R. Brian Ferguson

Professor of Anthropology, Rutgers University-Newark

R. Brian Ferguson is a Professor of Anthropology at Rutgers University-Newark. He received his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1988, for a study of economic and social change in a Puerto Rican village. Since then his primary area of research has been war and political violence. A generalist, he has published on war in “tribal” societies and among ancient states, archaeological evidence regarding the origins of war, large-scale identity-linked violence in the contemporary world, human nature and war, and anthropological theory about war. He is currently working on a book that examines theories about human nature and aggression through reports about chimpanzees in the wild. Other interests are culture and biology, policing, and the development of organized crime in New York history.

Participant In:

Male-Male Competition: Globalization, War, and Violence

Saturday, October 27th
2:30 - 4:30PM

Past Event

Little attention is paid to the fact that in his book, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, Darwin devoted twelve chapters to male-male competition (describing it as “the law of battle”), detailing intra-species male morphological and behavioral differences from molluscs through mammals, arriving finally and specifically at human mammals. Though this “law”… read more »