Christopher Robert Hallpike


Christopher Robert Hallpike is an English-Canadian anthropologist and an Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at McMaster University, Ontario, Canada. He is known for his extensive study of the Konso of Ethiopia and Tauade of New Guinea.

Early life and education

Hallpike was educated at Clifton College, and The Queen's College, Oxford, where he read PPE. After graduation he studied at the Institute of Social Anthropology, Oxford, under E. E. Evans-Pritchard and Rodney Needham. Fieldwork among the Konso in Ethiopia 1965–1967 was followed by a D.Phil. in 1968.

Career

After graduation, Hallpike was appointed a postdoctoral fellow at Dalhousie University, Nova Scotia, and in 1970–1972 carried out fieldwork among the Tauade of Papua New Guinea. He returned to Dalhousie as a research associate in 1972–1973, and after four years in England as a private researcher, in 1978 was appointed professor of anthropology at McMaster University, Ontario, until retiring in 1998 as professor emeritus. He became a Canadian citizen in 1982. Hallpike was a Bye Fellow of Robinson College, Cambridge, in 1984–1985, 1988–1989, and 1992, and was awarded a D.Litt. by Oxford University in 1989.

Research

Hallpike has researched and published on a wide range of subjects, including Ethiopia and Papua New Guinea; stateless societies; tribal warfare; systems of seniority based on age; the symbolism of hair style; sociocultural evolution; cultural materialism; Piaget, developmental psychology and primitive thought; the evolution of morality; the relevance of Darwinism and sociobiology in anthropology ; and the history of science. His photographs of 1960s Ethiopia and Papua New Guinea have recently been added to the Pitt Rivers Museum .
Hallpike is critical of "journalists, science writers, historians, linguists, biologists, and especially evolutionary psychologists" who write about primitive societies with ignorance or even ideologically driven falsifications espousing theories that are "nonsense". Thus, in his book Ship of Fools he evaluates critically the scientific merit – or the lack of it – of theories presented by Emma Byrne about swearing, Yuval Harari about human history, Rene Girard about mimetic causation of violence, about his denial of human cannibalism, and Noam Chomsky about universal grammar in language acquisition.

Publications