A Plague of Caterpillars

Nigel Barley returns to Cameroon on hearing that the elaborate and fearsome Dowayo circumcision ceremony, performed at six or seven year intervals, is about to take place. Yet, like much else in this hilarious book by the author of The Innocent Anthropologist, the circumcision ceremony proves frustratingly elusive, partly because of an extraordinary plague of black, hairy caterpillars. In the meantime, witchcraft fills the Cameroonian air, a man is lied to by his own foot and an earnest German traveller shows explicit birth-control propaganda to the respectable tribespeople. Beneath the joy and shared laughter in this comic masterpiece lies skilful and wise reflection on the problems facing people of different cultures as they try to understand one another.

Nigel Barley was born in Kingston-on-Thames in 1947 and studied Modern Languages at Cambridge before completing a doctorate in Social Anthropology at Oxford. Having taught at University College London and the Slade School of Art, he joined the British Museum in 1988 as an Assistant Keeper in the Department of Ethnography and remained there for some twenty years. After publishing several works of academic anthropology, he wrote The Innocent Anthropologist (1983) about his fieldwork amongst a hill people in Cameroon, West Africa. It contradicted so may of the cherished assumptions of the discipline that it led to calls for his expulsion from the professional body of anthropologists. He remained, however, and now the book has been translated into some twenty-five other languages and is often the first work encountered by students of anthropology in their studies. He left the Museum in 2002 and is now a professional writer, living in London but dividing his time between the UK and Indonesia. His most recent work is Island of Demons (Monsoon Books, Singapore), a fictionalised treatment of the life of the painter Walter Spies.