The essential focus of almost all these arguments has been the perennial question: What causes war? The intense interest in this question, to the neglect of the actual conduct or immediate effects of warfare, is undoubtedly attributable to its assumed practical utility. Just as we cure or eradicate disease by eliminating its causes, so anthropologists frequently premise their examinations of warfare on the hope that it may be extinguished by rooting out its (single) cause. These arguments between the materialist and antimaterialist schools concerning warfare represent only a flank of a larger theoretical battle among anthropologists. Because of the pervasive polarization, both sides have claimed that their own favored theories suffice to explain warfare and assert that any resort to the other side’s hypotheses is logically unnecessary.
Though many partisans in these debates imply that the warfare of a particular region—or even all warfare—has a single cause, no complex phenomenon can have a single cause. There are efficient, formal, material, and final causes, as well as necessary and sufficient conditions. Even something as straightforward as catching an infectious disease usually entails more than just exposure to a viral or bacterial agent because the illness will not develop if the host possesses an inborn or acquired immunity. Since infectious diseases actually have multiple causes, they can be defeated by various means: eliminating exposure to the disease by quarantine or by destruction of animal vectors, killing the active agent with antiseptics or antibiotics, mitigating adverse symptoms with antitoxins, inducing immunity with vaccination, and so on. In this example, quarantine and antibiotics eliminate an efficient cause; vaccination removes a formal cause; and antitoxins ignore causes but pallitate the effects. The complexity of the concept of cause means that seemingly contradictory views are often actually complementary because they focus on different categories. The anthropological debates about the causes of warfare may represent a classic case of unacknowledged complementarity.
PREHISTORIC PEACE
If social anthropologists of various persuasions have retained theoretical elements derived from the concept of a stylized, ineffective, and insignificant primitive war, archaeologists during the past twenty-five years have been even more accepting. Less by sustained argument than by studied silence or fashionable reinterpretation, prehistorians have increasingly pacified the human past. The most widely used archaeological textbooks contain no references to warfare until the subject of urban civilizations is taken up.32 The implication is clear: war was unknown or insignificant before the rise of civilization. In several recent collections of papers dealing with more specialized topics—such as prehistoric frontiers, migrations, trade, and “farmer-forager interactions”—the only mentions of warfare relate to historic civilized frontiers and civilized economies.33 The possibility that warfare might have been involved with these matters before the rise of urban states is not dismissed; it is simply never mentioned.
A few specific examples from my area of expertise, European prehistory, should clarify the character of this interpretative “pacification.” The earliest farmers to appear in Britain during the period known as the Early Neolithic, beginning about 4000 B.C., constructed ditched and palisaded enclosures called causewayed camps by archaeologists. In Brian Fagan’s very popular textbook on prehistory, the function of these enclosures is discussed in entirely peaceful terms. Noting that several such camps were “littered with human bone,” Fagan concludes that “perhaps these camps were places where the dead were exposed for months before their bones were deposited in nearby communal burials.” In an excellent survey of the early farming cultures of prehistoric Europe, Alasdair Whittle suggests that the “interrupted ditches backed by solid barriers” (log palisades banked or daubed with earth from the ditches) typical of these camps merely expresses the “symbolism of exclusion.” According to these syntheses or summaries, either causewayed camps were the Neolithic equivalent of the famous Parsi Towers of Silence of India or their deep ditches and palisaded ramparts stood as elaborate symbols bearing the message Keep Out!34
A far different impression is conveyed by the reports of the archaeologists who have conducted extensive excavations of some of these enclosures.35 At several camps, the distribution of thousands of flint arrowheads, concentrated along the palisade and especially at the gates (Figure 1.1), provides clear evidence that they “had quite obviously been defended against archery attack,” making it extremely probable that the enclosures were “built with this intention.” Moreover, the total destruction by fire of some of these camps seems to have been contemporaneous with the archery attacks. At one such site, intact skeletons of two young adult males were found at the bottom of the ditches, buried beneath the burned rubble of the collapsed palisade-rampart. In one poignant instance, the young man had been shot in the back by a flint-tipped arrow and was carrying an infant in his arms who had been “crushed beneath him when he fell.” Whatever ritual or symbolic functions of the enclosures might have had, they were obviously fortifications, some of which were attacked and stormed.
Figure 1.1 Distribution of arrowheads at a Neolithic causewayed camp in England. Concentrations were found along the line of the palisade and fanning inward from the gates. (Redrawn after Dixon 1988: 83 by Ray Brod, Department of Geography, University of Illinois at Chicago)
A Belgian archaeologist who has excavated many Iron Age burials was criticized by several colleagues at a recent conference for referring to burials from this period as “warrior” graves, even though they contained spears, swords, shields, a male corpse clothed in armor, and in some instances the remains of a chariot. The critics asserted that these weapons and armor were merely status symbols and had only a symbolic function rather than a practical military one. Similarly, copper and bronze axes from the Late Neolithic and Bronze Ages, formerly referred to as battle axes, are no longer classified as weapons but are considered a form of money. The 5,000-year-old Austrian glacier mummy recently reported in the news was found with one of these moneys mischievously hafted as an ax. He also had with him a dagger, a bow, and some arrows; presumably these were his small change.
Interpretive pacifications have been applied to archaeological finds from many other areas of the world.36 Such hypotheses about individual prehistoric artifacts and constructions are rarely implausible or manifestly wrong. Weapons and forts often do have symbolic significance. But these archaeological interpretations depend on rather tenuous arguments and assumptions and studiously ignore more violent interpretations directly supported by evidence. In short, they ignore the bellicosely obvious for the peaceably arcane.
These deconstructionist archaeological interpretations would be analogous to declaring that in contemporary Western culture automobiles and trucks are only symbols of status, masculinity, and liberty and that freeways are merely impractical ritual arenas for the enactment of rituals of status, masculinity, and personal autonomy while never mentioning that these artifacts and structures are fundamentally a means of transportation.37 Such completely symbolic interpretations also neglect the extremely significant fact that among the primary rationales for building the German autobahns and the American interstate-freeway system were arguments that they would facilitate the movement of modern mechanized armies. If present-day archaeologists were faced with interpreting the physical remains of modern industrial societies, they might emphasize the derivative symbolism of cars and highways while quietly ignoring the dependence of such symbolism on practical economic or even military concerns.
Although archaeologists may have pacified the past almost unconsciously, a handful of social anthropologists have recently codified this vague prejudice into a theoretical stance that amounts to a Rousseauian declaration of universal prehistoric peace. In some recent papers and books, Brian Ferguson and a number of other scholars have argued that the instances of tribal warfare described by Westerners, including ethnographers, were the product of disequalibrium induced by Western contact and did not represent the primitive condition.38 Specifically, suc
h warfare was a product of decimation by introduced diseases, native population movements induced by civilized colonization, social disruption associated with slave raiding, and hostilities engendered by conflicts over civilized trade goods. These Western derangements created a “tribal zone” of Hobbesian war of an unspecified radius around any civilized outpost or observer. Whenever civilized observers moved out to previously uncontacted groups, they would either still be within this zone of war or, if they moved beyond the disrupted region, merely transmit the virus of war themselves by bringing Western goods for trade and gifts or by introducing new diseases. Thus no civilized observer could ever view anything but the Hobbesian warfare created by European contact. Ferguson concludes that the “wild violence noted by Hobbes was not an expression of’ man in a state of nature’ but a reflection of contact with Hobbes’ Leviathan—the states of Western Europe. To take the carnage as revealing the fundamental nature of human existence is to pass through the looking glass.”39 This argument is based on the well-documented observation that contact with Westerners altered a wide variety of native behaviors and attitudes, including those involved in warfare. Undoubtedly, native warfare changed with increasing external contact, but important questions remain with regard to the character and speed of the changes and (especially) the nature of the situation prior to contact.
Since these neo-Rousseauian scholars characterize any evidence of Hobbesian social or demographic features, tribal traditions, and mythologies among prestate societies as being consequences of contact, they appear to believe that the resulting transformations, which touched almost every facet of social life and culture, occurred almost instaneously. Thus the proponents of prehistoric peace not only reject the validity of certain ethnographic observations uncongenial to their view of the primitive condition, but also deny the legitimacy of ethnography altogether. That is the substance of arguing that ethnographic descriptions merely mirror civilized behavior and do not provide a window on the precivilized way of life. But if ethnographers’ observations can tell us nothing useful about the conditions of life peculiar to prestate nonindustrial societies, why bother with ethnography or ethnographers at all? An undistorted image of civilization is much more immediately discernible in the work of economists, sociologists, and historians. One suspects that because the uncivilized villagers described by ethnography often appear to have lived in a Hobbesian state, certain scholars have metaphorically “destroyed the village in order to save it.”
This hypothesis attributes an exceptional potency—indeed, a peculiar radioactivity—to civilized people and their products. Were there never epidemic diseases before Western contact? Were there never uncivilized items of trade that excited the practical appetites of primitive consumers and were worth fighting over? Did new weapons never diffuse to modify prehistoric warfare? Were there never population movements or expansions before civilization? If any of these conditions existed before civilized expansion, then, by these arguments, the causes of war should also have existed. As we shall see in the following chapters, there is evidence that such things happened before civilized observers soiled the preliterate world. In this case, the tribal-zone hypothesis would be reduced to the claim that civilized contact merely brought some new weapons to fight with and new items to fight over to prestate regions, not the more general reasons for fighting or the institution of war itself.
Most neo-Rousseauians are vague about what they suppose the precontact situation to have been. Their assertions that “wild violence” and carnage were caused by civilized contact imply they imagine that precontact conditions approached Rousseau’s primitive peace. This hypothesis of prehistoric peace is analogous to my father’s facetious claim that the flesh of a watermelon is really white until the skin is broken and it turns instantly red. As with my father’s story, it is impossible to disprove by direct observation. It requires no great diligence to show that any primitive group, at the moment of its ethnographic description, has been subjected to an epidemic, possessed civilized trade goods, or sustained some form of disruption from the presence of a European observer in their midst. Ferguson does acknowledge that archaeology has the capacity to look inside the watermelon before it is cut, but neither he nor his colleagues ever mention any archaeological support for their declaration of prehistoric peace.
In the past few decades, the hypothesis of unserious, ritualized primitive war has thus been transformed—through the consistent deemphasis of prehistoric violence by archaeologists and later through the explicit arguments of some social anthropologists—into an neo-Rousseauian concept of prehistoric peace.
RESONANCE OF THE PACIFIED PAST
The neo-Rousseauian tenor of these postwar anthropological views on war and civilization has penetrated and resonated with other aspects of Western intellectual and popular culture. Let me cite a few recent expressions of such concurrences ranging from academic discourses by nonanthropologists to expressions in popular culture.
Directly reflecting the idea of primitive war, two military historians discussing the Iron Age of early Western civilization see it as the germinal period of real war:
In less than 2000 years, man went from a condition in which warfare was relatively rare and mostly ritualistic to one in which death and destruction were achieved on a modern scale.… The Iron Age also saw the practice of war firmly rooted in man’s societies and experience and, perhaps more importantly, in his psychology. War, warriors and weapons were now a normal part of human existence.40
Thus, before civilization, war was rare, ritualized, abnormal, and foreign to human psychology.
Recently, in a letter to an academic newsletter, a professor of sociology contrasted “the emotional richness and cultural diversity of traditional African tribal life” to “the enhanced capacity for destructiveness that the emergence of all civilizational structures brought forth, such as organized mass warfare.”41 Rousseau’s view of civilization as emotionally impoverished, culturally confining, and destructively warlike compared with traditional tribal life could not be more baldly restated.
In William Manchester’s quasi-memoirs of his service in the marines during World War II, he asserts that although the natives of Papua-New Guinea lived in a Stone Age culture, “it is equally true that their simple humanity would prevent them from even contemplating a Pearl Harbor, an Auschwitz or a Hiroshima.”42 Surprise attacks, slaughters of noncombatants, and general massacres are therefore unknown in a world of New Guinea tribesmen. As we shall see in later chapters, Manchester could not have been more wrong.
Reflecting several of the ideas of prehistoric peace, the plot of Jamie Uys’s film comedy The Gods Must Be Crazy centers on a Coke bottle that is tossed from a passing airplane and lands in an African San (Bushmen) encampment. The Bushmen’s encounter with this civilized artifact soon leads to conflict and fighting in the previously harmonious camp. The angry headman then undertakes a quest to return this evil item to the unhelpful gods who dropped it. Reaching a civilized outpost, he is eventually arrested and gets embroiled in a guerrilla war. The film is a broad farce, but the little San’s good sense and peacefulness are always favorably contrasted with the foolishness, cold hearts, and violence of the civilized people he meets. The underlying message is that the selfish strife and heartless wars characteristic of civilization emanate from even its most prosaic artifacts.
In intellectual and popular culture, war has come to be regarded by many as a peculiar psychosis of Western civilization. This atmosphere of Western self-reproach and neo-Rousseauian nostalgia is prevalent in the views espoused by many postwar anthropologists.
The pacification of the past now epidemic in anthropology is just the latest turn in the long struggle between the myths of progress and the golden age, between Hobbesian and Rousseauian conceptions of the nature of primitive societies and of the prehistoric past. Relying perhaps on the time-honored archaeological method of ethnographic analogy, archaeologists have increasingly ignored the phenomenon of prehistoric wa
rfare (inasmuch as it had been declared by ethnologists to be weightless and unimportant). They have written warfare out of prehistory by omitting any mention of evidence of prehistoric violence when they synthesize or summarize the raw data produced by excavation. Some social anthropologists have recently become more aggressively pacifist, dismissing all ethnographic descriptions of primitive warfare as being the product of civilized interference with more peaceful precontact (that is, truly prehistoric) primitive life. If these ideas are correct, anthropology has little to say about war.
But the proponents of primitive war and prehistoric peace have tended to neglect the very evidence that is crucial to their propositions. With regard to the intensity, dangerousness, and effectiveness of primitive war, it is vital to study the direct effects of precivilized conflict: the casualty rates, the destruction, and the gains or losses of territory and other vital possessions. If uncivilized societies were very peaceful before literate observers could record them, archaeology should be able to provide the documentation. The evaluation of these ideas (and, of course, any ideas contrary to them) requires careful surveillance of both ethnographic and archaeological data, with special attention to questions of how recent tribal and ancient prehistoric warfare was actually conducted and what the direct results of such conflicts were. Since implicit in any discussion of primitive warfare is a contrast with the corresponding forms of civilized conflict, it is also vital to make direct comparisons between the two in equivalent terms. Only then is it possible to achieve a realistic view of all warfare and to determine whether anthropology has anything to offer us in our attempts to understand and eventually eliminate the awful scourge of war. The purpose of this book is to provide just such a survey and evaluation.
War Before Civilization Page 4