Primitive Warfare and the Ratomorphic Image of Mankind

Abstract

The most influential current explanations of preindustrial violence and warfare see it as determined by factors and forces entirely external to human beings and their motives and purposes. This article critically examines the most prominent of these approaches—behavioristic, sociobiological, and ecological‐functional—and some of the assumptions underlying them. Then, drawing on ethnographic data from a society known for its peacefulness—the Semai Senoi—the article offers an alternative conception of action, one that views human behavior, including warfare and nonviolence, as purposive, and that sees human beings as active decision makers picking their ways through fields of options and constraints in pursuit of individually and culturally defined goals in a culturally constituted reality which they themselves are actively constructing.

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