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PEACE AND WAR
IN NONSTATE SOCIETIES
An Anatomy of the Literature
in Anthropology and Political Science
Johan M.G. van der Dennen
Present- day discourse about “the myth of the peaceful savage” is, clearly, an
extension of the old Hobbes- Rousseau controversy, but it is not so clear when
the argument that nonstate, hunter- gatherer societies tend to be peaceful, and
that their battles are like rituals or games, was rst gured in the social sciences
as a myth. The developmental typology informing anthropology may have made
the rise of the Rousseauian argument inevitable: by denition, an evolution-
Common Knowledge 20:3
DOI 10.1215/0961754X-2732698
© 2014 by Duke University Press
419
Symposium: Peace by Other Means, Part 1
. L.H. Keeley, in War before Civilization: The Myth of
the Peaceful Savage (New York: Oxford University Press,
), dene s the myth as t he erroneous belief t hat primi-
tive warfare is desultory, ineffective, unprofessional, and
unser ious. He distin guishes th ree aspects of t he myth: the
notion that prehistoric peoples did not have warfare, the
belief that hunter- gatherers have never engaged in war-
fare, and the assumption that, when war occurs among
triba l societies, it is r itualist ic or gamelike in n ature — w ith
the rst wounding, so the my th holds, the batt le stops. A
succinct formulation of the third aspect appears in Raoul
Naroll, “Does Military Deterrence Deter?” Trans- Actio n
, no. (): – , at . “Surprise is not a universally
applied militar y tactic. Some primitive tribes simply line
up at extreme missile range and work up from hurling
insults to hurling rocks at each other; this tournament-
like war usually ends when the rst enemy is killed. This
kind of combat is a prearranged tryst, like duels under
the European code duello.” A four- phase developmental
model, not cited by Keeley, is found in W.W. Newcomb,
“Towards an Understanding of War,” in Essays in the Sci-
ence of Culture, ed. Gertrude Dole and R.L. Carneiro
(New York: Crowell, ), – .
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. Bronislaw Malinowski, “War and Weapons among the
Natives of t he Trobriand Islands,” Man , no. ():
– .
. Erik Brandt, “ ‘Total War’ and the Et hnography of
New Guinea,” in Warfare and Society: Archaeological and
Social Anthropological Perspectives, ed. Ton Otto, Henrik
Thrane, and Helle Vandkilde (Aarhus: A arhus University
Press, ), – .
. Ruth Bene dict, “The Natu ral Histor y of War” (u npub-
lished MS, ), in Benedict, An Anthropologist at Work,
ed. Margaret Mead (Cambridge, M A: R iverside Press,
), – .
. E .D. Chapple and C .S. Coon , Principles of Anthropology
(New York: Henr y Holt, ).
. See Leslie A. White, The Science of Culture: A Study of
Man and Civilization (New York: Grove, ). The argu-
ment is essentially reiterated in Gwynne Dyer, War: New
Edition (; Toronto: Vintage Canada, ).
. J.D. Dawson, The Origins of Western Warfare: Mili-
tarism and Morality in the Ancient World (Boulder, CO:
Westview, ); Gwynne Dyer, War; John Keegan, The
Face of Battle (New York: Viking, ); Barbara Eh ren-
reich, Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War
(New York: Metropolitan Books, ).
. Keeley, War before Civilization, .
. Irenäus Eibl- Eibesfeldt, Krieg und Frieden aus der Sicht
der Vehaltenforschung (Munich: Piper, ).
ary sequence must show change over time, so that, if war has been a monstrous
scourge in our time, it must have been less common and lethal in the past. Shortly
after World War I, Bronislaw Malinowski described Trobriand warfare as “open
and chivalrous,” as waged “with a considerable amount of fairness and loyalty,”
and therefore as “rather a form of social ‘duel,’ in which one side earned glory and
humiliated the other, than [as a form of] warfare.”2 But anthropologists looking
into Malinowski’s suggestion produced an ethnographic literature that depicts
New Guinean warfare as anything but a nonviolent custom.3
Still, Ruth Benedict, on the eve of World War II, undertook to distinguish
between the “non- lethal species of warfare” carried on by many primitive peoples
and the “lethal variety” practiced by modern societies.4 Malinowski then offered
a developmental sequence for human warfare — this was — in which the rst
two phases are understood to be unserious, and the third is the conduct of armed
raids for sport. By it was possible to record in a textbook for students of
anthropology that primitive warfare is more closely related to game behavior
than to war as waged by nation- states.5 It was not long afterward that Leslie
White argued that tribal peoples have nothing serious over which to ght: not
until cultures progress to the point where it is worth ghting over hunting or
shing grounds, grazing lands, or fertile valleys does warfare in the modern sense
emerge.6 This point of view came to be accepted even by some historians of war,
notably Doyne Dawson, Gwynne Dyer, John Keegan, and Barbara Ehrenreich.7
Yet the accumulated facts, according to Lawrence Keeley, in his book War
before Civilization (), “indicate unequivocally that primitive and prehistoric
warfare was just as terrible and effective as the historic and civilized version....
Primitive warfare is simply total war conducted with very limited means.”8 By
, the ndings of ethology had conrmed those of historiography, and the
pioneering ethologist Irenäus Eibl- Eibesfeldt wrote powerfully against what
he referred to as the myth of the aggression- free hunter and gatherer societies.9
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van der Dennen • Peace by Other Means: Par t 1 421
The subtitle of Keeley’s book was The Myth of the Peaceful Savage, and in it he
admonished anthropologists for trying to
save the Rousseauian notion of the Noble Savage, not by making him
peaceful (as this was clearly contrar y to fact), but by arguing that tribes-
men conducted a more st ylized, less horrible form of warfare than their
civilized counterparts waged. This view was systematized and elabo-
rated into the theory that there existed a special type of “primitive war”
very different from “real,” “true” or “civilized” war.0
Keeley located the origins of the myth itself in Harry Hoijer’s essay “Primitive
Warfare” () and in H.H. Turney- High’s book Primitive War (). Keith
Otterbein, writing in , attributes the myth per se to the textbook Prin-
ciples of Anthropology by E.D. Chapple and C.S. Coon, which Keeley did not
cite, though Otterbein nds its roots in classic writings of anthropology written
earlier in the century.2
Otterbein argues, indeed, that the rise of cultural relativism as the key ide-
ology of anthropologists in the twentieth century made it inevitable that nonliter-
ate peoples would be depicted as admirable and benign. Margaret Mead described
the Arapesh, whom she knew to be warlike, as childlike; her Samoans likewise
did not make war, although their history included warfare.3 The Zuni also had a
history of serious warfare but were classied by Ruth Benedict as “Apollonian.”4
Another classic in this genre is The Tiwi of North Australia, by W.W.M. Hart and
A.R. Pilling: although by no means peaceful, the Tiwi entered the ethnographic
world, courtesy of Hart and Pilling, as a society conducting only ritual warfare.5
There have even been efforts, published as recently as , to depict the violent
Yanomamö as unwarlike.6 R.B. Edgerton has referred to such efforts as contrib-
uting to the myth of primitive harmony.7
. Keeley, War before Civilization, .
. Har ry Hoijer, “Primit ive War fare,” as cited in Qu incy
Wrig ht, A Study of War (; repr., Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, ), – ; H.H. Turney- High,
Primitive War: Its Practice an d Concepts (; repr., Colum-
bia: University of Sout h Carolina Press, ).
. Keith F. Otterbein, How War Began (College Station:
Texas A&M Universit y Press, ).
. See R.F. Fortune, “Arapesh Warfare,” American
Anthropology (): – .
. Ruth Benedict, “The Integration of Culture,” in Pat-
terns of Culture (New York: Mentor Books, ), – .
. C.W.M. Hart and A.R. Pilling, The Tiwi of North
Australia (New York: Holt, R inehart, a nd Winston, ).
. See L.E. Sponsel, “Yanomami: A n Arena of Conict
and Aggression in the A mazon,” Aggressive Behavior ,
no. (): – , and “Reections on the Possibilities
of a Nonkilling Societ y and a Nonkilling A nthropology,”
in Nonkilling Societies, ed. J. Evans Pim (Honolulu: Center
for Global Nonkilling, ), – .
. R.B. Edgerton, Sick Societies: Challenging the Myth of
Primitive Harmony (New York: Free Press, ).
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422
Peacelessness: The Shifting Consensus
Despite exceptions, some of which I have already cited, a loose consensus by
now exists among students of nonstate societies that they were not and are not
particularly peaceful.8 Nonstate societies — otherwise known as primitive, pre-
industrial, acephalous, simple, small- scale, face- to- face, nonliterate, preliterate,
traditional, premodern, foraging, band- level, tribal, hunter- gatherer, or (in older
literature) savage societies — do not exist in a noble and sublimely peaceful state
of nature. Scholars of warfare likewise, by and large, agree that raiding, sneak
. See R.D. Alexander, Darwinism and Human Affairs
(Seattle: Universit y of Washington Press, ), The Biol-
ogy of Moral Systems (New York: Aldine, ), and “Evo-
lution of the Human Psyche,” in The Human Revolution:
Behavioral and Biological Perspectives on the Origins of Mod-
ern Humans, ed. Paul Mellars and Chris Stringer ( Prince-
ton, NJ: Princeton Universit y Press, ), – ; Stan-
islav Andresk i, Military Organization and Society (London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul, ), “Origins of War,” in
The Natural History of Aggression, ed. J.D. Carthy and
F.J. Ebling (New York: Academic Press, ), – ,
and “Evolution and War,” Science Journal , no. ():
– ; Robert Bigelow, The Dawn Warriors: Man’s Evolu-
tion towards Peace (Boston: Little, Brow n, ), and “The
Role of Competition and Cooperation in Huma n Aggres-
sion,” in War, Its Causes and Correlates, ed. M.A. Nettle-
ship, R.D. Givens , and A nderson Nettlesh ip (The Hague:
Mouton, ), – ; Ronald Cohen , “War fare and State
Formation: Wars Make States and States Make Wars,” in
Warfare, Culture, and Environment, ed. R.B. Ferguson
(New York: Academic Press, ), – ; Christopher
Coker, Barbarous Philosophers: Reections on the Nature of
War from Heraclitus to Heisenberg (New York: Columbia
Universit y Press, ); M.R. Davie, ed., The Evolution of
War: A Study of Its Role in Early Societies (New Haven, C T:
Yale Universit y Press, ); W.H. Durham, “Resource
Competition and Human Aggression, Part : A Review
of Primitive War,” Quarterly Review of Biolog y ( ):
– ; Irenäus Eibl- Eibesfeldt, “The Myth of the
Aggression- Free Hunter and Gatherer Society,” in Pri-
mate Aggression, Territoriality, and Xenophobia: A Compara-
tive Perspective, ed. R.L. Holloway (New York: Academic
Press, ), – , and Krieg und Frieden; V.S.E. Falger,
Evolutie en politiek: biopoliticologische opstellen (Gro ningen:
Origin Press, ); Azar Gat, “The Pattern of Fight-
ing in Simple, Small- Scale, Pre- state Societies,” Journal
of Anthropological Research , no. (): – , “The
Human Mot ivational Complex: Evolutiona ry Theory a nd
the Causes of Hunter- Gatherer Fighti ng, Parts and ,”
Anthropological Quarterly (): – , – , and War
in Human Civilization (Oxford: Oxford Universit y Press,
); M.P. Ghiglieri, “Sociobiolog y of the Great Apes
and the Hominid A ncestor,” Journal of Human Evolution
(): – ; J.A. Gottschall, The Rape of Troy: Evo-
lution, Violence, and the World of Homer (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, ); Marvin Harris, Our Kind:
Who We Are, Where We Came From, and Where We Are
Going ( New York: Ha rper, ); Jürg Helbling, “War a nd
Peace in Societies without Central Power: Theories and
Perspect ives,” in Ot to, Thrane, and Vandkilde, Warfare
and Society, – ; Keeley, War before Civilization; S.A.
LeBlanc and K.E. Register, Constant Battles: The Myth of
the Peaceful, Noble Savage (New York: St. Martin’s Press,
); F.B. Livingstone, “The Ef fects of Warfare on
the Biology of the Human Species,” in War: The Anthro-
pology of Armed Conict and Aggression, ed. M.H. Fried,
Marvin Harris, and Robert Murphy (New York: Natu-
ral History Press, ), – ; B.S. Low, “An Evolution-
ary Perspective on Lethal Conict,” in Behavior, Culture,
and Conict in World Politics, ed. Will iam Zimmerm an and
H.K. Jacobson (A nn Arbor: Un iversity of Michigan P ress,
), – , and Why Sex Matters: A Darwinian Look at
Human Behavior (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, ); Peter Meyer, Evolution und Gewalt. Ansätze
zu einer bio- soziologischen Synthese (Hamburg: Parey, );
Otterbein, How War Began; E.R. Service, Primitive Social
Organization: An Evolutionary Perspective (; repr., New
York: Random House, ); D.L. Sm ith, The Most Dan-
gerous Animal: Human Nature and the Origins of War (New
York: St. Mart in’s Press, ); B.A. Thayer, Darwin and
International Relations: On the Evolutionary Origins of War
and Ethnic Conict (Lexington: University of Kentucky
Press, ); Turney- High, Primitive War; E.O. Wilson,
Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
Universit y Press, ); R.W. Wrangham, “Evolution of
Coalitionary Killing,” Yearbook of Physical Anthropology
(): – ; R.W. Wrangham and Luke Glowacki,
“Intergroup Agg ression in Chimpanzees and War in
Nomadic Hunter- Gatherers: Evaluating the Chimpan-
zee Model,” Human Nature (): – ; Wrangham
and Dale Peterson, Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of
Human Violence ( Boston: Houghton Mifin, ).
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van der Dennen • Peace by Other Means: Par t 1 423
. See Eibl- Eibesfeldt, “My th of the Aggression- Free
Hunter and Gatherer Society”; Livingstone, “Effect s of
Warfare”; Donald Symons, The Evolution of Human Sexu-
ality (Oxford: Oxford University. Press, ).
. C.R. Ember, “Myths about Hunter- Gatherers, Eth-
nology (): – ; Keeley, War before Civilization;
Wrig ht, Study of War.
. Keeley, War before Civilization, .
. Helbli ng, in “War and Peace in So cieties wit hout Cen-
tral Power,” proposes that this state of permanent peace-
lessness can be ex plained with reference to t wo structural
conditions: () the anarchic structure of a political system
consist ing of politically autonomous local groups and ()
the relat ive immobilit y of local group s, that is, thei r depen-
dence on locally concentrated resources. Others, going
back at least to Hobbes (Leviathan, ), have likewise
pointed to t his rst st ructural condit ion as an explanation;
see, for example, Marshall Sahlins, Tri bes m en (Engle-
wood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, ); Christopher R.
Hallpike, “Functionalist Interpretations of Primitive
Warfare,” Man (): – ; K.F. Koch, Anthropology
of Warfare (Men lo Park, CA: Cummings, ); Elizabeth
Colson, Tradition and Contract: The Problem of Order (Ch i-
cago: A ldine, ); Gerd Spittler, “Kon iktaust ragung in
akephalen Gesellschaften: Selbsthilfe und Verhandlung,”
in Alternative Rechsformen und Alternativen zum Recht, ed.
Erhard Bla nkenbu rg (Opladen: Westdeutscher, ),
– , and “Streitschlichtung im Schatten des Levia-
than: Eine Darstellung und Kritik rechtsethnologischer
Untersuchungen,” Zeitschrift für Rechtssoziologie ( ):
– ; a nd Keeley, War before Civilization. As for t he sec-
ond structural condition, the dependence on locally con-
centrated resources, a local tribe in this situation cannot
afford to move away and thereby avoids armed confronta-
tion wit h adjacent groups, at least not w ithout incurring
high oppor tunit y costs, includ ing the loss of prope rty and,
since ha rvests would need to be forgone, the risk of star va-
tion. According to Helbling, when these struc tural condi-
tions bot h exist, wars can break out at any time, hence the
state that I have referred to as “permanent peacelessness.”
attacks, and ambushes in these societies were and remain lethal and bloody affairs
(sometimes, indeed, they are massacres with genocidal intent), although, as I have
noted, a few military historians are responsible for disseminating the notion that
warfare in nonliterate societies was a harmless, ritualized affair. Even relatively
peaceful contemporary hunter- gatherers, such as the Bushmen and Hadza, are
known to have engaged in intergroup combat when not surrounded by stronger
peoples.9 According to C.R. Ember, L.H. Keeley, Quincy Wright, and oth-
ers (including myself), the overwhelming majority of known societies ( –
percent) have been involved in warfare.20 War in nonstate societies has severe
consequences: in Keeley’s sample — which includes the Tauna- Awa, Usurufa,
Mae Enga, Kamano, Auyana, Huli, Eipo, Baktaman (Faiwolmin), Dani, Anggor,
Abelam, Jivaro, Yanomamö, Waorani, Mekranoti, and Blackfoot — war- related
male mortality is as high as percent on average ( percent is the global norm),
and overall mortality is at percent on average in nonstate warfare (the global
norm is percent).2
The condition among so- called primitive societies is neither permanent
peace nor permanent war but a long- term peacelessness in which the state of war
and the state of peace are not easy to distinguish.22 These societies are always
prepared for war even when not actually at war (by contrast with state- level soci-
eties, in which “inter bellum et pacem nihil medium”). In the words of Edward
Glover and Morris Ginsberg:
The antithesis bet ween war and peace is really inapplicable to the simple
conditions in which these peoples live. Anything like the organized and
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aggressive warfare which we nd in early history and among the more
advanced of the simpler societies can have no place in the life of the
simplest societies, for this implies organization, discipline and differen-
tiation between leaders and led which the people of the lowest culture
do not possess. But if these do not have war, neither have they peace. 23
Where head- hunting, for example, is an important part of the mores of a society,
the maintenance of peace among neighbors is difcult to achieve. Intergroup
retaliation, feuds, and war are practically continuous. The Indians of the eastern
United States waged war for status so relentlessly that, as Alfred K roeber noted,
the violence reached levels that were “insane, unending, continuously attritional,
from our point of view, and yet it was so integrated into the whole fabric of eastern
culture, so dominantly emphasized within it, that escape from it was well nigh
impossible.”24
In general, two types of warfare in animals and human beings have been
distinguished: raiding (“lethal male raiding,” ambush, dawn surprise attacks) and
battle or combat (the confrontation of two opposing lines or phalanxes.) In tribal
societies, raiding is the most bloody and lethal form of warfare, given its small
but rapidly accumulating casualties and its occasionally near- genocidal routing.25
Massacres, including the Yanomamö nomohori or “treacherous feast,” might be
said to constitute a third category of warfare, which R.L. Wadley has suggested
be termed “lethal treachery.”26 The latter is characterized by an assault preceded
by deceptively peaceful social interaction between the attacker and attacked.
Since raiding and ambush always contain some element of surprise and treach-
ery, however, most researchers do not feel obliged to allow this third category. In
any case, there are few options to choose from in a generally hostile environment.
Discussing the Waorani of Amazonia (who are probably unique in deliberately
and consciously abandoning feuding and warfare), C.A. and C.J. Robarchek
make this point effectively:
Where warfare is endemic [and rampant], a people’s options are rather
limited: they can either ee, ght back, or be overwhelmed. Given the
sociocultural environment of the region (and with no safe refuge avail-
. Edward Glover and Morris Ginsberg, “A Symposium
on the Psychology of Peace and War,” British Journal of
Medical Psychology (): – , as cited in E. F. M.
Durbin and John Bowlby, Personal Aggressiveness and War
(London: Paul, Trench, and Trubner, ), .
. A lfred L. Kroeber, Cultural and Natural Areas of
Native North America (Berkeley: University of California
Press, ), .
. See D.L. Cheney, “Interactions and Relationships
between Groups,” in Primate Societies, ed. B.B. Smuts,
D.L. Cheney, R.M. Sey farth, R.W. Wrangham, and
T.T. Struhsaker (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
), – ; W.T. Divale, Warfare in Primitive Societ-
ies: A Bibliography (Santa Barbara, CA: Clio Press, );
Joseph H. Manson and R.W. Wrangham, “Intergroup
Aggression in Chimpanzees and Humans,” Current
Anthropology , no. (): – ; Keith F. Otterbein,
“Clan and Tribal Conf lict,” in Encyclopedia of Violence,
Peace, and Conict, ed. L.R. Kurtz (San Diego: Academic
Press, ), – .
. R.L. Wadley, “Lethal Treachery and the Imbalance
of Power in Warfare and Feudin g,” Jour nal of Anthropolog i-
cal Research , no. (): – .
<Insert , p. , l. .(n. ):> as cited in E . F.M. Durbin and John Bowlby,
Personal Aggressiveness and War (London: Paul, Trench, and Trubner, ),
.</>
<Insert , p. , l. (n. ):>Norbert El ias, Involvement and Detachment, vol.
of Collected Works (Dublin: UCD Press, ), .</>
<Insert , p. , l. . (n. )):> as cited in Darshan Singh Maini, Encyclo-
paedia of Anthropology, vol. . Anthropology of Peace (New Delhi: Mittal, ),
.</>
<Insert , p. , l. (n. ):> Collaborations and Con-
icts: A Leader through Time (Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt Col-
lege Publishers, 2000), 7.</>
<Insert , , l. . (n. ): archive.org/stream/rela-
tionofwartooholsrich/relationofwartooholsrich_djvu.
txt.</>
<Insert , , l. –>The tendency in this literature
is either to ignore women altogether or to suggest, vaguely,
that they are in general less aggressive than men. Theories
claiming a biological distinction between men and women in
this respect are to say the least inconclusive.</>
<Insert , p. , l. . (n. ):> in Genetics of Crimi-
nal and Antisocial Behavior, </>
<Insert , p. , l. .(n. ):> Chichester, UK:
Wiley,< />
<Insert , p. , l. –:> Keeley, War before Civili-
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van der Dennen • Peace by Other Means: Par t 1 425
able), engaging in at least defensive warfare becomes a functional neces-
sity for group survival. Warfare, under these conditions, is contagious;
once one group adopts it as a tactic for advancing its ends, others must
either take it up or be destroyed.27
When attacked, most societies not only ght to defend themselves but
also retaliate with attacks of their own. Less aggressive societies, stimulated by
more warlike groups in their vicinity, become more bellicose themselves, devote
more attention to military matters, and may institutionalize some aspects of war
making. The military sodalities or clubs of the Pueblo tribes of the American
Southwest seem to have been an institutional response to Apache- Navajo aggres-
siveness, given that these institutions declined in importance and membership
(and in some tribes disappeared altogether) after the United States pacied the
Apacheans. With long experience in defending against raids, the “peaceful Pueb-
los” were anything but peaceable. The Spaniards found them to be tough oppo-
nents initially, and valorous and effective allies later in ghting with nomadic
tribes.28 The result was a more or less stable balance of terror, with constant
raiding among the various social groups.29
No Edenic Solution Does Not Equal No Solution at All
One cannot look back, therefore, or to one side, or off the beaten track, of mod-
ern state societies in order to nd an Edenic solution, there all along, waiting for
the rest of us to notice and adopt it. It seems that for all societies, from the most
primitive to the most complex and sophisticated, peace and war are best under-
stood as the two extremes of an array of collective survival strategies, ranging
from collective retreat and cultural insulation to imperialist war making. Many
adjacent peoples have lived and still live in the state of peacelessness that I have
attributed to nonstate societies. War has high “opportunity costs,” while main-
taining peace at any price carries with it high “existential costs,” in the form of
. C.A Robarchek and C.J. Robarchek, “Cultures of
War and Peace: A Comparative St udy of Waorani and
Semai,” in Aggression and Peacefulness in Hum ans and Other
Primates, ed. James Silverberg and J.P. Gray (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, ), – , at . See also
Robarchek and Robarchek, “Waging Peace: The Psycho-
logical a nd Sociocultural Dynamics of Posit ive Peace,”
in Anthropological Contributions to Conict Resolution, ed.
A.W. Wolfe and H.G. Yang (Athens: Un iversity of Geor -
gia Press, ), – .
. Marc Simmons, “History of Pueblo- Spanish Rela-
tions to ,” in Southwest, vol. of Handbook of North
American Indians, ed. W.C. St urtevant , and Alfonso O rtiz
(Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office,
), – .
. See Roba rchek and Robarchek, “Cultu res of War a nd
Peace.” For furt her evidence that the driving force behind
war is fear rather than innate aggressiveness, see T.W.
Whiffen, The North- west Amazons: Notes on Some Months
Spent among Cannibal Tribes (New York: Scribner’s, );
W.E. Mü hlmann , Krieg und Frieden: Ein L eitfaden der p oli-
tischen Ethnologie (Heidelberg: C. Winters Univers itätsbu-
chhandlung, ); and Peter Meyer, Kriegs- und Militär-
soziologie (Munich: Goldmann St udienreihe, ).
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COMMON KNOWLEDGE 4 2 6
loss of life, territory, vital resources, and cultural integrity. For these reasons,
most peoples, at whatever level of social organization, may be seen maneuver-
ing between war and peace. Because “peaceability is not disability, not a cultural
essence unrelated to a people’s actual circumstances,” warlike peoples are quite
capable of peacefulness — as Robert Dentan reminds us — while peaceable peoples
are capable of intergroup violence when their circumstances alter.30 The “savage,”
pace Rousseau, is neither noble nor ignoble, just utterly human.
A culture’s having a high level of intergroup violence today does not pre-
clude a change toward peacefulness in the future, as the Waorani example and
other well- attested instances show. After a traumatic defeat and temporary exile
from their homeland in the s, the Navajo quickly made the transition from
rapacious raiders to peaceful pastoralists. Warfare among the Arawe of the Bis-
marck Archipelago was given up suddenly, in the early twentieth century, and
never reappeared as an institutionalized element of life.3 The Fipa of Tanzania
in the mid- nineteenth century emerged, in the words of R.G. Willis, “from a
period of conict and civil war to construct a peaceful, orderly, and prosperous
so c iet y.”32 As Keeley and Douglas Fry have each observed, history and anthro-
pology offer instances of societies in which relationships change from familiar
friendship to bitter enmity and back again with remarkable rapidity. And, as
Keeley writes, such changes are not attributable solely to the experience of defeat:
Even in the absence of defeat, the zeal of expansionist societies tends to
abate as they begin experiencing the diminishing returns of overexten-
sion or succumb to the attractions of consolidation and exploitation.
Military ferocity is not a xed quality of any race or culture, but a tem-
porary condition that usually bears the seeds of its own destruction.33
These sorts of ndings support the claim of David Riches, among others, that “to
speak of societies as ‘peaceful’ is analytically not helpful, since, as highly abstract
categories, ‘societies’ do not act purposively.”34 The same may be said about
speaking of societies as “warlike.” I shall nevertheless use the terms “peaceful” or
“peaceable” and “warlike” here as shorthand, indicating locations on a spectrum
of societal behaviors.
. R .K. Dent an, “The Ris e, Maintenanc e, and Destru c-
tion of Peaceable Polit y: A Preliminary Essay in Political
Ecology,” in Silverberg and Gray, Aggression and Peaceful-
ness, – .
. See Chris Gosden, “Warfare and Colonialism in the
Bismarck Archipelago, Papua New Guinea,” in Otto,
Thrane, and Vandkilde, Warfare and Society, – .
. R.G. Willis, “The ‘Peace Puzzle’ in Upa,” in Societ-
ies at Peace: Anthropological Perspectives, ed. Signe Howell
and Roy Wi llis (London: Routledge, ), – , at .
. Keeley, War before Civilization, .
. David Riches, “Violence, Peace and War in ‘Early’
Human S ociety: The Ca se of the Eskimo ,” in The S ociology
of War and Peace, ed. Colin Creighton and Martin Shaw
(London: Macmillan, ), – , at – .
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van der Dennen • Peace by Other Means: Par t 1 427
There is no theoretical reason to deny the possibility of peaceful societies. If
war were so universal and so ubiquitous as some claim, for example T.A. Gregor
or E.R. Service, the mere existence of peace, anywhere, at any time, would con-
stitute a problem, and we would have to develop a theory of peace as an abnormal,
anomalous condition.35 Gregor indeed writes that “political systems are so vola-
tile and war is so contagious that its existence should occasion little surprise. It is
peace that needs special explanation.”36 “It is usually idle to talk of the ‘causes of
war’,” Service argues, since “it is the evolution of the various causes of peace that
can be studied in the human record.”37 Most peoples seem to prefer peace when
they can afford it, that is, when they can solve both the internal problem of what
some call the “young male erce warrior syndrome” and the external problem
that neighboring peoples may not be peaceable. Young males are usually the most
warlike because, as Keeley argues, they have potentially “the least to lose and the
most to gain from successful combat,” including spoils and loot, power, prestige,
and sexual access to both ingroup and outgroup women.38 These tend to be pow-
erful incentives, across cultures. C.R. Hallpike has gone so far as to argue that,
because sexual gratication, love of prestige and power over others, and
envy of those who have these advantages, are some of the strongest
forces in human nature, men enjoy killing other men. The human race
has evolved few more denitive means of proving one’s superiority over
an enemy than by battering him to death and eating him, or by burn-
ing his habitation, ravaging his crops and raping his wife. The tortuous
explanations advanced by academics for the prevalence of violence in
primitive societies in some cases disclose their lack of knowledge of
human nature.39
Still, there may be as many reasons for peaceability as there are for belliger-
ence. Intercommunity nonviolence may be a response to overwhelming odds; it
may be the taming and pacifying effect of defeat; it may be enforced by colonial or
imperial powers; it may be the result of isolation and/or xenophobia; it may be due
to a negative cost/benet balance that renders peace more opportune under given
circumstances; it may be due to a voluntary decision to abstain from or abandon
violence, or to a nonviolent ethic or a pacistic ideology. And peaceability may
be due as well to some combination of all these factors. While evolution suggests
. See J.M.G. van der Dennen, “Primitive War and the
Ethnological I nventory Project,” in Sociobiology and Con-
ict: Evolutionary Perspectives on Competition, Cooperation,
Violen ce, and Warfare, ed. van der Den nen and V.S.E. Fal-
ger (London: Chapma n and Hall, ), – .
. T.A. Gregor, “Uneasy Peace: Intertribal Relations
in Brazil’s Upper Xing u,” in The Anthropology of War, ed.
Jonatha n Haas (Cambridge: Ca mbridge Universit y Press,
), – , at .
. E.R. Serv ice, Origins of the State and Civilization: The
Process of Cultural Evolution (New York: Norton, ), .
. Keeley, War before Civilization, .
. Hallpike, “Funct ionalist Inter pretations of Primitive
Warfare,” .
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COMMON KNOWLEDGE 4 2 8
that there are circumstances in which warfare would assist tness, it also suggests
conditions in which more peaceful relations between groups may be expected.
If resources are abundant or alternatives can be acquired at an acceptable cost,
then groups need not compete for them. (Demand for resources, moreover, may
be held in check by other factors, for example, a high mortality rate due to dis-
ease, parasitism, or predators.) If resources are widely distributed spatially or
temporally, the result may be migration, in which case competing groups would
be unlikely to come into contact.40 The absence of war, for example, among the
Netsilik Inuit may be ascribed to a great regional variation in food supply that
makes migration necessary; the sharing of food resources, moreover, is common
in this culture, and food storage is relatively easy under arctic conditions.4
Some scholars have argued, as Richard Alexander summarizes their claim,
that for “ percent of their history our ancestors lived” as hunter- gatherer soci-
eties in the Arctic and the Australian desert do now and that, therefore, peace
prevailed until recent millennia. But, Alexander continues, this argument fails to
recognize that “such people survive today only in marginal impoverished habitats
that support only the lowest of all densities of human population and also repre-
sent physical extremes that by themselves require cooperation among families for
mere survival.” Hunter- gatherers, he adds, “survive today only because even the
most advanced technological societies have found no way to use their homelands
that would make it protable to overrun or seize them by force.”42 Only rarely
are resources so abundant, or adequate alternatives so available, that tensions do
not arise. Seldom are population densities so low for generation after generation,
or geographic conditions so propitious, that groups can cooperate over resources
consistently. When the likelihood of conict is reduced, the cause — according
to Alexander and others — is the changing demographics of the groups involved
and the ecological conditions under which they live. A nthony Stevens offers a
concise summary of this outlook: “In practically all parts of the world in which
human populations have taken up residence, armed readiness has been the sine
qua non of survival, from the dawn of man’s history up to the present day.”43 And
indeed, it must be said that, when occasionally peace-loving peoples have refused
to ght, they usually have disappeared — either slaughtered, enslaved, or driven
into remote regions.
In Africa, for example, the Manansas were peaceful agriculturalists who fell
victim to the warlike Matabele, who were tough nomadic cattle rustlers. When
the Matabele crossed into their land, the Manansas greeted them in the classic
. See Durham, “Resource Competition and Human
Aggression.”
. See Asen Balikci, “The Netsilik Eskimos: Adaptive
Processes,” in Man the Hunter, ed. R.B. Lee and Ir ven
DeVore (Chicago: Aldine, ), – .
. Alexander, Darwinism and Human Affairs, – .
. Anthony Stevens, The Roots of War and Terror (Lon-
don: Continuum, ), .
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van der Dennen • Peace by Other Means: Par t 1 429
manner of pacists. Throwing their assegais to the ground, they said, “We do
not want to ght. Come into our houses.” The Matabele were astounded by this
extraordinary behavior and, suspecting some trick, seized the king of the Man-
ansas and cut out his heart. Holding it to his lips, they told him: “You have two
hearts.” The Manansas were universally treated with disdain, including by the
Bamangwato, their other immediate neighbors. No less a gure than Dr. Living-
stone observed that for an African tribe to adopt a policy of peace at any price was
to invite disaster. A chilling example, in a similar vein but taken from Oceania,
is the total destruction of the Moriori hunter- gatherer society on the Chatham
Islands, in , at the hands of nine hundred well- armed Maori agriculturalists
from nearby New Zealand. The Maori rst learned of the peaceful Moriori from
a transient Australian seal hunter. Excited by the report that the Moriori had
no weapons, the Maori immediately organized a seaborne invasion. When the
unsuspecting Moriori did not resist, the Maori raiding party slaughtered them
without hesitation.44
Despite this kind of evidence and the type of evolutionary scenario that
it supports, other scenarists, such as Raymond Kelly, still nd cause to argue
that war “is neither universal nor pervasive. Moreover, it is most likely to be rare
to nonexistent among unsegmented foraging societies (with little or no depen-
dence on agriculture), and that suggests an earlier prehistory characterized by
much more extensive zones of warlessness than the period covered by recorded
his tory.”45 According to Kelly, war per se originates not with a transition from
peaceful nonviolence to lethal armed conict but with a transition from one form
of collective violence to another. The latter entails a shift from () individual
homicide followed by eye- for- an- eye retribution against the killer, carried out by
the victim’s kin and supporters, to () a war or feud in which a relation or neighbor
of the killer is killed, triggering further acts of vengeance and episodes of lethal
armed conict between the victims’ communities. The critical change from indi-
vidual to group responsibility overrides the intrinsic self- limiting features of the
vengeance practiced in early warless societies.
Occupying a place between the theoretical positions represented by, say,
Kelly and Stevens, Bruce Knauft makes a distinction between “simple” and
“middle- range” societies and their concomitant patterns of (collective) violence.46
He proposes that the overall trajectory of violence and sociality (especially male
status differentiation) in pongid and hominid/human evolution may be U- shaped,
. See Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates
of Human Societies (Scranton, PA: Norton, ), and P.A.
Corning, Nature’s Magic: Synergy in Evolution and the Fate
of Humankind (New York: Cambridge University Press,
).
. R.C. Kel ly, Warless So cieties and the Or igin of War (Ann
Arbor: Universit y of Michigan Press, ), .
. B.M. K nauft, “Violence and Sociality in Human
Evolution,” Current Anthropology (): – , and
“Culture and Cooperation in Human Evolution,” in The
Anthropology of Peace and Nonviolence, ed. Leslie Sponsel
and Thoma s Gregor (Boulder, CO: Ly nne Rienner, ),
– .
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COMMON KNOWLEDGE 4 3 0
rather than linear. In particular, Knauft notes that generalizations about human
societal evolution are easily biased by samples drawn from the Human Relations
Area Files: these les are dominated by middle- range societies, which are far
more numerous in the ethnographic record than simple ones, though the former
have persisted for a much shorter period of evolutionary time. Lars Rodseth and
Thomas Abler point out that Knauft leaves open the question of whether his sim-
ple societies are merely products of the marginal environments they exploit and
of the resulting low population densities.47 Simple foraging societies, as known
from the ethnographic record, may not be representative of such societies in the
Pleistocene era; they may indeed be radically different, having adapted to mar-
ginal areas outside the “main currents of human social evolution.” The U- shape
of human social evolution proposed by Knauft would, Rodseth suggests, be an
illusion created by casting an adaptation to extreme conditions as a global evolu-
tionary stage.48
In his book The Human Potential for Peace: An Anthropological Challenge to
Assumptions about War and Violence (), Douglas Fry, writing about what he
calls the pervasive intergroup hostility model, argues that a half- dozen unrealistic
and untenable assumptions are made about the warlike human past: () groups
consisted of male- bonded patrilineages in common residence; () groups were
tight-knit and bounded; () intergroup hostility and warfare were prevalent; ()
chronic resource scarcity caused wars; () wars were waged, more specically,
over territory and to abduct women; and () military virtues and leadership were
valued and prevalent. But the only societies that Fry claims invalidate the model
are egalitarian, nomadic hunter- gatherers or foragers — the same societies that
other scholars have shown to be composed of “defeated refugees” and that Fry,
Kelly, and Leslie Sponsel believe erroneously to be our ancestors. It seems to
me that Kelly and Fry make the same fundamental mistake as Knauft did, and I
concur with Marvin Harris that it is a serious error
to suppose that contemporary band- organized hunting and gathering
societies are representative of the great bulk of paleolithic hunting and
gathering groups. Almost all of the ethnographically classic cases of
band- organized hunters and gatherers are marginal or refugee peoples
driven into, or conned to, unfavorable environments by surrounding
groups of more advanced societies.49
. Lars Rodseth, “Comment on Knauft’s ‘Violence and
Sociality in Human Evolution’,” Current Anthropology ,
no. (): – ; T.S. Abler, “Comment on K nauft’s
‘Violence and Sociality in Human Evolution’,” Current
Anthropology , no. (): – .
. Rodseth, “Comment on Knauft’s ‘Violence and Soci-
ality in Human Evolution’.”
. Marvin Harris, The Rise of Anthropological Theory: A
History of Theories of Culture (; repr., Walnut Creek,
CA: A ltaMira Press, ), .
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van der Dennen • Peace by Other Means: Par t 1 431
. Adam Kuper, The Chosen Primate: Human Nature and
Cultural Diversity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, ), .
. Davie, Evolution of War, .
. Martin van Creveld, The Transformation of War (New
York: Free Press, ), .
. See Jane Goodall, The Chimpanzees of Gombe: Patterns
of Behavior (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
) .
. Robin Fox, “Aggression: Then and Now,” in Man
and Beast Revisited, ed. M.H. Robinson and Lionel Tiger
(Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, ),
– , at . Cf. Otto Klineberg, The Human Dimension
in International Relations (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and
Wi nston, ).
Adam Kuper, too, makes essentially the same judgment: “Contemporary hunter-
gatherers cannot be taken as prototypical stand- ins for the human paleolithic
way of life.”50
The So- Called Security Dilemma
Douglas Fry thus divides evolutionary scenarios into those offered by social sci-
entists who hold that intergroup hostility is pervasive and those, like himself,
who claim otherwise. Among the former are rationalists who assume that human
groups pursue their own interests rationally and that, in the nature of things,
those interests will come into conict, sometimes violently. There are also those,
however — theorists like Maurice Davie in his book The Evolution of War — who
claim, more starkly, that war exists because “men like war.”5 Pronouncements
of this kind tend to be apodictic and universalizing (all men like war). They are
also obstinately reiterated, with only minor variations in wording from author
to author. Martin van Creveld, for instance, says that “men like ghting” rather
than that “men like war”: “However unpalatable the fact, the real reason why we
have wars is that men like ghting, and women like those men who are prepared
to ght on their behalf.”52 General Robert E. Lee is incessantly quoted as say-
ing, “It is a good thing that war is so horrible or else we would grow too fond of
it.” Primatology is also invoked regularly in support of the “men like ghting”
assertion, but not always with adequate nuance. Jane Goodall has observed, for
example, a great eagerness in young prime male chimpanzees for the behaviors
involved in “lethal male raiding” parties, but she also has pointed out emphati-
cally that there are distinct individual differences in the levels of eagerness.53
Robin Fox advances a theory of war more in line with the evidence of pri-
matology. He argues that one or a few percent of hyperaggressive or belligerent
males, distributed more or less at random throughout a megapopulation, would
be sufcient to create a “rampant war complex” among all the demes involved.
The “potentials for aggressivity are not uniform,” he writes, “but are normally
distributed in any population. Thus, in any naturally occurring population, only
about % of the individuals will be hyperaggressive.”54 But this percent might
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COMMON KNOWLEDGE 4 3 2
be responsible for the horrors of internecine wars. There is a much more tragic
variant of this theory — a scenario in which no one need harbor ill will: the expec-
tation or suspicion of ill will is enough for a rampant “war complex” to develop.
Virulent war complexes do not have to be explained by an evil streak in human
nature; they can be understood, at least in part, as results of a “war trap,” from
which no one can disengage on penalty of annihilation.55 Peter Richerson has
gone so far as to suggest that warfare is liable to evolve even if its existence makes
everyone worse off. Our “evolutionary tragedy,” he writes, is that war results
from the perdious logic of the war “game,” rather than from any perversion of
the actors involved.56 The only practical way to avoid victimization by aggressors
is to deter attack by displaying a credible ability and will to inict unacceptable
damage on would- be attackers.
Tribal societies and bands are, like city- states and modern nation- states,
survival units, in Norbert Elias’s sense of the term: they are trapped in double-
bind gurations and processes.57 They are interdependent because each of them is
without redress, without the ability to appeal for protection to a superior force or
to a binding code of self- restraint and civilized conduct, while constantly exposed
to the possible use of violence by other groups. Human groups arranged in the
form of such a guration, Elias writes, are “with great regularity drawn into a
power struggle and, if they form the top of an inter- state hierarchy, into a hege-
monial struggle with a strong self- perpetuating tendency.”58 They may be said to
live in a condition of mutual deterrence, backed up by metaphysical means (such
as magic) and, intermittently, physical means (feuds and wars). Simple game-
theoretical analysis will clarify why a situation of this kind tends to result in an
equilibrial stalemate of mutual deterrence (assuming that the actors make short-
term rational choices), even if none of the actors harbors evil intentions or sinister
motives (or is equipped with aggressive, violent, or belligerent drives, urges, or
instincts). Preemptive attack in this situation may have the advantage of reduc-
ing uncertainty. Likewise, threats and, once in a while, actually spreading terror
may help develop a reputation horric enough to deter potential opponents. To
do so, however, full- edged warfare is not required — which may be one of the
reasons why peoples traditionally considered ferocious are militarily rather inept.
. S.K. Tefft, “St ructural Contradictions, War Traps
and Peace,” Journal of Peace Research , no. ():
– , and “Cognitive Perspectives on Risk Assessment
and War Traps: An A lternat ive to Functional Theory,”
Journal of Political and Military Sociolog y (): – .
. PeterJ. Richerson, Principles of Human Ecolog y (Davis:
Universit y of California Press, ), chap. (“War-
fare”), w ww.des.ucdavis.edu/faculty/Richerson/Books
On li ne/tex t.ht m.
. Norbert Elias, “On Transformations of Aggressive-
ne ss,” Theory and Society (): – . Cf. Godfried
van Benthem van den Bergh, The Nature of Peace and the
Dynamics of International Politics, Working Paper Series
no. (The Hague: Institute of Social Studies, ), and
P.A. Corning, The Synergism Hypothesis: A Theory of Pro-
gressive Evolution ( New York: McGraw- Hill, ).
. Norbert Elias, Involvement and Detachment, vol. of
Collected Works (Dublin: UCD Press, ), .
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van der Dennen • Peace by Other Means: Par t 1 433
In Turney- High’s terms, they have not reached the “military horizon.” Most of
these are head- hunting and revenge- raiding peoples.
Notice that the processes important to the kind of social science under discus-
sion are psychological, rather than material or ecological: the terms used are “threat
perception,” “credibility,” “expectation,” and the like, because deterrence depends
on participants’ fears of their neighbors’ destructive capabilities. Too much fear,
however, may be a destabilizing force. The security dilemma in which nonstate and
tribal peoples nd themselves has the formal structure of a “prisoner’s dilemma”
in which individual short- term rational behavior leads to a collectively irrational
outcome: all parties involved defect and lose (in terms of casualties, destruction of
property, costs of war preparations, opportunity costs, and so forth). As Azar Gat
puts it, “The ‘Prisoner’s Dilemma’ game demonstrates how people under certain
conditions are rationally pushed by these conditions to adopt strategies that are not
in their best interest.”59 In evolutionary terms, the benets are often the difference
between extreme costs and slightly less extreme costs.60
Again, I quote Gat’s formulation of the problem:
Revenge or retaliation is an active reaction to an injury, arising from a
competitive and, hence, potentially conictual basic state or relations.
However, as Hobbes saw (Leviathan, ), the basic condition of com-
petition and potential conict, which gives rise to endemic suspicion
and insecurity, invites not only reactive but also pre- emptive response,
which further magnies mutual suspicion and insecurity.... The other
side, however, faces a similar security problem and takes similar pre-
cautions. The fear, suspicion, and feeling of insecurity are mutual and
natural, even in the absence of a concrete hostile intent on the part of
the other, let alone if some such intent exists.... As a result of all this,
measures that one takes to increase one’s security in an insecure world
often decrease the other’s security, even if this was not intended, and
vice versa. One’s strength is the other’s weakness.... Although both
sides of the Security Dilemma may be motivated by defensive concerns,
they may choose to pre- empt actively, that is, take not only defensive
precautions but attack the other side in order to eliminate or severely
weaken him as a potential enemy. Indeed, this option in itself makes
the other side even more insecure, the security dilemma more acute.
Warfare can thus become a self- fullling prophecy. The fear of war
breeds war.6
In a relatively stable socioecological environment — one in which each society
knows its own place and also those of others, their numerical strength, retalia-
. Gat, “War in Human Civilization,” .
. See J.M.G. van der Dennen, “(Evolutionary) The-
ories of Warfare in Preindustrial (Foraging) Societies,”
Neuroendocrinology Letters , suppl. (): – .
. Gat, “War in Human Civilization,” –.
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COMMON KNOWLEDGE 4 3 4
tory capacity, and so on — the strategy of remaining on the alert and preparing
to defend oneself may result in something like peace, with only sporadic and
incidental ares of overt violence.
In a case of this kind, which, as I say, has the formal structure of an iter-
ated prisoner’s dilemma, mutual suspicion and xenophobic fear can give rise to
mutual caution and diplomatic maneuvering but probably only if there also is a
higher authority within each tribe to stop the private revenge raiding and to relax
blood- feud obligations. Some authority must also hold the ideal of the macho
warrior in check, along with the material rewards and social (especially sexual)
privileges that tend to come with martial prowess. “Even when the population is
war weary,” W.R. Goldschmidt has observed, and “even when there is a genuine
need for peace, the peace is fragile precisely because there remain those who
feel that their masculinity, by which we mean their social identity, is lost if they
do not press their cause.”62 In other words, the hatchet will not be ceremonially
buried when there is no acceptable face- saving device (“peace with honor”) for
the warriors, whose reputation for erceness is at stake. In preindustrial societies,
internal dissatisfaction with peace treaties is a recurrent problem. An example,
according to K.M. Stewart, would be the Mohave Indians of the Colorado River
Valley, “by reputation a warlike tribe, although my informants insisted that the
people as a whole were pacically inclined. It was asserted that, while war was
disliked by a majority of the Mohave, battle was the dominant concern of the
kwanamis (‘brave men’), who were responsible for the recurrent hostilities and
over whom there was no effective control.”63
Even in a situation of chronic insecurity, however, the acceptance of miti-
gating rules of combat — of a common law of war and peace — is, as Wilhelm
Mühlmann argues, in accordance with enlightened self- interest. Quincy Wright
claims that human beings have a natural aversion to killing one of their own spe-
cies and that from this recoil springs a psychological need for rules of war. Mühl-
mann holds, though, that a common law of war and peace, including rules for the
mitigation of war, can develop only gradually and only in a situation of heredi-
tary enmity. A tribal society constitutes an anarchic system of autonomous local
groups dependent on locally concentrated resources. This structural framework
also functions as a system of incentives, in the context of which each local group
pursues its own interests in interacting with others. The result is a specic form
of strategic interaction that is describable, again, as a prisoner’s dilemma. As Jürg
Helbling writes, “It may be assumed that politically autonomous local groups
would prefer to [co- operate and to] settle their disputes in a peaceful, non- violent
. W.R. Goldschmidt, “Peacemaking and the Institu-
tions of Peace i n Tribal S ocieties,” in Sponsel a nd Gregor,
Anthropology of Peace and Nonviolence, – , as cited in
Darsha n Singh Main i, Anthropolog y of Peace, vol. of Ency-
clopaedia of Anthropology, (New Delhi: Mittal, ), .
. K.M. Stew art, “Mohave Warfa re,” Southwestern Jour-
nal of Anthropology (): – , at .
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van der Dennen • Peace by Other Means: Par t 1 435
way, because they could avoid high losses of human life and resources,” but the
structural framework of their interaction precludes intergroup cooperation. “The
mutual mistrust and reciprocal threat of force ultimately compel each group to
take steps to ensure its survival,” Helbling continues. “The conicts, leading to
war in an anarchic ‘state of nature,’ are themselves a result of this anarchic sys-
tem. It is thus not an innate human propensity for aggressiveness (the Hobbesian
position has sometimes been misrepresented in that sense) which propels collec-
tive violence, but fear.”64
Results of Fear
Still, fear can have more than one result. Men — or, rather, some men; generaliza-
tions about “men” are rife and unhelpful in these discussions — may fear combat
as much as they fear the enemy’s intentions. And even then men may fake illness
and nd other excuses to stay home or desert from a raiding party, or to call
the whole enterprise off at the last moment.65 It can take a considerable array of
cultural incentives to motivate reluctant men to overcome fear and then ght.
First, warrior norms and values must be inculcated: in the few studies that have
been done on combat motivation in nonstate societies, it has been found that,
in the most warlike, such as the Yanomamö, Abipon, and Creek, boys fear pain
and personal danger and that elaborate training and indoctrination are required
to turn them into warriors of the required ferocity.66 There must also be (as
Robert Harrison shows for the Manambu) war rituals, protective amulets, and
other such inducements.67 Even with the warrior training, the incentives, and
inducements, however, there remain many reasons for a man not to participate
in war; for instance, bad dreams and bad omens, such as the song of certain
birds, license warriors to stay at home.68 “Not infrequently a local group sets out
full of vim and boastfulness to go some distance away to attack another tribe,”
Elkin writes of Australian aborigine communities, “but some days later returns
in ‘ones’ or ‘twos’ or ‘threes’ and so on, without having sighted the group in the
. Helbling, “War and Peace in Societies without Cen-
tral Power,” .
. See W.R. Goldschmidt, “Inducement to Military
Participation in Tribal Societies,” in Social Dynamics of
Peace and Conict, ed. R.A. Rubinstein and M.L. Foster
(Boulder, CO: Westview, ), – , and R.B. Fergu-
son, “The G eneral Consequences of War: An A mazonian
Perspect ive,” in Studying War: Anthropological Perspectives,
ed. S.P. Reyna a nd R.E. Downs ( Langhorne, PA: Gordon
and Breach, ), – .
. See Napoleon A. Chagnon, Yanomamö: The Fierce
People, rd ed. ( New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston,
); Martin Dobrizhoffer, An Account of the Abipones, an
Equestrian People of Paraguay, vols. (; repr., London:
Murray, ); J.R. Swanton, “Contributions to the Eth-
nology of the Haida,” Memoirs of the American Museum of
Natural History (): – .
. Rober t Harrison, Warfare (Min neapolis, MN: Bur-
gess, ). See also Goldschmidt, “Inducement to Mili-
tary Participation in Tribal Societies.”
. W.R. Goldschmidt, “Inducement to Military Par-
ticipation in Tribal Societies,” in The Anthropology of War
and Peace: Perspectives on the Nuclear Age, ed. P.R. Turner
and David Pitt (Granby, MA: Berg in and Garvey, ),
– .
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COMMON KNOWLEDGE 4 3 6
. A.P. Elkin, The Australian Aborigines: How to Under-
stand Them (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, ), .
. See B.M. K nauf t, “Warfare and Histor y in Mela-
nesia,” in From Primitive to Postcolonial in Melanesia and
Anthropology (A nn A rbor: University of Michigan Press,
), – .
. A ndrew Strathern and Pamela J. Stewart, Collabora-
tions and Conicts: A Leader through Time (Fort Worth,
TX: Harcourt College Publishers, ), .
. Leopold Pospisil, Anthropology of Law: A Comparative
Theory (New York: Harper and Row, ), as quoted in
Keeley, War before Civilization, .
. Chagnon, Yan omamö, .
. See R.B. Ferguson, “A Savage Encounter: Western
Contact and the Yanomami War Complex,” in War in the
Tribal Zone: Expanding States and Indigenous Warfare, ed.
Ferguson and N.L. W hitehead (Santa Fe, NM: School
of American Research, ), – , and “Tribal War-
fa re,” Scientic American ( January ): – ; Leslie
Sponsel, “The Natural History of Peace: The Positive
View of Human Nature and Its Potential,” in A Natu-
ral History of Peace, ed. Thomas Gregor (Nashville, TN:
Vanderbilt Univer sity Press, ), – . See also Bruce
Albert, “Yanomami ‘Violence’: Inclusive Fitness or Eth-
nographer ’s Represe ntation?,” Current Anthropolog y , no.
(): – , and “On Yanomam i Warfare: Rejoin-
der,” Current Anthropology (): – ; Albert and
A.R. Ramos, “Yanomami Indians and A nthropological
Et h ic s,” Science (): ; Marcus Colchester, ed.,
The Health and Survi val of the Venez uelan Yanoama (Cop en-
hagen: International Work Group for Indigenous A ffairs,
); Kenneth Good, Into the Heart: An Amazonian Love
Story (London: Penguin, ); Jacques Lizot, Tal es of
the Yanomami: Daily Life in the Venezuelan Forest (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, ); A.R. Ramos,
“Reect ing on the Yanomami: Ethnographic Images and
the Pursuit of t he Exotic,” Cultural Anthropology ():
– ; W.J. Smole, The Yanoama Indians: A Cultural
Geography (Austin: University of Texas Press, ); and
Mark Ritchie, Spirit of the Rainforest: A Yanomamö Sha-
man’s Story (Chicago: Island Lake Press, ).
. Napoleon A. Chagnon, “Life Histories, Blood
Revenge, a nd Warfare in a Tribal Popu lation,” Science
(February , ): – , at .
other tribe whom they set out to annihilate.”69 Even the staunchest tribal war-
riors dislike combat; they fear war- related risks and, afterward, may suffer from
war trauma.70 In tribal New Guinea, where rates of violent death were among the
highest recorded anywhere, war was considered “a rubbish way of doing things.”7
As one Papuan Kapauku tribesman reportedly put it, “War is bad and nobody
likes it. Sweet potatoes disappear, pigs disappear, elds deteriorate, and many
relatives and friends get killed.”72
Napoleon Chagnon, noted for his depiction of the Yanomamö of Venezuela
and Brazil as incomparably aggressive, quotes a tribesman telling him, “We are
fed up with ghting. We don’t want to kill any more.”73 Many subdivisions of the
Yanomamö, moreover, were and are — according to Sponsel, R.B. Ferguson, and
other ethnologists who have conducted eld research among them — not nearly as
violent and belligerent as those that Chagnon made infamous.74 Chagnon himself
writes of persistent reluctance to ght and even cowardice among the Yanomamö:
Raiding parties among the Yanomamö usually include to men, but
not all men go on all raids and some men never go on raids. An enemy
village might be as far as or days’ march away. Many raiding parties
turn back before reaching their destination, either because someone
has a dream that portends disaster or because the enemy group is not
where it was believed to be. In all but the most determined raiding par-
ties, a few men drop out for reasons such as being “sick” or “stepping
on a thorn.” Chronic dropouts acquire a reputation for cowardice and
often become the subject of frequent insult and ridicule, and their wives
become targets of increased sexual attention from other men.75
Common Knowledge
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van der Dennen • Peace by Other Means: Par t 1 437
. See Bigelow, Dawn Warriors; Matthew Dennis, Culti-
vating a Lan dscape of Peace (It haca, NY: Cornell Un iversity
Press, ); C.A. Kupchan, How Enemies Become Friends
(Princeton, N J: Princeton University Press, ); J.D.
Leechman, Native Tribes of Canada (Toronto: W.J. Gage,
); L.H. Morgan, League of the Ho- de- no- sau- nee or
Iroquois (Rochester, NY: Sage and Brothers, ); Paul
Wallace, White Roots of Peace (Santa Fe, NM: Clear Light,
).
. J. Douglas Leechman, Native Tribes of Canada, as
quoted in Bigelow, Dawn Warriors, .
. Morgan, League of the Ho- de- no- sau- nee or Iroquois, .
. C harles A. Kupchan, How E nemies Become Fr iends: The
Sources of Stable Peace (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univer-
sity Press, ), .
. See G.T. Hunt, The Wars of the Iroquois: A Study in
Intertribal Trade Relations (Madison: University of Wis-
consin Press, ), and E.R. Service, “War and Our
Contemporary A ncestors,” in Fried, Harris, and Murphy,
War, – .
Still, it is worth observing, the Yanomamö have not undertaken in any systematic
way to eliminate these forms of cowardice and reluctance.
Sometimes, even when a people has demonstrated ferocity and military
prowess, their attitude toward war has been misinterpreted as positive. There is,
to take an important example, considerable evidence that the Iroquoian Confed-
eracy, also called the League of Peace, started, in the second half of the fteenth
century, as indeed an attempt to establish peace and to live in harmony with
neighboring peoples.76 According to J. Douglas Leechman, “The chief purpose
of the League of the Iroquois was to stop the ghting among the tribes and
bring about universal peace, and they fought like demons to attain this goal.
It sounds like a most contradictory way of going at it, but at times the best way
to make somebody stop ghting is to ght him till he does stop.”77 “It was the
boast of the Iroquois,” Lewis Henry Morgan writes, “that the great object of
their confederacy was peace — to break up the spirit of perpetual warfare, which
had wasted the red race from age to age.”78 Among the original Iroquoians — the
Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca (later joined by the Tuscarora)
nations — archaeology and ethnohistory clearly document chronic feuding, war-
ring, and cannibalism before the creation of the peace system put an end to the
carnage within the new confederacy. In his book How Enemies Become Friends,
Charles Kupchan writes of the confederacy that it “proved remarkably durable,
maintaining the peace among the Iroquois for over three hundred years” (that is,
until the late eighteenth century).79 Whereas the Iroquois still engaged in exter-
nal warfare after the confederacy was formed — they exterminated the Hurons,
among other depredations — their main goal was to maintain peace, security, and
unity within an alliance of a half- dozen former adversaries.80
There are, however, limits on how far such reinterpretation of tribal behav-
ior can go. Efforts have been made, for instance, to show that the Plains Indians’
warrior complex, with its emphasis on individual solitary feats of bravery and
bravado, actually limited violence. Counting coup — that is, touching the enemy,
whether alive or dead — was understood to be the ultimate act of bravery, a far
more important war objective than killing the enemy. Hence, Plains warfare,
Common Knowledge
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COMMON KNOWLEDGE 4 3 8
. Keeley, War before Civilization, .
. Keeley, War before Civilization, . On t his point, see
also R. B. Ferguson, “Anthropology and War: Theor y,
Politics, Ethics,” in Turner and Pitt, Anthropology of War
and Peace, – ; Douglas Fry, “Life w ithout War,” in
Human Conict: Winning the Peace, ed. Guy R iddihough,
Science (May , ): – ; Thomas Gregor and
Leslie Sponsel, “Preface,” in Sponsel and Gregor, Anthro-
pology of Peace and Nonviolence, xv – xviii; and L.T. Hob-
house, Gerald Wheeler, and Morris Ginsberg, “The
Material Culture and Social Institutions of t he Simpler
Peoples,” Monograph on Sociology no. ( London: Lon-
don School of Economics, ). For case studies, see
M.E. Opler, “Chiricahua Apache/Mescalero Apache,”
in Sturtevant and Ortiz, Southwest, – , – ; K . F.
Koch, “Pacication: Perspectives f rom Conict Theory,”
in The Pacication of Melanesia, ed. M.C .Rodman and
Matthew Cooper (A nn A rbor: Universit y of Michigan
Press, ), – ; and Leopold Pospisil, The Kapauku
Papuans of West New Guinea (New York: Holt, Rinehart,
and Winston, ).
. Turney- H igh, Primitive War, .
though incessant, is said to boil down to a series of small- scale raids of a few
“braves” touching enemies and stealing horses. Keeley has objected, however,
that “counting coup no more ameliorated the deadliness of combat than does
the civilized custom of awarding medals. Moreover, equally important to Plains
warriors was the custom of taking scalps, and these were decidedly difcult to
obtain from living enemies.”8
Peacelessness Revisited
Despite my argument, set out earlier, about permanent peacelessness, in one
important regard peace is the normal human condition: for most of the time,
most human groups, from bands to nation- states, are not at war. “However fre-
quent, dramatic, and eye- catching,” Keeley observes,
war remains a lesser part of social life.... There can be no dispute that
peaceful activities, arts, and ideas are by far more crucial and more com-
mon in even the most bellicose societies.... Warfare, whether primitive
or civilized, involves losses, suffering, and terror, even for the victors.
Consequently, it was nowhere viewed as an unalloyed good, and the
respect accorded to accomplished warriors was often tinged with aver-
sion.... At some level, even the most militant warriors recognized the
evils of war and the desirability of peace”82
Likewise, Turney- High argues that “cold- blooded slaughter has really never been
approved by the bulk of mankind. All have understood the amenities of peace to
a greater or less degree. Civilized and savage men understand that war requires
regulation and that human death is full of mana, which is a fearsome thing....
Peace, then, seems to be the normal situation in the minds of even warlike peo-
ples.” 83 Brian Ferguson, too, concurs:
Even if we focus on societies where warfare is an undisputed occur-
rence, periods of active warfare involving a given group usually are
relatively brief. The vast majority of humans, living or dead, have spent
Common Knowledge
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van der Dennen • Peace by Other Means: Par t 1 439
. Ferguson, “Anth ropology and War: Theory, Politics,
Ethics,” .
. A.C. Fletcher and Francis LaFlesche, “The Omaha
Tri be,” Annual Reports of the Bureau of American Ethnology
(): – .
. Rudolf Holsti, “The Relation of War to the Origin
of the State,” Annales Academiae Scientiarum Fennicae
(): archive.org/stream/relationofwartooholsrich
/relationofwartooholsrich_djvu.t xt.
. Wrangham and Glowacki, “Intergroup Aggression in
Chimpanzees.”
most of their lives at peace. So one can agree with Hobbes that politi-
cally autonomous groups have the potential for war, but this tells us
nothing about why real war occurs. Contrary to the Hobbesian image,
peace is the normal human condition.84
Tribes as erce as the head- hunting Jivaro (in South America) regarded their
incessant warfare as a curse.
War has sometimes been conceived of as a sorrow inherent to the universe.
The semiagricultural Omaha, though Plainsmen, had essentially pacic attitudes
and considered aggression a disintegrating force, but the mysterious “wakanda”
had decreed the existence of war, hate, and vengeance; humanity has no choice
but submission. Certain rites were said to control war and those turbulent, ambi-
tious men who liked it, but that control was understood to be feeble. The old men
of the tribe strove to spread as a paramount doctrine the necessity of peace and
order. As a part of that doctrine, it was considered, among the Omaha, inconsis-
tent with “natural law” for a man on, or about to go on, the warpath to marry.85
After all, war is life- wasting, and marriage is life- creating. Rudolf Holsti, after
reviewing the ethnographic literature on war up until his time, came to the con-
clusion in that “primitive man,”
instead of having really warlike qualities born into them, have on the
contrary often had to stir these up through scorn, through the appeals
of kinsmen, through exhortations, through the fear of punishments,
through promises of rewards, and through superstitious beliefs or other
considerations, as of unavoidable duties vested in them, and nally
through careful preparations and special customs in connection with
the opening as well the carrying on of hostilities. Moreover, primi-
tive man, relying upon his superstition, has often avenged injuries in a
nonwarlike way.86
Richard Wrangham and Luke Glowacki reported in their finding that
chimpanzee males are not warriors by nature.87 Something of the kind, appar-
ently, might be said of human males as well.
To Begin Again
I began this article by saying that “it is not so clear when the argument that
nonstate, hunter- gatherer societies tend to be peaceful, and that their battles are
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COMMON KNOWLEDGE 4 4 0
. Gregor, “Uneasy Peace,” .
. See W.E. Mühlmann, Rassen- und Völkerkunde: Leb-
ensprobleme der Rassen, Gesellschaften und Völker (Braun-
schweig: Vieweg, ). Common Knowledge has published
two extensive symposia on and around th is point: “Unso-
cial Thou ght, Uncommon Lives,” which app eared serially
in vol. , no. (Spring ); , no. (Fall ); and
, no. (Winter ); and “Apolog y for Quietism” in ,
no. (Winter ); , no. (Spring ); , no. (Fal l
); , no. (Wi nter ); , no. (Spring ); and
, no. (Fall ).
like rituals or games, was rst gured in the social sciences as a myth.” Although
the Rousseauian anthropology that I have associated here with Bronislaw
Malinowski, Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, and Leslie White, among others,
has been shown, time and again, by subsequent ethnographers, to be untenable, I
would like to argue now that their shared vision should not be regarded as a myth
in any negative sense of the word. While not all tribal societies are peaceful (and
while, when they are not, their wars can be erce), we may well be able to dene
terms and set criteria more carefully so as to show that some tribal societies have
been more peaceful than others and that the more peaceable nonstate societies
have also been more peaceful than any advanced society. In doing so, we may be
able to determine how so and why so, to the benet of modern societies. I shall
start by considering the obstacles to agreement about what peaceful and peaceful-
ness mean.
Peacefulness Does Not Equal Timidity or Gentleness
When Thomas Gregor tried to nd comparative data to complement his study
of the relatively peaceful Xingu communities, he was frustrated by the minimal
number of peaceful peoples that he could nd. “The societies that come closest
to tting the model of the truly peaceful culture,” he wrote,
are small in scale and primarily hunters and foragers. This conclusion is
in keeping with research on war by [Quincy] Wright... and others who
have positively associated war with community size and cultural devel-
opment. Peaceful peoples also tend to be geographically isolated.... In
most instances, however, peaceful societies appear to achieve their status
by evading rather than solving the problems of intertribal relations.88
Isolation, splendid or not, seems prima facie to be the most prominent condition
for peacefulness. Mühlmann indeed virtually identies peaceful peoples with
Rückzugsvölker (literally, evading or retreating peoples).89
It may be, then, that Gregor could nd so few peaceful peoples because
his criteria were wrong. This late in human evolutionary history, there are few
peoples that can qualify as so isolated, as Gregor put it, that they can “evade the
problems of intertribal relations.” In order to classify a people as peaceable, some
Common Knowledge
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van der Dennen • Peace by Other Means: Par t 1 441
. See, for example, B. D. Bonta, Peaceful Peoples: An
Annotated Bibliography (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press,
), and “Conict R esolution among Peacef ul Societie s:
The Culture of Peacef ulness,” Journal of Peace Research ,
no. (): – .
. Turney- High, Primitive War, .
. John Tooby and Leda Cosmides, “The Evolution of
War and Its Cognitive Foundations,” Proceedings of the
Institute of Evolutionary Studies (): – .
. Bron islaw Malinow ski, “An Anthropolog ical Analy sis
of War,” American Journal of Sociology (): – .
scholars demand not only proof that intercommunity warring and feuding are
absent but also evidence that any trace of intragroup violence, aggression, and
even simply conict is absent.90 They unrealistically require a peaceful society
to be gentle, harmonious, and even pusillanimous in all its aspects. But “war-
less people,” as Turney- High observed, “have by no means been friendly and
pacic. They have not been ignorant of how to shed human blood, nor have they
abhorred it. Neither have they been without social institutions which formalized
man- killing.... Field ethnology no more demonstrates that a warless people [is]
per se a kindly one than it shows that a monogamous tribe is sexually chaste.”9
Bellicosity Does Not Equal Aggression
The conspicuous absence of intergroup violence among mammals is the major
argument against a simple and naive linkage of aggression and warfare. Relatively
few species, apparently — mainly primates and social carnivores — have mastered
the art of war, though all mammalian species have agonistic behavior or aggres-
sion in their repertoire. If war were just another manifestation of aggression,
intergroup agonistic behavior should be much more widespread in the animal
kingdom than it is. The sophisticated coalitional psychology of male chimpan-
zees and humans is said to be a prerequisite for the conduct of war; John Tooby
and Leda Cosmides argue that specic Darwinian algorithms must be involved
to account for it.92 Whatever function aggression or violence may serve in the
life of the individual or the small group, Malinowski observed more than sev-
enty years ago, it does not serve the same function in relations between politi-
cal units.93 Warfare is not aggregated individual aggression. Ashley Montagu’s
distinction between intragroup and intergroup aggression implies that these two
kinds may vary independently:
When reference is made to aggressive societies we have to be quite clear
whether the reference is to intragroup or intergroup aggression. There
are societies in which intergroup aggression is high but in which intra-
group aggression is low, as among a number of New Guinea peoples.
There are some societies in which aggression is high both within the
group and bet ween groups, as among the Yanomamö. There are soci-
eties in which both inter- and intragroup aggression is low, as among
Common Knowledge
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COMMON KNOWLEDGE 4 42
. M.F.A. Montag u, ed., Learning Non- aggression: The
Experience of Non- literate Societies (Fair Lawn, NJ: Oxford
Universit y Press, ), .
. See G. D. Berreman, “The Incredible ‘Tasaday’:
Deconstructing t he Myth of a ‘Stone Age’ People,” Cul-
tural Survival Quarterly , no. (): – .
. Kelly, Warless Societies, .
. J.C. Kennedy, “Ritu al and Intergroup Mu rder: Com-
ments on War, Primitive and Modern,” in War and the
Human Race, ed. M. N. Walsh (A msterdam: Elsevier,
), – .
. C.R. Ember and Melvin Ember, “Resource Unpre-
dictability, Mistrust, and War: A Cross- cultural Study,”
Journal of Conf lict Resolution , no. (): – ,
and “War, Socializat ion, and I nterpersonal Violence: A
Cross- cultural Study,” Journal of Conict Resolution , no.
(): – .
. Kelly, Warless Societies, .
o. B.M. Knauf t, “Reconsidering Violence in Simple
Human Societies: Homicide among the Gebusi on New
Gu i ne a,” Current Anthropology , no. (): – .
the Toda of Southern India, and there are some societies in which both
inter- and intragroup aggression are nonexistent, as among the Tasaday
of Mindanao, in the Philippines.94
(The Tasaday were subsequently exposed as victims or perpetrators of a hoax.)95
Thus, the only reasonable criterion for the peacefulness of any society, as I argue
in my book The Origin of War (), is the absence of offensive war between that
society and any other. “Ideally,” as Kelly writes, “codes for warfare should care-
fully distinguish reciprocating collective armed conict from one- sided attacks,
since being subject to attack does not indicate any propensity to war.”96 The
presence or absence of intragroup violence, aggression, or conict should be irrel-
evant in making such classications.
The confusion about criteria for peacefulness derives from the mostly
implicit assumption that, in some unspecied way, war results from the collec-
tive outpouring of accumulated raw aggression. While aggression is obviously
correlated with, and is an integral aspect of, war, there is, according to J.C. Ken-
nedy (and numerous other authors), no simple cause- and- effect relationship.97
Leslie White has long contended that there is probably more evidence to support
the proposition that war produces aggression than that aggression leads to war.
Indeed, Melvin Ember and Carol Ember have found empirical evidence that,
among preliterate peoples, socialization for aggression is more likely to be a con-
sequence than a cause of war.98 The major nding consistent with this scenario is
that, because of pacication, socialization for aggression seems to decrease after
warfare ceases. “The lack of covariation between low homicide rates and the
absence of warfare,” Kelly writes, “undercuts the logic of seeking to account for
the character of peaceful (or warless) societies through recourse to child socializa-
tion practices”99 — and Bruce Knauft has detailed the difculties that the ethno-
graphic data on the !Kung, Semai, Central Eskimo, and Gebusi pose for theories
that attempt to link child socialization to the incidence of lethal violence.00 Sec-
ondary socialization, though, may be more closely related to the incidence of war
than is early childhood socialization.
Common Knowledge
Published by Duke University Press
van der Dennen • Peace by Other Means: Par t 1 443
. See, for example, Jef frey Blick, “Genocidal Warfare
in Tribal Societies as a Result of Eu ropean- Induced Cul-
ture Conict,” Man (): – ; Ferguson, “Sav-
age Encounter,” – ; Ferguson, “Tribal Warfare,”
– ; Ferguson and W hitehead, War in the Tribal Zone;
Leslie Sponsel, “The Mutual Relevance of Anthropolog y
and Peace Studies,” in Sponsel and Gregor, Anthropology
of Peace and Nonviolence, – .
. Ferguson, “Tribal Warefare,” – .
. R.B. Ferguson, “Explaining War,” in Haas, Anthro-
pology of War, – ; R.B. Ferguson, “Blood of the Levia-
than: Western Contact and Warfare in A mazonia,” Amer-
ican Ethnology (): – .
In assessing our criteria for whether a society is peaceful, we must pay close
attention as well to the strong androcentric bias in accounts that relate innate
aggression to warfare in primitive societies. The tendency in this literature is
either to ignore women altogether or to suggest, vaguely, that they are in gen-
eral less aggressive than men. Theories claiming a biological distinction between
men and women in this respect are to say the least inconclusive. Likewise, the
grudges of warriors “unemployed” after coercive pacication have sometimes
been construed as evidence of innate bellicosity, when there are several other
equally or more likely explanations. Greater resourcefulness and fewer precon-
ceptions might well result in our developing more useful criteria for peacefulness
in preindustrial societies.
Nonstate Warfare as a Postcontact Phenomenon
Anthropologists and other analysts of tribal warfare need, moreover, to resolve
a variety of disputes among themselves before sensible criteria for peacefulness
are set. Possibly the key dispute at present concerns the effects of contact with
colonial nation- states in the patterns of warfare among the colonized. According
to a group called Tribal Zone anthropologists, contact between state and nonstate
societies has exacerbated warfare within and between them to a degree we are
only beginning to realize.0 In R.B. Ferguson’s view,
accepted wisdom even now holds that “primitive” cultures are typically
at war and that the primary military effect of contact with the West is
the suppression of ongoing combat. In fact, the initial effect of Euro-
pean colonialism has generally been quite the opposite. Contact has
invariably transformed war patterns, very frequently intensied war and
not uncommonly generated war among groups who previously had lived
in peace. Many, perhaps most, recorded wars involving tribal peoples
can be directly attributed to the circumstances of Western contact.02
A consequence of this circumstance is, as Ferguson explains elsewhere, a sys-
tematic exaggeration of images of warlike behavior in supposedly “rst contact”
accounts.03
Common Knowledge
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COMMON KNOWLEDGE 444
. Napoleon A. Chagnon, “Chronic Problems in
Understanding Tribal Violence and Warfare,” in Genet-
ics of Criminal and Antisocial Behavior, CIBA Foundation
Symposium (Chichester, UK: Wiley, ): – ,
at .
. See N.J.B. Plomley, ed., Friendly Mission: The Tas-
manian Journals and Papers of George Augustus Robinson,
1829 – 34 (Hobart: Tasmanian H istorical Research Asso-
ciation, ), – ; H.L. Roth, The Aborigines of Tas-
mania (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Truebner, ),
– ; Rhys Jones, “Tasmanian Tribes,” in Aboriginal
Tribes of Australia, ed. N.B. Tindale (Berkeley: Univer-
sity of California Press, ), – , at ; Lyndall
Ryan, The Aboriginal Tasmanians (St. Lucia: University of
Queensland Press, ), – .
. See M.J. Leahy and Maurice Crain, The Land That
Time Forgot (London: Hurst and Blackett, ).
. Sponsel, “Natural History of Peace,” . See also
Polly Wiessner, Akii Tumu, Woody Tumu, and Nitze
Pupu, “Warfare in Enga Prov ince: From Prehistor y until
Modern Times,” Report to the Enga Provincial Govern-
ment, Wabag, September ; C.A. Robarchek and C .J.
Robarchek, “The Waorani: From Warfare to Peaceful-
ne ss,” The World and I , no. (): – ; H.W. Schef-
er, Choiseul Island Social Structure (Berkeley: University
of California Press, ); Willis, “ ‘Peace Puzzle’ in
Up a.”
On the other hand, Chagnon attributes the conclusions of the Tribal Zone
anthropologists to current postcolonialist fashion: “It becomes increasingly fash-
ionable and politically more correct,” he writes, “to explain away violence and
warfare in native societies as something that post- dates colonialism and the unde-
sirable effects of capitalism on native cultures.”04 To “explain away” precontact
violence is required, Chagnon argues, by belief in the myth that humans in the
state of nature are cooperative, altruistic, and nonviolent. And there is evidence
to support Chagnon’s view. Tasmania is as close, perhaps, as any place of human
settlement to the ideal of isolation and backwardness: there were an estimated
four thousand Tasmanians when Europeans arrived, and their population den-
sity was among the lowest on Earth. Still, lethal raiding and counterraiding took
place between Tasmanian social groups.05 The same was true of the precontact
Baliem Valley tribes, when rst discovered by Europeans in the s.06 Most
Tribal Zone anthropologists are well aware of the evidence for extensive and
brutal warfare in these societies before contact and do take care to mention it,
albeit briey.
Moreover, contrary to the assertions of Tribal Zone anthropologists, the
possibility cannot be excluded that, as Sponsel writes, “contact with Western
societies has sometimes led to the pacication of societies in which warfare was
formerly endemic.”07 In his introduction to the present symposium, Jeffrey Perl
quotes Jared Diamond as saying, in his recent book The World until Yesterday, that
tribesmen in Papua New Guinea were grateful to colonial Australian patrols for
pacifying them by force after years of vengeful internecine warfare. Perl then
quotes, however, the contrary argument of James C. Scott:
A reader aware that Scott advocates improvisational self- government,
“anarchist calisthenics,” and the “arts of resistance” will be unsur-
prised by his argument, “contra Diamond,” that, while “there is plenty
of violence in the world of hunter- gatherers,” it is “almost entirely a
state- effect. It simply cannot be understood historically from BC
forward apart from the appetite of states for trade goods, slaves and
precious ores.” Scott furthermore contends that “non- state peoples
Common Knowledge
Published by Duke University Press
van der Dennen • Peace by Other Means: Par t 1 445
. Jeffrey M. Perl, “I ntroduction: The Undivided Big
Banana,” Common Knowledge , no. ( Fall ): –.
. See Helbling, “War and Peace in Societies without
Central Power,” and Knauft, “Warfare and History in
Melanesia.”
. See J.H. Bodley, Victims of Progress, nd ed. (Palo
Alto, CA: May eld, ).
. J.R. Swanton, Are Wars Inevitable? ( Wa shi n gton,
DC: Smithsonian Institute War Backgrou nd Studies,
), .
. G. C. Leavitt, “The Frequency of Warfare: An
Evolutionary Perspective,” Sociological Inquiry ():
– .
. KeithF. Otterbein, The Evolution of War: A Cross-
cultural Study (New Haven, CT: Human Relations Area
Files Press, ).
have many techniques for avoiding bloodshed and revenge killings: the
payment of compensation or Weregild, arranged truces (‘burying the
hatchet’), marriage alliances, ight to the open frontier, outcasting or
handing over a culprit who started the trouble.... These practices are
examined by many of the ethnographers who have carried out intensive
eldwork in the New Guinea Highlands.” Diamond, in other words,
had sufcient — arguably ample — evidence at hand to make a case that,
in matters of peacemak ing as in matters of language, religion, health,
and ecology, “we” have much to learn from the practices of non- and
premodern societies.08
It is the case that the expansion of colonial states created new constellations of
conict, as well as new forms of war. Numerous archaeological ndings and
ethnohistorical data, however, indicate that it is wrong to say that tribal wars
are caused by contact with state societies.09 Even the less radical version of this
theory — claiming that wars did not emerge for the rst time but intensied after
contact — is not supported by the evidence we have. The interaction of tribal
groups with expanding states had different effects at different times in different
places and different contexts. In some times and places, contact appears to have
intensied existing warfare; in others, contact appears to have reduced or even
stopped it altogether. It should not be forgotten, furthermore, that the politics of
all colonial states aimed ultimately at pacifying tribal societies so that a monopoly
of power could be established.0
Which Peoples Are Said to Be Peaceable?
Given the confusion and controversy surrounding the criteria for peaceability, the
large differences between the various lists on offer of peaceful peoples is unsur-
prising. J. R. Swanton surveyed the anthropological literature in and found
that there were about as many societies that were peaceable as warlike. In a
survey, Gregory Leavitt found war absent or rare in percent of hunting and
gathering societies (n=), in percent of simple horticultural societies (n=),
and in percent of advanced horticultural societies (n=.)2 On the other hand,
Keith Otterbein, in a sample of fty societies, found only four or ve to have
engaged infrequently or never in any type of offensive or even defensive war.3
Common Knowledge
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COMMON KNOWLEDGE 4 46
. M.H. Ross, “Political Decision- Making and Con-
ict: A dditional Cros s- cu ltural Code s and Scales,” Ethnol-
ogy (): – .
. J.G. Jorgensen, Western Indians: Comparative Envi-
ronments, Languages, and Cultures of 172 Western American
Indian Tribes (San Francisco, C A: Freeman, ).
. R.B. Textor, ed., A Cross- cultural Summary ( New
Haven, CT: Human Relations Area Files Press, ).
. See Holsti, “Relation of War to the Origin of the
State”; Hobhouse, W heeler, and Ginsberg, “Mat erial Cul-
ture and Social Institut ions of the Simpler Peoples”; T.S.
van der Bij, Ontstaan en eerste ontwikkeling van den oorlog
(Groningen: Wolters, ); Ragnar Numelin, The Begin-
nings of Diplomacy: A Sociological Study of Intertribal and
International Relations (London: Oxford University Press,
); Textor, Cross- cultural Summary; Bonta, Peacef ul Peo-
ples, and “Conict Resolution among Peaceful Socie ties”;
Kell y, Warless Societies; Fry, Human Potential for Peace; and
Evans Pim, Nonkilling Societies.
Four of these groups had recently been driven by warfare into isolated refuges,
and this isolation protected them from further conict. Such groups might more
accurately be classied as defeated refugees than as pacist communities. In ,
Marc Howard Ross found that twelve societies had engaged in warfare “rarely
or never,” out of a sample of ninety.4 J.G. Jorgensen identied seven peaceful
societies in a study of northwestern North America.5 According to A Cross-
cultural Summary of , edited by R.B. Textor, a sample of forty- ve societies
led to the conclusion that warfare is prevalent in thirty- four and not prevalent in
the remaining eleven.6 Those most peaceable were found to be the Ainu, Anda-
manese, Aranda, Lapps, Semang, Vedda, Yahgan, and Yukaghir.
If we combine the inventories of Kalevi Holsti; L.T. Hobhouse, G.C.
Wheeler, and Morris Ginsberg; T.S. van der Bij; Ragnar Numelin; Bruce Bonta;
Joám Evans Pim; Textor; Kelly; and Fry, the following peoples have been classi-
ed, at some point in the last eighty years, as peaceful:7
• In North America: Central Californians (Mission Indians), Columbians
of the Plateau, Copper Eskimo (Inuit), Dogrib, Gosiute, Greenland
Eskimo (Inuit), Hopi, Hudson Bay Inuit (Koksoagmyut), Kawaiisu, Karok,
Mandan, Monache, Montagnais- Naskapi, Paiute (Kaibab), Panamint,
Papago, Point Barrow Inuit, Polar or Central Eskimo (Inughuit), Pueblos
(Taos and Tewa), Salish (Columbia), Sanpoil, Saulteaux, Shoshone (Battle
Mountain and Hukundika), Similkameen, Slave (Slavey), Wenatchi, and
Zuñi
• In South America: Aguitequedichaga, Apinayé, Aurohuaco, Bara, Carib,
Cayapa, Cayua, Choroti, Cuna, Curetu, Guato, Guayaki, Huichol, Island
Arawak, Kuikuru, Machiguenga (Matsigenka), Maku, Napo, Ninaquiguila,
Panaré, Paumari, Pemon, Piaroa, Puri, Siriono, Tarahumara, Tehuelche,
Trio, Waiwai, Warao (Warrau), Waorani (Waura), Xinguanos, Zapotec,
and Yahgan
• In Eurasia: Ainu, Akha, Alangan Agta, Andamanese, Badaga, Baiga,
Bajau Laut (Sama Dilaut), Batak Agta, Batek, Batti, Birhor, Bodo, Buid
(Taubuid), Chewong, Chuckchee, Dhimal, Gond, Hano, Hanunóo, Hunza,
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van der Dennen • Peace by Other Means: Par t 1 447
. Dentan, “Rise, Maintenance, and Dest ruction of
Peaceable Polity,” .
. See Van der Bij, Ontstaan en eerste ontwikkeling van
den oorlog.
Iraya Agta, Irula, Jahai, Kadar, Kazak, Khalka, Kota, Kubu, Kurumba,
Ladaki (Ladakhi), Lamba, Lapps (Saami), Lepcha, Malapandaram (Hill
Pandaram), Mamanua Agta, Mangyan, Mentawei Islanders, Mishmi,
Nayaka (Naikens), Palawan Agta, Paliyan, Punan (Penan), Samoyed,
Semang/Semai, Sherpa, Subanon, Sulod, Tagbanua (Tagbanuwa Agta),
Tanala, Temiar Senoi, Tenae, Tiruray Agta, Toda, Toala, Toraja, Vedda
(Veddah), Wana, Yakut, Yami, Yanadi, and Yukaghir
• In Africa: Barea, Dorobo, Fipa (Wapa, Upa), Guanches (Canary Islands),
G/wi, Hadza, Ju/’hoansi (Ju/wasi; formerly !Kung), Hadza, Kongo
(Bakongo), Mandaeans (Subba), Mbuti (Bambuti), Nubians, and Thonga
(Bathonga)
• In Oceania: Aranda (Arunta), Arafuras, Arapesh, Australian aborigines
generally, Balinese, Fiji Islanders, Fore, Gebusi, Hagahai, Ifaluk, Mardu
(Mardudjara), Moriori, Pesechem, Rotuma Islanders, Samoans, Sio,
Solomon Islanders, Tahitians, Tanna Islanders, Tapiro, Tikana (New
Ireland), Tikopia, Timorini, Tiwi, Toraja, and Wape.
In preparing this list, the main criterion that I have applied (the absence of offen-
sive warfare) has led me to include peoples excluded by scholars whose criteria
require either () the absence of intrasocietal aggression and conict behavior or
() the presence of interpersonal harmony. The latter criteria would have excluded
the Balinese, Fiji Islanders, Samoans, Solomon Islanders, Tahitians, and Toraja,
among others, from a list of peaceful peoples, whereas my criterion leads to their
inclusion. My inventory, furthermore, excludes cenobites (that is, nonethnic,
religion- based, and contemporary peace groups, such as Hutterites, Mennonites,
Amish, and Quakers), as well as all contemporary nation- states, some of which
(Norwegians and Thai, especially) are present on the lists, for instance, of Bonta,
Fry, and Textor.
The evidence that there are a substantial number of peoples without
warfare — or with mainly defensive or “ritualized” warfare, seldom exceeding the
level of petty feuding or desultory skirmishes — does not support the notion of
universal human belligerence. Equally, however, it does not support the idea that
humans are at bottom a peaceable species. The evidence, rather, supports the view
of Robert Dentan, Wilhelm Mühlmann, and others that peace, like war, is “an
adaptive response (in the Darwinian sense) to particular political ecologies.”8
From inventories such as the one that I have supplied here, analysts have
reached a variety of conclusions about what types of society are likely to be peace-
able. Van der Bij concluded, in , that primitive peoples were peaceful because
they were primitive.9 In the same year, S.R. Steinmetz concluded that primi-
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COMMON KNOWLEDGE 4 4 8
. See S.R. Steinmetz, Soziologie des Krieges (Leipzig:
J.A. Barth, ).
. Ludwig Gumplowicz, Die soziologische Staatsidee
(In nsbruck: Wagner, ).
. See, for exa mple, M.H. Fried, The Evolutio n of Politi-
cal Society: An Essay in Political Anthropology (Ne w Yor k :
Random House, ).
. See Fry, Human Potential for Peace; Kelly, Warless
Societies; Sponsel, “Natural History of Peace”; R.L. Car-
neiro, “War and Peace: Alternating Realit ies in Human
Histor y,” in Reyna and Downs, Studying War, – ; C .S.
Coon, The Hunting Peoples (Harmondsworth, UK: Pen-
guin, ); Fried, Evolution of Political Society; Mar vin
Harris, Cannibals and Kings: The Origins of Cultures (New
York: Random House, ); Helbling, “War and Peace
in Societies without Central Power”; A.W. Johnson and
Timothy E arle, eds., The Evol ution of Human So cieties: From
Foraging Group to Agrarian State (Stanford, CA: Stanford
Universit y Press, ); J.H. Steward, “Causal Factors
and Processes in the Evolution of Pre- farming Socie-
ties,” in Lee and DeVore, Man the Hunter, – ; E.R .
Wolf, “Cycles of Violence: T he Anthropology of War and
Peace,” in Waymarks: T he Notre Dame Inaug ural Lectures in
Anthropology, ed. Kenneth Moore (Notre Dame, I N: Uni-
versit y of Notre Dame Press, ), – ; M.J. Konner,
The Tangled Wing (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Win-
ston, ); and E.R. Ser vice, The Hunters (Englewood
Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, ).
. Keeley, War before Civilization, .
. Dav id Fabbro, “Peac eful Societ ies: An Int roduction,”
Journal of Peace Research , no. (): – .
tive peoples were primitive because they were peaceful.20 Steinmetz agreed with
the position of Ludwig Gumplowicz, set forth in , that peaceful peoples
remain on the level of monkeys (bleiben auf der Stufe der Affen).2 Gumplowicz
had admitted that ethnology offered numerous such examples, though he did
not explain why and how these peaceful primates had survived in so belligerent
a world as he envisaged. Over all, the emphasis of analysts is on the “simplicity”
of peaceful social orders. According to Knauft, “simple” human societies place
great emphasis on generalized reciprocity and far less on negative reciprocity or
competition. Concomitantly, collective military action tends to be rudimentary
or absent, whereas in more complex, sedentary, horti- and agricultural socie-
ties, subsistence and demographic intensication are associated with increasing
property ownership and status inequality, as well as increasingly competitive
politicoeconomic and military rivalry.22 In other words, war tends not to exist
in hunting- and- gathering societies — this, at least, is the argument of Fry, Kelly,
Sponsel, Robert Carneiro, Carleton Coon, Morton Fried, Marvin Harris, Jürg
Helbling, Allen Johnson and Timothy Earle, Julian Steward and his student Eric
Wolf, Richard Lee and Irven DeVore, Melvin Konner, and Elman Service.23
It should be noted, however, that even highly nomadic, geographically isolated
hunter- gatherers with low population densities are not universally peaceable. For
example, according to Keeley, “many Australian Aboriginal foragers, including
those living in deserts, were inveterate raiders.”24
David Fabbro, unlike the other analysts whom I have discussed so far,
includes, for reasons of comparison, literate communities, such as the islanders of
Tristan da Cunha, and cenobites, such as the Hutterites and the Amish, on his list
of peaceful societies, along with “simple,” nonliterate peoples like the Semai, the
Siriono, the Mbuti, the !Kung, and the Copper Eskimo.25 A peaceful society, by
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van der Dennen • Peace by Other Means: Par t 1 449
. C.R. McCauley, “Conference Overview,” in Haas,
Anthropology of War, – .
. Gregor, “Uneasy Peace”; Dentan, “Rise, Mainte-
nance, and Destruction of Peaceable Polity”; Dentan,
“ ‘Surrendered Men’ ”; and Fry, Human Potential for Peace.
. Kelly, Warless Societies, .
. See J.B. Bird sell, “Local G roup Composition among
the Australian Aborigines: A Critique of the Evidence
from Fieldwork Conducted since ,” Current Anthro-
pology (): – ; J.M. Cooper, “The Yahgan,”
in Handbook of South American Indians, vols., ed. J.H.
Steward ( Washington, DC: US Government Printing
Ofce, – ), : – ; and J.M. Cooper “The Ona,”
in Steward, Handbook of South American Indians, : – ;
R.B. Lee, The !Kung San: Men, Women, and Work in a
Foraging Society (New York: Cambridge Universit y Press,
); F.R. Myers, “Always Ask: Resource Use and Land
Ownership among Pintupi Aborigines of the Australian
Western Desert,” in Resource Managers: North American
and Australian Hunter Gatherers, ed. N.M. Williams and
Eugene Hunn (Boulder, CO: Westview, ), – ;
and G.C. Wheeler, The Tribe and Intertribal Relations in
Australia (London: Murray, ).
Fabbro’s criteria, is one not absorbed in internal (that is, intracultural) collective
violence — one that exhibits relatively little interpersonal violence, provides no
special role for warriors, and has values and sanctions in place against violence as
a means of resolving disputes. These criteria demand far more than my own do,
but Fabbro does not confuse peacefulness with pacism, which is only one genre
of peaceability. Applying criteria similar to Fabbro’s, C.R. McCauley studied the
Semai and two other peaceful societies, the Buid of the Philippines and the South
American Xingu River conglomeration of tribes. 26 Various combinations of the
peaceable communities studied by Fabbro and McCauley are present as well in
the analyses of Gregor, Dentan, and Fry.27
From the combined analyses of this rather limited sample, some patterns
of interpretation emerge:
• All peaceful societies are said to be essentially small, localized, face- to-
face communities, with a very low degree of social stratication and with
relatively open, egalitarian decision making. According to Kelly, “Warfare
is typically rare to nonexistent within and between unsegmented foraging
societies inhabiting environments characterized by low resource density,
diversity, and predictably at densities below . persons per square mile.”28
• No peaceful people, it is argued, maintains exclusive control over an area
of land. Other groups may come and go, and in times of shortage an
incumbent band may share the food and water resources with another
less fortunate group. “Among certain Australian Aborigines, the Ona of
South America, or the Ju/’hoansi, resource use is granted to outsiders if
permission is sought ahead of time.”29 When there are conicts within
these groups, they tend to be dealt with by personnel changes, dissociation
or ssion being for them a procedure for conict resolution.
• Peaceful peoples apparently generate little or no economic surplus. The
material inequality of individuals is impossible, at least on a long- term
basis, because there is no surplus to appropriate. As a corollary, leadership
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COMMON KNOWLEDGE 4 5 0
. Michael Barkun, Crucible of the Millennium (Sy ra-
cuse, N Y: Syracuse University Press, ), . See also
Abler, “Comment on K nauft’s ‘Violence and Sociality in
Human Evolut ion’ ”; G.R. Pitman, “The Evolution of
Human Warfare,” Philosophy of the Social Sciences , no.
(): – ; Rodset h, “Comment on Knauft’s ‘Vio-
lence and Socialit y in Human Evolution’ ”; and R. G.
Sipes, “War, Sports, and A ggression: An Empirical Test
of Two Rival Theories,” American Anthropologist , no.
(): – .
. Bigelow, Dawn Warriors, .
. Keeley, War before Civilization, .
. See H.O. Forbes, “The Kubus of Sumatra,” Jour-
nal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (): – ;
Allan R. Holmberg, Nomads of the Long Bow: The Sirionó of
Eastern Bolivia (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institute,
); Shepard Krech, “Hare,” in North America, vol. of
Encyclopedia of World Cultures, ed. T.J. O’Leary and David
Levinson (Boston: G.K . Hall, ), – ; Brian Mor-
ris, “Tappers, Trappers, and the Hill Pandaram,” Anthro-
pos (): – ; Øyvind Sandbukt, “Tributary
Tradition and Relations of Afnity and Gender among
the Sumatran Kubu,” in Hunters and Gatherers, ed. Tim
Ingold, Da vid Riches, and James Woodbur n, vols. (Lon-
don: Berg, ), : – .
. Keeley, War before Civilization, .
in such societies remains on the level of personal authority rather than
coercive power.
• Peaceability and nonviolence among cenobites and nonstate peoples is
said to stem from (a psychology of ) defeat. These are the groups that,
as I mentioned earlier, Mühlmann terms Rückzugsvölker (Service calls
them “cultures of defeat”). In the view of Michael Barkun: “Defeat
tamed them... those that survived did so by learning virtues of political
accommodation or withdrawal from temporal affairs.”30 Or, as Robert
Bigelow puts it, “their ‘peacefulness’ was imposed on them by force.”3
Keeley likewise argues that “almost all the peaceful agricultural groups
could be characterized as defeated refugees, ethnic minorities long
administered by states, or tribes previously pacied by the police or by
paramilitary organs of colonial or national states.”32 Among the peaceful
Malapandaram, Birhor, and Paliyan peoples, communities can split apart
in response to an internal conict, and individuals may transfer into other
bands to avoid conict escalation. Another type of avoidance involves
movement of one entire group to avoid another group. The peaceful Amish,
Hutterites, and Mennonites, as well as some nomadic hunter- gatherers such
as the Chewong, Semai, Semang, Kubu, Siriono, Hill Pandaram, and Hare,
avoid strangers by changing locations. 33 “Islets of peaceability,” as Dentan
calls them, can arise as an adaptive response to defeat by neighboring
peoples but only, it appears, when there are relatively unpopulated areas
(referred to as “refuges” or “enclaves”) to which the defeated can ee. Most
of these groups have evaded intertribal relations altogether by eeing
conict and have been able to do so because they have lived in very sparsely
settled regions, isolated from intimate contact with others by oceans,
desert wastes, mountain barriers, unhealthful swamps, and dense forests.
“Unfortunately,” one tends to agree with Keeley, “preserving peace by ight
from conict has not been a strategic option available to most societies.”34
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van der Dennen • Peace by Other Means: Par t 1 451
. McCauley, “Conference O verv iew,” .
. Howell and Willis, Societies at Peace, .
. Bonta, “Conict Resolution among Peacef ul Societ-
ies,” .
. LeBlanc and Register, Constant Battles, –.
. P.M. Gardner, “Symmet ric Respect and Memorate
Knowledge: The Str ucture and E cology of Indiv idualist ic
Cu lt ure ,” Southwestern Journal of Anthropology ( ):
– .
• Peaceable refugees tend to be insular, isolationist, and xenophobic. Lacking
the oppositional frontier processes that create peaceable refugees, cenobites
require mechanisms of their own to maintain the boundaries between their
people and the “others” by means of physical isolation. Peaceable peoples
like the Semai contrast themselves with the peoples they fear, thus creating
a counterculture. Outsiders are considered bloody, violent, dangerous,
ugly, evil, or animal-like — in any case, less than human. Children are
warned against outsiders and, especially, against behaving like outsiders.
Conceivably, as McCauley puts it, “hating violence requires violent people
to hat e.”35
• Many of these peaceful societies develop what Gregor calls an “antiviolent”
(not simply nonviolent) value system — that is, they develop cultural norms
and ideologies that discourage both intra- and intergroup violence (an
important component of which seems to be Gelassenheit, at least among
cenobites). Nonviolence is supported by stigmatizing all quarrels, boasting,
stinginess, anger, and violence and by according prestige to generosity,
gentleness, and conict avoidance. Such value systems are said to be
supported by supernatural beliefs. Signe Howell and Roy Willis, for
instance, suggest that peacefulness is “cosmologically constructed and
morally embedded in a cosmological universe of meaning.”36 This point
is emphasized as well by Bonta, who concludes that a “nonviolent belief
system is the single most important variable for keeping the peace.”37 A fair
number of nomadic hunter- gatherer societies are said to have nonviolent
values of this type. Steven LeBlanc and Katherine Register report, for
instance, that “the Sanpoil, at the geographic center of the [Columbia]
Plateau, emphasize no other value in life more than pacism.... Warfare is
virtually unknown to them and has been since time immemorial. No living
man can recount an instance of conict even from traditional history.”38
Fry’s inventory of such peoples includes the Birhor and Nayaka (Naikens)
of India, certain Canadian Inuit groups, the Greenland Inuit and Polar
Eskimos, the Jahai of Malaysia, the Mbuti of Africa, the Vedda of Sri
Lanka, and the Saulteaux of North America. Philippa Gardner lists, in
addition, the Paliyan, Kadar, Malapandaram, Semang, Yanadi, Siriono, and
Ju/’hoansi [!Kung].39
• The cross- cultural ndings of James Prescott support his thesis that
deprivation of bodily pleasure throughout life — but particularly during the
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COMMON KNOWLEDGE 4 5 2
. J.W. Prescott, “Body Pleasure and the Origins of
Violence,” Bulletin of Atomic Scientists , no. (Novem-
ber ): – .
. See , for example, Geof frey Gorer, Himalayan Village:
An Account of the Lepchas of Sikkim (London: M. Joseph,
); Bet ty Glad, ed., Psychological Dimensions of War
(Newbury Park, CA: Sage, ).
. E rich Fromm, The Anat omy of Human Des tructive ness
(New York: Fawcett Crest, ).
. Sponsel, “Natural H istor y of Peace,” . See also
D.B. Adams, “W hy There A re So Few Women War-
ri or s,” Behavior Science Research , no. (): – ;
V.C. Burbank, “Female Aggression in Cross- cultural
Perspective,” Behavior Science Research , nos. – ():
– ; W.T. Divale and Marvin Harris, “Population,
Warfare, and the Male Supremacist Complex,” American
Anthropologist (): – ; R.B. Lee, “Politics, Sex-
ual and Non- sexual, in an Egalitarian Society,” in Politics
and His tory in Band Societies, ed. E.B. Leaco ck and Richard
Lee (London: Cambridge University Press, ), – ;
Margarete Mitscherlich, The Peaceable Sex: On Aggres-
sion in Women and Men (New York: Fromm, ); Lizzi
Rosenberger, “Women’s Role in A ggression,” in Psycho-
logical Bases of War, ed. H.Z. Winnik, Rafael Moses, and
Mortimer Ostow ( New York: Quadrangle, ), – ;
C.M. Turnbull, “The Ritualization of Potential Conict
between the Sexe s among the Mbuti,” in Leacock a nd Lee,
Politics and History in Band Societies, – ; M.K. Whyte,
The Status of Women in Pre- industrial Societies (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, ).
formative years of infancy, childhood, and adolescence — correlates very
closely with the amount of warfare and interpersonal violence found in any
so ciet y.4 0 It has been noted, time and again, that peaceable communities
manifest an enormous gusto for concrete physical pleasure — eating,
drinking, sex, laughter — and generally make little distinction between the
ideal characters of men and women. These peoples seem, in particular,
to lack the ideal of the brave, aggressive male.4 Erich Fromm, having
analyzed thirty nonstate cultures, delineated three types of social system:
destructive, nondestructive- aggressive, and life- afrmative.42 In the last
type (consisting of eight societies: Aranda, Arapesh, Bathonga, Mbutu,
Polar Eskimo, Semang, Toda, and Zuñi), the main emphasis of ideals,
customs, and institutions is on the preservation and growth of life in all
its forms. There is a minimum of hostility, violence, or cruelty, no harsh
punishments, and hardly any crime — and the institution of war is absent
or plays an exceedingly small role. Children are treated with kindness;
women are generally considered equal to men, or at least are not exploited
or humiliated; and there is a generally permissive and afrmative attitude
toward sex.
• The gender equality characteristic of many egalitarian band- level
societies is not a necessary correlate of peacefulness among enclaved
peoples; however, as Sponsel remarks, “the idea that there is a positive
correlation between gender equality and nonviolence/peace is sustained
by ethnographic cases like the Semai, Chewong, Buid, and Piaroa, among
ot hers.”43 Those “others” include, for instance, the Canadian Inuit,
Copper Eskimo, Ju/wasi, !Kung, Mbuti, and Siriono.
• Differences in child- rearing practices between the so- called refugee
and cenobite societies are open to a number of explanations. Cenobites
generally are more authoritarian with children than are enclaved refugees
like the Semai; indeed, the former tend to approve the spanking and
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van der Dennen • Peace by Other Means: Par t 1 453
. See David Levinson and M.J. Malone, To ward
Explaining Human Culture: A Critique of the Findings
of Worldwide Cross- cultural Research (New Haven, C T:
HRAF Press, ); M.H. Ross, “Social Structure, Psy-
chocultural Dispositions, and Violent Conict: Exten-
sions from a Cross- cultural Study,” in Silverberg and
Gr ay, Aggression and Peacefulness, – .
. See Seyom Brown, The Causes and Prevention of War,
nd ed. (New York: St. Martin’s Press, ).
. Colson, Tradition and Contract, .
. See D.J. Black, “The Elementary Forms of Conict
Management,” in New Directions in the Study of Justice,
Law, and Social Control, ed. School of Just ice Studies (New
York: Plenum, ), and The Social Structure of Right and
Wrong (San Diego, CA: Academic Press, ); B.D.
Bonta, “Cooperation and Compet ition in Peaceful Soci-
et ies ,” Psychology Bulletin , no. (): – ; David
Levinson, ed., Aggression and Conflict: A Cross- cultural
Encyclopedia (Santa Barbara, C A: ABC- CLIO, ); J.H.
De Rivera, Handbook on Building Cultures of Peace ( New
York: Springer, ); Simon Roberts, Order and Dispute:
An Introduction to Legal Anthropology (Harmondsworth,
UK: Penguin, ); and M.H. Ross, The Culture of Con-
ict: Interpretations, Interests, and Disputing in Comparative
Perspective ( New Haven, CT: Yale Universit y Press, ).
whipping of children as corporal punishments of last resort. Enculturating
nonaggression or nonviolent socialization may be a relatively minor factor in
the development of peaceability, though some cross- cultural studies nd a
positive correlation between harsh socialization practices and bellicosity.44
• Peaceable societies do not appear to operate on the premise that their
members are by nature nonviolent. Even the most peaceful resort to forms
of social (including parental) conditioning and indoctrination in an effort
to constrain and deect the tendency toward aggression. Conditioning is
generally accompanied by inducements to discourage violence, along with
instruction in the art and virtues of conict resolution. Tribal cosmology,
rituals, legends, religious and ethical concepts and precepts, all reinforce
these social norms, and social ostracism is typically inicted on individuals
who violate them.45 In these enclaved societies, social control rests on the
fear of violence: members share a conscious sense that quarrels and feuds
may be dangerous to each of them personally. Elizabeth Colson reports
that while, in such communities, the anthropologist may see “people
apparently behaving with kindness, generosity, and forbearance, avoiding
disputes and sharing resources, tolerant of each other’s foibles,” they
usually do so out of fear. Anthropologists, she writes, “have a liking for
paradoxes and it should therefore be no surprise to us if some people live in
what appears to be a Rousseauian paradise because they take a Hobbesian
view of their situation: they walk softly because they believe it necessary
not to offend others whom they regard as dangerous.”46
• Finally, societies classied as peaceable are characterized by negotiation,
mediation, arbitration, adjudication, and conventionalized disputes; by
the channeling of conict into ritual (song contests, buffeting contests,
head- butting bouts, and arm wrestling); by informal processes of
shaming, shunning, ridicule, and punitive gossip; by the absence of formal
punishment, sometimes accompanied by belief in supernatural agencies as
punishers; by psychocultural practices that build security and mutual trust;
and by effective training in self- restraint.47
Common Knowledge
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COMMON KNOWLEDGE 4 5 4
. Matthew Melko, Fifty-Two Peaceful Societies
(Oakv ille, Ontario: CPRI Press, ).
. See especially S. M. Younger, “Conditions and
Mechanisms for Peace in Precontact Polynesia,” Current
Anthropology , no. (): – .
. Ross, “Political Decision- Making and Conict.”
The lists of peaceful societies cited thus far have been synchronic in nature,
but a diachronic list is also possible. Matthew Melko’s book Fif ty-Two Peacef ul
Societies concerns not peoples or cultures (in the ethnological sense) but particular
historical periods of particular civilizations (such as the Han and T’ang dynasties
in China) that passed without major wars.48 Melko’s ndings are interesting for
purposes of comparison with those of synchronic studies:
• No one form of government, no one economic system, no one structure
of society, and no one system of education seems (to Melko) essential to
peace. (Other scholars, including myself, have concluded otherwise — that
sociopolitical complexity and warfare tend to go hand in hand.)
• Moderately powerful states have had the advantage over great powers in
maintaining peace. The former are strong enough to resist attack but not
strong enough to harbor ambitions leading to overextension. Small powers
that have been successful in maintaining peace have refrained, according
to Melko, from interfering in the affairs of their neighbors. Great powers
seem to succeed in attaining peace only if they conquer all other great
powers within range.
• Peace is afrmed to be the normal condition of societies. When war does
occur, most people in the societies involved are not engaged in ghting, at
least not most of the time. Most people in most places at most periods of
history, Melko concludes, have not sustained injury or died as the result of
a war.
This and the other sets of generalizations I have recounted all require modi-
cation to take into account a variety of complexities otherwise unnoted. Fry
argues that external peace and internal harmony go together in most societies
that may be called peaceful, and Stephen Younger has found a positive correlation
between interpersonal violence and warfare in precontact Polynesian societies.49
M. Howard Ross has even developed an internal- conict scale that claims to
correlate levels of internal and external violence.50 Overall, however, it appears
from the evidence I have reviewed here that many societies have a high degree of
interpersonal harmony while being quite warlike intersocietally, and vice versa.
In more theoretical terms, I think we can say that internal and external conict
dimensions may vary independently.
Of more general and practical interest are ethnographic or historical
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van der Dennen • Peace by Other Means: Par t 1 455
. See especial ly Thomas Gregor and C .A. Robarchek,
“Two Paths to Peace: Semai a nd Mehinak u Nonviolence,”
in Gregor, Natural History of Peace, – .
. Helbling, “War and Peace in Societies without Cen-
tral Power,” . The internal reference is to Gregor and
Robarchek, “Two Paths to Peace.”
instances in which peace is or was maintained while contact between differ-
ent cultural and social groups has been close and sustained. Gregor gives as an
example the multitribal society of the Upper Xingu Basin in Brazil, compris-
ing some twelve hundred people of four different language groups living in ten
politically independent villages: Auétí, Bacaïri, Camayura (Kamayura, Kamaiy-
ura), Custenau, Kalapalo, Kuikuru, Matipú, Mehinacu (Mehinaku), Nahukwa
(Nafukhuá), Trumai, Waura (Wauja), and Yawalapití (Yaulipití).5 Aside from
rare intervillage homicides and some feuds, no planned violence (wars or raids)
has occurred between any of these villages for more than a century. The Xin-
guanos case appears to demonstrate that interethnic harmony and intercultural
appreciation are not preconditions for peace. A workable peace can be forged
and maintained between highly ethnocentric, mutually suspicious, and factious
groups. What interethnic peace appears to require is a minimal and practical
tolerance by the parties concerned for harmless differences between them: one’s
own group is understood, in other words, to live the right way but is content to
let others live in their own irrational, erroneous way. It is probable that the Xin-
guanos are all instances of a particular species of peaceable society that we have
previously encountered: defeated refugees. For this reason alone, Jürg Helbling
rejects their classication as peaceful societies: “The alleged peacefulness of the
Xinguanos, thus, turns out to be an optical illusion: they do not form a peaceful
tribal society, as Gregor and Robarchek maintained, but a permanent alliance
between local groups of different ethnic origins in a sanctuary.”52
Peacemaking: Strategies and Practices
It may be useful at this point to offer a typology of peace — a simplication of the
issues under discussion — before proceeding further. Below, for convenience, I
distinguish between two types of peace, dissociative and associative.
Dissociative (or Negative) Peace
Peace by isolation, accomplished as a result of
() geographical distance, insurmountable barriers, or the development of
large terrae nullius,
() absence of technical means of telecommunication, and
() conscious insulation, “splendid isolation,” and policies against intervention
in others’ affairs.
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Peace by annihilation.
Peace by ight and migration.
Peace by defeat or stalemate.
Peace by incorporation or subjugation (debellatio), as follows:
() conquest and annexation of the territory of the vanquished, and/or
() subjugation of the population, resulting in (a) slavery, (b) vassalage, (c) the
payment of tribute, (d) colonization, (e) assimilation, or (f ) reduction to the
status of a satellite group.
Peace as a result of war weariness.
Peace by means of deterrence.
Associative (or Positive) Peace
Peace through union, accomplished by means of (1) fusion, (2) alliance, or (3) federation
(or confederation).
Peace by convention — that is, by means of
() armistices, truces, and ceaseres, or
() peace treaties and covenants, enforced by (a) the intervention of invisible
powers (magical, religious); (b) the taking of hostages; (c) the publication of
cautions and guarantees; or (d) military occupation or reprisals.
Institutions for safeguarding peace:
() sanctuaries, asylums, and refuges,
() neutr a l it y,
() forms of treuga Dei.
Institutions and conventions tending to counteract or mitigate war:
() connubium: exogamy and intermarriage,
() commercium: trade,
() arbitration and mediation by religious authorities or third parties,
() diplomacy via messengers and envoys,
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van der Dennen • Peace by Other Means: Par t 1 457
. See, for example, Fry, Human Potential for Peace,
and “Life without War”; Johan Galtung, “Institut ion-
alized Conf lict Resolution: A Theoretical Paradigm,”
Journal of Peace Research , no. (): – ; Galtung,
“Peace,” in International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences,
: – ; John Gi l is se n, Essai d’une histoire comparative
de l’organisation de la paix (Brussels: Editions de la librairie
encyclopédique, ); Gregor, “Uneasy Peace”; Holsti,
“Relation of War to t he Origin of the State”; Mühlma nn,
Krieg und Frieden; Numelin, Beginnings of Diplomacy;
Sponsel, “Natural History of Peace; Tur ney- High, Prim-
it ive War; Joh an M.G. van der Dennen, T he Origin of War:
The Evolution of a Male-Coalitional Reproductive Strategy
(Groningen: Orig in Press, ); and Wright, Study of
War.
. See D.L. Oliver, Oceania: The Native Cultures of Aus-
tralia and the Pacic Islands, vols. (Honolulu: University
of Hawaii Press, ).
() intercommunity rites and feasts (such as corroboree),
() hospitality,
() war substitutes (such as potlatch),
() personal unions (blood- brotherhood, pseudokinship, friendship),
() establishing permanent international jurisdictions,
() requiring formal declarations of war,
() xing in advance the time and place of battle,
() requiring postbattle compensation, indemnication, and reparation.
Implementing ius in bello, including laws concerning
() the inviolability of certain persons (women, children, civilians, arbitrators,
holy men);
() the inviolability of certain places: refuges, or neutral areas;
() the inviolability of certain (taboo) times;
() the use of special, sublethal weapons (for example, among California tribes,
the use of arrows without points or shafts), or special tactics (for example,
in Plains Indian warfare, the custom of counting coup);
() expiatory combat, judicial duels, and sham battles;
() chivalry and courtesy in battle.
Other typologies of peace and anatomies of peacemaking are of course available
for consultation and comparison.53
Behind my distinction between dissociative and associative (or negative
and positive) peace is the axiom that war presupposes contact between political
entities. When these entities live apart, without any sort of contact, problems of
war and peace are nonexistent between them. Negative or dissociative peace in
its pure form is based on keeping relationships between peoples to a minimum.
Other classic forms of this negative type are peace by deterrence, by annihilation
(the “peace of the graveyard”), by incorporation or subjugation, and by defeat or
stalemate; peace in response to war- weariness or exhaustion is also a negative
type.54 Positive or associative peace depends, instead, on the exchange of goods,
services, and individuals. One of the effects of exchange is the development of
loyalties that are divided by both territory and bonds of interest (such as kinship
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COMMON KNOWLEDGE 4 5 8
. For examples, see R.B. Ekvall, “Peace and War
among the Tibetan Nomads,” American Anthropologist
(): – , and Jacques Lizot, “Words in the Night:
The Ceremonial Dialogue, One Expression of Peace-
ful Relationships among the Yanomami,” in Sponsel and
Gregor, Anthropology of Peace and Nonviolence, – .
. Keeley, War before Civilization, – .
or economic bonds). These competing allegiances attract a natural constituency
in favor of maintaining peaceful relations. Exchange may lead, moreover, to the
evolution of a common culture. Parallel institutions in different societies may
generate a consensus of values and stimulate interdependence.
Negotiations and Settlement Rituals
Diplomacy among tribal peoples can be every bit as formalized as that among
nation- states today.55 Most of the strategies, institutions, customs, and conven-
tions of positive peace are well known in the contemporary repertoire of nation-
state peacekeeping. Instead of examining those, I detail here — as a kind of pref-
ace to this Common Knowledge symposium — some less self- evident strategies and
conventions tending to mitigate war among nonstate, tribal peoples. European
travelers have been evidently less interested in the procedure by which peace was
and is restored than in the warfare among such peoples; in any case, travelers
from advanced societies have very seldom given details about the mechanisms
and rituals of peacemaking.
Lawrence Keeley supplies an overview of what is known:
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 over-
ture 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 alienation of one party is as difcult and
delicate a task as any arranged peace between contending nation- states.
Usually, peace negotiations are not even considered unless the ghting
has reached an impasse and losses are approximately equal for both con-
tenders. 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. Or one group may feel strong
enough to push the ghting 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 difcult to
obtain. Any “hawks” or “hotheads” dissenting from the consensus for
peace among the warriors can easily sabotage the negotiations simply
by committing further violence. Even with such a consensus, reaching
a nal settlement can be a laborious and precarious endeavor.56
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van der Dennen • Peace by Other Means: Par t 1 459
. Pierre Barrère, Nouvelle relation de la France équinoxi-
ale... (Paris: Piget, ), –.
. Alfred Métraux, “Warfare, Cannibalism, and
Human Trophies,” in Steward, Handbook of South Ameri-
can Indians, : – .
. Esteban L. Bridges, “Burying the Hatchet,” Man ,
no. (): – .
. See Elrand Nordenskiöld, Indianerleben im Gran
Chaco (Südamerika) (Leipzig: Brockhaus, ).
. Guntar Landtmann, The Kiwai Papuans of British
New Guinea: A Nature- Born Instance of Rousseau’s Ideal
Community (London: Macmillan, ).
Ethnologists throughout the world have long studied cases of tribal war
negotiations and settlements. In , Pierre Barrère reported that, among the
Guiana Carib, an emissary would be sent to notify the enemy of their desire
for peace: “The two nations then ranged themselves in order of battle, just as if
they wanted to ght. They ung abuse and reproaches at each other for all the
outrages committed. Finally, they threw their arms to the ground and then pro-
ceeded to the drinking hall where they feasted all together for several days.”57
J.G. Frazer’s The Golden Bough of offers numerous examples of covenants
made by the sacrice of a slave or an animal. Among the Araucanians of southern
Chile, the party that wished to sue for peace sent an armed herald, carrying a
branch of canelo, to the victors. The chiefs of the two parties then met at a desig-
nated place, and each sacriced a llama. The hearts were cut into pieces, the blood
was sprinkled on the canelo branch, and bits of the hearts were exchanged by the
opponents. The chiefs also exchanged the blood- smeared canelo branches and
often put all of their commanding staves together in a bundle with them. These
symbolic acts were followed by long speeches, in which peace terms were dis-
cussed and assurances of goodwill given. In some cases, the warriors buried their
toquis, arrows, and war instruments in a hole, over which they planted a canelo
tree.58 In Patagonia, when two Ona bands wished to end hostilities, each warrior
handed one of his opponents ve blunt arrows and subsequently walked toward
him, exposing himself to being shot, while also trying to dodge the arrows. After
the opponents reciprocated, the bands would fraternize for some days.59 The
Jivaro of northern Peru and eastern Ecuador would hold a peace ceremony that
consisted in burying a spear, which was supposed to carry with it the animosity of
the feud. Peace was reestablished among the Pilcomayo River Indians when every
family that had lost a member received wergeld in the form of sheep, horses, and
other gifts. Sometimes kidnapped children were exchanged.60
In Oceania, many Papuans considered peacemaking women’s work. If peace
was desired, a couple of men went with their wives to the hostile village. The
presence of the women indicated the end sought, so the rights of embassy were
respected. The suit for peace was nearly always accepted, and the men there-
upon broke each other’s beheading knives and exchanged arm guards. At night,
the hosts had sexual relations with their guests’ women and, according to Gun-
tar Landtmann, writing in , this was the true object of the visit.6 In a few
Common Knowledge
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COMMON KNOWLEDGE 460
. See W.G. Ivens, Melanesians of the Southeast Solomon
Islands (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, ).
. See R.A. Rappaport, Pigs for the Ancestors: Ritual in
the Ecology of a New Guinea People (New Haven, CT: Yale
Universit y Press, ); Koch, Anthropology of Warfare;
A.J. Strat hern, The Rope of Moka: Big- Men and Ceremonial
Exchange in Mount Hagen, New Guinea (New York: Cam-
bridge University Press, ); G.F. Vicedom and Her-
bert Tischner, Die Mbowamb: Die Kultur der Hagenberg-
Stämme in östlichen Zentral- Neuguinea, vols. (Hamburg:
Friederichsen and De Gr uyter, ).
. See Hans Sloane, A Voyage to the Isl ands Madera, Bar-
bados, Nieves, St. Christopher’s and Jamaica... with Some
Relation Concerning the Neighbouring Continent, and Islands
of America, vols. (London, – ).
days, the erstwhile hosts returned the visit and brought some of their wives for
their former foes to enjoy. The more hierarchical Solomon Islanders were not
quite so informal about peacemaking as the Papuans, but the end and the means
were largely the same. When one side had had enough war, the enemy would
be informed and asked for one of their chiey daughters as a bride for one of
their own chiefs. If all went well, the ghting ceased, and the side that sued for
peace would bring a large bride price for the young woman.62 Elaborate and
complex rituals of peacemaking have been more recently described for a number
of highly warlike New Guinea peoples, including the Tsembaga Maring, Jalé,
and Mount Hagen tribes.63 Because the Polynesian Mangaian regarded war and
peace as quite distinct states of affairs (or denite social statuses, or domains of
reality), rites of passage were required to make the shift from the one to the other:
peace had to be formally announced by peace drums and by a human sacrice to
the Mangaian war god. Of course, rituals of separation between war and peace
are not always so drastic. In various cultures, peace can be ratied through the
exchange of gifts, smoking the peace pipe or calumet, and, as we have seen, the
breaking of spears, planting of trees, and burial of the hatchet.
Not infrequently, third- party mediation is required in negotiating settle-
ments. The following example, drawn from Sir Hans Sloane’s account of his
travels in the Caribbean region, is typical of how third- party mediation works in
nonstate societies. On March , , a large Aricoure war party, from the Cas-
sipour River region of Brazil, stopped at a Yao village on the Oyapock, en route
to attack Carib settlements at Cayenne. The Yao intervened, as they were friends
of both parties. They secured a peace between the Caribs and the Aricoures,
upon which the Yaos entertained them for eight days, since peace was completely
new to both.64 This type of intervention we could perhaps call entrepreneur-
ial. Another type might be the role as ready mediators taken on, for instance,
by the headmen and chiefs of villages and bands among the Columbia Plateau
tribes. These elders disapproved of the petty feuds and occasional small- scale
raids conducted by fellow tribesmen and would go to great lengths to maintain
peace, sometimes risking their lives in negotiations with hostile outsiders. Feuds
between kin groups were known but not common, and chiefs served as arbiters
of such disputes as well, usually by arranging payments of blood money. The
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461
. For more on third- part y mediat ion in nonstate soci-
eties, see P.H. Gulliver, Disputes and Negotiations: A C ross-
cultural Perspective (New York: Academic Press, ), and
C.J. Greenhou se, “Mediation: A Comparat ive Approach,”
Man , no. (): – .
. See, for example, Wheeler, Tribe and Intertribal
Relations in Australia; Maximilian K rieger, Neu- Guinea
(Berlin: A. Schall, ); R.W. Williamson, The Mafulu:
Mountain People of British New Guinea (London: Macmil-
lan, ); Thomas Williams and James Calvert, Fiji and
the Fijians, vols. ( London: Heylin, ); B.H. Thom-
son, The Fijians: A Study of the Decay of Custom (London:
Heinemann, ); William Ellis, Polynesian Researches,
during a Residence of Nearly Eight Years in the Society and
Sandwich Islands (London: Fisher, Son , and Jackson, ),
and Narrative of a Tour through Hawaii, or Ownyhee (Lon-
don: Fisher, Son, a nd Jackson, ); Wi lliam Mar iner, An
Account of the Natives of the Tonga Islands in the South Pacic
Ocean, vols. ( London: Murray, ); Paul Sarasin and
Fritz Sarasin, Reisen in Celebes, vols. (W iesbaden: C . W.
Kreidel, ); W.H. Furness, “The Ethnog raphy of
the Nagas of Eastern Assam,” Journal of the Anthropologi-
cal Institute (): – ; L.R. Stewart, “Notes on
Northern Cachar,” Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal
(): – ; T.H. Lewin, The Hill Tracts of Chittagong
(Calcutta: Beng al Printing Company, ); E.T. Dalton,
Descriptive Ethnology of Bengal (Calcutta: Her Majesty’s
Publishers, ); T.C. Hodson, “The ‘Genna’ amongst
the Tribes of A ssam,” Journal o f the Anthropologica l Institute
(): – ; Henry Hark ness, A Descr iption of a Sin-
gular A boriginal Race Inhabiti ng the Summit of the Neilgher ry
Hills (London: W.H. Allen, ); J.H. Speke, Journal of
the Discovery of the Source of the Nile, vols. (New York:
Harper, ); H.H. Johnston, The Uganda Protectorate,
vols. (London: Hutchinson, ); Moritz Merker, Die
Masai: Ethnographische Monographie eines östafrikanischen
Semitenvolkes (Berlin: D. Rei mer, ); Ley cester Aylmer,
“The Country between the Juba River and Lake Rudolf,”
Journal of the Royal Geographical Societ y of London ():
– ; C.W. Hobley, “The K avirondo,” Geography Jour-
nal , no. (): – ; Hinrich Lichtenstein, Trav -
els in Southern Africa in the Years 1803 – 1806, vols. (Lon-
don: Truebner, – ); E.A. Casalis, The Basutos, or
23 Years in South Africa (London: J. Nisbet, ); Emil
Torday and T.A . Joyce, “Notes on the Ethnography of
the Ba- Mbala,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Insti-
tute (): – , and “The Et hnography of the Ba-
Yaka/The Ethnography of the Ba- Huana,” Journal of the
Royal Anthropological Institute (): – , – ;
Charles Partridge, Cross River Natives (London: Hutchin-
son, ); Peter Jones, His tory of the Ojebway Indian s (Lon-
don: A.W. Bennett, ); Morgan, League of the Ho- de-
no- sau- nee or Iroquois; J.D. Hunter, Memoirs of a Captivity
among the Indians of North America ( New York: Longman,
); J.O. Dorsey, “Omaha Sociology,” Annual Report of
the Bureau of American Ethnology (): – , and
“An Account of the War Customs of the Osages, Given
by Red Corn ( Hapa Oulse) of the Tsiou Peace- mak ing
Ge ns,” American Naturalist (): – ; Fletcher and
LaFlesche, “Omaha Tribe”; James Mooney, “The Calen-
dar History of t he Kiowa Indians,” 17th Annual Report of
the Bureau of American Ethnology (): – ; H. H.
Bancroft, vol. of Wild Tribes of The Native Races of the
Paci c States of North A merica (New York: Appleton, );
A.C. Fletche r, The Hako , a Pawnee Ceremony, nd Annual
Report ( Washington, DC: Bu reau of American Ethnol-
ogy, ); and F.S. Clav igero, The History of Mexico,
vols., trans. Charles Cullen (London: Robinson, ).
rudiments of a legal mechanism, in other words, were present in these societies.65
When no third party existed to adjudicate disputes over marriage arrangements,
personal injuries, trade, territory, and other economic concerns, or when the
mediators who did exist could not enforce their decisions on the recalcitrant,
disputants resorted regularly to violent self- help.
There is a considerable ethnographic literature on ceremonial peacemak-
ing and on the conclusion of peace treaties — in Oceania, among the Australian
aborigines and the Maori, as well as various tribes of New Guinea, Fiji, Tahiti,
Tonga, Hawaii, Celebes, and Borneo; in South Asia, among the Kuki, the Garo
of Bengal, and the Assam and Neilgherry Hills tribes; in Africa, among the
Unyamwesi, the tribes of Uganda, the Masai, Boran, Sakuju, Gubbra, Ajuran and
Gurreh, the Kavirondo and neighboring groups, the Kars, Basuto, BaMbala
and BaYaka, and the Cross River Negroes; and, in America, among the Ojib-
way, Iroquois, Kansas, Kickapoo, Osage, Omaha, Kiowa and Comanche, Haida,
Nootka, Nahua, and Pawnee Indians, as well as the ancient Mexicans.66
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COMMON KNOWLEDGE 4 6 2
. Roberts, Order and Dispute, . For “Rappaport’s
Account of t he Maring People,” see Roy A. Rappaport,
“Ritual Regulation of Environmental Relations among a
New Guinea People,” Ethnology (): – .
Ritual Battle
Even when wars cannot be ended, the pain and cost of warfare can be mitigated
by various kinds of restriction and ritual observance. Simon Roberts summarizes
the consensus among ethnographers about the conduct and meaning of ritualized
battle:
In disputes involving individuals from different groups or villages
private violence can easily escalate into warfare bet ween groups. The
majority of accounts describe highly formalized encounters in which
ghting of a limited character takes place within a framework of mutu-
ally accepted conventions. The kinds of restriction with which ghting
may be hedged about are well illustrated in [Roy] Rappaport’s account
of the Maring people of New Guinea. These Maring encounters are
highly formalized set- piece battles, accompanied by elaborate ritual off
the battleeld. Fighting takes place in two distinct stages. The rst, the
“nothing ght,” is preceded by ritual preparations designed to secure
the protection of the ancestors and other supernatural agencies. Then
the two sides line up opposite each other within bow- shot behind large
shields and re is exchanged with arrows and throwing spears. These
static encounters often continue over a number of days, with the respec-
tive combatants retiring at nightfall. Because both sides keep their dis-
tance and light weapons are used, serious injuries or fatalities are seldom
sustained during the “nothing ght.” When the “nothing ght” takes
place between two segments occupying a single territory, it may be the
full extent to which hostilities go. Tempers have an opportunity to cool
during set- piece exchange, less enthusiastic allies may damp down the
martial ardor of the principals, or sufcient wounds may be inicted by
the side issuing the challenge to enable them to feel that the wrong has
been redressed. Under such circumstances some kind of agreement may
be reached in the course of shouted exchanges between the combat-
ants themselves. A lternatively non- aligned neutrals may prevail on the
combatants to desist. Rappaport describes occasions on which neutrals
brought the ghting to an end by stoning the combatants or physically
interspersing themselves bet ween the battle lines.67
If hostilities do not cease with the “nothing ght,” then a “true ght” follows. But
even in the “true ght,” a static battle might continue for weeks on end without
decisive advantage to either side. Over this period, intermissions are taken by
agreement, when essential gardening operations or unfavorable climatic condi-
tions demand them. There is a further break whenever a fatality is inicted, so
that the necessary ritual procedures can be undertaken. According to Roberts,
“controls which have the effect of avoiding serious disruption of the business of
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van der Dennen • Peace by Other Means: Par t 1 463
. Roberts, Order and Dispute, . See also R. M.
Berndt, Excess and Restraint: Social Control among a New
Guinea Mountain People (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, ).
. Klaus-Friedrich Koch, War and Peace in Jalémó: The
Management of Conflict in Highland New Guinea (Cam-
bridge, M A: Harvard University Press, ), .
. M.J. Meggitt, Blood Is Their Argument: Warfare
among the Mae- Enga Tribesmen (Palo Alto, C A: Mayeld,
), .
making a living [in settled communities of horticulturalists] are widely reported.
For example, the ghting may be called off once one or two people have been
killed on either side; or periodic truces may be called. Often such conventions
are explicitly related to the exigencies of the harvest.”68 Klaus- Friedrich Koch,
writing about the Jalé people of Highland New Guinea, claims that “an indenite
extension of a harvesting recess... constitutes a kind of armistice. This truce is
a rather perilous affair, because now small bands of men from the men’s house
of a victim whose death has not been revenged on the battleeld make occa-
sional clandestine expeditions across the demarcation line in search of a chance
to ambush an enemy.”69
The Mae Enga “great ghts,” whose prevailing spirit was like that of a
sporting event (“pleasantly spiced with danger, a day of splendid fun”), were the
culmination of numerous interclan grievances that might otherwise have ended
in lethal warfare.70 They were terminated by ceremonial peacemaking, accom-
panied by the exchange of valuables. By deliberately widening, formalizing, and
blunting conicts, they served somewhat to contain and mitigate intergroup hos-
tility. Roy Rappaport suggests that these martial set pieces typically continue
until both sides feel there has been sufcient killing; a truce is then called. More
rarely, the ghting is ended with a rout and dispersal of one side. This latter
generally occurs where allies desert, leaving one side with an obvious numerical
advantage that encourages them to break away from the set piece and overrun
the enemy. With the calling of a truce, a sustained period of peace is, in these
cultures, generally assured.
A widespread characteristic of New Guinea Highlands warfare was the
existence of institutionalized means for halting escalation: by mutual exchanges
of compensation, by spirit- sanctioned truces, or simply by mutually respected
withdrawal from battle. Even in the event that there were no “doves” in Highland
societies, there were some people discerning enough to recognize the mutual
destructiveness of further ghting, particularly if, as often happened, they had
kinfolk in both camps and thus had crosscutting loyalty conicts as well. In the
Choiseul Islands, according to Harold Schefer, writing in , the general pref-
erence was “to settle disputes peacefully when possible.... It was better to settle
things peacefully with nes, exchanges of ziku or kesa [valuables], ‘because then
no one was killed’.” Despite these sentiments, the obligations of blood feud led to
continuous conict. When war ensued, however, its very organization entailed
its resolution: “The organization of warfare involved expansion of the conict
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. Schefer, Choiseul Island Social Structure, – .
. See B.G. Trigger, “Maintain ing Economic Eq uality
in Opposition to Complexity: An Iroquoian Case Study,”
in The Evolution of Political Systems: Sociopolitics of Small-
Scale Sedentary Societies, ed. Steadman Upham (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, ), – .
. See Keeley, War before Civilization, .
. See Alome Kyakas and Polly Wiessner, From Inside
the Women’s House: Enga Women’s Lives an d Traditions (Bris-
bane: Robert Brown, ), and Wiessner, Tumu, Tumu,
and Pupu, “Warfare in Enga Province.”
. A.R. R adcliffe- Brow n, The Andaman Islanders, nd
ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), .
through a multiplication of the number of parties; and as the number of parties
increased, so did the likelihood of conicts of allegiance, and in these resided the
possibility of peace.”7
Kinship Constraints on Warfare
War is largely an affair of young men, much as peacemaking — as I have already
had cause to mention — is sometimes regarded as women’s work. Among the Iro-
quois, young men were thought to be unreliable witnesses and untrustworthy
bearers of messages between communities. Given that young men acquired pres-
tige by performing deeds of valor, their contributions to intertribal communica-
tion were suspect. Older Iroquois men tended to be more interested in trade and
in friendly relations with other tribes and were also perhaps disinclined to hurry
the process by which younger men could win prestige and challenge their author-
ity. Hence, political ofces were held by older men, the younger ones excluded
from decision making to a considerable degree.72 Young men, however, could
readily incite or commit acts of violence that would lead to war.
In many tribal societies, women above all have detested war, though, as
Keeley remarks, “feminine antipathy toward war [has been] neither universal nor
eternal.”73 Enga women generally deplored warfare but had little say in decisions
about going to war. Before ghting escalated, some women would follow the
line of warriors with big net bags to harvest or destroy the enemy’s crops. When
wars began to threaten their homes, Enga women would retreat with their chil-
dren, household possessions, and pigs to live with relatives in other clans where
they were immune to violence. If their own natal clan was the enemy clan, they
often served as important emissaries in the early stages of informal peace negotia-
tions.74 Many nonstate peoples have employed women as messengers and diplo-
mats. A.R. Radcliffe- Brown reported that, among the Andamanese, “all peace
negotiations were conducted through the women. One or two of the women of
the one group would be sent to interview the women of the other group to see if
they were willing to forget the past and make friends. It seems that it was largely
the rancor of the women over their slain relatives that kept the feud alive, the
men of the two parties being willing to make friends much more readily than the
women.”75 Females are not uncommonly sacrosanct: they may enjoy personal
inviolability in war and are consequently ideal for such tasks.
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. See La ndtmann, K iwai Papuans of Br itish New Guinea.
. See Rappaport, “Ritual Reg ulation of Environmen-
tal Relat ions”; Goldschmidt, “Peacemak ing and the In sti-
tutions of Peace in Tribal Societies.”
. Elkin, Australian Aborigines, as cited in “Prince
Philip’s ‘Indigenist’ Plot to Destroy Australia,” Execu-
tive Intelligence Review , no. (April , ): , wlym
.com/archive/oakland/brutish/Australia.pdf. Cf. Baldwin
Spencer and F.J. Gillen, T he Arunta: A Study of a Stone Age
People, vols. (London: Macmillan, ).
. W.H.R. R ivers, as quoted in A .C. Haddon, “Quar-
rels and Warfare,” in Report of the Cambridge Anthropologi-
cal Expedition to Torres Straits, ed. Haddon, vol. . (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, ), – .
. Haddon, “Quarrels and Warfare,” .
Women, however, have often been part of peace settlements in another
sense. Among the Kiwai Papuans, for example, the peacemaking feast that each
enemy tribe gives its opponent includes giving their hosts access to their women.76
Among the Maring, women are exchanged between enemies during peace nego-
tiations, ideally one woman from one tribe for each man slain in the other.77
Women, in some cases, are involved both in the negotiations and as exchanges in
the settlement. According to A.P. Elkin, “When an [Australian] attacking party
is about to attack the home party, the latter, if it does not want to ght, sends a
number of its women over to the former. If these are willing to settle the matter
in dispute without ghting, they have sexual intercourse with the women; if not,
they send them back untouched.... The Aborigines have no desire to exterminate
each other’s groups, for, if they did, how could wives be found?”78
Relatives of various degrees have often exerted a strong restraining inu-
ence on hostilities. W.H.R. Rivers reported, with reference to the Torres Strait
expedition of , that if two aborigine men were ghting, certain kin of either
of them had the power to stop the ght.79 The relation who possessed this power
in the highest degree was the “wadwam” (mother’s brother or sister’s child). A
man’s wadwam could make him desist from ghting immediately by a mere word
or by simply holding up his hand. Indeed, Rivers wrote, “this power was so pro-
nounced that even tribal ghts would be stopped if a man on one side saw his
‘wadwam’ on the opposite side,” though other kin also were entitled to stop inter-
tribal combat.80 (A similar custom was prevalent in the Murray Islands.) The
intricacy of family ties and even of totem bonds could be a serious impediment to
war. Relying on the observations of Hubert Howe Bancroft, Frazer wrote in these
terms of the Kutchin Indians’ division into three metronymic exogamous totem
“castes.” In the following passage, the internal quotations are from Bancroft’s
book Native Races of the Pacic States of North America ():
“This system operates strongly against war between tribes; as in war it
is caste against caste, and not tribe against tribe. As the father is never
of the same caste as the son, who receives caste from his mother, there
can never be intertribal war without ranging fathers and sons against
each other.” Very extensive among the Haidah Indians also were the
duties of members of the same totem, although otherwise these might
be enemies to each other. Moreover, “in war it was not tribe against
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. Frazer, as cited in Holsti, Relation of War, archive
.org/stream/relationofwartooholsrich/relationofwartoo
holsrich_djvu.t xt. A mong the Eskimo in A lask a, rela-
tives were neutral when their communities happened to
be at war wit h each other; see E .W. Nelson, “The E skimo
about Bering Strait,” Bureau of American Ethnology Annual
Report (): – .
. James Chalmers, “The Natives of K iwai Island, Fly
River, Brit ish New Guinea,” Journal of the Royal Anthropo-
logical Institute (): – .
. See W.L. Warner, “Murngin Warfare,” Oceania
(): – .
. See Best, “Notes on t he Art of War,” .
. E .B. Tylor, “On a Met hod of Investigating t he
Development of I nstitution s, Applied to Laws of Ma rriage
and Descent,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute
(): – , at . See also Umberto Melot ti, “War
and Peace in Pr imitive Hum an Societies,” in va n der Den-
nen and Falger, Sociobiology and Conict, – .
tribe, but division against division, and as the children were never of
the same caste as the father, the children would be against the father
and the father against the children, part of one tribe against part of
another, and part against itself, so that there would have been a pretty
general confusion.”8
Important restrictions are not infrequently incumbent on the members
of different clans having the same totem. In New Guinea, according to James
Chalmers, writing in , ghting between members of the same totem clan was
strictly forbidden; in Kiwai Island, it was a xed law in battle that no man should
attack or slay another who bore the same totemic crest as himself.82 Strangers
even from hostile tribes could safely visit villages where there were clans with
the same totems as their own. Among the North Australians, it was believed that
while a totemic emblem is in camp all ghting should cease.83 Of the Maori, Els-
don Best reported in – that a person related to both sides in war was often
spared even if living with the enemy and caught in arms against the tribe that
spared him: “A ‘taharua,’ or person related to two tribes, would often pass to and
fro between the opposing camps when those tribes were at war.”84
Connubium: Exogamy as a Factor for Peace
According to Elman Service, tribal societies in general recognize the danger
of warfare and take measures to reduce its likelihood. These measures are vari-
ous but are all reducible to one generic mode of alliance making: the reciprocal
exchange. Marriage obviously is the earliest, most basic, and also the surest form
of alliance making, for it extends the domestic realm outward. E.B. Tylor made
this point in : “Among tribes of low culture there is but one means known of
keeping up permanent alliance, and that means is intermarriage.... Again and
again in the world’s history, savage tribes must have had plainly before their minds
the simple practical alternative between marrying- out and being killed- out. Even
far on in culture, the political value of intermarriage remains.”85 Exogamy has
been an extraordinary factor for peace, according to Tylor, because marriage
outside one’s own group develops a bond of solidarity between groups by making
them dependent on each other for wives and children. In an article titled “ ‘I Am
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van der Dennen • Peace by Other Means: Par t 1 467
. Leopold Pospisil, “ ‘I Am Very Sorry I Cannot Kill
You Any More’: War and Peace among the Kapauku,” in
Reyna and Downs, St udying War, – .
. Robin Fox, Kinship and Marriage: An Anthropological
Perspective (Harmondsworth, UK : Penguin, ), .
. Numelin, Beginnings of Diplomacy, . For more on
the evidence, see my epilogue to the present article. For
the potent ially pacif ying ties of k in- group dispersal and
exogamy (esp ecially in u xorilocal, m atrilocal , and neolocal
marr iages), see also R.A. LeVine, e d., “The Anth ropology
of Conict,” Journal of Conict Resolution (): – .
. Kelly, Warless Societies, .
. Maurice Godelier, “Betrayal: A Key Moment in the
Dynamic of Seg mentar y Tribal Societies,” Oceania
(): – .
. See Pierre Lemonnier, “Food, Competition, and
the Status of Food in New Guinea,” in Food and the Status
Quest, ed. Polly W ies sner and Wulf Schiefenhövel (Provi-
dence, RI: Berghahn, ), – .
. Elizabeth Colson, “Social Control and Vengeance
in Plateau Tonga Societ y,” Africa (): – , and
The Plateau Tonga of Northern Rhodesia: Social and Religious
Studies (Manchester, UK: Manchester Universit y Press,
).
Very Sorry I Cannot Kill You Anymore’,” Leopold Pospisil reports that Kapauku
men, often married to women of confederacies traditionally regarded as enemies,
would ght on the far end of battleelds from their “in- law” relations in order to
avoid killing or hurting any of them.86 As Robin Fox observes, “You would not
try to exterminate a band whose wives were your daughters and whose daughters
were your potential wives; you would become, in one sense at least, one people;
you would be dependent on each other for your continuity and survival.”87 Thus,
far from being only an economic “exchange of women,” in the Lévi- Straussian
sense, exogamy is more basically an exchange of genes.
“Exogamous tribes generally — though there are exceptions — live in peace
with each other,” Ragnar Numelin claimed in , though the claim seems not
to be substantiated unequivocally by the cross- cultural evidence.88 Tylor’s insight
that outmarriage functions to blunt violence between local groups represents
one of the earliest formulations of anthropological theory, and Raymond Kelly
has found evidence consistent with it. “Nevertheless,” Kelly writes, “it is clear
from [G. E.] Kang’s and [Keith] Otterbein’s contributions that exogamy does
not ensure peaceful relations between social groups.”89 Extensive outmarriage
may reduce rather than eliminate armed conict, and the effect may be more
pronounced among societies with little or no reliance on agriculture. Maurice
Godelier has argued that by marrying enemy women as a part of peacemaking
procedures, the Baruya (a New Guinea society in which warfare is continuous)
and their foes are perpetuating conict rather than consolidating peace.90 In
effect, the solidarity between brothers- in- law may be stronger than that between
a man and his paternal kin. As a result, intermarrying with the enemy may lead
to betrayal and to internal conicts that are a burden on the unity and strength
of a given group. Presenting a wife to an enemy group can be a cadeau empoi-
soné.9 Still, as Wilhelm Mühlmann claimed in , such divided loyalties and
conicts of allegiance can lead, in turn, to neutrality and war mitigation. Some-
times, indeed, conicts are resolved by expanding divided loyalties and multiply-
ing them. Elizabeth Colson has argued that incompatible loyalties put pressure
on the kin and neighbors of disputants to seek solutions to quarrels.92
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. See Iva n F. Kr uzenšter n, Reise um die Welt, 1803 – 1806
(St. Petersburg: Schnoor, ), and G.H. von Langs-
dorff, Bemerkungen auf eine Reise um die Welt in den Jahren,
1803 – 180 7 (Frankf urt am Main: Joseph Baer, ).
. C.B. Humphreys, The Southern New Hebrides: An
Ethnological Record (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, ), .
. Peter Greuel, “The Leopardskin Chief,” American
Anthropologist , no. (): – ; T.M. S. Evens,
“The Paradox of Nuer Feud and the Leopard Skin Chief:
A ‘Creative’ Solution to the Prisoner’s Dilemma,” Ameri-
can Ethnology , no. (): – .
. Claude Lévi-Strauss, “Introduction,” in Ferguson,
Warfare, Culture, and Environment, –.
A phenomenon related to commonalities of kinship, totem, and caste is
common worship or religion, which also sometimes can mitigate war. In Nuku
Hiva (Marquesas), priests were always immune from violence.93 The Ta h itia n s
would not molest an enemy who came to offer sacrice to the national god. Com-
mon worship has also led to the custom of forbidding war during religious fes-
tivals, a custom in some tribal cultures analogous to the Pax Dei of medieval
Christendom. Bonds of friendship, moreover, could have the same effect as bonds
of marriage on participation in warfare. C.B. Humphreys reported in that,
if a man of a tribe in the southern New Hebrides had a friend in a group set to
be attacked, “it was his prerogative to refuse to ght along side with his own
tribe... if a man chose not to join in the expedition, he had a perfect right to do
so, and no question as to his bravery was involved.”94 Conicting loyalties and
crosscutting ties do not seem, however, to affect the policy of entire groups and
will not prevent war between them; they affect solely individuals, who may refuse
to participate in a war in order to avoid clashing with relatives or friends on the
opposite side. In other words, kinship, marriage, friendship, common totems,
and common worship only help to settle conicts peacefully when Realpolitik so
requires. Peter Greuel and Terry Evens have argued that, at least in the case of
the Nuer, commonalities have contributed to the maintenance of peace mainly
between groups interested in cooperation against common enemies.95
Commercium: Trade as a Factor for Peace
Closely related to treaties of connubium are those of commercium or trade, which
tend to bring about friendly intercourse by rst modifying and later supplanting
hostile intergroup relations. In nonstate societies, trade is often an alternative
to war, and the manner in which the former is conducted — in terms of strategy,
tactics, and the deployment of the “animal spirits” of competition — shows how
it is a modication of the latter. Yet, for the development of trade, peace is neces-
sary. Hence, less war means more trade and vice versa. It is a common assumption
that if societies are exchanging goods and marriage partners with one another,
relations between them are likely to remain peaceful. Following the lead of Lévi-
Strauss, anthropologists such as R.B. Ferguson have characterized trading and
raiding as structurally opposed forms of social relations: “War is exchange gone
bad, and exchange is a war averted.”96 In a brief time frame, this statement gen-
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van der Dennen • Peace by Other Means: Par t 1 469
. Carol R. Ember, Melvin Ember, and Peter N. Pere-
grine, Anthropology, th ed. ( Englewood Clif fs, NJ: Pren-
tice Hall, ), .
. See Washington Matthews, “Ethnog raphy and Phi-
lology of the Hidatsa Indians,” US Geological and Geo-
graphical Survey (): – ; Thomas Spears, Kenya’s
Past (London: Longman, ); William Balee, “The
Ecology of Ancient Tupi Warfare,” in Ferguson, War-
fare, Culture, and Environment, – ; G.E.B. Mor-
ren, “Warfare on the Highland Fringe of New Guinea:
The Case of t he Mountain Ok,” in Ferguson, Warfare,
Culture and Environment, – ; George MacDon-
ald and John Cove, Trade and Warfare, vol. of Tsim-
shian Narratives (Ottawa: Canadian Museum of Civiliza-
tion, ); E.S. Burch, “Kotzebue Sou nd Esk imo,” in
Arctic, vol. of Handbook of North American Indians, ed.
W.C. Sturtevant and David Damas (Washington, DC:
US Government Printing Office, ), – ; E.S.
Hall, “Interior North A laska Esk imo,” in Sturtevant
and Damas, Arctic, – ; D.G. Smith, “Mackenzie
Delta Esk imo,” in Sturtevant and Damas, Arctic, – ;
Catherine McClellan, “Inland Tlingit/Tutchone,” in
California, vol. of Handbook of North American Indians,
ed. Sturtevant and R.F. Heizer (Washington, DC: US
Government Printing Ofce, ), – , – ;
A.M. Clark, “Koyukon,” in Subarctic, vol. of Hand-
book of North American Indians, ed. W. C. Sturtevant and
June Helm (Washington, DC: US Government Print-
ing Ofce, ), – ; W.J. Wallace, “Hupa, Chi-
lula, and Whilkut/Southern Valley Yokuts/Northern
Valley Yokuts,” in Sturtevant and Heizer, California,
– , – , – ; Shi rley Sil ver, “Chi ma ri ko/
Shastan Peoples,” in Stu rtevant and Heizer, California,
– , – ; T.R. Garth, “Atsugewi,” in Sturtevant
and Heizer, California, – ; J.E. Myers, “Cahto,” in
Sturtevant and Heizer, California, – ; F.R. LaPena,
“Wintu,” in Sturtevant and Heizer, California, – ;
W.R. G oldschmidt, “ Nom laki,” in Stur tevant and Heize r,
California, – ; J.J. Johnson, “Yana,” in Sturtevant
and Heizer, California, – ; P.J. Johnson, “Patwin,” in
Sturtevant and Heizer, California, – ; F.A. Riddell,
“Maidu and Konkow,” in Sturtevant and Heizer, Califor-
nia, – ; Sigrid Khera and P.S. Mariella “Yavapai,”
in Southwest, vol. of Handbook of North American Indi-
ans, ed. W.C. St urtevant and Al fonso Ortiz ( Washington ,
DC: US Government Printing Ofce, ), – ; R.I.
erally holds true: the exchange of goods or voluntary intermarriage cannot very
well take place while hostilities are actively in progress. But over the longer term,
to assume that intertribal exchanges of goods or intermarriage preclude warfare
is a mistake. The major reason that exchange partners and enemies have often
been the same people is simple propinquity. We interact most intensely with our
nearest neighbors, whether those interactions are commercial, nuptial, or hostile.
More intense contact also increases the chance of disputes, some of which can
turn violent. However, mere proximity cannot explain why some interactions are
benign, why some are violent, or why they are so often both.
In the modern world of nation- states, as well, exchange partners tend peri-
odically to become enemies. According to Carol Ember, Melvin Ember, and Peter
Peregrine, “disputes between trading partners escalate to war more frequently
than disputes between nations that do not trade much with each other.”97 Eth-
nographers have frequently encountered tribes that, although they intermarried
and traded with one another, were also occasionally at war. These peoples include
the Hidatsa, the Mae Enga and Walbiri, the Kikuyu and Masai, the Tupi, the
Mountain Ok, the Tsimshian, the Kotzebue Sound Eskimo, the Alaska Eskimo,
the Mackenzie Delta Eskimo, the Inland Tlingit and Tutchone, the Koyukon,
the Hupa, Chilula, and Whilkut, the Chimariko and Shasta, the Atsugewi, the
Cahto, the Wintu, the Nomlaki, the Patwin, the Yana, the Maidu, the Yavapai,
Indian tribes of the southwestern United States, the Nambicuara, and the tribes
of the Guianas.98 As previously explained, economic exchanges and intermar-
riages have been especially rich sources of violent conict.
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Ford, “Inter- Indian Exchange in the Southwest,” in Stur-
tevant and Ortiz, Southwest, – ; Claude Lévi- Strauss,
“The Tupí- Cawahí b; Tribes of the Upper Xingú River;
The Nambicuara; Tribes of the Right Bank of t he Gua-
poré River,” in Steward, Handbook of South American
Indians, : – , – , – , – ; J.P. Gi l l in ,
“Tribes of the Guianas,” in Steward, Handbook of South
American Indians, : – .
. Numelin, Beginnings of Diplomacy, – .
. See Walter McClintock, The Old North Trail; or Life,
Legends, and Relig ion of the Blackfeet I ndians (London: Mur-
ray, ).
. See Baldw in Spencer and F.J. Gillen, The Native
Tribes of Central Australia (London: Macmillan, ) and
The Northern Tribes of Ce ntral Australia ( London: Macmil-
lan, ); W heeler, Tribe and Intertribal Relations in Aus-
tralia; Partridge, Cross River Natives; Torday and Joyce,
“Notes on t he Ethnography of t he Ba- Mbala”; Torday a nd
Joyce, “Et hnography of the Ba- Yaka/ The Ethnography of
the Ba- Huana”; Emil Torday, On the Trail of the Bushongo
(London: Seeley, ); Clavigero, History of Mexico.
Still, barter exists virtually all over the map of nonstate peoples. Silent
trade — commercial relations without direct contact — probably originated out of
distrust, fear, or enmity, but territorial boundaries gradually came to be regarded
as neutral areas where people of different tribes might meet occasionally for
mutual benet, if not on friendly terms, then at least without hostility. Ran-
gar Numelin puts the point well and lls in some details: “As distrust declines,
the former silent trade becomes less silent and the tribal representatives (mostly
women) begin, though at rst shy, to meet at regular intervals: the primitive mar-
ket. The market day necessarily has the character of a rest day, holiday, afford-
ing opportunities for social intercourse, sports, and amusement, during which
hostilities are suspended. The marketplace can also become a kind of asylum,
violation of which is sacrilege.”99
Intercommunity Rituals, Feasts, and Festivals
Market days, of course, were and are not the only holidays that might mitigate
the effects of enmity. Because several independent clans gather for such occa-
sions, male initiation ceremonies are arguably the matrix out of which amphic-
tyonies (from the Greek ἀμφικτυονία, “league of neighbors”) evolved. Such leagues
in antiquity were based on the shared religious centers of neighboring peoples.
In Australia, antagonistic tribes met in peace during the performance of certain
initiation rites; all ongoing hostilities at such times were suspended. The inter-
tribal character and signicance of these ceremonies are apparent, given that
persons traveling to or from them could pass unmolested through the territory of
hostile tribes. Walter McClintock described in a great festival in which two
thousand representatives of fourteen distinct groups of North American Indians
participated.200 Similarly, we nd meetings taking place between different social
units to consult about policy and conclude alliances, or to perform religious or
other ceremonies; ethnographic accounts of such gatherings exist for Australian
aborigines, Tasmanians, Cross River Negroes, BaMbala, BaYaka, and the ancient
Mexicans.20 Among the Jalua tribes in Uganda, if a big chief died all the sur-
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van der Dennen • Peace by Other Means: Par t 1 471
. See, for example, on the Nagas: J. P. Mills, The
Rengma Nagas (London: Macmillan, ); on the Yano-
mamö: Chagnon, Yanoma mö.
. For the Dieri, see Samuel Gason, “Dieyerie Tribe
of Australian Aborigines,” in Native Tribes of South Aus-
tralia, ed. J.D. Woods (Adelaide: E.S. Wigg and Son,
). For the Mafu lu, see R. W. Williamson, The Mafulu
Mountain People of British New Guinea (London: Macmil-
lan, ). For the Barea and Ku nama, see Werner Munz-
inger, Ostafrikanische Studien (Schaffhausen, Switzerland:
F. Hurter, ).
. C.H. Wedgwood, “Some Aspects of Warfare in
Mela nesia ,” Oceania (): – , at .
. Thomas McCorkle, “Intergroup Conict,” in Stur-
tevant and Heizer, California, – , at .
rounding peoples joined in the funeral rites, even if he happened to be at war with
some of them, and on that occasion hostilities between clans were suspended.
On the other hand, accounts are not lacking of former enemies being invited to
a feast in the other’s camp only to be attacked there.202
Of special and more constructive relevance, there are reported instances of
festivals arranged specically for the invocation of peace; according to Raymond
Kelly, these are actually commonplace among hunter- gatherers. For the duration
of such a festival, all ghting would be placed under a ban or taboo, and the ban
could sometimes have lasting consequences (including the development of cor-
roborees or regular fairs and messenger feasts). Early ethnographies describe the
mindarie, the peace- invocation festivals of the Dieri tribe in Australia, as well as
the peace festivals of the Mafulu in New Guinea and of the Barea and Kunama
in East Africa.203
Indemnication and Compensation
Another factor in mitigating and preventing blood feuds enters the picture when
property compensation can be substituted for vengeance. The offender can then
stay the hand of a murdered man’s kin by paying blood money or wergeld. This
kind of substitution appears in ethnographies globally. Camilla Wedgwood, for
example, reported in that peacemaking procedures in Melanesia usually “fall
into two distinct parts; the making of compensation for injuries inicted dur-
ing the ghting; and the performance of some ceremonial, such as the exchange
of gifts or food, which symbolically unites the erstwhile opponents.”204 Tu r n -
ing from Oceania to North America, Thomas McCorkle in wrote of the
Californian tribelets that “regional, intertribal adherence to the unwritten law
that each injury must be exactly recompensed limited armed aggression, since
restraint served to save wealth goods that would have to be expended at the settle-
ment marking the end of hostilities.”205 There is also a widespread requirement of
pecuniary compensation for casualties and wounds sustained in battle, often paid
by the victor to the loser, although, as Quincy Wright points out, intergroup arbi-
tration may also result in the tribe whose member is responsible for the death or
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COMMON KNOWLEDGE 472
. Baldwin Spencer and F.J. Gillen, The Arunta: A
Study of a Stone Age People, vols. (London: Macmillan,
).
. See Wiessner, Tumu, Tumu, and Pupu, “Warfare in
En ga Provi nce.”
wound surrendering to the tribe of the victim one of its less desirable members,
on whom the injured group may wreak vengeance.
One case study, published in , of an Australian atinga (avenging party)
is particularly instructive. In The Arunta: A Study of a Stone Age People, Bald-
win Spencer and F.J. Gillen describe how the Arunta (or Aranda), a band of
hunter- gatherers in the harsh desert of Central Australia, determined through
mystical procedures that several recent and unaccountable deaths that had
occurred in their group were caused by the malevolent magic of a neighboring
band.206 After going through a number of purication rituals, the old men of
the atinga painted their bodies, took their ghting boomerangs and spears, and
approached the enemy group with stealth. The other band, however, discovered
them and, seeing that they themselves were outnumbered, immediately sent out
some of their women as evidence of their desire for peace. If the attacking group
copulated with the women, it would signify that they would not then attack.
In this particular case, the offering was rejected, so two men were sent out to
confer with the attackers. Two full days of palaver and negotiation took place.
Agreement was reached eventually between the old men of the two parties that
a battle would ensue. A secret agreement, however, was made that no one was to
be killed by the avengers apart from three of the young men. It seems that these
three had been causing trouble by not obeying their elders, violating rules for
the sharing of meat, taking sexual privileges that did not belong to them, and
in general being arrogant. Near dawn the next day, a signal re was lit by the
old men of the victim group. It was answered by the attackers, who then moved
in quickly, speared two of the marked men and retreated, taking their wives as
booty. The third victim had smelled trouble and pulled up stakes during the
night. The elders of the attacked group put up a faked resistance, but the only
casualties were two marked men who, it had been agreed in the negotiation,
would be killed.
Among some nonstate peoples, then, it seems that even when material com-
pensation does not sufce as payment for bloodshed and therefore battle ensues,
the warfare may be a facade that covers token casualties arranged to satisfy the
principle of retributive justice. Another case involving compensation and ritual-
ized combat is that of the Enga people of the New Guinea Highlands, who were
more or less constantly at war. In Enga, only terms for the cessation of hostili-
ties exist: yanda konjingi (“to cut off the ght”) and yandate lakenge (“to break the
spear”).207 By day, volleys of arrows were exchanged by warring clans, in an atmo-
sphere that initially might resemble that of a sporting match, played with intoxi-
cating team spirit. Once a man had been killed, however, team spirit would turn to
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van der Dennen • Peace by Other Means: Par t 1 473
. See Polly Wiessner, “The Impact of Egalitarian
Institutions on Warfare among the Enga: A n Ethnohis-
torical Perspect ive,” in Otto, Thrane, and Vandkilde,
Warfare and Society, – .
. See R.M. Glasse, The Huli of Papua: A Cognatic
Descent System (Paris: Mouton, ).
. See, for example, Paula Brown, Highland Peoples of
New Guinea (London: Cambr idge University Press, ),
and G.H. Herdt, The Sambia: Ritual and Gender in New
Guinea (New York: Holt, R inehart and Winston, ).
. José Gumilla, SJ, El Orinoco Ilustrado, y defendo histo-
ria natural, civil, y geographica de este Gran Rio, y de sus cau-
dalosas vertientes (Madrid, ); N.L. Whitehead, “The
Snake Warriors: Sons of t he Tiger’s Teeth: A Descriptive
Analysis of Caribbean Warfare, ca. – ,” in Haas,
Anthropology of War, – .
rage.208 Enga clans usually tried to evade paying blood money after battle by
resorting to token payments and delays, so most of their “peaces” ended more or
less swiftly. (Among the Huli of New Guinea, as well, unpaid homicide indemni-
ties have been identied as a very common cause of further wars.)209 In any case,
compensation was not paid to the enemy: families of one Enga clan would pay
compensation to families of that same clan who happened to be the kin or friends
of families in the enemy clan. There was no genuine peace to restore between
them, but by this means a multitude of interclan ties could be restored. Once
peace was established, marriages were arranged between enemy clans to further
strengthen ties. Forgiveness, however, was not an element of compensation, and
desire for revenge could be acted on years later. With the completion of akali
buingi, the bed and possessions of the deceased were removed so that fellow clans-
men would not be overcome by emotion and feel the need to take vengeance.
Members of the victim’s clan, in lieu of compensation from the enemy, might
instead receive a pig from the leader of their own clan, as a way to quell their desire
for revenge.
As the Enga example shows, the custom of paying blood money or other
forms of war reparations can be almost as much a cause of subsequent warfare as of
immediate peace. In general, material reparations are a weak mechanism for main-
taining peace and often enough prove to be an impediment to reconciliation or an
inducement to further violence.20 Think of the role that the Treaty of Versailles
played in developments leading toward World War II. I have already commented
on the resort of some nonstate peoples, on some occasions, to the prearrange-
ment of token casualties. Neil W hitehead brings to our attention another kind of
nonmonetary compensation, one described by Padre José Gumilla, an eighteenth-
century Jesuit who worked among Orinoco River tribes in Venezuela and New
Granada.2 According to Gumilla, ceremonies of peace were concluded among
the Otomaco and Saliva by individuals interchanging as many blows with a club
(though not the war club) as amounted to complete satisfaction for both parties.
Declarations of War
A further step toward the mitigation of war among nonstate peoples is the intro-
duction of the formal indictio belli. Because most tribes have relied for success
Common Knowledge
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COMMON KNOWLEDGE 474
. See Matthew W. Stirling, “Historical and Ethno-
graphical Mater ial on the Jivaro I ndians,” Bureau of Am er-
ican Ethnology Bulletin, no. (): – .
. K.F.P. Von Martius, Beiträge zur Ethnographie
und Sprachenkunde Amerikas, zumal Brasiliens (Leipzig:
Fleischer, ).
. See Curt Nimuendajú, The Šerente (Los Angeles:
Southwest Museum, ), – .
. See E.M. Curr, The Australian Race: Its Origin, Lan-
guage, Customs, vols. (Melbourne: J. Ferres, – );
J.J. Dawson, The Australian Aborigines: The Languages and
Custo ms of Several Tribes of Abor igines in the Western Distr ict
of Victoria, Australia (Melbourne: G. Robertson, );
A.W. Howitt, The Native Tribes of South- east Australia
(London: Macmillan, ); A.W. Howitt and Lorimer
Fison, “Further Notes on the Australian Class Systems:
Australian Message Sticks and Messengers,” Journal of
the Royal Anthropological Institute (): – , – ;
A.W. Howitt and Lorimer Fison, “On the Organization
of Aust ralian Tribes,” Transactio ns of the Royal Socie ty of Vic-
toria , no. (): – ; John Macgillivray, Narrative
of the Voyage of H.M.S. ‘Rattl esnake’ Comman ded by the Late
Captain Owen Stanley, during the Years 1846 – 1850 (Lon-
don: T. and W. Boone, ); R.B. Smyth, The Aborigines
on surprise attack, they have seldom declared war formally. There are excep-
tions, however, described in older ethnographic accounts from around the world.
The Chibcha sent heralds to the enemy to announce the beginning of hostilities,
and these emissaries remained with the enemy during the war. When the Jivaro
decided to attack a group with which they had been at war previously, the shaman
dug up a spear which had been buried during the peace ceremony. An emissary
was sent to notify the enemy, and war etiquette required that the enemy like-
wise dispatch a messenger to announce their readiness to ght.22 Before attack-
ing, the Amahuaca sent messengers to scatter grain on the enemy’s paths. The
Surinam Carib sent a few macaw feathers ahead of the war party. Caribs such
as the Huri of the Yaoura River declared war by hurling arrows or javelins into
enemy territory or sticking them into the ground at the territorial boundary.23
A Cashinawa chief who was about to storm a village told the enemy to ee at the
very moment when his warriors rushed in to cut off their retreat. As a threat and
a symbol of hostility, the Sherente impaled an arrow in a piece of burití rachis,
which they laid in the path of the enemy. If the foe declined the challenge and
sought a peaceable settlement, they shot an arrow with a broken head toward the
attackers.24 Populations that the Inca intended to subjugate were rst invited to
submit peacefully; ambassadors sent by the emperor detailed the advantages of
being incorporated into the Tahuantinsuyu. Supposedly, it was only after such
offers had been spurned that the Inca attacked.
Notication of hostilities to opponents has been described as well for the
Aztec and the tribes of Honduras; for North American tribes generally, including
the Huron, Iroquois, Natchez, and Chinook, the Columbian Indians, the Algon-
quian and Mississippi Valley tribes, and the Indians of Florida and California;
the Australian aborigines, the Maori, a number of New Guinea tribes, Samoans,
Tongans, and the tribes of the Torres Straits, Fiji Islands, and Rotuma; tribes of
the former Formosa, the headhunters of Borneo, the Naga tribes, the Malays,
the Ilongot, the Tenae of Bengal, the Manipuri Angami, and the Luhupa; the
headhunters of Nigeria and Bangala, and the Masai, Galla, Gannawarri, Kafr,
Eastern Equatorial, and South African tribes.25
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475
of Victoria, vols. (Melbourne: J. Ferres, ); Spencer
and Gillen, Northern Tribes of Central Australia; Wheeler,
Tribe and Intertribal Relations in Australia; R.E. Guise,
“The Tribes I nhabiting the Mouth of the Wan igela River,
New Guinea,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute
(): – ; Krieger, Neu- Guinea; Bernhard Von
Hagen, Unter den Papua’s in Deutsch Neugeuinea: Beobach-
tungen und Studien (Wiesbaden: C.W. Kreidel, );
A.C. Haddon, “The Et hnography of the Western Tribes
of Torres Straits,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Ins ti-
tute (): – ; J.S. Gardiner, “The Natives
of Rotuma,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute
(): – , – ; George Turner, Samoa, A
Hundred Years Ago and Long Before (London: Macmillan,
); Edward Tregear, The Maori Race (Wanganui, New
Zealand: Willis, ); Thomson, Fijians; Williams and
Calvert, Fiji and the Fijians; Levinus Hulsius, Eine Besch-
reibung der zweyen Insulen Formosa und Japan (Frankfurt
am Main, ); Friedrich Ratzel, Völkerkunde, vols.
(Leipzig: Brock haus, ); Dalton, Descriptive Ethnology
of Bengal; T.C. Hodson, The Naga Tribes of Manipur (Lon-
don: Macmillan, ); Leo Frobenius, Menschenjagden
und Zweikämpfe (Jena: Thüringer Verlagsanstalt, );
Friedrich Ratzel, The History of Mankind, vols. (London:
Murray, ); Gertrude M. Godden, “Par t : Naga and
Other Frontier Tribes of North- east India,” Journal of the
Royal Anthropological Institute (): – ; God-
den, “Part : Naga and Other Frontier Tribes of North-
east India,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute
(): – ; S.L. Hinde, The Last of the Masai (Lon-
don: Heinemann, ); P.V. Paulitschke, Ethnographie
Nordost- Afrikas, vols. (Berli n: Reimer, – ); A.J.N.
Tremearne, “Notes on the Kagoro and Other Nigerian
Head - H unter s,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Insti-
tute (): – ; J.A. Farrer, “Savage and Civilized
Warfare,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute
(): – ; James MacDonald, “Part : Manners,
Customs, Superstitions, and Relig ions of South African
Tri bes ,” Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great
Britain and Ireland (): – ; MacDonald, “Part
: Manners, Customs, Superst itions, and Religions of
South African Tribes,” Journal of the Anthropological Insti-
tute of Great Britain and Ireland (): – ; John H.
Weeks, “Part : Anthropological Notes on the Bangala
of the Upper Congo River,” Journal of the Royal Anthro-
pological Institute ( – ): – ; Weeks, “Part
: Anthropological Notes on the Bangala of the Upper
Congo River,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute
(): – ; F.S. Dellenbaugh, The North Ameri-
cans of Yesterday: A Comparative Study of North American
Indian Life, Customs, and Products... (New York: Putnam,
); Liv ingston Farrand, Basis of American History, vol.
of The American Nation: A History (New York: American
Museum of Nat ural History, ); Max Jaeh ns, Geschichte
des Kriegswesens von der Urzeit bis zur Renaissance (Leipzig:
Grunow, ); E.B. Tylor, Anthropology: An Introduction
to the Study of Man and Civilization (New York: Appleton,
); F.T. Waitz, Anthropologie der Naturvölker, vols.
(Leipzig: Fleischer, – ); Morgan, League of the Ho-
de- no- sau- nee or Iroquois; J.R. Swanton, “Indian Tribes of
the Lower M ississippi Valley and Adjacent Coast of the
Gulf of Mex ico,” Bulletin of Bureau of American Ethnology
(): – ; Bancroft, Native Races of the Pacic States
of North America; Gabriel Franchère, Narrative of a Voy-
age to the North- west Coast of America during the Years 1811,
1812, 1813, a nd 1814 (New York: Redfield, ); Ross
Cox, Adventu res on the Columbia R iver..., vols. (London:
H. Colburn and R. Bentley, ); Antonio Herrera, The
General History of the Vast Continent and Islands of America,
vols. (London: Batley, ); Charles Letourneau, Soci-
ology ( London: Kegan Paul, Trench, ); Lucient Biart,
The Aztecs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ).
Among all these peoples, the effect of war declarations was obviously to
give the enemy a fair chance to prepare; therefore, the requirement of declaration
was a kind of self- imposed deterrent. H.H. Turney- High considers this element
of nonstate diplomacy a clear mark of superiority over modern war ethics:
The importance of closely integrated and efciently functioning socio-
political institutions has been strik ingly demonstrated in the power or
lack of power to declare states of war or peace. To be sure, many people
think that the universal state of all persons below literate levels has been
one of war. This hardly squares with the facts. Many tribes in varying
states of culture considered war the unusual, so unusual that it required
some formal act of declaration. It is impossible to say that this idea cor-
relates with either the very simple or the complicated cultures. It has
been evident in all degrees of cultural development. Perhaps no simpler
Common Knowledge
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COMMON KNOWLEDGE 476
. Turney- High, Primitive War, .
. See, for example, M.W. Hilton- Simpson, Land and
Peoples of the K asai (London: Constable, ).
. Studies of such arrangements include J.H. Weeks,
Among Congo Cannibals (Philadelphia: Lippincott, );
Julius Lippert, Kulturgeschichte der Menschheit in ihrem
organischen Aufbau, vols. (Stuttgart: Kosmos, );
W.G. Sumner and A .G. Keller, The Science of Society,
vols. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, ); B.T.
Somerv ille, “Eth nological Notes on New Hebr ides,” Jour-
nal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, (): – ;
Adolf Bastian, Die deutsche Expedition an der Loango- Küste,
vols. ( Jena, – ); and Charles Dar win, The Expres-
sion of the Emotions in Man and Animals (London: Mur-
ray, ).
. E.A. Westermarck, Ursprung und Entwicklung der
Moralbegriffe (Leipzig: Klinkhardt, ).
or more wretched people existed in either of the Americas than the
inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego. They were also accustomed to bitter
and long standing feuds. Nevertheless, one Captain Low, quoted by
[J. M.] Cooper [], said that the West Patagonians made a rude
image of a man with long red teeth and with a neck halter of hide.
Around this they stuck spears, arrows and clubs. This they set up as a
declaration of war. A similar method was used by the Araucanians....
When the somewhat better organized but yet simple Canadian Algon-
kians went to war, they sent as a messenger to the people they intended
to attack a slave formerly captured from that people, bearing an axe
with a handle painted red and black. The Huron sent a black wampum
belt to the enemy- to- be. The royal Natchez lagged little behind the
level which civil and civilized states had achieved a few years ago. They
declared war by leaving a “hieroglyph” picture in enemy territory to
announce their intention of attacking at a certain phase of the moon.
The anything- but- royal Pomo behaved similarly. This, to be sure,
destroyed the surprise element, which may be why modern nations have
lost their manners.26
The effect of a war declaration by the BaMbala was to render the encounter
so much less severe that a special name, kutana (“small war”), was assigned to it.
When war was declared, a day and place were appointed for battle, the bush was
cleared to provide a fair and open eld, and the kind of weapons and mode of
ghting were so regulated that rarely were any of the combatants killed. Should
one or more by any chance be killed, however, gembi (“real war”) ensued, in which
no declaration was made, no quarter given to the wounded, and every form of
treachery employed.27 The most important development of the ius belli as well
as the ius in bello was the transition from the treacherous attack to the pitched
battle at an agreed- upon battleeld. All the other developments that I have men-
tioned can be more or less logically derived from this primordial achievement.
Many preindustrial societies had special theaters of war, arenas often located at
the boundary between the inhabited areas of the disputants. Sometimes neutral
zones were arranged, as well as asylums in which enemies could take refuge.28
The idea of neutral zones and the right of asylum probably arose, as E.A. Wes-
termarck suggested in , from magical and religious notions about spirits
dwelling in sacred places that must be kept free from disturbances.29 The graves
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van der Dennen • Peace by Other Means: Par t 1 477
. See S.R. Steinmetz, Ethnologische Studien zur ersten
Entwicklung der Strafe (Leiden: S. C. van Doesburgh,
– ).
. See C.E. Meinicke, Die Inseln des Stillen Ozeans,
vols. (Leipzig: Frohberg, – ).
. Mar iner, Account of the Natives of the Tonga Islands, .
. See Ellis, Narrative of a Tour through Hawaii.
. See, for example, J.G. Bourke, “The Medicine Men
of the Apache,” 9th Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnol-
ogy (): – .
. See George Turner, Nineteen Years in Polynesia (Lon-
don: J. Snow, ).
. See John Shakespear, “The Kuki- Lushai Clan,”
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute ():
– .
. See Dudley Kidd, The Essential Kaf r (London: Mac-
millan, ).
. See Merker, Die Masai.
. See A.H. Post, Afrikanische Jurisprudenz, vols.
(Oldenburg: Schulze, ).
. See, for e xample, Jonatha n Carver, Travels through the
Interior Parts of North America in the Years 1766, 1767, and
1768 (London: Printed for the author, ).
. Louis Hen nepin, A New Discovery of a Vast Country
between New France and New Mexico in America (London:
M. Bentley, ), .
of chiefs and ancestors are often sacred and taboo, as are the sanctuaries and
temples beside them. In Nissan Island, the hut of the chief served as an asylum.220
The tombs of dead chiefs gave shelter to refugees in Tonga.22 According to Wil-
liam Mariner, “If the most inveterate enemies meet upon this ground” in Tonga,
“they must look upon each other as friends under penalty of the displeasure of
the gods.”222 William Elllis wrote in his Narrative of a Tour through Hawaii
that two cities there afforded complete safety during war to all fugitives, includ-
ing the vanquished.223 Similarly, the Indians of the southeastern United States
had peacetowns (or “white towns”) in which no human life could be taken, not
even that of an enemy.224 Among the Samoans, George Turner reported in ,
the houses of the chiefs served as places of refuge.225 The same was the case
for the Kuki and Lushai,226 the Kars,227 the Masai,228 and other native peoples
of Africa.229
Taboo restrictions extended also to certain individuals. Among native peo-
ples of North America, for instance, the calumet was sacred from of old, and,
according to reports written from the eighteenth to the early twentieth century,
whoever carried it was respected and even welcomed by the enemy.230 As early as
, it was recorded that the calumet was “a Pass and Safe Conduct amongst all
the Allies of the Nation who has given it.”23 In many other places and circum-
stances, restrictions on killing extended to include all unarmed adversaries, or
even armed adversaries who had ceased to offer resistance. The Abipon as a rule
spared men regarded as unwarlike. Among the aborigines of Torres Strait, a man
who would not ght when the rest of the those in his group were at war was called
padaugarka and exempted from being attacked. The enemy would respect his
status in current hostilities and, moreover, would refrain even in the future from
attacking either him or his family. A similar immunity was granted, among many
nonstate peoples, to envoys, neutrals, noncombatants (notably women and chil-
Common Knowledge
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COMMON KNOWLEDGE 478
. For customs holding inv iolable the ambassadors,
peace negotiators, and messengers of other tribes, see, for
example, L .M.D. Albertis, New Guinea: What I Did and
What I Saw ( London: Sampson , Low, ); Ellis, The Ewe
Speaking Peoples of the Slave Coast of West Africa (London:
Chapman and Hall, ); Hinrich Lichtenstein, Tra v-
els in Southern Africa in the Years 1803 – 1806, vols. (Lon-
don: Truebner, – ); C.G. Rawling, The Land of the
New Guinea Pygmies (London: Seeley and Service, );
Joseph Thomson, Through Massailand: A Journey of Explo-
ration among the Snowclad Volcanic Mountains and Strange
Tribes of Eastern Africa ( London: Cass, ); and Oskar
Baumann, Durch Massailand und seine Nachbargebiete zur
Nilquelle (Berlin: Reimer, ).
. Dalton, Descriptive Ethnology of Bengal, .
. Se e, for example, W heeler, Tribe, an d Intertribal Rela-
tions in Australia; J.L.A. De Quatrefages, Hommes fossiles
et homme s sauvages (Paris: A lcan, ); Haddon, “ Ethnog-
raphy of the Western Tribes”; B.C. Seemann, Fiji and Its
Inhabitants (London: Heinemann, ); C.S. Stewart, A
Visit to the South Seas, in the United States’ Ship ‘Vincennes,’
during the Years 1829 and 1830 (London, Fisher, Son, and
Jackson, ); Ellis, Polynesian Researches [“only cowards
would kill women”]; E.H. Man, “The Andaman Islands,”
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Instit ute (): – ;
H.L. Roth, “On the Or igin of Agric ulture,” Journal of the
Royal Anthropological Institute (): – ; Godden,
“Naga and other Frontier Tribes”; J.L. Burckhardt, Notes
on the Bedouins and Wahabys, Collected during His Travels
in the East (London: H. Colburn and R. Bentley, );
Hinde, Last of the Masai; Johnston, Uganda Protectorate;
Thomson, Fijians; Torday and Joyce, “Ethnography of
the Ba- Yaka/The Et hnography of the Ba- Huana”; Farrer,
“Savage and Civilized Warfare”; Paulitschke, Ethnogra-
phie Nordost- Afrikas; John Roscoe, “Notes on the Bage-
shu,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute ():
– ; A.C. Cook , “The Aborigines of the Canar y
Islands,” American Anthropologist, n.s., (): – ;
Morgan, L eague of the Ho- de- no - sau- nee o r Iroquois; D ors ey,
“Omaha Sociology,” and “Account of the War Customs”;
J.W. Powell, “Wyandot Government: A Short Study of
Tribal Society, Annual Report of the Bureau of American
Ethnology (): – .
. Davie, Evolution of War, .
dren), and also smiths.232 The Tenae in India, Edward Dalton reported in ,
made “war only on men, inicting no injury whatever on noncombatants.”233
Many earlier ethnographies, going back to the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries, offer descriptions of nonstate peoples that spared and/or protected the
women and children of both sides during wars.234 Even male captives might be
spared, albeit then enslaved. Among some tribes — the Omaha in North America
and the Fijians, for example — no prisoners of war were taken, and the women
and children likewise were killed. As Maurice Davie writes, there are many tribes
that
take no prisoners or take them only to eat or sacrice them. The rst
mitigation of this savagery came... when women and children were
spared. Hence women and children were the first prisoners of war.
Indeed, primitive warfare seems to be characterized in general by the
fact that the men are slain and the women and children carried off into
captivity. The cases where this occurs range in civilization from the
naked savage to peoples of considerable culture.2 35
The usual fate of captured men, however, has been death, though occa-
sionally they too have been spared, if only to be tortured and mutilated. Among
the North American tribes — particularly the Iroquois, the Omaha and Ponka,
the Wyandot, and the Californian tribes — prisoners of war were sometimes well
treated and adopted or interchanged. The Maumi held male prisoners of war for
Common Knowledge
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van der Dennen • Peace by Other Means: Par t 1 479
. Adolphe Hanoteau and Aristide Letourneux, La
Kabylie et les coutumes Kabyles (Paris: L’imprimerie nation-
ale, ), .
. Davie, Evolution of War, .
. Adoption could also serve as a means of establish-
ing and pre serving peace. The Inca emperor, for instance,
adopted sons of conquered chiefs, thus cementing his
empire into a formidable monolith. Similarly, among the
Kapauku the adoption of young people of inuential fam-
ilies was used to bring lasting friendly relations. See, for
example, H.L. Roth, “Part : Low’s Natives of Borneo,”
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute ( – ):
– , and “Part : Low’s Natives of Borneo,” Journal of
the Royal Anthropological Institute (): – ; E.H.
Gomes, Seventeen Years among the Sea Dyaks of Borneo
(London: Seeley and Service, ); Lorimer Fison and
A.W. Howitt, Ka milaroi and Kurnai (Melbourne: G. Rob -
ertson, ); H.J. Nieboer, Slavery as an Industrial Sys-
tem: Ethnologi cal Researches (The Hague: Mart inus Nijhoff,
); F.W. Hodge, ed., Handbook of American Indians
North of Mexico, vols. ( Washington, DC: US Govern-
ment Printing Of ce, – ).
. Frances Del Mar, A Year among the Maoris (London:
E. Benn, ), as cited in Turney-High, Primitive War,
225.
ransom. With reference to the north Algerian Kabyles, Adolphe Hanoteau and
Aristide Letourneux observed that when a prisoner of war was set to be tortured,
“un des combattants peut le sauver en le couvrant de son burnous ou en échange-
ant son fusil avec lui.” Moreover, “les femmes, qui dans la vie civile tiennent si
peu de place,... par leur présence seule, éloignent la mort et donnent l’anaia’.”236
Slavery emerged with the development of agriculture, and prisoners of
war were normally spared for this purpose. Slavery placed an economic value on
human life, which is to say that it became more protable to enslave prisoners
to do agricultural work than it would be to eat, torture, or adopt them. Maurice
Davie even argues that slavery, “in its time and setting, marked a decided improve-
ment in human manners. It was, in truth, a great humanitarian advance.”237 Soci-
eties without slavery — for instance, the Kuki; the Mekeo tribes; the Dyaks; the
Kurnai; the Andamanese; the Abipon; the Charrua; the Minuane, Puelche, and
many other South American tribes; various tribes of Mexico; and many North
American peoples — commonly practiced adoption as a way to compensate for
their own losses in war.238
Chivalry: Equalizing the Odds
Another “improvement in human manners” was the development of chivalry in
warfare, which amounts to the refusal to ght anyone or any group at a disad-
vantage. To the extent that chivalry was ever practiced during European wars
(as opposed to jousts and other ritual battles), it was not practiced by European
colonialists ghting against tribal warriors. Frances Del Mar commented in
on the stark difference between Maori and British attitudes to ghting:
“Gallantry paid the Maori poorly when they tried it with modern British troops.
They were amazed when the British shot the people whom they sent from the
palisades for water, for was not water necessary? When British ammunition ran
low they waited for them to bring up supplies, for why ght a man on uneven
terms?”239 A generation earlier, Charles Letourneau reported that “the desire of
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. Letourneau, Sociology, .
. Smyth, Aborigines of Victoria, .
. See G.C. Brown, Melanesians and Polynesians (Lon-
don: Macmillan, ).
. A.L. K roeber, “Handbook of t he Indians of Ca lifor-
ni a,” Bulletin of the Bureau of American Ethnology ():
.
. See Robert G ardner and K.G. Heider, Gardens of
War: Life and Death in the New Guinea Stone Age (New
York: Random House, ), and K. G. Heider, The
Dugum Dani: A Papuan Culture in the Highlands of West
New Guinea (Chicago: Aldine, ).
. P.B. Roscoe, “ ‘Dead Birds’: The ‘Theater’ of War
among t he Dugum Dan i,” American Anthropologis t , no .
(): – .
. See Brian Cotterell and John K amm inga, Mechanics
of Pre- industrial Technology (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versit y Press, ).
some Australian tribes to equalize the chances was so strong that they have been
known to give arms to unarmed Europeans before proceeding to attack them.”240
R. Brough Smyth wrote in of the aborigines of Victoria that “tribes on hos-
tile terms scorn to take the least undue advantage of each other, and the instant
a ght is concluded, both parties seem perfectly reconciled and jointly assist in
tending the wounded men.”24 The Samoans were capable of the most intense
hatred toward their enemies yet often showed them the most elaborate ceremo-
nial courtesy before the action began. The combat lines would meet and address
each other with formality as great chiefs and warriors, then present each other
with gifts of food. Once the ght was joined, however, the Samoans meant to
kill, and the language bandied between the lines became scurrilous.242 Outside
Oceania, the Khonds of eastern India, for example, allowed the enemy time to
complete a religious ceremony in appeal for the war god’s cooperation in the
coming struggle. They themselves performed a similar rite.
A related practice is the use of “chivalrous” weapons in combat. Some of the
Californian tribelets fought with sublethal weapons — arrows without points, for
instance, or unetched shafts — that limited the ferocity and casualties of battle. A
warrior might look like a porcupine when the battle was over, as Alfred Kroeber
wrote, but he would live to ght another day.243 It should be noted, however, that
the use of unetched arrows has sometimes been mistaken for goodwill toward
the enemy. In New Guinea, the Dani and Tsembaga Maring use unfeathered
arrows in formal combat, and some scholars have speculated that they left their
arrows unetched to reduce the chances of injuring the enemy.244 Other scholars
have gone so far as to conclude that “Stone Age” cultures deliberately limit the
carnage of battle. P. B. Roscoe points out, however, that, though no mainland
New Guinea society ever etched its war arrows, there was no need for them to
do so.245 With a light reed stem and heavy hardwood head, the center of grav-
ity of a New Guinea war arrow was forward of its center of pressure, confer-
ring a natural aerodynamic stability over its typical range.246 As Quincy Wright
has observed, beyond the chivalric practice of insistence on equal advantage in
battle, the rules of “primitive war” do not ordinarily manifest much fairness to
the enemy.
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van der Dennen • Peace by Other Means: Par t 1 481
. S.F. Moore, “Legal Li ability and Evolut ionary Inter -
pretation: Some Aspects of St rict Liabilit y, Self- Help, a nd
Collect ive Responsibility,” in The Allocation of Responsibil-
ity, ed. Max Gluckman (Manchester, UK: Manchester
Universit y Press, ), – .
. See Christopher Boehm, Blood Revenge: The Enact-
ment and Management of Conict in Montenegro and Other
Tribal Societies (Philadelphia: Universit y of Pennsylva-
nia Press, ), and “Execution within the Clan as an
Extreme Form of Ost racism,” Social Science Information
(): – .
. Hobhouse, Wheeler, and Ginsberg, “Material Cul-
ture and Social Institut ions of the Simpler Peoples,” .
Arresting Vengeance
The basis of much, if not most, tribal warfare is revenge for injury and for homi-
cide. Since cycles of violence based on the desire for retaliation are not self-
limiting, some tribal communities have developed means of arresting vengeance.
I have mentioned a few already, in passing, but it should be worth considering
them now as a coherent grouping. Some tribes offer no support to individual
members in their personal vendettas against outsiders, for fear that the resulting
violence would prove detrimental to collective interests. Sally Moore has argued
that in situations of entrepreneurial homicide, nonliterate people consider kin
units as corporate entities sharing corporate liability.247 In the classical case, any
adult male member of a rst group can legitimately avenge a homicidal grievance
against a particular individual in a second group by killing any of the latter’s adult
males. When one of their members has become incorrigibly reckless, there are
three basic ways to avoid an unnecessary feud: () they may send the culprit into
exile; () they may renounce the clan’s responsibility to avenge him, giving other
clans free license to hunt him down; or () his own clan may turn him over to the
victim’s kin or even put him to death themselves.24 8 A clan system of collectivized
self- defense and liability “works” only if clan members are reasonably prudent
in committing homicides or in otherwise stimulating members of other clans to
kill them. Too much heroic aggressiveness can embroil a clan in so many feuds
that it faces decimation or an inability to earn its subsistence. Warriors living in
feuding societies (such as the Pathans or Pashtuns and the Montenegrins) are
aware of these costs and mostly behave accordingly. They try, in other words, to
be as aggressive as honor demands but also try not to initiate feuds imprudently
or poi nt lessly.
Another conict- limiting procedure is the judicial “duel of champions.” As
Hobhouse, Wheeler, and Ginsberg write of “the expiatory combats and the regu-
lated ghts” of the Australian aborigines, all of them are “palpably means of end-
ing a quarrel, or marking a point beyond which it is not to go. They do not seek
to punish a wrong but to arrest vengeance for wrong at a point which will save
the breaking- out of a devastating ght.”249 In Australia, single combats often took
the place of pitched battles as a means of deciding intergroup as well as intragroup
disagreements. The ghting stopped when blood was drawn. Since the combat
decided the dispute, no blood feud was inaugurated and further bloodshed was
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. See C.S. Wake, “The Mental Characteristics of
Primitive Man, as Exemplied by the Australian Aborig-
in es,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute ():
– , and Frederic Bonney, “Some Customs of the
Aborig ines of the Ri ver Darling, New Sout h Wales ,” Jour-
nal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (): – .
. See W.L. Warner, A Black Civili zation: A Social S tudy
of an Australian Tribe ( New York: Harper, ).
. Fry, Human Potential for Peace, .
. Tregear, Maori Race, .
. Best, “Notes on the A rt of War,” .
. Charles Elliot Fox, The Threshold of the Pacic: An
Account of the Social Organization, Magic, and Religion of
the People of San Christoval in the Solomon Islands (London:
Kegan Paul, ), –.
prevented.250 (If, however, friends on either side got restive and interfered, the
ght became general and plunged the two groups into actual war.) Frequently,
intertribal disputes over hunting grounds and trespasses upon them were set-
tled by single combat, usually between the chiefs, and the result was accepted as
nal. At other times, disputes were decided by combat between equal numbers
of warriors. Among the Australians of Arnhem Land, one type of battling, the
makarata, was itself a peacemaking ceremony; members of an aggrieved clan were
allowed to throw spears, in a controlled and usually nonlethal way, at relatives of
the individuals who had killed one of them, until their anger had subsided. The
ceremony did not end, however, until the injured clansmen had drawn blood from
the actual killers by jabbing spears through their thighs. According to W. Lloyd
Warner, who observed these proceedings over a twenty-year period, no deaths
resulted from makarata warfare25 — and as Douglas Fry aptly remarks, “it is very
confusing to call a nonlethal peacemaking ceremony ‘warfare.’ ”252
Such procedures for limiting conict have not been conned to Austra-
lia. Also in Oceania, in the Torres Straits, among Papuans, ceremonial com-
bat was the usual method of settling quarrels involving more than two people.
Single combats often occurred as well between chiefs of opposing forces among
the Maori. According to Edward Tregear, writing in , “As soon as one was
wounded the duel was over, but if either of the combatants received fatal injury
one of his relatives would claim ‘satisfaction,’ and a general mêlée ensued.”253
(Around the same time, Elsdon Best wrote of the Maori duel that it “was a great
institution. Not only on the battle elds did such encounters occur, but during
quarrels concerning women, land, etc.”)254 Regarding San Cristoval, in the Solo-
mon Islands, C.E. Fox wrote in the s that,
when peace is made... there is a preliminary payment of money...
after which ghting ceases. Then a day and place are xed, and the two
parties meet, fully decorated and armed for war, and engage in sham
ghting. It looked much more like a ghting party than a peace part y;
but it is the custom to make peace with the whole army, to convince the
enemy that it is only for his accommodation that they are making peace,
and not because they are afraid to ght him.255
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van der Dennen • Peace by Other Means: Par t 1 483
. See, for example, Kurt Breysig, Die Völker ewiger
Urzeit (Die Geschichte der Menschheit, Bd. I ) (Berlin:
Reimer, ), and A.H. Keane, “On the Botocudos,”
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute ():
– .
. M.W. Smith, “American Indian Warfare,” Transa c-
tions of the New York Academy of Sciences, nd ser., ():
– .
. See E.A. Hoebel, “Law- ways of the Primitive Eski-
mos,” Journal of Criminal Law, Criminology, and Police Sci-
ence , no. (): – .
. See Goldschmidt, “Peacemaking and the Instit u-
tions of Peace.”
. Hutton Webster, Primitive Secret Societies: A Study in
Early Politics and Religion ( New York: Macmillan, ),
.
It would seem, then, that face- saving is an important ingredient of mock combat.
Beyond Oceania, I have already mentioned the small war or kutana of the
BaMbala, which represents a tendency of this same kind. Single combat by cham-
pions has also been documented for the Eskimo, the Tlingit, the Columbian
Indians, the Indians of the northern Pacic coast, and the Botocudo of Brazil.256
Marian Smith, in the s, described sham battles among the North American
Plains Indians, in which the braves could display their strength, boldness, and
agility in bloodless contests.257 Among the Eskimo, an alternative to killing an
aggressor (and thus becoming involved in a brutal feud) was to challenge him to a
juridical song contest. In the manner of Provençal troubadours of the thirteenth
century, the two litigants scurrilously abused each other with songs composed for
the occasion. The singer who received the most applause won, and the issue was
settled without reference to the right or wrong of the case.258 As was repeatedly
argued in this journal’s symposium “Apology for Quietism” ( – ), disputes
are rarely concluded until justice becomes less important to the disputants than
peace.
“War Substitutes” and “Institutions of Peace”
W.R. Goldschmidt uses the terms “institution of peace” and “war substitute”
to name and classify socially constructed patterns of behavior in which antago-
nism and competitiveness are expressed in ways that are nonviolent and certainly
nonlethal. They do not eliminate war entirely but do tend to reduce the level of
military conict when it occurs. Goldschmidt examines three instances in some
detail: the white deerskin dance (as practiced by the Hupa, Karok, and Yurok
of California), the potlatch (as practiced by the Northwest Coast Kwakiutl and
Tlingit), and the kula (as practiced by the Melanesians.)259 An institution with
perhaps greater effect in preventing warfare and enforcing peace was the “secret
society.” Clandestine orders, especially those in West Africa, were concerned
with every matter of public interest, civil as well as religious. According to Hut-
ton Webster, writing in , “They punish crimes and act as public execution-
ers, serve as night police, collect debts, protect private property, and, where they
extend over a wide area, help to maintain intertribal amity.”260 Ragnar Numelin,
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. Joachim von Pfeil, “Duk Duk and Ot her Customs
as Forms of Ex pression of the Melanesians’ Intellectual
Li fe,” Journal of the Royal Anthr opological Ins titute ():
– , at .
. A.S. Gat schet, Various Ethnographic Notes Concer ning
the North American Aborigines (Philadelphia: D. Rice and
A.N. Hart, ).
. See J.O. Dorsey, “Siouan Sociology,” 15th Annual
Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology (): – .
in , ascribed a prominent role in the development of peaceful intergroup
relations to these societies. Other ethnologists, for instance, Joachim von Pfeil in
, emphasized the power of such groups. Of the “Duk- Duk” in the Bismarck
Archipelago, one of the most potent secret orders, he wrote that it was “a power
with sufcient inuence to enjoin peace on contending parties.”26
Another institution worth considering in this context is that of pseudo-
kinship, ritual cousinship, or blood- brotherhood. The exchange of blood between
persons establishing a friendship is a relatively common ceremony. Sometimes
mixed, sometimes drunk, the blood exchanged establishes peaceable relations like
those among kin. Friendship ties between Kapauku headmen of confederacies in
Western New Guinea pacied formerly vicious enemies for the lifetime of the
headmen. Between some Australian tribes, close bonds of friendship were main-
tained, sometimes for several generations; contiguous groups of the Tanganekald
and Jarildekald, for example, were friendly and frequently intermarried so that
access rights through marriage tended to develop between some families. As in
most fraternizations of this kind, jealousies, thefts of women, and deaths ascribed
to sorcery tended to limit the growth and continuation of friendship bonds, but
they could be strong while they lasted.
A nal example is the institution of tribal self- division and “dual chieftain-
ship.” Tribal communities were sometimes divided into peaceable and belliger-
ent groups. The warlike Galla of Ethiopia were divided into three classes, along
these lines: the “Moran” were unmarried warriors, the “Morua” were married
and never took part in war, and the “Levele” were married but might occasion-
ally ght. This sort of division was carried out most systematically among North
American peoples. According to A.S. Gatschet, writing in , many tribes,
to the east as well as west of the Mississippi, divided their male populations into
ghting and peaceful groups.262 Dual chieftainship — the establishment of dis-
tinct chieftainships for the peaceable and warrior groups — underscored and
functionalized the separation. It has sometimes happened that peaceful groups
within a tribe have divided themselves off completely from their warlike counter-
parts but with the result that the peaceable men have ended up ghting wars
themselves, albeit much more humanely than the warlike groups.263
Purication Rituals: Ambivalence toward the Enemy
The existence or nonexistence of “natural” inhibitions in human beings against
killing conspecics has been debated heatedly. Many authoritative ethologists,
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van der Dennen • Peace by Other Means: Par t 1 485
. See J.M.G. van der Denne n, “A Vindication of E ibl-
Eibesfeldt’s Concept of ‘Tötungshemmungen’ (Conspe-
cific K illing Inhibitions)?: Human Ethology, Military
Psychology, and the Neurosciences,” Human Ethology
Bulletin , nos. – (): – , for a review of this fas-
cinating literature.
. See Michael Potegal, “The Reinforcing Value of
Several Types of Aggressive Behavior: A Review,” Aggres-
sive Behavior , no. (): – .
. Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo: Some Points of
Agreeme nt between the Mental L ives of Savages and Neurotics,
trans. James Strachey ( New York: Norton, ), – .
. See C.B. Kroeber and B.L. Fontana, Massacre on the
Gila: An Account of the Last Major Battle between American
Indians, with Reections on the Origin of War (Tucson: Uni-
versity of Arizona Press, ).
. See H.A. Junod, The Life of a South African Tribe,
vols. (London: Macmillan, ), and E.J. Krige, The
Social System of the Zulus (London: Longmans Green,
).
primatologists, anthropologists, and psychologists have denied the existence of
such inhibitions, while others have afrmed them.264 As I have already observed,
warrior value systems typically require a great deal of social buttressing, from
early training in erceness to indoctrination, divine validation, shaming devices,
and fear- reducing rituals.265 What I have not discussed so far is postwar ritual
activity indicative of ambivalence toward killing other human beings. In a chap-
ter of The Golden Bough called “Taboo and the Perils of the Soul,” Frazer was the
rst anthropologist to summarize the available evidence of postwar disculpation
rituals, taboos, and purication ceremonies (“lustration”) and to focus on indica-
tions that they manifest the warriors’ feelings of guilt. In Totem and Taboo, Freud
was impressed by Frazer’s examples of disculpation ritual and connected them
with the ambivalence of taboo:
The conclusion that we must draw from all these observances is that
the impulses which they express towards an enemy are not solely hostile
ones. They are also manifestations of remorse, of admiration for the
enemy, and of a bad conscience for having k illed him. It is difcult to
resist the notion that, long before a table of laws was handed down by
any god, these savages were in possession of a living commandment:
“Thou shalt not kill,” a violation of which would not go unpunished.266
Much of the postwar ritual activity in tribal societies does seem to imply
the expiation of guilt. Fasting, vomiting, sexual abstinence, and seclusion were
commonly prescribed, as was the performance of ritual responsibilities, such as
making sacrices in fulllment of vows. The Pima of Arizona regarded the kill-
ing of an enemy to be so dangerous an act that the moment a Pima warrior did so
he withdrew from battle to begin his rites of lustration.267 Among the Papago of
Arizona and northwestern Mexico, such a warrior faced a sixteen- day ordeal of
purication that was even more severe than the hardships of the warpath. A killer
among the Jivaro of Amazonia also had to go through a lengthy and trouble-
some purication rite, though perhaps for a different reason: fear of the enemy
spirit thirsting for revenge. Likewise a Zulu killer received magical medication
to purge him of nuru, his victim’s vengeful spirit.268 After decapitating an enemy,
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. Métraux, “Warfare, Cannibalism, and Human Tro-
ph ies,” .
. See R .B. Lane , “Chilcoti n,” in St urtevant a nd Helm,
Subarctic, – ; E.S.C. Handy, “The Native Culture
of the Marquesas,” Bernice P. Bishop Museum Bulletin
(): – ; and J.A. Fadiman, An Oral History of Tribal
Warfare: The Meru of Mt. Kenya (Athens: Ohio University
Pr ess , ).
. Ehrenreich, Blood Rites, .
. N.B. Tindale, Aboriginal Tribes of Australia (Berke-
ley: University of California Press, ), .
an Ibo warrior licked some blood from the knife in order to identify himself with
the slain enemy and thereby become immune from attack by his ghost. Return-
ing Maori warriors could not participate in the victory celebration until they had
gone through a whake- hoa ritual, in which the hearts of enemies were roasted.
Offerings were made to the war god Tu, and the rest was eaten by priests, who
shouted spells to remove the “blood curse” and enable warriors to resume their
ordinary lives.
That these disculpation rituals may be regarded as masochistic is conrmed
by the postwar practices of the Taulipang Indians of Guyana, Brazil, and Ven-
ezuela: according to Alfred Métraux, writing in , victorious Taulipang war-
riors “sat on ants, ogged one another with whips, and passed a cord covered
with poisonous ants, through their mouth and nose.”269 Similar expiation and
purication practices have been recorded for a great number of other band- level
and tribal societies, among them the Carib, Chilcotin, Huli, Marquesan, and
Meru.270 Such painful and shocking postwar rites seem meant to impress on the
man who undergoes them that war is far more than a continuation of policyby
other means. In war, men enter an alternative realm of human experience that
is, as Barbara Ehrenreich rightly claims, “as far removed from daily life as those
things which we call ‘sacred’.”27
Epilogue: May We Generalize?
The level of disagreement about disagreement is, as we have seen, very high,
which may or may not tell us something relevant about the sources of war. Few
of the theories that scholars construct regarding war or peace, moreover, can
survive the test of all the available cross-cultural data. In other words, it may well
be that the mechanisms and processes under discussion are conducive to peace at
some level of socioeconomic development but not at others, or are so only when
a particular type of warfare prevails and not when other types prevail. And some
means of avoiding, limiting, or concluding warfare may be so specic to a par-
ticular people and its particular circumstances that they may not be transferable
to other contexts.
“Where intertribal marriages were common, the cross- tribal kinship links
established thereby often prevented large- scale quarrels” is a type of claim that
has typically been made — in this case by Norman Tindale, the authoritative
source on Australian peoples.272 Ronald Berndt, on the other hand, maintained
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van der Dennen • Peace by Other Means: Par t 1 487
. R.M. Berndt, Excess and Restraint: Social Control
among a New Guinea Mountain People (Chicago: Univer-
sity of Chicago Press, ), .
. See, especially, S.K. Tefft, “Warfare Regulation:
A Cross- c ultural Test of Hypotheses,” in Nettleship,
Givens, and Nettleship, War, Its Causes and Correlates,
– .
. Keeley, War before Civilization, .
. Joha n M.G. van der Dennen, “ The Politics of Peace,”
in Ethnic Conict and Indoctrination: Altruism and Identity
in Evolutionary Perspective, ed. Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt and
Frank K. Salter (New York: Berghah n, ), .
. Tefft, “Warfare Regulation,” –.
. Kelly, Warless Societies, .
(with respect to the Grand Valley Dani of New Guinea) that “marriage and close
relationship in this region are intimately correlated with warfare. The more
closely districts are bound by kinship ties, the greater the likelihood of dissension
and ope n host i l it y.”273 These positions are diametrically opposed, but then, they
regard discrete Oceanic societies. S.K. Tefft, Kenneth Waltz, Lawrence Keeley,
and Thomas Gregor have argued, each independently, that both exogamy and
trade may be positively, if counterintuitively, correlated with war frequency.274
Keeley maintains that “neither trade nor intermarriage encourages peace, but
often helps to rupture it,”275 and as I have myself written, “just as interpersonal
violence often occurs in close relationships, the most intense conicts seem to
occur between polities that are similar in structure and intensely engaged with
one another.”276 Tefft writes, in a more cautious summary of the position, that
interchange of membership through intermarriage does not seem to
reduce substantially the frequency of war or to further peaceful rela-
tions between political communities.... Economic ties create more
mutuality of interest and less division than kinship ties at the tribal
level. However, neither kinship nor economic ties create strong enough
bonds of mutual interest to prevent external war.277
Notice that, even in this more ramied version of the thesis, Tefft does not dis-
tinguish among types of warfare, nor does he take into account the various cul-
tural, political, or socioeconomic levels among the societies that he has studied.
The most nuanced formulation, that of Raymond Kelly, from which I
quoted earlier, seems to me to model the best way of making such generalizations:
“Extensive outmarriage may reduce rather than eliminate armed conict, and
this effect may be more pronounced among societies with little or no reliance on
agriculture. Nevertheless, it is clear from [G.E.] Kang’s and [Keith] Otterbein’s
contributions that exogamy does not ensure peaceful relations between social
groups.”278 Kelly’s is the best of the generalizations I have been citing, because
it generalizes the least, takes relevant variations between societies into account,
and is conditional in mood. It is not exactly “thick description,” in the Geertzian
sense, which this journal has long encouraged — but, in peace studies and related
elds, even this level of detail and nuance would constitute an advance over the
standard approaches, which respond to positivistic demands for theoretical clar-
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COMMON KNOWLEDGE 4 8 8
. See, for example, Clifford Geertz, “ ‘Ethnic Con-
ict’: Three Alter native Terms,” Common Knowledge , no.
(Winter ): – , repr. in Jeffrey M. Perl, ed., Peace
and Mind: Civilian Scholarship from “Common Knowledge”
(Aurora, CO: Davies, ), – .
. Keeley, War before Civilization, .
. Knauft, “Culture and Cooperation in Human Evo-
lution,” – .
. For examples, see Knauft, “Reconsidering Vio-
lence in Simple Human Societies,” on the Gebusi of New
Guinea, and D.J. Thomas, “Pemon,” in Johannes Wil-
bert, ed., Encyclopedia of World Cultures, vol. , – , on
the San (“Bushmen”) of southern Afr ica.
ity, assertiveness, and, when possible, universality.279 In the course of this essay, I
have outlined a substantial quantity of theoretical positions on matters that this
symposium may come to treat with due thoroughness. I want to conclude here by
repeating those general formulations whose accommodation of particularity and
nuance are adequate to make them worth consultation by contributors to “Peace
by Other Means”:
• Peaceability is not an essential or immutable characteristic of any group or
people. Whether a group or a people is peaceable is related to its particular
circumstances. Warlike peoples are capable of making peace, while
peaceable ones are capable of waging war under appropriate circumstances.
The hated enemy of yesterday, moreover, may be the respected ally
of today. Such reversals sometimes happen, as Lawrence Keeley has
observed, with “bewildering rapidity,” to which he adds: “Devout pacists
can become tigers on the battleeld.... Certain social and economic
circumstances [can] mold or override [existing] values and attitudes.”280
Thus, as Bruce Knauft puts it, “in simple societies, the reality of long-
term harmony and cooperation in the face of spasmodic violence is not a
paradox.”28
• There seems to be little correspondence between peaceable, nurturing
behaviors within tribes and the maintenance of peaceful relations between
them. Many peoples who value the continuance of peace between
themselves and other peoples have relatively high rates of intragroup
violence, and many who value intratribal amity are involved regularly in
intertribal warfare.282
• Interethnic harmony and intercultural appreciation are not preconditions
for peace, but, as Keeley observes in War before Civilization, mutual
toleration of different customs and beliefs, geographic isolation, a history
of catastrophic defeat, and the existence of a powerful third party able and
willing to punish violence are factors that contribute to peace.
• The claim that most nonstate societies are peaceful is supportable only
if the threshold criteria for war are raised and those for peace lowered.
Richard Wrangham and Luke Glowacki report that out of twenty- one
nomadic hunter- gatherer societies listed by Douglas Fry as peaceful, at least
thirteen ( percent) interact with pastoral, farming, or state societies in
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van der Dennen • Peace by Other Means: Par t 1 489
. See Wrangham and Glowacki, “Intergroup Aggres-
sion in Chimpanzees.”
. St. Augustine, The City of God, trans. Marcus Dods
(), book , chap. , at ww w.logoslibrar y.org/augusti ne
/city/. ht m l.
ways suggesting military or politically subordination.283 Of the remaining
eight, one (the Copper Inuit) is so isolated from other groups that it has
had no opportunity for war. Only two (the Columbian and the Sanpoil
tribes of the Pacic Northwest) appear never to have participated in a war.
The seeming peacefulness of small hunter- gatherer groups may be more a
consequence of the tiny size of their social units and the large scale implied
by our normal denition of warfare than of any real pacism on their part.
• On the other hand, the rise of peaceful societies at all, in this place or at
that time, should render it impossible to assert that human peaceability
is a counter- Darwinian fantasy. Conditions of long- term peace do occur,
after all, and in all intertribal relations there is peace more often than
war. Peaceability, when it does occur is, as for instance Robert Dentan has
emphasized, an adaptive response to particular political ecologies.
• And nally, I want to offer, as a word of warning to participants in and
readers of this symposium, a paradox — one to which Saint Augustine drew
the world’s attention in the early fth century: “It is obvious that peace is
the end sought for by war. For every man seeks peace by waging war, but no
man seeks war by making peace. For even they who intentionally interrupt
the peace in which they are living have no hatred of peace, but only wish it
changed into a peace that suits them better. They do not, therefore, wish to
have no peace, but only one more to their mind.”284
Common Knowledge
Published by Duke University Press
