Alan Barnard

Alan Barnard is Professor of the Anthropology of Southern Africa at the University of Edinburgh, where he has taught since 1978. Alan has worked with Bushmen or San and on the history of San studies since the early 1970s. His ethnographic fieldwork has been mainly with the Naro Bushmen in Botswana, and also with the Khoekhoe and other populations in Botswana, Namibia and South Africa.

Alan has written some seventy articles and eight books, and his work has been translated into more than ten languages. His books on Bushman peoples include an ethnographic survey, Hunters and Herders of Southern Africa: A Comparative Ethnography of the Khoisan Peoples (Cambridge University Press, 1992), a children's book, Kalahari Bushmen (Wayland, 1996), and a history of San studies, Anthropology and the Bushman (Berg, 2007). His edited works include Hunter-Gatherers in History, Archaeology and Anthropology (Berg, 2004) and five other collections.

He is currently working on the coevolution of language and kinship and other areas of overlap between linguistics, archaeology, history and social anthropology. In 2007 he was commissioned by Namibia's Minister of Foreign Affairs to serve as Honorary Consul of the Republic of Namibia for Scotland. His special interest is in setting up links between Namibian and Scottish educational institutions of all kinds.

Alan will take part in the panel discussion on the Bushmen of Southern Africa after the Bushmen documentary screenings on Sat 1 Nov.