War: Back to the Future

Annual Review of Anthropology, 1999.War is a fraught subject. Those who study it often fight about it. This chapter examines the current state of the study of war, described and analyzed by anthropologists and nonanthropologists who employ concepts like culture in writing about the future of war. Warfare seems bound to keep us revisiting certain aspects of the past. At the same time, nothing induces change quite like conflict. Does war have a future? The preponderance of evidence-biological, archeological, ethnological- suggests that it does. But not all anthropologists agree. This in and of itself represents one of a series of gaps that begs further consideration