A Plague of Caterpillars by Nigel Barley

A Plague of Caterpillars by Nigel Barley

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. 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.

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. In the meantime, witchcraft fills the Cameroonian air, a man is lied to by his own foot and an earnest German traveller shows explicit birth-control propaganda to the respectable tribespeople. Beneath the joy and shared laughter in this comic masterpiece lies skillful and wise reflection on the problems facing people of different cultures as they try to understand one another. A Plague of Caterpillars is the second in Barley's trilogy of anthropological journeys that began with The Innocent Anthropologist and ended with Not A Hazardous Sport (all published by Eland).

Nigel Barley was born south of London in 1947. After taking a degree in modern languages at Cambridge, he gained a doctorate in anthropology at Oxford. Barley originally trained as an anthropologist and worked in West Africa, spending time with the Dowayo people of North Cameroon. He survived to move to the Ethnography Department of the British Museum and it was in this connection that he first travelled to Southeast Asia. After forays into Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Japan and Burma, Barley settled on Indonesia as his principal research interest and has worked on both the history and contemporary culture of that area. After escaping from the museum, he is now a writer and broadcaster and divides his time between London and Indonesia.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780670807048
ISBN 10	0670807044
Title	A Plague of Caterpillars
Author	Nigel Barley
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	Penguin Books Ltd
Year published	1986-02-13
Number of pages	160
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.