ABSTRACT
Social anthropology (together with its close cousin, sociology) is particularly concerned with the social conditions which facilitate or encourage war and militarism. One of the basic assumptions is that war is a product of cultural evolution, simply a stage in human development. This idea, however, can take one of three main forms. For some theorists (e.g. Freud) it is characteristic of an early, primitive stage which humans will eventually outgrow. For others (e.g. Margaret Mead) war is a cultural invention which was not a feature of early, less well-developed societies. It is primarily this latter view which we are going to examine at this stage of our discussion. There is another view, associated with Quincy Wright, that war results from rapid social transformations. Actually, this is a variant of war as a cultural invention because its advocates are really saying that war results from the difficult situations brought about by accelerated social evolution. A quite different theory is that put forward by Malinowski (whom we shall be looking at in more detail) that wars, though culturally determined, are waged by tribal groups/states for political ends.
