Douglas P Fry
Biographic Data
| ID | 175496 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Douglas P Fry |
| GIVEN NAMES | Douglas P |
| FAMILY NAME | Fry |
| SIGNATURE | FRY D P |
| AFFILIATIONS | Åbo Akademi University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-5489-6290 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 49 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 120 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 47 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1980 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
The quest for scientific objectivity: Comment on Luke Glowacki's (2024) “The controversial origins of war and peace: Apes, foragers, and human evolution
Righting the wrong”: A multicountry study on people’s perceptions of “making things right” in the wake of human rights violations
More and more academics and policy makers advocate that countries ought to deal with past human rights violations. In this article, we explore whether people across the world agree with this normative expectation, and if so, what they think should be done to “make things right” and why. Our overarching objective was to see whether we can observe any universal patterns or common themes in this regard or whether people’s ideas and intuitions are pr…
Societies within peace systems avoid war and build positive intergroup relationships
A comparative anthropological perspective reveals not only that some human societies do not engage in war, but also that peaceful social systems exist. Peace systems are defined as clusters of neighbouring societies that do not make war with each other. The mere existence of peace systems is important because it demonstrates that creating peaceful intergroup relationships is possible whether the social units are tribal societies, nations, or acto…
Group‐based shame, guilt, and regret across cultures
To date, there has been no systematic examination of cross‐cultural differences in group‐based shame, guilt, and regret following wrongdoing. Using a community sample ( N = 1358), we examined people's reported experiences of shame, guilt, and regret following transgressions by themselves and by different identity groups (i.e., family, community, country) in Burkina Faso, Costa Rica, Indonesia, Japan, Jordan, the Netherlands, Poland, and the Unite…
Nam C. Kim & Marc Kissel. 2018. Emergent warfare in our evolutionary past. New York: Routledge; 978-1-62958-267-2 paperback £32.99
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
The Much Overlooked Foundational Principle of Restraint
Based on field observations that the members of certain chimpanzee communities on occasion attack and kill members of neighboring groups, primatologist Richard Wrangham has proposed that war in hum
The Original Partnership Societies: Evolved Propensities for Equality, Prosociality, and Peace
This article focuses on what nomadic forager research suggests about human nature and examines how this ancestral form of human social organization is fundamentally partnership-oriented. Taking mobile forager social organization into consideration is important to partnership studies because all humanity lived as mobile foragers until very recently. The material considered in this article stems from 1) individual forager ethnographies, 2) qualitat…
Introduction: Indigenous Insights
This essay, which introduces the fifth installment of the Common Knowledge symposium "Peace by Other Means," explores four ethnographically observed areas in which indigenous knowledge and practice hold insights for the prevention and reduction of enmity in the modern world. The four, very broadly, are values and norms (such as recoil from competition) that nurture peace, exceptional capacity for and recognition of the necessity of cooperation, e…
Conflict and War: Anthropological Aspects
La antropología filosófica de la interculturalidad: Un medio para crear identidades inclusivas y paz positiva
This chapter illustrates how a philosophical anthropology of interculturality can be the vehicle of higher level social, political, and ethical identities. It explores interculturality as a dynamic and inclusive model [1] (souillacg@orange
Myths about hunter-gatherers redux: Nomadic forager war and peace
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to critique several studies that claim to show that nomadic foragers engage in high levels of inter-group aggression. This is done through exploring four myths: nomadic foragers are warlike; there was a high rate of war mortality in the Pleistocene; the nomadic forager data support the “chimpanzee model” of lethal raiding psychology; and contact and state influence inevitably decrease aggression in nomadic f…
Lethal Aggression in Mobile Forager Bands and Implications for the Origins of War
Ancient Warriors or Murderers? Some have suggested that the human predilection for war is ancient, perhaps dating back to the emergence of our species, while others maintain that evidence for such early warring is scant. Past studies that looked at nomadic foraging bands as models of early humans and their potential for conflict concluded that war is in our blood. Fry and Söderberg (p. 270 ), however, reexamined the standard cross-cultural sample…
Dangerous Tribes - Napoleon A. Chagnon, Noble Savages. My Life Among Two Dangerous Tribes—The Yanomamö and the Anthropologists (New York, Simon & Schuster, 2013)
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
War, Peace, and Human Nature: The Convergence of Evolutionary and Cultural Views
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 context. The chapters in this book demonstrate that humans clearly have the capacity to make war, but …
The Evolution of Cooperation: What's War Got to Do With It
The three books under review reflect a recent up-swelling of interest in the cooperative and prosocial capacities of humankind. Nowak (2011) considers cooperation to be the hallmark of the human species and accounts for this remarkable capacity through multiple evolutionary mechanisms. Sahlins (2008) maintains that it is high time to throw off a horribly inaccurate and perverse view of human nature as avaricious and vicious, for it might even end…
Anthropological insights for creating non‐warring social systems
Cross‐cultural studies show that most, but not all, human societies engage in warfare. Some non‐warring societies cluster as peace systems. The existence of peace systems, and non‐warring societies more generally, shows that warfare is not an inevitable feature of human social life. This article considers three peace systems in some detail: Brazil's Upper Xingu River basin tribes, Aboriginal Australians, and the European Union. A primary goal is …
Killer Apes, Cannibals, and Coprolites: Projecting Mayhem onto the Past
In my youth, I heard my father tell a story that my grandfather had related to him about the leading nineteenth-century pathologist Rudolf Virchow. I later discovered that my grandfather had written the story down: [Robert] Koch wanted to demonstrate the tubercle bacillus to Virchow and invited him to his laboratory. When Virchow refused to go, Uulius] Cohnheim urged him to do so, telling him it was his duty to see the demonstration. Finally, he …
A Macroscopic Anthropological View
Anthropology offers a broad perspective on humanity that spans evolutionary time and crosses cultural space. In this sense, anthropology is macroscopic-it helps us to see the big picture. A macroscopic view, for instance, leads to insights about how cultural belief systems affect our thinking. We have examined how individuals tend to accept the belief system of their culture without much question. Widespread beliefs that war is natural and accept…
Appendix 1: Organizations to Contact
Charting a New Direction
This book takes the road less traveled. It examines how cultural beliefs about war bias scientific interpretations, affect perceptions of human nature, and may even close our minds to the possibility of developing alternatives to armed conflict. The book reexamines existing interpretations against the actual evidence in an attempt to untangle fact from fantasy. As we will discover, there is a lot of fantasy floating around out there. A thorough r…
Overlooked and Underappreciated: The Human Potential for Peace
Although war and other types of violence may be very noticeable, a close examination of cross-cultural data reveals that people usually deal with conflict without violence. Humans have a solid capacity for getting along with each other peacefully, preventing physical aggression, limiting the scope and spread of violence, and restoring peace following aggression.1 In this chapter we will consider a couple of ethnographic cases that illustrate this…
Insights from the Outback: Geneva Conventions in the Australian Bush
The island continent of Australia is immense-about as large as the contiguous forty-eight United States-and before the arrival of the Europeans, Australia supported an Aboriginal population up to 750,000 people, speaking well over two hundred distinct languages.1 In an area this large, it is not surprising that numerous ecological zones exist, from tropical to temperate forests and from prairies to deserts. Nonetheless, there was great similarity…
Do Nonwarring Societies Actually Exist?
A batch of recent books from archaeology, primatology, and psychology echo a Hobbesian theme: Humans are warlike by nature. The Dark Side of Man melodramatically asserts: “We live in a world in which cheaters, robbers, rapists, murderers, and warmongers lurk in every human landscape.” An evolutionary psychology textbook explains that “human recorded history, including hundreds of ethnographies of tribal cultures around the globe, reveals male coa…
Seeking Justice: The Quest for Fairness
Conflict is an inevitable feature of social life, but clearly violence is not the only option for dealing with conflict. Disputants can simply avoid each other, tolerate difficult situations, or negotiate mutually acceptable solutions. Other people very often become involved as mediators and arbitrators, judges and juries, or advisors and therapists. Although the violence of homicide, feud, and war grab our attention, an examination of cross-cult…
Void if Detached … from Reality: Australian “Warriors,” Yanomamo Unokais, and Lethal Raiding Psychology
In the previous chapter, I mentioned that the Murngin of Arnhem Land in northern Australia engaged in a ceremonial peacemaking fight called the makarata. Warner explains, “It is a kind of general duel and a partial ordeal which allows the aggrieved parties to vent their feelings by throwing spears at their enemies or by seeing the latter’s blood run in expiation.” Whereas the ceremony did not always succeed in restoring the peace, over the twenty…
Patterns and Universals of Adult Romantic Attachment Across 62 Cultural Regions: Are Models of Self and of Other Pancultural Constructs
As part of the International Sexuality Description Project, a total of 17,804 participants from 62 cultural regions completedthe RelationshipQuestionnaire(RQ), a self-reportmeasure of adult romanticattachment. Correlational analyses within each culture suggested that the Model of Self and the Model of Other scales of the RQ were psychometrically valid within most cultures. Contrary to expectations, the Model of Self and Model of Other dimensions …
Beyond War: The Human Potential for Peace
The classic opening scene of 2001, A Space Odyssey shows an ape-man wreaking havoc with humanity’s first invention--a bone used as a weapon to kill a rival. It’s an image that fits well with popular notions of our species as inherently violent, with the idea that humans are--and always have been--warlike by nature. But as Douglas P. Fry convincingly argues in Beyond War, the facts show that our ancient ancestors were not innately warlike--and nei…
Myths about hunter-gatherers redux: Nomadic forager war and peace
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to critique several studies that claim to show that nomadic foragers engage in high levels of inter-group aggression. This is done through exploring four myths: nomadic foragers are warlike; there was a high rate of war mortality in the Pleistocene; the nomadic forager data support the “chimpanzee model” of lethal raiding psychology; and contact and state influence inevitably decrease aggression in nomadic f…
Respect for the Rights of Others Is Peace: Learning Aggression versus Nonaggression among the Zapotec
This article examines differences in aggression between two Zapotec communities in Oaxaca, Mexico. An ethological study of three- to eight-year-old children (N = 48) reveals statistically significant intercommunity differences in children's serious and play aggression, corresponding to ethnographically observed intercommunity differences in adult behavior. The parallels between adult and children's conduct within the communities support the concl…
Indirect modes of aggression among women of Buenos Aires, Argentina
The Intergenerational Transmission of Disciplinary Practices and Approaches to Conflict
The investigation of the intergenerational transfer of family violence has been largely limited to studies conducted in the United States, and has been plagued with methodological shortcomings. This study provides data on disciplinary practices and the intergenerational transfer of approaches to conflict from a non-western culture, the Zapotec of Oaxaca, Mexico. It deals with methodological concerns such as definitional ambiguities, inaccuracy of…
The quest for scientific objectivity: Comment on Luke Glowacki's (2024) “The controversial origins of war and peace: Apes, foragers, and human evolution
Group‐based shame, guilt, and regret across cultures
To date, there has been no systematic examination of cross‐cultural differences in group‐based shame, guilt, and regret following wrongdoing. Using a community sample ( N = 1358), we examined people's reported experiences of shame, guilt, and regret following transgressions by themselves and by different identity groups (i.e., family, community, country) in Burkina Faso, Costa Rica, Indonesia, Japan, Jordan, the Netherlands, Poland, and the Unite…
The Original Partnership Societies: Evolved Propensities for Equality, Prosociality, and Peace
This article focuses on what nomadic forager research suggests about human nature and examines how this ancestral form of human social organization is fundamentally partnership-oriented. Taking mobile forager social organization into consideration is important to partnership studies because all humanity lived as mobile foragers until very recently. The material considered in this article stems from 1) individual forager ethnographies, 2) qualitat…
Introduction: Indigenous Insights
This essay, which introduces the fifth installment of the Common Knowledge symposium "Peace by Other Means," explores four ethnographically observed areas in which indigenous knowledge and practice hold insights for the prevention and reduction of enmity in the modern world. The four, very broadly, are values and norms (such as recoil from competition) that nurture peace, exceptional capacity for and recognition of the necessity of cooperation, e…
The evolution of aggression and the level of selection controversy
This paper has two objectives. The first is to examine the “level of selection” controversy in an historical light, particularly as it relates to the evolution and function of aggressive behaviors. Individual and kin selection, on the one hand, and group selection, on the other, are viewed as alternative scientific paradigms for interpreting aggression and other behaviors. It is suggested that the crux of the conflict between these positions invo…
Play aggression among zapotec children: Implications for the practice hypothesis
This study evaluates a prominent functional explanation for play aggression, the practice hypothesis, employing data from a non-Western culture, the Zapotec of Oaxaca, Mexico. The practice hypothesis proposes that play aggression, sometimes called rough-and-tumble play, has evolved primarily as a “safe” way for young individuals to practice and perfect adult fighting and/or hunting skills. Ethological observations of 3–8-year-old Zapotec children…
Female Aggression among the Zapotec of Oaxaca, Mexico
Respect for the Rights of Others Is Peace: Learning Aggression versus Nonaggression among the Zapotec
This article examines differences in aggression between two Zapotec communities in Oaxaca, Mexico. An ethological study of three- to eight-year-old children (N = 48) reveals statistically significant intercommunity differences in children's serious and play aggression, corresponding to ethnographically observed intercommunity differences in adult behavior. The parallels between adult and children's conduct within the communities support the concl…
The Intergenerational Transmission of Disciplinary Practices and Approaches to Conflict
The investigation of the intergenerational transfer of family violence has been largely limited to studies conducted in the United States, and has been plagued with methodological shortcomings. This study provides data on disciplinary practices and the intergenerational transfer of approaches to conflict from a non-western culture, the Zapotec of Oaxaca, Mexico. It deals with methodological concerns such as definitional ambiguities, inaccuracy of…
Preface: The cultural construction of gender and aggression
The Anthropology of Peace and Nonviolence
At a time when war and other forms of violence seem to be ubiquitous and increasing, this refreshing book provides some hope by looking at the brighter side of human nature. Though not ignoring violence and war, the authors focus on nonviolence and peace by analyzing a broad sample of indigenous societies. Included are the Mehinaku of Brazil, the Zapotec of Mexico, the Inuit of the Canadian Northwest Territories, the Semai of Malaysia, and the Ki…
Indirect modes of aggression among women of Buenos Aires, Argentina
Reflections of a sage
The web of violence: From the interpersonal to global, edited by Jennifer Turpin and Lester R. Kurtz
Anthropological perspectives on aggression: Sex differences and cultural variation
The purpose of this special issue of Aggressive Behavior is to present various topics and perspectives on the anthropology of aggression and conflict. First, a brief introduction to the articles in this issue is provided. Second, anthropological findings on sex differences in aggression are considered. The cross-cultural pattern is for males to engage in more frequent and more severe physical aggression than females. These observed sex difference…
Keeping the Peace: Conflict Resolution and Peaceful Societies Around the World
Patterns and Universals of Adult Romantic Attachment Across 62 Cultural Regions: Are Models of Self and of Other Pancultural Constructs
As part of the International Sexuality Description Project, a total of 17,804 participants from 62 cultural regions completedthe RelationshipQuestionnaire(RQ), a self-reportmeasure of adult romanticattachment. Correlational analyses within each culture suggested that the Model of Self and the Model of Other scales of the RQ were psychometrically valid within most cultures. Contrary to expectations, the Model of Self and Model of Other dimensions …
Killer Apes, Cannibals, and Coprolites: Projecting Mayhem onto the Past
In my youth, I heard my father tell a story that my grandfather had related to him about the leading nineteenth-century pathologist Rudolf Virchow. I later discovered that my grandfather had written the story down: [Robert] Koch wanted to demonstrate the tubercle bacillus to Virchow and invited him to his laboratory. When Virchow refused to go, Uulius] Cohnheim urged him to do so, telling him it was his duty to see the demonstration. Finally, he …
A Macroscopic Anthropological View
Anthropology offers a broad perspective on humanity that spans evolutionary time and crosses cultural space. In this sense, anthropology is macroscopic-it helps us to see the big picture. A macroscopic view, for instance, leads to insights about how cultural belief systems affect our thinking. We have examined how individuals tend to accept the belief system of their culture without much question. Widespread beliefs that war is natural and accept…
Appendix 1: Organizations to Contact
Charting a New Direction
This book takes the road less traveled. It examines how cultural beliefs about war bias scientific interpretations, affect perceptions of human nature, and may even close our minds to the possibility of developing alternatives to armed conflict. The book reexamines existing interpretations against the actual evidence in an attempt to untangle fact from fantasy. As we will discover, there is a lot of fantasy floating around out there. A thorough r…
Overlooked and Underappreciated: The Human Potential for Peace
Although war and other types of violence may be very noticeable, a close examination of cross-cultural data reveals that people usually deal with conflict without violence. Humans have a solid capacity for getting along with each other peacefully, preventing physical aggression, limiting the scope and spread of violence, and restoring peace following aggression.1 In this chapter we will consider a couple of ethnographic cases that illustrate this…
Insights from the Outback: Geneva Conventions in the Australian Bush
The island continent of Australia is immense-about as large as the contiguous forty-eight United States-and before the arrival of the Europeans, Australia supported an Aboriginal population up to 750,000 people, speaking well over two hundred distinct languages.1 In an area this large, it is not surprising that numerous ecological zones exist, from tropical to temperate forests and from prairies to deserts. Nonetheless, there was great similarity…
Do Nonwarring Societies Actually Exist?
A batch of recent books from archaeology, primatology, and psychology echo a Hobbesian theme: Humans are warlike by nature. The Dark Side of Man melodramatically asserts: “We live in a world in which cheaters, robbers, rapists, murderers, and warmongers lurk in every human landscape.” An evolutionary psychology textbook explains that “human recorded history, including hundreds of ethnographies of tribal cultures around the globe, reveals male coa…
Seeking Justice: The Quest for Fairness
Conflict is an inevitable feature of social life, but clearly violence is not the only option for dealing with conflict. Disputants can simply avoid each other, tolerate difficult situations, or negotiate mutually acceptable solutions. Other people very often become involved as mediators and arbitrators, judges and juries, or advisors and therapists. Although the violence of homicide, feud, and war grab our attention, an examination of cross-cult…
Void if Detached … from Reality: Australian “Warriors,” Yanomamo Unokais, and Lethal Raiding Psychology
In the previous chapter, I mentioned that the Murngin of Arnhem Land in northern Australia engaged in a ceremonial peacemaking fight called the makarata. Warner explains, “It is a kind of general duel and a partial ordeal which allows the aggrieved parties to vent their feelings by throwing spears at their enemies or by seeing the latter’s blood run in expiation.” Whereas the ceremony did not always succeed in restoring the peace, over the twenty…
The Earliest Evidence of War
In Demonic Males, Richard Wrangham and Dale Peterson attempt to convince their readers that human and chimpanzee violence stem directly from an ancestral ape common to both species. They propose that human males are violent by temperament and that modern humans are “the dazed survivors of a continuous, 5-million year habit of lethal aggression.” Later they suggest, “This notion of the violent male seems reasonable to anyone familiar with crime st…
Enhancing Peace
Anthropology provides many insights on war and peace, but by far the most important, for it pertains directly to the future of the species, is that war, like slavery before it, can be abolished. With wars continuing to erupt in different quarters of the planet, this idea might seem implausible. The elimination of war, however, is starkly realistic in two senses of the word. First, an anthropological perspective suggests that the human species, re…
Appendix 2: Nonwarring Societies
Sociology (28 works) · Psychology (26 works) · Political science (25 works) · Aggression (18 works) · History (18 works) · Law (18 works) · Social Psychology (18 works) · Philosophy (17 works) · Evolutionary Game Theory and Cooperation (16 works) · Environmental ethics (13 works)