Full Description
This book deals with the interrelationship between society and war seen through the analytical eyes of anthropologists and archaeologists. War is a ghastly thing, which unfortunately thrives almost everywhere in the world today. We need, therefore, to have a better understanding of what war does to people and their societies. War produces change, and archaeologists and anthropologists are analytically equipped to pinpoint its direction, patterning, scale and content. The perspective -- and filter -- of time provides one important tool, while context and comparison provide other tools. Looking at the history of war studies, war is quite often perceived of and treated as something set aside from other practices; almost personified. However, the results published in this book allow us to say that it is never autonomous and self-regulating. War always forms part of something else. Numerous questions arise, and at least some answers -- often tentative and multifaceted -- are provided in the twenty-eight studies included in the book. They certainly add to an ongoing debate, hopefully qualifying it as well.
Contents
Warfare and SocietyPerspectives; Conceptions of Warfare in Western Thought and Research: An Introduction; Laying Aside the Spear: Hobbesian Warre and the Maussian Gift; Aspects of War and Warfare in Western Philosophy and History; Archaeology and War: Presentations of Warriors and Peasants in Archaeological Interpretations; 'Total War' and the Ethnography of New Guinea; War as Practice, Power, and Processor: A Framework for the Analysis of War and Social Structural Change; Warfare and pre-State Societies: An Introduction; War and Peace in Societies without Central Power: Theories and Perspectives; Fighting and Feuding in Neolithic and Bronze Age Britain and Ireland; The Impact of Egalitarian Institutions on Warfare among the Enga: An Ethnohistorical Perspective; Warfare and Exchange in a Melanesian Society before Colonial Pacification: The Case of Manus, Papua New Guinea; Warfare and Colonialism in the Bismarck Archipelago, Papua New Guinea; Warfare and the State: An Introduction; War and State Formation: What is the Connection?; Warrior Bands, War Lords, and the Birth of Tribes and States in the First Millennium AD in Middle Europe; Chiefs Made War and War Made States? War and Early State Formation in Ancient Fiji and Hawaii; Warfare in Africa: Reframing State and 'Culture' as Factors of Violent Conflict; Warfare, Rituals, and Mass Graves: An Introduction; Semiologies of Subjugation: The Ritualisation of War-Prisoners in Later European Antiquity; Rebellion, Combat, and Massacre: A Medieval Mass Grave at Sandbjerg near Naestved in Denmark; Society and the Structure of Violence: A Story Told by Middle Bronze Age Human Remains from Central Norway; The Dead of Tormarton: Bronze Age Combat Victims?; Funerary Rituals and Warfare in the Early Bronze Age Nitra Culture of Slovakia and Moravia; Warfare, Discourse, and Identity: An Introduction; Warriors and Warrior Institutions in Copper Age Europe; From Gilgamesh to Terminator: The Warrior as Masculine Ideal: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives; The (Dis)Comfort of Conformism: Post-War Nationalism and Coping with Powerlessness in Croatian Villages; Violence and Identification in a Bosnian Town: An Empirical Critique of Structural Theories of Violence; War as Field and Site: Anthropologists, Archaeologists, and the Violence of Maya Cultural Continuities; Warfare, Weaponry, and Material Culture: An Introduction; Swords and Other Weapons in the Nordic Bronze Age: Technology, Treatment, and Contexts; What Does the Context of Deposition and Frequency of Bronze Age Weaponry Tell Us about the Function of Weapons?; Warfare and Gender According to Homer: An Archaeology of an Aristocratic Warrior Culture; Index.NER(01): GB IE
