On war and anthropology; A history of debates concerning the New Guinea Highlands and the Balkans

War calls for understanding. While well beyond representation to many, war still demands interpretation. It spurs reflection on its causes and consequences, and makes people consider their worldview. This way, anthropologists have recently come to rethink their discipline, which in the past would have failed to recognise war's full significance. While historians of anthropology tend to agree, Erik Brandt challenges this claim. Focused on the ethnographies of the New Guinea Highlands and the Balkans, he demonstrates that many modern anthropologists made war a central theme in their writing, the key to the cultural area of their concern. Based on this observation, Brandt argues that both anthropologists, and the historians of their discipline, have worked with a conventional image of war as all-out violence. This 'total-war' is a cultural construction of the modern West, however. To come to understandwar anthropologically, it is necessary to distinguish this influentual interpretation of war from the warfare that, historically, anthropologists had to face, and that they have to relate to ethnograpically.