Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches

by Marvin Harris

  Much interest centers on the question of whether the fighting and territorial adjustments among the Maring results from what is loosely called “population pressure.” If by “population pressure” we mean the absolute inability of a group to meet minimum calorie requirements, then we cannot say that there is population pressure in the Maring region. When the Tsembaga held their pig festival in 1963, the human population stood at 200 and the pig population at 169. Rappaport calculates that the Tsembaga had enough unused forest lands in their territory to feed an additional 84 people (or 84 mature pigs) without producing any permanent damage to the forest cover or degrading other vital aspects to their habitat. But I object to defining population pressure as the onset of actual nutritional deficiencies or the actual beginning of irreversible damage to the environment. In my opinion, population pressure exists as soon as a population begins to move closer to the point of calorie or protein deficiencies, or as soon as it begins to grow and consume at a rate which sooner or later must degrade and deplete the life-sustaining capacities of its environment.

  The population size at which nutritional deficiencies and degradation begin to occur is the upper limit of what ecologists call the habitats “carrying capacity.” Like the Maring, most primitive societies possess institutional mechanisms for restricting and reversing population growth well below carrying capacity. This discovery has led to much befuddle-ment. Since particular human groups cut back on population, production, and consumption in advance of any discernibly negative consequences caused by overshooting carrying capacity, some experts claim that population pressure cannot be the cause of the cutbacks. But we do not have to see a safety valve get stuck and a boiler explode in order to judge that the valve is there because it normally prevents the boiler from destroying itself.

  There is no great mystery either about how these cutoffs—the cultural equivalents of thermostats, safety valves, and circuit breakers—became part of tribal life. As in the case of other adaptive evolutionary novelties, groups that invented or adopted growth cutoff institutions survived more consistently than those that blundered forward across the limit of carrying capacity. Primitive warfare is neither capricious nor instinctive; it is simply one of the cutoff mechanisms that help to keep human populations in a state of ecological equilibrium with respect to their habitats.

  Most of us prefer to regard warfare not as a safeguard but as a threat to sound ecological relationships brought on by irrepressible and irrational behavior. Many of my friends think it is sinful to say that war is a rational solution to any kind of problem. Yet I think that my explanation of primitive warfare as an ecological adaptation provides more grounds for optimism about the prospects for ending modern warfare than currently popular aggressive instinct theories. As I said earlier, if wars are caused by innate human killer instincts, there is not much we can do about preventing them. If, on the other hand, wars are caused by practical conditions and relationships, then we can reduce the threat of warfare by changing those conditions and relationships.

  I don’t want to be labeled an advocate of war, so permit me to make the following disclaimer: I am saying that warfare is an ecologically adaptive lifestyle among primitive peoples, not that modern wars are ecologically adaptive. With nuclear weapons, war can now be escalated to the point of total mutual annihilation. So we have arrived at a phase in the evolution of our species when the next great adaptive advance must either be the elimination of nuclear weapons or the elimination of war itself.

  The system-regulating or system-maintaining functions of Maring warfare can be inferred from several different lines of evidence. First of all, we know that warfare breaks out at a point where production and consumption are booming and the pig and human populations are building back up from the lows reached at the end of the previous fight. The cutoff pig festival and subsequent hostilities don’t coincide with the same maxima for every cycle. Some clan groups try to validate their land claims at levels below previous maxima as a result of the disproportionately rapid build-up of enemy neighbors. Others may delay their pig festival until they actually transgress the threshold of the carrying capacity of their local territory. The important thing, however, is not the regulating effects of warfare upon the population of one or another clan, but upon the population of the Maring region as a whole.

  Primitive warfare does not achieve its regulating effects primarily through deaths in combat. Even among nations that practice industrialized forms of killing, combat deaths do not substantially affect the rate of population growth. Tens of millions of battle fatalities in the twentieth century show up as a slight hesitation in the growth curve’s implacable upward thrust. Take the case of Russia: During the height of the fighting and famine of World War I and the Bolshevik revolution, the correlation between projected peacetime population and actual wartime population was off by only a few percentage points. One decade after the fighting had ceased, the Russian population had fully recuperated and was right back on the curve where it would have been if the war and the revolution had never occurred. Another example: in Vietnam, despite the extraordinary intensity of the ground and air wars, population rose steadily all through the 1960’s.

  Referring to catastrophes like World War II, Frank Livingstone of the University of Michigan has said quite bluntly: “When we consider that these slaughters only occur about once in a generation, the conclusion seems inescapable that they have no effect on the population growth or size.” One reason for this is that the average woman is extremely fecund and can easily give birth eight or nine times during the twenty-five to thirty-five years during which she can bear children. In World War II, the number of all war-induced deaths remained below 10 percent of the population, and a slight increase in the number of births per woman could easily have made up the deficit in a few years. (There was also an assist from a lowering of infant mortality rates and a lowering of the death rate in general.)

  I can’t tell you the actual rates of war deaths among the Maring. But among the Yanomamo, a tribe that is located on the border between Brazil and Venezuela and is reputed to be one of the worlds most warlike primitive groups, about 15 percent of the adults die as a result of warfare. I shall have a great deal more to say about the Yanomamo in the next chapter.

  The most important reason for downgrading combat as a means of population control is that everywhere in the world, males are the main belligerents and the principal victims of battlefield engagements. Among the Yanomamo, for example, only 7 percent of adult women versus 33 percent of adult men die in battle. According to Andrew Vayda, the bloodiest rout among the Maring resulted in fatalities for fourteen men, six women, and three children out of a population of three hundred in the defeated clan. Male combat deaths can be dismissed as being virtually without effect on the reproductive potential of groups like the Tsembaga. Even if 75 percent of the adult males were killed off in one big battle, the surviving females could easily make up the deficit in a single generation.

  Like most primitive societies, the Maring and Yanomamo are polygynous, meaning that many men have several wives. All women get married as soon as they can bear children and remain married throughout their entire reproductive life span. Any normal human male can keep four or five fertile women pregnant most of the time. When a Maring man dies, there are plenty of brothers and nephews waiting to add the widow to their ménage. Even from a subsistence point of view, most males are entirely dispensable, and their deaths in combat need create no insurmountable difficulties for their widows and children. Among the Maring, as I mentioned in the previous chapter, the women are the main gardeners and pig raisers anyway. This is true of cut-and-burn subsistence systems all over the world. The men contribute to the gardening by burning off the forest cover, but women are perfectly capable of carrying out this heavy work on their own. In most primitive societies, whenever there are heavy loads to be moved—firewood or baskets of yams—the women, not the men, are regarded as the appropriate “beasts of burden.” Given the mini
mal contribution which Maring males make to subsistence, the higher the percentage of women in the population, the higher the overall efficiency of food production. As far as food is concerned, the Maring men are like the pigs: They consume much more than they produce. The women and children would eat better if they concentrated on raising pigs instead of men.

  So the adaptive significance of Maring warfare cannot consist of the brute effect of combat deaths upon population growth. Instead, I think that warfare preserves the Maring ecosystem through two rather indirect and less-known consequences. One of these has to do with the fact that as a result of warfare, local groups are forced to abandon their prime garden areas at a point below carrying capacity. The other is that warfare increases the rate of female infant mortality, and thus despite the demographic insignificance of male combat deaths, warfare acts as an effective regulator of regional population growth.

  First, let me explain the abandonment of prime garden lands. For several years after a rout, neither victors nor vanquished use the defeated group’s central gardening area, which consists of the best, middle-altitude, secondary forest sites. This abandonment, although temporary, helps to maintain the carrying capacity of the region. When the Kundegai defeated the Tsembaga in 1953, they tore up the Tsembaga gardens, destroyed groves of fruit trees, desecrated the burial grounds and pig ovens, burned the houses, slaughtered all the adult pigs they could find, and carried off all the baby pigs to their villages. As Rappaport says, the depradations were directed toward making it difficult for the Tsembaga to return to their own territory, rather than toward the acquisition of booty. The Kundegai, fearing the vengeance of the Tsembaga’s ancestor ghosts, withdrew to their own territory. There they hung up certain magic fight stones in net bags inside a sacred shelter. These stones were not taken down until the Kundegai were able to thank their own ancestors at the next pig festival. As long as the stones remained up, the Kundegai were fearful of the ancestral spirits of the Tsembaga and refrained from gardening or hunting on Tsembaga territory. As it happened, the Tsembaga themselves eventually reoccupied the abandoned lands. In other wars, as I have said, the victors or their allies eventually made use of the lands left temporarily vacant by routs. But in any event, the immediate effect of a rout is that intensively cultivated portions of forest are placed in fallow while previously unused areas—the border areas of the loser’s territory—are placed under cultivation.

  In the New Guinea highlands, as well as in all other tropical forest regions, repeated burning and cutting of the same area threatens the forest’s recuperative powers. If the interval between successive burnings is too short, the soil becomes dry and hard and the trees cannot reseed themselves. Grasses invade the garden sites, and the entire habitat gradually changes from rich primary forest to gullied and eroded grasslands that cannot be used for traditional kinds of agriculture. Millions of acres of grasslands throughout the world are known to have been produced by this sequence.

  Among the Maring, relatively little deforestation has occurred. There are some patches of permanent grassland and degraded secondary forest in the territory of large and aggressive groups such as the Kundegai—the group that was responsible for the rout of the Tsembaga in 1953. But the life-destroying consequence of trying to force the forest to sustain more pigs and people than it can tolerate are evident in many nearby regions of the New Guinea highlands. For example, a recent study of the South Foré region by Dr. Arthur Sorenson of the National Institutes of Health shows that the Foré have inflicted large-scale irreversible damage upon their primary forest habitat over a four-hundred-square-mile area of the Central Range. Thick Kunai grass has taken the place of abandoned garden and hamlet sites, following the movement of settlement deeper into the virgin forests. A general breaking up of the forest can be seen in regions where gardening has been carried out for many years. I think that the Maring’s ritually timed cycle of war, rumbim peace, and pig slaughter has helped to protect the Maring habitat from a similar fate.

  Amid all the bizarre events that take place during the ritual cycle—the rumbim planting, pig slaughter, the hanging of the magic fight stories, and the war itself—a simple matter of timing strikes me as more amazing than anything else. In the Maring region, gardens must lie fallow for a minimum of ten to twelve consecutive years before they can be burned and replanted without danger of being degraded into grassland. The pig festivals also occur about twice a generation—or every ten to twelve years. This can’t be a mere coincidence. So I think we can now at last answer the question “When do the Maring have enough pigs to thank the ancestors?” Answer: “They have enough pigs when the forest has grown back over the routed group’s former garden area.”

  The Maring, like other cut-and-burn people, live by “eating the forest”—burning trees and planting crops in the ashes. Their ritual cycle and ceremonialized war prevents them from eating too much forest too fast. The routed group draws back from the lands topographically best suited for gardens. This permits regeneration of forest cover in endangered sectors where they and their pigs have eaten too much. During the sojourn among their allies, the people who have been routed may return to make use of portions of their territory, but at unendangered sites in primary forest remote from their enemies. If they succeed, with the help of their allies, in raising many pigs and building back their strength, they will attempt to reoccupy their lands and place them into full production once again. The rhythm of war and peace, strength and weakness, many pigs and few pigs, central gardens and peripheral gardens, evokes corresponding pulses in all the neighboring clans. Although the victors do not immediately seek to occupy their enemy’s territory, they plant gardens closer to the routed enemy’s border than they did before the war. Most importantly, their pig population has been drastically reduced, yielding at least a temporary cutback in the rate of advance toward the threshold of the territory’s carrying capacity. When the pig population approaches maximum, the victors take down the magic fight stones, uproot the rumbim, and prepare to enter the unoccupied and newly regenerated territory—peacefully if their former enemies are still too weak to engage them, vengefully if their former enemies have moved back.

  In the linked pulsations of people, pigs, gardens, and forests we can well understand why the pigs acquire a ritual sanctity regarded as incompatible with swinedom in other parts of the world. Since one adult pig eats as much forest as one adult human, pig slaughter reduces man slaughter at the climax of each successive pulse. No wonder the ancestors crave pigs; otherwise they would have to “eat” their sons and daughters!

  One problem remains. When the Tsembaga were routed from their territory in 1953, they sought refuge with seven different local groups. In some cases, the clans they went to live with took in additional “refugees” from other wars before and after the defeat of the Tsembaga. It would seem, therefore, that the ecological threat to the routed groups’ territories had merely been transferred from one place to another, and that the refugees would soon begin to eat up their hosts’ forests. So mere displacement of people is not sufficient to keep the population from degrading the environment. There must also be some way of limiting actual population growth. This brings us to the second consequence of primitive warfare which I mentioned a moment ago.

  In most primitive societies, warfare is an effective means of population control because intense, recurring intergroup combat places a premium upon rearing male rather than female infants. The more numerous the adult males, the stronger the military force which a group dependent upon hand weapons can put into the field and the more likely it is to hold onto its territory against the pressure exerted by its neighbors. According to a demographic survey of over 600 primitive populations carried out by William T. Divale of the American Museum of Natural History, there is an extraordinary consistent imbalance of boys over girls in the junior and infant age ranks (up to about 15 years old). The average ratio of boys to girls is 150:100, but some groups even have twice as many boys as girls. The Tsembaga
ratio of boys to girls falls close to the average of 150:100. When we turn to the adult age ranks, however, the average ratio between men and women in Divale’s study falls closer to unity, suggesting a higher death rate for mature males than mature females.

  Combat casualties are the most likely reason for the higher death rate among adult males. Among the Maring, male battle casualties outnumber female casualties by as much as 10 to 1. But what accounts for the reverse situation in the junior and infant age categories?

  Divale’s answer is that many primitive groups follow a practice of overt female infanticide. Female children are suffocated or simply left unattended in the bush. But more often infanticide is covert, and people usually deny that they practice it—just as the Hindu farmers deny that they kill their cows. Like the unbalanced sex ratio among cattle in India, the discrepancy between human female and male infant mortality rates usually results from a neglectful pattern of infant care, rather than from any direct assault on the female baby’s life. Even a slight difference in a mother’s responsiveness to her children’s cries for food or protection might cumulatively account for the entire imbalance in the human sex ratios.

  Only an extremely powerful set of cultural forces can explain the practice of female infanticide and the preferential treatment given to male infants. In strictly biological terms, females are more valuable than males. Most males are reproductively redundant, since one man can suffice to impregnate hundreds of females. Only females can give birth to the young and only females can nurse them (in societies that lack baby bottles and formula substitutes for mother’s milk). If there is going to be any kind of sex discrimination against infants, one would predict that the males would be the victims. But it is the other way around. This paradox gets harder to understand if we admit that women are physically and mentally capable of performing all the basic tasks of production and subsistence quite independently of any help from males. Women can do every job that men can do, although perhaps with some loss of efficiency where brute strength is required. They can hunt with bows and arrows, fish, set traps, and cut down trees if taught to do so or permitted to learn. They can and do carry heavy burdens, and they can and do work in gardens and fields throughout the world. Among cut-and-burn horticulturalists like the Maring, women are the main food producers. Even among hunting groups like the Bushmen, female labor provides over two-thirds of the group’s nutritional needs. As for the inconveniences associated with menstruation and pregnancy, modern leaders of women’s liberation are quite correct when they point out that these “problems” can easily be eliminated in most jobs and production activities by minor changes in work schedules. The alleged biological basis for a sexual division of labor is a lot of nonsense. As long as all the females in a group are not found in the same stage of pregnancy at the same time, the economic functions considered to be the natural male prerogative—like hunting or herding—could be managed very nicely by women alone.