Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Personal life Barth was married 1949–1972 to Mary ("Molly") Allee (27 April 1926 – December 1998), and he was married again 30 January 1974 to Unni Wikan, professor of social anthropology at the University of Oslo, Norway. His sister Tone Barth (25 January 1924 – 10 October 1980) was married 1945–1963 to Terkel Rosenqvist (1921–2011), also an academic, and she was married again in 1963 to the Norwegian politician for the Conservative Party Vidkunn Hveding (1921–2001). Barth died in Norway on 24 January 2016 at the age of 87. Main ideas and contributions He was well known among anthropologists for his Transactionalism analysis of political processes in the Swat Valley of northern Pakistan, and his study of micro-economic processes and entrepreneurship in the area of Darfur in Sudan. The latter has been regarded as a classical example of formalist analysis in economic anthropology. During his long career, Barth has also published acclaimed studies based on field works in Bali, New Guinea, and several countries in the Middle East, thematically covering a wide array of subjects. Ethnicity Barth has been an influential scholar on the subject of ethnicity. Andreas Wimmer wrote in 2008, "The comparative study of ethnicity rests firmly on the ground established by Fredrik Barth in his well-known [1969] introduction to a collection of ethnographic case studies." As the editor of Ethnic Groups and Boundaries (1969), Barth outlined an approach to the study of ethnicity that focused on the ongoing negotiations of boundaries between groups of people. Barth's view was that such groups were not discontinuous cultural isolates, or logical a prioris to which people naturally belong. Barth parted with anthropological notions of cultures as bounded entities, and ethnicity as primordial bonds. He focused on the interface and interaction between groups that gave rise to identities. Ethnic Groups and Boundaries, which he edited, concentrates on the interconnections of ethnic identities. Barth writes in his introduction (p. 9): ... categorical ethnic distinctions do not depend on an absence of mobility, contact and information, but do entail social processes of exclusion and incorporation whereby discrete categories are maintained despite changing participation and membership in the course of individual life histories. He emphasizes the use by groups of categories - i.e. ethnic labels - that usually endure even when individual members move across boundaries or share an identity with people in more than