Word: warrior
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...what we like to think of as "primitive" warrior cultures, the passage to manhood requires the blooding of a spear, the taking of a scalp or head. Among the Masai of eastern Africa, the North American Plains Indians and dozens of other pretechnological peoples, a man could not marry until he had demonstrated his capacity to kill in battle. Leadership too in a warrior culture is typically contingent on military prowess and wrapped in the mystique of death. In the Solomon Islands a chief's importance could be reckoned by the number of skulls posted around his door...
...warrior peoples have fought for the same high-sounding reasons: honor, glory or revenge. The nature of their real and perhaps not conscious motivations is a subject of much debate. Some anthropologists postulate a ) murderous instinct, almost unique among living species, in human males. Others discern a materialistic motive behind every fray: a need for slaves, grazing land or even human flesh to eat. Still others point to the similarities between war and other male pastimes -- the hunt and outdoor sports -- and suggest that it is boredom, ultimately, that stirs men to fight...
...warrior culture it hardly matters which motive is most basic. Aggressive behavior is rewarded whether or not it is innate to the human psyche. Shortages of resources are habitually taken as occasions for armed offensives, rather than for hard thought and innovation. And war, to a warrior people, is of course the highest adventure, the surest antidote to malaise, the endlessly repeated theme of legend, song, religious myth and personal quest for meaning. It is how men die and what they find to live...
...must understand that Americans are a warrior nation," Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan told a group of Arab leaders in early September, one month into the Middle East crisis. He said this proudly, and he may, without thinking through the ugly implications, have told the truth. In many ways, in outlook and behavior the U.S. has begun to act like a primitive warrior culture...
...remarkable that he heard it at all. The candor of Salman's visitors was a manifestation of how the tremor from Kuwait has shaken the fixtures of Saudi society, one of the world's most conservative realms. For the first time since the visionary warrior-statesman Abdul Aziz, generally known as Ibn Saud, proclaimed his kingdom in 1932, Saudi Arabia has been confronted by the alarming threat of conquest. In coping with that challenge, the country and its 14.5 million inhabitants find themselves poised on the sword edge of change. The modernization and enrichment of Saudi life produced...