Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War

by Barbara Ehrenreich (Author)

43 customer reviews

ISBN-13: 978-0805057874

ISBN-10: 0805057870

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In Blood Rites, Barbara Ehrenreich confronts the mystery of the human attraction to violence: What draws our species to war and even makes us see it as a kind of sacred undertaking? Blood Rites takes us on an original journey from the elaborate human sacrifices of the ancient world 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 but in the blood rites early humans performed to reenact their terrifying experience of predation by stronger carnivores. Brilliant in conception, rich in scope, Blood Rites is a monumental work that will transform our understanding of the greatest single threat to human life.

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Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

In this ambitious work, Barbara Ehrenreich offers a daring explanation for humans' propensity to wage war. Rather than approach the subject from a physiological perspective, pinpointing instinct or innate aggressiveness as the violent culprit, she reaches back to primitive man's fear of predators and the anxieties associated with life in the food chain. To deal with the reality of living as prey, she argues that blood rites were created to dramatize and validate the life-and-death struggle. Jumping ahead to the modern age, Ehrenreich brands nationalism a more sophisticated form of blood ritual, a phenomenon that conjures similar fears of predation, whether in the form of lost territory or the more extreme ethnic cleansing. Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War may not offer a cure for human aggression, but the author does present a convincing argument for the difficulties associated with achieving peace. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

Social critic and Time magazine essayist Ehrenreich (The Worst Years of Our Lives, LJ 4/15/90) turns her attention here to anthropology, delving into the causes of man's age-old interest in war. Her remarkable thesis is that primitive peoples were defined not so much by a killer predatory instinct as by their role as prey for other animals. Social constructs such as war and ritual sacrifice then developed as ways to reenact the primal emotions of being prey?the terror of facing a hungry beast. Her thesis is fascinating, and the anthropological exposition is well written and convincing, if mainly speculative. Ehrenreich's last section, which uses scattered examples from modern history to illustrate the "sacralization" of war, is also intriguing (if somewhat less convincing). Recommended for both public and academic libraries.?Robert Persing, Univ. of Pennsylvania Lib., Philadelphia
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product details

Paperback: 304 pages
Publisher: Holt Paperbacks (May 15, 1998)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0805057870
ISBN-13: 978-0805057874
Product Dimensions: 6 x 0.8 x 228.6 inches
Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces
Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars See all reviews (43 customer reviews)
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #150,310 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #240 in Books > Politics & Social Sciences > Social Sciences > Violence in Society
- #306 in Books > Textbooks > Humanities > History > Military
- #4159 in Books > History > Military

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A provocative account of the origins of war

BySpunStories B.on May 8, 2012

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

Barbara Ehrenreich's BLOOD RITES is an investigation into the origins of war. Drawing parallels between ancient religions with their blood-soaked rituals, and the fact that for thousands of years a small band of humans had to ward off predators in the shape of tigers, lions and wolves, all without the arsenal of weapons that we have today, Ms. Ehrenreich tries to fill in a picture of the psychology of war. She makes the radical proposal that those ancient deities that demanded their blood-soaked sacrifices could be equated with predatory mammals looking to snack on human flesh.

The only effective weapon that ancient men and women had to fight with was fire. We know that the use of fire is very ancient because hearths dating back 750,000 years have been found in Israel. But the use of fire may have had less to do with keeping warm, than with keeping predators at bay. Images of rings of fire that abound in stories and operas (I'm thinking here of the ring of fire that Wotan uses to protect his sleeping daughter Brunnhilde), may have originated in the use of fire as a kind of fence around an encampment to protect the humans within.

Eventually, humans acquired better equipment in the shape of horses and arrows that meant that they could protect themselves far more efficiently from the big cats. Ms. Ehrenreich's basic argument is that when humans made the gigantic leap from prey to predator, the "underemployed" males of the tribe, whose job it had been to fight off the predators, needed something new to do in order to channel their energies. That new something turned out to be war.

I do not know if Ms. Ehrenreich is right about this. But I think she is right to point out that there is much more to war than killing people, even though that is its salient feature. Now that I think about it, there is a religious quality about war, that is unexpected. After all, you do not expect sanctioned murder to be religious in nature. But it is striking that down through the ages, masses, sacrifices, libations and other religious acts have been performed before a battle has started.

If you are interested in a provocative discussion about war, read this book. Four stars.

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War, the Predator Beast

ByG. Joy Robinson November 9, 2005

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

I loved Nickel and Dimed but was disappointed in For Her Own Good. Barbara Ehrenreich is a prolific writer and, I guess, not everything can be a gem. Blood Rites is well researched and exciting reading. Ehrenreich attacks the nature and origins of War, a subject on which she is admittedly not an expert. She brings a fresh eye, excellent research skills and the ability to put her conclusions in clear and compelling language.

Her key conclusion is that war grew out of our early experiences as prey turned predators. I don't know if that is as revolutionary an idea as she claims, but she convinced me. War is a religious experience based on the blood sacrifices of early humans to propitiate predator gods. It evolved with human society and now serves the new religion of nationalism, known in the US as patriotism.

While it is a human creation, like Frankenstein's monster, it has taken on a life of it's own and has become the new Beast. It is so enmeshed in our consciousness and culture that we may not be able to stop it. We find ourselves throwing young men and women into its merciless maw at a rate that makes even the bloodiest ancient rites seem tame in comparison.

Ehrenreich draws us to that frightening conclusion and then, apparently in search of a happy ending, suggests that perhaps the modern anti-war movement will grow powerful enough to actually put a stop to it; the war against war serving as the new but benign secular "religion".

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Good book.

ByChristopher Ron June 20, 2008

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

Since I read "Blood Rites" after "War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning", comparisons are inevitable and I will make no attempt to avoid them.

In "War is a Force..." Hedges speaks only of contemporary war and how it excites the passions of modern man in the late 20th and early 21st century. He draws extensively on his own personal experiences covering conflicts across the globe, which gives significant credence to the arguments that he makes. One of the shortfalls, though, of that book is that he tends to speak nearly exclusively in some parts on those personal experiences. What he lacks is a more scholarly attempt at defining the "force", or as Ehrenreich calls them, "passions" of war. This is where "Blood Rites" excells.

Ehrenreich's proposal regarding the evolution of the passions of war are very compelling. Until I read her book, I was of the mind that it is a "meme" (she mentions this concept and it's creator, Richard Dawkins, in her final chapter) that has persisted for many of the same reasons as religion: In those "true believers" doing the fighting, it excites group hysteria, feelings of brotherhood and kinship found nowhere else, etc. And in those who are the puppet masters, it provides them with the ability to force their will on the masses. (That is an extremely condensed version of my views.)

Her proposal that war developed from ritual sacrifice, which was something early man adopted to transition and cope with its history of being prey to large predators, and then persisted as agricultural advancements eliminated the need for men to hunt/gather, is fascinating. As an explanation for the origin of conflict, this is an interesting theory. Other contemporary attempts at explaining war do, as she argues, fall short as they are tainted by our contemporary perspective. Our motivations for recent wars, which are fought over geopolitical and economic interests, are not valid historically in all cases throughout all cultures.

Although her arguments are compelling, I do have some questions and think her theory has some holes. Perhaps this belief stems from the fact that I had to take a break from the book for a little over a week due to a death in the family, but perhaps not. A lot has happened in the decade since this was published, and I wonder what sort of critical review her theories have received and whether or not events have validated her theories or caused her to have to rethink them. That shall be my next endeavor, I suppose, although I think her overt sympathies to Marx and socialism that are found toward the end of this book will turn off a lot of scholars and prejudice any review they make of this work.