Document Type

Article

Publication Date

1-25-2021

Publication Title

Current Anthropology

Volume

62

Issue

S23

First page number:

169

Last page number:

181

Abstract

© 2021 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. All rights reserved. Archaeological and ethnographic accounts of violence in small-scale societies represent a baseline for thinking about the ways that violence and masculinity originated and evolved, becoming entwined social processes. Male violence (lethal and nonlethal) is expressed in diverse and complex ways because it is associated with social spheres of power and influence, and it is embedded within ideologies, histories, and collective memories. Applying anthropological research on violence as a generative and transformational social process demonstrates how violence plays a key role in creating, maintaining, and transforming social structures in small-scale societies. The reinterpretation of massacre sites in the ancient Southwestern United States in terms of social ideologies and beliefs offers an important counterbalance to earlier work that portrayed violence as the result of environmental stressors and/or cultural crises. Using an interpretive (poetics) approach that focuses on the ritualized aspects of male violence provides rich insights into the social processes governing the cultural logic that normalizes and institutionalizes violence.

Disciplines

Social and Cultural Anthropology

File Format

pdf

File Size

164 KB

Language

English

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