Indeed, several cross-cultural surveys of preindustrial societies found that losses and gains of territory were a very frequent result of warfare.29 One study concluded that the victors “almost always take land or other resources from the defeated.” In another study, almost half of the societies surveyed had gained or lost territory through warfare. In some cases, societies lost land to one enemy while gaining it from another. Over 75 percent of the wars of the Mae Enga of New Guinea ended with the victors appropriating part or all of their enemy’s territory.30 In other words, territorial change was a very common outcome of primitive wars.
Two wars fought by the Wappo hunter-gatherers of California illustrate both the intentional and the unintentional territorial windfalls resulting from tribal warfare.31 Six village communities of the Southern Pomo occupied a portion of the Alexander Valley (now renowned for its wine) along the Russian River, but their upstream neighbors were a village community of tough Wappo (whose name is an Anglo corruption of the Spanish guapo, meaning, in this case, “brave”). About 1830, some Pomo made the mistake of stealing an acorn cache from a Wappo oak grove. The Wappo immediately retaliated with two raids, killing a large number of Pomo and burning the offending village. All of the Pomo from the six Alexander Valley villages fled to other Pomo settlements downstream. The headman of the Pomo village cluster later exchanged gifts with his Wappo counterpart and settled the dispute. The Pomo were then invited to reoccupy their villages, but they refused. These changes at least temporarily widened the distance between the nearest Russian River Valley Wappo and Pomo villages from one to about ten miles. In the few years remaining before their decimation by disease and war with Mexican settlers, the Wappo occupied two of the six abandoned Pomo villages and had begun seasonally exploiting much of the relinquished area.
More than twenty years earlier, another group of Wappo had established themselves, by unknown means, in Pomo territory farther north on a small creek flowing into Clear Lake. These Wappo were dissatisfied because a delectable minnow spawned from the lake up a Pomo-held creek whose lower course ran only a few yards from their own minnowless stream. After digging a canal to divert the waters of the Pomo’s creek into their own, the Wappo dammed the latter, apparently hoping by these activities to force the spawning fish to use their stream. With this provocation, their Pomo neighbors determined to fight, and a battle broke out along the course of the deputed creek. After some losses, the Wappo were driven back to their still-minnowless creek.
In both cases, as was typical in aboriginal California, disputes over food resources precipitated the fighting. In one case, the Wappo were merely fighting to defend their rights to enjoy the produce of a particular acorn grove, but the fierceness of their response (and probably previous conflicts) convinced the Pomo to put some unoccupied territory between themselves and their fractious neighbors. The depopulated area was then exploited and slowly settled by the victors. This pattern of abandoning territory out of fear in order to widen a buffer zone, followed by gradually intensified use of the zone by the victors, illustrates the most common mechanism by which primitive warfare expanded and contracted the domains of prestate societies. In the Clear Lake case, the Wappo were obviously attempting to take control, if not actual possession, of a desirable stream and were driven back. Had the Wappo been victorious in the Clear Lake fight, the creek would undoubtedly have been added to the Wappo domain of exploitation. In neither case were the combatants fighting over land per se; rather they were fighting over spatially fixed resources.
As Figure 7.1 shows, the scale of such territorial gains and losses could be very significant—about 5 to 10 percent per generation in some instances involving hunter-gatherers. This would be equivalent to the United States losing or gaining California, Oregon, and half of Washington every twenty-five years. The rates of expansion and contraction among agriculturalists and pastoralists tended to be even higher. In one New Guinea case, the Telefolmin tribe more than tripled its territory in less than a century by means of ruthless warfare and virtual annihilation of the tribe’s enemies. By relentlessly raiding its Dinka neighbors, rather than by pursuing any conscious campaign or plan, the Nuer tribe of the Sudan expanded its domain from 8,700 to 35,000 square miles in just seventy years. Comparable examples of territorial acquisition and loss as an effect of warfare are recorded from every major ethnographic region of the world.32 These primitive rates of territorial change are proportionately similar to the extraordinary expansion rates of European empires and the United States during the nineteenth century, or of the growth of the Roman Empire. In this sense, tribal warfare against other prestate societies appears to have been just as effective as civilized war at moving boundaries and rewarding victors with vital territory appropriated from the losers.
Figure 7.1 Relative territorial gains and losses per generation for various soceities (see Appendix, Table 7.1).
Given the aversion of modern archaeology to the idea of migration and colonization (let alone conquest), the problem of documenting such processes in prehistory is difficult. One archaeologist who has given considerable thought to this problem, Slavomil Vend, admits that annihilation or forced migration would be manifested in the archaeological record only by the “peaceful existence of winners on the territory of the losers.”33 He gives as an example the victory of the Germanic Marcomanni over the Celtic Boii (from whom the region became known as Bohemia), recorded by Roman historians. Archaeologically, this event is evidenced only by the expansion of Germanic settlements and cemeteries into regions previously inhabited by Celts. An additional difficulty, as we have seen in the ethnographic cases, is that many violent territorial exchanges involve social units that are nearly identical in culture and physique. Prehistory is replete with examples of very distinctive cultures (sometimes associated with distinct human physical types) expanding at the expense of others, but determining whether these expansions were accomplished violently or peacefully is usually no simple task. Several regions of the world offer evidence that at least some prehistoric colonizations or abandonments of regions were accompanied by considerable violence.34 These most visible prehistoric cultural expansions, which involve the movement of a frontier, are discussed in more detail in Chapter 9.
As we have seen, even in situations where no territory exchanges hands, active hostilities along a border can lead to development of a no-man’s-land, as settlements nearest an enemy move or disperse to escape the effects of persistent raiding. Such buffer zones have been reported from Africa, North America, South America, and Oceania.35 As in the Wappo-Pomo case, encroachment on these zones by the stronger, more land-hungry, or more aggressive adversary was a common mechanism by which tribal warfare led to the exhange of territory, even in the absence of any clear design. The width of these no-man’s-lands varied with population density.36 High-density economies could afford to concede only a small amount of land to such low-intensity use and had a limited capacity to settle elsewhere refugees who fled such zones. Moreover, the higher the settlement density, the more eyes there were to watch for raids, the more rapid the communication of alarms became, and the more quickly local forces and allies could respond to incursions. Thus no-man’s-lands tended to shrink with increasing human density because they became more costly economically to create and because the security belt they provided was less necessary.
Where population density was high, these buffer zones were measured in hundreds of meters, as in highland New Guinea. Where density was lower, their width stretched to tens of kilometers, as in the more lightly populated areas of the Americas or in the dry savannas of Africa. Although such buffer zones could function ecologically as game and timber preserves, they were risky to use even for hunting and woodcutting because small isolated parties or individuals could easily be ambushed in them.
Whatever their stated purposes in going to war, tribal groups, like civilized ones, were not averse to accepting the spoils of war—which usually included valuable goods and often land. Andrew Vayda,
one of anthropology’s most distinguished students of primitive warfare, decries the obscurantism of certain distinguished social scientists who (in contrasting primitive and civilized war) ignore the essential similarities—”as, for example, the fact that both types of warfare can result in territorial conquests and the redistribution of population.”37
EIGHT
Crying Havoc
The Question of Causes
Not all societies are continually at war, nor are all wars equally terrible. As we have established, warfare is not a constant feature of human social life. It follows that explanations of these differences in warfare must focus on the variable characteristics and circumstances of human existence, not on constants of human biology and behavior.
THE MOTIVES FOR AND CAUSES OF NONSTATE WARFARE
As was noted in Chapter 1, some social scientists have asserted that the fundamental difference between primitive war and real, or civilized, war lies in the realm of motives and causes: real war is motived by economic and political goals (such as more territory or conquest), whereas primitive conflict is directed only toward fulfilling the personal and psychological aims of individual warriors (such as revenge or prestige). But the question of what motivates an individual or a group to engage in warfare is a vexing one. Should all of the individual motives expressed by active participants be considered? Should only the motives that are publicly declared by decision makers or deliberative bodies (kings, chiefs, councils, palavers, and so on) be taken into account? Should any motive declared by anyone be considered? Should motives be inferred from the operations, results, and effects of specific wars or acts of war? Are some causes of war independent of individual and collective motives—for example, droughts or crop failures?
A huge historical literature is devoted to the causes of modern wars and the explanations offered are often very complicated. For instance, many books have been devoted to the question of what caused World War I. Suggested factors include imperial and naval rivalries, diplomatic miscalculations and delusions, the Kaiser’s withered arm, the conflicting ambitions of Austria and Russia in the Balkans, France’s hunger to revenge its defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, and complicated alliances—all to explain how the murder of an Austrian prince by a Serbian terrorist could set off a global conflagration. Consider, too, the differences in opinion over rationalizations, causes, and motives for specific wars between adversaries such as the Union and the Confederacy, Japan and the United States, Iraq and the U.N. coalition. If civilized wars have multiple causes and mixed motives, why should we assume that wars in tribal societies, where there are no centralized governments or voluminous records, can accurately be reduced to a single and unmixed motive? Let us now turn to what ethnography tells us about the declared motives and causes of primitive wars.
No other aspect of primitive warfare has been the focus of more ethnological discussion than its causes.1 But these discussions generally lead to quandaries like those that attend investigations of the causes of civilized wars. Confusion often arises between individual and collective motives, or among efficient, formal, and final causes. The declared motives and aims of participants often fail to conform to those inferred by external observers. The material or social conditions that invite conflict may exist for long periods of time, while outbreaks of war occur only at specific instants. Similar grievances or disputes between two parties may be resolved without violence in some instances but lead to war on other occasions. Given such ambiguities, it is difficult to understand why some anthropologists have so emphasized motive in distinguishing primitive from civilized war.
A schematic account of the antecedents of one war among the Jalemo of New Guinea, recorded by the ethnographer Klaus Koch, illustrates the problems inherent in specifying causes and motives.2 Because the names of the two villages involved are so long, unpronounceable, and similar-sounding, I have replaced them with village A and village B. Village A owed village B a pig as reward for B’s help in a previous war in which the latter had killed one of A’s enemies. Meanwhile, a man from village A heard some (untrue) gossip that a man from village B had seduced his young wife; so, with the aid of a relative, he assaulted the alleged seducer. Village B then “overreacted” to this beating by making two separate raids on village A, wounding a man and a woman. The unpaid debt was acknowledged by both sides as the reason for village B’s disproportionate reaction. These two raids by village B led to a general battle in which several warriors on both sides were wounded, but no one was killed. At this point, with casualties about equal, both sides agreed to suspend the fighting with an indefinite truce. The truce ended later that evening, however, when a warrior from village B, to avenge a wound suffered by one of his kinsmen during the battle, ambushed and wounded a village A resident. The following day battle was resumed, and a B villager was killed. After this death, the war became general: all the warriors of both villages, plus various allies, began a series of battles and ambushes that continued intermittently for the next two years. Now which of these grievances and injuries motivated or caused this war? Was it an unpaid debt, sexual jealousy, or revenge? Which of the series of injuries was the precipitating or proximate cause of the war?
Two of the cross-cultural surveys mentioned in Chapter 2 attempted to tabulate information on motives and causes, but exactly whose motives or views of cause are recorded is unclear.3 Despite these ambiguities, the results of these two independent studies are remarkably similar. Both sets of data indicate that the predominant motives for prestate warfare are revenge for homicides and various economic issues.4 The precise character of such economic motives differs tremendously, depending on the focal economies of the groups involved.5 In New Guinea, for example, where gardening and pig rearing are important, thefts of pigs and of garden produce or pigs’ depredations of gardens, figure prominently as causes of conflict. In California, where tribes depended heavily on gathering wild plant foods and on hunting or fishing, conflicts over resource poaching were very common. Horses were usually the focus of fighting among the historic Plains Indians for whom these became an essential means of transportation and hunting. On the salmon-dependent Pacific Northwest Coast, tribes not infrequently warred over river and ocean frontage. In Minnesota, the Chippewa fought for over 150 years with the Dakota Sioux over use of hunting territories and wild-rice fields. The cattle-herding tribes of East Africa usually fought over livestock. At every level of social organization and with every type of economy, there are instances of fighting over territory. For example, the Walbiri hunter-gatherers of Australia fought a neighboring group for possession of a water hole, and the Mae Enga horticulturists of New Guinea quarreled primarily over land. The impulse to enhance prestige and to serve other personal motives—supposedly especially characteristic of primitive war—figures much less commonly in the tabulations. Indeed, the data in one of the surveys show that the prestige motive is actually more commonly associated with higher levels of political centralization (that is, chiefdoms and states) than with band or tribes.6
The only motive completely absent from most tribal societies is that of subjugation and tribute. Polities that lack the physical power to subjugate their own populations or to extract involuntary tribute or taxes from them are extremely unlikely to make war against others for these purposes, since they lack the institutional and administrative means to convert victory into hegemony or taxation. Instead, decentralized societies focus on pacifying dangerous neighbors by intimidation, expulsion, or annihilation and on acquiring additional food, valuables, labor, and territory by the direct methods of plunder, capture, and physical expulsion. A complex chiefdom or state can accomplish all these goals simultaneously by conquest. For states then, subjugation is merely a rubric that subsumes disparate goals of defense, revenge, economic, and territorial gain; but tribal societies, by their very nature, cannot fight for subjugation and all that it implies. Once this fundamental difference is taken into account, the cross-cultural studies indicate that the motives and goals in
warfare of both states and nonstates are substantially the same and that economic motives predominate in both categories.
As we discuss in greater detail later in this chapter, tribal peoples have sometimes used continual military harassment to extract a kind of tribute from and even impose a weak degree of subjugation on another group.7 For example, in pre-Columbian times, some nomadic Mbaya bands so harrassed Guaná farmers of the South American Gran Chaco that the latter bought peace by offering a kind of annual tribute. Every year at harvest time, a Mbaya band would spend a few days in its “subject” Guaná village, feasting and receiving its annual tribute. Since the Mbaya chiefs also gave “gifts” to their Guaná subjects, this interaction might be seen as a kind of enforced or extorted trade. The Mbaya also protected their “subjects” from inroads by other predatory semi-nomadic tribes. While none of these instances strictly qualifies as subjugation, they bear more than a passing resemblance to the protection schemes and extortion rackets exercised by urban gangsters, rural brigands, and pirates in civilized societies. Thus exploitative or unequal symbiotic relationships did arise among some tribal peoples, but whether this was the goal for which they initially fought is unclear.
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