Visions of War : Picturing Warfare from the Stone Age to the Cyberage

by Perlmutter, David D.

• ISBN13: 9780312200459
• ISBN10: 0312200455
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1999-11-29
• Publisher: St. Martin's Press

Summary

From the dawn of time to the present, from the days of mammoth hunting to the era of Scud-busting, pictures of war constitute the most persistent genre of images human beings have created. In fact, human beings are the only creatures who engage in these two activities--organized violence and the making of pictorial images--and the author shows how both art and war emerge from the same source: the hunter's eye. This book explores and analyzes the thirteen thousand-year legacy of pictures of war from various cultures over the centuries, from the Stone Age cave paintings and monumental sculpture of the ancient Near East to the art of the classical period and the Middle Ages, from pre-contact Mesoamerican imagery to Napoleonic propaganda and totalitarian art and on to the instantaneous images of the Gulf War.

Author Biography

David D. Perlmutter is currently area head for political communication at the Manship School of Mass Communication, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge. He is the author of Photojournalism and Foreign Policy and has published articles in a number of scholarly journals, including Historical Methods, Visual Anthropology, and Journal of Communication.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	ix
List of Illustrations	xi
Introduction	1	(10)
Origins	11	(30)
The First War?	11	(6)
The Focus on Big Game	17	(4)
The Fat of the Land	21	(4)
The Maleness of the Big-Game Hunt	25	(2)
Signs of the Hunt	27	(2)
The Communal Ideal	29	(5)
Megafauna ``Overkill'' and the Genesis of War	34	(7)
Primitive War	41	(24)
The New Face of War	41	(4)
Lethal Societies	45	(7)
Discipline and Dance	52	(3)
Cannae, Past and Present	55	(2)
Leadership and the ``Look'' of Power	57	(5)
Red Queens Old and New	62	(3)
Commanders	65	(24)
Identifying the War Commander	65	(6)
Visualizing Dominance	71	(7)
Subverting the War Commander	78	(6)
Voluntary Inversions	84	(5)
Comrades	89	(32)
Seeking Commilito	89	(4)
The Warrior Procession	93	(12)
Buddyhood and Buddy Posing	105	(5)
Loyal Brownies and Multicultural Platoons	110	(6)
Fear Itself	116	(5)
Enemies	121	(32)
The Useful Enemy	121	(3)
The Defeated Enemy	124	(9)
The Hated Enemy	133	(8)
The Off-Camera Enemy	141	(5)
The Ambiguous Enemy	146	(7)
Horrors	153	(22)
Horror and Sympathy	153	(6)
Noble Deaths	159	(5)
The ``Just'' Horrors	164	(11)
Living-Room Wars	175	(36)
Real-Time War	175	(6)
War in Everyday Life	181	(6)
Communal Viewing	187	(5)
Realism	192	(11)
The Effects of War Images	203	(8)
Futures	211	(22)
Seek	211	(5)
Hide	216	(4)
Virtual Warriors	220	(6)
Inreality and Disengagement	226	(7)
Notes	233	(26)
Bibliography	259	(28)
Index	287