This study explores what we as people can do with our bodies, what we can use them for, and how we can alter and understand them. With analysis based on artefacts found in graves, anthropomorphic images, and written sources, it considers the ways in which human groups from the Neolithic to the Migration Period have perceived and treated the body.

Kuk is a settlement at c. 1600 m altitude in the upper Wahgi Valley of the Western Highlands Province of Papua New Guinea, near Mount Hagen, the provincial capital. The site forms part of the highland spine that runs for more than 2500 km from the western head of the island of New Guinea to the end of its eastern tail. Until the early 1930s, when the region was first explored by European outsiders, it was thought to be a single, uninhabited mountain chain. Instead, it was found to be a complex area of valleys and basins inhabited by large populations of people and pigs, supported by the intensive cultivation of the tropical American sweet potato on the slopes above swampy valley bottoms. With the end of World War II, the area, with others, became a focus for the development of coffee and tea plantations, of which the establishment of Kuk Research Station was a result. Large-scale drainage of the swamps produced abundant evidence in the form of stone axes and preserved wooden digging sticks and spades for their past use in cultivation. Investigations in 1966 at a tea plantation in the upper Wahgi Valley by a small team from The Australian National University yielded a date of over 2000 years ago for a wooden stick collected from the bottom of a prehistoric ditch. The establishment of Kuk Research Station a few kilometres away shortly afterwards provided an ideal opportunity for a research project.

The communities of south coast New Guinea were the subject of classic ethnographies, and fresh studies in recent decades have put these rich and complex cultures at the centre of anthropological debates. Flamboyant sexual practices, such as ritual homosexuality, have attracted particular interest. In the first general book on the region, Dr Knauft reaches striking new comparative conclusions through a careful ethnographic analysis of sexuality, the status of women, ritual and cosmology, political economy, and violence among the region's seven major language-culture areas. The findings suggest new Melanesian regional contrasts and provide for a general critique of the way regional comparisons are constructed in anthropology. Theories of practice and political economy as well as post-modern insights are drawn upon to provide a generative theory of indigenous social and symbolic development.

As news of war and terror dominates the headlines, scientist Malcolm Potts and veteran journalist Thomas Hayden take a step back to explain it all. In the spirit of Guns, Germs and Steel, Sex and War asks the basic questions: Why is war so fundamental to our species? And what can we do about it? Malcolm Potts explores these questions from the frontlines, as a witness to war-torn countries around the world. As a scientist and obstetrician, Potts has worked with governments and aid organizations globally, and in the trenches with women who have been raped and brutalized in the course of war. Combining their own experience with scientific findings in primatology, genetics, and anthropology, Potts and Hayden explain war's pivotal position in the human experience and how men in particular evolved under conditions that favored gang behavior, rape, and organized aggression. Drawing on these new insights, they propose a rational plan for making warfare less frequent and less brutal in the future. Anyone interested in understanding human nature, warfare, and terrorism at their most fundamental levels will find Sex and War to be an illuminating work, and one that might change the way they see the world.

The myth of the peace-loving "noble savage" is persistent and pernicious. Indeed, for the last fifty years, most popular and scholarly works have agreed that prehistoric warfare was rare, harmless, unimportant, and, like smallpox, a disease of civilized societies alone. Prehistoric warfare, according to this view, was little more than a ritualized game, where casualties were limited and the effects of aggression relatively mild. Lawrence Keeley's groundbreaking War Before Civilization offers a devastating rebuttal to such comfortable myths and debunks the notion that warfare was introduced to primitive societies through contact with civilization (an idea he denounces as "the pacification of the past"). Building on much fascinating archeological and historical research and offering an astute comparison of warfare in civilized and prehistoric societies, from modern European states to the Plains Indians of North America, War Before Civilization convincingly demonstrates that prehistoric warfare was in fact more deadly, more frequent, and more ruthless than modern war. To support this point, Keeley provides a wide-ranging look at warfare and brutality in the prehistoric world. He reveals, for instance, that prehistorical tactics favoring raids and ambushes, as opposed to formal battles, often yielded a high death-rate; that adult males falling into the hands of their enemies were almost universally killed; and that surprise raids seldom spared even women and children. Keeley cites evidence of ancient massacres in many areas of the world, including the discovery in South Dakota of a prehistoric mass grave containing the remains of over 500 scalped and mutilated men, women, and children (a slaughter that took place a century and a half before the arrival of Columbus). In addition, Keeley surveys the prevalence of looting, destruction, and trophy-taking in all kinds of warfare and again finds little moral distinction between ancient warriors and civilized armies. Finally, and perhaps most controversially, he examines the evidence of cannibalism among some preliterate peoples. Keeley is a seasoned writer and his book is packed with vivid, eye-opening details (for instance, that the homicide rate of prehistoric Illinois villagers may have exceeded that of the modern United States by some 70 times). But he also goes beyond grisly facts to address the larger moral and philosophical issues raised by his work. What are the causes of war? Are human beings inherently violent? How can we ensure peace in our own time? Challenging some of our most dearly held beliefs, Keeley's conclusions are bound to stir controversy.

This is the only available comprehensive monograph on interrelations and interdependencies between agonistic and sexual behaviors. Integrating theory and research from biology, anthropology, neurophysiology, endocrinology, psychophysiology, and psychology, this book focuses on the mechanisms that govern the mutual influences between sexuality and aggression in behavior sequences and especially in admixtures of aggressive-sexual behaviors. This book places human agonistic and sexual behaviors into an evolutionary context. It offers a Weltbild of human aggressive-sexual behaviors by tracing their biological and developmental origins and examines the plasticity and manipulability of connections between agonistic and sexual behaviors. Strategies for the maximization of sexual pleasures are elaborated , and intervention treatments--aiming at the control of violent behaviors--are considered. Coercive sexuality is given special attention. Prevalent motive ascriptions to rape are called into question and the motivation that dominates rape is reinterpreted in the context of pleasure maximization. This second edition brings the coverage of pertinent research up to date. It advances the exploration of aggressive-sexual behaviors by further integrating the research contributions from various disciplines, and by refining and unifying theory capable of explaining the behavioral phenomena under consideration. COPY FOR ZILLMANN MAILER Zillmann examines issues such as sexual access through aggression, the involvement of agonistic behavior within sexuality, sex-aggression fusion, the consequences of anticipatory imagination concerning sexuality, and aspects of libido loss due to excitatory habituation. This book also: * traces connection between sexuality and aggression in nonhuman species, especially in nonhuman primates, * subjects human behavior to comparative and evolutionary analysis, * examines connectedness in neurological and endocrinological terms, * details both central and autonomic commonalities between sexual and aggressive behaviors, * outlines sexual dimorphism and chromosomal-endocrine aberrations, * pays special attention to adrenal commonalities in sexual and aggressive behaviors and the fusion of these behaviors, and * examines aggressive-sexual connectedness in the analysis of motivation and emotion. Zillmann finally proposes new explanations for the numerous documented associations between sexuality and aggression. These proposals combine biological, neuroendocrine, autonomic, and cognitive aspects of aggressive and sexual behaviors. A trichotomy of excitatory interdependencies is developed for fight, flight, and coition. In the nomenclature of emotion, this trichotomy concerns the interdependencies between aggressiveness, fear, and sexual impulsion. A considerable amount of research evidence is aggregated in support of these interdependencies. The author ultimately examines the exploitation of the existing connections between sexual and aggressive behaviors, especially the exploitation that serves the enhancement of sexual pleasure. In this context he arrives at novel, and perhaps distressing, characterizations of sexual coercion. However, he also explores sexual boredom and discusses remedies in the framework of his theorizing. Last but not least, sexual aggression, and sexual and aggressive behaviors independently, are placed into an evolutionary context. Recognition and acknowledgment of the archaic nature of many aspects of sexual and aggressive behaviors, in contrast to the comparatively vernal development of behavior-guiding contemplation, leads him to a unique and provocative proposal of the function of aggression in the realm of sexuality.