ABSTRACT
Fredrik Barth’s essay took quite a different tack. What was important, according to Barth, were the social forces that were responsible for the emergence and maintenance of ethnic boundaries in the first place. Barth’s framing of the question of ethnic conflict has led to an enormous literature aiming to describe the conditions under which ethnicity becomes socially and politically salient. The right question is a question that opens up entirely new avenues of research, rather than leading to stale conclusions and ultimate dead ends. As Barth appreciated, this kind of research must be simultaneously theoretical and empirical. To answer this kind of question, studies of intergroup conflict, nationalism, and civil wars are found in social psychology, sociology, political science, economics, and, of course, anthropology. In contrast to many practitioners, the leading British social anthropologists of that day considered their field to be part and parcel of the scientific enterprise.
