Raymond C. Kelly
University of Michigan
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Primary Section: 51, Anthropology Membership Type:
Member
(elected 2004)
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Research Interests
The social, economic and political organization of premodern unstratified societies (lacking centralized, hierarchical institional forms) has been the principal focus of my Anthropological research. The theoretical issues I have addressed in publications include: 1) the locus for the production of inequality in such societies, 2) the interrelationship between human nature, war and the constitution of society, 3) the distinctive features of peaceful societies, 4) the origin of war, 5) the prehistoric evolution of lethal intergroup violence, 6) the coevolution of war and society, 7) the causes and means of territorial expansion, 8) the constitution of socioecological systems of relations in which material causality operates and the selective cultural canalization of material forces, 9) the formal properties of expansionist (colonizing) systems, 10) the constitutive relational properties of structures, 11) the relation between structural constitution and event (or practice), and 12) the process of structural transformation.
