Event Date: November 14, 2011 - 12:00 pm
Location: Social Sciences Building, 120 Universi

THOMAS BARFIELD, Boston University.

Presented by CIPS and the Department of History.
Free. In English. Registration is not required.

Thomas Barfield is professor of anthropology at Boston University. His research examines problems of reconstruction and political development in contemporary Afghanistan, particularly on questions of customary law and its role in conflict resolution. Barfield conducted extensive ethnographic fieldwork in northern Afghanistan in the mid-1970s as well as shorter periods of research in Xinjiang, China, and post-Soviet Uzbekistan. He is author of The Central Asian Arabs of Afghanistan (1981), The Perilous Frontier: Nomadic Empires and China (1989), and The Nomadic Alternative (1993), co-author of Afghanistan: An Atlas of Indigenous Domestic Architecture (1991), and editor of Blackwell’s Dictionary of Anthropology (1997). His most recent book is titled Afghanistan: A Political and Cultural History. He is also director of the Institute for the Study of Muslim Societies & Civilization and president of the American Institute for Afghanistan Studies.