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Anthropology of War Keith F. Otterbein (1997) What is war ? How common was warfare in past and present ? How deadly was warfare in past and present ?.
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Anthropology of War Keith F. Otterbein (1997) What is war? How common was warfare in past and present? How deadly was warfare in past and present?
Warfare is defined by Malinowski (1941) as an armed contest between two independent political units by means of organized military force in the pursuit of a tribal or national policy. Mead (1968) stated that “ warfare exists if the conflict is organized and socially sanctioned and the killing is not regarded as murder”. Naroll (1964) defines warfare as public lethal group combat between territorial teams. A territorial team is a group of people whose membership is defined in terms of occupancy of a common territory and who have an official with the special function of announcing group decision.
In my definition, the term political community has the same meaning as Naroll’s territorial team. Warfare is “armed combat between political communities”while feuding is a type of armed combat occurring within a political community”. Feuding - fights among members of the same political community. Internal Warfare: fights between members of different political communities of the same culture or society. External warfare: fights between political communities of different societies. Sixteen approaches are used to classify the various studies of primitive warfare. These sixteen approaches can be grouped into two major categories: causes of war and effects of war.
Innate Aggression (cause) • It is genetically based derive. • It can be morally and culturally acceptable. Human nature is violent so war is inevitable. • Mcdougall who is psychologist says that innate aggression is an inherited predisposition that can be activated by some instigating frustrating condition. • Freud says that it is man's psychobiological heritage (common to all human beings) • Intergroup war is regarded as moral qualities: winners and losers • winners had superior moral qualities and losers have deficient in fundamental social attributes. • Two books were published one by Konrad Lorenz (1960) and other by Robert Ardrey on Innate Aggression.
But three criticisms can be leveled against the innate aggression theories of Lorenz and Ardrey. • Men go to war because they are compelled to go to war. Why are they compelled to go to war? • Their theories do not explain why some groups are more warlike then others or why different groups wage war differently. • There is no physiological evidence that men possess an aggressive instinct. • For me, men have two free hands that can hold tools or weapons. The tools can be used to strike other men as easily as they can be used to kill animals.
Effects on Species (effect) • Warfare can have a biological effect upon particular cultures and upon mankind as a whole. • Warfare can change age and sex composition of a particular culture, disease rates increase, poor sanitation, malnutrition and new contacts between people with different susceptibilities to communicable disease. • Returning warriors may bring home disease that have a selective influence upon the population and captured females may introduce new genes into the population. • Livingstone argues that many primitive societies have had a much higher proportion of deaths due to war than modern nations. • Migration and dispersions of population may create new genetic mixtures.
Frustration- Aggression (cause) • The frustration creates aggression which can lead to war but it does not mean that frustration always causes war. • It can be said that when the frustrated people organized than it is likely to go for war. This theory comes from psychology; there is an assumption that aggression is always a consequence of frustration. The occurrence of aggressive behavior always presupposes the existence of frustration and in reverse the existence of frustration always lead to some form of aggression. • The author presents an example of Ashanti warriors of West Africa. They were expected to commit a suicide rather than captured by enemy. This custom is interpreted as stemming from the frustration aroused in an individual warrior by battle conditions.
Ethnocentrism (effect) • A consequence of war is hatred of enemy which means love of own people. • Sumner gave the technical name ' ethnocentrism' to this phenomenon. • Sumner describes that " loyalty to the group, sacrifice for it, hatred for outsiders, brotherhood' these are all about competition of life. • A conflict of interest arises. If supplies are large and the number of men is small, the conflict may be mild, if there are many men fighting for a small supply the conflict may be violent.
The competition of life is responsible for war. • The two anthropological studies are congruent with the ethnocentrism approach • Wallace- describes the process of mobilization that occurs when a political community in a " relaxed state" transforms itself into a " mobilized state" in preparation for war. He argues that fear and hatred of the enemy are not prerequisites for war but develop once mobilization is achieved. • But Diamond argue that war may occur when political communities are not mobilized. • Leach says that we kill our enemies we do not kill our friends.
Diffusion (cause) • Few anthropologists regarded warfare as invention. Once invented war then it diffused from its point of origin to other people. • Perry argues that warfare was invented in and spread from Egypt. • Mead argues that war as " only an invention" argues that simple people, civilized people, mild people and violent, assertive people will go to war if they have the invention. Warfare is just an invention known to the majority of human societies. • Several scholars concern themselves with the development and spread of warfare from central Eurasia. • The historian argues that wars in particular locations disrupted trade routes that were supplying peoples beyond the periphery of the civilized world. When these people no longer received the goods to which they had become accustomed, they invaded the great civilizations in order to obtain them.
Acculturation (effect) • Acculturation is an approach that while taking diffusion for granted, examines the influence of the diffused practice or culture trait upon warfare itself and upon the way of life of the members of the recipient culture. • Secoy shows that how the diffusion of horses northward from the south west influence aboriginal warfare practices in western North America. • Again he shows that how the diffusion of firearms westward from the Atlantic seaboard influenced Indian warfare east of the Missippi River. • According to Kiefer (1967) when modern firearms diffused to the tausug, who live on the island of Jolo in the Phillippines 4 major effects occurred: • a lessening of the number and significance of large political alliances. • a lessening of the ethical basis of self- help as a legal institution. • an increase in cash crop production in order to purchase guns. • an immediate increase in the death rate.
Physical Environment (cause) • Few anthropologists argue that the physical environment is also responsible for warfare. • Vayda argues that Borneo and New Zealand peoples because of their mode of agriculture ( shifting cultivation) have traditionally been in constant need of new land. Warfare permitted them to expand territorially. • Through warfare, central political units forced peripheral units to expand into either uninhabited or inhabited territory.
Ecological Adaption (effect) • Ecology deals with the relationship of men and other animals to each other and to the physical environment. • An equitable distribution of resources is viewed as ecologically desirable. • Since a possible consequence of warfare is the reallocation of resources, either land or animal, ecologists have been interested in the effects of war. • Leeds in survey brought number of ecological effects that war can produce: resource may be used more intensively during and after war, exploitation of new resources or of old resources in new ways.
Internally warfare reorders the allocation of rewards within the society and externally warfare produces the immediate or delayed movements of resources which sets into cultural diffusion in a long run. • For example in Sweet's (1965) case study of camel raiding among north Arabian. She shows that groups with the greatest number of camel become victim of raiding activities rather than having less camels. Sweet believes that this raiding is a mechanism of ecological adaptation since it results in more equitable distribution of animals.
Goals of war (cause) • Wars are caused by man who are attempting to obtain certain goals and when men employ armed combat to achieve these goals, they are engaged in warfare. • Some analysts believe that the goals exist within the minds of individual warriors while other analysts believe that the genesis of the goals is the culture itself. For example: plains Indians went to war because their socio-cultural systems obliged them to and Mundurucu warfare a cultural warfare to recruit new members. • But Smith states that when a goal is a part of the culture of a people, it is a value and when the goal becomes internalized in individuals it is a motive. So, if he focuses on culture then he calls goal a value and if he focuses upon individual then he calls the goal a motive.
Swanton regards revenge as the leading war motive and some other lists are social advancement, excitement, and religious obligation, capture of women, trade, defense and fear. • Turney regards sociopsychological motive, economic motive and military values as goals of war while Speier describes 3 types of war: annihilate(destroy) the enemy, gain access to political, economic and religious values and achieve glory.
Patterns and Themes (effects) • Particular goals of war can be so important to the members of a culture that they influence and dominate many other aspects of life. • Voget argues that warfare may be the primary institutionalized pattern of a culture by which he means that the pattern effects integration in two ways: by structuring rules and by spreading its substance through other aspects of the culture. • For example Dobyns, Ezell, jones and Ezell (1957) show thematic changes in the warfare of the Yuman tribes of the southwest. They stated that these tribal peoples acquired technical means horses, knoves and spears to maintain their independence at the same time that they acquired new cultural themes and elaborated aboriginal themes such as cavalry warfare, ethnic insult and economic raiding which strengthened their will to resist being overwhelmed.
Social Structure (cause) • Presence of fraternal interest group is responsible for the conflicts that occur within local groups. It also explain internal war. • Fraternal interest group theory is used to explain not only feuding but warfare as well. • Small groups form small scale military organization that attack enemies who are members of other political communities. • The study shows that it is only in uncentralized political systems (band and tribes) that fraternal interest group explain internal war but in centralized political system (chiefdoms and states) political leaders can prevent the raiding of these small scale military organizations.
Effects of social organization (effect) • War may have 3 different effects on social organization: cohesion, stratification and disorganization. • conflict may repeat norms while at the same time it can also create new norms and modifying old ones. • I and my wife tested that hypothesis and found that cultures that frequently engage in war are less likely to have feuding than cultures that have peaceful external relations. • Similarly, low level of political integration is characterized by a high degree of feuding. • Similar political communities: internal war and different political communities (external war). • Warfare may lead to social disorganization.
Military Preparedness (cause) • Military readiness is considered a cause of war. It means if a culture is well prepared militarily, it is more likely to become involved in wars then it were not prepared. • Leader of an efficient military organization attack neighboring political communities that they believe are militarily less prepared. Efficient military organization may provoke a neighboring political community to attack due to fear. • But anthropologists have chosen to test the converse of it " military readiness decreases the likelihood that a political community will become involved in war'. This theory is called theory of deterrence. They argue that efficient military organization will deter from attacking. The military organization is related with frequency of war. Naroll did not find that cultures that have high score on various measure have low frequency of war.
Another theory was tested. The writer constructed a scale of military sophistication composed of 11 efficient military practices. If all practices were present in a culture, the culture received the highest scale score possible, the fewer the number of efficient practices the lower the scale score. • Again I tested a trail and error theory, a theory that a political community that frequently goes to war will utilize the most efficient military practices. • I conclude that culturally similar political communities are likely to engage in frequent warfare regardless of the efficiency of their military organizations.
Survival Value (effect) • Survival value theory is the practice of value to the culture in enhancing its chances for survival. • The higher the degree of military sophistication, the more likely that the political communities of a cultural unit will be militarily successful. • I also test for a relationship between level of political centralization and military success and find that only a low positive non significant correlation. • Political communities with sophisticated military organization are militarily successful. • A cultural unit whose political communities wage war in a sophisticated manner has an increased advantage in inter societal struggles in comparison with cultural units whose political community do not wage war in a sophisticated manner.
Cultural Evolution (cause) • Sociopolitical complexities or political centralization of the culture is responsible for war. • Sumner also discusses the development of war and peace as social institutions from the lowest to the most advanced levels of society. • For example: development of warfare in Cannibalism. • Chapple and Coon (1942) argues that the warfare of tribal peoples is more closely related with game behavior then to warfare in modern nations. • Wright(1965) demonstrate in a cross cultural study that with increasing political centralization the type of warfare waged changes from defensive to social, to economic and then to political.
Brochand Galtung (1966) in a reanalysis of Wright’s data, show that not only is political centralization a determinant of the type of war fought but so is the extent of intercultural contact between the culture and its neighbors. • Malinowski (1941) argues that warfare only slowly evolved as a mechanism of organized force for the pursuit of national policies. • White (1949) argues that as man’s cultural heritage increases, economic and political goals become the causes of war. • The complexities of culture also wage war, for example: Vayda (1956) in a comparative study of three Oceanic cultures- the Maori, the Marquesans and the Hawaiians- shows that the more complex culture of the Hawaiians is related to a manner of waging warfare that is more efficient than that waged by the Maori or the Marquesans
Origin of the state (effect) • Lowie says that the state had its origin in associations with territorial ties. • Park (1941) states that the function of war has been: to extend the area of peace, to create within that area a political power capable of enforcing it and to establish an ideology which rationalizes and a cult which idealizes the new political and social order. • Rosenfeld (1965) argues that the process of state formation began in the Arabian Desert region when ruling groups gained power over rival lineages by conquering towns and converting them into tribute states and trade centers
But Steward does not argue that warfare is instrumental in producing statehood, he does consider warfare to be an integral part. The first four stages of his scheme- hunting and Gathering, Incipient Agriculture, Formactive and regional florescent culminate in the state, triggers wars which result in a fifth stage known as Initial Empire. • Civil wars lead to a breakup of the empire which is called dark Ages and success in war creates new empires that again breakup which is called cyclical conquests. • Carneiro states that with increasing pressure of human population on the land, however the major incentive for war changed from a desire for revenge to a need to acquire land
