The F.G. Bailey Papers

Please note that these documents were not intended for publication by the author. They were notes the anthropologist made for himself and has generously given permission for them to be archived in this manner. The documents contained in the archive are ‘fieldnotes’. As such, the documents represent the active learning of an anthropologist about the field. Much of the material was necessarily tentative and speculative as the anthropologist attempted to understand what he saw and heard. The anthropologist would formulate these things differently in a final publication. The notes were made in the 1950s and have to be understood as being of their time.

F.G. Bailey (1924- ) is a British-born social anthropologist of South Asia. This archive contains digitized versions of his original fieldnotes from the 1950s. Bailey divided the material between 29 folders of texts and diagrams, with an additional file for photographs; this structure is maintained for the digital version.

In the 1950s, a Treasury Fellowship led Bailey into the Kondmals in Orissa, India. He conducted fieldwork in a Hindu village in an area predominantly inhabited by Kond communities. This research became a doctoral dissertation (1954), supervised by Max Gluckman and Elizabeth Colson at the University of Manchester.

Bailey took up a lectureship at SOAS in 1956 and was promoted to Reader four years later. In 1963, he left SOAS to pioneer the anthropology program at the University of Sussex. In 1971, he accepted a Professorship at the University of California, San Diego, where he remained until retirement.

The 1950s was an extraordinary period to conduct research in rural India, universal suffrage, affirmative action and the economic and political opportunities that came with Independence dominated village life.

Bailey’s pioneering study was published as Caste and the economic frontier (1957). In this book, he addresses social change, focusing on the consequences of a new mercantile economy and the dwindling powers of the old land-holding elite.

A second book Tribe, caste and nation (1960) examined the struggle between ‘tribal’ Kond and caste Hindus over power and land.

These two major works build directly on the notes in this archive. Bailey also published a third monograph, Orissa 1959 (1963), which focused on the workings of the new democratic setup. Some of the primary materials discussed in that work are also collected here.

In the 1990s, Bailey wrote three further retrospective books drawing from the fieldnotes in this collection. He intended these to ‘memorialize’ the village of Bisipada as he had known it. These are: The need for enemies (1989), The witch-hunt (1994) and The civility of indifference (1996).

Much of the material in the archive has never been referred to in print.

 

Additional detail of the collection's arrangement is available.