JOHN BARNES John Arundel Barnes 1918–2010 JOHN BARNES was an intellectual and a scholar who truly spanned dis- ciplines. He taught, did fi eld research, and contributed signifi cantly to the development of theoretical and methodological approaches in both soci- ology and social anthropology. He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1981 and was a member of the Sociology, Demography and Social Statistics Section (S4), although he would have been equally at home in Anthropology and Geography (S3). Indeed, often sociology and social anthropology coalesce in his work. He was also a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Social Sciences, and he contributed to the development of social sciences in both Australia and the United Kingdom. In the 1974 Register of Members of the Association of Social Anthropologists of the Commonwealth, Barnes listed his interests as Asia and Oceania (regional), and ecology, politics and economics, culture, and the ethics of social enquiry (theoretical).1 This makes clear his ever-changing concerns. He had already made his name in European and African ethnographic studies, in network analysis and mathematical modelling, in kinship the- ory, in the politics of ‘race relations’ in Africa, and in many other fi elds. Later he would make contributions in several other areas, but he was perhaps most at home in the eclectic style of social science that spanned conventional sociology and social anthropology and gave prominence to a history which embraced both social change and continuity, to relations 1 Register of Members (London, Association of Social Anthropologists of the Commonwealth, 1974), p. 21. Proceedings of the British Academy, 172, 27–45. © The British Academy 2011. 28 Alan Barnard between structure and individual action, and to the nature of virtually all contemporary societies. Barnes privately published his autobiography in 2008.2 Other auto- biographical material includes an interview by Les Hiatt, a video inter- view by Jack Goody, a short note in the Australian Anthropological Society Newsletter, and a shorter memoir.3 Material gathered from some of these is included in his autobiography, and his warm personality and great sense of humour come through wonderfully in the Goody interview. In 1990, Barnes published a valuable selection of his best essays, with a concentration on his ideas on the modelling process in social science research.4 And in the same year, colleagues presented him with a Festschrift published as a special issue of The Australian Journal of Anthropology.5 The latter dealt exclusively with the reinterpretation of Barnes’s famous and seminal paper, ‘Genetrix: genitor : : nature: culture?’.6 At least for some social anthropologists, this remains his most inspiring and enduring work. I John was born in Reading, Berkshire, on 9 September 1918. The family soon moved to a different part of town, but he recalled that when he was about fi ve or six his mother pointed out his birthplace to him and his brother Irwin: 27 Coley Hill, ‘a rather forbidding terrace house near the central shopping area’.7 His parents had moved from London, in the case 2 J. A. Barnes, Humping My Drum: a Memoir (Raleigh, NC). Available at www.lulu.com 3 Les Hiatt, ‘An interview with John Barnes’, Australian Anthropological Society Newsletter, 63 (1986), 4–15. Interview of John Barnes by Jack Goody, 19 Dec., 1983 <www.alanmacfarlane. com/ancestors/barnes.html>. J. A. Barnes, ‘Where lies the truth?’, Australian Anthropological Society Newsletter, 64 (1986), 4–9. John Barnes, ‘Looking back and hardly believing’, in Geoffrey Gray (ed.), Before It’s Too Late: Anthropological Refl ections, 1950–1970, Oceania Monographs, 51 (Sydney, 2001), pp. 147–51. 4 J. A. Barnes, Models and Interpretations: Selected Essays (Cambridge, 1990). 5 Warren Shapiro (guest editor), ‘On the generation and maintenance of the person: essays in honour of John Barnes’, The Australian Journal of Anthropology, 1 (2/3): Special Issue 1 (Sydney, 1990). 6 J. A. Barnes, ‘Genetrix: genitor : : nature: culture?’, in Jack Goody (ed.), The Character of Kinship (Cambridge, 1973), pp. 61–73. 7 Barnes, Humping My Drum, p. 1. Without further notes, I shall draw on Barnes’s memoir for much of the biographical material presented here, and also for his own recollections of career decisions. The memoir is extensive and incredibly detailed; it numbers 464 printed pages. As he suggests in the ‘Preamble’ there, it may be incorrect at times, but at least is based (mainly) on his own recollections. JOHN ARUNDEL BARNES 29 of his father, and from Bath, in the case of his mother, around 1912. John’s father, Thomas Daniel Barnes, known as Tom, had a music shop in Reading and before that worked as a piano tuner in Bath and then in London. Tom’s father, James, lived with John’s natal family in Reading. Grandfather James was one of twelve siblings, at least two of whom were said to have been last seen working in a quarry in New South Wales. Tom’s own brother was called Irwin, and John’s brother was named after him. Irwin the elder, after having worked as a surveyor in Africa, emigrated to Australia (also NSW) to practise that profession not long after 1900. John himself would follow his Uncle Irwin, but as an anthropologist, to Africa in 1946 and to Australia in 1956. The Barnes family belonged to the Baptist Church and Tom sang in the choir, although John learned later in life that Tom had rejected his Christian beliefs, and John eventually did the same. John’s mother, Mabel Grace Nash, known as Grace, was the daugh- ter of a Bath publican. One of her sisters, embarrassed by their father’s occupation, used to tell people that their father was ‘a traveller in hops’. Grace once told John and Irwin that he been a great traveller and had even been to the South Pole. Later they learned that ‘The South Pole’ was a pub near Bath Spa railway station, and that as a child Grace had lived above it. Grace’s mother had been an alcoholic, and the family were active in the Congregational Church and the temperance organisation, the Band of Hope. Before she married John’s father, Grace was manager of a milk shop in Bath. She lived to the age of 97, and in later life became ‘pleasantly confused’. At the age of six, in 1924, John started school. Clooneavon House School had been a small school for girls. To expand its intake it had opened its doors for boys that year, and for the whole of that year John was the only boy. After two and a half years there, he moved to the junior section of Reading School. He came top of his class in many subjects, but did ‘dismally’ in religious knowledge. He won a scholarship to Christ’s Hospital, a well-known boarding school near Horsham in Sussex. Because of his Baptist upbringing he had not yet been christened, but at school he was duly baptised and confi rmed in the Anglican Church. John joined the Christian Union, whose evangelical leanings later turned out to be of some practical benefi t when he came to work closely with evangelical mis- sionaries during his anthropological fi eldwork in Central Africa, Norway, Australia and Papua New Guinea. He was not much good at games, but excelled academically, especially at mathematics. His skills in mathe- matics also turned out to be useful later in his anthropological career, 30 Alan Barnard when he came to deciphering the intricacies of ‘Murngin’ (Yolngu) kin- ship structures that had eluded analysts and ethnographers, if not Yolgnu Aborigines themselves.8 They also earned him (after an entrance examination) a scholarship to Cambridge. John entered St John’s College, Cambridge, in 1936. He started in mathematics but expressed a desire to switch to economics, which was refused on the grounds that his scholarship was in mathematics. His col- lege allowed him to skip to Part Two of the Mathematics Tripos for his fi rst two years and read for Part Two of the Economics Tripos in the third. This would require him to work on Part One of the Economics Tripos in his spare time during his fi rst two years. However, he found economics dull. He dabbled in astronomy too, although the course proved to consist mainly of the kind of mathematics he least liked. He therefore settled on the Archaeology and Anthropology Tripos for his third year. His formal Director of Studies was the archaeologist Glyn Daniel, but he decided to study social anthropology as his main interest, with East Africa as his ‘special area’. He worked closely with Jack Driberg, a colour- ful former colonial offi cer who reportedly had supported his own anthropological training, at the London School of Economics, by playing poker.9 Driberg had spent considerable time in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan and in Uganda, and John would later follow him to Central Africa, where he made his name as an ethnographer of the Ngoni of Fort Jameson of what was then Northern Rhodesia. Through Driberg, John met a number of anthropologists based at Oxford, including A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Meyer Fortes and Max Gluckman. At Cambridge, John became secretary of the Student Christian Movement, and despite, by his own admission, lacking musical talent, joined the choir of the Cambridge University Socialist Club. He had been a pacifi st, but the rise of Hitler dissuaded him from keeping his pacifi st principles, although he maintained his broadly left-wing beliefs. He also, gradually it seems, became an atheist. It was at Cambridge that he met Frances Bastable, whom he married, at Kingsclere, in Hampshire, on 16 December 1942 when John was on leave from the Royal Navy.