Hostname: page-component-5db58dd55d-lqwgf Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2026-06-02T10:00:01.198Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The cultural evolution of war rituals

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 April 2018

Luke Glowacki
Luke Glowacki*
Affiliation:
Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse, 31015 Toulouse, France; Department of Anthropology, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16802. Glowacki@fas.harvard.edu https://scholar.harvard.edu/glowacki/home
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The cultural evolutionary processes outlined by Singh illuminate why ritualized behaviors aimed at controlling unseen forces and overcoming fear are common in warfare among many small-scale societies. They also suggest an explanation for the development of ritual specialists for war who are distinct from war leaders.

Information

Type
Open Peer Commentary
Information
Behavioral and Brain Sciences , Volume 41 , 2018 , e74
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2018 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

References

Bearor, K. A. (2011) The “Illustrated American” and the Lakota Ghost Dance. American Periodicals: A Journal of History & Criticism 21((2):143–63.Google Scholar
Bell, F. L. S. (1935) Warfare among the Tanga. Oceania 5(3): 253–79.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bollig, M. & Österle, M. (2007) We turned our enemies into baboons: Warfare, ritual, and pastoral identity among the Pokot of northern Kenya. In: The practice of war: Production, reproduction and communication of armed violence, ed. Rao, A., Bollig, M. & Böck, M., pp. 23–51. Berghahn Books.Google Scholar
Brown, D. (1979) Iban leadership. The Sarawak Museum Journal 27:15.Google Scholar
Chagnon, N. (1977) The fierce people. Holt, Reinhart, and Winston.Google Scholar
Ellis, F. (1951) Patterns of aggression and the war cult in southwestern Pueblos. Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 7:177–201.Google Scholar
Gettleman, J. (2012) The world's worst war. New York Times, Dec. 15, 2012.Google Scholar
Glowacki, L. (2015) Incentives for war in small-scale societies. Doctoral dissertation, Harvard University.Google Scholar
Glowacki, L., Isakov, A., Wrangham, R., Mcdermott, R., Fowler, J. & Christakis, N. A. (2016) Formation of raiding parties for intergroup violence is mediated by social network structure. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA USA 113:12114–19.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Glowacki, L. & von Rueden, C. (2015) Leadership solves collective action problems in small-scale societies. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 370:20150010.Google Scholar
Glowacki, L., Wilson, M. L. & Wrangham, R. W. (2017) The evolutionary anthropology of war. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization. Available online 23 September 2017 at: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jebo.2017.09.014.Google Scholar
Glowacki, L. & Wrangham, R. W. (2013) The role of rewards in motivating participation in simple warfare. Human Nature 24:444–60.Google Scholar
Goldschmidt, W. (1994) The inducement of military conflict in tribal societies. In: The social dynamics of peace and conflict: Culture in international security, ed. Rubinstein, R. A. & Foster, M. L., pp. 47–65. Westview Press.Google Scholar
Gulliver, P. H. (1951) A preliminary survey of the Turkana. University of Cape Town.Google Scholar
Lamphear, J. (1994) The evolution of Ateker “New Model” armies: Jie and Turkana. In: Ethnicity and conflict in the horn of Africa, ed. Fukui, K. & Markakis, J., pp. 63–91. Ohio University Press.Google Scholar
Rusch, H. (2014) The two sides of warfare: An extended model of altruistic behavior in ancestral human intergroup conflict. Human Nature 25:359–77.Google Scholar
Tarr, B., Launay, J. & Dunbar, R. (2014) Music and social bonding: “Self-other” merging and neurohormonal mechanisms. Frontiers in Psychology 5:1096.Google Scholar
Zefferman, M. R. & Mathew, S. (2015) An evolutionary theory of large-scale human warfare: Group-structured cultural selection. Evolutionary Anthropology 24:50–61.Google Scholar