Thus, it could not be claimed that some societies are inherently or genetically peaceful, while others are inherently warlike. Instead, it appears that societies do or don’t resort to war, depending on whether it might be profitable for them to initiate war and/or necessary for them to defend themselves against wars initiated by others. Most societies have indeed participated in wars, but a few have not, for good reasons. While those societies that have not are sometimes claimed to be inherently gentle (e.g., the Semang, !Kung, and African Pygmies), those gentle people do have intra-group violence (“murder”); they merely have reasons for lacking organized inter-group violence that would fit a definition of war. When the normally gentle Semang were enlisted by the British army in the 1950s to scout and kill Communist rebels in Malaya, the Semang killed enthusiastically. It is equally fruitless to debate whether humans are intrinsically violent or else intrinsically cooperative. All human societies practise both violence and cooperation; which trait appears to predominate depends on the circumstances.
Motives for traditional war
Why do traditional societies go to war? We can try to answer this question in different ways. The most straightforward method is not to attempt to interpret people’s claimed or underlying motives, but simply to observe what sorts of benefits victorious societies gain from war. A second method is to ask people about their motives (“proximate causes of war”). The remaining method is to try to figure out their real underlying motives (“ultimate causes of war”).
Victorious traditional societies are observed to obtain many benefits. Listing some of the major benefits alphabetically without any pretense of ranking them in importance, they include children captured, cows, food, heads (for head-hunters), horses, human bodies to eat (for cannibals), land, land resources (such as fishing areas, fruit orchards, gardens, salt pools, and stone quarries), pigs, prestige, protein, slaves, trade rights, and wives.
But the motives that people give for going to war, just like the motives that they give for any other important decision, may not coincide with the observed payoffs. In this as in other areas of life, people may be unconscious of or not frank about what is driving them. What do people allege as their motives for war?
The commonest answer is “revenge” for killings of fellow tribespeople or band members, because most tribal battles are preceded by other battles rather than by a long period of peace. Examples from the Dani War of Chapter 3 are the craving for vengeance by the Wilihiman after the battles or deaths of January, April 10 and 27, June 10, July 5, and August 16, 1961, and by the Widaia after April 3 and 10 and May 29.
If revenge is the main motive cited for continuing a war, what motives initiate a war? In the New Guinea Highlands, common answers are “women” and “pigs.” For men from New Guinea as from other parts of the world, women give rise to escalating disputes by being involved in or victims of adultery, desertion of husbands, kidnapping, rape, and bride-price disputes. The Yanomamo and many other peoples similarly report women as a or the major cause of war. When anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon had occasion to tell a Yanomamo headman about people of Chagnon’s “group” (i.e., Americans and British) “raiding” their enemies (i.e., Germans), the headman guessed, “You probably raided because of women theft, didn’t you?” That motive no longer applies to modern large-scale state societies. However, the origins of the Trojan War in the seduction of King Menelaus’s wife Helen by King Priam’s son Paris testify that women remained a casus belli at least until the times of small ancient states.
As for New Guineans ranking pigs on a par with women as causes of war, recall that pigs to a New Guinean are not mere food and the largest available source of protein: they are the main currency of wealth and prestige, and are convertible into women as essential components of bride-price. Like women, pigs are prone to wander and desert their “owners,” are easily kidnapped or stolen, and thus provoke endless disputes.
For peoples other than New Guineans, other domestic animal species, especially cows and horses, replace pigs as prized measures of wealth and causes of disputes. The Nuer are as obsessed with cows as New Guineans are with pigs, and the main goal of the Nuer in raiding the Dinka and other Nuer tribes is to steal cows. Nuer cows also lend themselves to disputes over trade and compensation (“You didn’t pay me the cows that you promised”). As one Nuer man (quoted by Evans-Pritchard) summarized it, “More people have died for the sake of a cow than for any other cause.” Horses and horse theft played the role of cows and pigs in triggering wars among Indians of North America’s Great Basin and among peoples of the Asian steppes. Many other types of material things besides women and animals have led to wars by being coveted, stolen, or subject to dispute among other peoples.
Small-scale societies go to war not only to acquire women as wives, but also to acquire other individuals for other purposes. The Nuer captured Dinka children to raise as Nuer and to incorporate into their own numbers. The long list of head-hunting peoples that went to war to capture and kill enemies for their heads included the Asmat and Marind in New Guinea, the Roviana people in the Solomon Islands, and various peoples of Asia, Indonesia, the Pacific islands, Ireland, Scotland, Africa, and South America. Cannibalistic peoples who ate captured or dead enemies included Caribs, some peoples of Africa and the Americas, some New Guineans, and many Pacific islanders. Capture of enemies to use them as slaves was practised by some complex chiefdoms and tribal societies such as northwest New Guineans, western Solomon Islanders, Native Americans of the Pacific Northwest and Florida, and West Africans. Slavery was practised on a large scale by many or perhaps most state societies, including ancient Greece, the Roman Empire, China, the Ottoman Empire, and European colonies in the New World.
There are at least two other frequently offered reasons that traditional people themselves mention as motives for war. One is sorcery: it’s routine in New Guinea and many other small-scale societies to blame anything bad that happens (such as an illness or a death that we would consider natural) on an enemy sorcerer, who must be identified and killed. The other is the common view that one’s neighbors are intrinsically bad, hostile, subhuman, and treacherous and thus deserve to be attacked whether or not they have committed some specific evil deed recently. I already quoted an example for New Guinea in Chapter 3: a Wilihiman Dani man’s answer to a Dani woman about why he was trying to kill the Widaia Dani (“Those people are our enemies, why shouldn’t we kill them?—they’re not human”).
In addition to all these conflicts over people and animals serving as motives for war, land conflicts are regularly mentioned as motives. A typical example is the land dispute that I described in Chapter 1, between my New Guinea mountain friends and the neighboring river people over the ridge-line between their villages.
Ultimate reasons
This enumeration of motives offered by members of small-scale societies for going to war—women, children, heads, and so on—doesn’t exhaust the list. However, it already suffices to make clear why these named motives by themselves aren’t a satisfying explanation for traditional warfare. Everybody’s neighbors have women, children, heads, and edible bodies, and many or most traditional neighbors have domestic animals, practise sorcery, and can be viewed as bad. Coveting of these individuals and things, or disputes about them, don’t inevitably trigger wars. Even in especially warlike societies, the usual response to a dispute arising is to try to settle it peacefully, e.g., by payment of compensation (Chapter 2). Only if efforts at peaceful resolution fail does the offended party resort to war. Why, then, are compensation negotiations more likely to fail among some peoples than among others? Why are there such differences, when women and the other claimed motives for war are ubiquitous?