Nigel Barley

Nigel Frederick Barley (born 1947) is a British anthropologist known for his books based on his anthropological field work, which have been treated as travel writing. His first book The Innocent Anthropologist, was an account of field work in Cameroon and was positively reviewed.

He later conducted field work in Indonesia. Since 2003, he has expanded his writing career. He divides his time between the United Kingdom and Indonesia. His book Not a Hazardous Sport (1989) was about his research in Tana Toraja. He has since written numerous other works, including fiction. He wrote a historical novel Island of Demons (2009), loosely based on the German artist Walter Spies, who lived for most of his career in Bali.

Biography Barley spent some years living in Tana Toraja, Sulawesi, studying the local customs.

Barley was born in Kingston upon Thames in 1947. He gained his bachelor's degree in modern languages at Cambridge University, and his doctorate in social anthropology at Oxford University. He worked for some years as an academic at University College London, teaching anthropology. He served for most of his career at the British Museum, from 1980 to 2003, as an assistant keeper of Ethnography. During this period, he also conducted anthropological field work in distant locations.

Barley wrote some travel books about his time in anthropological research. His first memoir, The Innocent Anthropologist (1983), gave a popular account of anthropological field work among the Dowayo people of Cameroon. and Sir James Brooke, the "white rajah" of Sarawak.

He has been twice nominated for the Travelex Writer of the Year Award. In 2002, he won the Foreign Press Association prize for travel writing.

Anthropologist Tony Waters described Innocent Anthropologist as a memorably written account. In a review in Ethnography, he said that it is the book he recommends to students for an understanding of "field work, ethnography, and cultural anthropology." Waters says he truly admires the book as it gives a realistic idea of field experience, but "Oddly, I find few anthropologists who have read it, much less heard of it." But in his view, Barley's writing has survived the test of time "in a postcolonial world" far better than O'Hanlon's, not least because, as an anthropologist, his observations on the people he wrote about were underpinned by "professional fieldwork ... proper language training and research". Hannigan found Barley's prose "effortlessly jaunty .. with an air of permanent good-natured amusement. But there's also the faintly discernible trace of inexplicable melancholy common to the best of British comic travel writing". All in all, Hannigan considered it an excellent travel book, both a "vicarious journey", entertaining, and valuable for steering the reader "away from complacency".