Native Land

by Nigel Barley

Anthropology

Genres: Nonfiction

176 pages, paperback

First published January 1, 1993

About the author

Born 1947. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nigel_Ba...

Reviews

[Brian Griffith · Rating 4 out of 5]

Barley turns his own scientific microscope on himself and his people, making anthropology far more relevant than usual. His writing runs on a borderline between insightful and hilarious.

[Vincent Hernot · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nigel Barley wrote the masterful The innocent Anthropologist and other works in that theme (one where he brings a tribe to London, for example), but this is a novel. As novel, it's not always very fluid, but it can be very funny.
At heart though, it is a critique of a certain type of colonisation, of a certain type of greed, of Europeans and also Africans, and of missionaries I guess!
It's also asking questions of good intentions, and above all probably it's a criticism of a sense of superiority that makes people blind to both their own defects and the strengths of others.