ABSTRACT
While many anthropologists have devoted attention to phenomena variously designated as warfare, feuding, armed conflict, or armed combat, they seldom attempt to define what they are describing. Two review articles dealing with the anthropology of conflict scarcely touch upon the subject of warfare. Warfare, when it has been analyzed by anthropologists, has been treated as a topic, not a theoretical approach. That is, it is a topic to be studied in the sense that kinship, religion, or technology is a topic, rather than a theoretical approach such as evolutionism, functionalism, or structuralism. Although many ethnographies contain brief but adequate descriptions of warfare, there are actually few anthropological books and articles that are devoted primarily to the analysis of warfare. The theoretical anthropological literature dealing with warfare is scant compared to the thousands of books and articles devoted to such topics as kinship, religion, and technology.
