In 1961 an expedition from Harvard University’s Peabody Museum arrived to carry out anthropological studies and filming. The campsite selected was in the Dugum Dani neighborhood, because that area had no government or mission station and relatively little outside contact. It turned out that traditional warfare was still going on. Accounts of fighting there between April and September 1961 have appeared in several forms: especially, the doctoral dissertation (in Dutch) of social scientist Jan Broekhuijse from the University of Utrecht; two books by anthropologist Karl Heider, based on Heider’s doctoral dissertation at Harvard; a popular book, Under the Mountain Wall, by the writer Peter Matthiessen; and a documentary film, Dead Birds, produced by Robert Gardner and including remarkable footage of battles between spear-wielding tribesmen.
The following brief summary of Dugum Dani warfare during those months of 1961 is derived especially from Broekhuijse’s thesis because it is the most detailed account, supplemented by information from Heider plus a few details from Matthiessen. Broekhuijse interviewed battle participants, who described to him their assessment of each battle, their resulting mood, and specifics of each person’s wounds. There are some minor discrepancies among these three accounts, notably in the spelling of Dani names (Broekhuijse used Dutch orthography while Heider used American orthography), and in some details such as a one-day difference in the date of one battle. However, these three authors shared information with each other and with Gardner, and their accounts are largely in agreement.
As you read this combined account, I think that you’ll be struck, as was I, by many features of Dani warfare that turn out to be shared with wars in many other traditional societies to be mentioned in Chapter 4. Those shared features include the following ones. Frequent concealed ambushes and open battles (Plate 36), each with few deaths, are punctuated by infrequent massacres that exterminate a whole population or kill a significant fraction of it. So-called tribal warfare is often or usually actually intra-tribal, between groups speaking the same language and sharing the same culture, rather than inter-tribal. Despite that cultural similarity or identity between the antagonists, one’s enemies are sometimes demonized as subhuman. Boys are trained already in childhood to fight, and to expect to be attacked. It is important to enlist allies, but alliances shift frequently. Revenge plays a dominant role as a motive for cycles of violence. (Karl Heider instead described the motive as the need to placate the ghosts of one’s recently killed comrades.) Warfare involves the whole population rather than just a small professional army of adult men: there is intentional killing of “civilian” women and children as well as of male “soldiers.” Villages are burned and pillaged. Military efficiency is low by the standards of modern warfare, as a result of the availability of only short-range weapons, weak leadership, simple plans, lack of group military training, and lack of synchronized firing. However, because warfare is chronic, it has omnipresent consequences for people’s behavior. Finally, absolute death tolls are inevitably low from the small size of the populations involved (compared to the populations of almost all modern nations), but relative death tolls as a proportion of the population involved are high.
The war’s time-line
The Dani War to be described pitted two alliances against each other, each numbering up to 5,000 people. To help readers keep track of the unfamiliar Dani names that will recur in the following pages, I summarize alliance compositions in Table 3.1. One alliance, termed the Gutelu Alliance after its leader Gutelu, consisted of several confederations of about 1,000 people each, including the Wilihiman-Walalua Confederation encompassing the Dugum Dani neighborhood, plus their allies the Gosi-Alua, the Dloko-Mabel, and other confederations. The other alliance, living to the south of the Gutelu Alliance, included the Widaia and their allies such as the Siep-Eloktak, the Hubu-Gosi, and the Asuk-Balek Confederations. The Gutelu Alliance was also simultaneously fighting a war on its northern frontier, which is not discussed in the following account. A few decades before the events of 1961, the Wilihiman-Walalua and the Gosi-Alua had been allied with the Siep-Eloktak and had been enemies of the Dloko-Mabel, until thefts of pigs and disputes over women induced the Wilihiman-Walalua and the Gosi-Alua to ally with the Dloko-Mabel, form an alliance under Gutelu, and attack and drive out the Siep-Eloktak, who became allies of the Widaia. Subsequent to the events of 1961, the Dloko-Mabel again attacked and became enemies of the Wilihiman-Walalua and the Gosi-Alua.
All of these groups speak the Dani language and are similar in culture and subsistence. In the following paragraphs I shall label the opposing sides for short as the Wilihiman and the Widaia, but it should be understood that each of those confederations was usually joined in battle by one or more allied confederations.
Table 3.1. Membership of two warring Dani alliances
| GUTELU ALLIANCE | WIDAIA ALLIANCE |
|---|---|
| Wilihiman-Walalua Confederation | Widaia Confederation |
| Gosi-Alua Confederation | Siep-Eloktak Confederation |
| Dloko-Mabel Confederation | Hubu-Gosi Confederation |
| other confederations | Asuk-Balek Confederation |
| - | other confederations |
In February 1961, before the main accounts of Broekhuijse, Heider, and Matthiessen begin, four women and one man of the Gutelu Alliance were killed by the Widaia while visiting clan relatives in a nearby tribe for a pig feast, enraging the Gutelu. There had been other killings before that one. Thus, one should talk about chronic warfare, rather than a war with a specifiable beginning and cause.
On April 3 a Widaia man wounded in a previous battle died. For the Wilihiman, that avenged the death of a Wilihiman man in January and confirmed the benevolent attitude of their ancestors, but for the Widaia the new Widaia death demanded revenge in order to restore their relationship with their own ancestors. At dawn on April 10 the Widaia shouted out a challenge to an open battle, which the Wilihiman accepted and fought until rain ended the battle at 5:00 P.M.[5] Ten Wilihiman were lightly wounded, one of the Gosi-Alua allies (a man named Ekitamalek) was seriously wounded (an arrow point broke off in his left lung and he died 17 days later), and an unspecified number of Widaia were wounded. That outcome left both sides eager for another battle.
5
Here and in several of the following paragraphs, we encounter a feature of Dani warfare that initially puzzles us: battles by appointment. That is, one side challenges the other side to meet at an appointed place on an appointed day for a battle. The other side is free to accept or ignore the challenge. When a battle has started, either side may call it off if rain begins. These facts have misled some commentators into dismissing Dani warfare as ritualized, not seriously intending to kill, and just a form of sporting contest. Against this view stand the undoubted facts that Dani nevertheless do get wounded and killed in these battles, that other Dani are killed in raids and ambushes, and that large numbers are killed in rare massacres. Anthropologist Paul Roscoe has argued that the apparent ritualization of Dani battles was made inevitable by the swampy and waterlogged terrain, with only two narrow dry hills on which large groups of warriors could safely maneuver and fight. To fight in large groups elsewhere would have posed a suicidal risk of pursuing or retreating from the enemy through swamps with hidden underwater bridges familiar to the enemy. In support of Roscoe’s interpretation, this apparent ritualization of Dani warfare is not paralleled among many other New Guinea Highland groups fighting on firm dry terrain. Rumors circulated, apparently originating with missionaries, that the Harvard Expedition itself, eager for dramatic film footage, somehow provoked the Dani to fight and kill each other. However, the Dani fought before the expedition arrived and after it left, and government investigation of the rumor found it baseless.