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The question of whether men are predisposed to war runs hot in contemporary scholarship and online discussion. Within this debate, chimpanzee behavior is often cited to explain humans' propensity for violence; the claim is that male chimpanzees kill outsiders because they are evolutionarily inclined, suggesting to some that people are too. The longstanding critique that killing is instead due to human disturbance has been pronounced dead and buried. In
Chimpanzees, War, and History, R. Brian Ferguson challenges this consensus. Bringing readers on a journey through theoretical struggle and clashing ideas about chimpanzees, bonobos, and evolution, Ferguson opens new ground on the age-old question--are men born to kill?
Table des matières
- List of Illustrations
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Part I: Controversies
- Chapter 1: From Nice to Brutal
- Chapter 2: The Second Generation
- Chapter 3: Theoretical Alternatives
- Part II: Gombe
- Chapter 4: From Peace to "War"
- Chapter 5: Contextualizing Violence
- Chapter 6: Explaining the War and Its Aftermath
- Chapter 7: The Postwar Era
- Chapter 8: Interpreting Gombe Violence
- Part III: Mahale
- Chapter 9: Mahale: What Happened to K Group?
- Chapter 10: Mahale History
- Part IV: Kibale
- Chapter 11: Kibale
- Chapter 12: Ngogo Territorial Conflict
- Chapter 13: Scale and Geopolitics at Ngogo
- Chapter 14: The Ngogo Expansion, RCH + HIH
- Chapter 15: Kanyawara
- Part V: Budongo
- Chapter 16: Budongo, Early Research
- Chapter 17: Sonso
- Part VI: Eleven Smaller Cases
- Chapter 18: Eastern Chimpanzees, Pan troglodytes schweinfurthii
- Chapter 19: Central Chimpanzees, Pan troglodytes troglodytes
- Chapter 20: Western Chimpanzees, Pan troglodytes verus
- Part VII: Tai
- Chapter 21: Tai and Its Afflictions
- Chapter 22: Sociality and Intergroup Relations
- Chapter 23: Killings and Explanations
- Part VIII: Bonobos
- Chapter 24: Pan paniscus
- Chapter 25: Social Organization and Why Male Bonobos Are Less Violent
- Chapter 26: Evolutionary Scenarios and Speculations
- Part IX: Adaptive Strategies, Human Impact, and Deadly Violence: Theory and Evidence
- Chapter 27: Killing Infants
- Chapter 28: The Case for Evolved Adaptations, by the Evidence
- Chapter 29: Human Impact, Critiqued and Documented
- Part X: Human War
- Chapter 30: The Demonic Perspective Meets Human Warfare
- Chapter 31: Toward a General Theory of War
- Chapter 32: Applications
- Tables
- References
- Index
A propos de l'auteur
R. Brian Ferguson is Professor of Anthropology at Rutgers University-Newark. He has studied war since the 1970s and has developed a general theoretical perspective that encompasses ethnology, archaeology, biological anthropology, historical anthropology, and militarism in the world today. Ferguson engages both theoretical and contemporary issues of public concern and has published for specialist and public audiences.
Résumé
The question of whether men are predisposed to war runs hot in contemporary scholarship and online discussion. Within this debate, chimpanzee behavior is often cited to explain humans' propensity for violence; the claim is that male chimpanzees kill outsiders because they are evolutionarily inclined, suggesting to some that people are too. The longstanding critique that killing is instead due to human disturbance has been pronounced dead and buried. In Chimpanzees, War, and History, R. Brian Ferguson challenges this consensus.
By historically contextualizing every reported chimpanzee killing, Ferguson offers and empirically substantiates two hypotheses. Primarily, he provides detailed demonstration of the connection between human impact and intergroup killing of adult chimpanzees. Secondarily, he argues that killings within social groups reflect status conflicts, display violence against defenseless individuals, and payback killings of fallen status bullies. Ferguson also explains broad chimpanzee-bonobo differences in violence through constructed and transmitted social organizations consistent with new perspectives in evolutionary theory. He deconstructs efforts to illuminate human warfare via chimpanzee analogy, and provides an alternative anthropological theory grounded in Pan-human contrasts that is applicable to different types of warfare. Bringing readers on a journey through theoretical struggle and clashing ideas about chimpanzees, bonobos, and evolution, Ferguson opens new ground on the age-old question--are men born to kill?
Texte suppl.
Men are not born to kill, but they can be cultivated to kill. Don't blame evolution.' The last line of Ferguson's incredible survey of studies of the higher primates, showing definitively that all the analogy-based talk of humans as the killer apes—those ferocious monsters at the beginning of 2001: A Space Odyssey—is just that: talk. In an age when it seems that war will never end, understanding human nature and the distorting effects of culture is vital. There can be no better starting place than Chimpanzees, War, and History.
