Anthropological perspectives on war

Abstract

The aim of this article is to review some of the lines of anthropology on the war theme, which constitute a subfield called “anthropology of war.” In the first place the arguments developed spe­cially by the American lines of research will be exposed, followed, in contraposition, by the argu­ments of other theoretical lines, which developed mainly after the structuralism of C. Lévi- Strauss. In a general way, this article will try to show how the questions here outlined are attached in some sort to the long term problems that concern the Social Sciences, as the relationship between war and politics and the emergence of the State as an institution that rules the war