RAG - A Short History

Radical: about the inherent, fundamental roots of an issue.
Anthropology : the study of what it means to be human.
Group: a collective bound together by common aims.

In 1978, Chris Knight – then a Diploma student in Anthropology at University College London – received an urgent telephone message from Professor Mary Douglas, then his supervisor and tutor at University College London. A lecturer who had been scheduled to teach a weekly evening class in anthropology had just gone to Africa. Could Chris fill the gap? Chris agreed and in September of that year began teaching “An Introduction to Anthropology”.

By 1984, the course – run under the auspices of London University’s Department of Extra-Mural Studies – had grown to be a popular weekly event in Morley College, London SE1. During the spring of 1984, the Principal at Morley College announced that for budgetary reasons, this particular course would be discontinued. No-one understood this, since Chris’ class – attended weekly by between 40 and 50 students – was in fact one of the more popular ones. Petitions and a lively demonstration to the Principal’s office made no difference,and so the students decided to ensure continuation of the course under new management. Within a few weeks, the students got organised among themselves, electing a treasurer, secretary and other officers. Without telling Chris, they booked a library in Camden – and invited him to continue teaching next year. In this way, the Radical Anthropology Group was born.

Anthropology is the study of what it means to be human. To be radical is to get to the roots of things. It therefore seemed natural to identify ourselves by linking these two words. Chris’ course suggested new ways of asking anthropology’s founding questions. Not only were we encouraged to learn from indigenous peoples in different parts of the world. Additionally, we sought answers by studying other species and other times. What might it mean to be almost – but not quite – human? How socially self-aware, for example, is a mountain gorilla or common chimpanzee? Do non-human primates have a sense of morality? Do they have the rudiments of language?

And what about distant times? What plants and animals flourished in Africa during the Miocene and Pliocene? Who were the Australopithecines and why had they begun walking upright? Where did Europe’s Neanderthals come from and why did they become extinct? How, when and why did human art, religion, language and symbolic culture first evolve?

In 1987, Chris completed his Ph.D. at University College London. It was a re-analysis of Claude Lévi-Strauss’ four-volume work on Native American mythology (Mythologiques). Shortly after this, Chris’ sister lent a copy of the Ph.D. to her friend Lionel Sims, who since the 1960s had been lecturing in sociology at the University of East London. As a member of the Socialist Workers’ Party, Lionel was enthusiastic about Chris’ intellectual defence of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels – particularly on the subject of “primitive communism”. After attending the Radical Anthropology Group evening class and after many discussions, Lionel invited Chris to help set up Anthropology at the University of East London. Since its establishment in 1990, Anthropology at UEL has retained close ties with the Radical Anthropology Group.

In 1991, Yale University Press published Chris’ book, Blood Relations: Menstruation and the origins of culture. Two recent RAG members and Ph.D. students – Ian Watts and Camilla Power – criticised certain aspects of Chris’ sex strike theory as both set out to test and explore some of the model’s predictions. Working on the ochre record in southern Africa and at the Institute of Archaeology, London University, Ian pushed back the date of the “human revolution” to at least 100,000 years ago, showing that the key transition had occurred in Africa, not Europe. Working in the Anthropology Department at University College London, Camilla Power criticised the model on Darwinian grounds, offering a substantially improved version based on her concept of “sham menstruation”. The new version of the theory was presented at a meeting of the Theoretical Archaeology Group held in Southampton late in 1993. In March 1994, the School of Oriental and African Studies in London hosted a conference entitled Ritual and the Origins of Culture, in which archaeologists, palaeoanthropologists, primatologists and others debated one another’s ideas. The success of this event led to the idea of a book, and this was eventually published by Edinburgh University Press. Edited by Robin Dunbar, Chris Knight and Camilla Power, The Evolution of Culture: An interdisciplinary view (1999) remains one of the few volumes in which competing models of human cultural origins can be contrasted and compared. Meanwhile, in 1995, Chris, Camilla and Ian published a joint article in the Cambridge Archaeological Journal – “The human symbolic revolution: a Darwinian account”. Ian completed his Ph.D. in 1998, while Camilla completed hers in 2001.

In 1994, Chris convened a small workshop at UEL on the origins of language. Attended by Jim Hurford from Edinburgh University, this led in 1996 to the first International Conference on the Evolution of Language. This was followed in 1998 by the Second International Conference on the Evolution of Language, held under the auspices of the University of East London. The third conference in the series was held in Paris in 2000, while the fourth was held in Harvard in 2002. The fifth conference was held in Leipzig in 2004 and the sixth in Rome, 2006.

Since its inception, members of the Radical Anthropology Group have had an interest in stone circles, Avebury and Stonehenge in particular. Starting in 1979, students from the evening class organised an annual trip to Avebury during the mid-summer period. When Lionel became active in the Radical Anthropology Group, he took a theoretical interest in the stones and began to offer a guided tour of the area. This interest developed during Lionel’s period as a postgraduate student in the anthropology department at University College London and has continued ever since. A television documentary centred on Lionel’s research has been made; this has been shown many times on a variety of TV channels since first being transmitted in 2003. In 2006, overcoming some resistance from archaeologists in high places, Lionel built on the film's success by publishing a ground-breaking article on Stonehenge in the June issue of the Cambridge Archaeological Journal.

The Radical Anthropology Group has never defined itself as a political organisation. But the implications of some forms of science are intrinsically radical, and this applies in particular to the theory that humanity was born in a social revolution. Many RAG members choose to be active in Survival International and/or other indigenous rights movements. Additionally, some RAG members combine academic research with activist involvement in environmentalist, anticapitalist and other campaigns. In 2001, Camilla Power and Elena Mouriki visited Tanzania and met up with activists in the local indigenous rights movement known as Aang Serian. The following summer, Chris, Ian and Camilla made further friendships with Aang Serian activists in Tanzania. These contacts led to the participation of Aang Serian activists at a London meeting on how to defend the land rights and cultural survival of African hunter gatherers.