Part One
We must know that war is common to all and strife is justice, and that all things come into being and pass away through strife.
—Heraclitus of Ephesus, frag. 80 (trans. John Burnet)
Chapter One
What Is War?
In its basic meaning, “war” (polemos, bellum, guerra, guerre, Krieg, and so on) is understood to be a specific institutionalized form of human conflict, whose outlines are so familiar that premodern writers on the subject rarely bothered to define it. Modern writers usually define it as an organized, legitimized, lethal conflict between human communities. This form of intraspecific conflict has been extremely common in human history for as far back as we can trace it. But it has taken many forms, and one of the major contributions of modern anthropology is to suggest a distinction of primary importance. There have been two types of “war,” or rather, two pure types, with many gradations in between.1
There is the warfare of policy, fought between societies that have centralized political organizations, a major function of which is to determine the policies, or raisons d’état, for which wars are fought, as well as the “strategies” of war and “tactics” of battle needed to implement those policies. This is the warfare of societies that have reached or approached the advanced technical stage we call “civilization.”
But a different kind of institutionalized, sanctioned, and often deadly conflict is common among small decentralized societies. It does not include anything that could be described as a clear policy, because these groups lack any organization capable of formulating one. They fight “wars” for purposes of their own, and at least their articulated motives are likely to strike us as private and personal rather than public and political. Their wars seem as devoid of strategy and tactics as they are of policy; because they are conducted according to such rigid conventions, they resemble some elaborate game, sport, magic, or other ritual more than the rational political operations described as wars by people describing themselves as civilized. Most readers of this book probably have sufficient acquaintance with anthropology to appreciate the importance of ritual in primitive cultures and to understand how difficult it is to separate ritual from the culture itself. Primitive warfare is a ritual practiced for its own sake; “civilized” warfare is an adaptation of that pattern to serve as a political instrument.
Most of this book will be concerned with the political wars of advanced literate societies and the ways those societies interpreted the business of war, especially their attempts to interpret the cluster of ideas mentioned above— policy, strategy, tactics—and to fit all this into their value systems and views of the world. But at the start, something must be said about the primitive ritual out of which such wars of policy arose. A better understanding of the assumptions and values of the most primitive warriors may throw some light on their calculating descendants. Although in the West “civilized” warfare has made a heroic effort to free itself from the influence of social structures and develop a clear theory of raison d’état, it continues to be more determined by culture and less by policy than we often assume.
Practices of Primitive War2
The Maring people of the New Guinea mountains continued their traditional practices of war into the 1950s, when the Australian government more or less put an end to these practices. These are among the best-reported of all primitive wars, and their elaborate ritualization has drawn much attention from anthropologists.3
The Maring live in farming communities containing a few hundred people each. Once or twice in a generation such a community would go to war with its neighbors, for reasons to be considered shortly. They distinguished two main phases of warfare, the “nothing fight” and the “true fight,” which were performed in that order. When a “nothing fight” was declared, the men of the two quarreling groups met by appointment at a designated clearing in the forest, where they formed two opposing lines and fired arrows at one another at a distance from behind large fixed shields, doing little damage. At this stage, the disputes that had started the affair might be settled by negotiations shouted across the battlefield or through negotiation by members of some neutral group with kin on both sides. Meanwhile, both sides had made a show of force and had had an opportunity to size up one another’s capabilities and determination. These activities might go on for weeks.
If negotiations failed, the conflict might escalate into a “true fight,” a much more serious and bloody affair using hand-to-hand weapons that could continue sporadically for weeks more, during which time taboos barred all intercourse between the warring groups. Even a “true fight” was strictly bound by convention. Before it began, the shamans would set killing quotas, and as soon as the warriors met their quota of slain enemies they would be ready for a truce. Every serious casualty caused a long interruption in the fighting to perform appropriate rituals—of burial, on the one side, and purification, on the other. Rarely was anything resembling a strategy or tactic discernible on the killing ground. Apparently the usual objective was simply to keep fighting until the enemy’s allies grew tired of the business and went home, whereupon the depleted enemy could be routed by a charge. In the event of a rout, or even with the expectation of one, the entire defeated community might flee precipitately from its territory, but the victors would not occupy the vacated land because they considered all the enemy’s possessions taboo. The routed group might come back years later and reclaim some of its land, but if not, land could eventually be annexed by the victors, after the proper rituals had removed the taboos.
These wars were rituals enclosed in ritual. Every war was preceded, accompanied, and followed by complicated magic and taboos intended to accomplish certain objectives: secure victory, make the warriors invulnerable, curse the enemy, place sanctions around the rules of war, set killing quotas, make peace, bury the dead, and purify warriors of the blood of the slain so that their ghosts would not cause trouble. The Red Spirits, ghosts of ancestors killed in war, presided over all martial affairs and sought victory for their descendants.
It seems that the most significant practical effect of all this ritualization was to preserve the gradual, multiphase character of the war process and prevent premature or unnecessary escalation. Serious fighting, if it came at all, had to be preceded by many rounds of symbolic confrontation that allowed ample opportunity for arbitration. Redistribution of territory, if it happened at all, came long after the end of serious fighting and appeared in some cases to have required the acquiescence of the defeated community.
Chivalrous though all this sounds, we should not forget the primitive warfare could become deadly. The Maring sometimes suffered heavy casualties during a rout. One routed Maring community was said to have lost in a single day twelve men and six women and children, out of a total population of two hundred and fifty. Nor is all primitive warfare restricted to the sort of chivalrous multiphase process described above. Despite their devotion to ritual, the Maring sometimes resorted to tactics of ambush and raid with the intent of killing and despoiling as many of the enemy, of every age and gender, as they could; and such tactics have been widely reported from primitive societies the world over.
But ritualization has also been widely reported. Earlier Western observers of primitive warfare were often misled because they failed to realize that what they were observing was only one stage in a process more complex, in some ways, than “civilized” warfare. Many primitive wars struck them as a kind of Homeric comic opera, as an excuse for warriors to put on paint and feathers and yell insults at one another from a safe distance. But they may have seen only a “nothing fight”—the innocuous initial phase in a ritual cycle that was as long-drawn-out, cautious, and procrastinating as that of the Maring. (There do seem to have been cultures, like that of the native Californians, where warfare rarely went beyond that stage.) Others observed wars of conquest and occupation that seemed no different from their European counterparts, without realizing that in truly primitive warfare, such an outcome is rare and perhaps accidental.
Such was the repertoire of primitive warfare. What was it all about?
Causes of Primitive War
The Martial Values
Perhaps the most striking difference between truly primitive and truly modern warfare is that the former seems normally to be fought not for materialistic interests but rather for “honor.” The commonest reason that primitive people give for going to war is to take vengeance for offenses.
Why is this not a perfectly adequate reason? Primitive people who belong to the same descent group and form a community have sanctions against intragroup violence; neighboring communities with kinship ties can usually settle their disputes through arbitration; but if a man is wronged by someone from an unrelated community, there is no nonviolent recourse, so he has to call upon his kinsmen and start a “war.” Any perceived insult or injury will do as a reason. The Helen of Troy theme is recurrent: A woman has been seduced or abducted, or a bride price has been paid and the bride not delivered, or vice versa. According to Napoleon Chagnon, longtime observer of the warlike Yanomamö of Venezuela, practically all Yanomamö wars arise initially over women. Other disputes may involve accusations of malicious magic, for primitive people tend to attribute all misfortunes, including natural death, to the withcraft of an enemy. Then again, retribution may be demanded for deaths in earlier wars, generating a long series of wars that go on until all blood debts have been paid. When a mutual hostility has gelled between two communities, it is likely to become permanent because it prevents intermarriages and kinship bonds, leaving no way to resolve grievances except war.
In a culture where these affairs of vengeance assume an important place, every male (for war is everywhere the exclusive prerogative of men, for reasons we will consider shortly) is primarily occupied with honor. Warlike societies invariably encourage an intense status competition among males over honor: Honor can be preserved only by demonstrating one’s readiness to avenge wrongs, will be lost irretrievably by failure to take vengeance, and can be enhanced by the accumulation of war trophies such as heads, scalps, ceremonial titles, and prerogatives. In an extremely warlike culture, martial honor and glory are normally the only means by which men can acquire prestige among their fellows. Obviously, the need for prestige can become a cause of war in itself, and the cult of male aggressiveness makes war more frequent: Ambitious warriors will always be looking for wrongs to avenge, and in turn, frequent warfare will intensify the competition among warriors to demonstrate their bravery. Revenge and prestige are mutually reinforcing.
We may refer to this self-reinforcing complex of motives for war—revenge and prestige, honor and glory—as the “martial values.” They are easily recognizable from one society to the next. When a culture has thoroughly routinized them, raising virtually all its males to think of themselves primarily as warriors whose central interests in life are revenge and prestige, we may call such a pattern “primitive militarism.” The majority of the primitive cultures known to anthropology seem to have militarized themselves to a greater or lesser degree. Anthropologists have studied some half a dozen examples (lists vary) of societies described as “peaceful,” or perhaps better, as “relatively peaceful” or “minimally warlike,” in that they do not practice war except in immediate self-defense, and the martial values seem to play no routine part in their culture.4 Apart from these dubious exceptions, whose significance we will consider later, it is not clear from the anthropological record that any primitive cultures in recent centuries have been altogether free of militarism.
Therefore, the original form of warfare seems essentially what it purported to be: an institutionalized method of conflict management for settling disputes with people outside the community. There is no obvious way to distinguish such wars from the feuding between kinship groups that goes on today in many parts of the more or less civilized world. As has been noted, some anthropologists prefer to call these affairs “fights” or “feuds” rather than “wars.”
But surely there is more to these “judicial” or “social” combats than meets the eye. There is a public aspect to the process that seems to justify the phrase “primitive warfare.” We have seen that the self-reinforcing character of militaristic culture makes men resort to this particular method of conflict management far more often than would otherwise be the case. Nor are honor and glory the absolute and self-evident imperatives that they always purport to be: Primitive warriors are notorious for “forgetting” wrongs for a long time, that is, until they find it convenient to “remember” them, and it is difficult to believe their fellow tribesmen are totally oblivious to the manipulativeness of this. It is easier to explain the popularity of militarism if we think of it as a public action, not merely as a sort of violent civil suit for the settlement of private torts. In fact, it is easy to see how these fights benefit the entire community, not just the influential men who start them. Men who are quick to react to wrongs gain prestige for themselves and their kindred, and communities led by such men gain prestige among neighboring communities. Those who have won such prestige are less likely to be molested. A reputation for militarism is a great deterrent. There are also more intangible advantages: Militarism promotes solidarity and cooperation, so that the warlike are likely to have an edge in any competition with the unwarlike. Some awareness of these advantages is implicit in the readiness with which a private grievance is taken up by an entire community. The martial values, for all their costs, are readily accepted because they bring easily perceived benefits to the whole people. Even the grisly trophy collections cherished by primitive warriors may protect the community by their deterrent effect, especially if severed heads are staked outside the village to greet visitors, as was the custom of the Northwest Coast Indians.
The culture of militarism has always had this double effect: It confers immediate benefits upon certain powerful individuals (in primitive groups, those seeking vengeance for their personal grievances) and at the same time brings long-term benefits to the whole community by deterring potential enemies and imposing solidarity. In more advanced forms of warfare, the interests of the leadership and the interests of the community tend to diverge, but in a primitive community there is rarely any serious conflict between these objectives. The men who started the war always take a leading role in the fighting, which may consist of little other than the Homeric duels of these heroes.
Revenge war always serves two social functions, one external and the other internal: It deters external enemies, and it promotes internal solidarity. These are the primitive roots of civilized society’s “moral” and “constitutional” theories of warfare, respectively.
Competition for Resources
The martial-values complex may seem an adequate explanation of the phenomenon of primitive warfare, but some anthropologists look for more, and their views should be considered.5 They hold that the common articulated motives for primitive war—revenge and prestige, honor and glory—are not to be taken at face value, as they are chiefly pretexts for materialistic motives arising from the competition for territory and economic resources. Success in war, it is argued, can bring substantial material benefits even at the most primitive level, and the warriors cannot be unaware of this.
There is much to be said for this view. Even in Paleolithic times, warfare probably had certain territorial implications. If Paleolithic hunter-gatherer cultures resembled recent ones, then they did not usually have fixed territories with definite boundaries, but they did have a sense of identification with a locality; it would have been obvious to them that some localities were far richer in game than others and that the number of hunter-gatherer bands any locality could support was strictly limited; and they may have needed access to specific places like water holes and fishing sites. Very primitive groups do not seem to have been capable of anything that we would describe as conquest, but they were capable of displacement: They could deny the use of territory to others, and by frequent warfare, they could induce a neighboring group to move out of a favorable territory.
Furthermore, there is no doubt that the territorial and economic effects of warfare became more important in Neolithic times. Recent primitives, most of whom are culturally Neolithic, usually claim that they fight wars for honor and sometimes deny outright that they ever fight for land, but their actions, and sometimes their words, suggest that competition for food resources—land, water, game, fish, trade goods—is also an important factor. In the scant recorded history of primitive warfare, favorable territories are known to be theaters of frequent warfare, and many cases of population displacement are known. Sometimes the declared motives of revenge and prestige seem no more than palpable pretexts for the acquisition of territory and goods—I have already mentioned the selectiveness and manipulativeness the primitive memory for insults and injuries. The Munducuru headhunters of Brazil say that they fight only to acquire heads (i.e., for honor and glory), never for land; but the anthropologist W. H. Durham has argued that they really fight to eliminate competitors for their main game animal, which is the peccary, and that this motive is partly conscious, for they express it in their own symbolic terms by saying that a warrior who collects enemy heads has pleased the spirit of the peccary.6
But can these motives be clearly separated? One of the insights produced by the new anthropology of war is that primitive warfare tends to fall into a multiphase pattern: It starts as a ritualistic duel with few casualties and then, if the dispute is not settled by arbitration, gradually escalates into more serious hand-to-hand fighting and sometimes into murderous raids and ambushes. The motives can change from one stage to the next. The usual proximate motive is revenge, for the social uses described above, but there is probably always some awareness of the possibility of gaining material resources eventually. It seems misleading to suggest that the one motive is a pretext for the other; rather, they are aspects of the same thing. War trophies are valued not only for their prestige but also for the perquisites of prestige. According to Tacitus, the Chatti of ancient Germany had an elite warrior society distinguished by the cropped hair and rings of the warriors who stood in the front rank of battle and otherwise did nothing because their tribesmen gave them all they wanted. They had brought the tribe honor and, probably, land. A Sioux who had earned the right to wear the warbonnet could enter any tepee and demand food. He had won his band glory and, probably, horses and buffalo.7
A human group is an adaptive mechanism that reacts when threatened to preserve its subsistence, security, and spirit. The ritualism of primitive warfare prevents any clear separation of those interests.
Hobbes or Rousseau?
When and how did this pattern arise? Modern theories of warfare have been bedeviled by the question of whether warfare is innate or invented, a product of nature or nurture, a subject for the biologist or the anthropologist. This controversy has sputtered on ever since the Enlightenment, when the two contrary positions were given classic expression by the philosophers Hobbes and Rousseau.
Neo-Rousseauism received a boost during the International Year of Peace in 1986, when an international conference of natural and social scientists at Seville University issued the Seville Statement on Violence, modeled on the UNESCO Statement on Race, which has since been endorsed by the American Anthropological Association, the American Psychological Association, and other professional organizations. The scientists were concerned to “challenge a number of alleged biological findings that have been used … to justify violence and war” and to affirm that “biology does not condemn humanity to war,” and they specifically condemned the following propositions:
IT IS SCIENTIFICALLY INCORRECT to say that we have inherited a tendency to make war from our animal ancestors …
IT IS SCIENTIFICALLY INCORRECT to say that war or any other violent behavior is genetically programmed into our human nature …
IT IS SCIENTIFICALLY INCORRECT to say that in the course of human evolution there has been a selection for aggressive behavior … 8
In spite of their confident tone, some of the Seville scientists may have sensed that they were on the defensive, for in fact there did not exist in 1986 a genuine consensus on these questions, either among scientists or the general public. Soon after this statement was published, a poll revealed that 50 percent of American college students believed war to be “intrinsic” in human nature.9 And since then in both the academic and the popular press, there has been a decided revival of speculation that many aspects of human nature are genetically based, including personality, intelligence, sex differences, and sexual orientation.
In the twentieth century, the Hobbes-Rousseau controversy has become largely a war of the faculties, with biologists (including many biological anthropologists) on the side of Nature and most cultural and social anthropologists in the camp of Nurture. In recent years, each side has produced its own grand theory about the functions of primitive warfare. Despite their contrary premises, these grand theories are in some ways strikingly similar. By “function” they do not mean the conscious motivations and intentions of the human actors, like the functions I have discussed in the preceding pages. Rather, they mean a very long-term causal factor to which the human participants are oblivious. The current version of neo-Hobbism calls itself “sociobiology”; the most influential neo-Rousseaist theory calls itself “cultural ecology.”
Sociobiology: The New Hobbes
In the 1970s, there emerged a new field of biological research that aimed to apply recent advances in evolutionary theory to animal (including human) social behavior. It was in fact a revival of the social Darwinism of the nineteenth century and might well have called itself neo-social Darwinism but preferred the label “sociobiology” because the older social Darwinism had become widely, if somewhat unfairly, associated with racism, eugenics, and militarism.10
The evolution of warfare is a central problem in sociobiological literature, as it was to the earlier social Darwinists. In brief, leading sociobiologists have argued that every human group has a natural tendency (often described as “ethnocentricity,” a term coined by the old social Darwinists) to close its ranks against outsiders and display hostility to them, thereby cementing the loyalties of the group and deflecting aggression away from it; this ethnocentric and xenophobic tendency has a genetic base that has evolved by natural selection. The tendency is adaptive, because a group that displays it will have an obvious advantage in competition with other groups for resources of every sort. Furthermore, once this pattern of in-group amity and out-group enmity is established, it will tend to perpetuate itself, spread, and escalate; it will set up a chain reaction, forcing all other groups to adapt to the militaristic pattern or else be pushed out or absorbed. Some sociobiologists have called this chain reaction the “balance of power,” borrowing a phrase normally used for the modern system of international relations and suggesting thereby that the familiar Machiavellian game of power politics has very primitive roots. It has been proposed that the evolution of war passed through three stages:
1. Primitive hominids formed small bands for defense against predators, developing a high degree of group cohesion, male bonding, and male aggressiveness.
2. Hominid bands turned increasingly to the hunting of game, for which these cooperative and aggressive tendencies proved advantageous.
3. At some point, the primary purpose of group organization became defense against other bands of the same species, followed by the balance of power and escalation in group size and organization to achieve a margin of safety.
Somewhere in this progression came the invention of lethal weapons, whose physically and psychologically distancing effects made it easy for man to kill members of his own species, and sufficient cognitive ability developed to distinguish “us” from “them“—to contemplate the significance of the Other and to decide upon his elimination.
Sociobiology offered a powerful and persuasive synthesis, incorporating the latest research in biology and anthropology. The original Hobbesians, and even some social Darwinists, had thought of warfare as an expression of egotism, which made its place in evolution difficult to explain; but the sociobiologists explained it, rather, as a supreme expression of altruism, stressing its cooperative rather than its violent aspects. They avoided the determinism associated with older biological explanations. They did not talk about blind “instincts,” but rather about flexible neural pathways activated by environmental triggers, using metaphors borrowed from the computer industry. They knew differences between cultures must be overwhelmingly the result of cultural evolution and were not biological. They ascribed to the genes a probabilistic rather than a deterministic influence, setting limits on the evolution of cultural patterns and biasing them in certain directions. It is untrue to say that they thought biology had condemned humanity to war, in the words of the Seville Statement (whose authors had sociobiology primarily in mind). They did not think warfare was any longer adaptive or beneficial and thought the ethnocentric tendencies of human nature could be overcome. Nevertheless, they did think that at one time warfare had generally been adaptive in a Darwinian sense and that the genes that pushed it had been selected by evolution. They suggested plausible links between the evolution of war and the evolution of hunting and linked both these quintessentially male activities to the ubiquitous primitive institutions of male bonding and male supremacy. In the 1970s, the new synthesis appeared to receive support from reports that male chimpanzees practice organized hunting of small animals and conduct lethal raids against neighboring chimpanzee bands; if the latter activity was not war, it looked uncannily like it.
Cultural Ecology: The New Rousseau
Despite the sociobiologists5 disclaimers of political implications, the new synthesis immediately raised a storm of protest, mostly from scholars with left-wing views, who assumed that to suggest that anything in human nature is biologically based must imply some sort of determinism with reactionary political effects. Sociobiology ran against well-rooted intellectual habits, for twentieth-century social science had been ruled by the hypothesis called “cultural determinism,” which holds that almost everything in human culture is a product of learned behavior. This attitude was especially entrenched among cultural anthropologists. For decades, influential anthropologists like Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict had spread the doctrine that culture is an autonomous and extremely malleable entity untouched by hereditary influences. Some extreme formulations of this view left the impression that “culture” is a sort of blank slate upon which anything might be written. Mead made this explicit in a 1940 article entitled “Warfare Is Only an Invention— Not a Biological Necessity.”11 Notice the assumptions of this title: Warfare has to be either biologically determined, which makes it a “necessity,” or culturally determined, in which case it is only that, a sort of “historical accident” (Mead’s phrase) persisted in, apparently, from force of habit. The same assumptions underlie the 1986 Seville Statement on Violence.
In fact, the mounting ethnographic data made it difficult by the 1940s to believe in the original Rousseauist view that primitive peoples are inherently peaceable. But the data did seem to support the view that primitive warfare was an innocuous sort of game or ritual or judicial mechanism that was not really “war,” and this became the neo-Rousseauist orthodoxy. I have argued here that this distinction between primitive and complex warfare is essentially correct, though I think some of these scholars underrated the seriousness and public purpose of primitive warfare. In any case, to make such a distinction is to raise the obvious question of how the complex political type of war developed out of the primitive practice. If anthropology rejected the idea that war was a product of biological evolution, then anthropology had to show it to be the result of cultural evolution. A cultural theory of the evolution of war was badly needed. By the 1970s, one had been produced, just in time to counter the ambitious claims of the sociobiologists.
The new theory, perhaps best represented by the writings of Marvin Harris, is often described as “cultural ecology.”12 In brief, it holds that primitive warfare is a mechanism for population redistribution: It corrects environmental imbalances by scattering human populations over a wider area than before, thereby reducing pressure on the land and at the same time creating buffer zones that serve as game sanctuaries. Some have gone further and suggested that warfare not only redistributes population but reduces it, not by killing off young men (whose fertility is demographically almost irrelevant in a polygynous society) but by killing girl babies: We are told that militaristic societies prefer to raise warriors and therefore have high rates of female infanticide.
At least some cultural ecologists suggest that these environmental benefits are not just accidental by-products of warfare but are in some fashion— which seems to me none too clear—the ultimate cause of the whole process. At such moments they sound very like their opponents. Like the social Darwinists and sociobiologists, they speak of warfare as a major instrument of evolution, only rather than biological evolution, they mean cultural evolution—a selection of norms and practices rather than genes. They suggest warfare may be compared to the agonistic territorial displays found in some other animal species that are said to function so as to ensure optimal population dispersal. If so, perhaps it accounted for the worldwide distribution achieved by Homo sapiens even in the Paleolithic. After Cain rose up against his brother Abel and killed him, he went away and dwelled in the land of Nod, east of Eden (Genesis 4.8-16).
The ecological thesis lends an ingenious new twist to Rousseauism. It emphasizes the gap between primitive war and “real” war. It makes primitive warfare a beneficial institution, not only for the human race but for the environment. It is a pacifistic evolutionism, whose dominant metaphor is not survival of the fittest but the maintenance of an equilibrium. It allows us to admit the universality of war without feeling trapped by it, for modern war can serve none of these ecological functions and seems wholly dysfunctional. And if we can no longer visualize primitive man as dwelling in Eden, at least we can imagine him in Nod.
This has been perhaps the most influential anthropological paradigm for explaining primitive warfare for the past twenty-five years, but by no means have all anthropologists accepted it. There are serious problems with this seductive thesis, and in one respect it seems weaker than its sociobiological rival. Cultural anthropologists have long tended to reify “culture,” speaking of it as though it were an independent variable that is somehow superorganic, endowed with enormous power to mold the minds and hearts of individuals, yet receiving no input from these individuals who carry it on. The cultural ecologists carry the reification of culture to extremes and, in addition, tend to reify ecology. In some formulations of this theory, a blind force called Culture seems to play at random upon human norms and practices in much the same way that the blind force of Nature, in Darwinian theory, plays upon genetic variations. But biological selection rests on a generally accepted body of Darwinian theory. There is no such theory behind cultural ecology, and this deficiency makes it difficult to imagine how ecosystems express their “needs” and how cultures respond to these. Survival of the biologically fittest is one thing; survival of the ecologically balanced is rather harder to believe in.
A Critique of Grand Functionalism
I suggest, however, that there are weaknesses common to both these grand theories, two of which may be fatal. First, there is the “boundary question.”13 It makes no sense to talk about functions unless we are clear as to who and what they are functional for. The grand theories assume warfare is functional for the society that practices it and speak of primitive “societies” as if these were unambiguously definable in extent. But in fact the boundaries of primitive societies are notoriously fuzzy—witness the trouble anthropologists have had in defining the word “tribe.” The smaller and more primitive the group, the vaguer and more anarchical its boundaries. The most primitive groups known to us follow a nomadic pattern sometimes called ‘fission and fusion”—they wander about in small open groups that constantly split and merge. Warfare must always benefit somebody, so if we keep changing our definition of “society,” it is always possible to say warfare has been beneficial to society. This seems a particularly hard problem for the sociobiological thesis, because in current Darwinian theory the process of natural selection for inclusive fitness can only work within a small group of closely related organisms that is clearly demarcated from other groups of the same species.
Second, neither of the grand functionalist theories seems to take adequate account of the element of historical accident in evolution (whether biological or cultural). Many events take place not because they are “functional” in the sense of being a successful adaptation to anything, but simply because of the history of previous events. In the past, evolutionary theories (both biological and cultural) have tended too often to assume that traits must be adaptive simply because they have been around for some time and to invent “Just-So Stories” to explain why these traits must be functional and beneficial to the society, which is especially easy if we are none too clear about the boundaries of the “society.” This method seems more treacherous in dealing with cultural evolution, because the speed with which human cultures can change gives great power to history and the accidents of history, quite independent of biological and environmental forces. Warfare would appear to be a process peculiarly under the control of history, rather than biology or ecology, because of the obvious tendency of a militaristic culture to perpetuate itself and to eliminate its rivals. Once the war pattern gets started, it will continue of its own momentum, so how could it always be good for the environment? Often it must go on until it has reduced population far below the carrying capacity of the land. Sometimes, by accident, it may produce the beneficial environmental effects described by the cultural ecologists; but this is an effect, not a cause.
It seems obvious that a prominent cause or function of warfare is militarism and that a prominent cause or function of militarism is warfare. In the current state of our evidence, it seems wise to reserve judgment as to the existence of grander functions.
Cultural Darwinism
In any case, do we really need the grand theories? We have seen that the phenomenon of primitive warfare can be adequately explained in terms of the conscious motivations of its makers, and perhaps these are all we need to explain its evolution.
There is a growing awareness among anthropologists that the processes of cultural evolution resemble those of biological evolution and can also be explained in Darwinian terms, without any sociobiological implications. There is a process of cultural selection that mimics natural selection, though in a rapid Lamarckian fashion that is largely conscious and deliberate on the part of the actors. “Culture” is not a reified abstraction, nor is it a blank slate. It is a public code of symbols that is constantly changing because it receives continual input from individuals who seek to change it for the most Darwinian of reasons—to promote the survival and reproduction of themselves, their kin, and their culture.
Human behavior, in short, is for the most part probably neither Nature nor Nurture, but Nurture imitating Nature. This is not to deny that all culture has a genetic base. The human capacity for culture has itself evolved through natural selection, and it is natural selection that makes cultural selection imitate it. But that means that at some point, culture has taken over from nature. The sheer speed of cultural evolution makes it unnecessary to postulate a genetic basis (and improbable that there is one) for most cultural adaptations. Some of these adaptations may indeed have been influenced by genetic factors. It is possible that there exists in human nature some hereditary tendency toward ethnocentricity, in-group amity and out-group enmity, and, perhaps, male bonding. But if so, it is rather easily controlled and manipulated. It does not condemn us to either war or peace unless our culture decides to program us in one of those directions. Extreme Hobbesians, who always talk about the “universality” of warfare, tend to ignore its equally obvious flexibility. The introduction of the horse into the Great Basin of North America did not automatically turn all its inhabitants into fierce mounted warriors: It had this effect upon the Comanche and the Ute but had the opposite effect upon their neighbors, the “Digger” Indians. Among modern peoples, none seem more pacific than the Swedes and the Swiss, but not many centuries ago, their ancestors had a different reputation across Europe. Under pressure, a culture may switch from extreme militarism to its opposite with the alacrity of Japan after World War II. Primitive cultures can do the same: So many headhunters have become peaceful farmers in recent years that the data bank on primitive warfare is now practically closed.
This hypothesis has been called “cultural Darwinism,” “Darwinian cultural theory,” or “evolutionary anthropology.”14 It assumes that the primary means of cultural evolution is the rapid, easily diffusible, collective, and sometimes rational and calculating selection of norms and values to promote the survival and reproduction of the members of the culture. It does not imply that all cultural change is adaptive in this Darwinian sense. Much change is purely accidental; much of it, especially in the more complex societies, is coercively imposed by the authorities and is maladaptive from the point of view of most of the population; much of it is the result of cultural lag, the persistence from force of habit in practices that were once successful adaptations but are no longer so. Still, it implies that a great deal of the time, culture must be kept on track by the collective interests of individuals acting deliberately. They may receive some help from nature at times, but we can rarely know this, and we should probably cease our obsession with the question. It is past time to bury the Nature-Nurture controversy and its false dichotomies. Warfare is essentially a cultural invention, but it is not “only” an invention. We may be glad biology has not condemned us to war, but if culture has done that instead, we have gained little. A depoliticized Darwinism, open to the fact that cultures evolve by adaptation, may be the most useful intellectual framework now available to address the problem of the origins of war.
The Evolution of Primitive War
Let us begin with a methodological observation. We know far less about the prevalence and frequency of prehistoric warfare than one would think from reading many military histories, which give the impression that primitive tribes are almost constantly at war. The fact is, we know practically nothing about the war habits of the great majority of primitive peoples, even in recent times. An inventory complied at the Polemological Institute of the University of Groningen lists 100,000 known primitive cultures, about most of which we know nothing but the name and location (often, the former location, as they are now extinct), with no evidence as to whether they were warlike or peaceful. An ethnographic survey of the Amazon Basin in 1910 listed 485 distinct tribes, of which about 40 were said to be “warlike” or “fierce,” or some such description, and 20 were reported to be “peaceful.” Nothing was known about the remaining 400 and nothing ever will be.15 The great majority of the recent primitives that we know anything about have been very frequently at war. This is as true of hunter-gatherers as it is of agriculturists. A recent survey of hunter-gatherer societies concluded that over 60 percent of the groups included in the sample went to war at least once every two years.16 But we need not assume that what is true of recent hunter-gatherers is necessarily true of the Paleolithic peoples. Some of the recent hunter-gatherers included in these samples were equestrian or fishing cultures, which are modes of life prone to warfare. Most of the known primitives had already come into contact with civilization or had been living in the hinterland of civilization for some time, and such contacts have almost always raised the level of military activity, especially in North America.17 We should admit we simply do not know what the “normal” degree of warlikeness was among prestate societies, even in recent centuries, before they came into contact with states.
If Hobbesians make much of the notorious “savagery” of primitives, Rousseauists make all they can of the handful of “relatively peaceful” cultures that I have just mentioned. Their existence certainly shows that warfare is not a universal norm, but no one ever literally thought it was. To say something is “innate” does not mean it goes on all the time. Others have argued that there are no truly peaceful cultures, for upon examination, it turns out that so-called peaceful societies like the Bushmen and the Eskimo have gone to war in the past, and their current pacifism is the result of defeat and isolation. There does seem to be a correlation between simplicity of social structure and unwarlikeness. But perhaps the extremely small and simple societies that have survived into the present are unwarlike because they have been marginalized, and they may not be typical of the simple human societies that existed in the Stone Age.18
Nor can archaeology tell us much about warfare before the Neolithic, from which there are indeed abundant traces (it is said the earliest conclusive evidence of warfare is the great stone wall of Jericho, which was built circa 8000 B.C., clearly not for the purpose of keeping out wolves). But what we really need to know is whether war existed in the Paleolithic and if so, of what sort. Hunting societies do not usually distinguish weapons of war from those of the hunt, and spearheads do not reveal their targets. It has been said that a high percentage of the known human fossils, including those of early hominid species, show possible signs of human violence, but this evidence now seems thoroughly inconclusive.19 Besides, there may well have been times during the Ice Age when more than one hominid species inhabited the same area, a possibility that raises intriguing questions about our definitions of “homicide” and “war.”
With these considerations in mind, let us attempt to reconstruct the evolution of warfare. There have probably been several major breakthroughs, of which the first and most decisive was surely the invention of culture itself. Doubtless this was preceded by a long period of preadaptation. Lethal intraspecific aggression is not so uniquely human as was once thought. We know now that social predators like lions, wolves, and hyenas engage in deadly combats to guard their territories from members of their own species and that male chimpanzees cooperate not only to hunt small game but under certain circumstances to attack individuals from other chimp bands.20 Among living species, the social predators are closest to early hominids in social organization, and the chimpanzees are their closest genetic relatives. During the millennia of preadaptation, our sociobiological evolution, building upon such habits as these, eventually endowed us with a highly flexible capacity to develop fierce ethnocentric conflicts. At some point there came language and culture, along with sufficient cognitive ability to clearly distinguish group from group and express the concept of “revenge.” At this point the ancient animal patterns of instinctual behavior developed into the conscious practice called “primitive warfare.” People were categorized as friends or aliens, and offensive behavior from aliens was likely to be met with organized retaliation. Honor and glory came into the world.
Unfortunately, nothing is more mysterious than the origins of language and culture. Some think that a fully human language and the capacity for rapid cultural adaptation did not emerge until about one hundred thousand years ago with the evolution of Homo sapiens sapiens; and others believe that these abilities had a much longer prehistory.
A second major turning point was the rise of big-game hunting, long considered a clue to the rise of war. But its chronology is as mysterious as that of language. Most anthropologists now think of Australopithecus, and even early Homo, as Man the Scavenger rather than Man the Hunter. Some think big-game hunting may have developed as early as Homo erectus, more than 1 million years ago; and others believe it did not appear until Homo sapiens sapiens did, a mere one hundred thousand years ago. Some kind of hunting society could have predated language. There may have been a long and slow evolution in which hominids, who at first lived by gathering plants, scavenging dead animals, and hunting small live animals, gradually learned the art of hunting larger ones. However it happened, adaptation to the hunting life must have brought with it the following changes: increased territoriality (not focused on occupation of land but rather on control of food resources to guard them from other bands, in the fashion of the social carnivores); a premium on male bonding and male leadership; a trend toward larger, more stable, better organized bands; and more intergroup conflict.
Why hunting and warfare are male monopolies is not clear. The male advantage in physical strength and the female occupation with child rearing would of course suggest this monopoly, but do these factors explain why the monopoly is so exclusive? All one can say is that the gender-based division of labor—women gather and care for infants, men hunt and go to war—is pervasive in the known hunter-gatherer cultures and clearly has deep roots in human nature, whether these are genetic or cultural or some combination of the two.21
Several considerations, however, prevent us from supposing that Paleolithic warfare, whether it began 1 million or one hundred thousand years ago, was very common or very serious. Among these factors are the puny manpower resources (recent hunter-gatherer bands have an average size of about forty people), the probably frequent intermarriages between bands, and above all, the thin distribution of these bands (a hunter-gatherer band may have a territory one hundred miles across). All theories of primitive warfare have recognized that whether or not warlike behavior is “innate” in human nature, it has to be triggered by competition. When competition reaches a certain level of intensity, it produces a balance-of-power situation in which all groups have to cultivate warlikeness simply to preserve a margin of safety. As Hobbes put it (.Leviathan 1.13), “From this diffidence of one another, there is no way for any man to secure himself so reasonable as anticipation; that is, by force or wiles to master the persons of all men he can, so long, till he see no other power great enough to endanger him; and this is no more than his own conservation requireth, and is generally allowed.” But as a modern anthropologist has said, “In large areas of the world in the past, social inefficiency was so great that the possibilities of effective competition were very limited.”22 It seems likely that the threshold of Hobbes’s “State of Warre” was not passed until a late date in human history. The practice of revenge warfare may have helped to account for the wide dispersal of early Paleolithic man, but the same dispersion would have checked the practice of revenge warfare.
Perhaps the final turning point was the intensification of revenge warfare into a balance of power, when primitive militarism became a normal pattern. This stage was probably reached during one of the two great revolutions of late prehistory, each of which brought a dramatic increase in cultural complexity.
The rise of the Upper Paleolithic hunting culture some thirty-five thousand years ago is now considered by many anthropologists to have been a breakthrough in social evolution at least as significant as the better-known Neolithic Revolution. By this time, a fully modern type of man (Homo sapiens sapiens) had fully occupied the Old World and may have already colonized the New World. He hunted the biggest game and could have hunted men if he chose. Often he had little choice, for in many areas bands could no longer avoid conflict with their neighbors simply by moving away from them. Population density brought increased territoriality, quasi-permanent settlements, and the ability to store food, which created caches of defensible resources. The sudden flowering of the visual arts testifies to an explosive growth in cultural complexity, richness, and sophistication. And perhaps it was in the Upper Paleolithic that militarism became a common and expected feature of human society.23
If not, it certainly became that during the Neolithic Revolution, which began in the Middle East some ten thousand years ago. There appeared fixed settlements dependent on agriculture, with concentrated and vulnerable food supplies and a population density often many times that of the Paleolithic. Archaeological evidence leaves no doubt that warfare of an often lethal intensity was common among Neolithic settlements the world over: Villages were fortified, and burial sites yield an unnaturally high percentage of young males wounded in forearm or skull. The first real missile weapons, the bow and the sling, seem to have been invented around the dawn of the Neolithic; and from the same period come the earliest depictions in cave art of what would appear to be battle scenes. Population growth multiplied opportunities for mutual irritation, while allowing more human and material capital to be allocated to war making, which was now perceived as the protection of a fixed territory. It has even been suggested that the decline of hunting redirected masculine energies into the hunting of men.24
In spite of all this, the course of primitive warfare, even in the Neolithic Age, probably resembled an endless cycle rather than a clear line of development. A group might take up the culture of war because of the pressures of competition or because certain of their traditions predisposed them to that solution; and they might later revert to a more peaceable pattern, bridling the prickly martial virtues, settling disputes by arbitration, slowing the escalation of warfare by heaping more and more ritual encumbrances upon it. Until the end of the Neolithic, the option of migration was often open. The “relatively peaceful” cultures, now driven to the ends of the earth, may have been much more common. There was still nothing inexorable about the progress of primitive warfare.
But warfare then began to promote the development of more advanced forms of social organization, simply because these were better at war. There appeared genuine “tribes,” networks of villages united by social and cultural ties—ties that included military assistance. In such tribes, famous war leaders might arise, and a very successful war leader might become a “chief.” With the chiefs, warfare in the political sense entered history.
Notes
1. The notion that primitive warfare was essentially different from modern warfare was established by the 1940s. In 1942, in A Study of War (2d ed., Chicago, 1965) Quincy Wright estimated that about 60 percent of primitive wars were fought not for economic or political reasons but for what he called “social” reasons (revenge, prestige, sport, ritual) and the more primitive the group, the more “social” its warfare. The distinction was supported by Bronislaw Malinowski, “An Anthropological Analysis of War,” American Journal of Sociology 46 (1941), 521-550, reprinted in War: Studies from Psychology, Sociology, Anthropology, ed. Leon Bramson and G. W. Goethals (New York, 1964), 245-268; by H. H. Turney-High in his 1949 work, Primitive War: Its Practices and Concepts, 2d ed. (Columbia, S.C., 1971); and by Joseph Schneider, “Primitive Warfare: A Methodological Note,” American Sociological Review 15 (1950), 772-777, reprinted in Bramson and Goethals, War.; 275-283. Schneider concluded that primitive war is “a matter of crime and punishment within populations where systems of public justice are undeveloped. This is not war.” This view I find too extreme, but the general distinction has won acceptance. Compare Tom Broch and Johann Galtung, “Belligerence Among the Primitives,” Journal of Peace Research 3 (1966), 33-45.
2. Anthropological studies of warfare, a once-neglected subject, have proliferated in the last thirty years, as witnessed by the titles listed in The Anthropology of War: A Bibliography, ed. R. B. Ferguson and Leslie Farragher (New York, 1988). We still lack a comprehensive and up-to-date synthesis comparable to the older works by Wright and Turney-High, but the collections listed in the bibliography will show the range of recent research. See also the report on a 1990 American Anthropological Association conference by Bruce Bower, “Gauging the Winds of War: Anthropologists Seek the Roots of Human Conflict,” Science News 139 (6) February 9, 1991, 88-89, 91.
3. Roy Rapaport, Pigs for the Ancestors: Ritual in the Ecology of a New Guinea People (New Haven, 1968); A. P. Vayda, War in Ecological Perspective: Persistence, Change, and Adaptive Processes in Three Oceanian Societies (New York, 1976); John Keegan, A History of Warfare (New York, 1993).
4. David Fabbro, “Peaceful Societies: An Introduction,” Journal of Peace Research 15 (1978), 67-83, reprinted in R. A. Falk and S. S. Kim, eds. The War System: An Interdisciplinary Approach (Boulder, 1980).
5. I refer to the anthropological school called cultural materialism, well known through the writings of Marvin Harris: Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches: The Riddles of Culture (New York, 1974); Cannibals and Kings: The Origin of Culture (New York, 1977); Our Kind: Who We Are, Where We Came From, Where We Are Going (New York, 1988). See also R. B. Ferguson, ed., “Introduction: Studying War,” in Ferguson, Warfare, Culture, and Environment (Orlando, Fla., 1984), 1-81.
6. W. H. Durham, “Resource Competition and Human Aggression: Part 1, A Review of Primitive War,” Quarterly Review of Biology 51 (1976), 385-415; Coevolution: Genes, Culture, and Human Diversity (Stanford, 1991).
7. Tacitus, Germania 31.1 owe the parallel with the Sioux to Turney-High, Primitive War, 146.
8. Reprinted in Aggression and War: Their Biological and Social Bases, ed. Jo Groebel and R. A. Hinde (Cambridge, 1989), xiii-xvi.
9. U. S. News and World Report, April 11, 1988, 57-58.
10. The most influential sociobiological treatises include Edward Wilson’s Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (Cambridge, Mass., 1975) and On Human Nature (Cam-bridge, Mass., 1978)—the latter contains Wilson’s fullest discussion of warfare—and Richard Alexander’s Darwinism and Human Affairs (Seattle, 1979), which introduced the balance of power theory. Literature on the sociobiological controversy is vast and keeps proliferating. A survey of recent research particularly relevant to the study of warfare is Sociobiology and Conflict: Evolutionary Perspectives on Competition, Cooperation, Violence, and Warfare, ed. J.M.G. Van der Dennen and V. Falger (London, 1990).
11. Asia 40 (1940), 402-405, reprinted in Bramson and Goethals, War; 269-274.
12. Marvin Harris, “Warfare Old and New,” Natural History 81 (1972), 18-20, and the works of the materialist school cited here in nn. 3 and 5. For the female infanticide theory, see Harris and W. T. Divale, “Population, Warfare, and the Male-Supremacist Complex,” American Anthropologist 78 (1976), 521-538.
13. The phrase was suggested by C. R. Hallpike, “Functionalist Interpretations of Primitive Warfare,” Man 8 (1973), 451-470. Another useful critique of the grand theories is C. A. Robarchek’s “Primitive Warfare and the Ratomorphic Image of Mankind,” American Anthropologist 91 (1989), 903-920.
14. Leading examples of the “cultural Darwinist” approach are Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt, The Biology of Peace and War: Man, Animals, and Aggression, trans. Erich Mossbacher (New York, 1979), first published in German in 1975; Robert Boyd and P. J. Richerson, Culture and the Evolutionary Process (Chicago, 1985); and Durham, Coevolution. These theories are discussed at greater length in my article “The Origins of War: Biological and Anthropological Theories,” History and Theory 35 (1996), 1-28, copyright © 1996 Wesleyan University. Some of its argument is used here with the permission of Wesleyan University.
15. J.M.G. Van der Dennen, “Primitive War and the Ethnological Inventory Project,” in Sociobiology and Conflict, 247-269.
16. C. R. Ember, “Myths About Hunter-Gatherers,” Ethnology 17 (1978), 439-448.
17. War in the Tribal Tone: Expanding States and Indigenous Warfare, ed. R. B. Ferguson and N. L. Whitehead (Santa Fe, N. Mex., 1992).
18. Eibl-Eibesfeldt, among others, has argued against the existence of peaceful societies. But see the counterarguments of B. M. Knauft, “Violence and Sociality in Human Evolution,” Current Anthropology 32 (1991), 391-428.
19. M. K. Roper, “A Survey of the Evidence for Intrahuman Killing in the Pleistocene,” Current Anthropology 10 (1969), 427-459.
20. See G. E. King, “Society and Territory in Human Evolution,” Journal of Human Evolution 5 (1976), 323-332; J. H. Manson and R. W. Wrangham, “Intergroup Aggression in Chimpanzees and Humans,” Current Anthropology 32 (1991), 369-390; and for a “Rousseauist” interpretation of chimpanzee and early-hominid societies, see Margaret Powers, The Egalitarians, Human and Chimpanzee: An Anthropological View of Social Organization (Cambridge, 1991).
21. The question of the origins of war is closely linked to the equally controversial question of the origins of gender roles. It is often said that all known human societies are male dominated to some degree, but this depends on our definition of male dominance. Some anthropologists think that any “asymmetry” in gender roles that is oriented to the male principle—whether in division of labor, descent systems, or post-marital residence—implies what Harris and Divale have called the male supremacy complex (see n. 12 here). For an introduction to this controversy, see Peggy Sanday, Female Power and Male Dominance: On the Origins of Sexual Inequality (Cambridge, 1981), 161-183. My own provisional conclusions, which in this limited space must be stated somewhat categorically, are as follows:
1. It is not clear that there has ever existed a culture without gender asymmetry in at least the division of labor. Since men monopolize warfare, they necessarily control external relations, so in this sense there has probably never been a society without a degree of male leadership, except possibly some of the so-called peaceful societies. This does not prevent women from having a degree of autonomy in their own sphere.
2. I prefer to restrict labels like male supremacy and male dominance to the more militaristic cultures that emphasize male aggressiveness and male secret societies and exclude women from decisionmaking in council. There is general agreement that militarism is associated with male supremacy, though even in very warlike cultures this may be more pronounced in myth than in practice.
Ever since Margaret Mead returned from Samoa, anthropologists have tried to find cultures without male leadership. Recently, Maria Lepowsky (Fruit of the Motherland: Gender in an Egalitarian Society [New York, 1993]) claimed to have discovered on the island of Vanatinai near New Guinea a “sexually egalitarian society that challenges the concept of the universality of male dominance and contests the assumption that the subjugation of women is inevitable” (vii); she found there neither gender asymmetries nor any exclusively male institutions of significance. These claims are somewhat dampened when one learns that the island was pacified by the British early in this century, and naturally, the end of warfare would have put an end to the principal male-bonded institution, there as elsewhere in Melanesia. The author minimizes this fact by arguing that even in the days of war making “women were not excluded from councils of war or diplomacy or from the battlefield” (75). One does not know what “diplomacy” could mean, but the traditions she relates suggest that Vanatinai women never participated in fighting and appeared on the battlefield only to perform the roles commonly assigned to women in primitive ritual battles—making magic, cheering the warriors, nursing the injured (58ff.). Lepowsky thinks that Vanatinai warfare was defensive rather than aggressive, but she also speaks of these people fighting for “revenge or defense” (74, 292), which raises the suspicion that like many other writers on premodern warfare, she has confused the two notions (see my earlier comment on this issue in the introduction).
22. Hallpike, “Functionalist Interpretations,” 467.
23. See W. T. Divale, “Systemic Population Control in the Middle and Upper Paleolithic: Inferences Based on Contemporary Hunter-Gatherers,” World Archaeology 4 (1972), 222-243; and for a survey of the general problem of the evolution of complex cultures, see Prehistoric Hunter-Gatherers: The Emergence of Cultural Complexity, ed. T. D. Price and J. A. Brown (Orlando, Fla., 1985).
24. Clinton Kroeber and Bernard Fontana, Massacre on the Gila: An Account of the last Major Battle Between American Indians, with Reflections on the Origin of War (Tucson, Ariz. 1986).