Barbara J. King
Barbara J. King is a contributor to the NPR blog 13.7: Cosmos & Culture. She is a Chancellor Professor of Anthropology at the College of William and Mary. With a long-standing research interest in primate behavior and human evolution, King has studied baboon foraging in Kenya and gorilla and bonobo communication at captive facilities in the United States.
Recently, she has taken up writing about animal emotion and cognition more broadly, including in bison, farm animals, elephants and domestic pets, as well as primates.
King's most recent book is How Animals Grieve (University of Chicago Press, 2013). Her article "When Animals Mourn" in the July 2013 Scientific American has been chosen for inclusion in the 2014 anthology The Best American Science and Nature Writing. King reviews non-fiction for the Times Literary Supplement (London) and is at work on a new book about the choices we make in eating other animals. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for her work in 2002.
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For many, Afghanistan does not at first conjure up images of black bears and musk deer. But that's just what Alex Dehgan found when his team went there in hope of establishing the first national park.
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Anthropologist Barbara J. King says Hurricane Florence should lead us to look beyond the agriculture industry's loss of "inventory" and view animals as thinking, feeling — and suffering — beings.
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Are playgrounds in the U.S. too sterile and risk-averse to help our kids thrive? Anthropologist Barbara J. King considers play and child development in evolutionary perspective.
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Would you eat beef, chicken, even foie gras grown from animal cells in the lab? Anthropologist Barbara J. King takes a look at new food technologies.
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Empathy for people diagnosed with an anxiety disorder can come about by reading first-person accounts and by knowing the facts from science, says anthropologist Barbara J. King.
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When it comes to finding and preparing food, we're a continually inventive species. Anthropologist Barbara J. King asks: What are the food trends of the future?
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A storm of this magnitude affects many animals. Uplifting videos show people rescuing all kinds of animals from Hurricane Harvey's floodwaters, says anthropologist Barbara J. King.
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Barbara J. King, a professor emerita of anthropology at William and Mary, discusses whether Neanderthals had "religious capacity."
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It's a popular idea, that there's a gift embedded in a diagnosis of cancer. Commentator and cancer patient Barbara J. King considers — and rejects — this notion, finding resonance instead in the words of two other women with cancer.
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Ivan spent decades confined within a small department store display, until activists won the gorilla's transfer to a zoo. Anthropologist and ape observer Barbara J. King remembers Ivan and considers the intense impact — positive and negative — that human actions have on individual animals' lives.