The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn From Traditional Societies?

by Jared Diamond

  Still a third advantage of state justice involves its goal of establishing right and wrong, and punishing or assessing civil penalties against wrong-doers, so as to deter other members of the society from committing crimes or wrongs. Deterrence is an explicit goal of our criminal justice system. In effect, it’s also a goal of our tort system of civil justice, which scrutinizes causes of and responsibility for injuries, and which thereby seeks to discourage injury-provoking behavior by making everyone aware of the civil judgments that they may have to pay if they commit such behaviors. For example, if Malo had been sued for civil damages for killing Billy under an effective state justice system, Malo’s lawyers would have argued (with good chances of success) that the responsibility for Billy’s death did not lie with Malo, who was driving safely, but instead with the mini-bus driver who let Billy off in the face of on-coming traffic, and with Billy’s uncle Genjimp, who was waiting to greet Billy on the opposite side of a busy road. An actual case in Los Angeles analogous to that of Billy and Malo was that of Schwartz v. Helms Bakery. A small boy was killed by a car while running across a busy street to buy a chocolate doughnut from a Helms Bakery truck; the boy had asked the driver to wait while the boy ran across the street to his house to fetch money; the driver agreed and remained parked awaiting the boy on that busy street; and the court held that a jury should decide whether Helms Bakery was partly responsible for the boy’s death, through the driver’s negligence.

  Such tort cases put pressure on citizens of state societies to be constantly alert to the possibility that their negligence may contribute to causing an accident. In contrast, the private negotiated settlement between Billy’s clan and Malo’s colleagues provided no incentive to New Guinea adults and mini-bus drivers to reflect on risks to schoolchildren running across streets. Despite the millions of car trips daily on the streets of Los Angeles, and despite the few police cars patrolling our streets, most Los Angelenos drive safely most of the time, and only a tiny percentage of those millions of daily trips end in accidents or injuries. One reason is the deterrent power of our civil and criminal justice system.

  But let me again prevent misunderstanding: I’m not praising state justice as uniformly superior. States pay a price for those three advantages. State criminal justice systems exist primarily to promote goals of the state: to reduce private violence, to foster obedience to the state’s laws, to protect the public as a whole, to rehabilitate criminals, and to punish and deter crimes. The state’s focus on those goals tends to diminish the state’s attention to goals of individual citizens involved in dispute resolution in small-scale societies: the restoration of relationships (or of non-relationships), and reaching emotional closure. It is not inevitable that states ignore these goals, but they often do neglect them because of their focus on the state’s other goals. In addition, there are other defects of state justice systems that are not so inherent, but are nevertheless widespread: limited or no compensation through the criminal justice systems to victims of a crime (unless through a separate civil suit); and, in civil suits, the slowness of resolution, the difficulty of monetizing personal and emotional injuries, the lack of provision (in the U.S.) for recouping of attorney fees by a successful plaintiff, and the lack of reconciliation (or often, worse yet, increased bad feelings) between disputants.

  We have seen that state societies could mitigate these problems by adopting practices inspired by procedures of small-scale societies. In our civil justice system we could invest more money in the training and hiring of mediators and the availability of judges. We could put more effort into mediation. We could award attorney fees to successful plaintiffs under some circumstances. In our criminal justice system we could experiment more with restorative justice. In the American criminal justice system we could re-assess whether European models emphasizing rehabilitation more and retribution less would make better sense for criminals, for society as a whole, and for the economy.

  All of these proposals have been much discussed. They pose difficulties of their own. I hope that, with wider knowledge of how small-scale societies resolve disputes, legal scholars may figure out how better to incorporate those admired procedures of small-scale societies into our own systems.

  CHAPTER 3

  A Short Chapter, About a Tiny War

  The Dani War The war’s time-line The war’s death toll

  The Dani War

  This chapter will serve to introduce traditional warfare by recounting a rather ordinary series of battles and raids among New Guinea’s Dani people, unusual only in that they were actually observed and filmed by anthropologists. The Dani are one of New Guinea’s most numerous and densest populations, centered on the Grand Valley of the Baliem River. Between 1909 and 1937, eight Western expeditions contacted and briefly visited outlying Dani groups or their neighbors without entering the valley itself. As mentioned in Chapter 1, the valley and its teeming population were “discovered”—i.e., first spotted by Europeans, about 46,000 years after the arrival of ancestral New Guineans—on June 23, 1938, from an airplane carrying out reconnaissance flights for the Archbold Expedition. First contact face-to-face followed on August 4, when an expedition patrol led by Captain Teerink walked into the valley. After the Archbold Expedition left the valley in December 1938, further contact of Baliem Dani with Europeans (apart from a brief U.S. Army rescue of a crashed airplane crew in 1945) was postponed until 1954 and subsequent years, when several mission stations and a Dutch government patrol post were established in the valley.

  In 1961 an expedition from Harvard University’s Peabody Museum arrived to carry out anthropological studies and filming. The campsite selected was in the Dugum Dani neighborhood, because that area had no government or mission station and relatively little outside contact. It turned out that traditional warfare was still going on. Accounts of fighting there between April and September 1961 have appeared in several forms: especially, the doctoral dissertation (in Dutch) of social scientist Jan Broekhuijse from the University of Utrecht; two books by anthropologist Karl Heider, based on Heider’s doctoral dissertation at Harvard; a popular book, Under the Mountain Wall, by the writer Peter Matthiessen; and a documentary film, Dead Birds, produced by Robert Gardner and including remarkable footage of battles between spear-wielding tribesmen.

  The following brief summary of Dugum Dani warfare during those months of 1961 is derived especially from Broekhuijse’s thesis because it is the most detailed account, supplemented by information from Heider plus a few details from Matthiessen. Broekhuijse interviewed battle participants, who described to him their assessment of each battle, their resulting mood, and specifics of each person’s wounds. There are some minor discrepancies among these three accounts, notably in the spelling of Dani names (Broekhuijse used Dutch orthography while Heider used American orthography), and in some details such as a one-day difference in the date of one battle. However, these three authors shared information with each other and with Gardner, and their accounts are largely in agreement.

  As you read this combined account, I think that you’ll be struck, as was I, by many features of Dani warfare that turn out to be shared with wars in many other traditional societies to be mentioned in Chapter 4. Those shared features include the following ones. Frequent concealed ambushes and open battles (Plate 36), each with few deaths, are punctuated by infrequent massacres that exterminate a whole population or kill a significant fraction of it. So-called tribal warfare is often or usually actually intra-tribal, between groups speaking the same language and sharing the same culture, rather than inter-tribal. Despite that cultural similarity or identity between the antagonists, one’s enemies are sometimes demonized as subhuman. Boys are trained already in childhood to fight, and to expect to be attacked. It is important to enlist allies, but alliances shift frequently. Revenge plays a dominant role as a motive for cycles of violence. (Karl Heider instead described the motive as the need to placate the ghosts of one’s recently killed comrades.) Warfare involves the whole populatio
n rather than just a small professional army of adult men: there is intentional killing of “civilian” women and children as well as of male “soldiers.” Villages are burned and pillaged. Military efficiency is low by the standards of modern warfare, as a result of the availability of only short-range weapons, weak leadership, simple plans, lack of group military training, and lack of synchronized firing. However, because warfare is chronic, it has omnipresent consequences for people’s behavior. Finally, absolute death tolls are inevitably low from the small size of the populations involved (compared to the populations of almost all modern nations), but relative death tolls as a proportion of the population involved are high.

  The war’s time-line

  The Dani War to be described pitted two alliances against each other, each numbering up to 5,000 people. To help readers keep track of the unfamiliar Dani names that will recur in the following pages, I summarize alliance compositions in Table 3.1. One alliance, termed the Gutelu Alliance after its leader Gutelu, consisted of several confederations of about 1,000 people each, including the Wilihiman-Walalua Confederation encompassing the Dugum Dani neighborhood, plus their allies the Gosi-Alua, the Dloko-Mabel, and other confederations. The other alliance, living to the south of the Gutelu Alliance, included the Widaia and their allies such as the Siep-Eloktak, the Hubu-Gosi, and the Asuk-Balek Confederations. The Gutelu Alliance was also simultaneously fighting a war on its northern frontier, which is not discussed in the following account. A few decades before the events of 1961, the Wilihiman-Walalua and the Gosi-Alua had been allied with the Siep-Eloktak and had been enemies of the Dloko-Mabel, until thefts of pigs and disputes over women induced the Wilihiman-Walalua and the Gosi-Alua to ally with the Dloko-Mabel, form an alliance under Gutelu, and attack and drive out the Siep-Eloktak, who became allies of the Widaia. Subsequent to the events of 1961, the Dloko-Mabel again attacked and became enemies of the Wilihiman-Walalua and the Gosi-Alua.

  All of these groups speak the Dani language and are similar in culture and subsistence. In the following paragraphs I shall label the opposing sides for short as the Wilihiman and the Widaia, but it should be understood that each of those confederations was usually joined in battle by one or more allied confederations.

  Table 3.1. Membership of two warring Dani alliances

  GUTELU ALLIANCE WIDAIA ALLIANCE

  Wilihiman-Walalua Confederation Widaia Confederation

  Gosi-Alua Confederation Siep-Eloktak Confederation

  Dloko-Mabel Confederation Hubu-Gosi Confederation

  other confederations Asuk-Balek Confederation

  other confederations

  In February 1961, before the main accounts of Broekhuijse, Heider, and Matthiessen begin, four women and one man of the Gutelu Alliance were killed by the Widaia while visiting clan relatives in a nearby tribe for a pig feast, enraging the Gutelu. There had been other killings before that one. Thus, one should talk about chronic warfare, rather than a war with a specifiable beginning and cause.

  On April 3 a Widaia man wounded in a previous battle died. For the Wilihiman, that avenged the death of a Wilihiman man in January and confirmed the benevolent attitude of their ancestors, but for the Widaia the new Widaia death demanded revenge in order to restore their relationship with their own ancestors. At dawn on April 10 the Widaia shouted out a challenge to an open battle, which the Wilihiman accepted and fought until rain ended the battle at 5:00 P.M.* Ten Wilihiman were lightly wounded, one of the Gosi-Alua allies (a man named Ekitamalek) was seriously wounded (an arrow point broke off in his left lung and he died 17 days later), and an unspecified number of Widaia were wounded. That outcome left both sides eager for another battle.

  On April 15 a battle challenge was again issued and accepted, and about 400 warriors fought until the onset of darkness compelled everyone to go home. About 20 men were wounded on each side. Three Hubikiak allies of the Widaia had to be carried away, accompanied by derisive laughter and jeers from the Wilihiman, who shouted out remarks such as “Make those jerks walk themselves, they’re not pigs!…Go home, your wives will cook potatoes for you.” One of those wounded Hubikiak died six weeks later.

  On April 27 Ekitamalek, the Gosi-Alua man wounded on April 10, died and was cremated. The Widaia noticed that no Gosi-Alua and few Wilihiman were out in their gardens, so 30 Widaia crossed a river into Wilihiman land and waited in ambush. When no one appeared, the Widaia knocked over a Wilihiman watch-tower and went home (Plate 13).

  On May 4 the Wilihiman and their allies issued a battle challenge and waited at a preferred battlefield, but no Widaia appeared, so they went home.

  On May 10 or May 11 the father of Ekitamalek led a raid of Gosi-Alua, Walalua, and many Wilihiman men into Widaia gardens while the remaining Wilihiman men and women worked in their gardens and behaved as if everything were normal, so that the Widaia wouldn’t suspect an ambush. The raiders spotted two Widaia men working in a Widaia garden while a third stood guard on top of a watch-tower. For hours, the raiders crept closer until the Widaia man on watch spotted them at a distance of 50 meters. All three Widaia fled, but the attackers managed to catch one named Huwai, pierced him repeatedly with spears, and fled. A counter-ambush that the Widaia staged in Wilihiman territory was unsuccessful. The wounded Widaia man died later that day. Three Wilihiman were lightly wounded in the day’s action. The Wilihiman now felt that they had avenged the death of their Gosi-Alua ally, and they celebrated by dancing into the night.

  On May 25 Gutelu warriors on their alliance’s northern front killed a man of the Asuk-Balek Confederation, allied with the Widaia and figuring in the August 25 death to be described below.

  On May 26 both sides issued challenges, carried out raids, and fought until late in the afternoon, whereupon they went home. Twelve Wilihiman were wounded, none of them seriously.

  On May 29 the Widaia reported that their warrior wounded on April 15 had just died, leading the Wilihiman to launch a celebratory dance that had to be interrupted because of a report of a Widaia raid on the northern frontier.

  The Widaia were now feeling restless because they had suffered two deaths without being able to take revenge. On June 4 they sent out an ambush party that developed into a battle involving a total of about 800 men, broken off because of darkness. Three Wilihiman were lightly wounded.

  A full-fledged battle developed on June 7, involving 400 or 500 warriors on each side. Amidst a hail of spears and arrows from opposing groups 20 meters apart, hotheads dashed to within 5 meters of the enemy, constantly darting to avoid being hit. About 20 men were wounded.

  A Widaia raid on June 8 was inferred from footprints but not spotted.

  On June 10 the Wilihiman devoted themselves to a ceremony, and no one was out in the gardens or manning the watch-towers. In the late afternoon of the hot day a Wilihiman man and three young boys went to drink cold water at the river, where they were surprised by 30 Widaia divided into two groups. When the first group popped out, the four Wilihiman fled, whereupon the second group of Widaia in hiding attempted to cut them off. The Wilihiman man and two of the boys managed to escape, but Wejakhe, the third boy, could not run fast because of an injured leg, was caught, was severely wounded with spears, and died that night.

  On June 15 Wejakhe’s Wilihiman relatives staged an unsuccessful raid.

  On June 22 the Widaia shouted out a challenge, and a battle with about 300 men on each side developed along with an ambush. Four men were lightly wounded. A Dloko-Mabel man was seriously wounded by an arrow point that broke off in his shoulder and that his companions attempted to extract, first by gripping it with their teeth and pulling, then by operating (without anesthetic) with a bamboo knife.

  On July 5, after two weeks without fighting, the Wilihiman raided a Widaia garden. A Wilihiman man named Jenokma, who was faster than his companions, impetuously sprinted ahead after a group of six fleeing Widaia, was cut off, and was speared. His companions fled, and the Widaia carried off his corpse but brought it back that evening
and set it down in the no-man’s land for the Wilihiman to retrieve. Three Gosi-Alua allies of the Wilihiman were lightly wounded. The Wilihiman were now depressed: they had hoped to make a kill, but instead it was they who had just suffered another death. An old Wilihiman woman lamented, “Why are you trying to kill the Widaia?” A Wilihiman man replied, “Those people are our enemies. Why shouldn’t we kill them?—they’re not human.”

  On July 12 the Wilihiman spent all day waiting in ambush until they issued an open challenge around 5:00 P.M. However, it was a rainy day, so the Widaia didn’t accept the challenge or go out into their gardens.

  On July 28 the Widaia staged a raid that was spotted by a group of eight Wilihiman men at a watch-tower. The Wilihiman hid themselves nearby. Not realizing that there were any Wilihiman around, the Widaia came to their tower, and one of them climbed it for a look. At that point the hidden Wilihiman jumped out, the Widaia on the ground fled, and the one man up on the tower attempted to jump down but wasn’t fast enough and was caught and killed. That evening the Wilihiman returned his body to the Widaia.

  On August 2 a small battle was provoked when a Widaia pig either was stolen by the Wilihiman or strayed from their territory.

  On August 6 a large battle developed between the Wilihiman, the Widaia, and allies on both sides. A parallel battle took place between Widaia and Wilihiman boys as young as six years old, standing on opposite sides of a river, firing arrows at each other, and urged on by older men. Only five men were lightly wounded, because the battle degenerated into more name-calling than fighting. Some sample insults: “You are women, you are cowards.” “Why do you have so many more women than your low status deserves?” “I have five wives, and I’m going to get five more, because I live on my own land. You are landless fugitives, that’s why you have no wives.”