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424 AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST
•
VOL.
99, No. 2 •
JUNE
1997
epilogue, Roger Just presents an engaging reflection
on the anomalies of a Greek culture appropriated by a
post-Renaissance West even as Greece itself "re-
mained on the periphery of much of what was done in
its name" (p. 287).
Of all the chapters, Paul Dresch's on multicultur-
alism on the campus of the University of Michigan
responds most reflexively to Wendy James's query as
to the latter-day fate of Enlightenment ideals. Cautious
in tone and argument, Dresch nonetheless paints a dis-
turbing portrait of multiculturalisms that attribute
such fixity to culture that they replicate, rather than
repudiate, earlier racialist essentialisms.
In her introduction, Wendy James suggests that
the spread of new forms of intolerance is related to
commodification, global communications, and the as-
cent of ideologies unconstrained by the give-and-take
of local relations. Perhaps this is a research agenda as
much as it is an empirical generalization. But James
and the authors of these fine essays have captured
something deeply important, directing all of us to one
of the most pressing problems for a post-Enlighten-
ment age and an anthropology after postmodernism. •
War before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Sav-
age. Lawrence Keeley. New York: Oxford University
Press,
1995. 246 pp.
R. BRIAN FERGUSON
Rutgers University
The anthropology of war has grown explosively in
recent years, and there is a need for a book that brings
together current knowledge in an accessible way.
Lawrence Keeley's War before Civilization might
have filled this need. An archaeologist well read in
ethnography and military history, Keeley is an engag-
ing writer who provides excellent summaries on many
topics. His central thesis, that "primitive" and "civi-
lized" war are essentially similar, would be endorsed
by many researchers. But the value of the book is se-
verely reduced by several distortions, apparently
aimed at making these summaries seem novel or con-
troversial.
Keeley begins by asserting that anthropology has
said "very little" on war by prehistoric and "primitive"
societies (p. 4) and then dichotomizes the entire field
of study into followers of Rousseau and Hobbes.
Prominent writers who cannot be jammed under
either heading are ignored. All the materialists of the
1970s debates are labeled "neo-Rousseauians" and are
said to believe that tribal warfare can be materially
rewarding but is "uncommon." Their various oppo-
nents are "neo-Hobbesians," who allegedly see war as
common but "deny that it has any important practical
causes or consequences" (pp. 15-17). The opening
paragraph on the dustjacket sums up the image that
Keeley constructs: "For the last fifty years, most popu-
lar and scholarly works have agreed that prehistoric
warfare was rare, harmless, unimportant." This is
plainly untrue. For 30 years at least, while there has
been debate about the material gains of war, few an-
thropologists have claimed war to be inconsequential.
Then Keeley turns to his primary targets, "a hand-
ful of social anthropologists [who] have recently codi-
fied this vague prejudice into a theoretical stance that
amounts to a Rousseauian declaration of universal
prehistoric peace" (p. 20), with myself named as the
main culprit. On the contrary, what I and others have
argued is that indigenous war patterns were trans-
formed, frequently intensified, and sometimes created
by contact with expanding states, especially for the
past 500 years. No one is claiming universal prehistoric
peace. But Keeley's portrayals read convincingly and
have been conveyed to the public in a New York Times
review (July 18, 1996), where the real "wonder" of this
book is said to be that anthropologists have been so
self-deluding.
In chapter 2, evolutionary stages are briefly dis-
cussed and then collapsed into the encompassing cate-
gory of "primitive" or tribal. (Ironically, though Keeley
sets out to demolish the distinction of "primitive" and
"civilized," he gives it more use than anyone in recent
memory.) Among such tribals, three statistical compi-
lations show war present in 87 percent or more of the
cases and occurring at least once every two years in
up to 75 percent of all cases (pp. 28, 32). (The latter
figure, I believe, is exaggerated.) An extremely careful
reader who sifts out scattered phrases here and else-
where (pp. 28, 31, 38, 119) will note that Keeley reluc-
tantly acknowledges that small, mobile, low-density
bands are commonly, though not universally, without
war. This is the condition in which human beings
evolved and lived until a few thousand years ago, a
hugely important point that Keeley effectively buries.
Characterizations of archaeological data in chap-
ters 1 and 2 are seriously misleading. Keeley begins
with the valid point that some archaeologists resist
acknowledging evidence of war and tend toward "ritu-
alistic" explanations when the evidence is too strong
to be ignored. But Keeley wants to show that the ar-
chaeology of prestate peoples reveals as much war as
the ethnography does. He presents a few selected
cases and concludes that "nothing suggests" prehis-
toric nonstate war was "significantly and universally
more peaceful than those described ethnographically"
(p.
39). Yet no reading of the archaeological record
supports anything near the frequency of war which
Keeley advances for ethnography (i.e., war present in
nine out of ten cases). Archaeologically, the cases with
BOOK REVIEWS
425
clear evidence of intense violence to which Keeley re-
peatedly returns are in contrast to many more cases
lacking any suggestion whatsoever of war. Keeley ac-
knowledges as "interesting" that war seems absent in
the ancient Near East until the late Neolithic (p. 38),
without considering the implications of that rather
striking finding. War also appears absent or rare until
the Neolithic in ancient China, Japan, and other places
presumably beyond the spell of Rousseau. There were
massacres before states appeared, but on the whole
the archaeological universe is much less violent than
the ethnographic. The question is, why?
The next chapters repeatedly argue that the tribal
warfare is not sportive, ritual, ineffective, or different
in essence from civilized warfare. Chapter 3 is Keeley
at his strongest, with a discussion of tactics and mili-
tary technology that is the best overview I know. Sub-
sequent chapters show that tribal warfare is not more
and can be less ritualistic than modern, and on occa-
sion may die in its combats. In polities where the en-
tire adult male population can be mobilized in war-
time,
combat deaths as percentage of total population
rise to far higher levels than in wars fought by Euro-
American armies of the past few centuries. Keeley
shows that the successes of civilized soldiers against
primitive warriors is due more to their advantages in
logistics, numbers, and fortifications than tactical su-
periority. European conquests, he notes, were often
made possible by introduced diseases, and even with
those advantages, civilized armies often adopted the
guerilla tactics of local enemies. By the end of chapter
6, Keeley has established what might be called a "for-
malist" position on war, that tribal and civilized war-
fare both adhere to a similar military rationality.
In discussing the causes of war, Keeley asks
whether civilized and primitive war can be distin-
guished by different motivations, concluding that both
are commonly directed toward political and economic
gain. I share that view, but the issue is hardly so clear.
Keeley's discussion of mutilation, trophy taking, and
cannibalism does not adequately address the major
differences in those regards that set the bureaucra-
tized slaughter of modern war apart from its predeces-
sors;
and the well-developed "substantivist" position,
that it is culturally determined values that make men
fight, is not even acknowledged here. Discussion of
causes is followed by consideration of those contexts
that make war common (which may confuse readers
previously impressed by the apparent ubiquity of in-
tense war). "Bad neighborhoods" are associated with
the local development of especially proficient raiders,
ecological crises, and frontiers. Frontiers come in
three types—civilized-tribal, nomadic pastoralist-farmer,
and forager-farmer—but Keeley is concerned primar-
ily with the last.
Omitted here is any serious consideration of inter-
tribal wars occurring along the civilized-tribal frontier.
The reader will have no clue to the extensive literature
now documenting transformations and intensifica-
tions of wars in tribal zones. Similarly, earlier discus-
sions conspicuously lack consideration of relevant
ramifications of contact with "civilization": how Euro-
peans often won by getting natives to kill other na-
tives,
how the "skulking way" of war Keeley describes
in New England represented a shift from open-field
fighting after muskets and metal points rendered ar-
mor useless, and how indigenous warfare was gener-
ated around the world by European demand for cap-
tive labor.
A final discussion on the difficulty of maintaining
peace argues that, even without tangible incentives,
war breaks out simply because there is no way to stop
it. Taken together, Keeley's efforts at explaining war in
chapters 7-10 admit most possibilities excepting in-
stincts. As he heads toward conclusion, Keeley returns
to polemic. He attributes anthropology's "prevailing
studied silence about prestate warfare" (with which I
am the sole living author identified; p. 163) to revul-
sion of war after World War II, ignoring the fact that it
was postwar graduate students who first put war on
the disciplinary agenda. He argues that nostalgia for
disappearing primitives and disillusionment with prog-
ress lead unnamed academics to propagate a doctrine
of "safe and ineffective primitive war" (p. 170). Keeley
heaps scorn on the neo-Rousseauians, who he asserts
are "as hypocritical as they are erroneous" and whose
"myth-making about primitive warfare" is "censurable
on scholarly and scientific grounds," "deplorable on
practical and moral grounds," and "in the thrall of nos-
talgic delusions." Their anticivilization attitude posi-
tions them against stereo, lower infant mortality,
knowledge, clean water, photography, and much,
much more, and implies that nuclear war might not be
such a bad thing (p. 179). (I wish to take this opportu-
nity to state that I for one am not against stereo.) •
Exposing Prejudice: Puerto Rican Experiences of Lan-
guage, Race, and Class. Bonnie Urciuoli. Boulder, CO:
Westview Press, 1996. 222 pp.
JACQUELINE
URLA
University of Massachusetts, Amherst
This is a wonderful book for people interested in
how racism operates in English-only America. Al-
though this is a subject that Latino artists and writers
such as Gloria Anzaldua and Guillermo Gomez Pena
have been addressing for years, it is curious how sel-
dom language is a part of our discipline's discussions
of racism. In her ethnographic study of Puerto Ricans
