A PINCH OF SALT

War has always been a fascinating anthropological problem. A culture’s attitude to war determines in a funda¬mental way its construction of the self and its relation to the other. Defeat in war, or even victory, can virtually generate a crisis in the structure of a society’s categories of percep¬tion. For instance, in recent times, two events have called into question the very basis of modern technocracy as a mode of thought.

The first episode was the success of guerilla warfare. The French defeat at Dien Bien Phu marked, in a manner, the end of Orientalism as a stable discourse. The ‘savage-peasant’ and the ‘mandarin’ escaped from the confines of the text to inflict on a modern military force a devastatingly traumatic defeat. The Ameri¬can experience in Vietnam was an escalation of this same con¬flict. The writings of Frances Fitzgerald (Fire in the Lake) and, more particularly, Michael Elliot Bateman (Defeat in the East) are fasci¬nating attempts to understand guerilla warfare as alternative technology, with its accom¬panying theory of communica¬tion and organization. The other crisis of modern techno-cracy arose from the opposite end of the spectrum and centres around the problem of nuclear armaments.