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Australasia and the Pacific Islands, Book Reviews
Volume 89 – No. 3

A TALENT FOR FRIENDSHIP: Rediscovery of a Remarkable Trait | By John Edward Terrell

New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. ix, 302 pp. (Figures.) US$29.95, cloth. ISBN 978-0-19-938645-1.


The inherent social nature of human beings is no longer disputed and no biologist or anthropologist would subscribe to a view of our human ancestors as isolated individuals wandering pristine forests in search of food and mates, ready to fight off competitors for either. But many sociobiologists, such as E.O. Wilson, and evolutionary psychologists, such as Stephen Pinker, would still maintain that the group as a basic social unit is competitive, bellicose, and murderous. Indeed, the idea of competition as the driving force in human evolution has required conviction that those in each generation who survive to transmit their genes are fit enough to resort to violence to do so.

The emphasis on competition has a number of depressing concomitants. It is masculinist; it presents individualism as a virtue; and it represents altruism as self-interest and those who are selfish as the victors in the evolutionary struggle. John Terrell proposes an alternative view of human nature as a determinant of successful evolution. While acknowledging that no single set of qualities provides a template for what might be called Human Nature, he argues that the human capacity for friendship is of primary importance and a major factor in the evolutionary success of the human species.

Terrell derives his argument from a diverse range of disciplinary traditions including anthropology, social theory, archaeology, primatology, neuroscience, psychology, and biology. He recounts the origin of his interest in a research project for the Field Museum of Natural History, during which he and his colleague observed the patterns of long-distance exchange networks that link people and goods along the north coast of Papua New Guinea. These networks, like many similar ones in non-industrial societies, enable people to gain access to scarce resources, and to exchange information, cultural knowledge, and specialized products. They incorporate people across geographical and linguistic barriers and they persist for generations. The people who form nodes in the network are friends who offer hospitality and sometimes refuge. The bonds between people are characteristically warm and visits to and fro are often festive occasions. He insists that these relationships are different in kind from instrumental cooperation observable in other species, for these people form friendships. For Terrell, the Sepik people whose exchange networks he studied constitute and demonstrate the talent for friendship that he maintains is essentially human.

“The Friendship Hypothesis” presents the human ability to make friends as a unique “biological and psychological capacity” that has enabled humans to develop advantageous social networks that are based on companionship. Terrell insists that “as a species, we are not struggling against the odds to control our bestial inner selves or wild savages lurking beyond the security of our campfires; instead … we are struggling to create reliable ways to cultivate trust and communication”(31). He explores this capacity as an effect of the evolution of the human brain, which enables us to reflect, imagine, and to transform our environments, both physical and social, in ways that are beneficent and advantageous to the species.

Terrell has much to say about the human brain and the ways that our minds work. In the chapters that deal specifically with the subject, he adopts a heuristic device of naming three different types of thinking which he calls Lou, Laurence, and Leslie. Lou and Laurence are recognizably type 1 and type 2 cognitive processes defined psychologically: the first automatic, emotional, and often “unconscious”; the second conscious, intentional, and rational. The reflective, imaginative, and contemplative mental capacity he designates Leslie. The ability to imagine forging friendship with a stranger is a critical “Leslie effect.”

While most of the book is structured around the demonstration of the social force of friendship, the concluding section is didactic. Here he elucidates six “Principles to Live By” that he believes enhance social connectedness. This includes a description of a Maori marae meeting ceremony in which two groups encounter and alternately engage in greeting and listening according to a formal procedure. Terrell includes an appendix that sets out the rules for such a meeting clearly and precisely and advocates their usefulness cross-culturally.

The book is written for a general reader and the author adopts a chatty, didactic style that draws on his own experiences, his relationships with others, and his experience as an anthropological researcher. His enthusiasm for his subject is quirky and engaging. It is recognizably a genre of popular “natural history” writing that renders the exotic familiar and the bizarre perfectly rational. Terrell ranges far and wide, occasionally veering off on tangents. He offers comments and asides that are sometimes amusing, other times distracting or simply odd. At times I wondered whether his eclecticism was a strength or a weakness. But his book raises questions about the nature of “Human Nature” that confront and confound the notion that selfishness and a propensity for violence are the human capacities that have determined our evolution as social beings.


Martha Macintyre
The University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia         

pp. 729-731

Pacific Affairs

An International Review of Asia and the Pacific

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