Synopses & Reviews
This lively, provocative text presents a new way to understand friendship. Professor John Terrell argues that the ability to make friends is an evolved human trait not unlike our ability to walk upright on two legs or our capacity for speech and complex abstract reasoning. Terrell charts how this trait has evolved by investigating two unique functions of the human brain: the ability to remake the outside world to suit our collective needs, and our capacity to escape into our own inner thoughts and imagine how things might and ought to be. The text is richly illustrated and written in an engaging style, and will appeal to students, scholars, and general readers interested in anthropology, evolutionary and cognitive science, and psychology more broadly.
Review
"Is friendship a transaction designed to smooth over our naturally brutish human nature? Or is it intrinsic to our being? Terrell, a leading anthropologist of Oceania and author of the seminal Prehistory in the Pacific Islands, offers a more complex answer... As a theory of friendship, Terrell's work is elegant." - PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
About the Author
John Edward Terrell, A.B., A.M., Ph.D. (Harvard) has long been recognized as one of the world's leading experts on the peopling of the Oceania and the remarkable biological, cultural, and linguistic diversity of modern Pacific Islanders. He is also a pioneer in the study of global human biogeography, baseline probability analysis, and the application of social network analysis in archaeology and anthropology. Since 1971 he has been the curator of Oceanic archaeology and ethnology at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago where he now holds the endowed Regenstein Curatorship of Pacific Anthropology established there in 2005. A strong voice for recognizing museums today as key players in global heritage management, he is currently working closely with Chicago's large Filipino-American community to foster the co-curation with them of Field Museum's outstanding early 20th century Philippines cultural collections.
The author of more than 180 books, scientific papers, reports, and reviews, his book Prehistory in the Pacific Islands (Cambridge, 1986, paper 1988) is considered by many to be a classic study of human diversity in all its complexity. He has been called one of the best writers in anthropology today, someone with a keen and well-demonstrated commitment to writing that can be read for pleasure as well as content. He also has the distinction of being the resident kaitiaki (guardian) of the only 19th century Maori meeting house in the New World, Ruatepupuke II, now at the Field Museum but originally from Tokomaru Bay, Aotearoa (New Zealand) where it was first opened with great pomp and circumstance in 1881.
Table of Contents
Part I. What Makes Us Human?1. Being human
2. Baron von Pufendorf
3. Ghost theories
4. The secret lives of Lou, Laurence, and Leslie
Part II. The Archaeology of Friendship
5. Suddenly all was chaos
6. A wimpy idea
7. In the footsteps of A. B. Lewis
8. Confronting the obvious
9. The archaeology of friendship
10. The sign of the sea turtle
11. Drawing conclusions
Part III. Selfish Desires
12. Houston, we've had a problem
13. You can't get there from here
14. The wizard of Down House
15. The numbers game
Part IV. The Social Baseline
16. Animal cooperation
17. The question of animal awareness
18. Babies and big brains
19. Mission impossible
Part V. Social Being
20. Alone in a crowd
21. A state of mind
22. It's who you know
23. Bloodlust, fear, and other emotions
Part VI. Principles To Live By
24. The lady or the tiger?
25. A kiss is just a kiss?
26. Friend or Facebook?
27. What was the Garden of Eden like?
28. The strength of weak ties
29. Meet me on the marae
30. Being in a family way
Appendix
Index