The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies? (28 page)

Related to raids, and also widespread in traditional warfare, are ambushes, another form of surprise attack in which the aggressors, instead of moving by stealth, hide themselves and remain in wait at a site to which unsuspecting enemies are likely to come. I described Dani ambushes that took place on April 27, May 10, June 4, June 10, July 12, and July 28, 1961. Ambushes remain equally popular in modern warfare, abetted by radar and code-breaking methods that facilitate detecting movements of enemy who are less likely to detect the ambushing party.

A traditional tactic without parallel in modern state warfare is the treacherous feast documented among the Yanomamo and in New Guinea: inviting neighbors to a feast, then surprising and killing them after they have laid down their weapons and focused their attention on eating and drinking. We moderns have to wonder why any Yanomamo group would let itself fall into that trap, having heard stories of previous such treachery. The explanation may be that honorable feasts are common, that accepting an invitation usually brings big advantages in terms of alliance-building and food-sharing, and that the hosts go to much effort to make their intentions appear friendly. The only modern example I can think of involving state governments is the massacre of the Boer commander Piet Retief and his whole party of a hundred men by the Zulu king Dingane on February 6, 1838, while the Boers were Dingane’s guests at a feast in his camp. This example may be considered the exception that proves the rule: the Zulus had been just one of hundreds of warring chiefdoms until unification and the foundation of the Zulu state a few decades previously.

Such blunt treachery has for the most part been abandoned under the rules of diplomacy which modern states now find it in their own self-interest to follow. Even Hitler and Japan issued formal declarations of war against the Soviet Union and the U.S., respectively, simultaneous with (but not before) their attacks on those countries. However, states do employ treachery against rebels whom they consider as not binding them to the
usual rules of diplomacy between states. For instance, the French general Charles Leclerc had no qualms about inviting the Haitian independence leader Toussaint-Louverture to a parley on June 7, 1802, seizing him there, and shipping him to a French prison, where he died. Within modern states, treacherous killings are still carried out by urban gangs, drug cartels, and terrorist groups, which do not operate by the rules of state diplomacy.

Another form of traditional warfare without close modern parallels is the non-treacherous gathering that degenerates into fighting. Far commoner than a treacherous feast, this involves neighboring peoples meeting for a ceremony without any intention of fighting. But violence may nevertheless erupt because individuals who have unsettled grievances and who rarely encounter each other now find themselves face-to-face, can’t restrain themselves, and begin fighting, and relatives then join in on both sides. For example, an American friend of mine who was present at a rare gathering of several dozen Fayu people told me of the tension prevailing as men periodically burst out in mutual insults and explosions of anger, pounded the ground with their axes, and in one case rushed at each other with axes. The risk of such unplanned fighting breaking out at gatherings intended to be peaceful is high for traditional societies in which neighboring peoples meet rarely, revenge for grievances is left to the individual, and there is no leader or “government” able to monopolize force and restrain hotheads.

Escalation of spontaneous individual fighting into organized warfare of armies is rare in centralized state societies but does sometimes happen. One example is the so-called Soccer War of June–July 1969 between El Salvador and Honduras. At a time when tensions between the two countries were already high over economic disparities and immigrant squatters, their soccer teams met for three games in a qualifying round for the 1970 World Cup. Rival fans began fighting at the first game on June 8 in the Honduran capital (won 1–0 by Honduras), and the fans became even more violent at the second game on June 15 in the El Salvador capital (won 3–0 by El Salvador). When El Salvador won the decisive third game 3–2 in overtime on June 26 in Mexico City, the two countries broke diplomatic relations, and on July 14 the El Salvador army and air force began bombing and invading Honduras.

How high is the mortality from traditional tribal warfare? How does it compare with the mortality from warfare between state governments?

Military historians routinely compile national casualty totals for each modern war: e.g., for Germany during World War II. That permits one to calculate national war-related mortality rates averaged over a century of a country’s history of alternating war and peace: e.g., for Germany over the whole of the 20th century. Such rates have also been calculated or estimated in dozens of studies of individual modern traditional societies. Four surveys—by Lawrence Keeley, by Samuel Bowles, by Steven Pinker, and by Richard Wrangham and Michael Wilson and Martin Muller—summarized such evaluations for between 23 and 32 traditional societies. Not surprisingly, there proves to be much variation between individual societies. The highest annual time-averaged war-related death tolls are 1% per year (i.e., 1 person killed per year per 100 members of the population) or higher for the Dani, Sudan’s Dinka, and two North American Indian groups, ranging down to 0.02% per year or less for Andaman Islanders and Malaysia’s Semang. Some of those differences are related to subsistence mode, with average rates for subsistence farmers being nearly 4 times those for hunter-gatherers in Wrangham, Wilson, and Muller’s analysis. An alternative measure of war’s impact is the percentage of total deaths that are related to warfare. That measure ranges from 56% for Ecuador’s Waorani Indians down to only 3%–7% for six traditional populations scattered around the globe.

For comparison with those measures of war-related mortality in traditional small-scale societies, Keeley extracted 10 values for societies with state government: one of them for 20th-century Sweden, which experienced no wars and hence zero war-related deaths, the other nine for states and time periods selected for notoriously horrible suffering in war. The highest-percentage long-term death tolls averaged over a century in modern times have been for 20th-century Germany and Russia, which reached 0.16% and 0.15% per year respectively (i.e., 16 or 15 people killed per year per 10,000 members of the population) due to the combined horrors of
World Wars I and II. A lower value of 0.07% per year held for France in the century that included the Napoleonic Wars and the winter retreat of Napoleon’s army from Russia. Despite the deaths inflicted by the two atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the fire-bombing and conventional bombings of most other large Japanese cities, and the deaths by gunfire and starvation and suicide and drowning of hundreds of thousands of Japanese soldiers overseas during World War II, plus the casualties from Japan’s invasion of China in the 1930s and the Russo-Japanese war of 1904–1905, Japan’s percentage war-related death toll averaged over the 20th century was much lower than Germany’s or Russia’s, “only” 0.03% per year. The highest long-term estimate for any state is 0.25% per year for the famously bloody Aztec Empire in the century leading up to its destruction by Spain.

Let’s now compare these war-related death rates (expressed again as percentages of the population dying per year of war-related causes, averaged over a long period of alternating war and peace) for traditional small-scale societies and for modern populous societies with state government. It turns out that the
highest
values for any modern states (20th-century Germany and Russia) are only one-third of the
average
values for traditional small-scale societies, and only one-sixth of Dani values.
Average
values for modern states are about one-tenth of average traditional values.

It may astonish you readers, as it initially astonished me, to learn that trench warfare, machine guns, napalm, atomic bombs, artillery, and submarine torpedoes produce time-averaged war-related death tolls so much lower than those from spears, arrows, and clubs. The reasons become clear when one reflects on the differences between traditional and modern state warfare that we shall discuss in more detail below. First, state warfare is an intermittent exceptional condition, while tribal warfare is virtually continuous. During the 20th century Germany was at war for only 10 years (1914–1918 and 1939–1945), and its war deaths during the remaining 90 years were negligible, while the Dani were traditionally at war every month of every year. Second, casualties of state war are borne mainly just by male soldiers age 18 to 40 years; even within that age range, most state wars use only small professional armies, with the mass conscription of the two world wars being exceptional; and civilians were not at direct risk in large numbers until saturation aerial bombing was adopted in World
War II. In contrast, in traditional societies everyone—men and women, prime-age adults and old adults, children and babies—is a target. Third, in state warfare soldiers who surrender or are captured are normally permitted to survive, whereas in traditional warfare all are routinely killed. Finally, traditional but not state wars are periodically punctuated by massacres in which much or all of the population on one side gets surrounded and exterminated, as in the Dani massacres of June 4, 1966, the late 1930s, 1952, June 1962, and September 1962. In contrast, victorious states nowadays routinely keep conquered populations alive in order to exploit them, rather than exterminating them.

In what respects is traditional warfare similar to state warfare, and in what respects is it different? Before answering this question, we should of course recognize that there isn’t a polar opposition between these two types of warfare, with no middle ground, but that warfare instead changes along a continuum from the smallest to the largest society. The larger the society, the larger the armed force that it can muster, hence the lower the possibility of concealing the force, the lower the potential for raids and ambushes by small concealed groups of a few men, and the greater the emphasis on open battles between large forces. The leadership becomes stronger, more centralized, and more hierarchical in larger societies: national armies have officers of various ranks, a war council, and a commander-in-chief, while small bands just have equal-ranked men fighters, and medium-sized groups (like the Gutelu Alliance among the Dani) have weak leaders directing by persuasion rather than by authority to give orders. Warfare in large centralized chiefdoms may approximate warfare in small states. Despite this continuity of societal size, it’s still useful to compare small and large societies in how they fight.

One similarity is in the importance of enlisting allies. Just as the Wilihiman-Walalua Confederation of Dani sought allies among other confederations in fighting against the Widaia and their allies, World War II pitted two alliances against each other, whose main members were Britain, the U.S., and Russia on one side, and Germany, Italy, and Japan on the
other side. Alliances are even more essential for warring traditional societies than for warring nations. Modern nations differ greatly in military technology, so that a small nation may be able to rely on superior technology and leadership rather than on more allies to win a war. (Think of the successes of Israel’s armies against far more numerous Arab alliances.) But traditional warfare tends to take place between opponents with similar technology and similar leadership, so that the side with the advantage of numbers from enlisting more allies is likely to win.

Another similarity involves the reliance of societies of all sizes on both hand-to-hand fighting and long-range weapons. Even the small Fayu bands fighting around the Kueglers’ house had bows and arrows, while the Dani threw spears as well as killing Wejakhe and Jenokma at close quarters with spear thrusts. The range of weapons increases with a society’s increasing size and level of technology. Although Roman soldiers continued to use swords and daggers for hand-to-hand fighting, their weapons-at-a-distance included arrows, javelins, slings, and catapults with a range of up to half a mile. By the time of World War I, the German army had developed a cannon (nicknamed Big Bertha) to bombard Paris from a distance of 68 miles, while modern intercontinental ballistic missiles have ranges of up to half of the world’s circumference. But modern soldiers still have to be prepared to use a pistol or a bayonet to kill at close quarters.

A psychological consequence of this increasing range of modern long-range weapons is that most military killing today is by “push-button” technology (bombs, artillery, and missiles), permitting soldiers to kill unseen opponents and not to have to overcome their inhibitions about killing face-to-face (
Plate 37
). In all traditional fighting one selects one’s target individually and sees his face, whether one is stabbing him at close quarters or shooting an arrow at him from a distance of tens of yards (
Plate 36
). Men in traditional societies grow up from childhood encouraged to kill, or at least knowing how to kill, but most modern state citizens grow up taught constantly that killing is bad, until after age 18 they suddenly enlist or are inducted into the army, given a gun, and ordered to aim at an enemy and shoot him. Not surprisingly, a significant fraction of soldiers in World Wars I and II—some estimates run as high as one-half—could not bring themselves to shoot an enemy whom they saw as another human being. Thus, while traditional societies lack both the moral inhibitions
against killing an enemy face-to-face, and the technology necessary to bypass those inhibitions by killing unseen victims at a distance, modern state societies have tended to develop both the inhibitions and the technology necessary to bypass the inhibitions.

As for the numerous differences between traditional and state warfare, one difference follows straight on from that discussion of the psychology of killing. Even when modern soldiers see an enemy face-to-face, the enemy is almost always a nameless person, someone whom they never met before and against whom they hold no individual grudge. In contrast, in small-scale traditional societies one recognizes and knows by name not only every member of one’s own society, but also many or most of the enemy warriors one is trying to kill—because shifting alliances and occasional intermarriages make one’s neighbors familiar as individuals. The taunts that Dani warriors shouted at each other in the battles recounted in
Chapter 3
included personal insults. Readers of the
Iliad
will recall how opposing Greek and Trojan leaders addressed each other by name before attempting to kill each other in battle—a famous example being the speeches of Hector and Achilles to each other just before Achilles fatally wounded Hector. Personal vengeance against an individual enemy known to have killed one of your own relatives or friends plays a major role in traditional warfare, but much less of a role or none in modern state war.