A Talent for Friendship
Rediscovery of a Remarkable Trait
John Edward Terrell
Reviews and Awards
"Terrell is a fine storyteller, and the book is an engaging read with a number of thought-provoking case studies and examples...The book's select case studies nicely illustrate the importance of friendship among human in a few places and times...an enjoyable read that weaves together many streams of thought and case studies to illustrate the remarkable capacity that humans can have for building new relationships with strangers." --Daniel Hruschka, American Anthropologist
"Is friendship a transaction designed to smooth over our naturally brutish human nature? Or is it intrinsic to our being? Terrell, a leading anthropologist of Oceania and author of the seminal Prehistory in the Pacific Islands, offers a more complex answer... As a theory of friendship, Terrell's work is elegant." - PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"Riveting... I highly recommend A Talent for Friendship... The author's engaging style and infectious enthusiasm also make the book appealing to any general reader with an interest in archaeology, geography, psychology, and anthropology." - American Scientist
"With A Talent for Friendship, John Terrell offers a mature view of human relatedness-one that takes us beyond the well-trodden ground of romantic pairings, filial bonds, and dependence upon caregivers. Here we get an extended, inclusive discussion of a profound and unaccountably neglected phenomenon: our ability to form friendships. Terrell's passion for the subject is matched by his compassion for the reader. Taking us by the proverbial hand, he guides us through some pretty woolly territory-an intellectual and scientific dreamscape of theories, disciplines, methods, and controversies leading, in the end, to an integrated land where we may finally understand what it means to be a person in relation to other persons, a self within a larger self." --James Coan, Associate Professor of Clinical Psychology and Director of the Virginia Affective Neuroscience Laboratory, University of Virginia
"An engaging, astute, and boldly original proposal about the nature of being human, this is five-fields anthropology at its best. Positioning insights against human history, sometimes debatable 'common' sense from the West, and Pacific islander life ways, Terrell draws on intellectual and literary threads to sew together the argument that humans have a predisposition toward friendship as surely as we have a predisposition to speak." --Janet Dixon Keller, Professor Emerita of Anthropology, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
"This is a book about friendship told through stories of friendship and rooted in anthropological and evolutionary analyses. Terrell takes us on a journey of discovery, demonstrating both personally and professionally how, where, and why friendship forms the backbone of what it means to be human. Intermingling history, ethnography, evolutionary theory, and personal experience, John Terrell reveals the deep and intricate realities of friendship and delightfully illustrates why it is a (or even 'the') central factor in what makes us human." --Agustin Fuentes, Professor of Anthropology, University of Notre Dame
"John Edward Terrell, using his archeological and ethnographic background of the peoples of New Guinea, an extraordinary eclectic bibliography, and a number of personal events and experiences, shows us that humans are not inherently selfish and dangerous. He leads us on a remarkable trail showing us that humans have an extraordinary talent for friendship." --Robert Sussman, Professor of Anthropology, Washington University in St. Louis
"In this original and imaginative book, Terrell explores the anthropology of friendship, which seems to define a peculiarly human relationship. Part of this book's considerable charm lies in its unashamed attempt to cross from descriptive and scientific into prescriptive and 'applied' by giving the reader hints on how to be a friend and even providing some crosscultural perspective from Polynesia. This comprises the book's final major theme and, for me, evokes some of the best of Ashley Montagu's mid-century popular anthropology books." --Jonathan Marks, Evolutionary Anthropology
