Chris Knight
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 3640585 |
|---|---|
| NOME | Chris Knight |
| PRENOMES | Chris |
| SOBRENOME | Knight |
| ASSINATURA | KNIGHT C |
| AFILIAÇÕES | University College London |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-8432-0658 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 54 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 239 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 50 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 5 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 1978 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 8 |
Moonstruck for a Fortnight
This article integrates structuralist methodology, evolutionary linguistics and recent developments in paleogenetics to reinterpret a wondertale, The Three Enchanted Princes. The narrative contrasts darkness with light, wilderness with cultivation and bloodthirsty animality with civilized human form, concluding by celebrating the transition to agriculture, purposeful property management and wedlock. The story’s solar and patriarchal stance frames…
Special Issue on The Dawn of Everything
How did we get stuck
The Dawn of Everything argues that human political arrangements got stuck when divine kings and other patriarchal despots began to confuse paternal care with coercive control. Drawing on insights provided by an Amazonian myth, this article argues that the decisive changes occurred much earlier than Graeber and Wengrow suppose. Gender politics got stuck when patriarchal forms of marriage and residence took over, disconnecting women from their form…
The Symbolic Revolution
This chapter presents a Darwinian account of how humans became the symbolic species. It challenges the widely held idea that symbolic culture did not emerge until long after our African speciation. Red ochre use appears as a cumulative cultural tradition emerging prior to modern humans, becoming ubiquitous with modern Homo sapiens. One argument for the evolution of within-group cooperation has been inter-group conflict, but this is unlikely to re…
Graeber, David (1961–2020)
David Graeber was that rare thing—a popular anthropologist. His best‐known book, Debt: The First 5,000 Years , was a publishing sensation. Graeber had a highly original anarchist take on his discipline, much influenced by his fieldwork experience in Madagascar. He wrote prolifically in a variety of fields while teaching in the United States and subsequently in the United Kingdom. He died suddenly in Venice in 2020
Decoding Chomsky
A fresh and fascinating look at the philosophies, politics, and intellectual legacy of one of the twentieth century’s most influential and controversial minds Occupying a pivotal position in postwar thought, Noam Chomsky is both the founder of modern linguistics and the world’s most prominent political dissident. Chris Knight adopts an anthropologist’s perspective on the twin output of this intellectual giant, acclaimed as much for his denunciati…
The Responsibility of Intellectuals
With the publication of ‘The Responsibility of Intellectuals’ half a century ago, Noam Chomsky burst onto the US political scene as a leading critic of the war in Vietnam. Privilege, he argues, brings with it the responsibility to tell the truth and expose lies, but our intellectual culture only pays lip-service to this ideal. The essay has been described as ‘the single most influential piece of anti-war literature’ of the Vietnam War period. Sin…
E ngels, F riedrich (1820–95)
Friedrich Engels was a German political theorist, philosopher, activist, journalist, and cofounder with Karl Marx of dialectical materialism or “scientific socialism.” In many ways, he was an anthropologist before the discipline was established. His most widely read publication was The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State , which argued that all human social life had once been communistic, based as it was on cooperative childcare …
M aine, H enry (1822–88)
Sir Henry Sumner Maine was a British comparative jurist and historian whose most influential work, Ancient Law , pioneered the field of comparative jurisprudence and effectively founded the anthropology of law. Holding conservative views that would now be considered racist, he identified progress and civilization with people of Aryan descent and saw no reason to study the customs of other racial groups. Property in the modern or civilized sense, …
Symbolic Culture, Origins of
Many animals have culture, but only humans have symbolic culture. This special kind of culture, which is unique to our species, poses a theoretical challenge to evolutionary theory. Each human community has its own set of symbolic cultural entities, a realm of objective facts whose existence depends, paradoxically, on collective faith. Currency values, underworlds, and football scores are good examples. The problem is to understand how, when, and…
Language, Social Origins of
Language is utterly different from any known system of animal communication. Whether it evolved gradually or in a sudden leap remains a matter of debate. While the capacity for language is biological, its communicative use is social and its elaboration and historical diversification essentially cultural. The evolutionary origins of language are currently unknown
Kinship
Modern kinship theory dates from the middle of the nineteenth century, when figures such as Sir Henry Sumner Maine, John F. McLennan, and Lewis H. Morgan debated whether the principles of early kinship and marriage were individual or collective, endogamous or exogamous, patriarchal or matriarchal. A related topic was whether early humans restricted their notions of kinship exclusively to one another or extended them to embrace animals and plants—…
Blood Relations
The emergence of symbolic culture is generally linked with the development of the hunger-gatherer adaptation based on a sexual division of labor. This original and ingenious book presents a new theory of how this symbolic domain originated. Integrating perspectives of evolutionary biography and social anthropology within a Marxist framework, Chris Knight rejects the common assumption that human culture was a modified extension of primate behavior…
Penelope Fitzgerald's Human Voices
The essay examines the English novelist Penelope Fitzgerald’s 1980 novel Human Voices, itself focused upon the BBC in the first years of the Second World War. The novel makes certain claims regarding the BBC and truth-telling, during this period; and the essay examines these claims as well as attending to Fitzgerald’s sensitive representation of character. This representation is particularly mindful not only of the stresses placed upon character …
Wild Voices
Why is it that, out of 220 primate species, we are the only one that talks? The relative inflexibility of primate vocal signaling reflects audience pressure for reliability. Where interests conflict, listeners' resistance to being deceived drives signalers to limit their vocal repertoire to signals that cannot be faked. This constraint was lifted in the human case, we argue, because the original victims of our species' first deceptive vocalizatio…
Decoding Chomsky
Puzzles and mysteries in the origins of language
The Social Origins of Language
Whereas Noam Chomsky views language as an internal faculty fitted to the requirements of private thought, this volume views it as designed essentially for communication between two or more speakers. In language, we formulate our thoughts for others and hence for ourselves. The system, in its diverse forms, resides and develops at the level of the community, and is acquired by individuals as part of their socialization. Focusing on language in its…
Social Origins of Language
Language and symbolic culture
Using language is ‘doing things with words’, but the action takes place not within physical reality (the world of brute facts) but exclusively within virtual reality (the world of institutional facts). Therefore, in order to explain how language evolved, we must first explain how virtual reality might have emerged. This chapter surveys currently circulating theories of the origin of language in the light of this requirement.
The Second Saddest Story
“The Second Saddest Story: Despair, Belief, and Moral Perseverance in Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Bookshop Christopher J. Knight (bio) I was grateful to you for your letter after Valentine’s death, for you were the sole person who said that for pain and loneliness there is no cure. — Sylvia Townsend Warner, quoted by Fitzgerald in The Afterlife Despair is a qualification of the spirit, is related to the eternal, and thus has something of the eterna…
Arrest for Attempted Street Theatre
On the eve of the royal wedding, two anthropologists and an actor - members of a street theatre troupe known as 'The Government of the Dead'- were arrested for conspiracy to stage a performance. We adopt a Bakhtinian perspective of carnival laughter as essential to the scientific investigation of officialdom and ceremonial power
Evolution of human behavior - By Agustín Fuentes
The Cradle of Language
Abstract This book is the first to focus on the African origins of human language. It explores the origins of language and culture 250,000-150,000 years ago when modern humans evolved in Africa. Scholars from around the world address the fossil, genetic, and archaeological evidence and critically examine the ways it has been interpreted. The book also considers parallel developments among Europe's Neanderthals and the contrasting outcomes for the…
Decoding Chomsky
Blood Relations
The emergence of symbolic culture is generally linked with the development of the hunger-gatherer adaptation based on a sexual division of labor. This original and ingenious book presents a new theory of how this symbolic domain originated. Integrating perspectives of evolutionary biography and social anthropology within a Marxist framework, Chris Knight rejects the common assumption that human culture was a modified extension of primate behavior…
The Human Symbolic Revolution
By 50,000 years ago, the effects of a ‘symbolic explosion’ — an efflorescence of human art, song, dance and ritual — were rippling across the globe. Applied to archaeological evidence, standard neo-Darwinian theory offers new understandings of this improbable event. The present article defines ‘symbolism’, models quasi-ritual behaviour in late archaic Homo sapiens, extends the argument to the emergence of anatomically modern humans and concludes …
Approaches to the Evolution of Language
Ancestral Passions
This is a biography of the first family of anthropology - Louis, Mary and Richard Leakey, whose discoveries have laid the foundations for much of our knowledge about the origins of man. The Leakeys have dominated their science. Not only did each of them make key fossil discoveries, but Louis (who argued that man did not originate on the Eurasian continent tens of thousands of years ago, but was more likely to have evolved in Africa millions of ye…
Wild Voices
Why is it that, out of 220 primate species, we are the only one that talks? The relative inflexibility of primate vocal signaling reflects audience pressure for reliability. Where interests conflict, listeners' resistance to being deceived drives signalers to limit their vocal repertoire to signals that cannot be faked. This constraint was lifted in the human case, we argue, because the original victims of our species' first deceptive vocalizatio…
The Prehistory of Sex
From cave art to penis sheaths, from the personal tragedies of death in childbirth to the grand symbols of Stonehenge, this is a collection and analysis of a wide range of artefacts and written records relevant to the sexual history of mankind. Examining the data of 4,000,000 years, the book encompasses transvestite priests, Amazon warrier-women, familial and societal power relations, genes and hormones. In the course of his research, the author …
Language and Human Behaviour
What language is? language and evolution language and intelligence language and consciousness. Appendix: samples of protolanguage
The Evolution of Culture
Levi-Strauss and the Dragon
Language co-evolved with the rule of law
The Wives of the Sun and Moon
In much Native American mythology marriage is conceptualized as a monthly honeymoon interrupted at each dark moon by menstruation. Woman's monthly alternation between marital sex and menstrual seclusion is coded as an alternation between her rival partners, Sun and Moon. Against this background, a Plains Indian myth attempts to come to terms with a novel problem. With the introduction of patrilocal residence, a woman must stay with her husband an…
Menstruation as medicine
How did we get stuck
The Dawn of Everything argues that human political arrangements got stuck when divine kings and other patriarchal despots began to confuse paternal care with coercive control. Drawing on insights provided by an Amazonian myth, this article argues that the decisive changes occurred much earlier than Graeber and Wengrow suppose. Gender politics got stuck when patriarchal forms of marriage and residence took over, disconnecting women from their form…
Penelope Fitzgerald's Human Voices
The essay examines the English novelist Penelope Fitzgerald’s 1980 novel Human Voices, itself focused upon the BBC in the first years of the Second World War. The novel makes certain claims regarding the BBC and truth-telling, during this period; and the essay examines these claims as well as attending to Fitzgerald’s sensitive representation of character. This representation is particularly mindful not only of the stresses placed upon character …
Puzzles and mysteries in the origins of language
Why humans cooperate
Decoding Chomsky
Noam Chomsky is an enigma. To many, he is — and has been for 50 years — the most prominent and courageous academic opponent of his country's militarist ambitions around the globe. Yet among those who admire him on that score, few find it easy to relate to his seemingly obscure theories about language. The academic community acclaims Chomsky as the principal inspiration behind the so-called ‘cognitive revolution’ in psychology and related sciences…
The Symbolic Species
Society in Prehistory
The Origins of Woman
The Origins of Woman
Levi-Strauss and the Dragon
Menstruation as medicine
Smith, Stein, Picasso ? and the contingency of value
The Scars of Evolution
They Watch Me as They Watch This
The Ethics of Indeterminacy in the Novels of William Gaddis
William Gaddis is one of the most significant postwar American novelists. His three large and experimental works - The Recognitions, J R (which won the National Book Award in 1975), and Carpenter's Gothic - sell to a reverential underground. In this first discussion of the ethical dimension of Gaddis's novels, Gregory Comnes maintains that Gaddis writes novels, narratives whose form provides readers with the means to understand how a postmodern e…
An Instinct for Revolution
The Human Symbolic Revolution
By 50,000 years ago, the effects of a ‘symbolic explosion’ — an efflorescence of human art, song, dance and ritual — were rippling across the globe. Applied to archaeological evidence, standard neo-Darwinian theory offers new understandings of this improbable event. The present article defines ‘symbolism’, models quasi-ritual behaviour in late archaic Homo sapiens, extends the argument to the emergence of anatomically modern humans and concludes …
Blood Relations
The Patient Particulars
This literary history focuses on four texts -- Stein's Tender Buttons, Hemingway's In Our Time, Williams's Spring and All, and Moore's Observations -- examining the way in which the relation between word and world seems to have lost its quality of necessity and is itself consequent upon the modernists' own prior project to bridge the gap
Society in Prehistory
Ancestral Passions
This is a biography of the first family of anthropology - Louis, Mary and Richard Leakey, whose discoveries have laid the foundations for much of our knowledge about the origins of man. The Leakeys have dominated their science. Not only did each of them make key fossil discoveries, but Louis (who argued that man did not originate on the Eurasian continent tens of thousands of years ago, but was more likely to have evolved in Africa millions of ye…
The Wives of the Sun and Moon
In much Native American mythology marriage is conceptualized as a monthly honeymoon interrupted at each dark moon by menstruation. Woman's monthly alternation between marital sex and menstrual seclusion is coded as an alternation between her rival partners, Sun and Moon. Against this background, a Plains Indian myth attempts to come to terms with a novel problem. With the introduction of patrilocal residence, a woman must stay with her husband an…
Approaches to the evolution of language
The Prehistory of Sex
From cave art to penis sheaths, from the personal tragedies of death in childbirth to the grand symbols of Stonehenge, this is a collection and analysis of a wide range of artefacts and written records relevant to the sexual history of mankind. Examining the data of 4,000,000 years, the book encompasses transvestite priests, Amazon warrier-women, familial and societal power relations, genes and hormones. In the course of his research, the author …
Approaches to the Evolution of Language
Language and Human Behaviour
What language is? language and evolution language and intelligence language and consciousness. Appendix: samples of protolanguage
The Symbolic Species
The Evolution of Culture
The Evolutionary Emergence of Language
Language has no counterpart in the animal world. Unique to Homo sapiens, it appears inseparable from human nature. But how, when and why did it emerge? The contributors to this volume - linguists, anthropologists, cognitive scientists, and others - adopt a modern Darwinian perspective which offers a bold synthesis of the human and natural sciences. As a feature of human social intelligence, language evolution is driven by biologically anomalous l…
Anthropology & Psychology
Decoding Chomsky
Noam Chomsky is an enigma. To many, he is — and has been for 50 years — the most prominent and courageous academic opponent of his country's militarist ambitions around the globe. Yet among those who admire him on that score, few find it easy to relate to his seemingly obscure theories about language. The academic community acclaims Chomsky as the principal inspiration behind the so-called ‘cognitive revolution’ in psychology and related sciences…
Language co-evolved with the rule of law
The evolution of cultural diversity
Sociology (30 obras) · Philosophy (29 obras) · History (27 obras) · Language and cultural evolution (17 obras) · Psychology (16 obras) · Computer Science (15 obras) · Political science (15 obras) · Epistemology (14 obras) · Art (13 obras) · Anthropology (12 obras)