Despite the difference in their basic definitions of war and their studied silence about each other’s work, both Wright and Turney-High agreed that primitive warfare differed drastically from warfare conducted by civilized states. Militarily, Wright thought primitives “resemble more the apes and the ants” than they did civilized men. Turney-High drew a very sharp line, literally a “military horizon,” above which real warfare was conducted by states and below which occurred only the submilitary combat of primitives. He spoke of primitive warfare as being childish, “reflecting the ways of human infancy.” Both men agreed that this distinction between primitive and civilized warfare was rooted in a fundamental difference in aims and motivation.
In civilized or real warfare, the motives or goals were economic and political—for example, plunder, more territory, or hegemony. Turney-High characterized these as “rational and practical.” By contrast, primitives were said to fight for personal, psychological, and social motives. Wright argued that the military goals of primitive societies primarily involved maintaining “the solidarity of the political group” and secondarily satisfying “certain psychic needs of human personality.” Their lists of primitive motives included tension release for violent impulses that could be conveniently redirected toward outsiders; pursuit of personal prestige and status, including initiation to manhood; and revenge. Both Turney-High and Wright asserted the widely repeated claim that primitive people commonly went to war for adventure or sport—literally, to escape boredom.13 Given Turney-High’s characterization of the motives of states, he clearly implied that the motives of primitive societies were irrational and impractical. Comparable purely psychological motives only occasionally appeared in civilized warfare in the motivations of individual soldiers or small units.
Wright and Turney-High dismissed the possibility that warfare might function to produce material advantages for primitive groups because the conscious pursuit of such advantages was characteristic only of states. They saw all features of primitive war making as flowing directly from impractical, personal goals, which could be achieved without “victory” and, indeed, could be served only if warriors had a very good chance of surviving combat.
Both Wright and Turney-High judged primitive warfare to be technically defective compared with civilized warfare.14 They independently listed the various deficiencies of primitive war:
1. Poor mobilization of manpower because of reliance on completely voluntary participation
2. Inadequate supply and logistics
3. Due to deficiencies 1 and 2, an inability to conduct protracted campaigns
4. No organized training of units
5. Poor command and control
6. Due to deficiencies 4 and 5, undisciplined units and flighty morale
7. Few weapons specialized for war and neglect of fortification
8. No professional warriors or military specializations (such as swordsmen, bowmen, and cavalrymen)
9. Ineffective tactics and neglect of certain principles of warfare
In short, they found primitive warfare desultory, ineffective, “unprofessional,” and unserious.
The highly voluntary nature of recruitment for war parties in tribal societies, Turney-High claimed, led to ineffective or defective mobilization. The ability of warriors in some tribes to desert a war party because of ill omens or dreams was even more disastrous. He suggested that “a good stiff jolt of punishment” would have quickly remedied such malingering. Although he conceded that social pressure alone was sufficient to raise large war parties in some tribes, he also believed the system of physical compulsion used by the Zulu, Dahomean, Celtic, and modern states was superior.15 Typically, Wright, and especially Turney-High, gauged the military efficacy of a practice by how closely it resembled that of the modern military, rather than by its effects. In the case of mobilization, the key effect involved the proportion of a society’s potential manpower that was actually mobilized for combat, an issue neither scholar ever addressed.
Turney-High noted that the inadequate supplies provided to warriors by their subsistence economies limited the possibilities for perpetuating campaigns or sieges beyond the first encounter. He linked the issues of adequate supplies and logistics to “a social organization capable of producing an economic surplus by a high agriculture” (presumably he means a state supported by short-fallow agriculture) and “a means of transporting such food.” Thus the absence of extended military campaigns was the direct consequence of poor logistics that, in turn, reflected a primitive economy and social organization. By implication, the only way a gardening tribe or hunting band could conduct an extended campaign would be by first becoming an agricultural state.
Both scholars noted that primitive warriors were ill-disciplined and rather selective about obeying their leaders’ commands. The military virtues of discipline and ready obedience were the product of training, practice, and exercise. Turney-High remarked that only states could afford such training and that only state leaders had the power to compel obedience.16 At the same time, he repeatedly implied that such discipline was essential for victory and that only states were capable of winning victories. He had nothing but disdain for the capriciousness and heedlessness of primitive warriors:
His is an undisciplined rabble which really does not stand and the when ordered by some alleged chief. A stand-up battle with quality troops against odds was no more his idea of fun than it is of his cultural descendent, the guerrilla. The primitive warrior … loves a sure thing. Turning an apparently hopeless cause into a winning one by valor and skill is not his way.17
Wright’s characterization of primitive warriors as “flighty” was not so openly contemptuous, but it carried the same message.
One feature that permeated Turney-High’s discussion of primitive war—and distinguishes it from Wright’s—was his profound belief that the tactical principles or laws of war taught to modern officers in training represented timeless requirements for effective warfare. He compared them to scientific laws and claimed that they could be used to predict or guarantee military success and failure. For him, to the degree that primitive warriors ignored or violated these commandments, their warfare was necessarily frivolous and ineffective.
According to Turney-High, primitive warriors did adhere to some of these principles or “laws” but characteristically ignored or disobeyed several others.18 Indeed, their application of some might even be superior to that of civilized soldiers. He found that tribal warriors generally obeyed the principles that prescribed Offensive Action, Surprise, Intelligence, Utilization of Terrain, and Mobility. They were quite variable in their use of the rules for Fire and Movement, with many groups merely exchanging missiles at a distance and never closing with their foes. They were surprisingly poor at the law of Security, often being surprised or ambushed and neglecting the use of fortifications. They rarely adhered to the commandments of Concentration at the Critical Point and Exploitation of Victory in that they failed to focus on key objectives or enemy weak points and to pursue defeated foes. Of course, Cooperation of Specialized Forces—another rule—was impossible for groups lacking specialized units such as cavalry and artillery. He insisted that primitives did not use the Correct Formations, but he was vague on this point. Given that his other accusations implied a lack of sophistication or complexity, it is surprising that he also found primitive warriors failing to observe the principle of Simplicity of Plans, either by having none at all or by having plans that were too standardized.
These principles, for which Turney-High claimed the status of social science laws, are contradictory and rather vague, especially in practice. For example, achieving “security” usually requires locating forces at other than the “critical point” and often necessitates restraint in the “exploitation of victory.” Many civilized units or armies have paid a high price by adhering to the injunction to exploit victories by racing headlong into piecemeal defeat by their rallied or reenforced foes. Fortifications exemplify “secur
ity” but are inimical to “mobility” and “offensive action.” Actually, few of these principles can be taken at face value or unequivocally. With examples like the disastrous trench offensives of World War I and Napoleon’s Russian campaign, it might be more honest to restate one principle as “offensive action except when inadvisable.” Others of these laws suffer from a debilitating vagueness. How simple should plans be? How does one recognize the critical point except in hindsight? Because of their proverbial vagueness and contradictoriness, these tactical laws are much more readily employed, like proverbs, in rationalizing outcomes than as scientific prescriptions for generating victories. Ironically, Turney-High’s “immutable Laws of War” are no longer taught to aspiring war leaders at the great Western military academies.19
For all of his disparagement of primitive warfare, Turney-High repeatedly recognized that the concentrated economic surplus, power of coercion, and centralized decision making of states were the basic determinants of his “true war.” The absence of these features in primitive societies explained most or all of their military “deficiencies.” In other words, Turney-High’s military horizon was not so much a tactical Rubicon as a political and economic one.
One tactical principle missing from Turney-High’s list is the importance of superior numbers (usually codified as the principle of Mass). This important feature of warfare he airily dismisses with the assertion that “good small armies have time and again humiliated large masses.”20 In fact, any number of good small armies have been ground into dust by less artful large masses. For example, the nimble Finns in 1939 and 1940 and the formidable Germans in 1941 and 1942 certainly humiliated the more massive Soviet Army initially, but they were soon overwhelmed as thoroughly as any armies in history. Like so many historians enamored of tactics, leadership, and discipline, Turney-High’s focus was on victory in battle, not wars. As the Romans fighting Hannibal showed, one can lose every battle but the last one and still win the war. That crucial last battle has almost always gone to the side with the larger manpower reserves and stronger economy.
Both Wright and Turney-High agreed that because of its frivolous motivations and technical deficiencies, primitive warfare had few important effects, nor was it particularly dangerous.21 Wright concluded that casualties and destructiveness only increased with social evolution. Both scholars simply assumed that fighting for practical goals with civilized techniques automatically made war more terrible and, conversely, that irrational goals with simple techniques made war ineffective. Neither author supported these assumptions with any facts or figures. Although Wright did have casualty figures from a few tribal groups (presumably because they contradicted his conclusions) they appeared only in an appendix.22 He even experienced difficulty supporting his trend of increasing death and destruction with historical data from Europe.23 Turney-High never bothered with figures at all. He believed that since primitive warriors were always defeated by civilized soldiers, the point was self-evident.24 He did, however, concede that primitive societies “made some very credible stands against the white man, in spite of their small populations and simple weapons,” implying that primitive warfare was not always entirely ineffective or safe. Essentially, Wright and Turney-High’s conclusions concerning the efficacy of primitive war amounted to aesthetic judgments of form and style, rather than practical or scientific evaluations of effects.
Subsequent students of precivilized life seem to have paid little heed to Wright and Turney-High’s technical points about the social contexts and techniques of primitive war. But no one seems to have forgotten their dismissal of primitive war as a relatively harmless sport, directed toward impractical goals and incapable of affecting any essential aspects of social existence. From this filtration, the postwar concept of a relatively benign primitive war was born.
THE CONTROVERSY OVER CAUSES
As the concept of ineffective and unimportant primitive war became embedded in textbooks and teaching, anthropologists devoted little attention to warfare during the 1950s.25 The situation changed dramatically in the 1960s, however, for a host of anthropological and nonanthropological reasons. During the late 1950s and early 1960s, ethnographers were able to observe the final stages of tribal warfare in highland New Guinea and in Amazonia. Anthropologists were again directly confronted with the realities of warfare among small-scale societies. Explanations of these new observations became entangled in the theoretical and political debates of the times. These arguments also reopened the Hobbes versus Rousseau question and revived the mythologizing impulses that have invariably attached themselves to this debate.
The anthropological debates about war are part of a wider theoretical battle in anthropology between cultural ecology and cultural materialism on one side and a variety of opposing “-isms” on the other. Cultural materialism proposes that most cultural practices are explainable by reference to the material conditions of life—ecology, technology, demography, and basic economy.26 Various anthropological opponents to cultural materialism deny this proposition, preferring explanations that refer to the independent realms of social dynamics, differing ideologies, or other nonmaterial factors.
The materialist perspective focuses on the adaptive consequences of war. One early materialist view was that warfare redistributes or controls human populations to bring them into a better balance with available scarce resources, especially productive land.27 There was also the implication that warfare should intensify with increasing population pressure on critical resources. The combatants may or may not be aware of these material causes, and they often use a fairly standard set of pretexts or justifications for fighting. Nevertheless, a common result of tribal warfare is that one side obtains from the other various means of production in the form of land, livestock, and additional labor. Some materialists argued that societies undertake warfare only when forced to do so by competition over food or other essential resources. Peace is the inertial or natural state to which societies revert when essential material needs can be cheaply supplied by nonviolent means.28
This type of theory simply elaborates Rousseau’s contention that primitive man is an enemy to others only when he is hungry. Yet the materialists were by no means completely Rousseauian; many of them (for instance, Andrew Vayda, Robert Carneiro, Marvin Harris, and William Divale) asserted that tribal warfare could be exceptionally vicious and inflict high casualty rates. Indeed, Robert Carneiro argued that warfare played a key role in social evolution, especially the development of states.
In the late 1960s, a substantial shock to the materialist interpretation of war was administered by Napoleon Chagnon’s influential and popular ethnography on the Yanomamo of Venezuela and Brazil.29 Chagnon described the Yanomamo as being embroiled in almost constant warfare. The men displayed a considerable propensity for violence against everyone. Yet Yanomamo villages were surrounded by abundant unoccupied territory; the fighting between them was apparently motivated only by desires to exact revenge and to capture women; and they experienced difficulty in obtaining sufficient food only as a result of warfare. Chagnon literally declared that the Yanomamo exemplified the Hobbesian state of “warre.”
Many antimaterialists have concentrated on the social features that escalate disputes between individuals into warfare between groups or make peace difficult to establish and maintain—in other words, on formal causes rather than material or final ones.30 This conception is neo-Hobbesian in that it derives primitive warfare especially from the absence of statelike institutions of external justice and mediation. The neo-Hobbesians deny that one gains anything from war except a bleak social survival. For example, C. R. Hallpike claims that nonstate societies “engage in warfare because among other reasons they cannot stop, not because they derive any benefit from fighting. In the absence of any central authority they are condemned to fight forever … since for any one group to cease defending itself would be suicidal.”31
Neo-Hobbesians argue that the booty obtained by warriors and the larger territories
often acquired by victors are merely occasional effects and have no bearing on the causes of warfare. Indeed, the neo-Hobbesians seem quite unconcerned with the content or nature of the disputes that lead to fighting, apparently believing that a dispute over almost any matter can lead to war, if no powerful third-party authority exists to adjudicate or suppress it. To judge from the various social and ideological factors they repeatedly discuss, neo-Hobbesians see war as a permanent social condition in which the potential for combat is always present, even if it actually breaks out only intermittently. The actual episodes of fighting receive—and by these scholars’ principles require—no general explanation.
Neo-Hobbesians also view prestate warfare as being very frequent and consider a state of war a latent condition of prestate existence. Yet like Wright and Turney-High, they deny that it has any important practical causes or consequences except bare survival of the social group. By contrast, some materialists see primitive wars as having important demographic and economic causes and effects; but, like the proponents of benign primitive war, they do not see war as “normal” to (and therefore necessarily common among) prestate societies. Indeed, materialists echo Wright and Turney-High in accepting that warfare becomes more frequent and terrible as the size, density, and complexity of economic and political organizations increase (that is, with social evolution). Thus recent anthropological theory has tended toward two extreme and opposed conceptions: primitive warfare is uncommon but rewarding, or it is very common but unrewarding. In either case, important aspects of Wright and Turney-High’s concept of primitive war survive.
War Before Civilization Page 3