by Ian Morris
“The excitement of meeting my first Yanomamö was almost unbearable as I duck-waddled through the low passage [in the defensive perimeter] into the village clearing,” Chagnon wrote. Slimy with sweat, his hands and face swollen from bug bites, Chagnon
looked up and gasped when I saw a dozen burly, naked, sweaty, hideous men staring at us down the shafts of their drawn arrows! … [S]trands of dark-green slime dripped or hung from their nostrils—strands so long that they clung to their pectoral muscles or drizzled down their chins. We arrived at the village while the men were blowing a hallucinogenic drug up their noses … My next discovery was that there were a dozen or so vicious, underfed dogs snapping at my legs, circling me as if I were to be their next meal. I just stood there holding my notebook, helpless and pathetic. Then the stench of the decaying vegetation and filth hit me and I almost got sick …
We had arrived just after a serious fight. Seven women had been abducted the day before by a neighboring group, and the local men and their guests had just that morning recovered five of them in a brutal club fight … I am not ashamed to admit that had there been a diplomatic way out, I would have ended my fieldwork then and there.
But he stayed and in more than twenty-five visits over the next thirty years learned that Yanomamiland was not Margaret Mead’s Samoa. He witnessed, he said, “a good many incidents that expressed individual vindictiveness on the one hand and collective bellicosity on the other … from the ordinary incidents of wife beating and chest pounding to dueling5 and organized raids … with the intention of ambushing and killing men from enemy villages” (Figure 1.7).
Figure 1.7. Not the noble savage: A Yanomami club fight over a woman, photographed in the early 1970s. The dark line down the chest and stomach of the man at center-left is blood from his head.
Armed with statistics going back decades, Chagnon discovered that roughly a quarter of Yanomami men died violently, and two men out of every five took part in at least one homicide during their lives. Worse still, he concluded that violence paid. On average, men who killed fathered three times as many children as men who did not kill. The Beast was alive and kicking in the Orinoco headwaters.
Unlike Hobbes and Rousseau, Chagnon was never driven into exile (in fact, he spent much of his career teaching in Santa Barbara, one of the cushiest berths a professor could ask for), but his academic enemies certainly made their best efforts. The first challenges focused on how he had collected his data, largely bacause Chagnon was much more forthcoming than most anthropologists about the difficulties of doing fieldwork. As soon as he arrived in the village of Bisaasi-teri, he confessed, he had run into trouble: he found that most Yanomami considered speaking another man’s name out loud to be deeply disrespectful (disrespectful enough to justify violence), which made his planned study of family trees distinctly tricky. Chagnon, undeterred, kept pushing. Offended by his rudeness, people got back at him by making up names, the sillier the better. To everyone’s amusement, the foolish foreigner kept writing them down.
Five months passed before Chagnon learned the truth, when, on a visit to another village, he let slip a name he had been given in Bisaasi-teri. “A stunned silence followed,” he says, “and then a villagewide roar of uncontrollable laughter, choking, gasping, and howling. It seems that I thought the Bisaasi-teri headman was called ‘long dong’ and his brother ‘eagle shit.’ The Bisaasi-teri headman had a son called ‘asshole’ and a daughter called ‘fart breath.’”
It is always a good idea to have a Plan B when doing fieldwork, and now, his strategy in tatters, Chagnon unveiled his. Yanomami might refuse to name their own kin, but they would happily rattle off the names of their personal enemies’ kin. Chagnon found that a little bribery or blackmail would usually elicit the facts he needed.
Plan B worked, but it was hardly an uplifting example of how to interact with other cultures. In fact, in 2002 the Executive Committee of the American Anthropological Association formally approved a report censuring Chagnon for his fieldwork methods—a first—only to rescind its approval (another first) after a referendum in 2005. Feelings were running high. If Chagnon could treat “his” people so dishonestly, some anthropologists asked, should scholars accept anything he said? Several who had worked in Yanomamiland simply refused to believe him, insisting that the Yanomami were not violent at all; Chagnon, they said, had falsified data to get attention.
And then things got really nasty. Some critics accused Chagnon of complicity in Brazilian plots to split Yanomamiland into tiny reservations so that gold miners could intimidate the tribes and exploit the resources more easily. In 2012, Venezuelan activists accused miners of murdering eighty Yanomami, but government inspectors found no bodies. One critic even claimed that Chagnon had helped spread a measles epidemic that killed hundreds of Yanomami.
It has been an unsavory episode in the history of scholarship, but what goes around comes around. As the attacks on Chagnon and his Lord of the Flies vision intensified, Margaret Mead and the Coming of Age thesis started getting the same treatment. In 1983, Derek Freeman, an anthropologist from New Zealand who had been working on Samoa since 1940, published a book charging that Mead had completely misunderstood the place.
Freeman learned from Mead’s unpublished papers that far from “speaking their language, eating their food, sitting barefoot and cross-legged upon the pebbly floor,” as she had described herself, she had actually picked up only the shakiest smattering of the local tongue, had stayed on Samoa just a few months, had misled people about who she was, had lived in a bungalow with an American pharmacist and his family, and had dined with the admiral of the U.S. Pacific Fleet. As a result of her colonialist lifestyle, Freeman concluded, Mead failed to notice what police records from 1920s Samoa make clear: that the island had higher rates of violent death than the United States (no small thing in the age of Al Capone).
Worse still, in an interview in 1987, Fa’apua’a Fa’amu (by then a great-grandmother, but back in 1926 one of Mead’s main informants) confessed that she and her girlfriend Fofoa had found Mead just as comical as the Yanomami would find Chagnon, but with one big difference: Mead never realized that people were pulling her leg. Embarrassed by Mead’s obsession with sex, Fa’amu said, “we just fibbed and fibbed to her.” Coming of Age in Samoa rested on teenagers’ tall tales about their sexploits.
By the 1990s, with mutual recriminations coming thick and fast, it was tempting to conclude that anthropology really had made no progress since Hobbes and Rousseau. Things got so bad that some anthropologists actually began celebrating their field’s apparent inability to produce results. Fieldwork, a new generation of scholars proclaimed, is not really a method of data collection at all; it is more a kind of artistic performance, weaving creative fictions. Those who expect it to establish “the facts” are missing the point.
Fortunately, these claims are just plain wrong. Quietly, often unnoticed amid all the mudslinging and name-calling, hundreds of anthropologists have spent decades steadily getting on with the real work, slowly assembling an impressive database on violence in small-scale societies. Bringing together studies made everywhere from Africa to the Arctic, this patient work has produced the key discovery that rates of violent death in small-scale societies are usually shockingly high.
In the twentieth century, the industrialized world fought two world wars and carried out multiple genocides. Thanks to all the databases compiled since Richardson’s Statistics of Deadly Quarrels (mentioned in the introduction), we can now say with some confidence that of the roughly 10 billion people who lived in these hundred years, somewhere between 100 million and 200 million met violent ends in wars, feuds, and homicides—roughly 1–2 percent of the total. In the small-scale societies that anthropologists and archaeologists were able to study, however, the proportion of people dying violently seemed to be on average between 10 and 20 percent—ten times as high.
This does not mean that the Yanomami and the Samoans were like nineteenth-century stereotypes of
savages, randomly killing and maiming from dusk to dawn. Anthropologists have also found that even the fiercest cultures have elaborate networks of kinship, gift exchange, and feasting, which they use to find peaceful solutions to most conflicts. But the hard fact remains that blood is their argument appallingly often. In 2008, the biologist and geographer Jared Diamond, traveling around highland New Guinea doing fieldwork, was astonished to hear his driver—“a happy, enthusiastic, sociable person,” says Diamond—casually chatting about his part in a three-year cycle of killings that claimed thirty lives. (Diamond was even more astonished when his former driver sued him for $10 million over the story. The case was eventually dismissed.)
The reason it took anthropologists so long to notice that “their” people regularly acted like extras from Lord of the Flies was simple: anthropologists rarely spent long enough looking. Take the case of Elizabeth Marshall Thomas (nowadays best known for her book The Hidden Life of Dogs), who spent her late teens with her anthropologist parents among San hunter-gatherers in the Kalahari Desert.6 She wrote a sensitive account of San life, which she called The Harmless People—even though in the 1950s San were killing one another faster than the residents of inner-city Detroit would do at the high point of the crack cocaine epidemic.
Thomas chose the title The Harmless People not because she was unobservant but because the numbers worked against her. If the rate of violent death in a particular hunter-gatherer society ran at 10 percent, that would mean that a band of a dozen people would have roughly one murder every quarter of a century. Few anthropologists have the funding—or fortitude—to spend twenty-five months in the field, let alone twenty-five years. It takes repeated revisits, ideally incorporating multiple communities (like Chagnon’s studies of the Yanomami), to reveal that an awful lot of people are meeting grisly ends.
The evidence for high levels of violence is unambiguous, but making sense of it is more complicated. If, as the Coming of Age theory says, war is a contagion of civilization, it might well be that the high rates of violence among the San were a disease they had caught from westerners. This idea inspired the classic 1980 comedy The Gods Must Be Crazy, but some of Chagnon’s critics took it in a much nastier direction, blaming him personally for infecting the Yanomami with war (as well as measles) by trading them steel axes for information.
The obvious way to settle the question is to look back in time, to see whether wars were common in small-scale societies before they came into contact with more complex societies (the Lord of the Flies view) or whether wars began only after contact had begun (the Coming of Age view). But when we do this, we run into a chicken-and-egg problem: most small-scale societies had no written records until they came into contact with more complex ones.
Samoa, Margaret Mead’s stomping ground, is a case in point. The earliest detailed account of the islands is by John Williams, a British missionary, and almost the first thing he saw on arriving in 1830 was the village of A’ana in flames. A “disastrous war,” Williams wrote, “continued with unabated fury for nearly nine months in which many of our people fell victims so that the dead & wounded were brought over every day.” It created a wasteland: “All the districts in AAna [Williams’s spelling] are depopulated & in sailing along the beautiful coast for ten or twelve miles not a habitation is to be seen.”
Just in case A’ana did not convince Williams that the Samoans were tough men, their chiefs showed him the preserved heads of men killed by their ancestors and regaled him with stories of the wars and massacres of the past. One village put a rock in a basket for each battle it fought: Williams counted 197.
But there is one difficulty. Williams was the first European to write much about Samoa, but he was not the first European to go there. The Dutch explorer Jakob Roggeveen had arrived in 1722, and others had followed over the next hundred years. For all we know, every single head, rock, and story that Williams encountered had accumulated since 1722 and was the fruit of contagion by civilization.
Archaeology, however, suggests otherwise. The interior of Samoa is packed with prehistoric hillforts. Some must have been built since 1722, but carbon 14 dating shows that others are between six hundred and a thousand years old. Samoans had been building forts, and probably waging war, long before Europeans showed up. Samoan traditions describe great wars against invaders from Tonga, apparently around eight hundred years ago, providing a plausible context for the fort-building, and the wooden clubs and war canoes still in use when Europeans arrived seem to have descended from Tongan prototypes of this era, suggesting a continuous tradition of using deadly force.
Even on Samoa, the Coming of Age theory seems not to work very well, but there are always multiple ways to interpret archaeological finds. Archaeology is a young field, and as recently as the 1950s there were still very few graduate programs training future professionals. The people who dug up the past tended to drift into it from other walks of life, and a remarkable number were former military men. Many of them, perhaps unsurprisingly, tended to see war and destruction almost everywhere they dug. But in the 1960s and ’70s, a new generation of men and women colonized the field, educated in university departments of anthropology and archaeology, and often steeped in the Coming of Age view of prehistory. They—equally unsurprisingly—tended to see war and destruction almost nowhere.
It can be painful for the middle-aged to look back on the follies of their youth. As a graduate student in the 1980s (probably the glory days of Coming of Age-ism), I dug for several summers at Koukounaries, an extraordinary prehistoric Greek site on the fairy-tale-beautiful island of Paros. On our first visit to the site, the director explained that it had been destroyed by violent attack around 1125 B.C. Its fortifications had been cast down and its buildings burned. The defenders had piled slingstones by the walls, and the skeletons of several donkeys—caught in the final disaster—had been excavated in the narrow alleys on the acropolis. But I (and, I hasten to add, my graduate student peers) flatly refused to believe that any of this was evidence of war, and once we had ruled out war as impossible, whatever explanations remained—no matter how improbable—had to be true.
It was this kind of thinking that led so many archaeologists to insist, in the face of equally overwhelming evidence, that the pre-Roman hillforts of western Europe mentioned earlier in this chapter were ceremonial centers, status symbols, and basically anything except military bases. But like the anthropologists, archaeologists began realizing in the 1990s that the evidence just could not be shoehorned into a Coming of Age pattern anymore.
New scientific methods played a part in this shift. When hikers found the celebrated Ice Man in the Italian Alps in 1991—a deep-frozen corpse dating around 3300 B.C.—archaeologists initially assumed that he had died in a snowstorm. In 2001, scanning technology revealed an arrowhead embedded in his left armpit, but even then some archaeologists hypothesized an elaborate funeral involving his dead body being carried up into the mountains. But in 2008, new immunohistochemical methods showed that the Ice Man had been attacked at least twice. The first assault gave him a deep wound in his right hand; in the second, a couple of days later, he was hit in the back with a blunt object and shot with the arrow, which severed an artery. In 2012, a nanoscanning atomic force microscope found intact red blood cells that proved he had bled to death within hours of being hit by the arrow.
We would not know any of this were the Ice Man not so spectacularly preserved, but systematic study of large samples of skeletons can produce equally nasty and brutish results. Sometime around A.D. 1325, for instance, at least 486 people were slaughtered and their bodies tossed into a ditch at Crow Creek in South Dakota. A good 90 percent—and possibly all—of the dead had been scalped. Eyes had been gouged out, tongues sliced off, teeth shattered, and throats cut. Some were beheaded. For a few, this was not even the first time they had been scalped or shot: their bones bore the telltale marks of older, partially healed wounds.
Excavations began at Crow Creek in 1978, and since then evide
nce for Native American massacres has come thick and fast. The most recent example (as I write) is at Sacred Ridge in Colorado, where a village was burned down around A.D. 800 and at least thirty-five men, women, and children were tortured and killed. Their enemies used blunt weapons—clubs, or perhaps just rocks—to smash their feet and faces to pulp. The killers scalped everyone, cutting off ears and hacking some corpses into dozens of pieces. Like the Romans described by Polybius a thousand years earlier, they even killed the village dogs.
In fact, not much about Crow Creek, Sacred Ridge, or Samoa would have surprised the Romans. Cicero and Tacitus, like Hobbes and Golding, knew perfectly well that the Beast was close, close, close, and that only an even more terrifying beast—Leviathan—could cage it.
Getting to Rome
In his book The Origins of Political Order, the political scientist Francis Fukuyama asks a penetrating question: How do we get to Denmark?
Fukuyama asks this not because he doesn’t know how to buy a plane ticket but because for social scientists Denmark has come to stand in as (in Fukuyama’s words) “a mythical place that is known to have good political and economic institutions: it is stable, democratic, peaceful, prosperous, inclusive, and has extremely low levels of political corruption. Everyone would like to figure out how to transform Somalia, Haiti, Nigeria, Iraq, or Afghanistan into ‘Denmark.’”
If there had been political scientists two thousand years ago, they would have asked instead how to get to Rome. The Roman Empire was not very democratic, but it certainly was peaceful and, by the standards of the day, stable, prosperous, and inclusive (corruption is a little harder to judge). The alternative to getting to Rome was to live in societies with more than a passing similarity to modern-day Somalia, Haiti, Nigeria, Iraq, or Afghanistan—but more dangerous.