 | |
| Author | Steven LeBlanc |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Subject | Warfare |
| Publisher | St. Martin's Griffin |
Publication date | 2003 |
| Media type | |
| Pages | 230 |
| ISBN | 9780312310905 |
Constant Battles: Why we fight (St. Martin's Griffin, 2003) is a book by Steven LeBlanc, a professor of archaeology at Harvard University who specializes in the American Southwest. The book explores the myth of the "noble savage", and demonstrates a long pattern of violence through human history from nearly all parts of the globe.
Much of the book explores debunking the myth of the "noble savage", [1] which the evidence of archaeological exploration from around the globe does not support (a peaceful ancient human existence). LeBlanc's data supports that as many as 25% (conservatively estimated) of adult males perished as a direct result of warfare and murder in pre-agricultural times. Chapter 2 titled, "Was There Ever an Eden?" explores this notion further.
As one review from The Wall Street Journal highlighted:
About 1,000 people die in local wars around the world each day. That's two people every three minutes or so, in places like the Balkans, Central Africa and Timor. It may sound like a lot of killing, but in fact the planet has never been more peaceful. The past is much bloodier. [2]
LeBlanc explains that resource scarcity leads to war and conflict. Scarcity involving access to reproductive capacity including women, food and water, and the required elements involved in creating and holding shelter. When these resources become scarce, warfare and bloodshed tend towards becoming increasingly likely. [3]
In the "Was There Ever an Eden?" chapter, LeBlanc demonstrates evidence, such as the "Buffalo jump", where hundreds to thousands of buffalo would be driven off a cliff, with only some of the killed being able to be used or harvested for their meat and hides, to show that Native and Indigenous persons in the America's were often very wasteful in their hunting practices, and that it is a myth that such groups and cultures were "conservationists" with regard to all of their interactions with nature, wildlife, and their ecology. [4]
The book received mostly positive reviews including from Scientific American , [5] The Washington Times, [6] The Harvard Crimson , [7] and National Review . [8]
Cow tipping is the purported activity of sneaking up on any unsuspecting or sleeping upright cow and pushing it over for entertainment. The practice of cow tipping is generally considered an urban legend and stories of such feats viewed as tall tales. The implication that rural citizens seek such entertainment due to lack of alternatives is viewed as a stereotype. The concept of cow tipping apparently developed in the 1970s, though tales of animals that cannot rise if they fall has historical antecedents dating to the Roman Empire.
War is an armed conflict between the armed forces of states, or between governmental forces and armed groups that are organized under a certain command structure and have the capacity to sustain military operations, or between such organized groups. It is generally characterized by extreme violence, destruction, and mortality, using regular or irregular military forces. Warfare refers to the common activities and characteristics of types of war, or of wars in general. Total war is warfare that is not restricted to purely legitimate military targets, and can result in massive civilian or other non-combatant suffering and casualties.
In Western anthropology, philosophy, and literature, the noble savage is a stock character who is uncorrupted by civilization. As such, the noble savage symbolizes the innate goodness and moral superiority of a primitive people living in harmony with Nature. In the heroic drama of the stageplay The Conquest of Granada by the Spaniards (1672), John Dryden represents the noble savage as an archetype of Man-as-Creature-of-Nature.
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Prehistoric warfare refers to war that occurred between societies without recorded history.
End Zone is Don DeLillo's second novel, published in 1972.
Pierre Clastres was a French anthropologist, ethnographer, and ethnologist. He is best known for his contributions to the field of political anthropology, with his fieldwork among the Guayaki in Paraguay and his theory of stateless societies. An anarchist seeking an alternative to the hierarchized Western societies, he mostly researched Indigenous peoples of the Americas in which the power was not considered coercive and chieftains were powerless.
Helen Vendler was an American academic, writer and literary critic. She was a professor of English language and history at Boston University, Cornell, Harvard, and other universities. Her academic focus was critical analysis of poetry and she studied poets from Shakespeare and George Herbert to modern poets such as Wallace Stevens and Seamus Heaney. Her technique was close reading, which she described as "reading from the point of view of a writer".
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The Harvard Art Museums are part of Harvard University and comprise three museums: the Fogg Museum, the Busch-Reisinger Museum, and the Arthur M. Sackler Museum, and four research centers: the Archaeological Exploration of Sardis, the Center for the Technical Study of Modern Art, the Harvard Art Museums Archives, and the Straus Center for Conservation and Technical Studies. The three museums that constitute the Harvard Art Museums were initially integrated into a single institution under the name Harvard University Art Museums in 1983. The word "University" was dropped from the institutional name in 2008.
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War Before Civilization: the Myth of the Peaceful Savage is a book by Lawrence H. Keeley, a professor of archaeology at the University of Illinois at Chicago who specialized in prehistoric Europe. The book deals with warfare conducted throughout human history by societies with little technology. In the book, Keeley aims to stop the apparent trend in seeing modern civilization as bad, by setting out to prove that prehistoric societies were often violent and engaged in frequent warfare that was highly destructive to the cultures involved.
Steven A. LeBlanc is an American archaeologist and former director of collections at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University's Peabody Museum.
Arthur Waldron is an American historian. Since 1997, Waldron has been the Lauder Professor of International Relations in the department of history at the University of Pennsylvania. He works chiefly on Asia, China in particular, often with a focus on the origins and development of nationalism, and the study of war and violence in general.
The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined is a 2011 book by Steven Pinker, in which the author argues that violence in the world has declined both in the long run and in the short run and suggests explanations as to why this has occurred. The book uses data documenting declining violence across time and geography. This paints a picture of massive declines in the violence of all forms, from war, to improved treatment of children. He highlights the role of nation-state monopolies on force, of commerce, of increased literacy and communication, as well as a rise in a rational problem-solving orientation as possible causes of this decline in violence. He notes that paradoxically, our impression of violence has not tracked this decline, perhaps because of increased communication, and that further decline is not inevitable, but is contingent on forces harnessing our better motivations such as empathy and increases in reason.
Robert Gerwarth is a German historian and author who specialises in European history, with an emphasis on German history. Since finishing a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Oxford, he has held fellowships at Princeton, Harvard, the NIOD (Amsterdam) and the Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of Western Australia. He teaches at University College Dublin (UCD), Ireland.
Lawrence H. Keeley was an American archaeologist best known for pioneering the field of microwear analysis of lithics. He is also known for his 1996 book, War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage. Keeley worked as a professor of archaeology at the University of Illinois Chicago.
Food or War is a 2019 book by British-Australian science writer Julian Cribb published by Cambridge University Press. The book discusses the central role of food in global stability, arguing that the modern food system, if unchecked, risks precipitating widespread conflict due to its unsustainable practices. Cribb proposes a reimagined food system that harnesses human creativity and technological innovation to secure a renewable, diverse, and safe food supply, thereby promoting global peace.