War in the Tribal Zone: Expanding States and Indigenous Warfare (School of American Research Advanced Seminar Series) - Tapa dura

Native warfare has long been accepted by anthropologists as the product of local culture, an indigenous expression of "warlike" peoples. It has most often been examined ahistorically and outside of any broader social context, within an "ethnographic present" that assumes the existence of a pristine precontact culture. But recent critical reevaluation of the history and patterns of violence among indigenous peoples indicates that much native warfare has been strongly affected or even caused by the presence of European or other colonial states.
War in the Tribal Zone is a thought-provoking presentation of nine case studies of indigenous warfare, ranging in time from the expansion of the ancient Roman Empire in North Africa to late twentieth-century intertribal violence in Highland Papua New Guinea, and geographically from Sri Lanka to the Americas.
In this volume, anthropologists and historians from around the world look at and compare the impact of expanding states on tribal conflict. From their cross-cultural investigation, the authors have developed a ground-breaking approach to the study of indigenous warfare, one that places tribal societies within the context of a larger and more complex social universe. The result is a radical reinterpretation of ethnographic reality as it relates to tribal warfare and patterns of tribe-state interaction.