'A Change of Perspective: Integrating Evolutionary Psychology Into the Historiography of Violence.' (original) (raw)

Due to violence’s cross-cultural and trans-historical importance in human societies and its contemporary significance as a locus of social fears, it has unsurprisingly been a key topic in research on the influence of innate biological factors on human psychology and behaviour. At the same time, especially since the 1980s, historians of crime have been focusing ever more attention on the topic of small-scale, ‘everyday’ violence, taking into account both its quantitative social history (e.g., analysing homicide and assault rates) and qualitative cultural history (e.g., reconstructing attitudes toward violence). There are many points at which these two strands of inquiry – natural science and socio-cultural history – might usefully contribute to a unified analysis. However, there have so far been few efforts to consider what a natural science perspective on violence (in particular that offered by ‘evolutionary psychology’ would actually mean for historical understanding of a topic such as violence. The work that has been done in this direction has been promising, but has also revealed certain difficulties in integrating approaches. Finally, some historians have sought to position history (particularly cultural history) as a site of resistance to ‘biological’ analyses of behaviour. In this paper, I will discuss some key interdisciplinary efforts made so far and argue that there are useful ways that evolutionary psychology can assist our understanding of violence within historical time frames.