Thomas Fredrik Weybye Barth (22 December 1928 – 24 January 2016) was a Norwegian social anthropologist who published several ethnographic books with a clear formalist view.

He spent a year at the London School of Economics (LSE) writing up this data, and in 1953 published his first book, Principles of Social Organization in Southern Kurdistan.

[4]: 2–3 Barth had originally planned to submit the manuscript of his Principles of Social Organization as his Ph.D. dissertation, but was unsuccessful in doing so.

This important and prestigious position gave him the opportunity to introduce British-style social anthropology to Norway.

Barth's introduction to Ethnic Groups and Boundaries became his most well-known essay and "ended up among the top 100 on the social science citation index for a number of years.".

[4]: 10 In 1974 Barth moved to Oslo, where he became professor of social anthropology and the head of the city's Museum of Cultural History.

Marxism and interpretive approaches were becoming more central, while Barth's focus on strategy and choice was being taken up by economics and related disciplines.

[6]: 7  By this time, Barth and his wife "felt we had both done our share of physically strenuous fieldwork" and decided to begin an ethnographic project in Bali.

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.

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.

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 one group.