"The innocent anthropologist": Africa, heartily

Every book can be summarized in 6 paragraphs….

• Editorial Chronicles anagram. Edition 1983
• Author: Nigel Barley
• Book for interested in: Africa, anthropology, tribes and humor..
• What will? A young British anthropologist decides to travel to Cameroon to study the customs of the Dowayo tribe. His coexistence is full of mutual discoveries, delusional problems and situations.

Paragraph 1

I couldn't help hearing the incessant fart series, ecthruption coughing and deafening accesses that left their home at night. I felt a lot of sympathy for her, Well, it seemed to me that their guts were as little prepared to live in the Dowayo country as mine (…)Matthieu finally returned, crying and weakened to laugh so much. It led me to Mariyo's house and pointed a small hut that had just behind mine. Inside were the goats. As a layman that was regarding those animals, I was unaware how their detonations sounded.

Barley's book is a fun chronicle in which he constantly laughs at himself and his mistakes in the way of interpreting the strange tribal reality with which he coexists.

Paragraph 2

He reluctantly confessed that the Dowayos believed that all the whites who lived for long periods in the Dowayo country were reincarnated spirits of sorcerers. Under the white skin that we had covered we were black. Someone had seen that when I went to bed at night I took out white skin and hung it. When I went to the mission with the other white men, When we ran the curtains, We threw the key to the door and took off the white skin.

Barley talks about a tribal Africa in the late decade of the 70. The book is a valuable testimony of the vision that from some tribes had of the white population that was installed in some communities. The work revolves around his gaze from the Dowayo and the Dowayo to him. The Dowayo, somehow, They also become anthropologists before them for them strange customs of the British. 

Paragraph 3

Each tribe despised some other: For the Dowayos, The koma were the ones who performed that necessary function. They were a pagan tribe that lived about fifty kilometers away, across the river. The Dowayos attributed a degraded form of language, A terrible savagery and primitivism, and an incredible degree of dirt. His ugliness was a topic in the goayos jokes.

The testimonial value of the book is to explain that in a society as culturally diverse as that of the Dowayo, the same racist and classist behaviors of more technologically advanced societies are repeated.

Paragraph 4

They often reproached me not having brought a machine gun from the land of the whites to eradicate the pathetic herd of antelopes that still exist in their territory. When the dowayos began to cultivate cotton for the state monopoly, They were provided with large amounts of pesticides, that they immediately applied to fishing.

Barley enters fully into the myth of the "wild noble" that takes care of nature, disassembling that vision with the simple story of reality with which he lives. But this is not a book by a western one clearing a "wild" society, It is the book of an anthropologist who limits himself to narrating the environment in which he has submerged without complexes. And that's his great value.

Paragraph 5

I got up and shook my hand politely. ‘Disculpe me, he said,, I have to steal some meat ’. At least it is what he intended to say, But due to a tone error I declared the perplex audience: 'Excuse me, I have to copulate with the blacksmith.

I think few books make laughs like this. The sense of humor of the British telling absurd situations and placing his character as a spectator or protagonist is simply masterful.

Paragraph 6

The anthropologist who returns home does not expect a welcome from hero, But the coldness of some friends seems excessive. An hour after arriving, an acquaintance telephone me to tell me succinctly: -Hey, I don't know where you've been, But you left a sweater in my house almost two years ago. When are you going to pick it up?

The return home and the "indifference" of family and friends in the welcome is one of the great disappointments of travelers' return. Barley, as in all the work, portrays it with simplicity and irony.