Rating: 
Summary: An amazing paradigm shift work
Review: "...To acknowledge that nationalism is itself a kind of religion would be to concede that all that is 'modern' is not necessarily 'progressive' or 'rational': that history can sometimes take us 'backward', toward what we have come to see as the archaic and primitive."
Barbara Ehrenreich, BLOOD RITES
From Chapter Thirteen, "Three Cases of War Worship" .... If we can accept the fact that the latest evolutionary stage of war has been completed--from multi-national/mechanical (1914 to 1945) to Cold/covert/technological (1946 to 1989), to terrorist/"asymmetrical" (today, in the 21st century)--we can see that this book easily surpasses anything written in the last decade for the title of Most Important. More than the ocean of tomes recently produced on the psychology of Osama bin Laden and the Taliban (and the Middle East as a whole), or those depicting the consequences of biological and chemical weaponry on American soil, Barbara Ehrenreich has, with this book, surpassed the innovative, seminal and profoundly contraversial scholarship of anthropology, psychology and political science of the past thirty years. BLOOD RITES: ORIGINS AND HISTORY OF THE PASSIONS OF WAR is one of the greatest, most frightfully illuminating books I've ever read. In the context of unified-field, "theory of everything" books on culture and the human psyche--the holistic/spherical direction into which Western consciousness seems to be finally heading--this book ranks with work like the 19th century Godfrey Higgins' ANACALYPSIS, scientific mythographer Alan Alford's WHEN THE GODS CAME DOWN, Camile Paglia's SEXUAL PERSONAE, linguist Kuhn's THEORY OF SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTIONS and CHANGES OF MIND by philsopher/psychologist Dr. Jenny Wade. I believed few works in this new discpline of evolutionary psychology/anthropology could ever come close to the impact of THE IMPERIAL ANIMAL by Tiger and Fox. Ehrenreich, however, with BLOOD RITES, via encapsulating all of their discoveries within an even newer and more all-encompassing paradigm, surpasses it with a quantum leap. Ehrenreich's idea is that the primal fear of predation of Paleolithic man has driven much of what we know as the genesis of culture, from religion to war. Early man's very real fear of being eaten alive in the jungle by much physically stronger animals, back when early human kind/hominids didn't leave willingly but was forced out of the trees by climatic changes in the Savannahs of central Africa--is the generative force behind the primal rituals of the blood. These rituals--blood rites--symbolize the eventual supremacy over the man-eating animals via man learning to hunt even better, and subsequently successfully fight for their survival as a species. In other words, they symbolize the ultimate transformation of the jungle: prey to predator. These rituals, with their corresponding symbol meaning, are the DNA of culture itself. The reenactment of this rite in every human community--the transformational ritual that told the story of mankind's most humble and frightened beginnings--in turn created much of society as it exists even today; from the characteristics of ancient culture's many gods and the corresponding behavioral architecture of ancient religions...to the shape and purpose of modern day war. How Ehrenreich proves her point will change the way you look at everything, including many other historically intellectuals and the actual validity of their ideas, regardless of how foundational to our culture they may seem. Particularly because so many influential thinkers and philosophers of the past three centuries have consciously and unconsciously based their theories of human existence on a now defunct paradigm: the unvanquished hunter-gatherer man of Neolithic times as the beginning of human civilization and thought. Ehrenreich reveals this foundational idea to be a myth of its own. *That alone*, when contemplating its implications, will change the way you look at literally everything--especially the true horror that is war. This is a book to be experienced, moreso than simply read. Those whose hearts question obvious things, like why the irrationality of war continuously re-demands supremacy over our lives, will have many questions answered by this work. But for those whose questions go deeper...deeper into the intellectual architecture of Western man and its place in the human psyche...for those who understand, who feel, but lack the words to explain the feeling of seeing an ignored pink polka-dotted elephant on the coffee table of every celebrated thinker of the past--from Descartes to Hobbes to Rouseau to Darwin to Nietzsche to Freud to feminist Susan Faludi...for those who question it all, but even the fairly current answers to so much of why culture is what it is only yields more questions, this book will change you in ways that could not be predicted. It is books like these for which Kuhn's term *paradigm shift* was created. And instead of like a college textbook, its 250-odd pages read like a novel. She is a brilliant intellectual and masterful storyteller herself, rolled into one. The influence this book will have on everything from child psychology to international politics to art will assert itself for many generations to come. In these times (it was first reviewed by the New York Times four years before the September 11th Tragedy), every American should read it.
Rating: 
Summary: mostly speculation
Review: An imaginative attempt to understand the origins of war, an essay that relies primarily upon the author's sensitive, and often sensible, imagination.
The book has an often irritating, superfluous, and promiscuous use of quotation marks when it is not actually quoting. Thus, she places quotation marks around Long Gray Line and drive, for example.
Rating: 
Summary: Well-researched but scattered thesis
Review: Barbara Ehrenreich's overview of the seemingly impulsive nature of humans to violence is a real eye-opener in that it brings points to the discussion table that academia seems to have easily dismissed. The author simply has a respect for both human psychology and geological time: two things that seem simple enough but are often overlooked by researchers. Her research led her to link killing and war to ritual and sacrifice and how religion and the sacrificial nature of war continues to act as a legitimaizing agent pitting the proverbial "us" against "them". Using texts such as Gilgamesh, the Bible, ancient Japanese and Greek poetry and other texts she points out a common link of fear of the unknown as viewed by the ancients in beasts, women, and nature. A flaw though in her tone is that it gets a tad repetative and it seems as though she uses the old academic trick of pulling from a variety of sources to make smaller points that coincide with her overall thesis. You eventually see what she is getting act but when she goes back and forth, say from the Inquisition to the Aztecs to Aborginies in each paragraph it tends to be cumbersome. Don't overlook this one. It brings together recent texts such as 'A History of Toture' and 'Male Fantasies' with a concise passion for the subject matter.
Rating:
Summary: Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War
Review: Being a Sociology major I found Barbara Ehrenreich's study of the Origins of war most interesting. For the first time, I have found a book that tries to answer the question why do we continue to have wars and what important part of our culture's development do they continue to play? The idea of prey and preditor still exists. The ideas of war being religious and part of the feeling of nationalism helped to make sense of something I could never understand. I have lent out my copy to many. Others I know have bought a copy on my recommendation. It leads to many interesting discussions of war. I have even lent it to a person who spent much of his time in the military. I think it provides food for thought whether you're a militant or pacifist.
Rating:
Summary: Brilliant
Review: Blood Rites presents an extremely compelling and highly readable account for the origins and the continuation of war across history and societies. Ehrenriech proposes that early humans' experience as prey animals, not predators, shaped our subsequent biological and cultural evolution in ways that make war endemic to our species. Ehrenreich masterfully blends biological anthropology, cultural anthropology, history, and sociology to support her basis thesis. Ehrenreich may not necessarily be right about everything-- there is considerable speculations-- but all of her reasoning is logical and well-supported. This book changed the way I think about humans' relationship to the natural world and our violent relationships with each other.
Rating:
Summary: Daring, original and extremely thought provoking
Review: Blood Rites rekindled my long held interest in (almost non-existent) theories of war. I recalled running around playing "guns" with neighborhood kids; long and involved role-playing fantasies from my pre-teen years; and my later interest in movies like Full Metal Jacket and books like Blood Meridian and Citizens. Blood Rites manages to tie my youthful digressions into a theory about the larger, bloodier, more despairing and bleak world of historical warfare. According to the book, my obsession with war is part of long-running tradition that equates "becoming-a-man" with the indoctrination into the ways of war. She _doesn't_ claim that war comes from aggressive hunter males (in fact, she tries to thoroughly stomp that argument into the ground). She claims that our aeon-long status as prey created a long running fear and admiration of animal predators. Later, after we became predators, the fear and admiration was shifted to the small band male hunters. (She states recent archeological evidence that suggests that small band hunters were predated by tribal herding practices. These practices ended after we drove most of the large herdable herbivores into extinction.) The hunters started providing a smaller portion of the tribal food (around 90% of our ancestor's diet was provided by gathering). And at some point, they turned their predator skills against other tribes and demanded the fear and admiration once exclusively belonging to animals. (Kind of... it's a little more involved than that.) Warriors (almost exclusively male) ascended to total power on the back of war. However, once created, War had a "life" of its own. No one could be totally peaceful unless completely cut-off from contact with war-like states (which was hard to do unless you were an Eskimo or an Australian Bushman). Once war was discovered or invented no one could ignore it. Every society had to escalate the potential and possibility of war. This constant escalation of warfare changed the rules and even! tually led to today's "total war." In today's war there is almost no notion of civilian. Everyone is forced into war. However, her book fumbles near the end. She states that a theory of war is needed in order to fight it, but the end of the book sounds false and forced. She starts to throw ideas at the wall, hoping one or two will stick. (She does admit to having no real working idea on how to stop war.) Still, the ending doesn't take away from the brilliant originality of the majority of the book... One of things I'm interested in is any connection between her theory and Deleuze and Guattari's theories of the "war machine." Their "war machine" seems to be largely ! a theory about the effects of war and hers is largely about the origin and perpetuation of war.
Rating:
Summary: Very good. Is it too broad?
Review: Considered in its own narrowest terms -- a genealogy of the passions surrounding the human practice of war -- this is a compelling read. One can see this work as a real-world application of E.O. Wilson's idea of Consilience, as Ehrenreich uses her training in biology to elucidate and inform what is conventionally seen as a question for the humanities. Starting from biology, Ehrenreich calls on experts from many disciplines, "soft" and "hard," as she lays out her case. This is both promising and perilous. A great deal of reading and study has gone in to this book, as is evident from her many citations. It would require an expertise deeper and broader than mine to assess whether she has truly "done her homework." What I found lacking, at times, was a sense of the contrast between her thesis and what had come before it. Is she synthesizing the likes of Toynbee, Weber, Fichte, Hegel, and the many others she mentions, or is she overturning them? I did not always get a clear sense of where previous thinkers had gone wrong on the topics she addresses. In the end, this is not a damning criticism; a reader geninely interested in the issues covered in this book will find a deep mine of additional reading in Ehrenreich's index and bibliography. This book is represents a seemingly fresh start on a matter of great human importance.
Rating:
Summary: Insight into War as Religion and More
Review: Ehrenreich begins with an reasonable assumption and a fact: She reasonably assumes that for tens of millennia our ancestors were cat food (while also occasionally serving as food for other predators like wolves, bears, crocs, etc.); and she points out that adherents to all the ancient religions we know of (including Judaism) offered bloody sacrifices to their "gods" as if they were appeasing man-eating predators with substitute victims. She then goes on to explore the career of the "passions of war" from this foundation. But I think she really should have developed further the implications of these ideas for the "passions of religion." If, as she implies, belief in "gods" derives from fear of predators, then the general conquest of predators the world over should inaugurate an era of freedom from fear of the gods. Does this indicate that "a-theism" in reality means "the absence of predators"?
Rating:
Summary: Better than Nickel and Dimed
Review: I read this one the evening after finishing "Nickel and Dimed" and found this one a better book. As Barbara points out this is not her primary scholarship interest and the resources she uses seem loaded with the kinds of things I read - so Richard Dawkins for example, so I suspect again this is written more for popular consumption than an advance in the science of war. Again I find it interesting that Barbara has a way of stating her points in a way I find mildly rebuking to the male sex without being as nasty as, say, Andrea Dworkin (by the way, I think Andrea has every right to be that way!) I half wonder reading this if what we see is the other side of the coin. Feminists have pointed out that even our very vocabulary emphasizes male dominance. Now that females are moving toward dominance, we see the vocabulary going the other way. But this book is a remarkably balanced review of contemporary studies of things such as ritual sacrifice, blood rites, ideas concerning the evolution of homo as either forager or hunter. Barbara emphasizes the need for defense against predators (I have to remember to ask Paul, our resident wolf specialist, about page 44 where Barbara references wolves hunting humans in India), as well as the usual comments on why we go to war. I found her presentation much less committed to any conclusion than the summary here Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War describes. I liked it enough to want to read Barbara's book Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment by Barbara Ehrenreich (Paperback) next. Maybe Wednesday.
Rating:
Summary: Blood Rites takes the reader on a fascinating journey
Review: In the book Blood Rites, Barbara Ehrenreich tries to find a theory of war. She gives the reader many of her original and thought provoking ideas as well as many other scholar's ideas of how war began and whether it is cultural or biological--in other words can war be stopped or is it bred into our genes? Blood Rites takes the reader on a fascinating journey through the elaborate human sacrifices of the ancient world to the wars of the twentieth century. Ehrenreich also explores the haunting attraction humans have to war and attempts to explain our transformation from prey to predator. Throughout the book Ehrenreich brings up many interesting questions, such as: When did human beings first begin to practice war? Why is war exclusively a male activity? Why are humans attracted to war and why do we see it as sacred? Ehrenreich provides many provocative answers to these questions, answers that begin by questioning the hunter theory of evolution and our belief that man is a "natural born killer." Blood Rites sends the reader through many different emotions, from feeling disgusted to captivated to empowered that human beings can end war. Blood Rites is an excellent book. I would highly recommend it to anyone who is the slightest bit interested in reading very intriguing and captivating theories of war. It is powerful and gives anyone who takes the time to be submerged into Ehrenreich's ideas a better understanding of the origin and history of the bloody practice we have come to know as war.
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