The Lawrence Jacobsen Library
P-S/PrimateLit Review Books

Chapais, Bernard.
Harvard University Press, 2008.

ABOUT THE BOOK
At some point in the course of evolution—from a primeval social organization of early hominids—all human societies, past and present, would emerge. In this account of the dawn of human society, Bernard Chapais shows that our knowledge about kinship and society in nonhuman primates supports, and informs, ideas first put forward by the distinguished social anthropologist, Claude Lévi-Strauss.

Chapais contends that only a few evolutionary steps were required to bridge the gap between the kinship structures of our closest relatives—chimpanzees and bonobos—and the human kinship configuration. The pivotal event, the author proposes, was the evolution of sexual alliances. Pair-bonding transformed a social organization loosely based on kinship into one exhibiting the strong hold of kinship and affinity. The implication is that the gap between chimpanzee societies and pre-linguistic hominid societies is narrower than we might think.

Many books on kinship have been written by social anthropologists, but Primeval Kinship is the first book dedicated to the evolutionary origins of human kinship. And perhaps equally important, it is the first book to suggest that the study of kinship and social organization can provide a link between social and biological anthropology.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Bernard Chapais is Professor of Anthropology, University of Montreal.

CONTENTS
Preface

1. The question of the origin of human society

PART I. Primatologists as evolutionary historians
2. Primatology and the evolution of human behavior
3. The uterine kinship legacy
4. From biological to cultural kinship
5. The incest avoidance legacy
6. From behavioral regularities to institutionalized data

PART II. The exogamy configuration decomposed
7. Levi-Strauss and the deep structure of human society
8. Human society out of the evolutionary vacuum
9. The building blocks of exogamy

PART III. The exogamy configuration reconstructed
10. The ancestral male kin group hypothesis
11. The evolutionary history of pair-bonding
12. Pair-bonding and the reinvention of kinship
13. Biparentality and the transformation of siblingships
14. Beyond the local group: the rise of the tribe
15. From male philopatry to residential diversity
16. Brothers, sisters, and the founding principle of exogamy

PART IV. Unilineal descent
17. Filiation, descent, and ideology
18. The primate origins of unilineal descent groups
19. The evolutionary history of human descent
20. Conclusion: Human society as contingent

References
Index

WHERE TO ORDER
ISBN 978-0-674-02782-4 (Hardcover) $39.95
Harvard University Press
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Cambridge, MA 02138
Tel: 617-795-1284
Email: Jennifer_Redding@harvard.edu
Website: http://www.hup.harvard.edu/index.htmlLink: http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/CHAPRI.html

Posted Date: 2009-05-21

URL: http://library.primate.wisc.edu/collections/books/index.php
File last modified: September 29, 2009