War/Sociology

Original feminine study of war. Comes over as social anthropology, almost Keith Thomas but multi-cultural and inter-disciplinary in the best sense.

worthwhile view of war as mass hysteria. Prey and predator, Democratisation of war. Sacrifice. War and nationalism as a form of religion. ( )

While Ehrenreich offers some insightful observations into why human kind seems to be drawn to war, I found the level of detail to be overwhelming, making the book less readable than many of her other efforts. Well researched but often bogged down with quotes. ( )

In Blood Rites, Barbara Ehrenreich confronts the mystery of the human attraction to violence: What draws our species to war and even makes us see it as a kind of sacred undertaking? Blood Rites takes us on an original journey from the elaborate human sacrifices of the ancient world to the carnage and holocaust of twentieth-century "total war".

Sifting through the fragile records of prehistory, Ehrenreich discovers the wellspring of war in an unexpected place — not in a "killer instinct" unique to the males of our species but in the blood rites early humans performed to reenact their terrifying experience of predation by stronger carnivores. Brilliant in conception, rich in scope, Blood Rites is a monumental work that will transform our understanding of the greatest single threat to human life.

No summary can do justice to Ehrenreich's argument, and that if you were intrigued enough by the title to have read this far, please, read the book. Frequently, it seems more like a novel than non-fiction, with a powerful but always appropriate imaginative drive behind it. This is one of the most enthralling and enlightening works of anthropology that I have ever read.

Rather than looking to modern day psychology for innate aggressive or defensive traits, Ehrenreich begins her story with the stresses for the earliest humans of being in the middle of the food chain:

[O]ur peculiar and ambivalent relationship to violence is rooted in...being preyed on by animals that were initially far more skillful hunters than ourselves...Rituals of blood sacrifice both celebrate and terrifyingly reenact the human transition from prey to predator, and so, I will argue, does war. [p.22]

The relationship between humans and their predators must have been a very ambivalent one. On the one hand, the beasts were killers; on the other, they were providers of meat for scavengers, as the earliest human meat-eaters were. This predator-provider dichotomy is repeated frequently in early religion; allied with the beastial nature of almost all of these early deities, it does seem entirely plausible that religious ritual arose as a reaction to this. ( )