Foreign thinker
Christopher Boehm
Christopher BoehmEvolutionary anthropologyAmericanb. 1931
Life and Thought
Christopher Boehm is an American evolutionary anthropologist and a professor at the University of Southern California. He is known for his research on egalitarianism in hunter-gatherer societies and the "reverse dominance hierarchy," and for his evolutionary theory of conscience and morality.
Christopher Boehm is an American evolutionary anthropologist who taught for many years at the University of Southern California and directed its Jane Goodall Research Center. His fieldwork included the study of human communities in the Balkans (among them Montenegro) and the observation of chimpanzees at Gombe.
His best-known work is "Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior" (1999). In it Boehm argues that hunter-gatherer groups lived under a "reverse dominance hierarchy": subordinates prevented bullies from dominating through coalitions, ridicule, ostracism and, in extreme cases, execution. He compares this behaviour with the dominance instincts of other primates.
In "Moral Origins: The Evolution of Virtue, Altruism, and Shame" (2012) he presented a theory of the evolution of the moral conscience. In his view, collective punishment of bullies and of those who broke norms gradually created selective pressure favouring traits such as shame, self-restraint and the internalisation of rules, and conscience arose by this path. His work is a standard reference in debates on the origins of morality, egalitarianism and politics in prehistoric societies, and Richard Wrangham's theory of "self-domestication" drew inspiration from it.