The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies? (32 page)

For example, until around 500 years ago Finland’s population was concentrated on the seacoast and Finland’s forested interior was sparsely inhabited. When individual families and small groups began moving as colonists into the interior, they tried to live as far as possible from each other. Finnish friends told me a story to illustrate how those colonists hated feeling crowded. A man cleared for himself and his family a small farm by a river, pleased that there were no signs of any neighbors. But one day he was horrified to observe a cut log floating down the river. Someone else must be living somewhere upstream! Enraged, the man started walking upstream through unbroken forest to track down the trespasser. On his first day of walking he met no one; on the second day, again no one. At last, on the third day he came to a new clearing, where he found another colonist. He killed that colonist and marched three days back to his own clearing and family, relieved that he had once again secured his family’s
privacy. While that story may be apocryphal, it illustrates the social factors that cause small-scale societies to have concerns even about distant “neighbors” far out of sight.

Still other ultimate factors proposed involve benefits, to the individual rather than to the social group, of being warlike. A bellicose individual or war leader is likely to be feared and to gain prestige for his war exploits. That can translate into his being able to win more wives and to rear more children. For instance, the anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon calculated, from Yanomamo genealogies that he gathered, that if one compares Yanomamo men who have or haven’t killed people, the killers have on the average over two and a half times more wives and over three times more children. Of course the killers are also more likely to die or to be killed at an earlier age than are non-killers, but during that shorter lifespan they win more prestige and social rewards and can thereby obtain more wives and rear extra children. Naturally, even if this correlation does apply to the Yanomamo, I’m not recommending it to all you readers, nor can it even be generalized to apply to all traditional societies. In some societies the shorter lifespan of warlike men is likely not to be compensated by an ability to attract more wives per decade of their shorter life. That is the case for Ecuador’s Waorani Indians, who are even more warlike than the Yanomamo. Nevertheless, more zealous Waorani warriors don’t have more wives than do milder men, and they have fewer rather than more children surviving to reproductive age.

Having thus addressed the question why small-scale societies fight, let’s now ask: whom do they fight? For instance, are tribes more likely to go to war against tribes speaking a different language than against speakers of their own language? Do they fight, or do they instead avoid fighting with, tribes with which they trade or intermarry?

We can place the answers in a more familiar context by first asking the same questions about modern nations going to war. A distinguished British meteorologist named Lewis Richardson, whose official career focused on mathematically analyzing complex patterns of atmospheric winds,
spent two years during World War I attached to a motor ambulance convoy transporting sick and wounded soldiers. Two of his wife’s three brothers were killed during that war. Possibly impelled by those experiences and by his own Quaker family background, Richardson developed a second career of mathematically studying the causes of wars, in the hope of drawing lessons about how to avoid wars. His method consisted of tabulating all wars that he could learn of between 1820 and 1949, recording their numbers of deaths, dividing his table into five sub-tables according to those numbers, and then testing questions about when and why different nations went to war.

During that period of 1820–1949 the number of wars in which a country was involved varied greatly among countries, from over 20 each for France and Britain down to 1 for Switzerland and 0 for Sweden. The main source of this variation was simply the number of nations with which a given country shared a common frontier: the more neighbors, the more wars averaged over the long run; the number of wars was approximately proportional to the number of adjoining states. Whether neighboring states spoke the same or different languages had little effect. The sole exceptions to this pattern were that there were fewer wars in which both sides spoke Chinese, and more wars in which both sides spoke Spanish, than expected statistically from the total world number of speakers of Chinese languages or Spanish. Richardson speculated about what cultural factors apparently make Spanish-speakers especially prone, and Chinese-speakers especially unlikely, to go to war. His speculations are intriguing, but I shall leave it to interested readers to read Richardson’s analysis for themselves, on
pages 223
–
230
and
240
–
242
of his 1960 book,
Statistics of Deadly Quarrels
.

Richardson did not test statistically the effect of trading between countries on the probability of war. However, because war is disproportionately between neighboring countries, which are also disproportionately likely to be trade partners, one would expect trade relations and war to tend to be associated with each other. It does appear, at least from anecdotal impressions, that modern nations that are trade partners fight more often than those that are not. Presumably that’s partly because the apparent correlation of trade with fighting is really just because both trade and fighting are in turn correlated with propinquity; and partly, too, because
trade often gives rise to disputes. Even for nations that aren’t neighbors, the biggest modern wars have pitted trade partners against each other. For instance, in World War II Japan’s two main targets of attack were its leading source of imported materials (the U.S.) and its leading export market for its goods (China). Similarly, Nazi Germany and Russia were trading right up until the eve of Germany’s invasion of Russia on June 22, 1941.

With that discussion of nations as background, let’s now consider the same questions for small-scale traditional societies. We don’t have available for analysis a tabulation of all recent traditional wars, corresponding to Richardson’s table of modern state wars. Instead, we’ll have to content ourselves with anecdotes. These suggest that small-scale societies, even more than nations, fight their neighbors, because they lack the capacity for long-distance transport that enabled Britain to send troops halfway around the world in the mid-1800s to fight New Zealand’s Maori. There is little evidence of small-scale societies differentiating between neighbors speaking the same or different languages in matters of war. Most traditional wars were between neighbors speaking the same language, because neighbors are more likely to speak the same rather than different languages. Everyone involved in the Dani War of
Chapter 3
spoke the Dani language. The long list of other societies that fought societies speaking the same language include the Enga, Fayu, Fore, Hinihon, Inuit, Mailu, Nuer, and Yanomamo; the list could be extended indefinitely. One partial exception, however, is that, while Nuer tribes fought other Nuer tribes as well as the Dinka, they fought the Dinka more often, and they observed restrictions in fighting the Nuer that they didn’t observe in fighting the Dinka. For instance, they didn’t kill Nuer women and children, they didn’t carry off Nuer as captives, and they didn’t burn Nuer huts; they limited themselves to killing Nuer men and stealing Nuer cattle.

As for the effects of trade and intermarriage, anecdotal evidence again suggests that a traditional society’s enemies are often the same people as their partners in trade and marriage. As Lawrence Keeley put it, “Many societies tend to fight the people they marry and to marry those they fight, to raid the people with whom they trade and to trade with their enemies.” The reasons are the same as the reasons producing this result for nations: propinquity fosters trade and marriage, but also war; and trade and marriage give rise to disputes for members of small-scale societies, just as for
modern states. Among so-called trade relations, neighboring societies may actually exchange goods at prices and exchange rates varying along a continuum from real trade (mutually voluntary exchanges between equally strong parties at fair prices), through “extortion” (unequal exchanges at unfair prices between a strong and a weak party, whereby the weak party gives up goods at low prices so as to buy peace), to raiding (one party “supplies” goods and the other party gives nothing in exchange, whenever one party’s weakness enables the other to raid and thereby to obtain goods for no price at all). Famous “raiders,” such as the Apache of the U.S. Southwest and the Tuareg of northern Africa’s deserts, actually practised a sophisticated mixture of such fair trade, extortion, and raiding, depending on the capacity of their partners at the moment to defend themselves.

As for marriage between bands and tribes, it often precipitates war for reasons similar to the reasons for wars resulting from trade agreements gone sour. One tribe’s baby girl is promised at birth as a bride to an older male of another tribe, and is paid for, but isn’t delivered on reaching the age of puberty. A bride-price or dowry is owed and initially paid in installments, until an installment is missed. Disputes over quality of “goods” (e.g., adultery, spouse abandonment, divorce, or inability or refusal to cook or garden or fetch firewood) produce demands for refund of the bride-price, but the demand is refused because the alleged quality defect is disputed, or else the payment received has already been traded away or (if it was a pig) eaten. Any consumer, business owner, exporter, or importer reading this paragraph will recognize analogies with the problems facing traders in modern states.

Frequent results of fighting the people with whom you intermarry are divided loyalties in times of war. Some of the enemy are one’s in-laws and blood relatives. When shooting an arrow or throwing a spear, a warrior must aim, insofar as possible, so as to avoid hitting a relative on the other side. When an Inuit woman moves upon marriage to her husband’s group, if her blood relatives in her natal society then plan a raid against her husband’s people, the blood relatives may warn her in advance to stay out of the way of the raid and not get killed herself. Conversely, if she learns from her husband’s people that they are getting ready to raid her blood relatives, she may warn the latter—or she may not; she may side with either her
in-laws or her blood relatives. Similarly, a Fore man who hears that his own clan is planning to attack the village to which his sister has moved in marriage may warn her and then expect a payment from her husband. Conversely, he may hear from his sister that the village into which she has married is going to attack his own village, whose members he warns and who give him presents in gratitude.

Finally, let’s return to the theme of revenge, with which small-scale societies may seem to us inordinately pre-occupied, giving it as their commonest explanation for going to war. We citizens of modern states commonly ignore how strong can be the thirst for vengeance. Among human emotions, it ranks along with love, anger, grief, and fear, about which we talk incessantly. Modern state societies permit and encourage us to express our love, anger, grief, and fear, but not our thirst for vengeance. We grow up being taught that vengeful feelings are primitive, to be ashamed of, and something that we should transcend. Our society inculcates those beliefs in order to discourage us from seeking personal vengeance.

There is no doubt that it would be impossible for us to coexist peacefully as fellow citizens of the same state, if we did not forswear the right to personal vengeance, and if we did not leave punishment to the state. Otherwise, we, too, would be living under the conditions of constant warfare prevailing in most non-state societies. But even for us Westerners who are wronged and who do receive satisfaction from the state, torment remains because of the lack of personal satisfaction. One friend of mine whose sister was murdered by robbers is still angry, decades afterwards, although the state did capture, try, and imprison the robbers.

We state citizens are thereby left in a bind that we are unable to acknowledge. The state’s insistence on its sole right to punish is essential to our living in peace and safety. But that gain for us comes at a severe personal cost. My conversations with New Guineans have made me understand what we have given up by leaving justice to the state. In order to induce us to do so, state societies and their associated religions and moral codes constantly hammer into us the message that seeking revenge is bad.
But, while acting on vengeful feelings has to be prevented, acknowledging those feelings should be not merely permitted but encouraged. To a close relative or friend of someone who has been killed or seriously wronged, and to the victims of harm themselves, those feelings are natural and powerful. Many state governments do attempt to grant the relatives of crime victims some personal satisfaction: by allowing them to be present at the trial of the accused; in some cases, to address the judge or jury (
Chapter 2
); to meet privately with the criminal, through the restoration justice system (
Chapter 2
); or even to watch the execution of their loved one’s murderer.

Readers who haven’t spent years talking with New Guinea Highlanders may still find themselves wondering: How did these societies come to be apparently so unlike us, and to revel in and reward killing? What sort of warped ogres are they, to talk so unabashedly of their pleasure in killing enemies?

Actually, ethnographic studies of traditional human societies lying largely outside the control of state government have shown that war, murder, and demonization of neighbors have been the norm, not the exception, and that members of those societies espousing those norms are often normal, happy, well-adjusted people, not ogres. What differs in many state-level societies is that we are taught to start embracing those traditional norms suddenly and only at a certain moment (upon a declaration of war), then to jettison them suddenly at a later moment (the conclusion of a peace treaty). The result is confusing: hatreds once acquired are not so easily jettisoned. Many of my European friends born like me in the 1930s—Germans, Poles, Russians, Serbs, Croats, British, Dutch, and Jews—were taught from birth to hate or fear certain other peoples, underwent experiences giving them good reason to do so, and are now still carrying those feelings more than 65 years later, even though my friends were subsequently taught that those feelings are no longer considered nice and are best not expressed unless you feel confident of your listeners’ approval.