Richard Blanton
Please join me in congratulating Richard Blanton, professor of anthropology and political science, on the publication of his most recent work, How Humans Cooperate: Confronting the Challenges of Collective Action (University Press of Colorado & Utah State University Press).
In this book, Rich and Lane F. Fargher, co-author, take a new approach to investigating human cooperation, developed from the vantage point of an "anthropological imagination." Drawing on the discipline’s broad and holistic understanding of humans in biological, social, and cultural dimensions and across a wide range of temporal and cultural variation, the authors unite psychological and institutional approaches by demonstrating the interplay of institution building and cognitive abilities of the human brain.
Currently, Rich is a co-Pl with Lane on an archaeological project in Tlaxcala, Mexico. An article in Science, It wasn’t just Greece: Archaeologists find early democratic societies in the Americas, introduces the findings that they have made while in Tlaxcala.
Since joining Purdue in 1976, he has done approximately 36 months of archaeological field work over many field seasons in Guatemala, Mexico, and Turkey, and has also completed several cross-cultural comparative research projects. He has reported on this research in 14 books and 78 articles and chapters published through diverse outlets, including Cambridge University Press, Science, American Anthropologist, American Antiquity, Journal of Field Archaeology, and Current Anthropology.
Congratulations, Professor Blanton!
David A. Reingold
Justin S. Morrill Dean
College of Liberal Arts