School of American Research Advanced Seminars – Serie

The book brings together a group of authors who are addressing the nature and causes of warfare in simpler, tribal societies. The authors represent a range of different opinions about why humans engage in warfare, why wars start, and the role of war in human evolution. Warfare in cultures from several different world areas is considered, ranging from the Amazon, the Caribbean, the Andes, the Southwestern US, Southeast Asia, Polynesia, and Malaysia. To explain the origins and maintenance of war in tribal societies, different authors appeal to a broad spectrum of demographic, environmental, historical and biological variables. Competing explanatory model of warfare are presented with overlapping bodies of data offered in support of each model.

The study of chiefdoms has moved from a preoccupation with their formal characteristics to a concern with their dynamics as political institutions. The contributors to this volume are interested in how ruling elites retain power through control over production and exchange, and then legitimize that control through an elaborate ideology. The eleven case studies look at particular chiefdoms, originating in specific historical conditions. Despite obvious differences between the chiefdoms, certain common underlying processes are revealed. The collection recognizes how complex and interdependent the sources of power in society are, as well as the forces of instability that constantly threaten to tear the society apart. Chiefdoms offers a rich and varied interpretation of sociopolitical power.

The Islamic culture that developed in the ninth and tenth centuries AD in what is now Eastern Iran was to have a significant impact on most Muslims of west, south and central Asia. Under the patronage of Persianized Turkic Muslim rulers, the culture spread westward to the Mediterranean and eastward into India. Up to the fifteenth century AD, Turko-Persia represented a distinctive variant of Islamic life and thought in these regions, particularly among the elite, but thereafter regional variants started to emerge. This collection of essays comprises an historical survey of the culture, a chronology of major developments in the region from the rise of the Persian empire before Islam up to the present, and six chapters by eminent authorities on the region, focusing on the importance of literature; the tension between central and peripheral institutions in Turko-Persian societies; and the confrontation of the Turko-Persian Islamicate world with the European world.