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Chris Knight (anthropologist)

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Chris Knight (1942 -) 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.

Knight was suspended by the University of East London on 27 March 2009, following comments made to various media prior to the G20 Summit in London.

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.
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