Books by Nigel Barley

Offers an introduction to the life of a social anthropologist.

Arthur Grimsby is an ageing museum curator in 1960s Singapore. He fears Singapore's looming independence and his redundancy and tries to complete one final piece of work: the life story of an real-life eccentric 19th-century Englishman called Alexander Hare. Hare was a slave-owner, the epitome of masculine, colonial exploitation, and the creator of an Asian harem initially in Borneo and then on an uninhabited atoll that would become the Cocos-Keeling Islands.

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).

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.

In 1985, Dr. Nigel Barley, senior anthropologist at The British Museum, set off for the relatively unknown Indonesian island of Sulawesi in search of the Toraja, a people whose culture includes headhunting, transvestite priests and the massacre of buffalo. In witty and finely crafted prose, Barley offers fascinating insight into the people of Sulawesi and he recounts the tale of the four Torajan woodcarvers he invites back to London to construct an Indonesian rice barn in The British Museum. Previously published as "Not a Hazardous Sport."

In 1942 Japanese-occupied Singapore, where violence and starvation stalk the streets, a bizarre tranquillity reigns between warring nations in the Singapore Botanic Gardens. This sensitive and humorous work of historical fiction explores a real, and complicated, chapter of Singapore's history in which British scientists avoided jail during WWII and worked with their Japanese counterparts in the pursuit of science, only to be accused of collaboration following the War.

The book is a detailed study of the symbolic universe of the Dowayos of north Cameroon.