Past Warfare: Ethics, Knowledge and the Yanomami Controversy (original) (raw)

Review of J. Haas, ed., THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF WAR

The nine articles in "The Anthropology of War" provide useful data and references on war in various prestate societies, argue sundry polemical points about how and why war and peace should be studied and explained, and raise certain methodological and explanatory issues which deserve discussion here even though no consensus on them, nor even any substantial clarification of them, appears to have been achieved at the week-long 1986 seminar from which the articles have been drawn. The stated goal of the seminar was arriving at "a better understanding of the causes of both war and peace in prestate societies and the impact of war on the evolution of those societies" (xi), and the articles contribute in varying degrees to meeting this goal, sometimes in ways different from those intended or claimed by the authors themselves.

History Explanation and War among the Yanomami a Response to Chagnons Noble Savages

Why do people make war? Is it in human nature? Publication of Napoleon Chagnon's Noble Savages resurrects old arguments, largely displaced in recent times by study of larger scale political violence, and sidelined by more contemporary theoretical currents. This shift ceded the human nature issue to a variety of biologistic approaches, for which Chagnon's image of the Orinoco-Mavaca Yanomamo is foundational. Chagnon proposes that war is driven by reproductive competition, with men fighting over women, revenge, and status, among a 'Stone Age' people living as they had for countless generations, in a tribal world untouched by larger history or the world system. This paper challenges each of those claims, and offers alternatives that provide a very different view of Yanomami warfare, and why men fight wars.

Militarized Anthropology, Controversy and Resistance to

TheInternational Encyclopedia of Anthropology, 2018

This entry analyzes the connections between military agencies and anthropology. It discusses the links between these dimensions across the history of this scholarly field through the use of some pertinent examples. To this end, it considers not only how the military has directly co-opted anthropologists but also how certain concepts were crucial for this rapprochement. Moreover, the entry analyzes oppositional and resistance movements and the connections between anthropology and war machines

Anthropology and Militarism

Annual Review of Anthropology, 2007

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