else in this hilarious book the circumcision ceremony was to prove frustratingly elusive.

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Set in the first decade of the 20th century, this moving book shares the tragic reality of the Dutch invasion of Bali and the mass suicides that ensued. In Love and Death in Bali, renowned author Vicki Baum skillfully intermeshes several different narratives that all culminate in the infamous puputan (the "ending"), the slaughter and mass suicides that brought the old Bali to an end in 1906. Written within living memory of these bloody events, the book tells the story of the passionate and deeply spiritual people who defy Dutch imperial forces through an act that brings them certain death—and certain rebirth.The looting of a Chinese trading ship gives the Dutch colonial forces the perfect excuse to intervene in island affairs, but they encounter astonishing resistance. In the battle of Badung, wave upon wave of Balinese clothed in white ceremonial garb charge into the blazing Dutch guns, kris daggers in hand, prepared to die. Who among them will survive, and how will their lives be forever changed?Love and Death in Bali, first published in German in 1937, is considered by many to be the finest novel ever written about this island paradise where everyone, regardless of caste or position, is woven into the fabric of an ancient culture, connected by customs and, above all, by strong religious beliefs. In this edition, anthropologist and award-winning author Nigel Barkley's introduction provides excellent context for the complex, dramatic tale that follows.

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