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R. Brian Ferguson

R. Brian Ferguson
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey Newark

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70
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Publications

Publications (70)
Book
Why do people make war? Why is war so common? Is it human nature for men to kill outsiders? Many say yes, and claim this is shown by a supposedly confirmed innate tendency of chimpanzees to kill outsiders. Chimpanzees, War and History challenges that consensus, with detailed contextual evidence showing how human disturbance leads directly to bloods...
Book
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 long...
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Editorial and opinion pieces speculate (or proclaim) about the foundations of war, the curse of humanity. Here is another perspective, backed by forty years of anthropological research, on origins, causes, variations, and meanings of war, and their contemporary implications.
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Grappling with application of anthropological thinking to 1980s Cold War confrontations.
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Why do people make war? Is it in human nature? Publication of Napoleon Chagnon's Noble Savages resurrects old arguments, largely displaced in recent times by study of larger scale political violence, and sidelined by more contemporary theoretical currents. This shift ceded the human nature issue to a variety of biologistic approaches, for which Cha...
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This chapter is an anomaly in this volume. It is about cooperation among primates, but cooperation for deadly violence against others of the same species. It is about warfare by chimpanzees and by humans. Whether chimpanzees make war depends on your definition. Mine has always been elementary: organized, potentially lethal violence against members...
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This article discusses an unknown restudy of one locale of the People of Puerto Rico Project–my own. From 1980 to 1982 the author did ethnographic fieldwork in Bo. Jauca, Santa Isabel, the research site of Sidney Mintz. Building on Mintz's work, my goal was to take our shared historical materialism further, into a broader analysis of capitalism, co...
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Have humans always waged war? Is warring an ancient evolutionary adaptation or a relatively recent behavior—and what does that tell us about human nature? This book brings together experts in evolutionary biology, archaeology, anthropology, and primatology to answer fundamental questions about peace, conflict, and human nature in an evolutionary co...
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Have humans always waged war? Is warring an ancient evolutionary adaptation or a relatively recent behavior—and what does that tell us about human nature? This book brings together experts in evolutionary biology, archaeology, anthropology, and primatology to answer fundamental questions about peace, conflict, and human nature in an evolutionary co...
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This article is a highly distilled summary of conclusions from three decades of research on war, involving examination of tribal societies, ancient states, recent civil wars, archaeology, biology and culture, and primatology. The key points are the following: (1) our species is not biologically destined for war; (2) war is not an inescapable part o...
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The Dark Side of Man: Tracing the Origins of Male Violence. Michael P. Ghiglieri. Reading, MA: Perseus Books, 1999. 323 pp.
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War before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage. Lawrence Keeley. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. 246 pp.
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Transforming Academia: Challenges and Opportunities for an Engaged Anthropology. Linda G. Basch. Lucie Wood Saunders. Jagna Wojcicka Sharff. and James Peacock. eds. Arlington, VA: American Anthropological Association, 1999. 307 pp.
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Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence (NHAI) provides a novel answer to a long-standing question: why do Jews of Ashkenazi ancestry carry so many recessive genes for harmful conditions? It argues that in heterozygotes, these alleles substantially increase intelligence. For 800 years, Ashkenazi were confined to professions demanding high cogniti...
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For decades, there have been three primary anthropological perspectives on why people make war: materialist, cultural, and biological. Each has a long history of application to the Yanomami. This paper considers these three alternatives. First, it summarizes the author's materialist models and what they are purported to explain. Second, it discusse...
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Tribes, broadly defined, are indigenous peoples outside the direct administration of a centralized, authoritative, state. Applied to the great diversity of tribal groupings, war must also be defined very broadly, as organized, deadly violence by members of one group against members of another. Tribal warfare is known to us through archaeological re...
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This article argues that reported wars among Native peoples of Amazonia are not representative of pre-Columbian warfare. The well-known cases that are the bases for our conceptions of Amazonian warfare, as well as dozens of less prominent instances of war, can be attributed largely to circumstances created by the European intrusion. The broader imp...
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The abstract for this document is available on CSA Illumina.To view the Abstract, click the Abstract button above the document title.
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This paper suggests a resolution of the long-standing controversy concerning game scarcity and warfare in Amazonia. The "protein hypothesis" is evaluated against extensive, mostly recent, literature on relationships between individuals, society, and nature. The findings indicate that those who say game scarcity does explain war and those who say it...
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Thesis (Ph. D.)--Columbia University, 1988. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 637-676).

Questions

Questions (3)
Question
On my page, three of the four people listed as co-authors simply reviewed a book of mine. They are not co-authors. How do I remove them?
Question
On my page, three people list as my co-authors are not, and one real co-authors is not listed. How can this be corrected?
Brian Ferguson
Question
Hi, My research interest % seem to never budge, for general, compared to first publication, or to other anthropologists. Given the amount of activity with my publications, that seems very odd. Are these regularly updated?
Thank you.
Brian Ferguson

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