Download or read book War Before Civilization written by Lawrence H. Keeley and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1997-12-18 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The myth of the peace-loving "noble savage" is persistent and pernicious. Indeed, for the last fifty years, most popular and scholarly works have agreed that prehistoric warfare was rare, harmless, unimportant, and, like smallpox, a disease of civilized societies alone. Prehistoric warfare, according to this view, was little more than a ritualized game, where casualties were limited and the effects of aggression relatively mild. Lawrence Keeley's groundbreaking War Before Civilization offers a devastating rebuttal to such comfortable myths and debunks the notion that warfare was introduced to primitive societies through contact with civilization (an idea he denounces as "the pacification of the past"). Building on much fascinating archeological and historical research and offering an astute comparison of warfare in civilized and prehistoric societies, from modern European states to the Plains Indians of North America, War Before Civilization convincingly demonstrates that prehistoric warfare was in fact more deadly, more frequent, and more ruthless than modern war. To support this point, Keeley provides a wide-ranging look at warfare and brutality in the prehistoric world. He reveals, for instance, that prehistorical tactics favoring raids and ambushes, as opposed to formal battles, often yielded a high death-rate; that adult males falling into the hands of their enemies were almost universally killed; and that surprise raids seldom spared even women and children. Keeley cites evidence of ancient massacres in many areas of the world, including the discovery in South Dakota of a prehistoric mass grave containing the remains of over 500 scalped and mutilated men, women, and children (a slaughter that took place a century and a half before the arrival of Columbus). In addition, Keeley surveys the prevalence of looting, destruction, and trophy-taking in all kinds of warfare and again finds little moral distinction between ancient warriors and civilized armies. Finally, and perhaps most controversially, he examines the evidence of cannibalism among some preliterate peoples. Keeley is a seasoned writer and his book is packed with vivid, eye-opening details (for instance, that the homicide rate of prehistoric Illinois villagers may have exceeded that of the modern United States by some 70 times). But he also goes beyond grisly facts to address the larger moral and philosophical issues raised by his work. What are the causes of war? Are human beings inherently violent? How can we ensure peace in our own time? Challenging some of our most dearly held beliefs, Keeley's conclusions are bound to stir controversy.

Download or read book Violence and Civilization written by Roderick Campbell and published by Oxbow Books. This book was released on 2013-12-31 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of essays begins with the premise that violence, in its relationship to order, is a central element of history. Taking a broad definition of violence, including structural and symbolic violence, the contributions move beyond the problematic of civilization’s mitigating or foundational role, instead seeing violence as inherently social, and, perhaps, socially inherent (if variable). The question then becomes what forms of harm are authorized or banned in which social orders and how they change over time. Beginning with a theoretical introduction, this interdisciplinary volume includes seven papers representing cultural anthropology, history, archaeology and international relations. The papers range from China to the Americas and from the 2nd millennium BCE to the 21st century CE. Some deal with long-term developments while others focus on a single time and place. Many treat the issue of the visibility/invisibility of violence, while all in one way or another deal with the role of violence in the re-production of community. Together, the volume aims to paint, with a few strokes, the outlines of a deep historical anthropology of social violence. The volume is based on the proceedings of a symposium hosted at Brown University.

Download or read book War in Human Civilization written by Azar Gat and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 839 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why do people go to war? Is it rooted in human nature or is it a late cultural invention? And what of war today: is it a declining phenomenon or simply changing its shape? This book sets out to find definitive answers to these questions in an attempt to unravel the riddle of war throughout human history.

Download or read book Violence and Civilization in the Western States Systems written by Andrew Linklater and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-01-11 with total page 1006 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Andrew Linklater's The Problem of Harm in World Politics (Cambridge, 2011) created a new agenda for the sociology of states-systems. Violence and Civilization in the Western States-Systems builds on the author's attempts to combine the process-sociological investigation of civilizing processes and the English School analysis of international society in a higher synthesis. Adopting Martin Wight's comparative approach to states-systems and drawing on the sociological work of Norbert Elias, Linklater asks how modern Europeans came to believe themselves to be more 'civilized' than their medieval forebears. He investigates novel combinations of violence and civilization through a broad historical scope from classical antiquity, Latin Christendom and Renaissance Italy to the post-Second World War era. This book will interest all students with an interdisciplinary commitment to investigating long-term patterns of change in world politics.

Download or read book Violence and Civilization written by Roderick Campbell and published by Oxbow Books. This book was released on 2013-12-31 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of essays begins with the premise that violence, in its relationship to order, is a central element of history. Taking a broad definition of violence, including structural and symbolic violence, the contributions move beyond the problematic of civilization’s mitigating or foundational role, instead seeing violence as inherently social, and, perhaps, socially inherent (if variable). The question then becomes what forms of harm are authorized or banned in which social orders and how they change over time. Beginning with a theoretical introduction, this interdisciplinary volume includes seven papers representing cultural anthropology, history, archaeology and international relations. The papers range from China to the Americas and from the 2nd millennium BCE to the 21st century CE. Some deal with long-term developments while others focus on a single time and place. Many treat the issue of the visibility/invisibility of violence, while all in one way or another deal with the role of violence in the re-production of community. Together, the volume aims to paint, with a few strokes, the outlines of a deep historical anthropology of social violence. The volume is based on the proceedings of a symposium hosted at Brown University.

Download or read book Violence and Civilization written by Jonathan Fletcher and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2013-04-23 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides an introduction to the work of Norbert Elias. It is the first systematic appraisal of two central themes of his thought - violence and civilization. Although Elias is best known for his theory of civilizing processes, this study highlights the crucial importance of the concept of decivilizing processes. Fletcher argues that while Elias did not develop a theory of decivilizing processes, such a theory is logically implied in his perspective and is highly pertinent to an understanding of the most violent episodes of twentieth-century history, such as the Nazi genocides. Elias's original synthesis of sociology and psychology is examined through an analysis of several key texts including The Civilizing Process, The Established and the Outsiders and The Germans. Fletcher shows how Elias constructs his "figurational models" and applies these comparatively to specific historical examples drawn from England and Germany. Violence and Civilization is an excellent introduction to Elias's work. It will appeal to students of sociology, anthropology, and history interested in understanding the phenomenon of violence in the modern world.

Download or read book Civilization Violence written by Imbesat Daudi MD, PhD, FACS and published by Xlibris Corporation. This book was released on 2014-03-05 with total page 437 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Is Islamic civilization violent? Many in the West believe that Islam and Muslims are indeed violent. In the Muslim world, this question itself implies Western prejudice. The answer can only be achieved by comparing various parameters of the violence of “civilizations”. In this book, violent conflicts of various “civilizations” of the last two centuries have been quantified, compared and analyzed through well-established scientific principles and presented in layman's terms.

Download or read book Civilization and Violence written by Cristina Rojas and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order written by Samuel P. Huntington and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2007-05-31 with total page 555 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The classic study of post-Cold War international relations, more relevant than ever in today’s geopolitical climate—with a foreword by Zbigniew Brzezinski. Since its initial publication in 1996, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order has become one of the most influential books ever written about foreign affairs. Samuel Huntington explains how clashes between civilizations pose the greatest threat to world peace, but also how an international order based on civilizations is the best safeguard against war. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order explains how the population explosion in Muslim countries and the economic rise of East Asia have changed global politics. These developments challenge Western dominance, promote opposition to supposedly “universal” Western ideals, and intensify inter-civilization conflict over such issues as nuclear proliferation, immigration, human rights, and democracy. In his incisive analysis, Huntington offers a strategy for the West to preserve its unique culture and emphasizes the need for people everywhere to learn to coexist in a complex, multipolar, multi-civilizational world.

Download or read book War Before Civilization written by Lawrence H. Keeley and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1997-12-18 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The myth of the peace-loving "noble savage" is persistent and pernicious. Indeed, for the last fifty years, most popular and scholarly works have agreed that prehistoric warfare was rare, harmless, unimportant, and, like smallpox, a disease of civilized societies alone. Prehistoric warfare, according to this view, was little more than a ritualized game, where casualties were limited and the effects of aggression relatively mild. Lawrence Keeley's groundbreaking War Before Civilization offers a devastating rebuttal to such comfortable myths and debunks the notion that warfare was introduced to primitive societies through contact with civilization (an idea he denounces as "the pacification of the past"). Building on much fascinating archeological and historical research and offering an astute comparison of warfare in civilized and prehistoric societies, from modern European states to the Plains Indians of North America, War Before Civilization convincingly demonstrates that prehistoric warfare was in fact more deadly, more frequent, and more ruthless than modern war. To support this point, Keeley provides a wide-ranging look at warfare and brutality in the prehistoric world. He reveals, for instance, that prehistorical tactics favoring raids and ambushes, as opposed to formal battles, often yielded a high death-rate; that adult males falling into the hands of their enemies were almost universally killed; and that surprise raids seldom spared even women and children. Keeley cites evidence of ancient massacres in many areas of the world, including the discovery in South Dakota of a prehistoric mass grave containing the remains of over 500 scalped and mutilated men, women, and children (a slaughter that took place a century and a half before the arrival of Columbus). In addition, Keeley surveys the prevalence of looting, destruction, and trophy-taking in all kinds of warfare and again finds little moral distinction between ancient warriors and civilized armies. Finally, and perhaps most controversially, he examines the evidence of cannibalism among some preliterate peoples. Keeley is a seasoned writer and his book is packed with vivid, eye-opening details (for instance, that the homicide rate of prehistoric Illinois villagers may have exceeded that of the modern United States by some 70 times). But he also goes beyond grisly facts to address the larger moral and philosophical issues raised by his work. What are the causes of war? Are human beings inherently violent? How can we ensure peace in our own time? Challenging some of our most dearly held beliefs, Keeley's conclusions are bound to stir controversy.

Download or read book Violence Kinship and the Early Chinese State written by Roderick Campbell and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-05-03 with total page 363 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The violence of war and sacrifice were not the antithesis of civilization at Shang Anyang, but rather its foundation.

Download or read book Assaulting the Past written by Katherine D. Watson and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2009-03-26 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers an important contribution to the comparative history of interpersonal violence since the early modern period, a subject of great contemporary and historical importance. Its overarching theme is Norbert Elias’s theory of the civilizing process, and the chapters in the book recognise, as he did, that changes in human behaviour are related to transformations of both social and personality structures. Drawing on a vast range of archival and written records from five countries, the contributors explore the usefulness of the theory—the subject of much debate over the past two decades—to explaining long-term patterns in violence, but also point to the need for further empirical and comparative studies, to reflect current thinking and developments within historical, criminological, and sociological methodologies. In approaching the subject from a variety of perspectives, Assaulting the Past: Violence and Civilization in Historical Context presents a comparative and qualitative assessment of violent behaviour and the experience of violence. Approaches used include the empirical and the theoretical, and the book is strongly interdisciplinary, drawing on the history of crime, history of medicine, criminology and legal history. The volume seeks to offer new insights on violence, the individual and society, to further illuminate the links between state formation, social interdependency and self-discipline that are so integral to the theory of the civilizing process.

Download or read book Religion Civilization and Civil War written by Jonathan Fox and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2004 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Religion, Civilization, and Civil War author Jonathan Fox carves out a new space of research and interrogation in conflict studies. Covering over five decades, this study provides the most comprehensive and detailed empirical analysis of the impact of religion and civilization on domestic conflict to date and will become a critical resource for both international relations and political science scholars.

Download or read book War What Is It Good For written by Ian Morris and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2014-04-15 with total page 513 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Introduction: Friend to the undertaker. - The wasteland? : war and peace in ancient Rome. - The barbarians strike back : the counterproductive way of war, A.D. 1-1415. - The five hundred years' war : Europe (almost) conquers the world, 1415-1914. - Storm of steel : the war for Europe, 1914-1980s. - Red in tooth and claw : why the chimps of Gombe went to war. - The last best hope of Earth : American empire, 1989-?

Download or read book The Civilization of Crime written by Eric Arthur Johnson and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Along with most of the rest of Western culture, has crime itself become more "civilized"? This book exposes as myths the beliefs that society has become more violent than it has been in the past and that violence is more likely to occur in cities than in rural areas. The product of years of study by scholars from North America and Europe, The Civilization of Crime shows that, however violent some large cities may be now, both rural and urban communities in Sweden, Holland, England, and other countries were far more violent during the late Middle Ages than any cities are today. Contributors show that the dramatic change is due, in part, to the fact that violence was often tolerated or even accepted as a form of dispute settlement in village-dominated premodern society. Interpersonal violence declined in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as dispute resolution was taken over by courts and other state institutions and the church became increasingly intolerant of it. The book also challenges a number of other historical-sociological theories, among them that contemporary organized crime is new, and addresses continuing debate about the meaning and usefulness of crime statistics. CONTRIBUTORS: Esther Cohen, Herman Diederiks, Florike Egmond, Eric A. Johnson, Michele Mancino, Eric H. Monkkonen, Eva Österberg, James A. Sharpe, Pieter Spierenburg, Jan Sundin, Barbara Weinberger

Download or read book City of Sacrifice written by David Carrasco and published by Beacon Press. This book was released on 2000-12-08 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At an excavation of the Great Aztec Temple in Mexico City, amid carvings of skulls and a dismembered warrior goddess, David Carrasco stood before a container filled with the decorated bones of infants and children. It was the site of a massive human sacrifice, and for Carrasco the center of fiercely provocative questions: If ritual violence against humans was a profound necessity for the Aztecs in their capital city, is it central to the construction of social order and the authority of city states? Is civilization built on violence? In City of Sacrifice,Carrasco chronicles the fascinating story of Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital, investigating Aztec religious practices and demonstrating that religious violence was integral to urbanization; the city itself was a temple to the gods. That Mexico City, the largest city on earth, was built on the ruins of Tenochtitlan, is a point Carrasco poignantly considers in his comparison of urban life from antiquity to modernity. Majestic in scope, City of Sacrifice illuminates not only the rich history of a major Meso american city but also the inseparability of two passionate human impulses: urbanization and religious engagement. It has much to tell us about many familiar events in our own time, from suicide bombings in Tel Aviv to rape and murder in the Balkans.

Download or read book War in Human Civilization written by Azar Gat and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2008-03-26 with total page 839 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why do people go to war? Is it rooted in human nature or is it a late cultural invention? How does war relate to the other fundamental developments in the history of human civilization? And what of war today - is it a declining phenomenon or simply changing its shape? In this truly global study of war and civilization, Azar Gat sets out to find definitive answers to these questions in an attempt to unravel the 'riddle of war' throughout human history, from the early hunter-gatherers right through to the unconventional terrorism of the twenty-first century. In the process, the book generates an astonishing wealth of original and fascinating insights on all major aspects of humankind's remarkable journey through the ages, engaging a wide range of disciplines, from anthropology and evolutionary psychology to sociology and political science. Written with remarkable verve and clarity and wholly free from jargon, it will be of interest to anyone who has ever pondered the puzzle of war.