The Imperial Animal [Paperback]

Robin Fox (Author, Introduction), Lionel Tiger (Author, Introduction)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 1560009624 | ISBN-13: 978-1560009627 | Publication Date: January 1, 1997

This volume offers a compelling perspective on the controversy over humans and their biology. This now-classic study is about the social bonds that hold us together and the antisocial theories that drive us apart. The authors divulge how the evolutionary past of the species, reflected in genetic codes, determines our present and coerces our future. It also give us a direct and intimate look at how we see ourselves. It offers insight into our politics, our ways of learning and teaching, reproducing and producing, playing and fighting.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Lionel Tiger is Charles Darwin Professor of Anthropology at Rutgers University. He is the author of The Decline of Males,Optimism,The Pursuit of Pleasure,China’s Food,The Manufacture of Evil, Men in Groups, and The Imperial Animal. In addition, he is a regular contributor to both Psychology Today and The New York Times.  He is the series editor of Evolutionary Foundations of Human Behaviorfor Transaction Publishers.

Product Details

• Paperback: 308 pages
• Publisher: Transaction Publishers (January 1, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1560009624
• ISBN-13: 978-1560009627
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.1 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #309,994 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

28 of 31 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars One of the millestones of human consciousness, November 22, 2000

By 

Earl Hazell (New York) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: The Imperial Animal (Paperback)

It has been said that Copernicus' treatises on the actual heliocentric nature of the solar system were written more for the friends of his on his unique level of understanding and education. They were more or less accidentally leaked to the Catholic Church years later; hence the unexpected nature of their reaction. The historian of science Giorgio de Santillana wrote in THE CRIME OF GALILEO that it was the European academic community (owing its legitimacy to proving inaccurate Aristotlian interpretations of astronomy to be correct) and not the Catholic Church, that gave Galileo the most resistance. And it was they who were instrumental in politically influencing the Church itself in its damnation of his theories. Darwin's book ORIGIN OF SPECIES was said to have been scoffed at before all but disappearing... before becoming the focal point of the intellectual wars in Europe and America in the latter half of the 19th century. And Einstein was a postal clerk for years before his theory of relativity was taken seriously.

All of this, combined with Schoepenhauer's theory about the three stages of an emerging truth (first it is ignored, second, it is violently opposed, third, it is accepted as self evident), serve to me as explanation as to why this book, THE IMPERIAL ANIMAL by Tiger and Fox, was not only met with disdain by a number of sociologists and cultural anthropologists upon publication, but has never been previously reviewed on AMAZON.COM and is not referred to among psychoanalytical or sociopolitical minded intellectuals or even everyday people and the Media during the course of any given day. And yet, in much the same way Freud and Jung made words like "ego", "unconscious", "introvert", and "sibling rivalry" a part of the everyday language of people who say they don't even believe in the social relevance of psychology, this one book is responsible for us looking at the prehistoric world of man and thinking, now with a flipness that makes references both colloquial and unconsious, that it has something to teach us about who we are in the here and now.

This book is considered a classic amongst anthropologists and the equivalent of the life-altering books and theories I've mentioned above to Evolutionary psychologists. It may be singlehandedly responsible for people using anaolgies of prehistoric times to explain the inclinations and dilemmas of modern man, in all aspects. Listen to the writers themselves as they talk about the climate in which they wrote this book thirty years ago in the introduction wriiten in 1998:

"We could mention several areas in which our scorned ideas of 1971 have become commonplaces of today's academic and public dialogue. Tiger's term 'male bonding' seems to have passed into the language much as 'inferiority complex' did... It heartens us, for instance, that on opening almost any serious health book today we come across passages like this: 'Even if we are not 100 percent sure that a high fiber diet helps prevent most of the diseases listed, common sense directs us to eat in a manner more closely resembling that of our ancestors, who were rarely bothered by these problems (William Manahan, M.D., "Eat For Health", 1988).'...This splendid advice is attributed to 'common sense'. All we can say is that today's common sense is yesterday's ridiculous theories."

Tiger and Fox as sociobiological thinkers make clear that an overwhelmingly significant portion of all interpersonal and cultural human behavior stems from biological imperatives. We are, as the end result of our biology, destined to have a language of behavioral traits established in us that create much of what is called culture. And though it definitively is not created by culture, it actually is the biggest impact ON culture in all its permutations throughout time and around the world. It is what they call the "biogrammar" of human kind. It is borne via the million or so years of evolution that brought us to a refined state of hunter-based society in the jungle savannahs around the world, and then combined with the alterations of and additions to that paradigm with the birth of agricultural society- which lead to civlization as we know it.

The book is profoundly humbling and disheartening. It attacks and obliterates the cultural hubris regarding the uniqueness of mankind that you would not know exists as the foundation of your psyche until they reveal it, regardless of your philosophical or theological views. Even the enlightened evolutionary/biochemical view that turns out to be a contradiction in the minds of most laypeople like me- that we share most of the same genetic material with apes and other primates but none of the behavioral implications of that scientific fact- is blown apart in just a look at the essential nature of all political systems:

"These are some of the features of baboon and macque social structure... whatever the details of the system, certain underlying processes are obvious despite the diversity of surface structures, and can be easily summarized.

-the system is based on hierarchy and competiton for status...

-the males dominate the political system, and the older males dominate the younger.

-females can be influential in sending males up the status ladder, and their long term relationships to one another are critical for the stability of the system...

-cooperation among males is essential; coalitions of bonded males act as units in the dominance system.

-the whole structure is held together by the attractiveness of the dominants and the attention that is constantly paid them.

-Because of this, charismatic individuals can upset the the hierarchical structure, and by the same token, retain power."

What they show to be the aspects of the basic social environment of the baboon, are also, *at the very least*, the running themes of the past several centuries of western history.

Using superlatives to describe this book is pointless. Its impact and influence speaks for itself- in fact our culture as it is today speaks for it. It has the power to shake the foundations of your faith in absolutely everything, which cannot be put into words. But with this idea of the "biogram" and the biogrammatical language of humankind being a fact to be worked with, the way aviators work with the fact of gravity or Oscar Petrson works with the 88 unchangeable keys of the piano... Its power to illuminate and encourage is equally as strong.

It is pretty amazing.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant, November 25, 2000

By 

E. Grannis "Lady Liz" (Acapulco, Mexico) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Imperial Animal (Paperback)

An absoulutely fascinating look at the origins of present day human behavior through the eyes of an emerging science. The study of Darwinian anthropology and psychology are so commonplace now and filled with contradictory perspectives, that is refreshing to see the courage and logic of where much of it began. After thirty years, this work has yet to be outdone.

2 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Good for its time, January 13, 2007

By 

L. SAXON - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Imperial Animal (Paperback)

This is an improvement on Tiger's 'Men in Groups' but is again undermined by what is now outdated and incorrect information on primates and 'man the hunter'.

Male bonding and the detrimental consequences of it today nevertheless remains relevant and the authors do their best to present evolutionary evidence for why men who are 'banded together in some interest will readily resort to violence against other groups of men who are seen as opposed to that interest'.

The authors miss the more recently recognized probability that we inherited male philopatry from our common ancestor with the chimpanzee and how this acted against female bonding/kinship and increased male-bonded influence and self-interest. They also, as others at the time, believed the incest taboo to be specific to humans yet we now know that the avoidance of inbreeding exists throughout the animal - and even the plant - kingdoms.

Tiger and Fox are not totally blind to the female perspective but their tone is often dismissive towards them and offensive at times eg when discussing baboon consortships they describe the end of the consortship when the female 'is thrown back into the pool of females'! Hardly! Also, discussing homicidal murderers, they describe the 'Crazy Dogs' of the Crow Indians who were young, killer males, allowed to wreck the camp and rape the women on the night before a battle or raid. These young men could do this with impunity because they were facing death the next day and they were therefore the most honored of men. There is little concern here to discuss the price the women pay for the 'protection' from warring males!

The authors have a romanticized view of what they presume was the hunter life - not because they pretend it was not harsh and violent but because its small-scale violence was not threatening to the species nor the planet and the males were excited by the hunting and killing ie their work. Unable to return to the hunter way of life they suggest the best we can do is to contain and control male-bonded violence which is now natural but maladaptive and potentially disastrous.

Tiger and Fox certainly do not paint a pretty picture of masculinity and male violence but they do mix it with an almost sacred status to protect it from any real challenge or potential for evolutionary change. Women have changed in ways that were not even imagined as recently as 1971 so it would be a little premature to settle for what is settled for here. In some ways the book sounds as if it could have been written in 1871, especially in their attitude towards women and female primates.

Male-bonded violence remains a major problem in human societies and this book helps in the understanding of its force and dangers. The authors said they tried to view 'man' as if they were observing an alien species but they obviously can only really view humans from a male perspective and with male hormones and inherited male thinking and feeling which they acknowledge in human males as being full of fantasies of omnipotence and what can only be descibed as male narcissism.

Good for its time but should not be accepted uncritically today.