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Internal War: A Cross‐Cultural Study1
Abstract
In this study, three categories of variables—social structure, political organization, and intersocietal relations—are examined for their influence upon the occurrence of internal war (warfare between culturally similar political communities). A sample of fifty societies is used to test hypotheses that relate variables drawn from the three categories to the frequency of such war. It is demonstrated that fraternal interest groups and unauthorized raiding parties influence the frequency of internal war in uncentralized political systems, but not in centralized ones. It is also shown that the frequency of external war (warfare between culturally different political communities) does not influence the frequency of internal war. In conclusion the results of this study are compared with those obtained in a cross‐cultural study of feuding.
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“Once they emerge, complex societies, such as chiefdoms and states, tend to supervene the patrilineal kin group as the unit of intergroup competition, and while they may not eradicate them altogether as sub-polity-level social identities, warfare between such kin groups is suppressed very effectively51,52.”
From Cultural hitchhiking and competition between patrilineal kin groups explain the post-Neolithic Y-chromosome bottleneck (2018) · cites this paper as [52]
Citations
Cites
No references could be resolved yet.
Research works printed but not linked: 16
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- Bohannan Paul, 1963, Social anthropology
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- Gearing Fred, 1962, Priests and warriors
- 10.1525/aa.1957.59.4.02a00090 · DOI
- Murdock George P., 1962, Ethnographic atlas, Ethnology, 1
- 10.1086/200501 · DOI
- 10.1525/aa.1964.66.4.02a00090 · DOI
- Otterbein Keith F., 1968, Cross‐cultural studies of armed combat, Buffalo Studies, 4, 91
- 10.1525/aa.1965.67.6.02a00070 · DOI · Paper page
- 10.1525/aa.1965.67.6.02a001010 · DOI
- Service Elman R., 1962, Primitive social organization
- Sherif Muzafer, 1961, Intergroup conflict and cooperation: the Robbers Cave experiment
- Velzen Van, 1960, Residence, power groups and intra‐societal aggression, International Archives of Ethnography, 49, 169
- Young Frank W., 1965, Initiation ceremonies: a cross‐cultural study of status dramatization
Cited by
SOSIS, R., KRESS, H., & BOSTER, J. (2007) · Evolution and Human Behavior · doi:10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2007.02.007 · Cited by 276
Complex societies: The evolutionary origins of a crude superorganism
Richerson, P. J., & Boyd, R. (1999) · Human Nature · doi:10.1007/s12110-999-1004-y · Cited by 227
Zeng, T. C., Aw, A. J., & Feldman, M. W. (2018) · Nature Communications · doi:10.1038/s41467-018-04375-6 · Cited by 121
Migration in Prehistory: The Northern Iroquoian Case
Snow, D. R. (1995) · American Antiquity · doi:10.2307/282076 · Cited by 80
Metadata
- Authors
- OTTERBEIN, K. F.
- Venue
- American Anthropologist
- Publisher
- Wiley
- Published
- 1968-04
- Volume
- 70
- Issue
- 2
- Pages
- 277-289
- ISSN
- 0002-7294
- 1548-1433
- Cited by
- 78
- References
- 0
- Language
- en
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