Why do animals appear together with the people? What is the significance of the injured horse at the center of the painting and the tortured bull in the top left? Do these figures symbolize human elements of the conflict, or do they simply represent suffering caused by war?
What elements of cubism do you see in the painting? How do those elements contribute to Picasso's message?
What is the symbolic import of the broken dagger/sword in the bottom-center of the painting?
What do you think Picasso wanted to communicate through this painting? Why are glory and dignity absent from the work?
What symbolic roles do light sources, such as candles and lightbulbs, play in the painting? Is the painting itself a sort of "light source" designed to illuminate something? If so, what?
MAKING CONNECTIONS
Compare the portrayals of war in Guernica and Liberty Leading the People (p. 494). How are the political messages of both paintings connected to their artistic forms?
Compare the depictions of war in Guernica and Marevasei Kachere's "War Memoir" (p. 514). Does Kachere's memoir touch on any of the tragic elements of war depicted by Picasso?
Compare Picasso's response to fascist brutality to those of Aung San Suu Kyi (p. 442) and George Orwell (p. 508). What similarities and differences do you find?
What conception of human nature underlies Guernica? How are the animals portrayed in the painting related to that conception? How does Picasso's view of human nature compare with Hobbes's (p. 94) or Wilson's (p. 356)?
WRITING ABOUT THE TEXT
Think of a tragedy—personal, national, or global. Write an essay proposing an artwork that would communicate a strong emotional reaction and perhaps create one in the viewer. Would you render the scene visually realistic? What kinds of lines or colors would you use? What would the figures or components of the painting be doing? How would they interact to achieve your vision?
Try to translate Picasso's visual rhetoric (p. 614) into words. Does the painting have an overall argument? How does it support that argument? What is lost when visual images are translated into written arguments?
Choose a single component of Guernica, such as the bull or the mother and child— and interpret its significance within the larger context of the painting. Pay special attention to the possible symbolism of the component.
Read two or three interpretations of Guernica (hundreds are readily available in any library or on the Internet) and write a paper identifying some of the problems of interpretation, or key areas of disagreement among scholars, that you uncover.
margaret mead
Warfare: An Invention—Not a Biological Necessity
[1940]
IN 1 969, TIME MAGAZINE named anthropologist Margaret Mead (1901-1978) the "Mother of the World." This title stemmed in part from Mead's work with young girls in various cultures around the world, but it also recognized the moral and intellectual status that she had earned during her fifty-year career as the world's most famous and respected anthropologist.
Mead was born in Philadelphia in 1901. She earned a doctoral degree in anthropology from Columbia University, where she studied under the legendary anthropologist Ruth Benedict. In 1925, Mead traveled to American Samoa for an extensive fieldwork project studying adolescent girls. She used this research as the basis for her first book, Coming of Age in Samoa (1928), which became a bestseller and introduced a generation of nonspecialists to the field of anthropology. In 1929, Mead traveled to New Guinea for a similar study, which resulted in her second major book, Growing Up in New Guinea (1930). She continued doing fieldwork throughout the world, but maintained strong ties to New York, where for most of her career she worked at the American Museum of Natural History.
In the course of her career, Mead became known as an expert on both a diverse group of cultures and on human culture generally—on the ways that human beings form, maintain, and modify social relations. She refused to accept the common division of the world into "civilized" and "primitive" cultures, insisting instead that all cultures had things to learn from each other. The accessibility of her scholarly work, combined with her willingness to write articles for the popular press (she wrote a monthly column for Redbook magazine for seventeen years), put a human face on the often-obscure discipline of anthropology and gave Mead enormous influence with the American public.
The following essay, "Warfare: An Invention—Not a Biological Necessity," was originally published in Asia magazine in 1940. It is based on one of Mead's most cherished beliefs: that people can change by learning from other cultures. In this essay, Mead draws on her vast experience with other cultures to refute the popular argument that the inherent aggressiveness of human beings makes warfare inevitable.
Mead illustrates every major point that she makes with examples drawn from the cultures that she has studied. Each example argues, in effect, that a trait cannot be considered "universal" if there are people anywhere who do not possess it.
Is war a biological necessity, a sociological inevitability, or just a bad invention? Those who argue for the first view endow man with such pugnacious instincts that some outlet in aggressive behavior is necessary if man is to reach full human stature.
It was this point of view which lay back of William James's famous essay, "The Moral Equivalent of War," in which he tried to retain the warlike virtues and channel them in new directions.[246] A similar point of view has lain back of the Soviet Union's attempt to make competition between groups rather than between individuals. A basic, competitive, aggressive, warring human nature is assumed, and those who wish to outlaw war or outlaw competitiveness merely try to find new and less socially destructive ways in which these biologically given aspects of man's nature can find expression. Then there are those who take the second view: warfare is the inevitable concomitant of the development of the state, the struggle for land and natural resources of class societies springing, not from the nature of man, but from the nature of history. War is nevertheless inevitable unless we change our social system and outlaw classes, the struggle for power, and possessions; and in the event of our success warfare would disappear, as a symptom vanishes when the disease is cured.
One may hold a compromise position between these two extremes; one may claim that all aggression springs from the frustration of man's biologically determined drives and that, since all forms of culture are frustrating, it is certain each new generation will be aggressive and the aggression will find its natural and inevitable expression in race war, class war, nationalistic war, and so on.
All three positions are very popular today among those who think seriously about the problems of war and its possible prevention, but I wish to urge another point of view, less defeatist perhaps than the first and third, and more accurate than the second: that is, that warfare, by which I mean organized conflict between two groups as groups, in which each group puts an army (even if the army is only fifteen Pygmies) into the field to fight and kill, if possible, some of the members of the army of the other group—that warfare of this sort is an invention like any other of the inventions in terms of which we order our lives, such as writing, marriage, cooking our food instead of eating it raw, trial by jury, or burial of the dead, and so on. Some of this list any one will grant are inventions: trial by jury is confined to very limited portions of the globe; we know that there are tribes that do not bury their dead but instead expose or cremate them; and we know that only part of the human race has had a knowledge of writing as its cultural inheritance. But, whenever a way of doing things is found universally, such as the use of fire or the practice of some form of marriage, we tend to think at once that it is not an invention at all but an attribute of humanity itself. And yet even such universals as marriage and the use of fire are inventions like the rest, very basic ones, inventions which were perhaps necessary if human history was to take the turn it has taken, but nevertheless inventions. At some point in his social development man was undoubtedly without the institution of marriage or the knowledge of the use of fire.