Cannibals and Kings (7 page)

The first such contribution is the dispersal of populations over wider territories. While bands and villages do not conquer each other’s lands the way states do,
they nonetheless destroy settlements and rout each other from portions of the habitat that they would otherwise jointly exploit. Raids, routs, and the destruction of settlements tend to increase the average distance between settlements and thereby lower the overall regional density of population.

One of the most important benefits of this dispersion—a benefit shared by both victor and vanquished—is the creation of “no man’s lands” in areas normally providing game animals, fish, wild fruits, firewood, and other resources. Because the threat of ambush renders them too dangerous for such purposes, these “no man’s lands” play an important role in the overall ecosystem as preserves of plant and animal species that might otherwise be permanently depleted by human activity. Recent ecological studies show that in order to protect endangered species—especially large animals that breed slowly—very extensive refuge areas are needed.

The dispersal of populations and the creation of ecologically vital “no man’s lands” are very considerable benefits which derive from intergroup hostilities among band and village peoples despite the costs of combat. With one proviso: having dispersed the enemy camps and settlements, the victors cannot allow the population of their camps and settlements to increase to the point where game and other resources are threatened by their own population growth and intensification effort. Warfare under pre-state conditions cannot satisfy this proviso—at least not through the direct effect of combat deaths. The problem is that the combatants are almost always males, which means that most of the battle fatalities are men. Warfare causes only 3 percent of adult female deaths among the Dani and 7 percent among the Yanomamo. Moreover, war-making band and village societies are almost always polygynous, that is, the husband
services several wives. Thus there is no possibility that warfare alone can depress the rate at which a band or village—especially if it is victorious—grows and depletes its environment. Male combat deaths, like geronticide, can produce short-run relief from population pressure, but they cannot influence overall trends as long as a few polygynous male survivors continue to service all the noncombatant females. The biological reality is that most males are reproductively superfluous. As Joseph Birdsell has put it, the fertility of a group is determined by the number of its adult women, rather than by its adult men. “Undoubtedly, one able-bodied male could keep ten women continuously pregnant.” This is obviously a conservative statement, since at ten pregnancies per woman the male in question would have only a maximum of 100 children while many Arab sheiks and Eastern potentates seem to encounter no great difficulty in siring well over 500 children.

But let us follow Birdsell’s logic, which is unassailable even though it is based on the hypothetical example of one man and only ten women:

As I will show, warfare does drastically affect the number of women and thus does have a powerful effect on the human crop. But the manner in which it achieves this has hitherto not been understood.

Before I explain how warfare limits the rate at which settlements grow, I want to emphasize one point. The
twin demographic effects that warfare produces among band and village societies are not characteristic of state-level military complexes. For the moment, I will address myself only to the origin of pre-state warfare. Among state-level societies warfare may disperse populations, but it seldom depresses their rate of growth. Each of the major wars of this century—World Wars I and II, Korea and Vietnam—has failed to reduce the long-term rate of growth of the combatant populations. While it is true that during World War I the deficit between the projected and actual population for Russia reached 5 million, it took only ten years for this to be overcome. Even short-time population growth may be unaffected. All through the decade of the Vietnam War, the population of Vietnam grew at the phenomenal rate of 3 percent per year. That warfare does not automatically depress the rate of population growth should be obvious from European history. Scarcely a decade went by during the past three centuries without large-scale combat, and yet the European population soared from 103 million in 1650 to 594 million in 1950. One might more readily conclude that European wars—and wars of states in general—have been part of a system for stimulating rapid population growth.

What no one seems to have realized is that, unlike state societies, bands and villages were exceptional in their use of warfare to achieve very low rates of population growth. They achieved this not primarily through male combat deaths—which, as we have just seen, are always easily compensated for by calling upon the remarkable reproductive reserves of the human female—but by another means that was intimately conjoined with and dependent upon the practice of warfare yet was not part of the actual fighting. I refer to female infanticide. Warfare in band and village societies made
the practice of infanticide sex-specific. It encouraged the rearing of sons, whose masculinity was glorified in preparation for combat, and the devaluation of daughters, who did not fight. This in turn led to the limitation of female children by neglect, abuse, and outright killing.

Studies recently carried out by William Divale show that among band and village societies practicing warfare when they were first censused the number of males aged fourteen or under greatly exceeded the number of females in the same age bracket. Divale found that the ratio of boys to girls was 128:100, whereas the ratio of adult men to women was 101:100. Since the expected world-wide sex ratio at birth is 105 males to 100 females, the discrepancy between 105 and 128 is a measure of preferential treatment of male children and the drop to 101:100 is probably a measure of the rate of adult male combat deaths. This interpretation was strengthened when Divale compared the sex ratios of groups that had practiced warfare at progressively more remote periods in the past with those that were actively practicing warfare when they were first censused.

For populations that were censused five to twenty-five years after warfare had been stopped, usually by colonial authorities, the average sex ratios were 113 boys and 113 adult men per 100 girls and 100 adult women. (The increase in the adult sex ratio from 101:100 when war was present to 113:100 when war had been stopped is probably the result of the survival of males who previously would have been killed in war.) Among populations that were censused more than twenty-five years after warfare, the sex ratio of persons fifteen years and younger was still lower—106:100, approximating the world norm of 105:100, at birth.

These shifts are even more dramatic when the reported frequency of any kind of infanticide, male or female, and the presence of warfare are taken into consideration. Among populations who were still practicing warfare at the time of census and who according to ethnographers’ reports were commonly or occasionally practicing some kind of infanticide, the average sex ratio among the young was 133 boys to 100 girls. Yet among adults it declined to 96 men to 100 women. For populations in which warfare had been stopped twenty-five or more years prior to the census and in which infanticide was reported as not common or not practiced, the sex ratio among the young was 104 boys to 100 girls and 92 men to 100 women.

I am not suggesting that war caused female infanticide or that the practice of female infanticide caused war. Rather, I propose that without reproductive pressure neither warfare nor female infanticide would have become widespread and that the conjunction of the two represents a savage but uniquely effective solution to the Malthusian dilemma.

Regulation of population growth through the preferential treatment of male infants is a remarkable “triumph” of culture over nature. A very powerful cultural force was needed to motivate parents to neglect or kill their own children, and an especially powerful force was needed to get them to kill or neglect more girls than boys. Warfare supplied this force and motivation because it made the survival of the group contingent on the rearing of combat-ready males. Males were chosen to be taught how to fight because armaments consisted of spears, clubs, bows and arrows, and other hand-held weapons. Hence military success depended upon relative numbers of brawny combatants. For this reason males became socially more valuable than females, and
both men and women collaborated in “removing” daughters in order to rear a maximum number of sons.

To be sure, preferential female infanticide sometimes occurs in the absence of warfare. Many Eskimo groups maintain high rates of female infanticide even though they have relatively little organized intergroup armed combat. The explanation for this is that in the Arctic environment the superior muscle power of males plays a role in production that is analogous to the role it plays in warfare in other regions. The Eskimo need every extra ounce of brawn to track, trap, and kill their animal prey. Unlike hunters in temperate zones, the Eskimo find it difficult to achieve overkill. Their problem is simply to get enough to eat and to prevent their own population from falling below replacement strength. They cannot rely on the collection of plant foods as their main source of calories. In such a context sons become socially more valuable than daughters, even without frequent warfare, and both men and women collaborate in limiting the number of females, just as if males were needed for combat.

In more favorable habitats, high levels of female infanticide would be difficult to maintain in the absence of warfare. Band and village peoples are perfectly capable of understanding that the number of mouths to be fed is determined by the number of women in the group. But it is difficult for them to limit the number of females in favor of males, because in other regards women are more valuable than men. After all, women can do most of the things that men can do, and they alone can bear and nurse infants. Except for their long-range contribution to the population problem, women are in fact a better cost/benefit bargain than are men. Anthropologists have been misled about women’s labor value by the fact that among
hunter-collectors women have never been observed to hunt large animals. This does not prove that the observed division of labor naturally follows from the brawn of the male or from the supposed need for women to stick close to the campfire, to cook, and to nurse the children. Men on the average may be heavier, stronger, and faster runners than women, but in favorable habitats there are few production processes in which these physiological features make men decisively more efficient than women. In temperate or tropical zones the rate of production of meat is limited by the rate of reproduction of the prey species rather than by the skills of the hunters. Women hunters could easily substitute for men without reducing the supply of high-quality protein. And several recent studies have shown that among horticulturalists women provide more calories and proteins in the form of food plants and small animals even if they don’t hunt big game. Moreover, the need for women to nurse infants does not “naturally” lead to their roles as cooks and “homebodies.” Hunting is an intermittent activity, and there is nothing to prevent lactating women from leaving their infants in someone else’s care for a few hours once or twice a week. Since bands consist of closely related kinspeople, hunter-collector women are not as isolated as modern working women and have no trouble finding the pre-industrial equivalents of baby-sitters and day-care centers.

The explanation for the near-universal exclusion of women from big-game hunting appears to lie in the practice of warfare, the male supremacist sex roles which arise in conjunction with warfare, and the practice of female infanticide—all of which ultimately derive from the attempt to solve the problem of reproductive pressure. Virtually all band and village societies
teach only males how to become proficient in the use of weapons, and frequently women are forbidden even to touch these weapons just as they are generally discouraged or prevented from engaging in front-line combat.

Male military prowess is closely associated with sexually differentiated training for fierce and aggressive behavior. Band and village societies train males for combat through competitive sports such as wrestling, racing, and dueling. Women seldom participate in such sports and never compete with men. Band and village societies also instill masculinity by subjecting boys to intense ordeals involving genital mutilations such as circumcision, exposure to the elements, and drug-induced hallucinatory encounters with supernatural monsters. It is true that some band and village societies also put girls through puberty rituals but these usually involve trials by boredom rather than terror. Girls are kept out of sight in special huts or rooms for a month or more, during which time they are forbidden to touch their own bodies. Even if they develop an itch, they must use an instrument like a back-scratcher. Sometimes they are forbidden to speak throughout the entire period of their seclusion. It is also true that some cultures mutilate the female genitalia by cutting off a portion of the clitoris, but this is a very uncommon practice and occurs far less frequently than does circumcision.

One question that remains is why
all
women are barred from being trained as military co-equals with males. There are women who are brawnier and more powerful than some men. The winner of the 1972 Olympic women’s javelin competition set a record of 209′ 7″, which not only surpasses the spear-throwing potential of most males but also betters the performance of several former champion Olympic male javelin
throwers (though they used slightly heavier javelins). So if the crucial factor in forming a war party is brawniness, why not include women whose strength matches or exceeds that of the average enemy male? I think the answer is that the occasional military success of well-trained, large, and powerful females against smaller males would conflict with the sex hierarchy upon which preferential female infanticide is predicated. Males who are successful warriors are rewarded with several wives and sexual privileges that depend on women being reared to accept male supremacy. If the whole system is to function smoothly, no woman can be permitted to get the idea that she is as worthy and powerful as any man.