Considering Anthropology and Small Wars

Book excerpt: This book includes a variety of chapters that consider the role and importance of anthropology in small wars and insurgencies. Almost every war since the origins of the discipline at the beginning of the 19th century has involved anthropology and anthropologists. The chapters in this book fall into the following myriad categories of military anthropology. Anthropology for the military. In some cases, anthropologists participated directly as uniformed combatants, having the purpose of directly providing expert knowledge with the goal of improving operations and strategy. Anthropology of the military. Anthropologists have also been known to study State militaries. Sometimes this scholarship is undertaken with the objective of providing the military with information about its own internal systems and processes in order to improve its performance. At other times, the objective is to study the military as a human group to identify and describe its culture and social processes. Anthropology of war. As a discipline, anthropology has also had a long history of studying warfare itself. This book considers the anthropology of small wars and insurgencies through an analysis of the Islamic State’s military adaptation in Iraq, Al Shabaab recruiting in Somalia, religion in Israeli combat units, as well as many other topics. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the journal, Small Wars & Insurgencies.