The World Until Yesterday

An accident

Late one afternoon towards the end of the dry season, a car driven by a man named Malo accidentally struck and killed a young schoolboy, Billy, on a road in Papua New Guinea. Billy was riding home from school in a public mini-bus (not a marked school bus), and his uncle Genjimp was waiting to meet him on the other side of the road. Malo, the driver for a local small business, was bringing office staff home at the end of the day and was driving in the opposite direction from the mini-bus carrying Billy. When Billy jumped down from the mini-bus, he saw his uncle Genjimp and started running across the road to join him. However, in crossing the road, Billy didn’t walk in front of the mini-bus, which would have left him visible to Malo’s car and other on-coming traffic. Instead, Billy ran out of sight behind the mini-bus and became visible to Malo only at the instant when he darted out into the middle of the road. Malo couldn’t stop in time, and his car’s hood struck Billy in the head and tossed him into the air. Uncle Genjimp took Billy straight to the hospital emergency room, but Billy died there several hours later from massive head injuries.

In the United States a driver involved in a serious accident is expected to remain at the scene until police arrive: if he leaves and doesn’t report to the police, he is viewed as fleeing, and that itself is considered a crime. In Papua New Guinea, though, as in some other countries, the law permits, and police and common sense urge, the driver not to stay at the scene but to drive straight to the nearest police station. That’s because angry bystanders are likely to drag the offending driver from his car and beat him to death on the spot, even if the accident was the pedestrian’s fault. Adding to the risk to Malo and his passengers, Malo and Billy belonged to different ethnic groups, which in Papua New Guinea is often a recipe for tension. Malo was a local resident from a nearby village, but Billy belonged to a group of lowlanders originating many miles away. Many lowlanders who had migrated to the area for work lived near the accident’s site. If Malo had stopped and gotten out to help the boy, he might well have been killed by lowlander bystanders, and possibly his passengers would have been dragged out and killed as well. But Malo had the presence of mind to drive to the local police station and surrender himself. The police locked up the passengers temporarily at the station for their own safety, and escorted Malo for his own safety back to his village, where he remained for the next several months.

The ensuing events illustrate how New Guineans, like many other traditional peoples living largely outside the effective control of systems of justice established by state governments, nevertheless achieve justice and peacefully resolve disputes by traditional mechanisms of their own. Such mechanisms of dispute resolution probably operated throughout human prehistory, until the rise of states with their codified laws, courts, judges, and police beginning 5,400 years ago. The case of Billy and Malo contrasts with a case that I shall relate in the next chapter, a case also resolved by traditional means, but ones opposite to those used in the case of Billy and Malo: by revenge killings and war. Depending on the circumstances and the parties involved, disputes in traditional societies may be resolved either peacefully, or else by war if the peaceful process breaks down or isn’t attempted.

The peaceful process involves what is termed “compensation.” (As we shall see, that usual English translation of a New Guinea term is misleading; it would be impossible to compensate for the death of a child, and that isn’t the goal. The term in the New Guinea lingua franca of Tok Pisin is sori money, meaning “sorry money,” and that translation is more appropriate, because it correctly describes the money as being paid out of shared sorrow or apology for what has happened.) The case of traditional compensation following Billy’s death was related to me by a man named Gideon, at that time the local office manager of the business employing Malo as driver, and a participant in the ensuing process. It turns out that traditional New Guinea’s mechanisms of justice have goals fundamentally different from those of state justice systems. While I agree that state justice offers big advantages and is absolutely essential for resolving many disputes between citizens of states, especially disputes between strangers, I now feel that traditional justice mechanisms may have much to teach us when the disputants are not strangers but will remain locked in on-going relationships after the dispute’s settlement: e.g., neighbors, people connected by a business relationship, divorcing parents of children, and siblings disputing an inheritance.

A ceremony

Because of the risk that Billy’s clansmen might seek to retaliate against Malo and Gideon and other employees of their company, Gideon told the staff not to come to work on the day after the accident. Gideon himself remained alone in his office, within a gated patrolled compound, only a hundred yards from the house where Gideon and his family lived. He instructed the security guards to remain alert, not to let strangers in, and especially to be on the look-out for any lowlanders and to keep them out. Nevertheless, in the course of the morning Gideon glanced up from his desk and to his horror saw three large men, recognizable as lowlanders from their appearance, standing outside the back window of his office.

Gideon’s first thought was: either I smile at them, or I run. But then he reflected that his wife and his young children were nearby, and that running might save only his own life. He managed a smile, and the three men managed to smile back. Gideon went to the back window of the office and opened it, recognizing that that could immediately prove fatal but that he had no choice because the alternative was worse. One of the three men, who turned out to be Peti, father of the dead boy, asked Gideon, “Can I come into your office and talk with you?” (This and most of the other conversations that I shall relate took place not in the English language but in Tok Pisin. Peti’s actual words to Gideon were “Inap mi kam insait long opis bilong yu na yumi tok-tok?”)

Gideon nodded, went to the front of his office, opened the door, and invited Peti to come in alone and sit down. For a man whose son had just been killed, and who was now confronting the killer’s employer, Peti’s behavior was impressive: clearly still in a state of shock, he was nevertheless calm, respectful, and direct. Peti sat quietly for some time, and finally said to Gideon, “We understand that this was an accident, and that you didn’t do it intentionally. We don’t want to make any problems. We just want your help with the funeral. We ask of you a little money and food, in order to feed our relatives at the ceremony.” Gideon responded by offering his sympathies on behalf of his company and its staff, and by making some vague commitment. Immediately that afternoon, he went to the local supermarket to start buying the standard food items of rice, tinned meat, sugar, and coffee. While in the store, he happened to encounter Peti again, and once again there was no trouble.

Already on that second day, the day after the accident, Gideon talked to the senior member of his staff, an older New Guinean named Yaghean, who was a native of a different district but was experienced in New Guinea compensation negotiations. Yaghean offered to handle the negotiations. On the following day (day 3) Gideon convened a staff meeting of his company to discuss how to proceed. Everybody’s main fear was that the extended family of the dead boy (his more distant relatives and clanspeople) might prove violent, even though the father had given assurance that the immediate family would cause no trouble. Encouraged by Peti’s calm behavior during their two encounters, Gideon’s first inclination was to go straight to the lowlander settlement himself, to seek out Billy’s family, to “say sorry” (formally apologize), and to attempt to defuse the threat from the extended family. But Yaghean insisted that Gideon should not do this: “If you yourself, Gideon, go there too soon, I’m concerned that the extended family and the whole lowlander community may still have hot tempers. We should instead go through the proper compensation process. We’ll send an emissary, and that will be me. I’ll talk to the councilor for the ward that includes the lowlander settlement, and he in turn will talk to the lowlander community. Both he and I know how the compensation process should proceed. Only after the process has been completed can you and your staff have a say-sorry [tok-sori in Tok Pisin] ceremony with the family.”

Yaghean went to speak to the councilor, who arranged for the next day (day 4) a meeting involving Yaghean, the councilor, Billy’s family, and the extended clan. Gideon has little knowledge of what went on at that meeting, other than Yaghean’s report that they talked at length about how to handle the issue, that the family itself had no intention to resort to violence, but that some men in the settlement felt strongly for Billy and were still stirred up. Yaghean told Gideon that he should buy more food for the compensation ceremony and funeral, and that agreement had been reached on a compensation payment of 1,000 kina (equivalent to about $300) from Gideon’s company to the family. (The kina is the national currency of Papua New Guinea.)

The compensation ceremony itself took place on the following day, day 5, with formal and structured arrangements. It began with Gideon, Yaghean, and the rest of the office staff except for Malo driving in the company car into the lowlander settlement. They parked the car, walked through the settlement, and entered the yard behind Billy’s family’s house. Traditional New Guinea ceremonies of mourning take place under some kind of shelter, to cover the mourners’ heads; in this case the shelter that the family set up was a tarpaulin, under which everyone—the family and the visitors—was to gather. When the visitors came in, one of the dead boy’s uncles pointed out to them their place to sit and motioned the family to other seats.

The ceremony began with an uncle speaking, to thank the visitors for coming, and to say how sad it was that Billy had died. Then Gideon, Yaghean, and other office staff talked. In describing the event to me, Gideon explained, “It felt awful, just awful, to have to give that talk. I was crying. At that time, I, too, had young children. I told the family that I was trying to imagine their level of grief. I said that I was trying to grasp it by supposing the accident to have happened instead to my own son. Their grief must have been unimaginable. I told them that the food and the money that I was giving them were nothing, mere rubbish, compared to the life of their child.”

Gideon went on to tell me, “Next came the talk of Billy’s father, Peti. His words were very simple. He was in tears. He acknowledged that Billy’s death was an accident, and not due to negligence on our part. He thanked us for being there, and said that his people wouldn’t make any problems for us. Then he talked about Billy, held up a photograph of his son, and said, ‘We miss him.’ Billy’s mother sat quietly behind the father as he spoke. A few others of Billy’s uncles stood up and reiterated, ‘You people won’t have any problems with us, we are satisfied with your response and with the compensation.’ Everybody—my colleagues and I, and Billy’s whole family—was crying.”

The transfer of food consisted of Gideon and his colleagues handing the food over in order to “say sorry,” with the words “This food is to help you in this hard time.” After the talks, the family and the visitors ate together a simple meal of sweet potato (the traditional New Guinea staple food) and other vegetables. There was much shaking of hands at the end of the ceremony. I asked Gideon whether there had also been any hugging, and whether for instance he and the father had hugged each other while they were crying. But Gideon’s answer was “No, the ceremony was structured, and it was very formal.” Still, I have difficulty imagining in the U.S. or any other Western society a similar meeting of reconciliation, in which a dead child’s family and the child’s accidental killers, previously strangers to each other, sit down and cry together and share a meal a few days after the death. Instead, the child’s family would be planning a civil lawsuit, and the accidental killer’s family would be consulting lawyers and their insurance broker in order to prepare to defend themselves against the lawsuit plus possible criminal charges.

What if…?

As Billy’s father and relatives agreed, Malo hadn’t intended to kill Billy. I asked Malo and Gideon what would have happened if Malo really had murdered Billy intentionally, or if Malo had at least been unequivocally negligent.

Malo and Gideon replied that, in that case, the matter could still have been settled by the same compensation process. The result would just have been more uncertain, the situation more dangerous, and the required compensation payment larger. There would have been a greater risk that Billy’s relatives would not have awaited the outcome of compensation negotiations, or else would have refused payment and instead would have carried out a so-called payback killing: preferably by killing Malo himself, or else someone of his close family if they didn’t succeed in killing Malo, or else a more distantly related fellow clansman of Malo’s if they couldn’t kill a member of his immediate family. If, however, Billy’s relatives could have been prevailed on to await the outcome of the compensation process, they would have demanded much higher compensation. Malo estimated for me the required compensation (if he had been clearly responsible for Billy’s death) as approximately five pigs, plus 10,000 kina (equal to about $3,000), plus a quantity of local food including a bunch of bananas, taro, sweet potatoes, sago, garden vegetables, and dried fish.

I also wondered what would have happened if Malo hadn’t been a driver for a company but just a private New Guinean, and thus if the company hadn’t been involved. Malo answered that the compensation negotiations from his side would then not have been handled by his office colleague Yaghean, but instead by some of his uncles and by elders from his village. The compensation itself would not have been paid by the company, but rather by Malo’s whole village, including his family, his fellow clanspeople, and villagers belonging to other clans whom Malo might have had to call upon for help in raising the payment. Malo would thereby have incurred obligations to all those who had contributed. At some later time in his life, Malo would have had to make payments to those people for their contributions, and to his uncles for their hard work in handling the negotiations. Had Malo died before making such payments, the contributors and his uncles would have claimed payment from Malo’s family and clan. However, apart from those differences in who handled the negotiation and who made the payments, the compensation process if the company hadn’t been involved would have unfolded much as it actually did.

What the state did

The chain of events that I recounted is an example of how traditional New Guinea mechanisms can deal peacefully with a loss suffered by people at the hands of others. It contrasts with how Western state systems of justice deal with such losses. In the case of Billy and Malo, the response of the Papua New Guinea state was that the police did not concern themselves with the grieving or vengeful feelings of Billy’s relatives but did charge Malo with dangerous driving. Although Billy’s family, including his uncle Genjimp, who had actually been present at the accident scene, didn’t blame Malo’s driving, the police nevertheless claimed that Malo had been driving too fast. For many months Malo remained in his village, except for when he came into town to talk to the police. That’s because Malo was still afraid of possible retaliation by hot-headed young lowlanders. Malo’s fellow villagers remained alert and ready to protect him in case of such an attack.

After the initial police hearing, several months passed until the second hearing, at which Malo was ordered to come into town twice a week to report to the traffic officer while waiting for his case to come up for trial. Each such reporting visit ended with Malo waiting in the traffic office for between half a day and a full day. Malo’s driving license was taken away from him at the second hearing. Because Malo’s job with the company was as a driver, the loss of his license also cost Malo his job.

The dangerous-driving case against Malo finally came up for trial a year and a half later. During that time, Malo continued to live in limbo in his village, unemployed. When Malo did appear at court on the appointed date for trial, it turned out that the responsible judge was busy with a conflicting obligation, and the trial date had to be rescheduled for three months later. Again on that rescheduled second date, the judge was unable to be present, and another trial date was set three months later. That third date and still another trial date had to be postponed because of further problems involving the judge. Finally, on the fifth date set for trial, now two and a half years after the accident, the judge did appear, and the case was heard. But the police called by the prosecutor did not appear, and so the judge had to dismiss the case. That ended the state’s involvement with the matter of Billy and Malo. Lest you think that such no-shows and postponements mark the Papua New Guinea judicial system as uniquely inefficient, a close friend of mine recently on trial in Chicago experienced a similar course and outcome of his criminal proceedings.

New Guinea compensation

The traditional compensation process, illustrated by the story of Billy and Malo, has as its aims the dispute’s speedy peaceful resolution, emotional reconciliation between the two sides, and restoration of their previous relationship. This sounds simple, natural, and appealing to us, until we reflect how fundamentally it differs from the aims of our state systems of justice. Traditional New Guinea didn’t possess a state system of justice, a state government, a centralized political system, or professional leaders and bureaucrats and judges exercising decision-making powers and claiming a monopoly on the right to use force. States have their own separate interests in settling disputes and administering justice among their citizens. Those state interests don’t necessarily coincide with the interests of either participant in a dispute. Traditional New Guinea justice is, instead, of the do-it-yourself sort, arranged by the disputants themselves and by their respective supporters. The compensation process is one prong, the peaceful one, of the two-pronged system of traditional dispute resolution. The other prong (Chapters 3 and 4) is to seek personal retribution by violence, tending to escalate into cycles of counter-retribution and ultimately war.

An essential fact shaping the traditional New Guinea compensation process, and distinguishing it from Western disputes, is that the participants in almost any traditional New Guinea dispute were previously known to each other, either from already having been involved in some sort of personal relationship, or at least from knowing of each other by name or father’s name or group affiliation. For instance, even if you as a New Guinean don’t personally know the man in the village a few miles away who killed your pig while it was wandering in the forest, you surely have heard of him by name, you know of the clan to which he belongs, and you personally know some members of that clan. That’s because traditional New Guinea consisted of small-scale localized societies of a few dozen to a few hundred individuals. People traditionally maintained their area of residence for life or else moved short distances just for specific reasons, such as for marriage or to join relatives. Traditional New Guineans rarely or never encountered complete “strangers,” as do we citizens of modern state societies. But we citizens of Westernized states, unlike New Guineans, live in societies of millions, so of course we daily encounter and have to deal with previously unknown members of our own society. Even in sparsely inhabited rural areas where all the residents know each other, such as Montana’s Big Hole Basin, where I spent summers as a teen-ager, strangers routinely appear—e.g., someone driving through town and stopping to fill his car with gas. Furthermore, we move long distances for work, vacation, or just personal preference and thereby undergo almost complete turnovers of our circle of contacts repeatedly throughout our lives.

As a result, whereas in state societies most of our disputes arising from car accidents or business transactions are with strangers whom we didn’t know previously and with whom we shall never have dealings again, in traditional New Guinea any dispute is with someone with whom you will continue to have an actual or potential relationship in the future. At the maximum, your dispute will be with someone, such as a fellow villager, whom you encounter repeatedly and with whom you can’t avoid having continued daily dealings. At minimum, the other party in the dispute will be someone whom you won’t have to encounter repeatedly in the future (e.g., that villager a few miles distant who killed your pig), but that person still lives within traveling distance of you, and you at least want to be able to count on having no more trouble with him. That’s why the main aim of traditional New Guinea compensation is to restore the previous relationship, even if it was merely a “non-relationship” that consisted only of giving each other no trouble despite the potential for doing so. But that aim, and the essential facts underlying it, represent a huge difference from Western state systems of dispute resolution, in which restoring a relationship is usually irrelevant because there wasn’t any relationship before and there won’t be any again in the future. For instance, in my lifetime I have become involved in three civil disputes—with a cabinet-maker, with a swimming-pool contractor, and with a real estate agent—in which I didn’t know the other party involved before the disputed transaction involving cabinets or a pool or real estate, and I haven’t had any further contact with them or even heard of them after our dispute was resolved or dropped.

For New Guineans, the key element in restoring a damaged relationship is an acknowledgment of and respect for each other’s feelings, so that the two parties can clear the air of anger as well as possible under the circumstances and get on with their former involvement or non-involvement. Although the payment cementing the restored relationship is now universally referred to in Papua New Guinea by the English word “compensation,” that term is misleading. The payment is actually a symbolic means to reestablish the previous relationship: side A “says sorry” to side B and acknowledges B’s feelings by incurring its own loss, consisting of the compensation paid. For instance, in the case of Billy and Malo, what Billy’s father really wanted was for Malo and his employers to acknowledge the great loss and grief that he had suffered. As Gideon said explicitly to Billy’s father in turning over to him the compensation, the money was worthless rubbish compared to the value of Billy’s life; it was just a way of saying sorry and sharing in Billy’s family’s loss.

Reestablishing relationships counts for everything in traditional New Guinea, and establishing guilt or negligence or punishment according to Western concepts is not the main issue. That perspective helps explain the resolution, astonishing to me when I learned of it, of a long-running dispute between some New Guinea mountain clans, one of the clans being my friends at Goti Village. My Goti friends had become embroiled with four other clans in a long series of raids and reciprocal killings, in the course of which the father and an older brother of my Goti friend Pius were killed. The situation became so dangerous that most of my Goti friends fled from their ancestral lands and took refuge among allies at a neighboring village in order to escape from further attacks. Not until 33 years later did the Gotis feel safe enough to move back to their ancestral lands. Three years after that, to put a definitive end to living under fear of raids, they hosted at Goti a ceremony of reconciliation, in which the Gotis paid compensation of pigs and other goods to their former attackers.

When Pius told me this story, I at first couldn’t believe my ears and was sure that I had misunderstood him. “You paid them compensation?” I asked him. “But they killed your father and other relatives; why aren’t they paying you?” No, explained Pius, that’s not how it works; the goal wasn’t to extract payment for its own sake, nor to pretend to equalize accounts by A receiving X pigs from B after B has inflicted Y deaths on A. The goal was instead to reestablish peaceful relations between recent enemies, and to make it possible to live safely again at Goti Village. The enemy clans had their own complaints over claimed encroachment on their land, and over the killing of some of their own members by Goti people. After negotiations, both parties declared themselves satisfied and willing to set aside their hard feelings; on the basis of that agreement under which the enemy clans received pigs and other goods, the Goti people reclaimed their former lands, and both sides could live in freedom from further attacks.

Life-long relationships

In traditional New Guinea society, because networks of social relationships tend to be more important and lasting than in Western state societies, the consequences of disputes are prone to radiate beyond the immediate participants to a degree difficult for Westerners to understand. To us Westerners, it seems absurd that the damaging of the garden of a member of one clan by a pig belonging to a member of another clan could trigger a war between the two clans; to New Guinea Highlanders, that outcome is unsurprising. New Guineans tend to retain for life the important relationships into which they are born. Those relationships give each New Guinean support from many other people, but also bring obligations towards many other people. Of course we modern Westerners also have long-lasting social relationships, but we acquire and shed relationships throughout our lives much more than do New Guineans, and we live in a society rewarding individuals who seek to get ahead. Hence in New Guinea disputes the parties who receive or pay compensation are not just the immediate participants concerned, such as Malo and Billy’s parents, but also more distantly related people on both sides: Billy’s clansmen, from whom payback killings were feared; Malo’s fellow workers, who were the potential targets of retaliation, and whose employer actually paid the compensation; and any member of Malo’s extended family or clan, who would have been both a target of retaliation and a source of compensation payments if Malo had not been employed by a business. Similarly, if in New Guinea a married couple is considering a divorce, then other people are affected and get involved in the arguments about divorce far more than in the West. Those others include the husband’s relatives, who paid the bride-price and will now demand its repayment; the wife’s relatives, who received the bride-price and will now face demands for its repayment; and both clans, for whom the marriage may have represented a significant political alliance, and for whom the divorce would thus constitute a threat to that alliance.

The flip side of that overriding emphasis on social networks in traditional societies is our greater emphasis on the individual in modern state societies, especially in the United States. We not only permit, we actually encourage, individuals to advance themselves, to win, and to gain advantages at the expense of others. In many of our business transactions we aim to maximize our own profit, and never mind the feelings of the person on the other side of the table on whom we have succeeded in inflicting a loss. Even children’s games in the U.S. commonly are contests of winning and losing. That isn’t so in traditional New Guinea society, where children’s play involves cooperation rather than winning and losing.

For instance, the anthropologist Jane Goodale watched a group of children (the Kaulong people of New Britain) who had been given a bunch of bananas sufficient to provide one banana for each child. The children proceeded to play a game. Instead of a contest in which each child sought to win the biggest banana, each child cut his/her banana into two equal halves, ate one half, offered the other half to another child, and in turn received half of that child’s banana. Then each child proceeded to cut that uneaten half of the banana into two equal quarters, ate one of the quarters, offered the other quarter to another child, and received another child’s uneaten quarter banana in return. The game went on for five cycles, as the residual piece of banana was broken into equal eighths, then into equal sixteenths, until finally each child ate the stub representing one-thirty-second of the original banana, gave the other thirty-second to another child to eat, and received and ate the last thirty-second of another banana from still another child. That whole play ritual was part of the practising by which New Guinea children learn to share, and not to seek an advantage for themselves.

As another example of traditional New Guinea society’s deemphasis of individual advantage, a hard-working and ambitious teen-ager called Mafuk worked for me for a couple of months. When I paid him his salary and asked him what he intended to do with the money, he answered that he was going to buy a sewing machine with which he would mend other people’s torn clothes. He would charge them for the repairs, thereby recoup and multiply his initial investment, and start accumulating money to improve his lot in life. But Mafuk’s relatives were outraged at what they considered his selfishness. Naturally, in that sedentary society the people whose clothes Mafuk would be mending would be people whom he already knew, most of them his close or distant relatives. It violated New Guinea societal norms for Mafuk to advance himself by taking money from them. Instead, he was expected to mend their clothes for free, and in turn they would support him in other ways throughout his life, such as by contributing to his bride-price obligation when he married. Similarly, gold miners in Gabon who don’t share their gold and money with jealous friends and relatives become targets of sorcerers believed responsible for causing their victims to contract the usually fatal disease Ebola hemorrhagic fever.

When Western missionaries who have lived in New Guinea with their young children return to Australia or the United States, or when they send their children back to Australia or the U.S. to attend boarding school, the children tell me that their biggest adjustment problem is to deal with and adopt the West’s selfish individualistic ways, and to shed the emphasis on cooperation and sharing that they have learned among New Guinea children. They describe feeling ashamed of themselves if they play competitive games in order to win, or if they try to excel in school, or if they seek an advantage or opportunity that their comrades don’t achieve.

Other non-state societies

What about differences in dispute resolution among non-state societies? While resort to mediation, as in the case of Billy and Malo, may work well in traditional New Guinea villages, it may be either unnecessary or ineffective in other types of societies. It turns out that there is a virtual continuum, from small societies with no centralized authority or justice system, through chiefdoms in which the chief resolves many disputes, on to weak states in which individuals often still take justice into their own hands, and concluding with strong states exercising effective authority. Let us consider peaceful dispute resolution in five different non-state societies, ranging from ones smaller than New Guinea villages to a large society with the beginnings of political centralization (Plate 15).

We begin with disputes in the smallest societies, consisting of local groups with just a few dozen members. The !Kung (Plate 6) impressed a visiting anthropologist as a society in which people talked constantly, disputes were in the open, and everybody in the band became involved in disputes between any two band members. The anthropologist happened to visit for a month when a husband and wife were unhappy with each other, and when other band members (all of them somehow related to the husband or wife or both) were constantly joining in the couple’s arguments. A year later, the anthropologist returned for another visit, to find the couple still together, still unhappy with each other, and other band members still involved in the resulting arguments.

The Siriono of Bolivia, who also lived in small groups, were also described as quarreling constantly, especially between husband and wife, between co-wives of the same husband, between in-laws, and between children within the same extended family. Of 75 Siriono disputes witnessed, 44 were over food (failing to share it, hoarding it, stealing it, eating it secretly at night in camp, or stealing off into the forest to eat it secretly there); 19 were over sex, especially over adultery; and only 12 disputes were over something other than food or sex. Without an arbiter, most Siriono disputes were settled between the disputants, occasionally with the involvement of a relative joining to support one side. If enmity between two families in the same camp became intense, one family might move out of camp to live separately in the forest until hostile feelings subsided. If enmity still persisted, one family split off to join another band or to form a new band. That illustrates an important generalization: among nomadic hunter-gatherers and other mobile groups, disputes within a group can be settled just by the group dividing so that disputants move apart. That option is difficult for settled village farmers with a big investment in their gardens, and even more difficult for us Western citizens tied to our jobs and houses.

Among still another small group, Brazil’s Piraha Indians (Plate 11), social pressure to behave by the society’s norms and to settle disputes is applied by graded ostracism. That begins with excluding someone from food-sharing for a day, then for several days, then making the person live some distance away in the forest, deprived of normal trade and social exchanges. The most severe Piraha sanction is complete ostracism. For instance, a Piraha teen-ager named Tukaaga killed an Apurina Indian named Joaquim living nearby, and thereby exposed the Piraha to the risk of a retaliatory attack. Tukaaga was then forced to live apart from all other Piraha villages, and within a month he died under mysterious circumstances, supposedly of catching a cold, but possibly instead murdered by other Piraha who felt endangered by Tukaaga’s deed.

My next-to-last example involves the Fore, a New Guinea Highland group among whom I worked in the 1960s, and who live at a considerably higher population density, and hence appear to be more aggressive, than the !Kung, Siriono, or Piraha. The Fore were studied between 1951 and 1953 by a husband-and-wife anthropologist couple, Ronald and Catherine Berndt, at a time when fighting was still going on in the area. Without a central authority or formal mechanism to deal with offenses, Fore dispute resolution within a clan or lineage was of the do-it-yourself variety. For instance, the responsibility for defending one’s property against theft rested on the owner. While theft was condemned by community standards, it was up to the owner to seek compensation in pigs or another form. The magnitude of compensation was not standardized to the value of the object stolen but depended on the relative strength of the offender and the offended, on past grudges, and on how the thief’s kin regarded the thief and whether they were likely to support him.

A Fore dispute was likely to drag in people other than the two initially concerned. In the case of dissension between a husband and wife, the kin of both would become involved but could themselves experience conflicting interests. While a man belonging to the same clan as the husband might support his fellow clansman (the husband) against his clansman’s wife, he might instead support the wife against the husband because of having contributed to the bride payment to acquire the wife for the clan. Hence disputes within a lineage were usually under pressure to be settled quickly, by payment of compensation, exchanging gifts, or holding a feast to signal the reestablishment of friendly relations. Disputes between two lineages of the same district could also be settled by payment of compensation, but (as we shall see in the next two chapters) the risk of resort to violence was higher than if the dispute were within a lineage, because of less pressure for settlement being applied by other people.

The last of the non-state societies that I compare here is the Nuer of the Sudan (Plate 7), who numbered about 200,000 people (divided into many tribes) when studied by the anthropologist E. E. Evans-Pritchard in the 1930s. Among the five societies, they are the largest, the one with apparently the highest prevalence of formalized violence, and the only one with a formally recognized political leader, termed a “leopard-skin chief.” The Nuer are quick to feel insulted, and the admired way for men to settle disputes within a village is by fighting with clubs until either one man is badly injured, or (usually) until other villagers intervene and pull the fighters apart.

The most serious offense among the Nuer is a killing, which triggers a blood-feud: if X kills Y, Y’s relatives are obliged to seek vengeance by killing X and/or one of X’s close relatives. Hence a killing marks a dispute not only between the killer and the slain but also among all the close relatives of both, and among their whole communities. Immediately after a killing, the killer, knowing that he is now a target for revenge, takes asylum in the chief’s house, where he is immune from attack—but his enemies keep watch to spear him if he should make the mistake of leaving the chief’s house. The chief waits a few weeks for tempers to cool (similar to the briefer delay in the case of Billy’s death in New Guinea that I related), then opens negotiations for compensation between the killer’s relatives and the victim’s relatives. The usual compensation for a death is 40 or 50 cows.

However, it is crucial to understand that a Nuer chief has no authority to rule, to decide the merits of a dispute, or to impose a settlement. Instead, the chief is just a mediator who is used if and only if both parties want to reach a settlement and to return to the pre-existing state of affairs. The chief elicits from one side a proposal, which the other side usually refuses. Eventually, the chief urges one side to accept the other side’s offer, and the former side does so with a show of reluctance, insisting that it is doing so only to honor the chief. That is, the chief provides a face-saving way to accept a compromise necessary for the good of the community. A feud cannot be tolerated within a village and is difficult to sustain for long between nearby villages. But the greater the distance between the two lineages involved, the more difficult it becomes to settle the feud (because there is less desire to restore normal relations), and the more likely is the initial killing to escalate to further violence.

The Nuer leopard-skin chief may also be used to mediate lesser disputes, such as ones over stealing cattle, clubbing someone, or a bride’s family failing after a divorce to return the bride-price cows that they received at the time of marriage. However, Nuer disputes do not pose clear issues of deciding between right and wrong. If for instance the dispute is about stealing cattle, the thief does not deny the theft but instead boldly justifies it by invoking some score to be settled: a previous theft of cattle by the present owner or the owner’s relatives, or some debt (e.g., as compensation for adultery, for an injury, for having sex with an unmarried girl, for divorce, for claimed underpayment or non-return of bride-price, or for a wife’s death in childbirth which is considered the husband’s responsibility). Just as Nuer compensation does not involve right or wrong, the offended party will not succeed in extracting his compensation unless he is prepared to use force, and unless it is feared that he and his kin will resort to violence if not compensated. As with the Fore, self-help or do-it-yourself is the basis of Nuer dispute resolution.

Compared to the other four non-state societies discussed here, the role of Nuer chiefs suggests a first step towards dispute adjudication. But it is worth re-emphasizing the features of state dispute adjudication still absent among the Nuer, as among most other non-state societies except for strong chiefdoms. The Nuer chief has no authority to settle the dispute, and is just a mediator, a means to save face and promote a cool-off period if both parties so desire, as was also true of Yaghean’s role in the dispute between Billy’s family and Malo’s employer. The Nuer chief has no monopoly on force, nor indeed any means to apply force at all; the disputing parties are still the ones able to use force. The aim of Nuer dispute resolution is not to decide right or wrong, but to re-establish normal relations in a society where everyone knows or at least knows of everyone else, and where persistence of ill will between any two members of the society endangers the society’s stability. All these limitations of Nuer tribal chiefs change when one encounters more populous chiefdoms (such as those of large Polynesian islands and large Native American polities), whose chiefs hold real political and judicial power, assert a monopoly on the use of force, and represent potential intermediate stages towards the origins of state government.

State authority

Let’s now compare those non-state systems of dispute resolution with the systems of states. Just as the various non-state systems that we discussed share features in common while differing among themselves in other respects, state systems also share other common themes amidst their diversity. My comments about state dispute resolution will mostly be based on the system most familiar to me, that of the United States, but I shall mention some differences in other state systems.

Both state dispute resolution and non-state dispute resolution have two alternative procedures: mechanisms for reaching mutual agreement between the disputing parties, and then (if those mechanisms are attempted but fail) mechanisms for reaching a contested solution. In non-state societies the flip side of the compensation process for reaching mutual agreement is escalating violence (Chapters 3, 4). Non-state societies lack formal central state mechanisms for preventing dissatisfied individuals from pursuing their aims by violent means. Because one act of violence tends to provoke another, violence escalates and becomes an endemic threat to peace in non-state societies. Hence a prime concern of effective state government is to guarantee or at least improve public safety by preventing the state’s citizens from using force against each other. In order to maintain internal peace and safety, the central political authority of the state claims a near-monopoly on the right to use retaliatory force: only the state and its police are permitted (with sufficient cause) to employ violent retaliatory measures against the state’s own citizens. However, states do permit citizens to use force to defend themselves: e.g., if citizens are attacked first, or if they reasonably believe that they or their property are in imminent serious danger.

Citizens are dissuaded in two ways from resorting to private violence: by fear of the state’s superior power; and by becoming convinced that private violence is unnecessary, because the state has established a system of justice perceived to be impartial (at least in theory), guaranteeing to citizens the safety of their person and their property, and labeling as wrong-doers and punishing those who damage the safety of others. If the state does those things effectively, then injured citizens may feel less or no need to resort to do-it-yourself justice, New Guinea–style and Nuer-style. (But in weaker states whose citizens lack confidence that the state will respond effectively, such as Papua New Guinea today, citizens are likely to continue traditional tribal practices of private violence.) Maintenance of peace within a society is one of the most important services that a state can provide. That service goes a long way towards explaining the apparent paradox that, since the rise of the first state governments in the Fertile Crescent about 5,400 years ago, people have more or less willingly (not just under duress) surrendered some of their individual freedoms, accepted the authority of state governments, paid taxes, and supported a comfortable individual lifestyle for the state’s leaders and officials.

An example of the behavior that state governments aim to prevent at all costs was the Ellie Nesler case in the small town of Jamestown, California, a hundred miles east of San Francisco. Ellie (Plate 35) was the mother of a six-year-old son, William, whom a camp counselor named Daniel Driver was suspected of sexually molesting at a Christian summer camp. At a preliminary courtroom hearing on April 2, 1993, at which Daniel was being charged with abusing William and three other boys, Ellie fired five shots at close range into Daniel’s head, killing him instantly. That constituted retaliatory force: Ellie was not defending her son against an attack in progress, nor against the imminent prospect of an attack, but she was retaliating after a suspected event. In her defense, Ellie declared that her son had been so distraught over being abused that he was vomiting and incapable of testifying against Daniel. She feared that Daniel would go free, and she lacked faith in an inept justice system that had allowed a sexual predator with a history of such behavior to remain at large and continue his crimes.

Ellie’s case provoked a national debate on vigilantism, with her defenders hailing her for exacting her own justice, and her critics condemning her for doing so. Every parent will understand Ellie’s outrage and feel some sympathy for her, and probably most parents of an abused child have fantasies of doing exactly what Ellie did. But the view of the state of California was that only the state had the authority to judge and punish the abuser, and that (however understandable Ellie’s rage) state government would collapse if citizens took justice into their own hands, as Ellie did. She was tried and convicted of manslaughter and served 3 years of a 10-year sentence before being released on appeal based on jury misconduct.

Thus, the overriding goal of state justice is to maintain society’s stability by providing a mandatory alternative to do-it-yourself justice. All other goals of state justice are secondary to that main one. In particular, the state has less or no interest in the overriding goal of justice in small-scale non-state societies: to restore a pre-existing relationship or non-relationship (e.g., by promoting an exchange of feelings) between disputing parties who already knew or knew of each other and must continue to deal with each other. Hence non-state dispute resolution is not primarily a system of justice in the state sense: that is, a system to decide right and wrong, according to a state’s laws. Bearing in mind those different overriding goals, how similar are state and non-state systems of dispute resolution in their operation?

State civil justice

A starting point is to realize that state justice is divided into two systems, which often employ different courts, judges, lawyers, and bodies of the law: criminal justice and civil justice. Criminal justice is concerned with crimes against the state’s laws, punishable by the state. Civil justice is concerned with non-criminal injuries inflicted by one individual (or group) on another, and further subdivided into two types of actions: contract cases, resulting from breach of a contract, and often or usually involving money; and tort cases, resulting from injury done to a person herself or to her property through the action of another person. The state’s distinction between criminal and civil actions is gray in a non-state society, which has societal norms of behavior between individuals but does not have codified laws defining crimes against a formally defined institution, the state. Compounding the grayness is that an injury to an individual is likely to affect other individuals as well, and small societies are much more concerned than are state societies with those effects on others—as exemplified by the case I related of everyone in a !Kung band being affected by and joining the arguments between an unhappy husband and wife. (Imagine if a judge in a California divorce court were to take testimony about how the divorce would affect everybody in town.) In New Guinea, essentially the same system for negotiating compensation is used to deal with the intentional killing of one person by another, the repayment of a bride-price after a divorce, and one man’s pig damaging another man’s garden (respectively a crime, a contract, and a tort in Western courts).

Let’s begin by comparing state and non-state systems for civil disputes. One similarity is that both use third parties to mediate, to separate the disputing parties, and thereby to promote cooling-off. Those intermediaries are experienced negotiators like Yaghean in New Guinea, leopard-skin chiefs among the Nuer, and lawyers in state courts. In fact, states have other types of intermediaries besides lawyers: many disputes are handled outside the court system by third parties such as arbitrators, mediators, and insurance adjusters. Despite Americans’ reputation for being litigious, the great majority of civil disputes in the U.S. are settled outside the courts or before going to trial. Some professions consisting of a small number of members monopolizing a resource—such as Maine lobster fishermen, cattle ranchers, and diamond traders—commonly settle member disputes by themselves without state involvement. Only if third-party negotiation fails to produce a settlement mutually agreeable to the parties do they resort to their society’s method of dealing with a dispute without a mutual agreement: violence or war in a non-state society, and a trial or formal adjudication in a state society.

A further similarity is that both state and non-state societies often spread the cost owed by the offending party over many other payers. In state societies we purchase automobile and homeowner insurance policies that pay the costs if our car injures a person or another car, or if someone is injured by falling on our house’s steps that we negligently left slippery. We and many others pay insurance premiums that permit the insurance company to pay those costs, so that in effect other policy-holders share our liability and vice versa. Similarly, in non-state societies the relatives and fellow clan members share in payments owed by an individual: for instance, Malo told me that his fellow villagers would have contributed to the compensation payment for Billy’s death if Malo hadn’t been working for a company able to make the payment.

In state societies the civil cases whose courses are most similar to that of a New Guinea compensation negotiation are business disputes between parties involved in a long-term business relationship. When an issue arises that such business parties cannot work out by themselves, one party may become angry and consult an attorney. (That’s much more likely in the U.S. than in Japan and other countries.) Especially in a long-term relationship in which there has been a build-up of trust, the aggrieved party feels taken advantage of, betrayed, and even more angry than if it were just a “one-off” relationship (i.e., the first business encounter for the parties). As in a New Guinea compensation negotiation, channeling business-dispute discussions through lawyers cools off the dispute by substituting (one hopes) calm reasoned statements of lawyers for angry personal recriminations of the parties, and reduces the risk that opposing positions will harden. When the parties have the prospect of continuing a profitable business relationship in the future, they are motivated to accept a face-saving solution—just as New Guineans in the same village or neighboring villages, expecting to continue to encounter each other for the rest of their lives, are motivated to find a solution. Nevertheless, lawyer friends tell me that a New Guinea–style genuine apology and emotional closure are rare even in business disputes, and that usually the most that can be expected is a scripted apology produced as a settlement tactic at a late stage. If, however, business parties are involved in a one-off relationship and never expect to deal with each other again, then their motivation for amicable settlement is lower (just as is true of New Guinea or Nuer disputes between members of distant tribes), and the risk increases that the dispute will proceed to the state’s equivalent of war: a trial. Nevertheless, trials and adjudications are expensive, their outcomes are unpredictable, and even one-off business disputants experience pressures to settle.

Yet another parallel between state and non-state dispute resolution involves international disputes between states (as opposed to disputes between fellow citizens within the same state). While some international disputes are now settled by the International Court of Justice by agreement of the governments involved, others are dealt with by essentially the traditional approach operating on a large scale: direct negotiations or mediated negotiations between the parties, aware that failure of the negotiations may trigger the flip-side mechanism of war. Prime examples are the 1938 dispute between Hitler’s Germany and Czechoslovakia over the Czech border region of Sudetenland with an ethnic German majority, resolved by mediation by Britain and France (which pressured their Czech ally to settle); and the series of European crises in the years before World War I, each temporarily settled by negotiation until the 1914 crisis provoked by the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand did end in war.

Those are some of the parallels between non-state dispute resolution and state civil justice. As for the differences, the most basic is that, if a civil case does pass from the negotiating stage to trial, then the state’s concern at the trial is not primarily with emotional clearance, restoring good relations, or promoting a mutual understanding of feelings between the disputing parties—even when the parties are siblings, estranged spouses, parents and children, or neighbors who share a huge emotional investment in each other and may have to deal with each other for the rest of their lives. Of course, in many or most cases in populous state societies, consisting of millions of citizens who are strangers to each other, the people involved had no prior relationship, don’t anticipate any future relationship, and were brought together just on a one-shot basis by the event underlying the case: a customer and a merchant, two drivers involved in a traffic accident, a criminal and a victim, and so on. Yet the underlying event and the subsequent judicial proceedings still create a legacy of feelings in both of those strangers, and the state does little or nothing to assuage the feelings.

Instead, at a trial the state is first concerned with determining right or wrong (Plate 16). If the case involves a contract, did or did not the defendant breach the contract? If the case involves a tort, was or was not the defendant negligent, or did the defendant at least cause the injury? Note the contrast between that first question asked by the state and the case of Malo and Billy. Billy’s relatives agreed that Malo had not been negligent, but they still requested compensation, and Malo’s employer immediately agreed to pay compensation—because the goal of both parties was to reestablish a previous relationship (in this case, a previous non-relationship) rather than to debate right or wrong. That feature of New Guinea peace-making applies to many other traditional societies as well. For example, in the words of Chief Justice Robert Yazzie of the Navajo Nation, one of the two most populous Native American communities of North America, “Western adjudication is a search for what happened and who did it; Navajo peace-making is about the effect of what happened. Who got hurt? What do they feel about it? What can be done to repair the harm?”

Once the state has resolved that first step of determining whether the defendant is legally liable in a civil dispute, the state then proceeds to the second step of calculating the damages owed by the defendant if the defendant is found to have breached the contract or been negligent or liable. The purpose of the calculation is described as “making the plaintiff whole”—i.e., insofar as is possible, to restore the plaintiff to the condition that she would have been in if there had been no breach or negligence. For instance, suppose that the seller signed a contract to sell to the buyer 100 chickens at $7 per chicken, that the seller then breached the contract by failing to deliver the chickens, and that the buyer as a result had to buy 100 chickens at the higher price of $10 per chicken on the open market, thereby forcing the buyer to spend an extra $300 above the contractual amount. In a court case the seller would be ordered to pay to the buyer those damages of $300, plus costs incurred in securing the new contract, plus perhaps interest for the lost use of that $300, thereby restoring the buyer (at least nominally) to the position in which he would have been if the seller had not breached the contract. Similarly, in the case of a tort, the court will attempt to calculate the damages, although that is more difficult to calculate for physical or emotional injury to a person than for damage to property. (I recall a lawyer friend of mine who was defending a motorboat-owner whose motorboat propeller had severed the leg of an elderly swimmer, and who argued to the jury that the value of the severed leg was modest because of the victim’s advanced age and short expected remaining lifespan even before the accident.)

Superficially, the state’s calculation of damages seems similar to compensation negotiated in New Guinea or among the Nuer. But that is not necessarily true. Whereas the standardized compensation for some New Guinea and Nuer offenses (e.g., 40 to 50 Nuer cows for taking a person’s life) could be construed as damages, in other cases non-state compensation is calculated as whatever amount the disputing parties agree on as the basis for putting behind them their injured feelings and resuming their relationship: e.g., the pigs and other goods that my Goti Village friends agreed to pay to the clans that had killed the father of my Goti friend Pius.

Defects in state civil justice

The defects in our state system of civil justice are widely discussed by lawyers, judges, plaintiffs, and defendants alike. The defects of the American system are variously more or less severe in other state societies. One problem is that court resolution of civil disputes tends to take a long time, often up to five years, because criminal cases take precedence over civil cases, and judges may get re-assigned from civil court to criminal court in order to try criminal cases. For instance, at the time that I drafted this paragraph, no civil cases were being tried in Riverside County just east of my home city of Los Angeles because of a backlog of criminal cases. That means five years of irresolution, living in limbo, and emotional torment, compared to the five days that it took to settle the case of Malo’s accidental killing of Billy. (However, the clan warfare that might have resulted if Malo’s and Billy’s case hadn’t been resolved by negotiation could have lasted much longer than five years.)

A second claimed defect of state civil justice in the U.S. is that, in most cases, it fails to require the losing party to pay the lawyers’ fees of the successful party, unless that had been specified at the outset in the contract under dispute. That failure, it is often argued, creates an asymmetry favoring the wealthier party (whether that is the plaintiff or the defendant), and placing pressure on a less wealthy plaintiff to settle for less than the actual loss, and on a less wealthy defendant to settle by paying a frivolous claim. That’s because wealthy parties threaten expensive litigation, adopt delaying tactics, and file endless discovery motions in order to wear down the other party financially. It is illogical that the goal of civil justice should be to make the aggrieved party whole, but that the loser should not be required to pay the winner’s attorney fees in the U.S. In contrast, legal systems in Britain and some other countries require the loser to pay at least some of the winner’s fees and costs.

The remaining defect of state civil justice is the most fundamental one: that it is concerned with damages, and that emotional closure and reconciliation are secondary or irrelevant. For civil disputes pitting against each other strangers who will never encounter each other again (e.g., two people whose cars collide), in some cases something could be done to promote emotional closure and avoid a life-long legacy of non-resolution, even if it merely involved offering both parties the opportunity (if they consent) to air their feelings to each other, and to perceive each other as humans with their own motives and sufferings. That can be possible even under such extreme circumstances as when one of the parties has killed a close relative of the other party. Better than no emotional exchange at all was the exchange that did take place between Gideon and Billy’s father—or the exchange between Senator Edward Kennedy and Mary Jo Kopechne’s parents, when Kennedy on his own private initiative courageously visited and looked into the faces of the parents whose daughter’s death he had caused through his own gross negligence.

Worst of all are the innumerable civil cases in which the parties in a dispute do potentially have the prospect of an on-going relationship: notably, divorcing couples with children, siblings in inheritance disputes, business partners, and neighbors. Far from helping to resolve feelings, court proceedings often make feelings worse than they were before. All of us know disputants whose relationship became poisoned for the rest of their lives by their court experience. In merely the latest in a long list of such stories among my own acquaintances, one close friend of mine and her sister were subpoenaed in an inheritance court case between her brother and her father, who were suing each other. The bitterness left by those judicial proceedings was such that my friend and her sister are now being sued by their own stepmother, and that both my friend and her sister expect never again to speak to their brother as long as they live.

One suggestion often made about how to mitigate this fundamental defect of our civil justice is to make increased use of mediation programs. They do exist, and they are often helpful. But we don’t have enough mediators and family-law judges, our mediators are undertrained, and our family courts are understaffed and underfunded. As a result, divorcing couples often end up talking to each other only through their lawyers. Anyone who has repeatedly visited family-law courts knows that the scene there can be horrible. Opposite parties in a divorce case, their lawyers, and their children may have to wait in the same waiting room with each other, and with disputants in inheritance cases. To mediate effectively, one must make the parties feel comfortable first: that’s impossible if they have been glaring at each other for hours in the same waiting room. Children get caught in the middle of arguments between divorcing parents.

A judge can and often does require parties to participate in an attempted settlement conference before letting the case proceed to trial. But it takes time and skill for a mediator to make a mediation or settlement conference work. Mediation commonly requires much more time than is allowed for a mandatory settlement conference. Even if the parties in the dispute are not going to have any future relationship, successful mediation would decrease future burdens on the court system: burdens arising from the parties going to the expense of a trial, or else being dissatisfied with the decision and coming back to court with future complaints, or settling only after a long expensive fight.

If our state societies would pay for more mediation and more family-law judges, perhaps many divorce and inheritance cases could be resolved more cheaply and with fewer hurt feelings and more quickly, because the extra money and emotional energy and time required for mediation are likely to be less than the extra money and energy and time required for bitter court proceedings in the absence of mediation. Divorcing couples who agree to it and can afford it are able to obtain those advantages by opting out of the family-law court system, through hiring retired judges to settle their dispute. The retired judge conducts a pseudo-trial and commands a high hourly fee, but that fee would otherwise be dwarfed by weeks of lawyers’ fees. The judge is there to hammer out a deal for everyone and isn’t rushed as are our judges in family courts. The hearing is predictably timed: the parties know that it will take place at a certain hour, and they don’t have to appear several hours ahead merely because they can’t predict whether the judge will be running late on previous cases on the docket, as commonly happens in divorce courts.

I don’t want to overstate the value of mediation, or to imply that it is a panacea. Mediation presents many problems of its own. Its outcome can be kept secret and so may not establish a judicial precedent or serve a broader educational purpose. Litigating parties who accept mediation know that, if mediation fails, the case will be litigated according to the usual criteria of legal right, wrong, guilt, and responsibility, so mediators do not feel entirely free to adopt different criteria. Many disputing parties want to be heard in court, do not want mediation, and resent being pressured or forced to mediate.

For example, in a famous case based on an incident in New York City on December 22, 1984, a man named Bernhard Goetz was approached by four young men whom he took to be muggers. He pulled out a gun, shot all four of them in claimed self-defense, and was subsequently indicted by a grand jury for attempted murder. His case provoked vigorous and divergent public discussion, some people praising him for having the courage to fight back, others condemning him for over-reaction and vigilantism. Only later did the background become known: Goetz had actually been mugged four years earlier by three young men who chased him and beat him severely. When one of those assailants was caught, the wily assailant filed a complaint claiming that he had instead been attacked by Goetz. Hence the court invited Goetz to a mediation hearing with his mugger. Goetz declined the invitation and was never told that the mugger was eventually jailed after committing another mugging. Goetz decided to buy a gun, having lost faith in a legal system that appeared to offer only mediation between muggers and their victims. While Goetz’s case is unusual, it remains sadly true that our courts are so overburdened that they not infrequently do propose or mandate mediation for parties who are adamantly opposed to their case being mediated. But these facts should not blind us to the potential value of mediation in many cases, and to our underinvestment in this pathway.

I’ll conclude this discussion of mediation and emotional closure by quoting comments on pros and cons by a lawyer colleague of mine, Professor Mark Grady of UCLA Law School: “Many people object that the state has no business concerning itself with damaged personal relationships and feelings. They argue that only a ‘nanny state’ would take on that task, and that for a state even to try to repair personal relationships and damaged feelings is a threat to liberty. They also argue that it is an infringement of people’s liberty to be forced to settle their differences with wrongdoers. Instead, victims should have the right to seek the state’s judgment against their adversaries and, having received that judgment, simply to walk away from those who have wronged them.

“A response is that states maintain costly systems of justice that serve highly evolved and distinctive purposes in mass, non-face-to-face societies. Nevertheless, we can learn something valuable from New Guineans without compromising the distinctive purposes of our justice systems. Once the state takes jurisdiction over a dispute, it has incurred a cost to settle that dispute. Why not at least give the parties the option to settle the dispute on a personal level as well as on a legal level? No one should require disputing parties to avail themselves of mediation systems that the state might offer them, and the systems would not necessarily replace the usual formal systems of adjudication unless the parties agreed that they should do so. Instead, mediation systems would be an adjunct and possible substitute for a more formal legal system, which would still remain available. There would be no harm in offering people this opportunity, and a lot of good could come from it. The danger, which is well illustrated by the New Guinea system, is that people could be coerced into mediation under circumstances that compromise their dignity and liberty, and that might even extend the injustice of the original wrong. The reformed system would have to safeguard against these abuses, but the possibility of these abuses is no reason wholly to neglect the possibility that human wrongs can be resolved on the human level.”

State criminal justice

Having thus compared state and non-state dispute resolution systems with respect to civil justice, let’s now turn to criminal justice. Here we immediately encounter two basic differences between state and non-state systems. First, state criminal justice is concerned with punishing crimes against the state’s laws. The purpose of state-administered punishment is to foster obedience to the state’s laws and to maintain peace within the state. A prison sentence imposed upon the criminal by the state doesn’t, and isn’t intended to, compensate the victim for his injuries. Second, as a result, state civil justice and criminal justice are separate systems, whereas those systems are not distinct in non-state societies, which are generally concerned with compensating individuals or groups for injuries—regardless of whether the injury would in a state society be considered a crime, a tort, or a breach of contract.

Just as is true of a state civil case, a state criminal case proceeds in two stages. In the first stage the court assesses whether the accused criminal is or is not guilty of one or more of the charges. That sounds black and white and seems to call for a yes-or-no answer. In practice, the decision is not so absolute, because there can be alternative charges differing in severity: a killer may be judged guilty of premeditated murder, killing of a police officer in the course of duty, killing in the course of an attempted kidnapping, killing as a spontaneous act of passion, killing in the sincere but unreasonable belief that the victim was threatening imminent and grave bodily injury, or killing as an act of temporary insanity or under conditions of diminished responsibility—with differing punishments according to the charge. In reality, many criminal cases are settled by plea-bargaining before coming to trial. But, if the case does come to trial, the charge still requires a verdict of guilty or not guilty: Ellie Nesler was found guilty of killing Daniel Driver, even though her motive of avenging the abuse of her son won her the sympathy of much of the public. In contrast, in non-state societies an injury inflicted is routinely viewed as something gray: yes, I did kill him but—I was justified, because he practiced sorcery on my child, or his cross-cousin killed my paternal uncle, or his pig damaged my garden and he refused to pay for the damages, so I owe his relatives no compensation or else lower compensation. (But similar mitigating circumstances do play a wide role at the sentencing stage of a Western criminal trial.)

If the accused is found guilty of a crime, the state then proceeds to the second stage of imposing a punishment, such as a prison sentence. The punishment’s aims include serving three purposes, on which the relative emphasis differs between different national systems of justice: deterrence, retribution, and rehabilitation. These three purposes differ from the main purpose of non-state dispute resolution, namely, to compensate the victim. Even if Daniel Driver had been sentenced to prison, that wouldn’t have compensated Ellie Nesler and her son for the trauma of the son’s sexual abuse.

One major purpose of punishment for crimes is deterrence: to deter other citizens from breaking the state’s laws, and thereby creating new victims. The wishes of the current victim and her relatives, or of the criminal and his relatives, are largely irrelevant: the punishment aims instead to serve that purpose of the state, as representative of the state’s other citizens. At most, the victim, the criminal, and their relatives and friends may be permitted to address the judge at the time of sentencing, and to express their own desires about sentencing, but the judge is free to ignore those desires.

These separate interests of the state and of the victim are illustrated by a widely publicized criminal case brought by the state of California. The film director Roman Polanski was accused of drugging, raping, and sodomizing a 13-year-old girl (Samantha Geimer) in 1977, pleaded guilty in 1978 to the felony of having sex with a minor, but then fled to Europe before he could be sentenced. Polanski’s victim, now a woman in her 40s, has said that she has forgiven him and doesn’t want him prosecuted or imprisoned. She has filed a statement in court asking for dismissal of the case. While it may at first strike us as paradoxical that the state of California should seek to imprison a criminal against the explicit wishes of the crime’s victim, the reasons for nevertheless doing so were stated forcefully in an editorial in the Los Angeles Times: “The case against Polanski was not brought to satisfy her [the victim’s] desire for justice or her need for closure. It was brought by the state of California on behalf of the people of California. Even if Geimer no longer holds a grudge against Polanski, that doesn’t mean he doesn’t pose a continuing danger to others…. Crimes are committed not just against individuals but against the community…. People accused of serious crimes must be apprehended and tried and, if convicted, must face their sentences.”

A second purpose of punishment, besides deterrence, is retribution: to enable the state to proclaim, “We, the state, are punishing the criminal, so you the victim have no excuse for trying to inflict punishment yourself.” For reasons that are much debated, imprisonment rates are higher, and punishments more severe, in the U.S. than in other Western countries. The U.S. is the only Western country still applying the death penalty. My country often imposes long-term imprisonment or even life imprisonment, which in Germany is reserved for only the most heinous crimes (e.g., postwar Germany’s worst case of serial murder, in which a nurse was convicted of killing 28 patients in a German hospital by injecting them with lethal drug mixtures). While long-term imprisonment in the U.S. has traditionally been reserved for serious crimes, the “three-strikes-and-you’re-out” policy now adopted by my state of California requires judges to impose long terms on criminals convicted of a third felony following two serious felony convictions—even when the third offense is a minor one such as stealing a pizza. Partly as a result, the amount of money that California spends on its prison system is now approaching its expenditures on higher education in its colleges and universities. Californians opposed to this budgetary allocation consider it not only a reversal of human priorities but also a bad economic policy. They argue that California’s current widely advertised economic woes might best be reduced by spending less money on keeping criminals imprisoned for long terms for minor offenses, spending more money on rehabilitating criminals and quickly returning them to productive jobs, and spending more money on educating non-imprisoned Californians to become capable of filling high-paying jobs. It is unclear whether these severe punishments in the U.S. are effective in promoting deterrence.

The remaining purpose behind punishing convicted criminals is to rehabilitate them, so that they can reenter society, resume a normal life, and make an economic contribution to society instead of imposing a heavy economic cost on society as prisoners of our costly prison system. Rehabilitation rather than retribution is the focus of European approaches to criminal punishment. For instance, a German court case forbade the showing of a documentary film accurately depicting a criminal’s role in a notorious crime—because the criminal’s right to demonstrate his rehabilitation, and to have a fair chance of making a healthy return to society after serving his prison term, was considered even more sacred than freedom of the press or the public’s right to know. Does this outlook reflect greater European concern with human dignity, nurturing, and mercy, and lower European concern with Old Testament retribution and with free speech, compared to the U.S.? And how effective, really, is rehabilitation? For instance, its effectiveness seems limited in cases of pedophiles.

Restorative justice

Missing so far from our discussion of purposes of state criminal punishment has been mention of the main purposes of state civil justice (to make the injured party whole) and of non-state dispute resolution (to restore relationships and achieve emotional closure). Both of those purposes, which address needs of a crime’s victim, are not the major goals of our criminal justice system, although there is some provision for them. In addition to furnishing testimony helpful in convicting an accused criminal, the victim or the victim’s relatives may at the time of sentencing be permitted to address the court in the criminal’s presence, and to describe the crime’s emotional impact. As for making the victim whole, some state compensation funds for victims exist, but they are generally small.

For example, the most publicized criminal case in recent American history was the trial of ex–football star O. J. Simpson for the murder of his wife Nicole and her friend Ron Goldman. After a criminal trial lasting eight months, Simpson was found not guilty. But the families of Nicole and Ron then prevailed in a civil suit against Simpson on behalf of Simpson’s and Nicole’s children and of the families, and won (but had little success in collecting) a verdict totaling about $43,000,000. Unfortunately, cases of compensation being obtainable from a civil suit are exceptional, because most criminals are not wealthy and do not have significant assets that could be attached. In traditional societies the victim’s chances of obtaining compensation are increased by the traditional philosophy of collective responsibility: as in Malo’s case, not only the perpetrator but also the perpetrator’s relatives, fellow clansmen, and associates are obliged to pay compensation. American society instead emphasizes individual responsibility over collective responsibility. In New Guinea, if my male cousin is deserted by his wife, I would be angrily demanding from the wife’s clan the refund of the portion of her bride-price that I paid to acquire her for my cousin; as an American, I am glad not to share responsibility for the success of my cousins’ marriages.

A promising approach towards bringing emotional closure in some cases, to both a criminal not condemned to death and to the surviving victim or the dead victim’s closest relative, is a program called restorative justice. It views a crime as an offense against the victim or community as well as against the state; it brings the criminal and victim together to talk directly (provided that both are willing to do so), rather than keeping them apart and having lawyers speak for them; and it encourages criminals to accept responsibility, and victims to say how they have been affected, rather than discouraging those expressions or providing little opportunity for them. The criminal and the victim (or the victim’s relative) meet in the presence of a trained mediator, who lays down ground rules such as no interrupting and no abusive language. The victim and the criminal sit face-to-face, look each other in the eye, and take turns relating to each other their life stories, their feelings, their motives, and the crime’s effect on their subsequent lives. The criminal gets a flesh-and-blood view of the harm that he has caused; the victim sees the criminal as a human with a history and motives, rather than as an incomprehensible monster; and the criminal may come to connect the dots in his own history, and to understand what set him on a criminal path.

For instance, one such encounter in California brought together a 41-year-old widow, Patty O’Reilly, and her sister Mary, with a 49-year-old prisoner, Mike Albertson. Mike was serving a 14-year prison term for killing Patty’s husband Danny two and a half years previously, by striking Danny from behind with Mike’s truck while Danny was bicycling. Over the course of four hours, Patty told Mike her initial feelings of hatred towards him, the details of her husband’s last words to her, how she and her two young daughters were brought the news of Danny’s death by a sheriff’s deputy, and how she was still reminded every day of Danny by such seeming trivia as hearing a song on the radio or seeing a bicyclist. Mike told Patty his life story of sexual abuse by his father, drug addiction, a broken back, running out of painkiller pills on the night of the killing, phoning and being rejected by his girlfriend, setting off drunk in his truck to check himself in at a hospital, seeing a bicyclist—and confessing that he may have hit Danny on purpose, in rage against his father, who had repeatedly raped him, and against his mother, who hadn’t stopped it. At the end of the four hours, Patty summed up the process by saying, “Forgiving is hard, but not forgiving is harder.” Over the next week she felt unburdened, empowered, and strong from having watched across a table her husband’s killer see the devastation that he had caused. Thereafter, Mike felt alternately drained, depressed, and uplifted by Patty’s willingness to meet and forgive him. Mike kept on his bedside table a card that Patty had brought him from her daughter Siobhan: “Dear Mr. Albertson, Today is the 16th of August and I will be 10 years old on September first. I just want to make sure you know that I forgive you. I do still miss my Dad, I think that’s a life-long thing. I hope you’re feeling OK. Bye bye, Siobhan.”

Such restorative justice programs have been operating for up to 20 years in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and various American states. There is still much experimentation going on—e.g., as to whether the meeting should involve just the criminal and the victim or should also involve relatives, friends, and teachers; whether the meeting takes place at an early stage (soon after arrest) or at a late stage (in prison, as in the case of Patty and Mike); and whether there is an effort at restitution by the criminal to the victim. There are many anecdotal accounts of outcomes, and some control tests that randomly assign criminals to one of several alternative programs or else to a control group with no such programs, and that then evaluate outcomes statistically. Favorable results reported in cumulative statistical analyses of cases by some programs include lower rates of further offenses being committed by the criminal, less severe offenses if any are committed, a decrease in the victim’s feelings of anger and fear, and an increase in the victim’s feelings of safety and closure. Not surprisingly, better results are obtained in cases in which the criminal is willing to meet the victim, actively participates in the meeting, and realizes the harm that he has done, than in cases in which the criminal unwillingly participates in a court-mandated meeting.

Naturally, restorative justice is not a panacea for all criminals and victims. It requires a trained facilitator. Some criminals do not feel remorse, and some victims would feel traumatized rather than helped by re-living the crime in the criminal’s presence. Restorative justice is at best an adjunct to, not a substitute for, our criminal justice system. But it holds promise.

Advantages and their price

What conclusions can we draw from these comparisons of dispute resolution in states and in small-scale societies? On the one hand, in this area of dispute resolution as in the other areas to be discussed in succeeding chapters of this book, we should not naively idealize small-scale societies, view them as uniformly admirable, overstate their advantages, and castigate state government as at best a necessary evil. On the other hand, many small-scale societies do possess some features that we could profitably incorporate into our state societies.

At the outset, let me prevent misunderstanding and reiterate that dispute resolution even within modern industrial states already contains areas that utilize tribal-like dispute resolution mechanisms. When we have a dispute with a merchant, most of us don’t immediately hire a lawyer or sue; we begin by discussing and negotiating with the merchant, perhaps even asking a friend to contact the merchant on our behalf if we feel too angry or helpless ourselves. I already mentioned the many professions and groups within industrial societies that have their own routine procedures for dispute resolution. In rural areas and other small enclaves where everyone knows everyone else and expects relationships to be life-long, motivation and pressure to settle disputes informally are strong. Even when we do resort to lawyers, some disputants expecting an on-going relationship—such as some divorcing parents of children, or business partners or counterparts—end up using the lawyers to reestablish a non-hostile relationship. Many states besides Papua New Guinea are sufficiently new or weak that much of the society continues to function in its traditional ways.

With that as background, let’s now recognize three inherent advantages of state justice when it functions effectively. First and foremost, a fundamental problem of virtually all small-scale societies is that, because they lack a central political authority exerting a monopoly of retaliatory force, they are unable to prevent recalcitrant members from injuring other members, and also unable to prevent aggrieved members from taking matters into their own hands and seeking to achieve their goals by violence. But violence invites counter-violence. As we shall see in the next two chapters, most small-scale societies thereby become trapped in cycles of violence and warfare. State governments and strong chiefdoms render a huge service by breaking those cycles and asserting a monopoly of force. Of course, I don’t claim that any state is completely successful at curbing violence, and I acknowledge that states themselves to varying degrees employ violence against their citizens. Instead, I note that, the more effective the control exercised by the state, the more limited the non-state violence.

That’s an inherent advantage of state government, and a major reason why large societies in which strangers regularly encounter each other have tended to evolve strong chiefs and then state government. Whenever we find ourselves inclined to admire dispute resolution in small-scale societies, we have to remind ourselves that it consists of two prongs, of which one prong is admirable peaceful negotiation and the other prong is regrettable violence and war. State dispute resolution also has its own two prongs of which one is peaceful negotiation, but the state’s confrontational second prong is merely a trial. Even the most horrible trial is preferable to a civil war or a cycle of revenge murders. That fact may make members of small-scale societies more willing than members of state societies to settle their private disputes by negotiation, and to focus those negotiations on emotional balance and the restoration of relationships rather than on vindicating rights.

A second advantage or potential advantage of state-administered justice over do-it-yourself traditional justice involves power relationships. A disputant in a small-scale society needs to have allies if his bargaining position is to be credible, and if he really wants to collect those cattle that the Nuer leopard-skin chief has proposed as appropriate compensation. This reminds me of an influential article about Western state justice, entitled “Bargaining in the Shadow of the Law”—meaning that mediation in states takes place with both parties aware that, if mediation fails, the dispute will be settled in court by the application of laws. By the same token, compensation negotiations in small-scale societies take place “in the shadow of war”—meaning that both parties know that, if the negotiation is unsuccessful, the alternative is war or violence. That knowledge creates a non-level playing field in small-scale societies and gives a strong bargaining advantage to the party expected to be able to marshal more allies in the eventuality of war.

Theoretically, state justice aims to create a level playing field, to offer equal justice to all, and to prevent a powerful or rich party from abusing her power so as to obtain an unfair settlement. Of course, I and every reader will immediately protest: “Theoretically, but…!” In reality, a rich litigant enjoys an advantage in civil and criminal cases. She can afford to hire expensive lawyers and expert witnesses. She can pressure a less affluent adversary into settling, by filing extensive discovery motions in order to drive up the adversary’s legal costs, and by filing suits that have little merit but that will be costly for the other party to contest. Some state justice systems are corrupt and favor wealthy or politically well-connected parties.

Yes, it’s unfortunately true that the more powerful disputant enjoys an unfair advantage in state justice systems, as in small-scale societies. But states at least provide some protection to weak parties, whereas small-scale societies provide little or none. In well-governed states a weak victim can still report a crime to the police and will often or usually be heard; a poor person starting a business can seek the state’s help in enforcing contracts; a poor defendant in a criminal case is assigned a court-paid lawyer; and a poor plaintiff with a strong case may be able to find a private lawyer willing to accept the case on contingency (i.e., a lawyer willing to be paid a fraction of the award if the case is successful).

Still a third advantage of state justice involves its goal of establishing right and wrong, and punishing or assessing civil penalties against wrong-doers, so as to deter other members of the society from committing crimes or wrongs. Deterrence is an explicit goal of our criminal justice system. In effect, it’s also a goal of our tort system of civil justice, which scrutinizes causes of and responsibility for injuries, and which thereby seeks to discourage injury-provoking behavior by making everyone aware of the civil judgments that they may have to pay if they commit such behaviors. For example, if Malo had been sued for civil damages for killing Billy under an effective state justice system, Malo’s lawyers would have argued (with good chances of success) that the responsibility for Billy’s death did not lie with Malo, who was driving safely, but instead with the mini-bus driver who let Billy off in the face of on-coming traffic, and with Billy’s uncle Genjimp, who was waiting to greet Billy on the opposite side of a busy road. An actual case in Los Angeles analogous to that of Billy and Malo was that of Schwartz v. Helms Bakery. A small boy was killed by a car while running across a busy street to buy a chocolate doughnut from a Helms Bakery truck; the boy had asked the driver to wait while the boy ran across the street to his house to fetch money; the driver agreed and remained parked awaiting the boy on that busy street; and the court held that a jury should decide whether Helms Bakery was partly responsible for the boy’s death, through the driver’s negligence.

Such tort cases put pressure on citizens of state societies to be constantly alert to the possibility that their negligence may contribute to causing an accident. In contrast, the private negotiated settlement between Billy’s clan and Malo’s colleagues provided no incentive to New Guinea adults and mini-bus drivers to reflect on risks to schoolchildren running across streets. Despite the millions of car trips daily on the streets of Los Angeles, and despite the few police cars patrolling our streets, most Los Angelenos drive safely most of the time, and only a tiny percentage of those millions of daily trips end in accidents or injuries. One reason is the deterrent power of our civil and criminal justice system.

But let me again prevent misunderstanding: I’m not praising state justice as uniformly superior. States pay a price for those three advantages. State criminal justice systems exist primarily to promote goals of the state: to reduce private violence, to foster obedience to the state’s laws, to protect the public as a whole, to rehabilitate criminals, and to punish and deter crimes. The state’s focus on those goals tends to diminish the state’s attention to goals of individual citizens involved in dispute resolution in small-scale societies: the restoration of relationships (or of non-relationships), and reaching emotional closure. It is not inevitable that states ignore these goals, but they often do neglect them because of their focus on the state’s other goals. In addition, there are other defects of state justice systems that are not so inherent, but are nevertheless widespread: limited or no compensation through the criminal justice systems to victims of a crime (unless through a separate civil suit); and, in civil suits, the slowness of resolution, the difficulty of monetizing personal and emotional injuries, the lack of provision (in the U.S.) for recouping of attorney fees by a successful plaintiff, and the lack of reconciliation (or often, worse yet, increased bad feelings) between disputants.

We have seen that state societies could mitigate these problems by adopting practices inspired by procedures of small-scale societies. In our civil justice system we could invest more money in the training and hiring of mediators and the availability of judges. We could put more effort into mediation. We could award attorney fees to successful plaintiffs under some circumstances. In our criminal justice system we could experiment more with restorative justice. In the American criminal justice system we could re-assess whether European models emphasizing rehabilitation more and retribution less would make better sense for criminals, for society as a whole, and for the economy.

All of these proposals have been much discussed. They pose difficulties of their own. I hope that, with wider knowledge of how small-scale societies resolve disputes, legal scholars may figure out how better to incorporate those admired procedures of small-scale societies into our own systems.

The Dani War

This chapter will serve to introduce traditional warfare by recounting a rather ordinary series of battles and raids among New Guinea’s Dani people, unusual only in that they were actually observed and filmed by anthropologists. The Dani are one of New Guinea’s most numerous and densest populations, centered on the Grand Valley of the Baliem River. Between 1909 and 1937, eight Western expeditions contacted and briefly visited outlying Dani groups or their neighbors without entering the valley itself. As mentioned in Chapter 1, the valley and its teeming population were “discovered”—i.e., first spotted by Europeans, about 46,000 years after the arrival of ancestral New Guineans—on June 23, 1938, from an airplane carrying out reconnaissance flights for the Archbold Expedition. First contact face-to-face followed on August 4, when an expedition patrol led by Captain Teerink walked into the valley. After the Archbold Expedition left the valley in December 1938, further contact of Baliem Dani with Europeans (apart from a brief U.S. Army rescue of a crashed airplane crew in 1945) was postponed until 1954 and subsequent years, when several mission stations and a Dutch government patrol post were established in the valley.

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

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.

On April 15 a battle challenge was again issued and accepted, and about 400 warriors fought until the onset of darkness compelled everyone to go home. About 20 men were wounded on each side. Three Hubikiak allies of the Widaia had to be carried away, accompanied by derisive laughter and jeers from the Wilihiman, who shouted out remarks such as “Make those jerks walk themselves, they’re not pigs!…Go home, your wives will cook potatoes for you.” One of those wounded Hubikiak died six weeks later.

On April 27 Ekitamalek, the Gosi-Alua man wounded on April 10, died and was cremated. The Widaia noticed that no Gosi-Alua and few Wilihiman were out in their gardens, so 30 Widaia crossed a river into Wilihiman land and waited in ambush. When no one appeared, the Widaia knocked over a Wilihiman watch-tower and went home (Plate 13).

On May 4 the Wilihiman and their allies issued a battle challenge and waited at a preferred battlefield, but no Widaia appeared, so they went home.

On May 10 or May 11 the father of Ekitamalek led a raid of Gosi-Alua, Walalua, and many Wilihiman men into Widaia gardens while the remaining Wilihiman men and women worked in their gardens and behaved as if everything were normal, so that the Widaia wouldn’t suspect an ambush. The raiders spotted two Widaia men working in a Widaia garden while a third stood guard on top of a watch-tower. For hours, the raiders crept closer until the Widaia man on watch spotted them at a distance of 50 meters. All three Widaia fled, but the attackers managed to catch one named Huwai, pierced him repeatedly with spears, and fled. A counter-ambush that the Widaia staged in Wilihiman territory was unsuccessful. The wounded Widaia man died later that day. Three Wilihiman were lightly wounded in the day’s action. The Wilihiman now felt that they had avenged the death of their Gosi-Alua ally, and they celebrated by dancing into the night.

On May 25 Gutelu warriors on their alliance’s northern front killed a man of the Asuk-Balek Confederation, allied with the Widaia and figuring in the August 25 death to be described below.

On May 26 both sides issued challenges, carried out raids, and fought until late in the afternoon, whereupon they went home. Twelve Wilihiman were wounded, none of them seriously.

On May 29 the Widaia reported that their warrior wounded on April 15 had just died, leading the Wilihiman to launch a celebratory dance that had to be interrupted because of a report of a Widaia raid on the northern frontier.

The Widaia were now feeling restless because they had suffered two deaths without being able to take revenge. On June 4 they sent out an ambush party that developed into a battle involving a total of about 800 men, broken off because of darkness. Three Wilihiman were lightly wounded.

A full-fledged battle developed on June 7, involving 400 or 500 warriors on each side. Amidst a hail of spears and arrows from opposing groups 20 meters apart, hotheads dashed to within 5 meters of the enemy, constantly darting to avoid being hit. About 20 men were wounded.

A Widaia raid on June 8 was inferred from footprints but not spotted.

On June 10 the Wilihiman devoted themselves to a ceremony, and no one was out in the gardens or manning the watch-towers. In the late afternoon of the hot day a Wilihiman man and three young boys went to drink cold water at the river, where they were surprised by 30 Widaia divided into two groups. When the first group popped out, the four Wilihiman fled, whereupon the second group of Widaia in hiding attempted to cut them off. The Wilihiman man and two of the boys managed to escape, but Wejakhe, the third boy, could not run fast because of an injured leg, was caught, was severely wounded with spears, and died that night.

On June 15 Wejakhe’s Wilihiman relatives staged an unsuccessful raid.

On June 22 the Widaia shouted out a challenge, and a battle with about 300 men on each side developed along with an ambush. Four men were lightly wounded. A Dloko-Mabel man was seriously wounded by an arrow point that broke off in his shoulder and that his companions attempted to extract, first by gripping it with their teeth and pulling, then by operating (without anesthetic) with a bamboo knife.

On July 5, after two weeks without fighting, the Wilihiman raided a Widaia garden. A Wilihiman man named Jenokma, who was faster than his companions, impetuously sprinted ahead after a group of six fleeing Widaia, was cut off, and was speared. His companions fled, and the Widaia carried off his corpse but brought it back that evening and set it down in the no-man’s land for the Wilihiman to retrieve. Three Gosi-Alua allies of the Wilihiman were lightly wounded. The Wilihiman were now depressed: they had hoped to make a kill, but instead it was they who had just suffered another death. An old Wilihiman woman lamented, “Why are you trying to kill the Widaia?” A Wilihiman man replied, “Those people are our enemies. Why shouldn’t we kill them?—they’re not human.”

On July 12 the Wilihiman spent all day waiting in ambush until they issued an open challenge around 5:00 P.M. However, it was a rainy day, so the Widaia didn’t accept the challenge or go out into their gardens.

On July 28 the Widaia staged a raid that was spotted by a group of eight Wilihiman men at a watch-tower. The Wilihiman hid themselves nearby. Not realizing that there were any Wilihiman around, the Widaia came to their tower, and one of them climbed it for a look. At that point the hidden Wilihiman jumped out, the Widaia on the ground fled, and the one man up on the tower attempted to jump down but wasn’t fast enough and was caught and killed. That evening the Wilihiman returned his body to the Widaia.

On August 2 a small battle was provoked when a Widaia pig either was stolen by the Wilihiman or strayed from their territory.

On August 6 a large battle developed between the Wilihiman, the Widaia, and allies on both sides. A parallel battle took place between Widaia and Wilihiman boys as young as six years old, standing on opposite sides of a river, firing arrows at each other, and urged on by older men. Only five men were lightly wounded, because the battle degenerated into more name-calling than fighting. Some sample insults: “You are women, you are cowards.” “Why do you have so many more women than your low status deserves?” “I have five wives, and I’m going to get five more, because I live on my own land. You are landless fugitives, that’s why you have no wives.”

On August 16 another large battle drawing in allies on both sides took place. At least 20 men were wounded, one possibly seriously by an arrow shot into his belly. The Wilihiman now felt tense, pressured by their inability to avenge their two recent dead, and under a collective obsession to kill an enemy quickly. The spirits of their ancestors wanted revenge, which they themselves had not delivered. They felt that ancestral spirits were no longer supporting them, and that they depended only on themselves; that fear lowered their desire to fight.

On August 24 a Widaia woman unhappy with her husband fled to Wilihiman land in order to seek refuge. A group of Wilihiman wanted to kill her to avenge Jenokma’s death on July 5, but they were dissuaded from doing so.

On August 25, as I related in Chapter 2, four Asuk-Balek men from the other side of the Baliem River came to visit relatives of two of the men in the Dloko-Mabel area. They ran into a Wilihiman group, who immediately realized that these were allies of their enemies, and that the two who had no local relatives should be killed. One of the two succeeded in fleeing, but the other was overpowered and killed. As Wilihiman men dragged off the dying Asuk-Balek, young boys ran alongside him, piercing his body with tiny spears. The killing triggered wild rejoicing and singing everywhere among the Wilihiman, followed by a celebratory dance. The Wilihiman concluded that the Asuk-Balek had been steered to them by their ancestral spirits, or else by Jenokma’s ghost. Even though the revenge was not tit-for-tat (the death of just one enemy for the earlier deaths of two Wilihiman), tension decreased. The killing of even one enemy was the surest sign that ancestral spirits were now again helping them.

In early September a Widaia raid killed a young boy named Digiliak, while a Gutelu raid killed two Widaia. On the next day, warfare was abruptly ended on the Gutelu southern frontier by the establishment of a Dutch patrol post there, but it continued on another Gutelu frontier.

Each of the actions described so far produced only limited tangible consequences, because few people died and no population was driven out of its homeland. Five years later, on June 4, 1966, a large-scale massacre took place. Its origins lay in tensions within the Gutelu Alliance, between the alliance’s leader, Gutelu of the Dloko-Mabel Confederation, and jealous leaders of the allied Wilihiman-Walalua and Gosi-Alua Confederations. Several decades previously, the latter two confederations had been at war with the Dloko-Mabel Confederation until a switch of alliances. It is unclear whether Gutelu himself planned the attack on his former enemies, or whether he was unable to restrain hotheads among his own people. If the latter interpretation were true, it would illustrate a recurrent theme in tribal societies that lack the strong leadership and monopolization of force characterizing chiefdom and state societies. The attack was carefully scheduled for a day when the local missionary and Indonesian police (who had gained control of western New Guinea from the Dutch in 1962) happened to be away. Dloko-Mabel warriors and other northern members of the Gutelu Alliance snuck across the Elogeta River at dawn under cover of fog to attack the alliance’s southern members. Within an hour, 125 southern adults and children of both sexes were dead or dying, dozens of settlements were burning, and other alliances alerted to the impending attack joined in to steal pigs. The southerners would have been exterminated except for help that they received from another alliance further to the south that had formerly been their allies. The result, besides all those deaths, was a flight of southerners further towards the south, and a split in the Gutelu Alliance between southerners and northerners. Such massacres are infrequent events with big consequences. Karl Heider was told of four other such massacres, burnings of villages, pig plundering, and population shifts between the 1930s and 1962.

The war’s death toll

All of the fighting between April and early September 1961 resulted in only about 11 deaths on the southern frontier. Even the massacre of June 4, 1966, produced a death toll of only 125. To us survivors of the 20th century and two world wars, such numbers are so low as not even to be worth dignifying with the name of war. Think of some of the far higher death tolls of modern state history: 2,996 Americans killed within one hour in the World Trade Center attacks of September 11, 2001; 20,000 British soldiers killed on a single day, July 1, 1916, at the Battle of the Somme during World War I, mowed down as they charged across open ground against German positions heavily defended by machine guns; about 100,000 Japanese killed on or after August 6, 1945, by the American atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima (Plate 37); and over 50,000,000 total deaths as a result of World War II. By these standards, the Dani fighting that I just summarized was a tiny war, if it is considered a war at all.

Yes, as measured by the absolute number of people killed, the Dani War was indeed tiny. But the nations involved in World War II were far more populous, and offered far more potential victims, than did the two alliances involved in the Wilihiman-Widaia war. Those alliances numbered perhaps 8,000 people in all, while the major participants in World War II had populations ranging from tens of millions to nearly a billion. The relative death toll of the Dani War—the number of Dani killed as a proportion of the total population involved—rivaled or eclipsed the casualty rates suffered by the U.S., European countries, Japan, or China in the world wars. For example, the 11 deaths suffered by the two Dani alliances on the Gutelu southern front alone, in the six months between April and September 1961, represented about 0.14% of the alliances’ population. That’s higher than the percentage death toll (0.10%) from the bloodiest battle on the Pacific front during World War II: the three-month struggle for Okinawa, employing bombers and kamikaze planes and artillery and flame-throwers, in which about 264,000 people (23,000 American soldiers, 91,000 Japanese soldiers, and 150,000 Okinawan civilians) died, out of a total American/Japanese/Okinawan population then of around 250,000,000. The 125 men, women, and children killed within an hour in the Dani massacre of June 4, 1966, represented about 5% of the targeted population (about 2,500), the southern confederations of the Gutelu Alliance. To match that percentage, the Hiroshima atomic bomb would have had to kill 4,000,000 rather than 100,000 Japanese, and the World Trade Center attack would have had to kill 15,000,000 rather than 2,996 Americans.

By world standards, the Dani War was tiny only because the Dani population at risk of being killed was tiny. By the standards of the local population involved, the Dani War was huge. In the next chapter we shall see that that conclusion also applies to traditional warfare in general.

Definitions of war

Traditional warfare, as illustrated by the Dani War described in the previous chapter, has been widespread but not universal among small-scale societies. It raises many questions that have been hotly debated. For example, how should war be defined, and do so-called tribal wars really constitute wars at all? How do the death tolls from warfare in small-scale societies compare to death tolls from state warfare? Does warfare increase or decrease when small-scale societies become contacted and influenced by Europeans and other more centralized societies? If fighting between groups of chimpanzees, lions, wolves, and other social animals furnishes precedents for human warfare, does that suggest a genetic basis of warfare? Among human societies, are there some especially peaceful ones? If so, why? And: what are the motives and causes of traditional warfare?

Let’s begin with the question of how to define warfare. Human violence assumes many forms, only some of which are normally taken to constitute war. Anyone will agree that a battle between large armies of trained professional soldiers in the service of rival state governments that have issued formal declarations of war does constitute war. Most of us would also agree that there are forms of human violence that don’t constitute war, such as individual homicides (the killing of one individual by another individual belonging to the same political unit), or family feuds within the same political unit (such as the feud between the Hatfield and McCoy families of the eastern United States beginning around 1880). Borderline cases include recurrent violence between rival groups within the same political unit, such as fighting between urban gangs (commonly referred to as “gang warfare”), between drug cartels, or between political factions whose fighting has not yet reached the stage of declared civil war (such as the fighting between armed militias of fascists and socialists in Italy and Germany leading up to Mussolini’s and Hitler’s assumptions of power). Where should we draw the line?

The answer to that question may depend on the purpose of one’s study. To future soldiers in training at a state-sponsored military college, it may be appropriate to exclude from a definition of warfare Chapter 3’s stories of violence between rival Dani alliances. However, for our purposes in this book, which is concerned with the whole spectrum of related phenomena observed from the smallest human bands of 20 people to the largest states of over a billion people, we must define warfare in a way that doesn’t define traditional warfare between small bands out of existence. As Steven LeBlanc has argued, “Definitions of war must not be dependent on group size or methods of fighting if they are to be useful in studying past warfare…. Many scholars define warfare in such a way that it refers to something that only complex societies employing metal tools can have [i.e., pitched battles and professional soldiers]. Anything else—say, a raid or two now and then—is not ‘real’ warfare, they believe, but is something more akin to game playing and not a subject of much concern. Such an approach or attitude, however, confuses the methods of war with the results of war…. Does conflict between independent political units lead to significant deaths and loss of territory, while resulting in some territory being rendered useless because it’s too dangerous to live in? Are people spending a great deal of time and energy defending themselves?…If fighting results in significant impacts on people, it is war regardless of how the fighting is conducted.” From that perspective, war should be defined sufficiently broadly so as to include the Dani fighting described in Chapter 3.

Consider one fairly typical definition of war, that from the Encyclopaedia Britannica’s 15th edition: “A state of usually open and declared armed hostile conflict between political units, such as states or nations or between rival political factions of the same state or nation. War is characterized by intentional violence on the part of large bodies of individuals who are expressly organized and trained to participate in such violence…. War is generally understood to embrace only armed conflicts on a fairly large scale, usually excluding conflicts in which fewer than 50,000 combatants are involved.” Like many other apparently common-sense definitions of war, this one is much too restrictive for our purposes, because it requires “large bodies of individuals who are expressly organized and trained,” and it thereby refuses to admit the possibility of war in small band societies. Its arbitrary requirement of at least 50,000 combatants is more than six times the entire population (men warriors, women, and children) involved in Chapter 3’s Dani War, and far larger than most of the small-scale societies discussed in this book.

Hence scholars studying small-scale societies have come up with various alternative broader definitions of war, similar to each other and usually requiring three elements. One element is violence carried out by groups of any size, but not by single individuals. (A killing carried out by one individual is considered a murder, not an act of war.) Another element is that the violence is between groups belonging to two different political units, not belonging to the same political unit. The remaining element is that the violence must be sanctioned by the whole political unit, even if only some members of the unit carry out the violence. Thus, the killings between the Hatfield and McCoy families didn’t constitute war, because both families belonged to the same political unit (the U.S.), and the U.S. as a whole did not approve of that family feud. These elements may be combined into a short definition of war that I shall use in this book, and that is similar to definitions formulated by other scholars of small-scale as well as state societies: “War is recurrent violence between groups belonging to rival political units, and sanctioned by the units.”

Sources of information

Chapter 3’s account of Dani warfare might suggest that it’s straightforward to study traditional war: send out graduate students and a film crew, observe and film battles, count the wounded and dead warriors being carried back, and interview participants for more details. That’s the evidence available to us for Dani warfare. If we had hundreds of such studies, there would be no arguments about traditional war’s reality.

In fact, for several obvious reasons, direct observations of traditional war by scholars carrying cameras are exceptional, and there is some controversy about its extent in the absence of European influence. As Europeans expanded over the globe from AD 1492 onwards and encountered and conquered non-European peoples, one of the first things that European governments did was to suppress traditional warfare: for the safety of Europeans themselves, and to administer the conquered areas, and as part of a perceived civilizing mission. By the time that the science of anthropology entered the era of abundant well-funded field studies and graduate students after World War II, warfare among traditional small-scale societies had become largely confined to the island of New Guinea and to parts of South America. It had ended much earlier in other Pacific islands, North America, Aboriginal Australia, Africa, and Eurasia, although modern forms of it have recently been resurfacing in some areas, especially in Africa and New Guinea.

Even in New Guinea and South America, recent opportunities for anthropologists to observe traditional warfare first-hand have been limited. Governments don’t want the problems and publicity resulting from unarmed vulnerable outsiders being attacked by warring tribespeople. Governments also don’t want anthropologists to be armed, to be the first representatives of state societies to enter an unpacified tribal area, and to try to end fighting by force themselves. Hence both in New Guinea and in South America there have been government restrictions on travel until an area is considered officially pacified and safe for anyone to visit. Nevertheless, some scholars and missionaries have succeeded in working in areas where fighting was still going on. Notable examples were the observers in 1961 in the Dani area, where there already was a Dutch patrol post established in the Baliem Valley, but where the Harvard Expedition was permitted to operate beyond the area of government control; the Kuegler family’s work among the Fayu people of western New Guinea beginning in 1979; and Napoleon Chagnon’s work among the Yanomamo Indians of Venezuela and Brazil. Even in those studies that did yield some first-hand observations of warfare, however, much or most of the detail was still not observed directly by the Westerner writing about it, but was instead acquired second-hand from local informants: e.g., Jan Broekhuijse’s detailed accounts of who in each Dani battle was wounded under what circumstances in which part of the body.

Most of our information about traditional warfare is entirely second-hand and based on accounts given by participants to Western visitors, or else is based on first-hand observations by Europeans (such as government officers, explorers, and traders) who were not trained scientists gathering data for doctoral dissertations. For instance, many New Guineans have reported to me their own experiences in traditional warfare. However, in all my visits to Australian-administered eastern New Guinea (now independent Papua New Guinea) and Indonesian-administered western New Guinea, I have never personally witnessed New Guineans attacking other New Guineans. The Australian and Indonesian governments would never have permitted me to enter areas where fighting was still going on, even if I had wanted to do so, which I didn’t.

Most of the Westerners who did observe and describe traditional warfare have not been professional scholars. For instance, Sabine Kuegler, daughter of missionaries Klaus and Doris Kuegler, described in her popular book Child of the Jungle how, when she was six years old, a fight with bows and arrows erupted between the Tigre clan of the Fayu (among whom her family was living) and visitors from the Sefoidi clan, and how she saw arrows flying around her and wounded men being carried away in canoes. Similarly, the Spanish priest Juan Crespí, a member of the Gaspar de Portolá Expedition, which was the first overland European expedition to reach the Chumash Indians on the coast of southern California, in 1769–1770, wrote in detail about groups of Chumash shooting arrows at each other.

A problem associated with all of these accounts of traditional warfare by outside (usually European) observers, whether anthropologists or laypeople, is reminiscent of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle of physics: the observation itself perturbs the phenomenon observed. In anthropology this means that the mere presence of outsiders inevitably has large effects on previously “untouched” peoples. State governments routinely adopt a conscious policy of ending traditional warfare: for example, the first goal of 20th-century Australian patrol officers in the Territory of Papua and New Guinea, on entering a new area, was to stop warfare and cannibalism. Non-government outsiders may achieve that same result in different ways. For instance, Klaus Kuegler eventually had to insist that his host Fayu clan stop fighting around his house and go somewhere else to shoot each other, otherwise he and his family would have to leave for their own safety and peace of mind. The Fayu agreed, and gradually stopped fighting altogether.

Those are examples of Europeans intentionally ending or decreasing tribal fighting, but there are also claims of Europeans intentionally provoking tribal fighting. There are also many ways in which outsiders, through their activities or mere presence, may unintentionally increase or decrease fighting. Thus, whenever an outside visitor reports observations of traditional warfare (or lack of warfare), there is inevitable uncertainty about how much fighting there would have been if no outside observer had been present. I shall return to this question later in this chapter.

An alternative approach has been to scrutinize evidence of tribal fighting preserved in the archaeological record laid down before the arrival of outsiders. This approach carries the advantage of removing the influence of contemporary outside observers entirely. However, in analogy with the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, we gain that advantage at the cost of a disadvantage: increased uncertainty about the facts, because fighting was not observed directly nor was it described on the basis of reports of local eyewitnesses, but it instead had to be inferred from archaeological evidence, which is subject to various uncertainties. One undeniable type of archaeological evidence for fighting is piles of skeletons, thrown together without the usual hallmarks of intentional proper burial, with cut marks or breaks on bones recognizably made by weapons or tools. Such marks include bones with imbedded arrow points, bones with cut marks made by a sharp weapon such as an ax, skulls with long straight cut marks indicative of scalping, or skulls with the first two vertebrae attached as normally results from decapitation (e.g., for head-hunting). For instance, at Talheim in southwestern Germany, Joachim Wahl and Hans König studied 34 skeletons of what turned out to be identifiable as 18 adults (nine men, seven women, and two of uncertain sex) and 16 children. They had been heaped haphazardly around 5000 BC in a pit without the usual grave goods associated with respectful burial by relatives. Unhealed cut marks on the right rear surfaces of 18 skulls showed that those people had died of blows administered from behind by at least six different axes, evidently wielded by right-handed assailants. The victims were of all ages from young children to a man of about 60. Evidently, an entire group consisting of half a dozen families had been massacred simultaneously by a much larger group of attackers.

Other types of archaeological evidence for warfare include finds of weapons, armor and shields, and fortifications. While some weapons aren’t unequivocal signs of war, because spears and bows and arrows can be used to hunt animals as well as to kill people, battle axes and piles of large slingshot missiles do provide evidence of war, because they are used only or mainly against people, not against animals. Armor and shields are similarly employed only in war, not in hunting animals. Their use in war has been described ethnographically among many living traditional peoples, including New Guineans, Aboriginal Australians, and Inuit. Hence finds of similar armor and shields in archaeological sites are evidence of fighting in the past. Further archaeological signs of warfare are fortifications, such as walls, moats, defensible gates, and towers for launching missiles against enemy attempts to scale walls. For instance, when Europeans began to settle in New Zealand in the early 1800s, New Zealand’s indigenous Maori population had hill forts, called pa, used initially to fight each other and then eventually also to fight Europeans. About a thousand Maori pa are known, many of them excavated archaeologically and dated to many centuries before European arrival, but similar to the ones that Europeans saw in use. Hence there is no doubt that Maori were fighting each other long before European arrival.

Finally, other archaeological settlement sites are on hilltop, cliff-top, or cliff-face locations that make no sense except for defense against enemy assault. Familiar examples include Anasazi Indian settlements at Mesa Verde and elsewhere in the U.S. Southwest, on cliff ledges and overhangs accessible only by ladders. Their positions high above the valley floor meant that water and other supplies had to be carried hundreds of feet up to them. When Europeans arrived in the Southwest, Indians used such sites as retreats to hide or protect themselves against European attackers. It’s therefore assumed that cliff dwellings dated archaeologically to many centuries before European arrival were similarly used for defense against Indian attackers, especially as recourse to such sites increased with time as population density and evidence of violence were increasing. If all of this archaeological evidence weren’t enough, rock paintings dating back to the Upper Pleistocene show fighting between opposing groups, depict people being speared, and depict groups of people fighting each other with bows, arrows, shields, spears, and clubs. Sophisticated later but still pre-European art works in this tradition are the famous Maya wall paintings at Bonampak, from a society around AD 800, depicting battles and torture of prisoners in realistic gory detail.

Thus, we have three extensive bodies of information—from modern observers, from archaeologists, and from art historians—about traditional warfare, in small-scale societies of all sizes, ranging from small bands to large chiefdoms and early states.

Forms of traditional warfare

Warfare has assumed multiple forms, both in the past and today. Traditional warfare utilized all basic tactics that are now used by modern states and that were technologically possible for tribal societies. (Naturally, the means for aerial warfare were not available to tribes, and naval warfare with specialized warships is not documented until the emergence of state governments after 3000 BC.) One familiar and still-practised tactic is the pitched battle, in which large numbers of opposing combatants face off against each other and fight openly. This is the first tactic that comes to mind for us when we think of modern state warfare—famous examples including the Battles of Stalingrad, Gettysburg, and Waterloo. Except for scale and weapons, such battles would have been familiar to the Dani, whose battles developing spontaneously on June 7, August 2, and August 6, 1961, I described in Chapter 3.

The next familiar tactic is the raid, in which a group of warriors small enough to conceal itself, advancing under cover or at night, makes a surprise attack on enemy territory with the limited goal of killing some enemies or destroying enemy property and then retreating, but without the expectation of destroying the whole opposing army or permanently occupying enemy territory. This is perhaps the most widespread form of traditional warfare, documented in most traditional societies, such as the Nuer raids against the Dinka, or the Yanomamo raids against each other. I described Dani raids that occurred on May 10, May 26, May 29, June 8, June 15, July 5, and July 28, 1961. Examples of raids, by infantry and now also by ships and airplanes, abound in state warfare as well.

Related to raids, and also widespread in traditional warfare, are ambushes, another form of surprise attack in which the aggressors, instead of moving by stealth, hide themselves and remain in wait at a site to which unsuspecting enemies are likely to come. I described Dani ambushes that took place on April 27, May 10, June 4, June 10, July 12, and July 28, 1961. Ambushes remain equally popular in modern warfare, abetted by radar and code-breaking methods that facilitate detecting movements of enemy who are less likely to detect the ambushing party.

A traditional tactic without parallel in modern state warfare is the treacherous feast documented among the Yanomamo and in New Guinea: inviting neighbors to a feast, then surprising and killing them after they have laid down their weapons and focused their attention on eating and drinking. We moderns have to wonder why any Yanomamo group would let itself fall into that trap, having heard stories of previous such treachery. The explanation may be that honorable feasts are common, that accepting an invitation usually brings big advantages in terms of alliance-building and food-sharing, and that the hosts go to much effort to make their intentions appear friendly. The only modern example I can think of involving state governments is the massacre of the Boer commander Piet Retief and his whole party of a hundred men by the Zulu king Dingane on February 6, 1838, while the Boers were Dingane’s guests at a feast in his camp. This example may be considered the exception that proves the rule: the Zulus had been just one of hundreds of warring chiefdoms until unification and the foundation of the Zulu state a few decades previously.

Such blunt treachery has for the most part been abandoned under the rules of diplomacy which modern states now find it in their own self-interest to follow. Even Hitler and Japan issued formal declarations of war against the Soviet Union and the U.S., respectively, simultaneous with (but not before) their attacks on those countries. However, states do employ treachery against rebels whom they consider as not binding them to the usual rules of diplomacy between states. For instance, the French general Charles Leclerc had no qualms about inviting the Haitian independence leader Toussaint-Louverture to a parley on June 7, 1802, seizing him there, and shipping him to a French prison, where he died. Within modern states, treacherous killings are still carried out by urban gangs, drug cartels, and terrorist groups, which do not operate by the rules of state diplomacy.

Another form of traditional warfare without close modern parallels is the non-treacherous gathering that degenerates into fighting. Far commoner than a treacherous feast, this involves neighboring peoples meeting for a ceremony without any intention of fighting. But violence may nevertheless erupt because individuals who have unsettled grievances and who rarely encounter each other now find themselves face-to-face, can’t restrain themselves, and begin fighting, and relatives then join in on both sides. For example, an American friend of mine who was present at a rare gathering of several dozen Fayu people told me of the tension prevailing as men periodically burst out in mutual insults and explosions of anger, pounded the ground with their axes, and in one case rushed at each other with axes. The risk of such unplanned fighting breaking out at gatherings intended to be peaceful is high for traditional societies in which neighboring peoples meet rarely, revenge for grievances is left to the individual, and there is no leader or “government” able to monopolize force and restrain hotheads.

Escalation of spontaneous individual fighting into organized warfare of armies is rare in centralized state societies but does sometimes happen. One example is the so-called Soccer War of June–July 1969 between El Salvador and Honduras. At a time when tensions between the two countries were already high over economic disparities and immigrant squatters, their soccer teams met for three games in a qualifying round for the 1970 World Cup. Rival fans began fighting at the first game on June 8 in the Honduran capital (won 1–0 by Honduras), and the fans became even more violent at the second game on June 15 in the El Salvador capital (won 3–0 by El Salvador). When El Salvador won the decisive third game 3–2 in overtime on June 26 in Mexico City, the two countries broke diplomatic relations, and on July 14 the El Salvador army and air force began bombing and invading Honduras.

Mortality rates

How high is the mortality from traditional tribal warfare? How does it compare with the mortality from warfare between state governments?

Military historians routinely compile national casualty totals for each modern war: e.g., for Germany during World War II. That permits one to calculate national war-related mortality rates averaged over a century of a country’s history of alternating war and peace: e.g., for Germany over the whole of the 20th century. Such rates have also been calculated or estimated in dozens of studies of individual modern traditional societies. Four surveys—by Lawrence Keeley, by Samuel Bowles, by Steven Pinker, and by Richard Wrangham and Michael Wilson and Martin Muller—summarized such evaluations for between 23 and 32 traditional societies. Not surprisingly, there proves to be much variation between individual societies. The highest annual time-averaged war-related death tolls are 1% per year (i.e., 1 person killed per year per 100 members of the population) or higher for the Dani, Sudan’s Dinka, and two North American Indian groups, ranging down to 0.02% per year or less for Andaman Islanders and Malaysia’s Semang. Some of those differences are related to subsistence mode, with average rates for subsistence farmers being nearly 4 times those for hunter-gatherers in Wrangham, Wilson, and Muller’s analysis. An alternative measure of war’s impact is the percentage of total deaths that are related to warfare. That measure ranges from 56% for Ecuador’s Waorani Indians down to only 3%–7% for six traditional populations scattered around the globe.

For comparison with those measures of war-related mortality in traditional small-scale societies, Keeley extracted 10 values for societies with state government: one of them for 20th-century Sweden, which experienced no wars and hence zero war-related deaths, the other nine for states and time periods selected for notoriously horrible suffering in war. The highest-percentage long-term death tolls averaged over a century in modern times have been for 20th-century Germany and Russia, which reached 0.16% and 0.15% per year respectively (i.e., 16 or 15 people killed per year per 10,000 members of the population) due to the combined horrors of World Wars I and II. A lower value of 0.07% per year held for France in the century that included the Napoleonic Wars and the winter retreat of Napoleon’s army from Russia. Despite the deaths inflicted by the two atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the fire-bombing and conventional bombings of most other large Japanese cities, and the deaths by gunfire and starvation and suicide and drowning of hundreds of thousands of Japanese soldiers overseas during World War II, plus the casualties from Japan’s invasion of China in the 1930s and the Russo-Japanese war of 1904–1905, Japan’s percentage war-related death toll averaged over the 20th century was much lower than Germany’s or Russia’s, “only” 0.03% per year. The highest long-term estimate for any state is 0.25% per year for the famously bloody Aztec Empire in the century leading up to its destruction by Spain.

Let’s now compare these war-related death rates (expressed again as percentages of the population dying per year of war-related causes, averaged over a long period of alternating war and peace) for traditional small-scale societies and for modern populous societies with state government. It turns out that the highest values for any modern states (20th-century Germany and Russia) are only one-third of the average values for traditional small-scale societies, and only one-sixth of Dani values. Average values for modern states are about one-tenth of average traditional values.

It may astonish you readers, as it initially astonished me, to learn that trench warfare, machine guns, napalm, atomic bombs, artillery, and submarine torpedoes produce time-averaged war-related death tolls so much lower than those from spears, arrows, and clubs. The reasons become clear when one reflects on the differences between traditional and modern state warfare that we shall discuss in more detail below. First, state warfare is an intermittent exceptional condition, while tribal warfare is virtually continuous. During the 20th century Germany was at war for only 10 years (1914–1918 and 1939–1945), and its war deaths during the remaining 90 years were negligible, while the Dani were traditionally at war every month of every year. Second, casualties of state war are borne mainly just by male soldiers age 18 to 40 years; even within that age range, most state wars use only small professional armies, with the mass conscription of the two world wars being exceptional; and civilians were not at direct risk in large numbers until saturation aerial bombing was adopted in World War II. In contrast, in traditional societies everyone—men and women, prime-age adults and old adults, children and babies—is a target. Third, in state warfare soldiers who surrender or are captured are normally permitted to survive, whereas in traditional warfare all are routinely killed. Finally, traditional but not state wars are periodically punctuated by massacres in which much or all of the population on one side gets surrounded and exterminated, as in the Dani massacres of June 4, 1966, the late 1930s, 1952, June 1962, and September 1962. In contrast, victorious states nowadays routinely keep conquered populations alive in order to exploit them, rather than exterminating them.

Similarities and differences

In what respects is traditional warfare similar to state warfare, and in what respects is it different? Before answering this question, we should of course recognize that there isn’t a polar opposition between these two types of warfare, with no middle ground, but that warfare instead changes along a continuum from the smallest to the largest society. The larger the society, the larger the armed force that it can muster, hence the lower the possibility of concealing the force, the lower the potential for raids and ambushes by small concealed groups of a few men, and the greater the emphasis on open battles between large forces. The leadership becomes stronger, more centralized, and more hierarchical in larger societies: national armies have officers of various ranks, a war council, and a commander-in-chief, while small bands just have equal-ranked men fighters, and medium-sized groups (like the Gutelu Alliance among the Dani) have weak leaders directing by persuasion rather than by authority to give orders. Warfare in large centralized chiefdoms may approximate warfare in small states. Despite this continuity of societal size, it’s still useful to compare small and large societies in how they fight.

One similarity is in the importance of enlisting allies. Just as the Wilihiman-Walalua Confederation of Dani sought allies among other confederations in fighting against the Widaia and their allies, World War II pitted two alliances against each other, whose main members were Britain, the U.S., and Russia on one side, and Germany, Italy, and Japan on the other side. Alliances are even more essential for warring traditional societies than for warring nations. Modern nations differ greatly in military technology, so that a small nation may be able to rely on superior technology and leadership rather than on more allies to win a war. (Think of the successes of Israel’s armies against far more numerous Arab alliances.) But traditional warfare tends to take place between opponents with similar technology and similar leadership, so that the side with the advantage of numbers from enlisting more allies is likely to win.

Another similarity involves the reliance of societies of all sizes on both hand-to-hand fighting and long-range weapons. Even the small Fayu bands fighting around the Kueglers’ house had bows and arrows, while the Dani threw spears as well as killing Wejakhe and Jenokma at close quarters with spear thrusts. The range of weapons increases with a society’s increasing size and level of technology. Although Roman soldiers continued to use swords and daggers for hand-to-hand fighting, their weapons-at-a-distance included arrows, javelins, slings, and catapults with a range of up to half a mile. By the time of World War I, the German army had developed a cannon (nicknamed Big Bertha) to bombard Paris from a distance of 68 miles, while modern intercontinental ballistic missiles have ranges of up to half of the world’s circumference. But modern soldiers still have to be prepared to use a pistol or a bayonet to kill at close quarters.

A psychological consequence of this increasing range of modern long-range weapons is that most military killing today is by “push-button” technology (bombs, artillery, and missiles), permitting soldiers to kill unseen opponents and not to have to overcome their inhibitions about killing face-to-face (Plate 37). In all traditional fighting one selects one’s target individually and sees his face, whether one is stabbing him at close quarters or shooting an arrow at him from a distance of tens of yards (Plate 36). Men in traditional societies grow up from childhood encouraged to kill, or at least knowing how to kill, but most modern state citizens grow up taught constantly that killing is bad, until after age 18 they suddenly enlist or are inducted into the army, given a gun, and ordered to aim at an enemy and shoot him. Not surprisingly, a significant fraction of soldiers in World Wars I and II—some estimates run as high as one-half—could not bring themselves to shoot an enemy whom they saw as another human being. Thus, while traditional societies lack both the moral inhibitions against killing an enemy face-to-face, and the technology necessary to bypass those inhibitions by killing unseen victims at a distance, modern state societies have tended to develop both the inhibitions and the technology necessary to bypass the inhibitions.

As for the numerous differences between traditional and state warfare, one difference follows straight on from that discussion of the psychology of killing. Even when modern soldiers see an enemy face-to-face, the enemy is almost always a nameless person, someone whom they never met before and against whom they hold no individual grudge. In contrast, in small-scale traditional societies one recognizes and knows by name not only every member of one’s own society, but also many or most of the enemy warriors one is trying to kill—because shifting alliances and occasional intermarriages make one’s neighbors familiar as individuals. The taunts that Dani warriors shouted at each other in the battles recounted in Chapter 3 included personal insults. Readers of the Iliad will recall how opposing Greek and Trojan leaders addressed each other by name before attempting to kill each other in battle—a famous example being the speeches of Hector and Achilles to each other just before Achilles fatally wounded Hector. Personal vengeance against an individual enemy known to have killed one of your own relatives or friends plays a major role in traditional warfare, but much less of a role or none in modern state war.

Another psychological difference involves self-sacrifice, praised in modern warfare and unknown in traditional warfare. Modern state soldiers have often been ordered, on behalf of their country, to do things highly likely to get them killed, such as charging across open ground towards barbed-wire defenses. Other soldiers decide themselves to sacrifice their lives (e.g., by throwing themselves onto a primed hand grenade) in order to save the lives of their comrades. During World War II thousands of Japanese soldiers, at first voluntarily and later under pressure, made attacks intended to be suicidal, by piloting kamikaze airplanes, rocket-powered baka gliding bombs, and kaiten human torpedoes into American warships. Such behavior requires that prospective soldiers be programmed from childhood onwards to admire dutiful obedience and sacrifice for one’s country or religion. I have never heard of such behavior in New Guinea traditional warfare: every warrior’s goal is to kill the enemy and to stay alive himself. For instance, when Wilihiman raiders caught and killed the Widaia man Huwai on May 11, 1961, Huwai’s outnumbered two companions fled without trying to save him; and when Widaia raiders in ambush caught and killed the already-injured Wilihiman boy Wejakhe on June 10, the other three outnumbered Wilihiman man and boys with Wejakhe similarly fled.

Traditional societies and states differ as to who are their soldiers. All state armies have included full-time professional soldiers who can remain in the field for years at a time, supported by civilians who grow food for themselves and for the soldiers. Either the professionals make up the entire army (as is currently true in the U.S.), or else their ranks are augmented (mainly in time of war) by non-professional volunteers or conscripts. In contrast, all band and tribal warriors, like the Dani warriors described in Chapter 3, and all or most warriors of chiefdoms, are non-professionals. They are men normally occupied with hunting or farming or herding, who suspend those subsistence activities for periods ranging from a few hours up to a few weeks in order to fight, and then go home again because they are needed for hunting or planting or harvesting. Hence it’s impossible for traditional “armies” to remain in the field for lengthy periods. That basic reality gave a decisive advantage to European colonial soldiers in their wars of conquest against tribes and chiefdoms around the world. Some of those non-European peoples, like New Zealand’s Maori, Argentina’s Araucanian Indians, and North America’s Sioux and Apache Indians, were determined and skilled fighters who could muster large forces for short times and achieved some spectacular successes against European armies. But they were inevitably worn down and eventually defeated because they had to break off fighting in order to resume obtaining and producing food, while professional European soldiers could continue to fight.

Modern military historians regularly comment on what strikes them as the “inefficiency” of traditional warfare: that hundreds of people can fight for an entire day, at the end of which no one or only one or two people have been killed. Part of the reason, of course, is that traditional societies lack artillery, bombs, and other weapons capable of killing many people at once. But the other reasons are related to the tribes’ non-professional army and lack of strong leadership. Traditional warriors don’t undergo group training that might enable them to be more lethal by executing complex plans or even just by coordinating their shooting. Arrows would be more effective if fired in a synchronized volley rather than one at a time: a targeted enemy can dodge an individual arrow but can’t dodge a whole flight of arrows. Nevertheless, the Dani, like most other traditional bowmen, had not practiced synchronizing their volleys. (Northwest Alaska Inuit were exceptional in that respect.) Discipline and organized formations are minimal: even if fighting units are well formed before a battle, the units quickly fall apart, and the battle degenerates into an uncoordinated melee. Traditional war leaders cannot issue orders for which the price of disobedience is court-martial. The 1966 massacre that broke apart the alliance of the Dani leader Gutelu may have resulted from Gutelu’s inability to prevent his own hot-headed northern warriors from massacring his southern allies.

One of the two biggest differences between traditional and state warfare involves the distinction between total war and limited war. We Americans are accustomed to thinking of total war as a new concept introduced by the northern general William Tecumseh Sherman during the American Civil War (1861–1865). Warfare by states and large chiefdoms tends to have limited goals: to destroy the enemy’s armed forces and capacity to fight, but to spare the enemy’s land, resources, and civilian population because those are what a would-be conqueror hopes to take over. General Sherman, in his march to the sea (from the inland hub of Atlanta to the Atlantic Ocean) through the heart of the Confederacy and then north through South Carolina, became famous for his explicit policy of total war: destroying everything of possible military value, and breaking Southern morale, by taking food, burning crops, killing livestock, wrecking farm machinery, burning cotton and cotton gins, burning railroads and twisting their rails to preclude their being repaired, and burning or blowing up bridges, railroad stock, factories, mills, and buildings. Sherman’s actions resulted from a calculated philosophy of war, which he described as follows: “War is cruelty and you cannot refine it…. We are not only fighting hostile armies, but a hostile people, and must make young and old, rich and poor, feel the hard hand of war…. We cannot change the hearts of those people of the South, but we can make war so terrible… make them so sick of war that generations would pass before they would again appeal to it.” But Sherman did not exterminate Southern civilians or kill Confederate soldiers who surrendered or were captured.

While Sherman’s behavior was indeed exceptional by standards of state warfare, he did not invent total warfare. Instead, he practiced a mild form of what has been practiced by bands and tribes for tens of thousands of years, as documented by the skeletal remains of the massacre at Talheim described on page 134. State armies spare and take prisoners because they are able to feed them, guard them, put them to work, and prevent them from running away. Traditional “armies” do not take enemy warriors as prisoners, because they cannot do any of those things to make use of prisoners. Surrounded or defeated traditional warriors do not surrender, because they know that they would be killed anyway. The earliest historical or archaeological evidence of states taking prisoners is not until the time of Mesopotamian states of about 5,000 years ago, which solved the practical problems of getting use out of prisoners by gouging out their eyes to blind them so that they could not run away, then putting them to work at tasks that could be carried out by the sense of touch alone, such as spinning and some gardening chores. A few large, sedentary, economically specialized tribes and chiefdoms of hunter-gatherers, such as coastal Pacific Northwest Indians and Florida’s Calusa Indians, were also able routinely to enslave, maintain, and make use of captives.

However, for societies simpler than Mesopotamian states, Pacific Northwest Indians, and the Calusa, defeated enemies were of no value alive. War’s goal among the Dani, Fore, Northwest Alaskan Inuit, Andaman Islanders, and many other tribes was to take over the enemy’s land and to exterminate the enemy of both sexes and all ages, including the dozens of Dani women and children killed in the June 4, 1966, massacre. Other traditional societies, such as the Nuer raiding the Dinka, were more selective, in that they killed Dinka men and clubbed to death Dinka babies and older women but brought home Dinka women of marriageable age to force-marry to Nuer men, and also brought home Dinka weaned children to rear as Nuer. The Yanomamo similarly spared enemy women in order to use them as mates.

Total warfare among traditional societies also means mobilizing all men, including the Dani boys down to age six who fought in the battle of August 6, 1961. State war, however, is usually fought with proportionally tiny professional armies of adult men. Napoleon’s Grande Armée with which he invaded Russia in 1812 numbered 600,000 men and thus rates as huge by the standards of 19th-century state warfare, but that number represented under 10% of the total population of France at that time (actually even less, because some of the soldiers were non-French allies). Even within modern state armies, combat troops are generally outnumbered by support troops: the ratio is now 1 to 11 for the U.S. Army. The Dani would have been scornful of Napoleon’s and the U.S. armies’ inability to field combat troops, measured as a proportion of the society’s whole population. But the Dani would have found familiar Sherman’s behavior on his march to the sea, reminiscent of Dani behavior during the dawn raid of June 4, 1966, when they burned dozens of settlements and stole pigs.

Ending warfare

The remaining big difference between tribal and state warfare, after that distinction between total and limited warfare, involves the differing ease of ending war and maintaining peace. As illustrated by the Dani War of Chapter 3, wars of small-scale societies often involve cycles of revenge killings. A death suffered by side A demands that side A take vengeance by killing someone from side B, whose members now in turn demand vengeance of their own against side A. Those cycles end only when one side has been exterminated or driven out, or else when both sides are exhausted, both have suffered many deaths, and neither side foresees the likelihood of being able to exterminate or drive out the other. While analogous considerations apply to ending state warfare, states and large chiefdoms go to war with much more limited goals than do bands and tribes: at most, just to conquer all of the enemy’s territory.

But it’s much harder for a tribe than for a state (and a large centralized chiefdom) to reach a decision to seek an end to fighting, and to negotiate a truce with the enemy—because a state has centralized decision-making and negotiators, while a tribe lacks centralized leadership and everyone has his say. It’s even harder for a tribe than for a state to maintain peace, once a truce has been negotiated. In any society, whether a tribe or a state, there will be some individuals who are dissatisfied with any peace agreement, and who want to attack some enemy for their own private reasons and to provoke a new outbreak of fighting. A state government that asserts a centralized monopoly on the use of power and force can usually restrain those hotheads; a weak tribal leader can’t. Hence tribal peaces are fragile and quickly deteriorate to yet another cycle of war.

That difference between states and small centralized societies is a major reason why states exist at all. There has been a long-standing debate among political scientists about how states arise, and why the governed masses tolerate kings and congressmen and their bureaucrats. Full-time political leaders don’t grow their own food, but they live off of food raised by us peasants. How did our leaders convince or force us to feed them, and why do we let them remain in power? The French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau speculated, without any evidence to back up his speculations, that governments arise as the result of rational decisions by the masses who recognize that their own interests will be better served under a leader and bureaucrats. In all the cases of state formation now known to historians, no such farsighted calculation has ever been observed. Instead, states arise from chiefdoms through competition, conquest, or external pressure: the chiefdom with the most effective decision-making is better able to resist conquest or to outcompete other chiefdoms. For example, between 1807 and 1817 the dozens of separate chiefdoms of southeastern Africa’s Zulu people, traditionally warring with each other, became amalgamated into one state under one of the chiefs, named Dingiswayo, who conquered all the competing chiefs by proving more successful at figuring out how best to recruit an army, settle disputes, incorporate defeated chiefdoms, and administer his territory.

Despite the excitement and the prestige of tribal fighting, tribespeople understand better than anyone else the misery associated with warfare, the omnipresent danger, and the pain due to the killings of loved ones. When tribal warfare is finally ended by forceful intervention by colonial governments, tribespeople regularly comment on the resulting improved quality of life that they hadn’t been able to create for themselves, because without centralized government they hadn’t been able to interrupt the cycles of revenge killings. Anthropologist Sterling Robbins was told by Auyana men in the New Guinea Highlands, “Life was better since the government had come because a man could now eat without looking over his shoulder and could leave his house in the morning to urinate without fear of being shot. All men admitted that they were afraid when they fought. In fact, they usually looked at me as though I were a mental defective for even asking. Men admitted having nightmares in which they became isolated from others in their group during a fight and could see no way back.”

That reaction explains the surprising ease with which small numbers of Australian patrol officers and native policemen were able to end tribal warfare in the then-territory of Papua New Guinea. They arrived at a warring village, bought a pig, shot the pig to demonstrate the power of firearms, tore down village stockades and confiscated the war shields of all warring groups in order to make it lethally dangerous for anyone to initiate war, and occasionally shot New Guineans who dared to attack them. Of course, New Guineans are pragmatic and could recognize the power of guns. But one might not have predicted how easily they would give up warfare that they had been practicing for thousands of years, when achievement in war had been praised from childhood onwards and held up as the measure of a man.

The explanation for this surprising outcome is that New Guineans appreciated the benefits of the state-guaranteed peace that they had been unable to achieve for themselves without state government. For instance, in the 1960s I spent a month in a recently pacified area of the New Guinea Highlands, where 20,000 Highlanders who until a decade or so previously had been constantly making war against each other now lived along with one Australian patrol officer and a few New Guinea policemen. Yes, the patrol officer and the policemen had guns, and the New Guineans didn’t. But if the New Guineans had really wanted to resume fighting each other, it would have been trivially easy for them to kill the patrol officer and his policemen at night, or to ambush them by day. They didn’t even try to do so. That illustrates how they had come to appreciate the biggest advantage of state government: the bringing of peace.

Effects of European contact

Did traditional warfare increase, decrease, or remain unchanged upon European contact? This is not a straightforward question to decide, because if one believes that contact does affect the intensity of traditional warfare, then one will automatically distrust any account of it by an outside observer as having been influenced by the observer and not representing the pristine condition. Lawrence Keeley used the analogy of supposing that watermelons are white inside and become red only as soon as they are cut with a knife: how could one ever hope to demonstrate that watermelons really are red even before they are cut open in order to examine their color?

However, the mass of archaeological evidence and oral accounts of war before European contact discussed above makes it far-fetched to maintain that people were traditionally peaceful until those evil Europeans arrived and messed things up. There can be no doubt that European contacts or other forms of state government in the long run almost always end or reduce warfare, because all state governments don’t want wars disrupting the administration of their territory. Studies of ethnographically observed cases make clear that, in the short run, the initiation of European contact may either increase or decrease fighting, for reasons that include European-introduced weaponry, diseases, trade opportunities, and increases or decreases in the food supply.

A well-understood example of a short-term increase in fighting as a result of European contact is provided by New Zealand’s original Polynesian inhabitants, the Maori, who had settled in New Zealand by around AD 1200. Archaeological excavations of Maori forts attest to widespread Maori warfare long before European arrival. Accounts of the first European explorers from 1642 onwards, and of the first European settlers from the 1790s onwards, describe the Maori killing Europeans as well as each other. From about 1818 to 1835 two products introduced by Europeans triggered a transient surge in the deadliness of Maori warfare, in an episode known in New Zealand history as the Musket Wars. One factor was of course the introduction of muskets, with which Maori could kill each other far more efficiently than they had previously been able to do when armed just with clubs. The other factor may initially surprise you: potatoes, which we don’t normally imagine as a major promoter of war. But it turns out that the duration and size of Maori expeditions to attack other Maori groups had been limited by the amount of food that could be brought along to feed the warriors. The original Maori staple food was sweet potatoes. Potatoes introduced by Europeans (although originating in South America) are more productive in New Zealand than are sweet potatoes, yield bigger food surpluses, and permitted sending out bigger raiding expeditions for longer times than had been possible for traditional Maori depending upon sweet potatoes. After potatoes’ arrival, Maori canoe-borne expeditions to enslave or kill other Maori broke all previous Maori distance records by covering distances of as much as a thousand miles. At first only the few tribes living in areas with resident European traders could acquire muskets, which they used to destroy tribes without muskets. As muskets spread, the Musket Wars rose to a peak until all surviving tribes had muskets, whereupon there were no more musket-less tribes to offer defenseless targets, and the Musket Wars faded away.

In Fiji as well, the introduction of European muskets around 1808 made it possible for Fijians to kill each other in much larger numbers than they had traditionally been able to do with clubs, spears, and arrows. European guns, boats, and steel axes transiently facilitated inter-island head-hunting in the Solomon Islands in the 19th century: unlike stone axes, steel axes can behead many humans without losing their sharp edge. Similarly, European guns and horses, and European guns and slave-buyers, stimulated warfare in the North American Great Plains and in Central Africa, respectively. For each of these societies that I have just mentioned, warfare had been endemic long before European arrival, but effects of Europeans caused an exacerbation of warfare for a few decades (New Zealand, Fiji, Solomon Islands) or a few centuries (Great Plains, Central Africa) before it died out.

In other cases the arrival of Europeans or of other outsiders led instead to warfare’s end without any hint of an initial flare-up. In many parts of the New Guinea Highlands the first Europeans were government patrols that immediately ended warfare before European traders, missionaries, or even indirectly transmitted European trade goods could appear. When first studied by anthropologists in the 1950s, Africa’s !Kung bands were no longer raiding each other, although the frequency of individual murders within bands or between neighboring bands remained high until 1955. Four of the last five murders (in 1946, 1952, 1952, and 1955) resulted in the Tswana administration taking the killers off to jail, and that plus the availability of Tswana courts for settling disputes induced the !Kung to abandon murder as a means for resolving conflicts after 1955. However, !Kung oral histories report inter-band raids several generations earlier, until the time when increased Tswana contact introduced iron for arrowheads and other changes. Somehow, that contact resulted in an end to raiding long before the Tswana police intervened to arrest killers.

My remaining example comes from northwest Alaska, where formerly widespread fighting and exterminations among Yupik and Iñupiaq Inuit ended within a decade or a generation of European contact—not because of patrol officers, police, and courts forbidding war but because of other consequences of contact. The end of Yupik warfare is attributed to an 1838 smallpox epidemic that depleted the populations of several groups. The end of Iñupiaq warfare appears to have been due to the Iñupiaq chronic obsession with trade, and to their greatly increased new opportunities to trade furs to the Europeans with whom regular contact became intense after 1848: continued warfare would have been an obvious impediment to those opportunities.

Thus, the long-term effect of European, Tswana, or other outside contact with states or chiefdoms has almost always been to suppress tribal warfare. The short-term effect has variously been either an immediate suppression as well or else an initial flare-up and then suppression. It cannot be said that traditional warfare is an artifact of European contact.

Nevertheless, there has been a long history of denial of traditional warfare among Western scholars. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, already mentioned for his speculative theory of state formation not based on any empirical evidence, had an equally speculative and ungrounded theory of warfare: he claimed that humans were naturally compassionate in a state of nature, and that wars began only with the rise of states. Trained ethnographers studying traditional societies in the 20th century mostly found themselves dealing with tribes and bands that had already been pacified by colonial governments, until some anthropologists were able to witness the last examples of traditional wars in the 1950s and 1960s in the New Guinea Highlands and Amazonia. Archaeologists excavating fortifications associated with ancient wars have often overlooked, ignored, or explained them away, e.g., by dismissing defensive ditches and palisades surrounding a village as mere “enclosures” or “symbols of exclusion.” But the evidence of traditional warfare, whether based on direct observation or oral histories or archaeological evidence, is so overwhelming that one has to wonder: why is there still any debate about its importance?

One reason is the real difficulties, which we have discussed, in evaluating traditional warfare under pre-contact or early-contact conditions. Warriors quickly discern that visiting anthropologists disapprove of war, and the warriors tend not to take anthropologists along on raids or allow them to photograph battles undisturbed: the filming opportunities available to the Harvard Peabody Expedition among the Dani were unique. Another reason is that the short-term effects of European contact on tribal war can work in either direction and have to be evaluated case by case with an open mind. But the widespread denial of traditional warfare seems to go beyond those and other uncertainties in the evidence itself, and instead to involve reluctance to accept evidence for its existence or extent. Why?

There may be several reasons at work. Scholars tend to like, to identify with, or to sympathize with the traditional people among whom they live for several years. The scholars consider war bad, know that most readers of their monographs will also consider war bad, and don’t want “their” people to be viewed as bad. Another reason involves unfounded claims (to be discussed below) that human warfare has an inexorable genetic basis. That leads to the false assumption that war would be unstoppable, and hence to a reluctance to acknowledge the apparently depressing conclusion that war traditionally really has been widespread. Still another reason is that some state or colonial governments are eager to get indigenous people out of the way by conquering or dispossessing them or by turning a blind eye to their extermination. Branding them as warlike is used as an excuse to justify that mistreatment, so scholars seek to remove that excuse by trying to absolve the indigenous people of the charge of being warlike.

I sympathize with scholars outraged by the mistreatment of indigenous peoples. But denying the reality of traditional warfare because of political misuse of its reality is a bad strategy, for the same reason that denying any other reality for any other laudable political goal is a bad strategy. The reason not to mistreat indigenous people is not that they are falsely accused of being warlike, but that it’s unjust to mistreat them. The facts about traditional warfare, just like the facts about any other controversial phenomenon that can be observed and studied, are likely eventually to come out. When they do come out, if scholars have been denying traditional warfare’s reality for laudable political reasons, the discovery of the facts will undermine the laudable political goals. The rights of indigenous people should be asserted on moral grounds, not by making untrue claims susceptible to refutation.

Warlike animals, peaceful peoples

If one defines war as I defined it on p. 131—“recurrent violence between groups belonging to rival political units, and sanctioned by the units”—and if one takes a broadened view of “political units” and “sanctioned,” then war characterizes not only humans but also some animal species. The species most often mentioned in discussions of human war is the common chimpanzee, because it is one of our two closest living animal relatives. War among chimpanzees resembles human band and tribal warfare in consisting of either chance encounters or else apparently intentional raids involving adult males. Calculated war-related death rates in chimpanzees, 0.36% per year (i.e., 36 chimpanzees per year in a population of 10,000), are similar to those for traditional human societies. Does this mean that warfare was transmitted to humans in a straight line from our chimpanzee ancestors, hence that it has a genetic basis, hence that we are helplessly pre-programmed to make war, hence that it’s inevitable and can’t be prevented?

The answer to all four of these questions is no. Chimpanzees are not the ancestors of humans; instead, chimpanzees and humans are both descended from a common ancestor that lived about 6,000,000 years ago, and from which modern chimpanzees may be more divergent than are modern humans. It is not the case that all descendants of that common ancestor make war: bonobos (formerly known as pygmy chimpanzees), which genetically are the same distance from us as are chimpanzees and hence are the other one of our two closest animal relatives, are also derived from that common ancestor but have not been observed to make war; and some traditional human societies don’t make war. Among social animal species other than chimpanzees, some (e.g., lions, wolves, hyenas, and some ant species) are known to practise lethal fighting between groups, while others are not known to do so. Evidently, war does arise repeatedly and independently but is not inevitable among social animals in general, nor within the human-chimpanzee evolutionary line in particular, nor among modern human societies more particularly. Richard Wrangham argues that two features distinguish those social species that do practise war from those that don’t: intense resource competition, and occurrence in groups of variable size such that large groups sometimes encounter small groups or individual animals which they can safely attack and overwhelm by numbers with little risk to the aggressors.

As for a genetic basis to human warfare, it of course has a genetic basis, in the same broad and distant sense in which cooperation and other multi-faceted human behaviors have a genetic basis. That is, the human brain and hormones and instincts are laid down ultimately by genes, such as the genes that control the synthesis of the hormone testosterone associated with aggressive behavior. However, the normal range of aggressive behavior, like the normal range of body height, is influenced by many different genes and by environmental and social factors (like effects of childhood nutrition on adult height). That’s unlike single-gene traits such as sickle-cell hemoglobin, which a person carrying the gene for that trait synthesizes regardless of childhood nutrition, other genes, or environmental competition. Like warfare, warfare’s converse of cooperation is widespread but variably expressed among human societies. We already saw in Chapter 1 that cooperation between neighboring human societies is favored by certain environmental conditions, such as resource fluctuations within or between years, and whether or not a territory contains all resources necessary for self-sufficient survival. It is not inevitable or genetically programmed that neighboring small-scale societies cooperate; there are reasons why some cooperate more and some cooperate less.

Similarly, there are external reasons why some human societies are peaceful, although most are not. Most modern state societies have been involved in recent wars, but a few haven’t, for understandable reasons. The Central American nation of Costa Rica hasn’t had a recent war, and even abolished its army in 1949, because its historical population and social conditions resulted in relatively egalitarian and democratic traditions, and its only neighbors (Nicaragua and Panama) are unthreatening and offer no targets of great value to conquer except the Panama Canal, which would be defended by the U.S. Army if Costa Rica were foolish enough to invest in an army to attack the canal. Sweden and Switzerland haven’t had recent wars (although Sweden formerly did), because they now do have aggressive and far more powerful and populous neighbors (Germany, France, and Russia) which they could never hope to conquer themselves, and because they have successfully deterred those neighbors from attacking them by being armed to the teeth.

Like these modern states without recent involvement in wars, a small minority of traditional societies have also been peaceful for understandable reasons. Greenland’s Polar Eskimos were so isolated that they had no neighbors, no outside contacts, and no possibility of war even if they had wanted it. Absence of war has been reported for quite a few small bands of nomadic hunter-gatherers living at very low population densities, in harsh unproductive environments, with large home ranges, with few or no possessions worth defending or acquiring, and relatively isolated from other such bands. These include the Shoshone Indians of the U.S. Great Basin, Bolivia’s Siriono Indians, some Australian desert tribes, and the Nganasan of northern Siberia. Farmers without a history of war include Peru’s Machiguenga Indians, living in a marginal forest environment not coveted by others, without pockets of good land sufficiently dense or dependable to warrant war or defense, and with currently low population density, possibly because of a recent population crash during the rubber boom.

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?

The ultimate factors behind a war aren’t necessarily the factors that the participants themselves understand or enunciate at the time. For instance, one theory of Yanomamo warfare debated by anthropologists postulates that its ultimate purpose is to acquire scarce protein by assuring abundant availability of game animals to be hunted. However, traditional Yanomamo don’t know what protein is, and they persist in citing women rather than availability of game animals as their motive for making war. Hence even if the protein theory of Yanomamo warfare were correct (which it probably isn’t), we would never learn about it from the Yanomamo themselves.

Unfortunately, understanding ultimate factors that you can’t ask people about is much more difficult than understanding proximate motives that people can describe to you. Just reflect on our difficulties in establishing the ultimate cause(s) of World War I, despite the availability of enormous quantities of relevant documents to whose study hundreds of historians have devoted their lives. Everyone knows that the proximate cause of World War I was the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the throne of the Habsburg Empire, by the Serb nationalist Gavrilo Princip at Sarajevo on June 28, 1914. However, numerous other heads of state and heirs apparent have been assassinated without such dire consequences, so what were the ultimate reasons why this particular assassination did trigger World War I? The debated candidate theories of World War I’s ultimate cause(s) include the pre-war system of alliances, nationalism, threats to the stability of two major multi-ethnic empires (the Habsburg and Ottoman empires), festering territorial disputes over Alsace-Lorraine and transit through the Dardanelles, and Germany’s rising economic power. Because we still can’t agree about the ultimate causes even of World War I, we can’t expect it to be easy to understand the ultimate causes of traditional warfare either. But students of traditional warfare enjoy a big advantage over students of the two world wars, in that we have an almost infinite number of traditional wars to compare.

The ultimate factor most often proposed for traditional warfare is to acquire land or other scarce resources such as fisheries, salt sources, stone quarries, or human labor. Except in harsh fluctuating environments whose conditions keep human populations periodically or permanently low, human groups grow in size to utilize their land and its resources, and can then increase further only at the expense of other groups. Hence societies go to war to seize land or resources belonging to other groups, or to defend their own land and resources that other groups seek to seize. This motive is often proclaimed explicitly by state governments going to war to acquire land and labor. For instance, Hitler wrote and spoke of Germany’s need for Lebensraum (living space to the east), but Russians and other Slavs lived to the east of Germany, so Hitler’s goal of acquiring eastern living space for Germany led him to invade Poland and then Russia in order to conquer, enslave, or kill the Slavs who lived there.

The most extensive test of this theory that land and resource shortages lead to war was by Carol and Melvin Ember, using a cross-cultural sample of 186 societies. From ethnographic information about these societies summarized in the Human Relations Area Files (a large cross-cultural survey), Ember and Ember extracted measures of several causes of resource shortages: the frequencies of famines, of natural disasters such as droughts or frosts, and of food scarcity. It turned out that these measures were the strongest predictor of war’s frequency. The authors took this finding to mean that people go to war to take resources (especially land) from their enemies, and thereby to protect themselves against unpredictable resource scarcity in the future.

Although this interpretation is plausible, it doesn’t operate so straightforwardly that all scholars accept it. While some traditional wars are indeed followed by the losers fleeing and the victors occupying their land, there are also cases of the vacated land being left unoccupied for some time. It is not the case that traditional wars are consistently fiercer in more densely populated areas, because some habitats and subsistence modes can comfortably support much higher population densities than can other habitats and subsistence modes. For instance, hunter-gatherers living at a density of 5 people per square mile in a desert feel more resource-starved and pressed to expand than do farmers living at 100 people per square mile in fertile, warm, well-watered farmlands. That is, what counts is not population density itself, but population density in relation to resource density, resulting in actual or potential resource shortages. If one compares traditional peoples with similar subsistence modes and living in similar habitats with similar resources, the frequency of warfare does increase with population density.

Other ultimate factors proposed to explain traditional warfare are social factors. People may go to war to keep troublesome neighbors at a distance, to get rid of the neighbors altogether, or to acquire a bellicose reputation and thereby to deter the likelihood of attacks by neighbors who wouldn’t hesitate to attack a group with a reputation for not defending itself. This social interpretation isn’t incompatible with the previous theory in terms of land and resources: an ultimate reason for wanting to keep one’s neighbors at a distance may be to maintain secure control of one’s land and resources. But it’s worth mentioning social considerations as a factor separate from resource considerations, because one’s desire to maintain distance from neighbors may cause one to take actions far more extreme than what others would consider necessary just for securing resources.

For example, until around 500 years ago Finland’s population was concentrated on the seacoast and Finland’s forested interior was sparsely inhabited. When individual families and small groups began moving as colonists into the interior, they tried to live as far as possible from each other. Finnish friends told me a story to illustrate how those colonists hated feeling crowded. A man cleared for himself and his family a small farm by a river, pleased that there were no signs of any neighbors. But one day he was horrified to observe a cut log floating down the river. Someone else must be living somewhere upstream! Enraged, the man started walking upstream through unbroken forest to track down the trespasser. On his first day of walking he met no one; on the second day, again no one. At last, on the third day he came to a new clearing, where he found another colonist. He killed that colonist and marched three days back to his own clearing and family, relieved that he had once again secured his family’s privacy. While that story may be apocryphal, it illustrates the social factors that cause small-scale societies to have concerns even about distant “neighbors” far out of sight.

Still other ultimate factors proposed involve benefits, to the individual rather than to the social group, of being warlike. A bellicose individual or war leader is likely to be feared and to gain prestige for his war exploits. That can translate into his being able to win more wives and to rear more children. For instance, the anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon calculated, from Yanomamo genealogies that he gathered, that if one compares Yanomamo men who have or haven’t killed people, the killers have on the average over two and a half times more wives and over three times more children. Of course the killers are also more likely to die or to be killed at an earlier age than are non-killers, but during that shorter lifespan they win more prestige and social rewards and can thereby obtain more wives and rear extra children. Naturally, even if this correlation does apply to the Yanomamo, I’m not recommending it to all you readers, nor can it even be generalized to apply to all traditional societies. In some societies the shorter lifespan of warlike men is likely not to be compensated by an ability to attract more wives per decade of their shorter life. That is the case for Ecuador’s Waorani Indians, who are even more warlike than the Yanomamo. Nevertheless, more zealous Waorani warriors don’t have more wives than do milder men, and they have fewer rather than more children surviving to reproductive age.

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.

Frequent results of fighting the people with whom you intermarry are divided loyalties in times of war. Some of the enemy are one’s in-laws and blood relatives. When shooting an arrow or throwing a spear, a warrior must aim, insofar as possible, so as to avoid hitting a relative on the other side. When an Inuit woman moves upon marriage to her husband’s group, if her blood relatives in her natal society then plan a raid against her husband’s people, the blood relatives may warn her in advance to stay out of the way of the raid and not get killed herself. Conversely, if she learns from her husband’s people that they are getting ready to raid her blood relatives, she may warn the latter—or she may not; she may side with either her in-laws or her blood relatives. Similarly, a Fore man who hears that his own clan is planning to attack the village to which his sister has moved in marriage may warn her and then expect a payment from her husband. Conversely, he may hear from his sister that the village into which she has married is going to attack his own village, whose members he warns and who give him presents in gratitude.

Forgetting Pearl Harbor

Finally, let’s return to the theme of revenge, with which small-scale societies may seem to us inordinately pre-occupied, giving it as their commonest explanation for going to war. We citizens of modern states commonly ignore how strong can be the thirst for vengeance. Among human emotions, it ranks along with love, anger, grief, and fear, about which we talk incessantly. Modern state societies permit and encourage us to express our love, anger, grief, and fear, but not our thirst for vengeance. We grow up being taught that vengeful feelings are primitive, to be ashamed of, and something that we should transcend. Our society inculcates those beliefs in order to discourage us from seeking personal vengeance.

There is no doubt that it would be impossible for us to coexist peacefully as fellow citizens of the same state, if we did not forswear the right to personal vengeance, and if we did not leave punishment to the state. Otherwise, we, too, would be living under the conditions of constant warfare prevailing in most non-state societies. But even for us Westerners who are wronged and who do receive satisfaction from the state, torment remains because of the lack of personal satisfaction. One friend of mine whose sister was murdered by robbers is still angry, decades afterwards, although the state did capture, try, and imprison the robbers.

We state citizens are thereby left in a bind that we are unable to acknowledge. The state’s insistence on its sole right to punish is essential to our living in peace and safety. But that gain for us comes at a severe personal cost. My conversations with New Guineans have made me understand what we have given up by leaving justice to the state. In order to induce us to do so, state societies and their associated religions and moral codes constantly hammer into us the message that seeking revenge is bad. But, while acting on vengeful feelings has to be prevented, acknowledging those feelings should be not merely permitted but encouraged. To a close relative or friend of someone who has been killed or seriously wronged, and to the victims of harm themselves, those feelings are natural and powerful. Many state governments do attempt to grant the relatives of crime victims some personal satisfaction: by allowing them to be present at the trial of the accused; in some cases, to address the judge or jury (Chapter 2); to meet privately with the criminal, through the restoration justice system (Chapter 2); or even to watch the execution of their loved one’s murderer.

Readers who haven’t spent years talking with New Guinea Highlanders may still find themselves wondering: How did these societies come to be apparently so unlike us, and to revel in and reward killing? What sort of warped ogres are they, to talk so unabashedly of their pleasure in killing enemies?

Actually, ethnographic studies of traditional human societies lying largely outside the control of state government have shown that war, murder, and demonization of neighbors have been the norm, not the exception, and that members of those societies espousing those norms are often normal, happy, well-adjusted people, not ogres. What differs in many state-level societies is that we are taught to start embracing those traditional norms suddenly and only at a certain moment (upon a declaration of war), then to jettison them suddenly at a later moment (the conclusion of a peace treaty). The result is confusing: hatreds once acquired are not so easily jettisoned. Many of my European friends born like me in the 1930s—Germans, Poles, Russians, Serbs, Croats, British, Dutch, and Jews—were taught from birth to hate or fear certain other peoples, underwent experiences giving them good reason to do so, and are now still carrying those feelings more than 65 years later, even though my friends were subsequently taught that those feelings are no longer considered nice and are best not expressed unless you feel confident of your listeners’ approval.

In Western state societies today, we grow up learning a universal code of morality that is promulgated every week in our houses of worship, and codified in our laws. The sixth commandment declares simply, “Thou shalt not kill”—with no distinction between how we should behave towards citizens of our own state and towards citizens of other states. Then, after at least 18 years of such moral training, we take young adults, train them to be soldiers, give them guns, and command that they should now forget all of that former upbringing forbidding them to kill.

It’s no wonder that many modern soldiers can’t bring themselves in battle to point their gun at an enemy and fire. Those who do kill often suffer long-lasting post-traumatic stress disorder (e.g., about one-third of American soldiers who have served in Iraq or Afghanistan). When they come home, far from boasting about killing, they have nightmares and don’t talk about it at all, unless to other veterans. (Imagine how you, if you are not yourself a war veteran, would feel about an American soldier who described to you proudly the personal details of how he killed an Iraqi, or even how he killed a Nazi soldier in World War II.) In the course of my life I have had hundreds of conversations with American and European veterans, some of them close friends or close relatives, but not one has ever related to me how he killed, as have many of my New Guinea friends.

In contrast, traditional New Guineans from their earliest childhood onwards saw warriors going out and coming back from fighting, saw the dead bodies and the wounds of their relatives and clansmen killed by the enemy, heard stories of killing, heard fighting talked about as the highest ideal, and witnessed successful warriors talking proudly about their killings and being praised for it. Remember the Wilihiman Dani boys excitedly jabbing their small spears into the dying Asuk-Balek man, and the six-year-old Wilihiman Dani boys shooting arrows at six-year-old Widaia Dani boys under the tutelage of their fathers (Chapter 3). Of course New Guineans end up feeling unconflicted about killing the enemy: they have had no contrary message to unlearn.

On reflection, for Americans old enough to recall Japan’s 1941 bombing of our naval base at Pearl Harbor (viewed by us as a treacherous outrage, because it was not preceded by a declaration of war), the intense hatred of enemy people, and the craving for revenge, that traditional people learn from their elders should not feel so remote after all. We Americans of the 1940s grew up in an atmosphere saturated with demonization of the Japanese, who did indeed do unspeakably cruel things to us and to other peoples (think of the Bataan Death March, the Sandakan Death March, the Rape of Nanking, and other such events). Intense hatred and fear of Japanese became widespread even among American civilians who never saw either a live Japanese soldier or the dead body of an American relative killed by the Japanese; my New Guinea friends did see the corpses of their relatives. Hundreds of thousands of American men volunteered to kill hundreds of thousands of Japanese, often in face-to-face combat, by brutal methods that included bayonets and flame-throwers. Soldiers who killed Japanese in particularly large numbers or with notable bravery were publicly decorated with medals, and those who died in combat were posthumously remembered as heroes who had died nobly.

Then, less than four years after Pearl Harbor, we Americans were told to stop hating and killing Japanese, and to forget the slogan that had dominated American life: “Remember Pearl Harbor!” Many Americans alive during those years have struggled for the rest of their lives with what they were taught and subsequently told to unlearn—especially if they were directly affected then, for instance through having survived the Bataan Death March, or through having had close friends and relatives who did not come back. Yet those legacies of American attitudes resulted from just four years of experience, for most of us second-hand. Having grown up during the anti-Japanese hysteria of World War II, I find it unsurprising that the Wilihiman Dani became so passionate about killing the Widaia Dani, when those attitudes were inculcated into them for decades by both teaching and extensive first-hand experience. The thirst for revenge isn’t nice, but it can’t be ignored. It has to be understood, acknowledged, and addressed—in ways other than actually taking revenge.