Aug 01, 2007 15:20
To wage war, become an anthropologist. Lose the fascination with Clausewitz, and embrace culture as the way to understand conflict. Or so argue a number of strategists, historians, and officers on both sides of the Atlantic.
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This article makes four arguments. First, it shows that there has been a cultural turn toward an anthropological approach to war. As part of this cultural turn, some historians and strategists argue that there is an undifferentiated nonwestern way of war, to be found in both strategic texts and historical behavior, and that eastern and western warfare are intrinsically different. Second, it argues that classic writings do not support this notion. Such a notion oversimplifies the western strategic tradition, and overstates its differences with eastern conceptions of war. Third, when it comes to understanding the actual behavior of cultures at war, the cultural turn is empirically unviable. There are too many exceptions and qualifications that must be made to the picture of two conflicting eastern and western ways of war. Finally, by depicting culture as the driver of military history, the culture turn notion risks being politically naïve. This can result in overlooking the many moments where strategic cultures do not control states, but where states control strategic cultures, and where the differences between conflicting approaches to war are dictated less by cultural traditions and more by the hard realities of power, weakness, and pragmatism.
war,
culture