Anthropology and the study of of conflict: an introduction

Abstract

Ethnographers have long been recording instances of warfare, feuding, factionalism, and sorcery, but theoretical attention to social conflict is relatively new in anthropology. Recent theoretical work by anthropologists on this subject has been influenced primarily by the structural-functional theory of social systems and indirectly by the psychoanalytic theory of personality (including its behavioristic revision in the frustration-aggression hypothesis). At the present writing there appear to be two schools of anthropological thought on the subject of conflict. One is that of Max Gluckman and V. W. Turner, of the University of Manchester, who see patterns of social conflict as eufunctional for the maintenance of social systems. silver-lining approach of Gluckman is exemplified by the titles of some of his well-known BBC lectures (6): The Peace in the Feud and The Bonds in the Colour-Bar. theoretical position of this school of thought is that conflicts within and between small social units

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