Introduction
The gendered character of warfare is extraordinarily consistent across human cultures. I define war broadly as lethal intergroup violence, and define the war system as the interrelated ways that societies organize themselves to participate in potential and actual wars. This war system is among the most consistently gendered of human activities. Every known society assigns war roles differentially by gender, with men as the primary fighters (and usually the only ones). Since nearly every society has war in its social repertoire, gendered war roles have broad social ramifications.
Attention to Gender and War in Anthropology
Anthropology has long taken gender seriously in studying war, in contrast to political science and history (Goldstein, 2001, pp. 34–36). Margaret Mead’s (1967, p. 236) conclusion in the first major anthropological symposium on war called for paying “particular attention… to the need of young males to validate their strength and courage, and to…the...
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Acknowledgments
Parts of this article are excerpted and adapted, with permission, from my War and Gender: How Gender Shapes the War System and Vice Versa (Cambridge University Press, 2001), which also contains further scholarly references. For more resources, see www.warandgender.com
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Goldstein, J.S. (2003). War and Gender. In: Ember, C.R., Ember, M. (eds) Encyclopedia of Sex and Gender. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/0-387-29907-6_11
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