Harrison & Scheper Hughes

Harrison (1989) central argument

• War is not a failure of social control but a deliberately, ritually constructed activity that men must work hard to bring about

• For Avatip, the default is sociality, not violence → war is actively constructed through magic, ritual and empathy suppression

Two opposed social idioms in Avatip life?

1. Secular equality → Everyday ethics of reciprocity and empathy - all beings can become kin

2. Ritual hierarchy → Men’s initiatory cult where relations are defined by ritual grade

• These oppose each other

Ka’aw

• A quality of aggressive self assertion that men accumulate as they rise through ritual grades

• War-magicians bespell raiders with magic inducing a trance-state of emotional withdrawal

• Raiders wore chest ornaments as face-masks: to kill, a man had to literally put on a different face

Why did Avatip men work to maintain war rather than peace

• Everyday sociality — trading, intermarrying, feasting with outsiders — threatened to dissolve political boundaries and erode community distinctness.

• The men's cult counteracted this, constructing the village as a politically independent entity

• War constructed bounded political groups

Scheper-Hughes (1995) Militant anthropology

• Cultural relativism, when it slides into moral relativism, has become an obstacle rather than a virtue.

• Traditional detached observation constitutes ethical failure in the presence of human suffering — not neutrality but complicity.

• She calls for a politically committed anthropology willing to 'take sides',

Anthropologist as a spectator vs witness

• Spectator →positioned outside events, accountable only to science. Witness: accountable to history and also recognises shared humanity and accepts responsibility for what one sees

• Scheper-Hughes calls for 'barefoot anthropologists': practitioners who make their discipline available as a resource to communities