Whom do people fight?
Having thus addressed the question why small-scale societies fight, let’s now ask: whom do they fight? For instance, are tribes more likely to go to war against tribes speaking a different language than against speakers of their own language? Do they fight, or do they instead avoid fighting with, tribes with which they trade or intermarry?
We can place the answers in a more familiar context by first asking the same questions about modern nations going to war. A distinguished British meteorologist named Lewis Richardson, whose official career focused on mathematically analyzing complex patterns of atmospheric winds, spent two years during World War I attached to a motor ambulance convoy transporting sick and wounded soldiers. Two of his wife’s three brothers were killed during that war. Possibly impelled by those experiences and by his own Quaker family background, Richardson developed a second career of mathematically studying the causes of wars, in the hope of drawing lessons about how to avoid wars. His method consisted of tabulating all wars that he could learn of between 1820 and 1949, recording their numbers of deaths, dividing his table into five sub-tables according to those numbers, and then testing questions about when and why different nations went to war.
During that period of 1820–1949 the number of wars in which a country was involved varied greatly among countries, from over 20 each for France and Britain down to 1 for Switzerland and 0 for Sweden. The main source of this variation was simply the number of nations with which a given country shared a common frontier: the more neighbors, the more wars averaged over the long run; the number of wars was approximately proportional to the number of adjoining states. Whether neighboring states spoke the same or different languages had little effect. The sole exceptions to this pattern were that there were fewer wars in which both sides spoke Chinese, and more wars in which both sides spoke Spanish, than expected statistically from the total world number of speakers of Chinese languages or Spanish. Richardson speculated about what cultural factors apparently make Spanish-speakers especially prone, and Chinese-speakers especially unlikely, to go to war. His speculations are intriguing, but I shall leave it to interested readers to read Richardson’s analysis for themselves, on pages 223–230 and 240–242 of his 1960 book, Statistics of Deadly Quarrels.
Richardson did not test statistically the effect of trading between countries on the probability of war. However, because war is disproportionately between neighboring countries, which are also disproportionately likely to be trade partners, one would expect trade relations and war to tend to be associated with each other. It does appear, at least from anecdotal impressions, that modern nations that are trade partners fight more often than those that are not. Presumably that’s partly because the apparent correlation of trade with fighting is really just because both trade and fighting are in turn correlated with propinquity; and partly, too, because trade often gives rise to disputes. Even for nations that aren’t neighbors, the biggest modern wars have pitted trade partners against each other. For instance, in World War II Japan’s two main targets of attack were its leading source of imported materials (the U.S.) and its leading export market for its goods (China). Similarly, Nazi Germany and Russia were trading right up until the eve of Germany’s invasion of Russia on June 22, 1941.
With that discussion of nations as background, let’s now consider the same questions for small-scale traditional societies. We don’t have available for analysis a tabulation of all recent traditional wars, corresponding to Richardson’s table of modern state wars. Instead, we’ll have to content ourselves with anecdotes. These suggest that small-scale societies, even more than nations, fight their neighbors, because they lack the capacity for long-distance transport that enabled Britain to send troops halfway around the world in the mid-1800s to fight New Zealand’s Maori. There is little evidence of small-scale societies differentiating between neighbors speaking the same or different languages in matters of war. Most traditional wars were between neighbors speaking the same language, because neighbors are more likely to speak the same rather than different languages. Everyone involved in the Dani War of Chapter 3 spoke the Dani language. The long list of other societies that fought societies speaking the same language include the Enga, Fayu, Fore, Hinihon, Inuit, Mailu, Nuer, and Yanomamo; the list could be extended indefinitely. One partial exception, however, is that, while Nuer tribes fought other Nuer tribes as well as the Dinka, they fought the Dinka more often, and they observed restrictions in fighting the Nuer that they didn’t observe in fighting the Dinka. For instance, they didn’t kill Nuer women and children, they didn’t carry off Nuer as captives, and they didn’t burn Nuer huts; they limited themselves to killing Nuer men and stealing Nuer cattle.
As for the effects of trade and intermarriage, anecdotal evidence again suggests that a traditional society’s enemies are often the same people as their partners in trade and marriage. As Lawrence Keeley put it, “Many societies tend to fight the people they marry and to marry those they fight, to raid the people with whom they trade and to trade with their enemies.” The reasons are the same as the reasons producing this result for nations: propinquity fosters trade and marriage, but also war; and trade and marriage give rise to disputes for members of small-scale societies, just as for modern states. Among so-called trade relations, neighboring societies may actually exchange goods at prices and exchange rates varying along a continuum from real trade (mutually voluntary exchanges between equally strong parties at fair prices), through “extortion” (unequal exchanges at unfair prices between a strong and a weak party, whereby the weak party gives up goods at low prices so as to buy peace), to raiding (one party “supplies” goods and the other party gives nothing in exchange, whenever one party’s weakness enables the other to raid and thereby to obtain goods for no price at all). Famous “raiders,” such as the Apache of the U.S. Southwest and the Tuareg of northern Africa’s deserts, actually practised a sophisticated mixture of such fair trade, extortion, and raiding, depending on the capacity of their partners at the moment to defend themselves.
As for marriage between bands and tribes, it often precipitates war for reasons similar to the reasons for wars resulting from trade agreements gone sour. One tribe’s baby girl is promised at birth as a bride to an older male of another tribe, and is paid for, but isn’t delivered on reaching the age of puberty. A bride-price or dowry is owed and initially paid in installments, until an installment is missed. Disputes over quality of “goods” (e.g., adultery, spouse abandonment, divorce, or inability or refusal to cook or garden or fetch firewood) produce demands for refund of the bride-price, but the demand is refused because the alleged quality defect is disputed, or else the payment received has already been traded away or (if it was a pig) eaten. Any consumer, business owner, exporter, or importer reading this paragraph will recognize analogies with the problems facing traders in modern states.