John Barnes

 

John Barnes died on 13 September, 2010.

 

John Barnes has had a long and distinguished career in anthropology, both in England and Australia. He did his first fieldwork among the Ngoni of East Central Africa. After completing his doctoral thesis on their social organization in 1949 at Oxford he taught at University College London and then took up a Research Fellowship at Manchester University and began a new project on the social organization of fishing and farming communities in Western Norway. Based on that work he made important contributions to network theory, of which he is one of the founders. In 1956 he moved to Australia to take up the chair in Anthropology at the University of Sydney. From 1958-69 he was Professor of Anthropology and Sociology in the Research School of Pacific Studies at Australian National University. He then became Professor of Sociology at Cambridge University, where he is currently Emeritus Professor and a fellow of Churchill College.  He has written on tribal politics in colonial Zambia, social organization in Arnhem Land and the New Guinea highlands, social network analysis, professional ethics and the sociology of lying. Having retired back in Australia where he continued to be active for some years, he and his wife returned to England when their health began seriously to decline. Writing his memoir (Humping my Drum) there, he expressed his feelings for Australia in the final words in the book: 'though my head lies in Britain, my heart lies in Australia'.