Cannibals and Kings (6 page)

Any anthropologist can recite the names of a handful of “primitive” peoples who are reported never to wage war. My favorite list includes the Andaman Islanders, who live off the coast of India, the California-Nevada Shoshoni, The Yahgan of Patagonia, the California Mission Indians, the Semai of Malaysia, and the recently contacted Tasaday of the Philippines. The existence of such groups suggests that organized intergroup homicide may not have been part of the cultures of our stone age ancestors. Perhaps. Yet most of the evidence no longer supports this view. It is true that a few modern band-level peoples have no interest in war and seek to avoid it, but several cultures on my list consist of refugees who have been driven into remote areas by more warlike neighbors. The majority of hunter-collectors known to modern observers carry out some form of intergroup combat in which teams of warriors deliberately try to kill each other. William Divale has identified thirty-seven such groups.

Proponents of the view that warfare originated with village settlements and the growth of the state claim that contemporary hunter-collectors are not really representative of prehistoric peoples. Some experts even hold that all incidents of armed combat between hunter-collectors reflect the debasement of “primitive” ways as a result of direct or indirect contact with state-level societies.
Archaeologists have not yet been able to settle this controversy. The problem lies in the fact that the weapons of prehistoric war would have been identical with those used in hunting, and deaths caused by wounds to vital organs cannot easily be detected by examining skeletons. Evidence of mutilated and severed skulls extends back 500,000 years or more. The famous Peking Man skulls had been smashed at the base—probably to provide access to the brains. This is a common practice among modern cannibals, many of whom regard brains as a delicacy. But how can one tell if the individuals to whom the skulls belong died in combat? Much present-day cannibalism is practiced not on enemies but on revered next of kin. As for severed heads, contemporary peoples such as the Manus of New Guinea treasure the skulls of close relatives and use them in rituals. For the first really reliable archaeological evidence of warfare one must wait for the construction of fortified villages and towns. The oldest of these is pre-Biblical Jericho, where by 7500
B.C
. an elaborate system of walls, towers, and defensive ditches, or moats had already been constructed, leaving no doubt that warfare was by then an important facet of everyday life.

In my opinion warfare is a very ancient practice, but its characteristics differed in the successive epochs of prehistory and history. During the upper paleolithic period intergroup violence must have been moderated by the absence of sharply defined territorial boundaries and by frequent changes in band membership as a result of intermarriage and a high volume of visiting. Ethnographic studies have shown that the resident core of a typical modern hunter-collector band changes from season to season, and even from day to day, as families shuttle back and forth between the camps of the husband’s
and wife’s relatives. While people identify with the territory in which they were born, they don’t have to defend that territory in order to earn their living. Hence acquisition of additional territory through the rout or annihilation of enemy forces is seldom a conscious motive for joining battle. Bands usually initiate combat as the result of an accumulation of personal grievances between influential individuals. If the aggrieved persons can muster a sufficient number of relatives who sympathize with their cause or who have grievances of their own against members of the targeted band, a war party can be organized.

One example of a war between hunter-collector bands took place in the late 1920’s between the Tiklaulia-Rangwila and Mandiiumbula bands of Bathhurst and Melville Islands in northern Australia. The Tiklauila-Rangwila men were the instigators. They painted themselves white, formed a war party, and advised the Mandiiumbula of their intentions. A time was set for a meeting. When the two groups had gathered, both sides “exchanged a few insults and agreed to meet formally in an open space where there was plenty of room.” As night fell—to continue the account given by Arnold Pilling and C. W. Hart—individuals from the two groups exchanged visits, since the war parties included relatives on both sides and no one regarded every member of the other group as an enemy. At dawn the two groups lined up on opposite sides of the clearing. Hostilities began with some old men shouting out their grievances at one another. Two or three individuals were singled out for special attention.

Since the old men did most of the spear throwing, marksmanship tended to be highly inaccurate.

I do not mean to liken hunter-collector warfare to slapstick comedy. W. Lloyd Warner reported high rates of fatalities for at least one other northern Australian hunter-collector group called the Murngin. According to Warner, 28 percent of adult male Murngin deaths were caused by wounds inflicted on the battlefield. Bear in mind that when a whole band contains only ten adult males, one death per battle every ten years is all it takes to rack up this kind of body count.

Warfare after the development of agriculture probably became more frequent and more deadly. Certainly the scale of combat increased. Permanent houses, food-processing equipment, and crops growing in the fields sharpened the sense of territorial identity. Villages tended to remain enemies across the generations, repeatedly attacking and plundering, seeking to rout each other from their territories. Among the village-dwelling Dani of West Irian, New Guinea, warfare has a regulated “nothing fight” phase, similar to that of the Tiwi, in which there are few casualties. But the Dani also launch all-out sneak attacks that result in the destruction and rout of whole villages and the deaths of several hundred people at a time. Karl Heider estimates that 29 percent of Dani men die as a result of injuries
sustained during raids and ambushes. Among the Yanomamo village horticulturalists along the Brazil-Venezuela border, raids and ambushes account for 33 percent of adult male deaths from all causes. Since the Yanomamo are an important test case, I’ve set aside a whole chapter for them following this one.

The reason some anthropologists deny the reality of high levels of combat among band and village peoples is that the populations involved are so small and spread out as to make even one or two intergroup killings seem utterly irrational and wasteful. The Murngin and the Yanomamo, for example, have population densities of less than one person per square mile. But even groups with such low densities are subject to reproductive pressure. There is considerable evidence indicating that the balance between people and resources does in fact lie behind band and village warfare and that the origin of this scourge stems from the inability of preindustrial peoples to develop a less costly or more benign means of achieving low population densities and low rates of population growth.

Before I discuss this evidence, let me review some alternative explanations and show why I think none of these is adequate to the task. The major alternatives include
war as solidarity, war as play, war as human nature
, and
war as politics
.

War as solidarity
. According to this theory, war is the price that is paid for building up group togetherness. Having external enemies creates a sense of group identity and enhances esprit de corps. The group that fights together stays together.

I must admit that aspects of this explanation are compatible with one based on reproductive pressure. If a group is undergoing stress caused by intensification, declining efficiencies, and increased abortions and infanticides,
the deflection of aggressive behavior onto neighboring bands or villages would certainly be preferable to letting it fester within the community. I do not doubt that deflecting aggressive behavior onto foreigners can act as a “safety valve.” What this approach fails to explain, however, is why the safety valve has to be so deadly. Wouldn’t verbal abuse, mock combat, or competitive sports be less costly ways of achieving solidarity? The claim that mutual slaughter is “functional” cannot be based on some vague abstract advantage of togetherness. It must be shown how and why such deadly recourse is necessary to prevent an even more deadly consequence—how, in other words, the benefits of war outweigh its costs. No one ever has shown or will be able to show that the consequences of less solidarity would be worse than deaths in combat.

War as play
. Some anthropologists have tried to balance the material costs and benefits of warfare by representing it as a pleasureable, competitive team sport. If people actually enjoy risking their lives in combat, then war can be materially wasteful but psychologically valuable and the puzzle disappears. I agree that people, especially men, are frequently brought up to believe that warfare is a zestful or ennobling activity and that one should enjoy stalking and killing other human beings. Many of the mounted Indians of the Great Plains—the Sioux, the Crow, the Cheyenne—kept a tally of their acts of bravado in war. A man’s reputation lay in counting coups. They gave the most points not to the warrior with the highest body count, but to the one who took the most risks. The greatest feat of all was to sneak in and out of an enemy camp without being detected. But indoctrination for military bravado among band and village peoples was not always successful. The Crow and other Indians of the Great Plains took care of
their pacifists by letting them put on women’s clothing and making them serve as attendants to the warriors. And even the bravest of warriors, as among the Yanomamo, have to be emotionally prepared for the fray by performing rituals and taking drugs. If people can be taught to value war and to enjoy stalking and killing other human beings, one must also grant that they can be taught to hate and fear war and to be revolted by the spectacle of human beings trying to kill each other. Both kinds of teaching and learning actually do take place. So if warlike values cause wars, the crucial problem becomes that of specifying the conditions under which people are taught to value war rather than to abhor it. And this the
war as play
theory cannot do.

War as human nature
. A perennially favorite way for anthropologists to avoid the problem of specifying the conditions under which war will be regarded as a valuable or an abhorrent activity is to endow human nature with an urge to kill. War occurs because human beings, especially males, have a “killer instinct.” We kill because such behavior has been proved successful from the standpoint of natural selection in the struggle for existence. But
war as human nature
runs into difficulties as soon as one observes that killing is not universally admired and that intensity and frequency of warfare are highly variable. I fail to see how anyone can doubt that these variations are caused by cultural rather than genetic differences, since sharp reversals from extremely warlike to peaceful behavior may occur in one or two generations without any genetic changes whatsoever. The Pueblo Indians in the Southwest of the United States, for example, are known to contemporary observers as peaceful, religious, unaggressive, cooperative peoples. Yet not so long ago they were known to the Spanish governor of New Spain as the Indians who
tried to kill every white settler they could get their hands on and who burned every church in New Mexico, together with as many priests as they could lock inside and tie to the altars. One need merely recall the astonishing flip-flop in post-World War II Japanese attitudes toward militarism, or the sudden emergence of the Israeli survivors of Nazi persecution as the leaders of a highly militarized society, to grasp the central weakness of the
war as human nature
argument.

Obviously it is part of human nature to be able to become aggressive and to wage war. But how and when we become aggressive is controlled by our cultures rather than by our genes. To explain the origin of warfare one must be able to explain why aggressive responses take the specific form of organized intergroup combat. As Ashley Montagu has warned us, even in infrahuman species killing is not the goal of aggression. There are no drives or instincts or predispositions in human beings to kill other human beings on the battlefield, although under certain conditions they can easily be taught to do so.

War as politics
. Another recurrent explanation of war holds that armed conflict is the logical outcome of an attempt of one group to protect or increase its political, social, and economic welfare at the expense of another group. War occurs because it leads to the expropriation of territory and resources, the capture of slaves or booty, and the collection of tribute and taxes—“To the victor belong the spoils.” The negative consequences for the vanquished can simply be written off as a miscalculation—“the fortunes of war.”

This explanation makes perfectly good sense in relation to the wars of history, which are primarily conflicts between sovereign states. Such wars clearly involve the attempt on the part of one state to raise its standard of
living at the expense of others (although the underlying economic interests may be covered up by religious and political themes). The form of political organization which we call the state came into existence precisely because it was able to carry out wars of territorial conquest and economic plunder.

But band and village warfare lacks this dimension. Band and village societies do not conquer territories or subjugate their enemies. Lacking the bureaucratic, military, and legal apparatus of statehood, victorious bands or villages cannot reap benefits in the form of annual taxes or tribute. And given the absence of large amounts of stored foods or other valuables, the “spoils” of war are not very impressive. Taking prisoners and making slaves of them is impractical for a society that cannot intensify its system of production without depleting its resource base and that lacks the organizational capacity to exploit a hostile, underfed labor force. For all of these reasons, the victors in pre-state wars often returned home carrying a few scalps or heads as trophies or with no spoils at all—except the right to boast about how manly they were in combat. In other words, political expansion cannot explain warfare among band and village societies because most such societies do not engage in political expansion. Their entire mode of existence is dominated by the need not to expand in order to preserve the favorable ratio of people to resources. Hence we must look to the contributions of warfare to the conservation of favorable ecological and demographic relationships in order to understand why it is practiced by band and village societies.