d e v r e s e r s t h g i r l l A p u o r G s c n a r F i l r o y a T 3 0 0 2 t h g i r y p o C Friday Karl F Samurai Warfare and the State in Early Medieval Japan Taylor Francis Group 2003 ProQuest Ebook Central http ebookcentral proquest com lib iub ebooks detail action docID 200611 Created from iub ebooks on 2025 02 02 21 43 19 1355THE CULTURE OF WARYou may be obliged to wage war but you are not obliged to use poisoned arrows Baltasar Gracian y Morales The Art of Worldly Wisdom 1647War is a social creation Michael Walzer Just and Unjust Wars 1977In one of the most intriguing analyses of early medieval military culture to date William Wayne Farris applied extrapolations from sociobiology and anthropology to early samurai battle eld behavior Building on Robert O Connell s musings on the evolution of animal weaponry and its relationship to human arms development Farris likened early bushi warfare to the intraspeci c combat of stags and rams contesting with rivals over mates or wolves sparring to secure dominance within their packs and contrasted it with the predatory con ict that occurs between animals of differing species such as when lions prey on antelopes The latter practiced for survival tends to be ruthless and to involve prosaic weaponry while the former tends toward ritual individual combat and elaborate armaments In human terms he argued predatory warfare usually occurs between distinct political or ethnic groups such as kingdomsand states while intraspeci c combat holds within a group such as a family region or class 1 This hypothesis is imaginative and tantalizing but the analogy on which it turns breaks down at both ends In the animal as well as the human world intraspeci city is a necessary condition of ritual combat but it is far from a suf cient condition Clearly rules limiting the weapons targets and other conditions of warfare can evolve only for con icts between constituent groups or individuals within a larger society whose members share and agree on the values underlying the rules But neither the creation nor the observance of such rules can be expected unless the objectives what can be gained from victory are overshadowed by the consequences of winning by illegitimate means In d e v r e s e r s t h g i r l l A p u o r G s c n a r F i l r o y a T 3 0 0 2 t h g i r y p o C Friday Karl F Samurai Warfare and the State in Early Medieval Japan Taylor Francis Group 2003 ProQuest Ebook Central http ebookcentral proquest com lib iub ebooks detail action docID 200611 Created from iub ebooks on 2025 02 02 21 43 19 136THE CULTURE OF WARpractice ritual combat occurs when and only when the purpose of the combatis ritual Farris s analogy was a valiant attempt to explain a key tenet of the received wisdom on early samurai warfare one that was largely unchallenged at the time he wrote Indeed the terms ritual and formalism were until recently nearly ubiquitous in standard treatments of this topic In the mid 1980s for example Ishii Shir enumerated six fundamental rules of engagement for the period xing of the time and place for battles guarantees for the safety of messengers exchanged at the start of battles ghting centered on one to one duels ikki uchi selection of suitable or worthy opponents by self introductions nanori honorable treatment for surrendered or captured enemy troops guarantees for the safety of non combatants on the eld He noted that none of these rules were absolute that there were more than a few exceptions to any of them but argued that the rules existed nonetheless 2 And he was far from alone in this conclusion Early medieval battles have long been portrayed as set pieces governed by gentlemanly norms and conventions and following an elaborate choreography in which the conduct of the ghting seemed as important as the result Eiko Ikegami s characterization of early medieval warfare as a complex social ritual of death honor and calculation and actual combats on the medieval battle eld as colorful rites of violence death and honor is a recent case in point 3 Not all intraspeci c combat in the animal kingdom is ritualized and non lethal Chimpanzees and ants for example regularly stage lethal group attacks on others of their species Stylized low casualty ghts between animals occur only when the ends of the con ict mitigate against maiming or killing the opponent Wolves contesting for leadership of the pack or rams butting heads over females would lose far more than they gained if they crippled or killed the other males the alpha wolf would have no pack to lead and the alpha ram would permanently eliminate from his herd s gene pool the best of the younger rams before they could reach their prime Similarly in the case of human beings all ritual combat is intraspeci c but not all intraspeci c combat is ritualized Farris cites the battles of Homeric heroes over Helen of Troy and the jousts of medieval knights to win the admiration of their ladies as examples of highly ritualized warfare But the heroic individual combats of the Trojan War took place on the pages of the Iliad not on the battle elds of Troy and even there they were ultimately trumped by the cunning and per dy of the Greeks who built the Trojan Horse The joust was ritualized for and in tournaments knightly sporting events Actual warfare in medieval Europe was far more freewheeling and far more lethal John Keegan A History of Warfare 240 54 John Warry Warfare in the Classical World 10 23 and Bernard Knox Trojan War 479 80 offer concise discussions of the historicity of Homer s portrait of ancient Greek warfare J F Verbruggen The Art of Warfare Malcolm Vale War and Chivalry and Matthew Strickland War Chivalry are among the best overviews of warfare in medieval Europe d e v r e s e r s t h g i r l l A p u o r G s c n a r F i l r o y a T 3 0 0 2 t h g i r y p o C Friday Karl F Samurai Warfare and the State in Early Medieval Japan Taylor Francis Group 2003 ProQuest Ebook Central http ebookcentral proquest com lib iub ebooks detail action docID 200611 Created from iub ebooks on 2025 02 02 21 43 19 THE CULTURE OF WAR137But as I suggested in the introduction to this volume the early medieval period thus envisioned is more epic than epoch arising not from the battle eld exploits of the bushi themselves but from the imaginations of later litterateurs and jongleurs who recounted them Such creative nostalgia found its most eloquent expression on the pages of the H gen Heiji and Heike monogatari which were until
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