|
|
|
Erik Brandt On war and anthropology A history of debates concerning the New Guinea Highlands and the Balkans |
|||
| |||
|
War calls for understanding. While well beyond representation to many, war still demands interpretation. It spurs reflection on its causes and consequences, and makes people reconsider their worldview. This way, anthropologists have recently come to rethink their discipline, which in the past would have failed to recognise war's full significance. While historians of anthropology tend to agree, Erik Brandt challenges this claim. Focused on the ethnographies of the New Guinea Highlands and the Balkans, he demonstrates that many modern anthropologists made war a central theme in their writing, the key to the cultural area of their concern. Based on this observation, Brandt argues that both anthropologists, and the historians of their discipline, have worked with a conventional image of war as all-out violence. This 'total-war' is a cultural construction of the modern West, however. To come to understand war anthropologically, it is necessary to distinguish this influential interpretation of war from the warfare that, historically, anthropologists had to face, and that they have to relate to ethnograpically. Erik Brandt is associated with the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Nijmegen. Table of contents List of maps Preface and acknowledgements Introduction 1. War in anthropology 2. Anthropology and war The ethnography of the New Guinea Highlands 3. The first World War, and the wars of the Melanesians 4. Violent wars, or the order of exchange 5. Western development, and Eastern rites of war 6. War in the state of the gift The ethnography of the Balkans 7. The Balkan images of the Great War 8. Yugoslavia's modernity, and its Balkan past 9. Modern wars, or the realist's violent reality Conclusion 10. Anthropologies of war and warfare Notes Bibliography Author index Nederlandse samenvatting (Summary in Dutch) Curriculum Vitae Maps New Guinea Highlands Former Yugoslavia Bestel/Order |
|||
