Waorani:  The Contexts of Violence and War

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The authors:      Biographies   Photo by Wichita State Alumnai Association; all rights reserved.     Clayton Robarchek was born in McCook, Nebraska, in 1939.  His father was a meatcutter, and his mother a bookkeeper.  After completing high school in Grand Island, Nebraska, he spent more than a decade in a variety of jobs.  In the mid-1960s he enrolled in a night class, an introduction to anthropology, at the University of Nebraska, and was hooked.  he completed his BA in anthropology at the University of Nebraska in 1970, and his PhD at the University of California, Riverside in 1977.   He has taught in the California State University system at Los Angeles, Bakersfield, and Chico; at the University of California, Riverside; and at Wichita State University.  He also served as a Senior Fulbright-Hays lecturer in Anthropology at Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia.   Carole Robarchek was born in Kingman, Arizona, in 1943.  Her father was an officer in the Air Force, her mother a homemaker.  After high school, she worked as a model in Japan, and for the telephone company in California.  She discovered anthropology at the University of California, Riverside, where she received her BA in 1971, entering the PhD program the same year.  In 1974, on returning from her dissertation fieldwork in Malaysia, she was diagnosed with advanced breast cancer and given a 50% chance of surviving the year.  During the years of surgery and intensive chemotherapy that followed, academic deadlines passed with her dissertation uncompleted.   Later, however, as survival began to appear to be a real possibility, she resumed her ethnographic research.  She has since conducted fieldwork in Malaysia and Ecuador and has taught at the California State Universities at Los Angeles and Bakersfield and at Wichita State University.  She also served as a consultant conducting community health and needs assessments in Kansas.   The authors met and married while they were graduate students.   They have collaborated on four field research projects.  Two studies among the Malaysian Semai in 1973-74 and 1979-80 analyzed various aspects of the dynamics of peacefulness in this nonviolent society, and two studies among the Ecuadorian Waorani in 1987 and 1992-93 examined the Waorani warfare complex and its transformation into a much more peaceful way of life.  The results of their research have been published in numerous journal articles and edited volumes including, among others, The Anthropology of War (J. Haas, ed.), Societies at Peace (S. Howell and R. Willis, eds.), The Anthropology of Peace and Nonviolence (L. Sponsel and T. Gregor, eds.), Aggression and Peacefulness in Humans and Other Primates (J. Silverberg and J. Gray, eds.), A Natural History of Peace (T. Gregor, ed.), Anthropological Contributions to Conflict Resolution (A. Wolfe and H. Yang, eds.), and Cultural Variation in Conflict Resolution (D. Fry and K. Bjorkqvist, eds.).  Clay is Professor of Anthropology at Wichita State University.  Carole is Research Development Specialist in the Office of Research Administration at Wichita State University and serves as a social research consultant in the Wichita area.   This exciting book may be ordered from the following services:     Back to Top of Page Back to Top of Page We would like to hear your comments:   mailto:crobarch@twsu.edu