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The Innocent Anthropologist Summary

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The Innocent Anthropologist is about a man by the name of Nigel Barker who set off on an assignment to Cameroon, a West African country, in determination to study and learn about a primitive tribal group called the Dowayo. He recounted his experience in West Africa in hopes to demonstrate the diversity of culture throughout the world and to teach us how we can study and embrace it.
What took me by surprise were the endless amounts of unexpected delays Barley faced on his trip to the study site. “With delays in documentation, I was now two months into my fieldwork time and not even seen a Dowayo (Barley 27)”. The officials in West Africa seemed very uninterested in his mission and were constantly demanding numerous forms and fees from him. …show more content…

Language, being the framework of how we understand culture, was Barley’s initial and central aim. He began with trying to learn their language, but unlike an English speaker, the Dowayos spoke in tonal language. He hired a young man as an interpreter; however, he still found that facing each new speaker with a higher or lower voice became a challenge. In one instance Barker had said ‘Excuse me, I am cooking some meat.’ At least that was what I had intended to say; owing to tonal error I declared to an astonished audience, ‘Excuse me. I am copulating with the blacksmith.’ (Barker 57)”. Barley also had eventually learned that Dowayos divided up parts of a conversation much differently than the English language. “Whereas in the West we learn not to interrupt when somebody else is talking, this does not hold in much of Africa. One must talk to people physically present as if on the telephone, where frequent interjections and verbal response must be given if only to assure the other party that one is still there and paying attention (Barker 66)”. These cultural dissimilarities are very striking to me and again they show the diversity of culture.
One incident that was quite witty but actually a good example of the different aspects of culture was when Barley tried to get chickens to lay eggs for him to eat. According to the Dowayos, eating eggs was disgusting because the eggs come out of

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