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In Blood Rites, renowned social critic Barbara Ehrenreich confronts a subject that has challenged thinkers from Homer to Freud: What draws our species to war and even makes us see it as a kind of sacred undertaking? Ehrenreich takes us on an original journey from the grasslands of prehistoric Africa to the trenches of Verdun, from the spectacular human sacrifices of precolonial Central America 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, nor in our Paleolithic hunting tradition, but in the blood rites early humans performed to reenact their terrifying experience of predation by stronger carnivores. It is in these ancient blood rites that Ehrenreich finds the first form of organized, socially sanctioned violence - and the spiritual antecedent of war.
Moving into historical time, Ehrenreich traces the evolution of war from the sacred undertaking of a privileged warrior caste to the central rite of the mass religion we know today as nationalism and shows the persistence of ancient fears in the most modern rituals and passions of war.
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Previews available in: English
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Blutrituale: Ursprung und Geschichte der Lust am Krieg
1999, Rowohlt
Paperback
in German
3499604876 9783499604874
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3
Blood rites: origins and history of the passions of war
1998, Henry Holt
in English
- 1st Owl Book ed.
0805057870 9780805057874
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4
Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War
May 15, 1998, Holt Paperbacks
Paperback
in English
0805057870 9780805057874
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5
Blood Rites
October 1, 1998, Virago Press Ltd, Time Warner Books Uk
Paperback
- New Ed edition
1860495699 9781860495694
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6
Blood rites: origins and history of the passions of war
1997, Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt & Co.
in English
- 1st ed.
0805050779 9780805050776
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Blood rites: origins and history of the passions of war
1997, Virago
in English
1853818062 9781853818066
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Book Details
Edition Notes
Originally published: New York : Metropolitan Books, 1997.
"An Owl book."
Includes bibliographical references (p. 267-280) and index.
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- Created February 12, 2009
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December 10, 2022 | Edited by ImportBot | import existing book |
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February 12, 2009 | Created by ImportBot | Imported from San Francisco Public Library record |