Hampshire College

“For Friends and Faith: Understanding the path and barriers to political violence”

Scott Atran spoke at Hampshire College on March 25 at 5:30 p.m. as part of the college’s science and religion lecture series. His talk was entitled “For Friends and Faith: Understanding the path and barriers to political violence.”

Professor Atran is research director in anthropology at the National Center for Scientific Research in Paris, visiting professor of psychology and public policy at the University of Michigan, and presidential scholar in sociology at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City.

Atran's books include Cognitive Foundations of Natural History: Towards an Anthropology of Science; In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion; and The Native Mind: Cognition and Culture in Human Knowledge of Nature (co-authored with Douglas Medin). Talking to the Enemy: Faith, Brotherhood, and the (Un)Making of Terrorists is due out later this year.

Abstract:
Many creatures will fight to the death for their close kin, but only humans fight and sacrifice unto death for friends and imagined kin, for brotherhoods willing to shed blood for one another. The reasons for brotherhoods—unrelated people cooperating to their full measure of devotion—are as ancient as our uniquely reflective and auto-predatory species. Different cultures ratchet up these reasons into great causes in different ways. Call it love of God or love of group, it matters little in the end . . . especially for young men, mortal combat in a great cause provides the ultimate adventure and glory to gain maximum esteem in the eyes of many and, most dearly, in the hearts of their peers. This century's major terrorist incidents are cases in point.