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War and the Arc of Human Experience (Paperback)
Loot Price: R831
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War and the Arc of Human Experience (Paperback)
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Glenn Petersen flew seventy combat missions in Vietnam when he was
nineteen, launching from an aircraft carrier in the Tonkin Gulf.
He'd sought out the weighty responsibilities and hazardous work.
But why? What did the cultural architecture of the society he grew
up in have to do with the way he went to war? In this book he looks
at the war from an anthropological perspective because that's how
he's made his living in all the subsequent years: it's how he sees
the world. While anthropologists write about the military and war
these days, they do so from the perspective of researchers. What
makes this a fully original contribution is that Petersen brings to
the page the classic methodology of ethnographers, participant
observation-a kind of total immersion. He writes from the dual
perspectives of an insider and a researcher and seeks in the
specifics of lived experience some larger conclusions about humans'
social lives in general. Petersen was long oblivious to what had
happened to him in Vietnam and he fears that young men and women
who've been fighting the US military's wars in Afghanistan and Iraq
might be similarly unaware of what's happened to them. Skills that
allowed him to survive in combat, in particular his ability to
focus tightly on the challenges directly in front of him, seemed to
transfer well to life after war. The same intensity led him to a
successful academic career, including the time he represented the
Micronesian islands at the United Nations; how could anything be
wrong? Then surreptitiously, the danger, the stress, and the trauma
he'd hidden away broke through a brittle shell and the war came
spilling out. As an anthropologist he sees in this a classic
pattern: an adaptation to one set of conditions is put to a new and
practical use when conditions change, but in time what had once
been beneficial turns into maladaptive behavior. In writing about
why we fight, he shed lights on what the fighting does to us.
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