DUNBAR’S NUMBER
Edited by David Shankland, Director, RAI
Sean Kingston: RAI Occasional Publication Number 45
By special arrangement with the publishers, paperback copies are available privately to Fellows at the reduced price of £15 +£2.50 post and packing (where it needs to be sent). Please write to admin@therai.org.uk if any fellow would like one, or more copies.
The published list price of the volume is £50 (hardback) for library sales. The publisher’s description and list of contents are as follows:
Hardcover: 196 pages: Publisher: Sean Kingston Publishing (15 Feb. 2019): Language: English
ISBN-13: 978-1912385034
Blurb
Dunbar’s Number, as the limit on the size of both social groups and personal social networks, has achieved something close to iconic status and is one of the most influential concepts to have emerged out of anthropology in the last quarter century. It is widely cited throughout the social sciences, archaeology, psychology and network science, and its reverberations have been felt as far afield as the worlds of business organization and social-networking sites, whose design it has come to underpin. Named after its originator, Robin Dunbar, whose career has spanned biological anthropology, zoology and evolutionary psychology, it stands testament to the importance of an interdisciplinary approach to human behaviour. In this collection Dunbar joins authors from a wide range of disciplines to explore Dunbar’s Number’s conceptual origins, as well as the evidence supporting it, and to reflect on its wider implications in archaeology, social anthropology and medicine.
“The celebrated Dunbar’s number is now well established as a key measure of human social organisation – but how did it come to be, what are its many ramifications? Full of stimulating ideas, this truly engaging collection is an indispensable way of finding out, its themes as appetising for general readers as students and academics.” John Gowlett, Professor of Archaeology and Evolutionary Anthropology, The University of Liverpool.
List of contents
Preface David Shankland
Chapter 1 Dunbar’s time and human evolution Clive Gamble
Chapter 2 From there to now, and the origins of some ideas R.I.M. Dunbar
Chapter 3 From 150 to 3 Dunbar’s numbers Russell A. Hill
Chapter 4 Inclusive hierarchies and the rank-size rule Matt Grove
Chapter 5 Monogamy and infanticide in complex societies Christopher Opie
Chapter 6 Untangling causality Multiple levels of explanation for human cognitive Evolution Robert A. Foley
Chapter 7 Lifting the gloomy curtain of time past Tracing the identity of the first cognitively modern hominin in deep history S.J. Underdown and S.J. Smith
Chapter 8 Ego-centred networks, community size and cohesion Dunbar’s Number and a Mandara Mountains conundrum James H. Wade
Chapter 9 About the curious power of dialogue Esther Goody
Chapter 10 Schizophrenia, evolution and self-transcendence Simon Dein
Chapter 11 Dunbar’s Number(s) Constraints on the social world R.I.M. Dunbar
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