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.
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.
[4] Stephen K. Sanderson, 2001: "Pierre has the crucial traits a good sociologist should have: irreverence, iconoclasm, wit, a resistance to intellectual fads, a methodological eclecticism, a willingness to put together the best of the best theoretical schools, and a penchant for the truth rather than the popularity of one’s ideas.