A History of Warfare

by John Keegan

  WAR AND THE ANTHROPOLOGISTS

  A psychological basis for a theory of aggression was advanced by Freud, who originally regarded it as the frustration of the sexual drive by the ego. After the First World War, in which two of his sons served with distinction but which marked him by its tragedy, he adopted a darker view.8 In a famous correspondence with Einstein, published as Why War?, he states bluntly that ‘man has within himself a lust for hatred and destruction’ and offered as the only hope of offsetting it the development of ‘a well-founded dread of the form future wars will take’. These observations, adopted by Freudians as the theory of the ‘death drive’, principally concerned the individual. In Totem and Taboo (1913), Freud had proposed a theory of group aggression which drew heavily on literary anthropology. He suggested that the patriarchal family was the primal social unit and that it had ramified by the working of sexual tensions within it. The patriarchal father was supposed to have had exclusive sexual rights over the family women, thus driving his sexually deprived sons to murder and then eat him. Ridden by guilt, they then outlawed or tabooed the practice of incest and instituted that of exogamy — marrying beyond the family circle — with all its potentiality for wife-stealing, rape and consequent inter-family and then inter-tribal feud of which the study of primitive societies yields so many examples.

  Totem and Taboo was a work of the imagination. More recently the new discipline of ethology, in which psychological theory is combined with the study of animal behaviour, has produced more rigorous explanations of group aggression. The founding ‘territorial’ idea derives from the work of Konrad Lorenz, a Nobel prizewinner, who argued from his observation of animals in the wild and in controlled environments that aggression was a natural ‘drive’, deriving its energy from the organism itself, which achieves ‘discharge’ when stimulated by an appropriate ‘releaser’. Most animals of the same species, however, possessed in his view the ability to palliate the aggressive discharge in others of their own kind, usually by displaying signs of submission or retreat. Man, he argued, originally behaved in the same way; but by learning to make hunting weapons he succeeded in overpopulating his territory. Individuals then had to kill others in order to defend a patch, and the use of weapons, which emotionally ‘distanced’ killer from victim, atrophied the submissive response. Such was the process, he believed, by which man had been transformed from a subsistence hunter of other species into an aggressive killer of his own.9

  Robert Ardrey elaborated Lorenz’s territorial idea to suggest how individual aggression might have become group aggression. Being more effective as hunters than individuals, groups of humans, he argued, learnt to hunt cooperatively over common territories as hunting animals had adapted to do, so that cooperative hunting became the basis of social organisation and supplied the impulse to fight human interlopers.10 From Ardrey’s hunting thesis, Robin Fox and Lionel Tiger have gone on to propose an explanation of why males provide social leadership. Hunting-bands, they say, had to be exclusively male in composition, not just because males are stronger but because the presence of women would be a biological distraction; because hunting-bands had to accept leadership for reasons of efficiency and were for millennia the principal providers of sustenance, aggressive male leadership thereafter determined the ethos of all forms of social organisation.11

  The theories of Lorenz, Ardrey, Tiger and Fox, which drew heavily on the work of human and animal behavioural scientists, were not welcomed by the practitioners of the oldest discipline in social science, anthropology. Anthropology is an extension of ethnography, the study of surviving ‘primitive’ peoples in their habitats; from ethnography it attempts to supply explanations of the origins and nature of civilised societies. Early ethnographers, like Latifau and Demeunier, had recognised in the eighteenth century that warfare was an intrinsic feature of the societies they studied and in their work on, for example, the American Indians they provided now invaluable descriptions of ‘primitive’ warfare.12 Descriptive ethnography became anthropology because, in the nineteenth century, it was invaded by proponents and opponents of Darwinian theory; thus was born the great ‘nature versus nurture’ debate which continues to divide social scientists to this day. In the course of the nature/nurture debate — it was opened by Francis Dalton, Darwin’s cousin, in 1874 — war was quite soon extruded as a subject of study. That was an achievement of the nurture school which, determined in a typically nineteenth-century way to prove that man’s higher powers were dominant over his lower nature and that reason would lead him to foster ever more cooperative social forms, managed to fix the focus of anthropological enquiry on to the origin of political institutions. Those, they said, were to be found within the family, clan and tribe, rather than in their external relations (of which warmaking was a type). Some in the nature school, who became known as Social Darwinians for their dedication to the concept of struggle as a means of change, disagreed, but they were marginalised.13 The nurture school contrived to draw discussion into what they had identified as the key issue, that of kinship in primitive society, from which they believed it could be shown how all higher, more complex, non-blood relationships derived.

  Kinship concerned the relationship between parents and their children and their children’s relationships with each other and more distant relatives. It was not at issue that such relationships pre-dated the formation of the state. It was equally not at issue that family and state were different organisations. The problem was to show how the state had developed from the family and whether family relationships determined those that states adopted. The essentially liberal philosophy of the nurture school demanded evidence that relationships within a state could be established by rational choice and fixed by legal form. Anthropology came under pressure, therefore, to produce examples of primitive societies in which patterns of kinship anticipated those in the politics of modern liberal states. There was a great deal of malleable evidence available, particularly of the sort in which myth and ritual were used to reinforce bonds of kinship and obviate recourse to violence, and the nurture school made full use of it. By the end of the nineteenth century, indeed, the energies of anthropologists were largely devoted not to debating whether kinship was the root of human relations, but whether the creative cultures they took as a model of human organisation had developed spontaneously at a number of separate places or had been diffused — that argument was called ‘diffusionism’ — from an original centre to others.

  This search for origins was essentially self-defeating, since not even the most primitive societies available for study, it had to be admitted, existed in a primeval state. All must have evolved in some way or been altered by contact, however tenuous, with others. The wasteful diffusion of energy among anthropologists in what was essentially a sterile debate was ended peremptorily at the beginning of the twentieth century by a German emigrant to the United States, Franz Boas, who simply denied that a search for origins was productive. Anthropologists, he said, would discover if they searched widely enough that cultures merely perpetuated themselves. Since perpetuation was not rational, it was futile to sift between cultures in the search for historical endorsement of a preferred modern political form. Man should be free to choose among the widest variety of cultural forms and adopt that which best suited him.14

  This academic doctrine, which became known as Cultural Determinism, quickly achieved enormous public popularity through the work of his assistant, Ruth Benedict, whose Patterns of Culture, published in 1934, became the most influential work of anthropology ever written, even allowing for the widespread attention drawn to the universality of human myths by Sir James Frazer through The Golden Bough (eleven volumes, 1890–1915).15 Benedict proposed the existence of two main cultural forms, Apollonian and Dionysian, the former authoritarian, the latter permissive. The idea of the Dionysian mode, however, had already aroused widespread attention as a result of a visit made by a young pupil of Boas, Margaret Mead, to the South Seas in 1925. In Coming of Age in Samoa Mead re
ported that she had found a society which existed apparently in perfect harmony with itself, where the bonds of kinship attenuated almost into invisibility, where parental authority was dissolved within the affections of the extended family, where children did not compete for primacy and where violence was virtually unknown.

  For feminists, progressive educationists and moral relativists Coming of Age in Samoa remains today a gospel text, whether they are aware of it or not. Cultural Determinism also had a profound effect on Boas’ fellow anthropologists in the Anglo-Saxon world, but for a different reason. The British in particular, leaders in ethnography because of the opportunities for fieldwork that the enormous extent of their empire offered, accepted the importance of its thrust but recoiled from its intellectual imprecision; they were dissatisfied above all by the refusal of the Cultural Determinists to admit that human nature and man’s material needs might be as important as freedom of choice in determining within which culture he lived. Under the influence, therefore, of another German-speaking émigré, Bronislaw Malinowski, who had also done his first fieldwork in the South Seas, but ten years before Margaret Mead, they offered an alternative which has come to be known as Structural Functionalism.16 The clumsy title reflected a conflation of two philosophies. The first was evolutionary and Darwinian: it laid down that any society’s form was a function of its ‘adaptation’ — the term is a pure Darwinism — to its surroundings. Thus, to suggest a crude example, ‘swidden’ (slash-and-burn) agriculturalists pursued their apparently feckless way of making a living because they found themselves in forested areas where soil fertility was low but other people thin on the ground. It therefore made sense to hack out a clearing for a season or two, grow yams, fatten pigs and then move on. The ability of such societies, however, to remain ‘adapted’ to their surroundings is sustained by their cultural structure, which may appear simple at first glance but, to the ethnographer prepared to devote sufficient time to living among them, may reveal itself as surprisingly elaborate.

  The Structural Functionalists got down to a far more detailed analysis of society than the Cultural Determinists thought necessary. The raw material they collected to show how structure supported function turned out, however, to fall into those two now familiar categories, myth and kinship. Over the interrelationship of the one with the other they were to debate in increasingly complex and private language up to the Second World War and beyond. The debate became all the more agitated after the war with the intervention of a brilliant Frenchman, Claude Lévi-Strauss, who succeeded in making structure seem much more important than function. Starting with Freud’s favoured concept of taboo, he set out to give it the anthropological foundation that psychoanalysis had always failed to supply. There was indeed, he said, a taboo, supported by myth, against incest in primitive societies; they accommodated it by arranging mechanisms of exchange, between families, tribes and so on, in which women were the most valuable commodity. Exchange systems evened out rancours and resentments; the exchange of women, in the avoidance of incest, was the ultimate emollient.17

  Anthropology had got itself into a situation where explanations of how societies remained stable and self-sustaining dominated all other ways of looking at them. Anthropologists knew that disputes over women were the chief cause of trouble among primitives; they refused, however, to apply themselves to the study of its consequence, which was war. This was perverse. Lévi-Strauss was writing in the aftermath of the worst war in the world’s history, and numbers of leading anthropologists, notably Edward Evans-Pritchard, the outstanding British anthropologist of his generation, had fought in it; Evans-Pritchard had actually led a band of ferocious tribesmen against the Italians in Ethiopia in 1941 and the horrors of the revenge they took on their former rulers caused him anguish for the rest of his life.18 In any case, the nature of the two world wars, particularly the morbidly ritual character of the trench offensives of the First World War, cried out for anthropological investigation. It was a cry that anthropologists chose not to heed.

  Part of the reason for that may have been because the first anthropologist to lose patience with his colleagues’ collective refusal to recognise the importance of warfare had done so in a book deliberately intended to cause intellectual offence. Primitive Warfare, published in 1949, was the work of Harry Turney-High, an American anthropologist who, like many of his generation, did his fieldwork among native Americans — some of whom were among the most warlike people known to ethnographers. In 1942, however, Turney-High left his university to enter military service and had the good luck to be posted to the horsed cavalry at the moment that it was about to disappear for good. The warhorse and the horsed warrior’s weapons must draw the thoughts of an educated man with an informed imagination back to the very beginnings of man’s relationship with the animal world; ‘you have to have ridden with a squadron to understand the fascination of horses en masse, for the horse is a herd animal by instinct,’ wrote Alexander Stahlberg, a contemporary of Turney-High’s in one of the last German cavalry regiments.19 Turney-High’s exercises with the sword opened his eyes to the inadequacy of almost everything professional ethnographers had written about early warfare.

  The persistence with which social scientists have confused war with the tools of war [he wrote on his opening page] would be no less astounding did their writing not reveal … complete ignorance of the simpler aspects of military history.… It would be hard to find a noncommissioned officer in the professional armies of the second rate powers who has been as confused as most analysts of human society.20

  Turney-High was right; I constantly recall the look of disgust that passed over the face of a highly distinguished curator of one of the greatest collections of arms and armour in the world when I casually remarked to him that a common type of debris removed from the flesh of wounded men by surgeons in the gunpowder age was broken bone and teeth from neighbours in the ranks. He had simply never considered what was the effect of the weapons about which he knew so much, as artefacts, on the bodies of the soldiers who used them. ‘This civilian attitude’, Turney-High remarked, ‘has resulted in hundreds of museum cases holding weapons from all over the world, catalogued, marked with accession number, and uncomprehended.’21 He was determined to make his brother and sister anthropologists comprehend the dark and violent side of the life of the peoples they studied, the bone-crushing, flesh-piercing purpose of the weapons they carried in ceremony, and the lethal consequences of breakdown in the exchange mechanisms with which they were alleged to sustain their kinship systems in perpetual equilibrium.

  Turney-High did not deny that some primitive peoples were ‘pre-military’. He was even prepared to admit that some peoples, if left to themselves, were happy to choose as peaceful and productive a way of life as Margaret Mead said she had found among the Samoans.22 He was insistent, however, that war was a timelessly universal activity, give or take the odd exceptions, and he was pitiless in rubbing his fellow anthropologists’ noses in that fact.

  The ethnographer has not hesitated to describe, classify, and co-ordinate all culture, material and non-material, to the best of his ability. Neither has he hesitated to discuss war at length, for it is one of man’s most important non-material complexes. The core alone, ‘How does this group fight?’, is excluded. The field researcher has been meticulous regarding the icing and has overlooked the cake.23

  The anthropologist-turned-cavalryman served up in man-sized helpings the ethnographic record of how groups fought. Moving in great swoops from Polynesia to the Amazonian basin, from Zululand to the America of the Plains Indians, from the sub-Arctic tundra to the West African forests, Turney-High described in bloody detail the practises of captive torture, cannibalism, scalp-taking, head-hunting and ritual evisceration wherever they were to be found. He analysed the exact nature of combat in dozens of different societies, explaining how the New Hebrideans appointed champions to stage ritual duels before the assembled warring sides, the North American Papago chiefs nominated some men to
be ‘killers’ and others to protect the killers in the fight, the Assinboin accepted the war leadership of men who had had a dream of victory over a customary enemy and the Iroquois maintained a battle police to hold the shirkers in a war party to their duty. He was relentless in tabulating the exact effect of spear, arrow, club and sword on human flesh; lest any fainthearted colleague flinch from contemplating what the function of a flint warhead might have been, he pointed out that its lineal descendant was the bayonet, the development, he alleged, of a weapon system which had been responsible for the destruction of more human life than any other artefact in history.24

  Turney-High’s purpose was, however, a larger one than that of confronting anthropology with evidence that primitive man had blood on his hands. He postulated from the evidence he presented an agonising crux: most of the societies which ethnographers preferred to study, he said, existed ‘below the military horizon’ and it was only when the sun of their future rose above it that they emerged into modernity. At a stroke he challenged all the theorisings of the Cultural Determinists, the Structural Functionalists and the disciples of Lévi-Strauss (whose seminal Structures élémentaires de la parenté also appeared in 1949). What Turney-High boldly asserted was that it was pointless to look for the origins of the liberal state in any freedom of choice among available cultural systems, structural adaptation to habitat or mythic management of exchange systems. All societies trapped at that level, he insisted, were bound to remain primitive till kingdom come. It was only when a society moved from the practice of primitive war to what he called true war (sometimes he called it civilised war) that a state could emerge, and it was only, by inference, when a state had come into existence that choices could be made about the nature that it should take — theocratic, monarchic, aristocratic or democratic. The key test of transition from primitivity to modernity, he concluded, was ‘the rise of the army with officers’.25