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Anthropology Warfare Project. Anthropologist Publishes Research on Warfare Paradox (8/31/2007) Some leading scientists who have studied warfare through the ages have long suggested that humans — the males of the species, at least — have little choice when it comes to slaughtering one another in great numbers. Such warlike behavior, the scholars contend, is hardwired into the human brain. We are, in other words, born to kill our own, an evolutionary trait that sets us apart from nearly all other species on the planet. Paul "Jim" Roscoe, a University of Maine professor of anthropology and cooperating professor of Quaternary and climate studies, subscribes instead to an equally long-held theory that suggests just the opposite: humans actually have an innate aversion to killing.

However, Roscoe believes that this natural aversion can be disabled when warfare is thought to be advantageous to a clan, a tribe or a nation. "It certainly raises big questions, though," Roscoe says of his theory. "If we do have an aversion to killing, how is it that we manage to kill pretty efficiently? The Anthropology of Warfare | Science/AAAS. War: Anthropologists and Sociologists Ask Whether Warfare and Aggression are Inherited or Learned. Public Comments on Research Ethics and the Yanomami - R. Brian Ferguson. Killer chimps fuel debate on how war began. The Evolution of Warfare Part I. The Evolution of Warfare Part I by Anita Stratos Egypt was considered to be the most peaceful country in the ancient world. Its natural boundaries (the First Cataract on the Nile at Aswan, the deserts east and west of the Nile Valley, and the Mediterranean coast to the north) provided plenty of protection from outsiders, and Egyptians themselves were not a society of invaders or conquerors.

Up until that time, Egypt had a loosely organized, part-time army and crude, inferior weapons. Of course, there were some military campaigns carried out in early times, such as those of King Scorpion and King Menes (Narmer or Aha), whose military force enabled him to establish a united Egypt. The Hyksos invasion forced Egypt to create a trained, professional army and improve its weaponry. Horemheb According to the Edict of Horemheb at the end of the 18th Dynasty, during peacetime the army was split into an Upper Egyptian corps and a Lower Egyptian corps, and each was led by a lieutenant commander. Disciplinary Views Of War: Anthropology. This entry is a subentry of Disciplinary Views Of War. Anthropology seeks the type of comparative explanations that are lacking in histories of specific wars or in the synchronic analyses of social and political science. Because of anthropology's access to the archeological and ethnographic data, it is well placed to analyze not only the causes of specific wars but also the origins of warfare itself.

The definitions of warfare anthropology uses to achieve this special focus are a source of continuing debate; in part because of these problems in defining war, some anthropologists turn to the study of peace, seeing war only as socially dysfunctional. However, most definitions of war draw attention to its collective and socially sanctioned nature, allowing its distinction from the great variety of human behaviors that demonstrate aggression and violence. Social‐structural models developed the idea that certain types of social organization (or the lack thereof) impelled people to war. R. Group items tagged children warfare - World Systems @ KSU. Ideas and Trends - Anthropology Enters the Age of Cannibalism.

THE anthropologist Napoleon A. Chagnon has spent decades studying patterns of conflict and revenge among Yanomami Indians, deep within the Amazon Basin. He needn't have traveled so far to pursue his research. After all, anthropologists themselves are one of the most bellicose tribes on earth. The discipline's latest outbreak of infighting -- over accusations of ''ethnographic cleansing'' made against Mr. Chagnon in an upcoming book, ''Darkness in El Dorado'' -- may be its nastiest battle yet. Disputes within anthropology have a way of becoming blood feuds. Virtually all of the field's leading figures have been struck by poison arrows. Anthropology wasn't always so fratricidal. That faith has eroded badly. Mr. ''Darkness in El Dorado,'' by a journalist, Patrick Tierney, which was excerpted last week in The New Yorker and will be published by W.

Worse, the book suggests that Mr. Mr. But the broader accusation that Mr. Anthropology is riven by two opposing worldviews. Mr. How warfare shaped human evolution - life - 12 November 2008. IT'S a question at the heart of what it is to be human: why do we go to war? The cost to human society is enormous, yet for all our intellectual development, we continue to wage war well into the 21st century. Now a new theory is emerging that challenges the prevailing view that warfare is a product of human culture and thus a relatively recent phenomenon.

For the first time, anthropologists, archaeologists, primatologists, psychologists and political scientists are approaching a consensus. Not only is war as ancient as humankind, they say, but it has played an integral role in our evolution. The theory helps explain the evolution of familiar aspects of warlike behaviour such as gang warfare. And even suggests the cooperative skills we've had to develop to be effective warriors have turned into the modern ability to work towards a common goal. These ideas emerged at a conference ... Scientists Say Warfare Began After People Formed Villages. Skip to comments. Scientists Say Warfare Began After People Formed Villages Seattle Times ^ | 9-16-2003 | Dan Vergano Posted on Wed Sep 17 02:33:47 2003 by blam Scientists say warfare began after people formed villages By Dan Vergano Gannett News Service From ancient Troy to today's Iraq, warfare forms the backdrop of human history.

Two anthropologists from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, suggest that although people could have come into conflict before civilization, archaeological remains of burning homes, fleeing refugees and slain captives show simple raids steadily maturing into full-scale warfare as humans settled into villages and society became more stratified. Their report appears in today's Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. In their study, Kent Flannery and Joyce Marcus examined the past 10,000 years of Mexico's Oaxaca (wah-HA-ka) Valley.

But researchers find signs of dwellings burned in raids from 3,500 years ago, when settled life began. To: blam To: xJones Hb. Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence. Anthropologists on the Front Lines. The Pentagon’s new program to embed anthropologists with combat brigades raises many concerns A pilot program to embed anthropologists on the front lines in Iraq and Afghanistan has sparked major controversy in the anthropological community. The program, known as the Human Terrain System (HTS) project, reflects a much larger trend in the national security establishment, with the military increasingly hungry for cultural expertise to fight counterinsurgencies and sustain long, low-intensity conflicts. Anthropologists are struggling to come to grips with the ethics of research on the front lines. The Human Terrain System project is a joint undertaking by the Foreign Military Studies Office (FMSO) and U.S. Army Training and Doctrine command (TRADOC) in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.

The first HTTs shipped out in the fall of 2006. Proponents of the program claim that brigades with HTTs are engaging in “kinetic operations” (military force) significantly less often. Roberto J. González and David H. Price: When Anthropologists Become Counter-Insurgents. By ROBERTO J. GONZÁLEZ And DAVID H. PRICE When anthropologists work overseas, they typically arrive with an array of equipment including notebooks, trowels, tape recorders, and cameras.

But in the new context of the Bush Administration’s "war on terror," a growing number of anthropologists are arriving in foreign countries wearing camouflage, body armor, and guns. As General Petraeus and his staff push to enact new strategies in Iraq, the value of culture is taking on a greater role in military and intelligence circles, as new military doctrines increasingly rely on the means, methods and knowledge of anthropology to provide the basis of counterinsurgency practices. The Department of Defense, intelligence agencies, and military contractors are aggressively recruiting anthropologists for work related to counter-insurgency operations. Kipp’s comparison of HTS and CORDS begs a series of ethical questions which have gone unanswered. At the height of the Cold War, C. Roberto J.

A Reporter at Large: Dying in Darfur. I asked to be directed to the wells where Amina had collected water. As we drove toward them, with a local guide, we passed a large gray rocket that was partly lodged in the sand; this was the undetonated Sudanese Air Force rocket that Amina had described to me. We also passed an enormous crater, at least twenty-five feet in diameter and five feet deep, where another bomb had exploded. Antonovs are imprecise bombers, and the Sudanese Air Force crew simply heave their munitions out the planes’ trapdoors. As a result, the planes have proved bad at killing S.L.A. rebels but good at bluntly wiping out civilian life. “Here are the wells,” our guide said as we pulled up to the red-rock hillock that Amina had depicted on a map she had drawn for me. The killers in Darfur are not always so careful. Last March, the U.N.’s humanitarian coördinator for Sudan, Mukesh Kapila, who had served a year there without denouncing Darfur’s horrors, erupted.

Bush’s evangelical base offered full backing. Nicholas D. Kristof's Columns. Damon Winter/The New York Times Nicholas D. Kristof , a columnist for The New York Times since 2001, writes op-ed columns that appear twice a week. Mr. Kristof won the Pulitzer Prize two times, in 1990 and 2006. In 2012, he was a Pulitzer finalist in Commentary for his 2011 columns that often focused on the disenfranchised in many parts of the world. Mr. While working in France after high school, he caught the travel bug and began backpacking around Africa and Asia during his student years, writing articles to cover his expenses. Mr. After joining The Times in 1984, initially covering economics, he served as a Times correspondent in Los Angeles, Hong Kong, Beijing and Tokyo. Read More... In 1990 Mr. He has also won other prizes including the George Polk Award, the Overseas Press Club award, the Michael Kelly award, the Online News Association award and the American Society of Newspaper Editors award.

A documentary about him, " Reporter ,” aired on HBO in 2010. In his column, Mr. Mr. Hide. Frontline: the triumph of evil. It is one of the most shameful stories of the post-Cold War world. One million Tutsis were slaughtered by the Hutu majority in Rwanda while the West turned a blind eye. As the U.N.ís Genocide Conventionócreated to make sure genocide would never happen againómarks its fiftieth anniversary, FRONTLINE examines the role of the U.S. and the U.N. as they ignored the warnings and evidence of impending massacre in Rwanda.

FRONTLINE's web site delves deeper into the story, offering: the cables showing how the UN and Western powers ignored warnings and evidence of impending massacre; a chronology of the US and UN actions during the 100 days of slaughter;interviews with US/UN officials and writer Philip Gourevitch; an update on justice in Rwanda today;and readings on genocide and Hutu/Tutsi relations over two centuries. Facing the Truth with Bill Moyers. Outh Africans are on a truth-telling mission. As part of the negotiated settlement that led to the end of apartheid and the election of Nelson Mandela as president, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was established by the South African Government to investigate the crimes committed between 1960 and 1994 during the fight against apartheid.

Hailed worldwide as a model for airing gross violations of human rights without resorting to Nuremburg-style trials, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was seen by many in South Africa as a means of healing the wounds of history. "We needed to acknowledge that we had a horrendous past," said the TRC chairman, Desmond Tutu. "We needed to look the beast in the eye, so that the past wouldn't hold us hostage anymore. " After more than two years of hearings, the Commission published findings compiled from the testimony of more than 21,000 victims. Amnesty hearings continue for those who perpetrated the atrocities. The St. Disaster in Darfur by John Ryle. Darfur is a 150,000-square-mile expanse of desert and savannah, with five or six million inhabitants, spreading out from the fertile slopes of Jebel Marra, the mountainous zone in Sudan’s far west.

Remote from the country’s political heartland on the Nile, it is linked to the Sudanese capital, Khartoum, by seven hundred miles of dirt road and a single-track railway. Over the last sixteen months a disas-ter has been unfolding in Darfur, one that is agonizingly familiar to observers of Sudan during the past two decades. In response to an insurgency on the part of rebel groups demanding greater political representation in Khartoum, the government of General Omar al-Bashir has unleashed a scorched-earth policy across large tracts of the province. Hundreds of thousands of people have been displaced by the conflict. 120,000 are in camps in Chad.

The crisis in Darfur comes at a time when Sudan’s other war, the war in the south, seems to be on the point of resolution. Anthropology of War in the News. War on the Decline Around the World (1/15/06) Yanomamö Ax Fight Interactive: a web page providing elements of The Ax Fight A series of articles on tribal warfare: Probably the single most common motive mentioned by tribal warriors when asked why they go to war, is revenge, according to a Penn State anthropologist.

"The impulse for revenge is far from being uniquely human," says Dr. Stephen Beckerman, associate professor of anthropology. "Clutton-Brock and Parker show how widespread in the animal kingdom is the behavior of returning injury for injury. Beckerman notes that among some primates, injured individuals may punish one of his or her attacker's relatives rather than punish the attacker or, in other primates, the punishment may be meted out not to a relative, but to a friend or ally of the victim. Human revenge is concerned with dominance and status as is that of other primates, and often revenge is taken on a relative or ally. Revenge is not always an immediate act.