Chris Knight (anthropologist)

Chris Knight (born 1942) is a British anthropologist and political activist.

Following an MPhil in Russian Literature from the University of Sussex in 1975, Knight gained his PhD in 1987 at the University of London for a thesis on Claude Lévi-Strauss's four-volume Mythologiques. He became a lecturer in anthropology at the University of East London in 1989 and a professor at the same institution in 2000. Knight is a founding member of the "Radical Anthropology Group" (RAG). He is currently a Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Anthropology, University College London.

Since graduating from the University of Sussex in 1966, Knight has been exploring the idea that language and symbolic culture emerged in the human species through a process of Darwinian evolution culminating at a certain point in revolutionary change. Becoming human was, according to this theory, a classic instance of a dialectical process, i.e. one in which quantitative change culminates eventually in a qualitative leap. In pursuing this line of thought, Knight takes inspiration not only from modern Darwinian theorists such as Eörs Szathmáry and John Maynard Smith but also from Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, who in their later years were fascinated by what was then the new science of anthropology.

Published in 1991, Knight's first full-length book, Blood Relations: Menstruation and the origins of culture was favourably reviewed in The Times Higher Educational Supplement, The Times Literary Supplement and The London Review of Books; it also received publicity through an interview on the BBC World Service Science Now programme, a debate with Dr. Henrietta Moore on BBC Radio 4 Woman’s Hour, a front-page news report in The Independent on Sunday and Daily Telegraph and coverage in many other periodicals.The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute described Blood Relations as ‘a very readable, witty, lively treasure-trove of anthropological wisdom and insight.’ In April 1998, the Independent on Sunday featured a two-page article on Knight's work by science correspondent Marek Kohn, who described his approach as ‘drawing together some of the most dynamic lines of argument in current British evolutionary thought’. A dissenting voice was the Socialist Worker's Party's Chris Harman, who dismissed Knight's argument as "menstrual moonshine".

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