Pierre L. van den Berghe (1933 – 6 February 2019) was a Congolese-born American
professor emeritus[2] of sociology and anthropology at the
University of Washington, where he had worked since 1965. Born in the
Belgian Congo to Belgian parents, and spending
World War II in occupied Belgium, he was an early witness to ethnic conflict and racism, which eventually led him to become a leading authority on ethnic relations. He conducted field work in South Africa, Mexico, Guatemala, Iran, Lebanon, Nigeria, Peru, and Israel. Early in his career, he lectured at the
University of Natal alongside
Leo Kuper and
Fatima Meer.[1] A student of
Talcott Parsons at Harvard (receiving the PhD in 1960), he nevertheless had little interest in
structural functionalism and was one of the first proponents of
sociobiological approaches to social phenomena.[3] Van den Berghe died on 6 February 2019.[4]
Selected works
Van den Berghe, Pierre L. 1981. The Ethnic Phenomenon. New York: Elsevier.
---. 1979. Human Family Systems: An Evolutionary View. New York: Elsevier.
---. 1977. Inequality in the Peruvian Andes: Class and Ethnicity in Cuzco. Columbia: University of Missouri Press.
---. 1975. Man in Society: A Biosocial View. New York: Elsevier.
---. 1973. Age and Sex in Human Societies: A Biosocial Perspective. Belmont, Calif: Wadsworth Pub. Co.
---. 1972. Intergroup Relations: Sociological Perspectives. New York: Basic Books.
---. 1970. Academic Gamesmanship; How to Make a PhD Pay. London: Abelard-Schuman.
Van den Berghe, Pierre L. 1990. "From the Popocatetepl to the Limpopo." pages 410–431 in Bennett M. Berger, editor, Authors of Their Own Lives: Intellectual Autobiographies by Twenty American Sociologists. University of California Press.