Anthropology of violence and conflict

Almost a hundred years ago, the German sociologist Georg Simmel published his important study on combat (Simmel 1908). With the publication of this study, Simmel is among the pioneers of thinkers who have gone beyond the limits of traditional evolutionary thinking about violence, which used to view conflict between groups as a tool for evolutionary selection. It was usual, according to the evolutionary point of view, to view war as representing something that had evolved, along with other elements of the cultural stock, from a primitive, irregular aggression deep within the human race to the modern mechanized war as described by the military theorist Carl Philipp von Clausewitz. According to Simmel, violence represents a synchronous event and a type of social relations existing between individuals and groups. This violence serves specific purposes at both the levels between and within the group. This functional approach adopted by Simmel has undoubtedly contributed to paving the way for researchers to study violent confrontations according to modern anthropological approaches that view these confrontations as social actions closely linked to the interests and convictions of conscious individuals.