A Conversation with Irven DeVore

The Annual Review of Anthropology presents Irven DeVore, Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at Harvard University, in conversation with Peter Ellison, Co-Editor of this journal and Professor of Anthropology and Human Evolutionary Biology, also at Harvard University. Dr. DeVore talks about his life and career, describing how he went from social anthropology to studying and filming baboons and other primates in Africa, to observing the Bushmen of the Kalahari and the Pygmies. Dr. DeVore was one of the first to incorporate sociobiological theory into his work, a decision that would prove as fundamental as it was challenging. In his own words, he would have to "turn [his] back on everything [he'd] understood until that point in anthropology."