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By expanding the geographical scope of the history of violence and war, this volume challenges both Western and state-centric narratives of the decline of violence and its relationship to modernity. It highlights instead similarities across early modernity in terms of representations, legitimations, applications of, and motivations for violence. It seeks to integrate methodologies of the study of violence into the history of war, thereby extending the historical significance of both fields of research. Thirteen case studies outline the myriad ways in which large-scale violence was understood and used by states and non-state actors throughout the early modern period across Africa, Asia, the Americas, the Atlantic, and Europe, demonstrating that it was far more complex than would be suggested by simple narratives of conquest and resistance. Moreover, key features of imperial violence apply equally to large-scale violence within societies. As the authors argue, violence was a continuum, ranging from small-scale, local actions to full-blown war. The latter was privileged legally and increasingly associated with states during early modernity, but its legitimacy was frequently contested and many of its violent forms, such as raiding and destruction of buildings and crops, could be found in activities not officially classed as war.
certainly good box office, although its popularity in the ‘20s makes its absence from the output of the next decade the more striking. Expedition films and ethnographic films may not have had a mass following, but their treatment of the role of the explorer, and of the relationship between white observers and primitive peoples, certainly influenced the approaches of many feature films. There seems
activity and an aspect of ‘traditional’ culture. Anthropological studies of indigenous warfare in Papua New Guinea and the Amazon, including the muchcriticized ethnographic film Dead Birds, reinforced characterizations of ‘primitive war’ as ritualized, symbolic, and low-casualty.4 The PBS documentary War, and Raiding war and globalization 89 its companion book, helped popularize the ‘primitive war’ notion of raiding for a broad public audience in the United States in the 1980s. Gwynne Dyer, author of the companion volume for the documentary, asserts that ‘though
wearing a white version of the lavalava which returned memories of earlier Fijian practices. Needless to say, the political revolutions of the 1980s and the consequent social shifts have had their effects upon the Fijian game. Away to the north-west, cricket in the Trobriand Islands took an even more radically different form, as depicted brilliantly in the ethnographic film produced in Australia by an
France and colonies also increased over time. Those for whom overseas vacations remained an unaffordable luxury could sample imperial adventure, if only vicariously, by purchasing a cinema ticket. In the 1920s French documentary makers still drew inspiration from the colonies, the first ethnographic films of colonial life having been made as far back as 1897. 50 But cinemagoers
to celebrate the completion of her major work for CNRS was intense and palpable. Much of Retel-Laurentin’s quantitative data no longer exists, though her library resides in the Fonds Retel-Laurentin at the Musée de l’Homme, and Jacques Retel still had much of her Nzakara material, including field notebooks, extensive photographs, and two ethnographic