On August 16 another large battle drawing in allies on both sides took place. At least 20 men were wounded, one possibly seriously by an arrow shot into his belly. The Wilihiman now felt tense, pressured by their inability to avenge their two recent dead, and under a collective obsession to kill an enemy quickly. The spirits of their ancestors wanted revenge, which they themselves had not delivered. They felt that ancestral spirits were no longer supporting them, and that they depended only on themselves; that fear lowered their desire to fight.
On August 24 a Widaia woman unhappy with her husband fled to Wilihiman land in order to seek refuge. A group of Wilihiman wanted to kill her to avenge Jenokma’s death on July 5, but they were dissuaded from doing so.
On August 25, as I related in Chapter 2, four Asuk-Balek men from the other side of the Baliem River came to visit relatives of two of the men in the Dloko-Mabel area. They ran into a Wilihiman group, who immediately realized that these were allies of their enemies, and that the two who had no local relatives should be killed. One of the two succeeded in fleeing, but the other was overpowered and killed. As Wilihiman men dragged off the dying Asuk-Balek, young boys ran alongside him, piercing his body with tiny spears. The killing triggered wild rejoicing and singing everywhere among the Wilihiman, followed by a celebratory dance. The Wilihiman concluded that the Asuk-Balek had been steered to them by their ancestral spirits, or else by Jenokma’s ghost. Even though the revenge was not tit-for-tat (the death of just one enemy for the earlier deaths of two Wilihiman), tension decreased. The killing of even one enemy was the surest sign that ancestral spirits were now again helping them.
In early September a Widaia raid killed a young boy named Digiliak, while a Gutelu raid killed two Widaia. On the next day, warfare was abruptly ended on the Gutelu southern frontier by the establishment of a Dutch patrol post there, but it continued on another Gutelu frontier.
Each of the actions described so far produced only limited tangible consequences, because few people died and no population was driven out of its homeland. Five years later, on June 4, 1966, a large-scale massacre took place. Its origins lay in tensions within the Gutelu Alliance, between the alliance’s leader, Gutelu of the Dloko-Mabel Confederation, and jealous leaders of the allied Wilihiman-Walalua and Gosi-Alua Confederations. Several decades previously, the latter two confederations had been at war with the Dloko-Mabel Confederation until a switch of alliances. It is unclear whether Gutelu himself planned the attack on his former enemies, or whether he was unable to restrain hotheads among his own people. If the latter interpretation were true, it would illustrate a recurrent theme in tribal societies that lack the strong leadership and monopolization of force characterizing chiefdom and state societies. The attack was carefully scheduled for a day when the local missionary and Indonesian police (who had gained control of western New Guinea from the Dutch in 1962) happened to be away. Dloko-Mabel warriors and other northern members of the Gutelu Alliance snuck across the Elogeta River at dawn under cover of fog to attack the alliance’s southern members. Within an hour, 125 southern adults and children of both sexes were dead or dying, dozens of settlements were burning, and other alliances alerted to the impending attack joined in to steal pigs. The southerners would have been exterminated except for help that they received from another alliance further to the south that had formerly been their allies. The result, besides all those deaths, was a flight of southerners further towards the south, and a split in the Gutelu Alliance between southerners and northerners. Such massacres are infrequent events with big consequences. Karl Heider was told of four other such massacres, burnings of villages, pig plundering, and population shifts between the 1930s and 1962.
The war’s death toll
All of the fighting between April and early September 1961 resulted in only about 11 deaths on the southern frontier. Even the massacre of June 4, 1966, produced a death toll of only 125. To us survivors of the 20th century and two world wars, such numbers are so low as not even to be worth dignifying with the name of war. Think of some of the far higher death tolls of modern state history: 2,996 Americans killed within one hour in the World Trade Center attacks of September 11, 2001; 20,000 British soldiers killed on a single day, July 1, 1916, at the Battle of the Somme during World War I, mowed down as they charged across open ground against German positions heavily defended by machine guns; about 100,000 Japanese killed on or after August 6, 1945, by the American atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima (Plate 37); and over 50,000,000 total deaths as a result of World War II. By these standards, the Dani fighting that I just summarized was a tiny war, if it is considered a war at all.
Yes, as measured by the absolute number of people killed, the Dani War was indeed tiny. But the nations involved in World War II were far more populous, and offered far more potential victims, than did the two alliances involved in the Wilihiman-Widaia war. Those alliances numbered perhaps 8,000 people in all, while the major participants in World War II had populations ranging from tens of millions to nearly a billion. The relative death toll of the Dani War—the number of Dani killed as a proportion of the total population involved—rivaled or eclipsed the casualty rates suffered by the U.S., European countries, Japan, or China in the world wars. For example, the 11 deaths suffered by the two Dani alliances on the Gutelu southern front alone, in the six months between April and September 1961, represented about 0.14% of the alliances’ population. That’s higher than the percentage death toll (0.10%) from the bloodiest battle on the Pacific front during World War II: the three-month struggle for Okinawa, employing bombers and kamikaze planes and artillery and flame-throwers, in which about 264,000 people (23,000 American soldiers, 91,000 Japanese soldiers, and 150,000 Okinawan civilians) died, out of a total American/Japanese/Okinawan population then of around 250,000,000. The 125 men, women, and children killed within an hour in the Dani massacre of June 4, 1966, represented about 5% of the targeted population (about 2,500), the southern confederations of the Gutelu Alliance. To match that percentage, the Hiroshima atomic bomb would have had to kill 4,000,000 rather than 100,000 Japanese, and the World Trade Center attack would have had to kill 15,000,000 rather than 2,996 Americans.
By world standards, the Dani War was tiny only because the Dani population at risk of being killed was tiny. By the standards of the local population involved, the Dani War was huge. In the next chapter we shall see that that conclusion also applies to traditional warfare in general.
* Here and in several of the following paragraphs, we encounter a feature of Dani warfare that initially puzzles us: battles by appointment. That is, one side challenges the other side to meet at an appointed place on an appointed day for a battle. The other side is free to accept or ignore the challenge. When a battle has started, either side may call it off if rain begins. These facts have misled some commentators into dismissing Dani warfare as ritualized, not seriously intending to kill, and just a form of sporting contest. Against this view stand the undoubted facts that Dani nevertheless do get wounded and killed in these battles, that other Dani are killed in raids and ambushes, and that large numbers are killed in rare massacres. Anthropologist Paul Roscoe has argued that the apparent ritualization of Dani battles was made inevitable by the swampy and waterlogged terrain, with only two narrow dry hills on which large groups of warriors could safely maneuver and fight. To fight in large groups elsewhere would have posed a suicidal risk of pursuing or retreating from the enemy through swamps with hidden underwater bridges familiar to the enemy. In support of Roscoe’s interpretation, this apparent ritualization of Dani warfare is not paralleled among many other New Guinea Highland groups fighting on firm dry terrain. Rumors circulated, apparently originating with missionaries, that the Harvard Expedition itself, eager for dramatic film footage, somehow provoked the Dani to fight and kill each other. However, the Dani fought before the expedition arrived and after it left, and government investigation of the rumor found it baseless.
CHAPTER 4
A Longer Chapt
er, About Many Wars
Definitions of war Sources of information Forms of traditional warfare Mortality rates Similarities and differences Ending warfare Effects of European contact Warlike animals, peaceful peoples Motives for traditional war Ultimate reasons Whom do people fight? Forgetting Pearl Harbor
Definitions of war
Traditional warfare, as illustrated by the Dani War described in the previous chapter, has been widespread but not universal among small-scale societies. It raises many questions that have been hotly debated. For example, how should war be defined, and do so-called tribal wars really constitute wars at all? How do the death tolls from warfare in small-scale societies compare to death tolls from state warfare? Does warfare increase or decrease when small-scale societies become contacted and influenced by Europeans and other more centralized societies? If fighting between groups of chimpanzees, lions, wolves, and other social animals furnishes precedents for human warfare, does that suggest a genetic basis of warfare? Among human societies, are there some especially peaceful ones? If so, why? And: what are the motives and causes of traditional warfare?
Let’s begin with the question of how to define warfare. Human violence assumes many forms, only some of which are normally taken to constitute war. Anyone will agree that a battle between large armies of trained professional soldiers in the service of rival state governments that have issued formal declarations of war does constitute war. Most of us would also agree that there are forms of human violence that don’t constitute war, such as individual homicides (the killing of one individual by another individual belonging to the same political unit), or family feuds within the same political unit (such as the feud between the Hatfield and McCoy families of the eastern United States beginning around 1880). Borderline cases include recurrent violence between rival groups within the same political unit, such as fighting between urban gangs (commonly referred to as “gang warfare”), between drug cartels, or between political factions whose fighting has not yet reached the stage of declared civil war (such as the fighting between armed militias of fascists and socialists in Italy and Germany leading up to Mussolini’s and Hitler’s assumptions of power). Where should we draw the line?
The answer to that question may depend on the purpose of one’s study. To future soldiers in training at a state-sponsored military college, it may be appropriate to exclude from a definition of warfare Chapter 3’s stories of violence between rival Dani alliances. However, for our purposes in this book, which is concerned with the whole spectrum of related phenomena observed from the smallest human bands of 20 people to the largest states of over a billion people, we must define warfare in a way that doesn’t define traditional warfare between small bands out of existence. As Steven LeBlanc has argued, “Definitions of war must not be dependent on group size or methods of fighting if they are to be useful in studying past warfare…. Many scholars define warfare in such a way that it refers to something that only complex societies employing metal tools can have [i.e., pitched battles and professional soldiers]. Anything else—say, a raid or two now and then—is not ‘real’ warfare, they believe, but is something more akin to game playing and not a subject of much concern. Such an approach or attitude, however, confuses the methods of war with the results of war…. Does conflict between independent political units lead to significant deaths and loss of territory, while resulting in some territory being rendered useless because it’s too dangerous to live in? Are people spending a great deal of time and energy defending themselves?…If fighting results in significant impacts on people, it is war regardless of how the fighting is conducted.” From that perspective, war should be defined sufficiently broadly so as to include the Dani fighting described in Chapter 3.
Consider one fairly typical definition of war, that from the Encyclopaedia Britannica’s 15th edition: “A state of usually open and declared armed hostile conflict between political units, such as states or nations or between rival political factions of the same state or nation. War is characterized by intentional violence on the part of large bodies of individuals who are expressly organized and trained to participate in such violence…. War is generally understood to embrace only armed conflicts on a fairly large scale, usually excluding conflicts in which fewer than 50,000 combatants are involved.” Like many other apparently common-sense definitions of war, this one is much too restrictive for our purposes, because it requires “large bodies of individuals who are expressly organized and trained,” and it thereby refuses to admit the possibility of war in small band societies. Its arbitrary requirement of at least 50,000 combatants is more than six times the entire population (men warriors, women, and children) involved in Chapter 3’s Dani War, and far larger than most of the small-scale societies discussed in this book.
Hence scholars studying small-scale societies have come up with various alternative broader definitions of war, similar to each other and usually requiring three elements. One element is violence carried out by groups of any size, but not by single individuals. (A killing carried out by one individual is considered a murder, not an act of war.) Another element is that the violence is between groups belonging to two different political units, not belonging to the same political unit. The remaining element is that the violence must be sanctioned by the whole political unit, even if only some members of the unit carry out the violence. Thus, the killings between the Hatfield and McCoy families didn’t constitute war, because both families belonged to the same political unit (the U.S.), and the U.S. as a whole did not approve of that family feud. These elements may be combined into a short definition of war that I shall use in this book, and that is similar to definitions formulated by other scholars of small-scale as well as state societies: “War is recurrent violence between groups belonging to rival political units, and sanctioned by the units.”
Sources of information
Chapter 3’s account of Dani warfare might suggest that it’s straightforward to study traditional war: send out graduate students and a film crew, observe and film battles, count the wounded and dead warriors being carried back, and interview participants for more details. That’s the evidence available to us for Dani warfare. If we had hundreds of such studies, there would be no arguments about traditional war’s reality.
In fact, for several obvious reasons, direct observations of traditional war by scholars carrying cameras are exceptional, and there is some controversy about its extent in the absence of European influence. As Europeans expanded over the globe from AD 1492 onwards and encountered and conquered non-European peoples, one of the first things that European governments did was to suppress traditional warfare: for the safety of Europeans themselves, and to administer the conquered areas, and as part of a perceived civilizing mission. By the time that the science of anthropology entered the era of abundant well-funded field studies and graduate students after World War II, warfare among traditional small-scale societies had become largely confined to the island of New Guinea and to parts of South America. It had ended much earlier in other Pacific islands, North America, Aboriginal Australia, Africa, and Eurasia, although modern forms of it have recently been resurfacing in some areas, especially in Africa and New Guinea.
Even in New Guinea and South America, recent opportunities for anthropologists to observe traditional warfare first-hand have been limited. Governments don’t want the problems and publicity resulting from unarmed vulnerable outsiders being attacked by warring tribespeople. Governments also don’t want anthropologists to be armed, to be the first representatives of state societies to enter an unpacified tribal area, and to try to end fighting by force themselves. Hence both in New Guinea and in South America there have been government restrictions on travel until an area is considered officially pacified and safe for anyone to visit. Nevertheless, some scholars and missionaries have succeeded in working in areas where fighting was still going on. Notable examples were the observers in 1961 in the Dani area, where there already was a Dutch patrol post established in the Ba
liem Valley, but where the Harvard Expedition was permitted to operate beyond the area of government control; the Kuegler family’s work among the Fayu people of western New Guinea beginning in 1979; and Napoleon Chagnon’s work among the Yanomamo Indians of Venezuela and Brazil. Even in those studies that did yield some first-hand observations of warfare, however, much or most of the detail was still not observed directly by the Westerner writing about it, but was instead acquired second-hand from local informants: e.g., Jan Broekhuijse’s detailed accounts of who in each Dani battle was wounded under what circumstances in which part of the body.
Most of our information about traditional warfare is entirely second-hand and based on accounts given by participants to Western visitors, or else is based on first-hand observations by Europeans (such as government officers, explorers, and traders) who were not trained scientists gathering data for doctoral dissertations. For instance, many New Guineans have reported to me their own experiences in traditional warfare. However, in all my visits to Australian-administered eastern New Guinea (now independent Papua New Guinea) and Indonesian-administered western New Guinea, I have never personally witnessed New Guineans attacking other New Guineans. The Australian and Indonesian governments would never have permitted me to enter areas where fighting was still going on, even if I had wanted to do so, which I didn’t.
The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn From Traditional Societies? Page 16