Review of J. Haas, ed., THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF WAR (original) (raw)
Related papers
Considering Anthropology and Small Wars
Small Wars & Insurgencies, 2020
Almost every war since the origins of the discipline at the beginning of the 19th century has involved anthropology and anthropologists. In some cases, anthropologists participated directly as uniformed combatants. Following the philosopher George Lucas, one might call this ‘anthropology for the military,’ having the purpose of directly providing expert knowledge with the goal of improving operations and strategy. In some cases this scholarship is undertaken, anthropologists have also studied State militaries, which following George Lucas might be considered ‘anthropology of the military.’ Sometimes this scholarship is undertaken with the objective of providing the military with information about its own internal systems and processes in order to improve its performance. At other times, the objective is to study the military as a human group to identify and describe its culture and social processes. Both ‘anthropology for the military’ and ‘anthropology of the military’ tend to have a practical, applied aspect, whether the goal is improving military effectiveness or influencing national security policy. On the other hand, anthropology as a discipline has also had a long history of studying warfare itself, known as ‘the anthropology of war.’ The papers in this special edition fall into these myriad categories of military anthropology.
in Unlearning the Language of Conquest, edited by Four Arrows (Don Jacobs), 2006
Perhaps the ultimate price we all pay for diminishing the female's power and position in society is war, the great corporate money-machine and ideological tool of fascism. This chapter reveals the relationship between patriarchal culture and war. Discussion of this relationship has typically been suppressed in one of two primary ways. The previous chapter addressed the first way: simply curtail any discussion about the power of Indigenous women in peaceful, traditional Indigenous society. The second way is to re-create history so as to make the world believe that Indigenous cultures were not at all peaceful in the first place. The latter has been a primary occupation for a number of authors for some time. For example, in 2003, St. Martin's Press published Harvard archaeologist Steven LeBlank's book, Constant Battles: The Myth of the Peaceful, Noble Savage, co-authored with Katherine E. Register. Like a number of other academic books, such as those referred to in the introduction, this one attempts to demonstrate that waifare today is far less prevalent than it was in ''primitive" cultures. It argues that the assumptions and the actions of early Indigenous People resulted in patterns of violence throughout the world, and that awareness of these P'!tterns in concert with recognizing the advantages of modern technology increases the ability for humans to avoid war in the future. An admirable goal, but their anecdotal evidence contradicts larger bodies of evidence about war in pre-contact cultures. In fact, their "evidence" simply replicates the self-authorizing mythology in which the majority of Americans have been thoroughly steeped. From images of the caveman dragging his mate into a cave afte1· crushing the head of an opponent with a club to memories of Saturday morning television programs depicting blood-thirsty savages, Americans do not need "more awareness" about Indigenous violence. As previous chapters have shown, popular literature, Hollywood movies, and school textbooks have done an ample job of getting the average person to see ancient cultures as having been prone to violence and war. A large body of research, however, opposes claims that war and belligerence were very prevalent in Indigenous cultures. A day spent looking at the Human Resources Area Files demonstrates this clearly. HRAF, an internationally PEACEFUL VERSUS WARLIKE SOCIETIES II I 3 5
Anthropology, archaeology, and the origin of warfare
World Archaeology, 2003
The main theories of the origin of warfare -from evolutionary psychology, materialism, and historical contingency -are examined. Their implications and their use of anthropological evidence, especially for the Yanomamö of the Amazon, are explored, then their relationship to the Palaeolithic and Mesolithic archaeological record. The early prehistoric evidence for conflict and warfare, mainly from Europe, is considered, from individual injuries, mostly from club wounds to the skull and death by arrowshot, to mass killings which could have destroyed a group. The enormous regional variation in this evidence is set against universal theories which imply uniformity and are thus found wanting.