Chris Knight (anthropologist)
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Chris Knight is a Professor of Anthropology at the University of East London and a founding member of the Radical Anthropology Group. Taught by Alan Barnard and Mary Douglas, he gained his PhD in 1987 at the University of London for a thesis on Claude Lévi-Strauss's four-volume Mythologiques.
Knight is best-known for his theory that human language, religion and culture emerged in the human species not simply by gradual Darwinian evolution but in a process culminating in revolutionary social change.
Knight published his first book, Blood Relations: Menstruation and the origins of culture in 1991. Since then, he has been a major figure in debates on the origins of human symbolic culture and especially the origins of language.
[edit] Selected works
- Knight, C. 1991. Blood Relations: Menstruation and the origins of culture (London & New Haven: Yale University Press), ISBN 0300049110.
- Knight, C., R. Dunbar and C. Power (eds), 1999. The Evolution of Culture (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press), ISBN 0748610766.
- Knight, C., M. Studdert-Kennedy and J. R. Hurford (eds) 2000. The Evolutionary Emergence of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), ISBN 0521781574.
[edit] External links
- Personal Web site at the University of East London.
- Blood Relations reviews and responses
- Radical Anthropology Group
