indonesia exporter of dayak tribe's handmade crafts & tribal arts
War before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage
Today's shopping tips: "Be wise in purchasing ..... find best value one"
List Price: $19.99
Our Price: $12.04
You Save: $ 7.95 ( 40% )
(prices subject to change)
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Average Customer Ratings:
For the last fifty years, most popular and scholarly works have agreed that prehistoric warfare was rare, harmless, and unimportant. According to this view, it 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.
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, Keeley convincingly demonstrates that prehistoric warfare was in fact more deadly, more frequent, and more ruthless than modern war. He cites evidence of ancient massacres in many areas of the world, and surveys the prevalence of looting, destruction, and trophy-taking in all kinds of warfare, again finding little moral distinction between ancient warriors and civilized armies. Finally, and perhaps most controversially, he examines the evidence of cannibalism among some preliterate peoples.
But Keeley 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.
DESCRIPTION:
Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 781
EAN: 9780195119121
ISBN: 0195119126
Label: Oxford University Press, USA
Manufacturer: Oxford University Press, USA
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 272
Publication Date: 1997-12-18
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Studio: Oxford University Press, USA
SIMILAR ITEMS:
• Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence
• Soldiers and Ghosts: A History of Battle in Classical Antiquity
• How War Began (Texas a&M University Anthropology Series)
• Constant Battles: Why We Fight
• The Origins of War: Violence in Prehistory
CUSTOMER REVIEWS:
Customer Rating:
Summary: Invalidates the view that humans were "peaceful" before the arrival of "civilization"
Comment: This scholorly book, written by University of Chicago Anthropology Professor Lawrence Keeley, makes use of the latest research available to make the argument that, before "civilization", humans were predominately (but with exceptions) at war not only within their own clans but perpetually with others. Reasons included the need for more land, food and, of course, women. Keeley shows, through documented research, that this warfare took predominately the form of "low-intensity" warfare that accounted for more dead (as a percentage of population) than even the most vicious "modern" wars (i.e., world wars I and II, etc.). His research shows that the peaceful savage was much more myth than reality.
Customer Rating: 
Summary: Good Overview of Primitive Warfare
Comment: The book has a simple premise - primitive societies, far from being peaceful and cooperative tend to be highly violent. The perception of peace derives from the fact that "they" fight wars differently from "us" and are much smaller. He also describes the evasions that scholars use to "hide" the casualty figures of primitive warfare - namely counting war dead as "murders" because they didn't die in a good old fashioned battle the way westerners would fight.
Keely deals with the different types of combat these societies tend to engage in and highlights how a society based on raids and ambushes can be as, if not more, deadly (in relative terms)than full scale modern warfare based around huge armies. In basic sum if two tribes with 50 people each fight a war and kill 10 people over a year that is a catastrophically high casualty rate for those tribes but it won't register as much for a state of 200 million people.
Keely marshals an impressive array of evidence and examples and offers explanations that will make sense to people who are not anthropologists. The book is well organized and makes the solid point that "primitive" warfare isn't "inferior" warfare. It can be very effective (horribly effective in some cases) and fits the needs of these societies.
Customer Rating:
Summary: What's going horribly wrong here?
Comment: There's a problem when books like this or "Sick Societies" or Ward-Perkins' "The Fall of Rome" HAVE to be written. The same problem can be found in people today who find an equivalency in an attack on a valid military target that results in unintended and unwanted civilian fatalities--collateral damage--and some suicide bomber driving an explosives-packed vehicle directly into a crowd of children. Noam Chomsky claims he was fired up to do battle with the Great Satan when he was confronted by the sister of a child who was killed during the Reagan-era raid on Libya, but he apparently wasn't too concerned about all the young people who were killed in the terrorist attack on a club in Germany that the raid was a response to.
This is an excellent book and the author makes his points well. The problem is that what he's combating is not anything rational or logical, it is an all-encompassing hatred of the West that really needs to be scrutinized by a psychiatrist and not a sociologist. Paul Hollander's superb "Anti-Americanism" covers the territory well be still does not get to the core of the dysfunction. Simply, in the late 1960s the academic world allowed itself to be bullied into letting the kids run the show. Being kids, they brought their juvenile personal baggage and constricted self-referential worldview into nearly every academic realm. Now these same kids have--at least physically--grown up and they are teaching newer generations.
What we have is a juvenilized academia not so much interested in seeking truth but in justifying, for just one example, anti-authoritarian mindsets that have more to do with their relationships with their parents than any geo-political situation.
I'll stop there. Somebody needs to write a good book on this subject.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Keely slaughters the myth of the golden age of peace
Comment: Keeley utterly demolishes the "golden age" idiotological mythos with hard anthropological, ethnographic and archaeological fact. He also, very cleverly to my mind, considering the biases of modern academics, gives "primitives" a great deal of credit for their fighting prowess. There were some flaws to his thesis, of course. But this is a sort of polemic; a bludgeon with which to beat home the unarguable fact that primitive man was a violent creature; not the Rousseauean "noble savage" of popular mythology.
It also contains some great black humor, such as his recounting of a Maori chief taunting the preserved head of an enemy chief: " You wanted to run away, did you? But my war club overtook you: and after you were cooked, you made food for my mouth. And where is your father? he is cooked:- and where is your brother? he is eaten:- and where is your wife? there she sits, a wife for me:- and where are your children? there they are, with loads on their backs, carrying food, as my slaves."
Humanity is ugly. The simple fact that we are unpleasant, violent apes seems to be lost on certain social classes of people. In my opinion, you can't begin to understand people without understanding that human beings are deeply flawed creatures. We are not made horrible by our social conditions, psychological trauma or any other such nonsense: humanity is just horrible. Any meaningful discussion of sociology, history or politics must start from these assumptions, or they are destructive folly.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Burying myths
Comment: This book examines and buries one of the great myths of our times. The myth of the peaceful past, the Noble Savage. Keeley reminds us, with empirical evidence, that war and violence is part of the human heritage and not the exclusive sin of one race, one culture or even one epoch. This myth demeans the humanity of all of us. His final and more speculative final chapters on how the myth of the passive past shapes modern debate is full of uncommon sense.
NOTE: All online transactions are processed at Amazon.com's secure server, using the latest technology on internet's secure transactions.
