Tribes / by Desmond Morris and Peter Marsh

Superbly illustrated with over one hundred photographs in both colour and black and white, and with a highly read able and informative text, Tribes is sure to appeal to the same vast audience as Desmond Morris's Manwatching, Robert Ardrey's The Territorial Imperative and Richard Leakey's The Making of Mankind.

Man is a tribal animal - and has been for the last five million years. For it was about five million years ago that Man's ancestors first became hunter-gatherers: they needed to band together in order to hunt more effectively, and the bands themselves had to group together into tribes to ensure the viability of each succeeding generation.

In this fascinating book, Desmond Mor ris, author of many bestselling books from The Naked Ape onwards, and Peter Marsh, Senior Lecturer in Social Psychology at Oxford Polytechnic. trace the origins of tribal mores and behaviour and take us on a global journey to examine the "primi tive" tribes of today, so that we may infer the nature and structures of the tribes pre history.

However, much of this book is concer ned with modern tribes. In technological cultures such as those of the West. people have responded to the disappearance of formal tribes by consciously or uncon sciously creating new ones from chap ters of Hell's Angels to the armies of identically dressed gentlemen who inhabit New York's Wall Street or London's Stock Exchange. These new tribes, too, can tell us much about our tribal heritage. This book is essential reading for any intelligent human being who wishes to discover his or her own true tribal - nature.