The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies? (87 page)

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By the terms “traditional” and “small-scale” societies, which I shall use throughout this book, I mean past and present societies living at low population densities in small groups ranging from a few dozen to a few thousand people, subsisting by hunting-gathering or by farming or herding, and transformed to a limited degree by contact with large, Westernized, industrial societies. In reality, all such traditional societies still existing today have been at least partly modified by contact, and could alternatively be described as “transitional” rather than “traditional” societies, but they often still retain many features and social processes of the small societies of the past. I contrast traditional small-scale societies with “Westernized” societies, by which I mean the large modern industrial societies run by state governments, familiar to readers of this book as the societies in which most of my readers now live. They are termed “Westernized” because important features of those societies (such as the Industrial Revolution and public health) arose first in Western Europe in the 1700s and 1800s, and spread from there overseas to many other countries.

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Throughout this book, I’ll use the word “state” not only with its usual meaning of “condition” (e.g., “he was reduced to a state of poverty”), but also with its technical political meaning of a large society with centralized bureaucratic government, as described below.

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People of Arctic North America refer to themselves as Inuit, and that is the term to be used in this book. The more familiar lay term is Eskimo.

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Here and in several of the following paragraphs, we encounter a feature of Dani warfare that initially puzzles us: battles by appointment. That is, one side challenges the other side to meet at an appointed place on an appointed day for a battle. The other side is free to accept or ignore the challenge. When a battle has started, either side may call it off if rain begins. These facts have misled some commentators into dismissing Dani warfare as ritualized, not seriously intending to kill, and just a form of sporting contest. Against this view stand the undoubted facts that Dani nevertheless do get wounded and killed in these battles, that other Dani are killed in raids and ambushes, and that large numbers are killed in rare massacres. Anthropologist Paul Roscoe has argued that the apparent ritualization of Dani battles was made inevitable by the swampy and waterlogged terrain, with only two narrow dry hills on which large groups of warriors could safely maneuver and fight. To fight in large groups elsewhere would have posed a suicidal risk of pursuing or retreating from the enemy through swamps with hidden underwater bridges familiar to the enemy. In support of Roscoe’s interpretation, this apparent ritualization of Dani warfare is not paralleled among many other New Guinea Highland groups fighting on firm dry terrain. Rumors circulated, apparently originating with missionaries, that the Harvard Expedition itself, eager for dramatic film footage, somehow provoked the Dani to fight and kill each other. However, the Dani fought before the expedition arrived and after it left, and government investigation of the rumor found it baseless.