ABSTRACT
Similar to historically situated social praxis in general, war must be understood as being simultaneously shaped by the structural constraints of a given historical context and by the cultural mediation of this context through the actors’ social ideology. While war results from conflicts caused by the objective structures of social reality, these conflicts are perceived through a specific cultural lens by any local collectivity. Reactions (ranging from violence to accommodation or avoidance) are not automatically enforced by the structural parameters, but are contingent on cultural models of decision-making in conflict situations. Moreover, these cultural models initially shape the representation of violence in a social arena, thus giving meaning to the actual conflict by situating it in a framework of appropriate reactions under comparable conditions in the past.1
