War Before Civilization

by Lawrence H Keeley

  This state of affairs is a paradox only for idealists, however. For materialists, values, beliefs, and attitudes are primarily epiphenomenal “superstructures”—that is, they either passively reflect or actively obfuscate economic and social reality. Negative attitudes toward war certainly reflect the unpleasant realities of warfare, but values and beliefs are slippery and changeable. Ironically (but often without the least trace of hypocrisy), a desire for peace has justified peacetime military preparations and the wartime use of very brutal methods. With bewildering rapidity, hated enemies can become respected allies, devout pacifists can become tigers on the battlefield, peaceable societies can become belligerent, and vice versa. The roots of war and peace clearly lie in certain social and economic circumstances that mold or override values and attitudes.

  MAKING PEACE

  By far the most common form of settlement concluding a tribal war involves having a leader on one side declare a desire for peace; this overture is then accepted by the opposing leader, followed by an exchange of gifts or the mutual payment of homicide compensation. This process may sound easy, but in practice the establishment of peace at any stage short of the utter defeat or annihilation of one party is as difficult and delicate a task as any arranged peace between contending nation-states.11 Usually, peace negotiations are not even considered unless the fighting has reached an impasse and losses are approximately equal for both contenders. If the losses are not relatively even, there may be considerable resistance to a settlement on both sides: one group has suffered deaths that it must leave unavenged; the other must pay out a larger amount of “blood money” than it will receive.12 Or one group may feel strong enough to push the fighting to a more decisive conclusion. Before any peace negotiations can even begin, there must be a general consensus for peace among the warriors on both sides, which may be difficult to obtain. Any “hawks” or “hotheads” dissenting from the consensus can easily sabotage the negotiations simply by committing further violence. Even with such a consensus, reaching a final settlement can be a laborious and precarious endeavor.

  The peace-making process among the Central Enga of New Guinea illustrates the excruciating delicacy necessary to establish peace between small-scale societies.13 When it is clear that neither side can defeat the other and when losses are nearly equal, the allies of the principal contenders will usually suggest that a peace be negotiated. Then the big men, or political leaders (who are not the war leaders), of the two principals will try to exhort a consensus for peace among their own warriors, with opposition expected from self-confident “fight leaders,” hotheaded young bachelors, and bereaved relatives of the slain. If the necessary consensus can be obtained from each side, neutral go-betweens carry proposals and counterproposals concerning the composition of the peace delegations and the location of the peace conference. These are important issues because both sides may suspect a treacherous ambush and because the inclusion of hawks or hotheads in either delegation would increase the likelihood of violence erupting at the meeting. Even when a mutually agreeable meeting has been arranged, it remains “no easy task to create a setting for reasonable discourse, one that will not disintegrate into bloody violence.” When meeting, the delegates lay aside their bows and spears (but not their axes), and both sides keep armed warriors lurking within earshot, ready to intervene if treachery is attempted or violence breaks out. As an opening, the opposing Big Men make prolonged speeches justifying their cause in a formal florid style, spiced with humor at the expense of their adversaries. Despite their conventionalized character and humor, these orations can fray tempers and lead to an explosion. When these harangues are finished, the crucial issue of blood-money payments is addressed. If this haggling is successful, down payments of homicide compensation are presented and divided among those due to receive them (the relatives of the slain). No one is ever really satisfied with these down payments, and it requires all of the Big Men’s influence and powers of persuasion to have them accepted. It is very common for a brawl to break out at this point, as some warriors reject what they consider insultingly small payments. Should any blood be drawn, the war resumes. If this hurdle is successfully passed, however, more bombastic speeches follow, threatening dire consequences should the foes delay or default in making full payment of their reparations. In practice, Enga clans usually try to evade paying the outstanding blood money by resorting to delays, procrastinations, or token payments, so most of their “peaces” seldom endure for long.

  As the Enga example shows, the custom of paying blood money or other forms of war reparations are almost as much a cause of subsequent warfare as of immediate peace. New disputes can arise or fighting can resume when compensation is not paid promptly or to the satisfaction of the recipients. Indeed, among the Huli of New Guinea, unpaid homicide indemnities have been identified as a very common cause of wars.14 In addition, any wounded man who dies after the peace is concluded, even years later, requires new compensation. These belated claims are often refused, and the war begins again. Some New Guinea groups have even conducted autopsies to establish whether an old wound (or which of several old wounds) was the cause of death and represents a basis for a blood-money claim. In some cultures, compensation must be paid to families of allies killed in battle; if these payments are delayed or withheld, former allies can become active enemies. In general, reparations are a very weak mechanism for maintaining peace, and they often prove to be an impediment to reconciliation or an inducement to further violence.15

  Other noncompensatory methods for establishing peace have been no more effective. For example, the Murngin of Australia would arrange very stylized and relatively harmless duels between the contenders in order to make peace. But these “peace-making fights” were often unsuccessful because the tribal elders could not control the tempers of their younger men; then one side would inflict a serious injury or death on the other, and wholesale fighting would resume.16

  Just as with the Treaty of Versailles, the settlement of one tribal conflict could produce grievances leading to the start of another. Because these agreements were not enforced by a more powerful third party, peace settlements between nonstate societies, like those between nations, tended to be extremely brittle. The broken settlements, shifting alliances, smoldering grievances, and (in some instances) gross treachery displayed by nonstate societies led one ethnographer to remark that if records had been kept, the history of many such groups would be as complicated as that of any modern European nation.17 Peace may thus have been more precious in the precivilized condition because it was so rare and fleeting.

  States enjoy a slight advantage over nonstates with regard to peace making because they exercise a much greater degree of centralized control over their populations and economic resources. Because political decision making is in the hands of a tiny minority of a state’s population, no complete consensus is needed from all citizens or soldiers before a peace can be negotiated. Hawkish dissenters can be controlled or even eliminated by the police institutions typical of states. States are then better able to enforce the peace from their own side. Where individuals have greater autonomy, as in small-scale societies or on colonial frontiers, almost anyone can commit acts (amounting to crimes) that bring their social units into armed conflict with neighbors. Of course, ambitious, greedy, treacherous, or faithless ruling elites can start wars without obtaining the consent of their subjects.

  One of the apologies for imperialism during its heyday was pacification—the suppression of intertribal warfare by persuasion or force (usually the latter) and the substitution of legal means of resolving disputes or redressing wrongs. Had pacification and “the rule of law,” wider trade, and improvements in transportation and communication been the only innovations introduced by imperial agents, imperialism might ultimately have been more of a boon and less of an ordeal for its native subjects. In fact, colonial pacification was not an end in itself but a means to achieve goals that almost invariably benefited the intruders as much as they
harmed the native inhabitants: forced labor, loss of territory, economic exploitation, subordinate social and political status, and lack of legal redress against wrongs or crimes committed by colonists. The price of imperial peace was manifold indignity, dispossession, abject poverty, slavery, famine, and worse; and that price was surely too high. The peace that humans universally desire is not that of the grave or the chain gang, but imperial pacification often meant both.

  MAINTAINING PEACE

  As Gregor noted when decrying the scarcity of peace, the most common peaceable societies are ones that could evade the problem of intertribal relations by fleeing conflict, because they lived in very sparsely settled regions and were isolated from intimate contact with others by oceans, desert wastes, mountain barriers, unhealthful swamps, and dense forests. Unfortunately, preserving peace by flight from conflict has not been a strategic option available to most societies. Of more general and practical interest are ethnographic or historical instances in which peace was maintained even though contact between different cultural and social groups was close and sustained.

  Gregor nominates as such an example the multitribal society of the Upper Xingu Basin in Brazil, comprising some 1,200 people of four different language groups living in ten politically independent villages.18 For more than a century, aside from rare intervillage homicides and a few feuds, no wars or raids have occurred among these villages. But Gregor’s descriptions of warfare with non-Xingu “wild” tribes and the frequent killing of “witches,” which occasionally escalate into minor feuds, make what he calls a “negative peace” look anything but peaceful. He implies that deterrence primarily prevents these witchcraft killings from developing into wholesale feuding or even a Hobbesian state of war. He also notes that the Xingu region is geographically isolated, a situation that to some degree limits possible hostilities with non-Xingu tribes. But no matter how rarely they are met, these “wild Indian” enemies of the Xingu alliance are never far from its thoughts. They represent an external threat that binds the Xingu tribes together, and they serve as a moral example of the subhuman savagery that the Xinguanos could descend into should they abandon the principle of peace among themselves. Less extreme versions of ethnocentrism and negative ethnic stereotypes limit informal interaction among the allied tribes themselves. Formal interactions involve some intermarriage, considerable trade, and some participation in intervillage rituals; otherwise, the separate groups keep very much to themselves. It is also probable that the Xinguanos are all examples of a particular species of peaceable society we have previously encountered: defeated refugees. The Xingu tribes do seem much more harmonious than usual, but only with the aid of geography and on the basis of an uneasy but equitable social separatism.

  The Xingu case does suggest that one form of monopoly exchange either promotes peace or is a symptom of it. Each of the Xingu tribes has what might be called an artificial monopoly.19 Every tribe produces and exports goods that none of the other tribes makes, although there is no objective reason why these products can not be made by all. The tribal specializations include shell belts, salt produced by burning water hyacinth plants, hardwood bows, spears, and ceramic pots. None of these monopolies can be explained on geographic grounds, since clay for pots, water hyacinths, shells, and hard wood for bows are equally accessible to all. In other words, unlike monopolies that are accidents of geographic proximity to sources of materials (and can provoke war), these are arbitrary and maintained by tradition. When Gregor asked why the specialty of another village was not made “at home,” he was told that to do so would anger the monopolists, perhaps leading them to bewitch the monopoly-busters. Allowing these arbitrary monopolies to remain in force has clearly helped to maintain peace.

  A similar but less enduring association between arbitrary specializations and peaceful relations has been observed among the Yanomamo of the Upper Orinoco. For example, one of two allied Yanomamo villages made no pottery and obtained all its ceramics from its allies. When asked why they made no pots despite the availability of clay, the aceramic villagers claimed that the local clay was unsuitable and that they had forgotten how to make pots and so had to get them elsewhere. But when the alliance broke down, as frequently happens among the Yanomamo, the aceramic villagers immediately began making pots and exporting them to their new allies.20 This instance shows that such patterns of specialization and exchange are an effect of peace, and not its cause. By contrast, the Xingu tribesmen seem to recognize that perturbing the trade among arbitrary specialists would disturb the peace.

  A prehistoric example of similar arbitrary village specializations has been found among some frontier villages of Early Neolithic farmers in Belgium, some of which were fortified.21 While all these villages raised their own grain and livestock, they appear (judging from finds of manufacturing debris) to have specialized variously in the production of stone axes, flint blades, some types of ceramics, and some special form of finished hide. These products were then exchanged among the villages, since all seem to have been equally well supplied with the finished products (except that no conclusion can be drawn as to the leather, which was not preserved). These specialties were arbitrary because the sources of raw material either were equally distant from all (as in the case of stone for axes) or were equally accessible (as with hides, flint, and clay). Moreover, most of these sites were separated from one another by distances of less than two miles. Given their frontier location and fortifications, these villagers, like the Xinguanos, appear to have been maintaining an alliance against the foragers beyond them.

  One interesting “controlled” comparison that isolates the crucial conditions for war and peace involves the contrast between the nineteenth-century histories of western Canada and the western United States (and northern Mexico). These regions share a number of fundamental similarities in landscape, people, and final outcomes. During the nineteenth century, the arable and pasturable areas of North America west of the Mississippi and the Great Lakes passed from the possession of its native inhabitants into that of people of European origin. The prevailing subsistence economy changed from foraging or foraging supplemented by marginal agriculture to ranching and intensive farming. The Indians’ numbers were severely reduced, their traditional economies were destroyed, and they were left in occupation of small and usually infertile reserves.

  The tribes on both sides of the border were warlike. In many cases, in fact, they were exactly the same tribes because the forty-ninth parallel cut through their territory. The tribes of the prairie and plains of Canada were enthusiastic horse raiders and placed the same value on martial prowess as did those to the south. The tribes of the British Columbian coast were among the most aggressive and militarily sophisticated peoples north of central Mexico, and they did not hesitate to raid the Russians when they first appeared in the area. The westward-pioneering Euro-Canadians and Euro-Americans were likewise essentially the same people; they came from the same regions of Europe in the same waves, and their New World family histories often crossed and recrossed the forty-ninth parallel. Euro-Canadians displayed the same ethnocentrism as Euro-Americans concerning the Indian cultures and the conviction that because they would make “better use” of fertile land, they (and not the “feckless” Indians) deserved to possess it.22 Francophone “Canadiens” and Métis (”mixed-blood” Catholics) played the same roles as traders, trappers, boatmen, and guides on both frontiers. Thus the plot, the scenery, the cast of characters, and the denouement were the same in both countries; however, the action and dialogue were very different.

  South of the forty-ninth parallel, this drama was attended by frequent and bitter warfare. The Indians were, in the words of one of their foes, “fighting for all that God gave any man to fight for”—that is, for their homelands, for the safety of their families, and for preservation of their particular ways of life. The fertility, mineral wealth, and sheer magnificence of this huge territory made it a prize worth the risk to those who sought to seize it; and the settlers al
so fought, when war came, to protect their families and their way of life. Both the Indians and the settlers fought to perpetuate two incompatible ways of life so attractive (in retrospect, anyway) that they remain the objects of worldwide nostalgia. The Indian, Spanish, Mexican, and American bloodshed that stains the history of the West and littered its landscape with violent place-names (Battle Mountains, Massacre Lakes, and Bloody Islands) therefore appears to have been inevitable, a fated tragedy. It then comes as something of a shock to discover that in western Canada the same land-grab was perpetrated and the same subjugation of the Indians resulted but without a single war and with only one raid. North of the forty-ninth parallel, even though the stakes for both sides were every bit as high as in the south, peace reigned.

  The Canadian peace was not absolute, nor was it maintained without the occasional use of force.23 In British Columbia, before its Indian treaties were ratified when it joined Canada in 1871, a few minor incidents did occur, involving Indians killing a few whites or looting shipwrecks. One case, the “Chilcotin War,” termed a “ludicrous ‘campaign’” by one ethnohistorian, exemplifies the nature of these incidents. In 1864, some Chilcotin Indians murdered some whites in three separate incidents. A large party of Royal Marines and militia was sent up country to arrest the culprits. This “war” ended when the suspects were recognized and captured while they were nonchalantly visiting the militia camp. Another case of Indian-white conflict occurred in 1885 during the Second Northwest Rebellion in Saskatchewan. This was the second revolt by Métis; their first “rebellion” in Manitoba fifteen years earlier had been bloodless and involved no Indians. The Métis’ principal grievance was that the parcels of land being granted to them were divided into grid squares rather than into long strips anchored on bodies of water. Despite the entreaties of the Métis and the hunger caused by poor government rations and the disappearance of the buffalo, only two small bands of Cree went on the warpath. The “hostile” Cree bands’ military cooperation with the Métis was limited to murdering nine people captured at a small undefended trading post and repulsing a force of Canadian militia, killing eight militiamen. After a few dozen deaths on both sides and some surprising defeats of Dominion forces by Métis militia in several skirmishes, the Métis’ “capital” was quickly overrun, their leader was arrested, and the rebellion ended.24 More generally, of course, force was often used by the Mounties in capturing or killing Indian, Métis, and white law-breakers. But compared with what went on to the south, the Canadian colonization of the West was extraordinarily peaceful.