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Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War
by: Barbara Ehrenreich

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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 355.02
EAN: 9780805057874
ISBN: 0805057870
Label: Holt Paperbacks
Manufacturer: Holt Paperbacks
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 256
Publication Date: May 15, 1998
Publisher: Holt Paperbacks
Sales Rank: 101782
Studio: Holt Paperbacks

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Product Description:
An ALA Notable Book
A New York Times Notable Book

In Blood Rites, Barbara Ehrenreich confronts the mystery of the human attraction to violence: What draws our species to war and even makes us see it as a kind of sacred undertaking? Blood Rites takes us on an original journey from the elaborate human sacrifices of the ancient world to the carnage and holocaust of twentieth-century 'total war.' Sifting through the fragile records of prehistory, Ehrenreich discovers the wellspring of war in an unexpected place--not in a 'killer instinct' unique to the males of our species but in the blood rites early humans performed to reenact their terrifying experience of predation by stronger carnivores. Brilliant in conception, rich in scope, Blood Rites is a monumental work that will transform our understanding of the greatest single threat to human life.

Amazon.com Review:
In this ambitious work, Barbara Ehrenreich offers a daring explanation for humans' propensity to wage war. Rather than approach the subject from a physiological perspective, pinpointing instinct or innate aggressiveness as the violent culprit, she reaches back to primitive man's fear of predators and the anxieties associated with life in the food chain. To deal with the reality of living as prey, she argues that blood rites were created to dramatize and validate the life-and-death struggle. Jumping ahead to the modern age, Ehrenreich brands nationalism a more sophisticated form of blood ritual, a phenomenon that conjures similar fears of predation, whether in the form of lost territory or the more extreme ethnic cleansing. Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War may not offer a cure for human aggression, but the author does present a convincing argument for the difficulties associated with achieving peace.

Customer Reviews

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- War is hiding inside us
The passions of war are just waiting to be triggered. Are you prepared to fight your emotional programming instead of for your nation? Any deep investigation of war needs to go into what we are, where we have evolved from, and the history of war and its cultural growth. The book has a good style and length, and intelligently presented a coherent thesis from the researches of the author. The book deserves a read to discover the potentials of prey and predator in all of us. There are insights into military history and behavior, and the theme grows around our recent in evolutionary terms 'ascent' from being prey of carnivores to an organized predator who kills from a distance with fearsome armaments. The theme of this book will always be topical, because war is always a part of what we are. Knowledge of its consequences has always been in some of us, while most of us are swept along with the tides of feeling. I ... Read More

Rating:

- Good book.

Since I read "Blood Rites" after "War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning", comparisons are inevitable and I will make no attempt to avoid them.

In "War is a Force..." Hedges speaks only of contemporary war and how it excites the passions of modern man in the late 20th and early 21st century. He draws extensively on his own personal experiences covering conflicts across the globe, which gives significant credence to the arguments that he makes. One of the shortfalls, though, of that book is that he tends to speak nearly exclusively in some parts on those personal experiences. What he lacks is a more scholarly attempt at defining the "force", or as Ehrenreich calls them, "passions" of war. This is where "Blood Rites" excells.

Ehrenreich's proposal regarding the evolution of the passions of war are very compelling. Until I read her book, I was of the mind that it is a "meme" (she ... Read More

Rating:

- on the origins of war
Blood Rites is a book about the origin of war. The author's thesis is that the origins of war stem back to a time when humanity was the prey of large animals. Eventually humans organized and developed weapons to fight off predatory animals but the memories of being prey lived on in us and manifested itself in sacrifice, human and otherwise and finally, up to this day, war. In the process of explaining the above the author goes into the history of war, writing of a time when the making of war was a sacred kind of thing reserved for the elite of each society and about the democratizing effect modern weapons had on war, first making the lower soldiers such as archers more important than the knights and samurai and then with the advent of guns making the idea of a knight or samurai class completely obsolete. Finally we enter modern times with nationalism forming the identity of each group of people and hence what we fight ... Read More

Rating:

- War at the Heart of the Human Enterprise
In this deep and meticulously researched treatise on the origins of war Barbara Ehrenreich argues that 1.In our earliest history we were scavengers with no good defense mechanism, hardly the top of the food chain. 2.When humans developed the brain power to become an apex predator the wound inflicted by being a prey animal formed the basis of the first religious ceremonies as small bands of humans re-enacted the trauma of the predator prey relationship in sacrificial blood rites. 3.That about 12,000 years ago at the end of the Pleistocene and the beginning of the agricultural revolution the large prey that consumed the attentions of the most violent segment of society had been all but hunted out. 4.Putting these men to work as warriors to replace their hunting niche was adaptative at the time. 5.War began as an organized human enterprise about 12,000 years ago as these new warriors captured people from other tribes to use ... Read More

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