R. Brian Ferguson – författare

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?

In this book, a collection of experts investigate the varied forces - from global systems to local beliefs - that lead to civil violence, chaos and, perhaps, a new political order.The State, Identity and Violence explores acts of mass violence occurring within national borders and examines the links such acts have to personal identities and how they challenge the character or very existence of the state. Building upon the anthropological premises of holism and cross-cultural comparison, this volume shows how violent challenges to existing states should be conceptualized as layered problems, with multiple kinds of causes. It not only goes beyond the "ancient hatreds" explanation, but shows the inadequacy of the concept of "ethnic violence" and of theories which treat interests and identities as separate, sometimes opposed variables

War in the Tribal Zone, the 1991 anthropology of war classic, is back in print with a new Preface by the editors. Their timely and insightful essay examines the occurrence of ethnic conflict and violence in the decade since the idea of the 'tribal zone' originally was formulated. Finding the book's analysis tragically prophetic in identifying the key dynamics that have produced the kinds of conflicts recently witnessed globally-as in Bosnia, Kosovo, Rwanda, and Somalia-the editors consider the political origins and cultural meanings of 'ethnic' violence in our postcolonial world.