Its Desirability and Fragility
The other side of the question What contexts promote war? is What conditions favor peace? Indeed, answering the first question satisfactorily is impossible without addressing the second. However, the second question is much more difficult to answer on the basis of ethnographic data, simply because genuinely peaceful societies—as we have seen—are extremely rare. Both the historical and the ethnographic records display what frustrated social anthropologist Thomas Gregor called a “scarcity of peace.”1 Any attempt to look for the common circumstances and cultural features that encourage peace must proceed under this rather severe constraint.
Although warfare in many (if not most) nonstate societies was extremely frequent, deadly, and destructive, little evidence indicates that its practitioners and potential victims revelled in or harbored a special affection for it. Like people in civilized societies, tribal people responded to warfare with mixed emotions and contradictory social reactions. In most nonstate societies, as in our own, prowess and effective leadership in combat were granted high status and other rewards. The costs of defeat were so high and warfare was so frequent that the brave and skilled warrior was of immense social value. But warfare, whether primitive or civilized, involves losses, suffering, and terror, even for the victors. Consequently, it was nowhere viewed as an unalloyed good, and the respect accorded to accomplished warriors was often tinged with aversion.
For example, it was common the world over for the warrior who had just killed an enemy to be regarded by his own people as spiritually polluted or contaminated.2 He therefore had to undergo a magical cleansing to remove this pollution. Often he had to live for a time in seclusion, eat special food or fast, be excluded from participation in rituals, and abstain from sexual intercourse. Because he was a spiritual danger to himself and anyone he touched, a Huli killer of New Guinea could not use his shooting hand for several days; had to stay awake the first night after the killing, chanting spells; drink “bespelled” water; and exchange his bow for another. South American Carib warriors had to cover their heads for a month after dispatching an enemy. An African Meru warrior, after killing, had to pay a curse remover to conduct the rituals that would purge his impurity and restore him to society. A Marquesan was tabooed for ten days after a war killing. A Chilcotin of British Columbia who had killed an enemy had to live apart from the group for a time, and all returning raiders had to cleanse themselves by drinking water and vomiting. These and similar rituals emphasize the extent to which homicide was deemed abnormal, even when committed against enemies.
Furthermore, even the most bellicose societies did not award their best warriors or captains their highest positions of status or leadership.3 Instead, these rewards were reserved for men who, although they were often expected to be brave and skilled in war, were more proficient in the arts of peace—oratory, wealth acquisition, generosity, negotiation, and ritual knowledge. The six desired characteristics of a western Apache headman, for instance, were industriousness, generosity, impartiality, forbearance, conscientiousness, and eloquence; not one of these pertains directly to warfare. Cheyenne “peace chiefs” had more political influence, material wealth, and wives than the chiefs who led war parties. Among the militarily sophisticated and war-torn tribes of the Pacific Northwest Coast, chiefs and high-ranking males owed their status to inheritance and wealth, not to military prowess. The “Big Men” of highland New Guinea were seldom renowned warriors; rather, they were wealthy, generous, and persuasive. Among the Mae Enga, it was recognized that “rubbish men”—those with the least wealth and the lowest status—were often the most effective warriors. Civilized soldiers have often observed, with Kipling, that they are treated as saviors “when the guns begin to shoot” but are received with much less enthusiasm (and even with distaste) in peacetime. Evidently, tribal warriors were often regarded with similar reserve.
While men could acquire the spoils of victory or, even in defeat, the enhanced status of a warrior, women’s share from warfare was mostly negative. Even if they and their children were less likely to suffer physical harm than adult males, women had a great deal more to lose and less opportunity to gain. The gardens they tended and the food stores they produced could be looted or destroyed, and their homes razed. The threat of capture, rape, and exile loomed if the men were defeated. In short, they shared many of the risks but few of the benefits of war. It is therefore not surprising to discover that in many societies women detested war. Representing the unanimous opinion of her sex in a society where land disputes were the most common cause of fighting, one Mae Enga woman protested, “Men are killed but the land remains. The land is there in its own right and it does not command people to fight for it.”4 Such feminine antipathy toward for war was neither universal nor eternal, however. The taunts of women often incited men to fight; women took an active role in the torture of captives, as among the Tupi and Carib of South America; and in a few cases, women participated in actual combat (Chapter 2). But in the more commonly encountered situation, where their opinions on political matters were discounted or ignored and where their expected role was to suffer in silence, women usually viewed warfare as an unredeemed evil.
At some level, even the most militant warriors recognized the evils of war and the desirability of peace.5 Thus certain New Guinea Jalemo warriors, who praised and bragged about military feats and who took great pleasure in eating both the pigs and the corpses of vanquished enemies, readily confessed that war was a bad thing that depleted pig herds, incurred burdensome debts, and restricted trade and travel. Similarly, despite their frequent resort to it, Kapauku Papuans seem to hate war. As one man put it:
War is bad and nobody likes it. Sweet potatoes disappear, pigs disappear, fields deteriorate, and many relatives and friends get killed. But one cannot help it. A man starts a fight and no matter how much one depises him, one has to go and help because he is one’s relative and one feels sorry for him.
In small-scale societies, it is usually a matter of “my relatives, right or wrong” rather than “my country.”
Even the fierce head-hunting Jivaro of South America regarded their incessant warfare as a curse. Additional evidence of the universal preference for peace is the ease and even gratitude with which some of the most warlike of tribal peoples accepted colonial pacification or, in The new conditions wrought by European contact, pacified themselves.6 For example, Auyana men in New Guinea declared that life was much better after pacification because now one could go out to urinate in the morning without fear of ambush and one could eat a meal without anxiety about raids. Whether one takes any of these protestations at face value or cynically, they are remarkably like the attitudes and platitudes expressed by civilized people, both military and civilian.
In a rare ethnographic mention of psychological reactions to combat, some New Guinean Auyana warriors with reputations for bravery—actually all who were asked—admitted to suffering nightmares about becoming isolated in combat. A somewhat comparable nightmare about engaging in solitary combat against a raiding party of spirits and being trapped was recorded from a New Guinea Tauade man.7 Almost identical nightmares involving being left behind or otherwise separated from one’s comrades and being surrounded or trapped by enemies have been a common symptom of “combat neurosis” or “delayed stress syndrome” among American combat veterans.8 These examples provide tantalizing evidence that the fear and gore of combat are traumatic regardless of the cultural value placed on military prowess and that primitive combat is every bit as stressful and terrible as modern warfare.
On Tahiti, where warfare was especially brutal and merciless, “exhorters,” called Rauti, circulated constantly among the warriors during combat, urging the latter to spare no enemy—even relative or friend—and to display the ferocity of “the devouring wild dog.” When they were being browbeaten into doing something, Tahitian men would murmur, “This is equal to a Rauti.”9 This custom strongly implies that even when enemy atrocities to avenge were plentiful and where warfare was customarily exceptionally cruel, men had to be persistently nagged into committing acts of inhumanity.
Ethnographers have seldom asked individuals—men or women—about their attitudes toward and reactions to war, but the few available examples show that personal reactions in tribal societies varied as much as they do among civilized folk and that few people regarded war as more than a necessary evil. It was redeemed only by the opportunity it afforded for the display of courage and by the prospect of the profits of victory. In other words, tribal peoples were much like ourselves.
To judge from their mythologies, most cultural groups have invented many stories to account for the origins of warfare or for the warlike nature of aggressive neighbors, but they have created very few devoted to the genesis of peace. Although this seeming lack may be a consequence of the inadequate questions asked by ethnographers, it may also reflect a sense that war needs excuses (in the form of grievances, causes, mythological prescriptions by gods and ancestors, and so on), whereas peace requires none. From a similar survey, Harry Turney-High concludes that war and the killing it entails put men in a situation that they find at least uncomfortable and that peace is preferred “even in the minds of the most warlike peoples.”10 The clear implication is that peace is unexceptional, normal, and desirable to humans everywhere; and war is not.
Given that war is universally condemned and peace is everywhere preferred, it is very difficult to argue that values and attitudes play any significant role in promoting peace or war. As we have seen, even the most bellicose societies appear to regard their military heroes with mixed feelings—honoring their deeds but treating them in the short term as spiritually contaminated and denying them in the long term the highest rewards of wealth and status. Evidence also suggests that combat is just as psychologically traumatic for tribal warriors as for their civilized counterparts. People universally recognize that even for victors the practical effects of warfare are extremely unpleasant. It seems impossible that attitudes that are so widespread, realistic, and rational, that reflect direct experience and self-interest, are insincere or merely abstract. Yet if this worldwide revulsion had any real impact on social behavior, wars should be rare and peace common; instead the opposite is true.
This state of affairs is a paradox only for idealists, however. For materialists, values, beliefs, and attitudes are primarily epiphenomenal “superstructures”—that is, they either passively reflect or actively obfuscate economic and social reality. Negative attitudes toward war certainly reflect the unpleasant realities of warfare, but values and beliefs are slippery and changeable. Ironically (but often without the least trace of hypocrisy), a desire for peace has justified peacetime military preparations and the wartime use of very brutal methods. With bewildering rapidity, hated enemies can become respected allies, devout pacifists can become tigers on the battlefield, peaceable societies can become belligerent, and vice versa. The roots of war and peace clearly lie in certain social and economic circumstances that mold or override values and attitudes.
By far the most common form of settlement concluding a tribal war involves having a leader on one side declare a desire for peace; this overture is then accepted by the opposing leader, followed by an exchange of gifts or the mutual payment of homicide compensation. This process may sound easy, but in practice the establishment of peace at any stage short of the utter defeat or annihilation of one party is as difficult and delicate a task as any arranged peace between contending nation-states.11 Usually, peace negotiations are not even considered unless the fighting has reached an impasse and losses are approximately equal for both contenders. If the losses are not relatively even, there may be considerable resistance to a settlement on both sides: one group has suffered deaths that it must leave unavenged; the other must pay out a larger amount of “blood money” than it will receive.12 Or one group may feel strong enough to push the fighting to a more decisive conclusion. Before any peace negotiations can even begin, there must be a general consensus for peace among the warriors on both sides, which may be difficult to obtain. Any “hawks” or “hotheads” dissenting from the consensus can easily sabotage the negotiations simply by committing further violence. Even with such a consensus, reaching a final settlement can be a laborious and precarious endeavor.
The peace-making process among the Central Enga of New Guinea illustrates the excruciating delicacy necessary to establish peace between small-scale societies.13 When it is clear that neither side can defeat the other and when losses are nearly equal, the allies of the principal contenders will usually suggest that a peace be negotiated. Then the big men, or political leaders (who are not the war leaders), of the two principals will try to exhort a consensus for peace among their own warriors, with opposition expected from self-confident “fight leaders,” hotheaded young bachelors, and bereaved relatives of the slain. If the necessary consensus can be obtained from each side, neutral go-betweens carry proposals and counterproposals concerning the composition of the peace delegations and the location of the peace conference. These are important issues because both sides may suspect a treacherous ambush and because the inclusion of hawks or hotheads in either delegation would increase the likelihood of violence erupting at the meeting. Even when a mutually agreeable meeting has been arranged, it remains “no easy task to create a setting for reasonable discourse, one that will not disintegrate into bloody violence.” When meeting, the delegates lay aside their bows and spears (but not their axes), and both sides keep armed warriors lurking within earshot, ready to intervene if treachery is attempted or violence breaks out. As an opening, the opposing Big Men make prolonged speeches justifying their cause in a formal florid style, spiced with humor at the expense of their adversaries. Despite their conventionalized character and humor, these orations can fray tempers and lead to an explosion. When these harangues are finished, the crucial issue of blood-money payments is addressed. If this haggling is successful, down payments of homicide compensation are presented and divided among those due to receive them (the relatives of the slain). No one is ever really satisfied with these down payments, and it requires all of the Big Men’s influence and powers of persuasion to have them accepted. It is very common for a brawl to break out at this point, as some warriors reject what they consider insultingly small payments. Should any blood be drawn, the war resumes. If this hurdle is successfully passed, however, more bombastic speeches follow, threatening dire consequences should the foes delay or default in making full payment of their reparations. In practice, Enga clans usually try to evade paying the outstanding blood money by resorting to delays, procrastinations, or token payments, so most of their “peaces” seldom endure for long.
As the Enga example shows, the custom of paying blood money or other forms of war reparations are almost as much a cause of subsequent warfare as of immediate peace. New disputes can arise or fighting can resume when compensation is not paid promptly or to the satisfaction of the recipients. Indeed, among the Huli of New Guinea, unpaid homicide indemnities have been identified as a very common cause of wars.14 In addition, any wounded man who dies after the peace is concluded, even years later, requires new compensation. These belated claims are often refused, and the war begins again. Some New Guinea groups have even conducted autopsies to establish whether an old wound (or which of several old wounds) was the cause of death and represents a basis for a blood-money claim. In some cultures, compensation must be paid to families of allies killed in battle; if these payments are delayed or withheld, former allies can become active enemies. In general, reparations are a very weak mechanism for maintaining peace, and they often prove to be an impediment to reconciliation or an inducement to further violence.15
Other noncompensatory methods for establishing peace have been no more effective. For example, the Murngin of Australia would arrange very stylized and relatively harmless duels between the contenders in order to make peace. But these “peace-making fights” were often unsuccessful because the tribal elders could not control the tempers of their younger men; then one side would inflict a serious injury or death on the other, and wholesale fighting would resume.16
Just as with the Treaty of Versailles, the settlement of one tribal conflict could produce grievances leading to the start of another. Because these agreements were not enforced by a more powerful third party, peace settlements between nonstate societies, like those between nations, tended to be extremely brittle. The broken settlements, shifting alliances, smoldering grievances, and (in some instances) gross treachery displayed by nonstate societies led one ethnographer to remark that if records had been kept, the history of many such groups would be as complicated as that of any modern European nation.17 Peace may thus have been more precious in the precivilized condition because it was so rare and fleeting.
States enjoy a slight advantage over nonstates with regard to peace making because they exercise a much greater degree of centralized control over their populations and economic resources. Because political decision making is in the hands of a tiny minority of a state’s population, no complete consensus is needed from all citizens or soldiers before a peace can be negotiated. Hawkish dissenters can be controlled or even eliminated by the police institutions typical of states. States are then better able to enforce the peace from their own side. Where individuals have greater autonomy, as in small-scale societies or on colonial frontiers, almost anyone can commit acts (amounting to crimes) that bring their social units into armed conflict with neighbors. Of course, ambitious, greedy, treacherous, or faithless ruling elites can start wars without obtaining the consent of their subjects.
One of the apologies for imperialism during its heyday was pacification—the suppression of intertribal warfare by persuasion or force (usually the latter) and the substitution of legal means of resolving disputes or redressing wrongs. Had pacification and “the rule of law,” wider trade, and improvements in transportation and communication been the only innovations introduced by imperial agents, imperialism might ultimately have been more of a boon and less of an ordeal for its native subjects. In fact, colonial pacification was not an end in itself but a means to achieve goals that almost invariably benefited the intruders as much as they harmed the native inhabitants: forced labor, loss of territory, economic exploitation, subordinate social and political status, and lack of legal redress against wrongs or crimes committed by colonists. The price of imperial peace was manifold indignity, dispossession, abject poverty, slavery, famine, and worse; and that price was surely too high. The peace that humans universally desire is not that of the grave or the chain gang, but imperial pacification often meant both.
As Gregor noted when decrying the scarcity of peace, the most common peaceable societies are ones that could evade the problem of intertribal relations by fleeing conflict, because they lived in very sparsely settled regions and were isolated from intimate contact with others by oceans, desert wastes, mountain barriers, unhealthful swamps, and dense forests. Unfortunately, preserving peace by flight from conflict has not been a strategic option available to most societies. Of more general and practical interest are ethnographic or historical instances in which peace was maintained even though contact between different cultural and social groups was close and sustained.
Gregor nominates as such an example the multitribal society of the Upper Xingu Basin in Brazil, comprising some 1,200 people of four different language groups living in ten politically independent villages.18 For more than a century, aside from rare intervillage homicides and a few feuds, no wars or raids have occurred among these villages. But Gregor’s descriptions of warfare with non-Xingu “wild” tribes and the frequent killing of “witches,” which occasionally escalate into minor feuds, make what he calls a “negative peace” look anything but peaceful. He implies that deterrence primarily prevents these witchcraft killings from developing into wholesale feuding or even a Hobbesian state of war. He also notes that the Xingu region is geographically isolated, a situation that to some degree limits possible hostilities with non-Xingu tribes. But no matter how rarely they are met, these “wild Indian” enemies of the Xingu alliance are never far from its thoughts. They represent an external threat that binds the Xingu tribes together, and they serve as a moral example of the subhuman savagery that the Xinguanos could descend into should they abandon the principle of peace among themselves. Less extreme versions of ethnocentrism and negative ethnic stereotypes limit informal interaction among the allied tribes themselves. Formal interactions involve some intermarriage, considerable trade, and some participation in intervillage rituals; otherwise, the separate groups keep very much to themselves. It is also probable that the Xinguanos are all examples of a particular species of peaceable society we have previously encountered: defeated refugees. The Xingu tribes do seem much more harmonious than usual, but only with the aid of geography and on the basis of an uneasy but equitable social separatism.
The Xingu case does suggest that one form of monopoly exchange either promotes peace or is a symptom of it. Each of the Xingu tribes has what might be called an artificial monopoly.19 Every tribe produces and exports goods that none of the other tribes makes, although there is no objective reason why these products can not be made by all. The tribal specializations include shell belts, salt produced by burning water hyacinth plants, hardwood bows, spears, and ceramic pots. None of these monopolies can be explained on geographic grounds, since clay for pots, water hyacinths, shells, and hard wood for bows are equally accessible to all. In other words, unlike monopolies that are accidents of geographic proximity to sources of materials (and can provoke war), these are arbitrary and maintained by tradition. When Gregor asked why the specialty of another village was not made “at home,” he was told that to do so would anger the monopolists, perhaps leading them to bewitch the monopoly-busters. Allowing these arbitrary monopolies to remain in force has clearly helped to maintain peace.
A similar but less enduring association between arbitrary specializations and peaceful relations has been observed among the Yanomamo of the Upper Orinoco. For example, one of two allied Yanomamo villages made no pottery and obtained all its ceramics from its allies. When asked why they made no pots despite the availability of clay, the aceramic villagers claimed that the local clay was unsuitable and that they had forgotten how to make pots and so had to get them elsewhere. But when the alliance broke down, as frequently happens among the Yanomamo, the aceramic villagers immediately began making pots and exporting them to their new allies.20 This instance shows that such patterns of specialization and exchange are an effect of peace, and not its cause. By contrast, the Xingu tribesmen seem to recognize that perturbing the trade among arbitrary specialists would disturb the peace.
A prehistoric example of similar arbitrary village specializations has been found among some frontier villages of Early Neolithic farmers in Belgium, some of which were fortified.21 While all these villages raised their own grain and livestock, they appear (judging from finds of manufacturing debris) to have specialized variously in the production of stone axes, flint blades, some types of ceramics, and some special form of finished hide. These products were then exchanged among the villages, since all seem to have been equally well supplied with the finished products (except that no conclusion can be drawn as to the leather, which was not preserved). These specialties were arbitrary because the sources of raw material either were equally distant from all (as in the case of stone for axes) or were equally accessible (as with hides, flint, and clay). Moreover, most of these sites were separated from one another by distances of less than two miles. Given their frontier location and fortifications, these villagers, like the Xinguanos, appear to have been maintaining an alliance against the foragers beyond them.
One interesting “controlled” comparison that isolates the crucial conditions for war and peace involves the contrast between the nineteenth-century histories of western Canada and the western United States (and northern Mexico). These regions share a number of fundamental similarities in landscape, people, and final outcomes. During the nineteenth century, the arable and pasturable areas of North America west of the Mississippi and the Great Lakes passed from the possession of its native inhabitants into that of people of European origin. The prevailing subsistence economy changed from foraging or foraging supplemented by marginal agriculture to ranching and intensive farming. The Indians’ numbers were severely reduced, their traditional economies were destroyed, and they were left in occupation of small and usually infertile reserves.
The tribes on both sides of the border were warlike. In many cases, in fact, they were exactly the same tribes because the forty-ninth parallel cut through their territory. The tribes of the prairie and plains of Canada were enthusiastic horse raiders and placed the same value on martial prowess as did those to the south. The tribes of the British Columbian coast were among the most aggressive and militarily sophisticated peoples north of central Mexico, and they did not hesitate to raid the Russians when they first appeared in the area. The westward-pioneering Euro-Canadians and Euro-Americans were likewise essentially the same people; they came from the same regions of Europe in the same waves, and their New World family histories often crossed and recrossed the forty-ninth parallel. Euro-Canadians displayed the same ethnocentrism as Euro-Americans concerning the Indian cultures and the conviction that because they would make “better use” of fertile land, they (and not the “feckless” Indians) deserved to possess it.22 Francophone “Canadiens” and Métis (”mixed-blood” Catholics) played the same roles as traders, trappers, boatmen, and guides on both frontiers. Thus the plot, the scenery, the cast of characters, and the denouement were the same in both countries; however, the action and dialogue were very different.
South of the forty-ninth parallel, this drama was attended by frequent and bitter warfare. The Indians were, in the words of one of their foes, “fighting for all that God gave any man to fight for”—that is, for their homelands, for the safety of their families, and for preservation of their particular ways of life. The fertility, mineral wealth, and sheer magnificence of this huge territory made it a prize worth the risk to those who sought to seize it; and the settlers also fought, when war came, to protect their families and their way of life. Both the Indians and the settlers fought to perpetuate two incompatible ways of life so attractive (in retrospect, anyway) that they remain the objects of worldwide nostalgia. The Indian, Spanish, Mexican, and American bloodshed that stains the history of the West and littered its landscape with violent place-names (Battle Mountains, Massacre Lakes, and Bloody Islands) therefore appears to have been inevitable, a fated tragedy. It then comes as something of a shock to discover that in western Canada the same land-grab was perpetrated and the same subjugation of the Indians resulted but without a single war and with only one raid. North of the forty-ninth parallel, even though the stakes for both sides were every bit as high as in the south, peace reigned.
The Canadian peace was not absolute, nor was it maintained without the occasional use of force.23 In British Columbia, before its Indian treaties were ratified when it joined Canada in 1871, a few minor incidents did occur, involving Indians killing a few whites or looting shipwrecks. One case, the “Chilcotin War,” termed a “ludicrous ‘campaign’” by one ethnohistorian, exemplifies the nature of these incidents. In 1864, some Chilcotin Indians murdered some whites in three separate incidents. A large party of Royal Marines and militia was sent up country to arrest the culprits. This “war” ended when the suspects were recognized and captured while they were nonchalantly visiting the militia camp. Another case of Indian-white conflict occurred in 1885 during the Second Northwest Rebellion in Saskatchewan. This was the second revolt by Métis; their first “rebellion” in Manitoba fifteen years earlier had been bloodless and involved no Indians. The Métis’ principal grievance was that the parcels of land being granted to them were divided into grid squares rather than into long strips anchored on bodies of water. Despite the entreaties of the Métis and the hunger caused by poor government rations and the disappearance of the buffalo, only two small bands of Cree went on the warpath. The “hostile” Cree bands’ military cooperation with the Métis was limited to murdering nine people captured at a small undefended trading post and repulsing a force of Canadian militia, killing eight militiamen. After a few dozen deaths on both sides and some surprising defeats of Dominion forces by Métis militia in several skirmishes, the Métis’ “capital” was quickly overrun, their leader was arrested, and the rebellion ended.24 More generally, of course, force was often used by the Mounties in capturing or killing Indian, Métis, and white law-breakers. But compared with what went on to the south, the Canadian colonization of the West was extraordinarily peaceful.
The reasons why western Canada’s frontier history is so different from that of Hispanic northern Mexico and the American West are seldom addressed by historians. Extensive trade for furs preceded actual settlement on both frontiers, including trade in those inflammatory commodities, alcohol and guns.25 Even if the Hudson’s Bay Company’s methods, calculated to create dependency, were less provocative than those of fly-by-night entrepreneurs in the south, it lost its trade monopoly before the agricultural settlement and railroad building began. In any case, the Canadian Plains tribes preferred to trade with cut-rate Métis and American independents. In the earlier fur trade in both countries, the Indians monopolized production of the furs, whereas whites and Métis played the role of traders. Later, whites and Métis eliminated this informal Indian monopoly when they began trapping and hunting directly, first in the 1820s in the Rockies and Pacific Northwest, and then on the Plains in the 1860s (when the focus of trade shifted to buffalo hides). In fact, the trade situation in western Canada was similar to that south of the border during the critical period between 1860 and 1890.
One crucial Canadian-U.S. difference was the role played by the central government in colonization.26 In Canada, agricultural settlement occurred only after treaties had “extinguished aboriginal title,” whereas in the United States, settlement usually preceded treaties. The Canadian government and its agents kept these agreements by regularly delivering the commodities and cash annuities promised and by preventing white encroachment. In the United States, such treaties were often not ratified by the Senate, nor were the necessary funds allocated by the House. If funds were available, they were often skimmed by corrupt officials and traders. The Spanish and Mexican governments, when they played any role at all, granted large land grants to settlers without paying any attention to native title. In the United States and Mexico, grazing or squatting on Indian land was ignored or even encouraged.
The reserves granted to Canadian tribes in arable regions were small and scattered but allowed each tribe or band to remain within its traditional territory, if only on tiny fragments of it. The Canadian government thus divided its potential enemies as it dispossessed them, but took pains to minimize other potential grievances. In the United States, reservations were much larger; but in these several tribes or bands (sometimes mutually hostile ones) were concentrated, often far from their homelands. Homesickness, intertribal rivalries, and the terrible living conditions made American reservations a constant fount of hostile excursions. Many army officers and settlers regarded these turbulent reserves as little more than temporary sanctuaries where the unpacified bands could receive food and be rearmed each winter after spending the warm season hunting and raiding. Although this view grossly overestimated the winter comforts of these places, in a few instances it bore a kernel of truth. The most outrageous case involved the Kiowas of Fort Sill (Oklahoma) who raided each summer into Texas but then received supplies and ammunition each winter on the reservation.27 (The Kiowas believed that Texans were not Americans and were puzzled by the outrage expressed by U.S. officials concerning their raids.) In general, the U.S. Indian policy and its implementation united and concentrated potential enemies, multiplied their grievances, and even supplied them with arms and ammunition. It is hard to imagine a better recipe for frontier war.
By and large, Canadian justice was evenhanded; both white and Indian malefactors were caught and punished. The Indians of western Canada seemed to get along as well with the Mounties as any people would with those who policed them. These reasonable relations applied even to refugee warriors from south of the border—for example, the bitterly antiwhite Chief Sitting Bull. The Mounties were and behaved as policemen, not soldiers, in their dealings with Indians and with others. As historian Robert Utley puts it, the paramilitary Mounted Police “could deal with individuals as well as tribes. It did not have to go to war with a whole people to enforce order.”28 Since Mountie officers also served as magistrates, the legal system on the Canadian frontier resembled a mild form of martial law. Typically, the Canadian government ensured the benefits of peace and raised the costs of all crime—especially homicide—for both newcomers and natives. As well, the restraint exercised by the Indians of western Canada as they were subjugated and dispossessed is evidence of how much injustice people will tolerate for the sake of peace if they are assured of receiving the means to survive, certain punishment for breaking the peace, and impartial protection of their persons and property if they keep it. Peace, like war, has its price, and some parties pay more for it than others.
In the U.S. and Mexican realms, crimes committed against Indians went unpunished or were punished less severely than similar offenses against whites. Similarly, the tribes were averse to punishing fellow tribesmen for crimes committed against settlers. White law officers lacked legal jurisdiction over independent Indians, who in any case refused to surrender tribesmen to a foreign and obviously unfair legal system. Because of these legal deficiencies, a state of primitive war often arose between the Indians and the settlers, as these groups’ war parties and “militias” exchanged murders, raids, and massacres in cycles of retaliation. When the U.S. and Mexican governments did intervene in these feuds, it was invariably on the side of the colonists. Even on those occasions when the U.S. government or its representatives tried to secure more equitable legal treatment for the Indians, their efforts were usually sabotaged by local legislatures, politicians, and juries.29 The frequent resort to vigilantism by American settlers indicates that their own legal systems often failed to provide them with adequate redress for crimes committed among themselves. It is, then, hardly surprising that these weak and highly localized frontier legal systems were incapable of redressing crimes committed by Indians or those committed against them. In the nineteenth century, the American West was hardly lawless—on the contrary, it suffered from a plethora of insular, mutually uncooperative systems of law and legal enforcement: customary tribal (various); Spanish and Mexican colonial; American federal, state/territorial, and local (or vigilante).
The primary difference between the Canadian and the American western frontiers has been succinctly summarized by a Canadian historian: “the Canadian government got to the West first”—that is, before the settlers. In the American West, effective federal control of land allotments, treaty negotiations, and law enforcement lagged far behind the expansion of settlement. The primary role played by the U.S. government on the western frontier involved supplying a regular army to extinguish the numerous brushfire wars ignited between the equally independent, aggressive, and weakly policed settlers and tribes. Even decades after the first Euro-American colonization, the American West remained in a virtually stateless (or tribal) condition.
Comparing the examples of the Xingu and of nineteenth-century western Canada, it is difficult to isolate common features that might represent generalizable preconditions for peace. Like Xingu society, early-nineteenth-century Canadian society was founded by three abjectly defeated groups: resident French-Canadians and refugee American Loyalists and Highland Scots. But the term “defeated refugees” hardly applies to Canada’s later immigrants or to the native tribes of the Canadian West. The trade in specialities linking Indians and Europeans in Canada was hardly arbitrary in the fashion of the Xingu exchanges. The Canadian peace was predominantly the product of the mediation and police powers of the central state and the use made of them, but the Xinguanos lacked such Hobbesian institutions entirely. Geographic isolation may have played a role in limiting external wars in the Xingu, but this situation did not apply to Canada in relation to its western Indians. Looking at these peaces from the point of view of Xinguanos accused of witchcraft (who had to fear for their lives) or Canadian Indians living in diminished (and sometimes destitute) circumstances on reserves in the late nineteenth century, one could hardly call them attractive. Nevertheless, these peaces do share one enticing feature: they worked.
The only thing both cases clearly demonstrate is that interethnic harmony and intercultural appreciation are not preconditions for peace. Victorian Canada and the Xingu provide evidence that a workable peace can be forged and maintained between highly ethnocentric, mutually suspicious, and factious groups. What interethnic peace appears to require is a minimal and practical tolerance by the different parties for the harmless differences between them: one’s own group lives the right way and lets others live their own irrational, erroneous way. By and large, the attitude of the allied Xingu tribes was to let their fellow Xinguanos speak a brutish language, wear shocking or ridiculous fashions, eat disgusting foods, worship in the wrong way, and call noise “music”—as long as they honored debts and commitments, did not break the general peace, and refrained from unduly interfering with one’s own “proper” mode of life. These allied tribes treated one another with what Gregor describes a “false good manners.” Although various forms of covert and overt intolerance among its various ethnic groups have engendered many of Canada’s major political quarrels, the only organized violence these have generated since 1820 has been a handful of interethnic killings and two minimally bloody, comic-opera uprisings. That peace may flourish in the face of mildly biased attitudes is heartening, since a condescending tolerance seems less difficult to inculcate than eliminating the universal feeling that one’s own ways are best or training people to cherish uncritically precisely those behaviors and beliefs most different from their own. Peace may require minding one’s own business and sustaining coolly correct manners, but not wholesale brainwashing.
The Xingu, Canadian, and other cases previously mentioned suggest a few factors that seem to help peace endure. As noted, geographic isolation limits the number of provocations that can lead to war. The bitter aftertaste of a catastrophic defeat and dispossession can foster an aversion to war among the losers that can last for generations. The existence of a powerful third party that effectively and impartially punishes violence and theft can prevent war. A degree of mutual sufferance for the customs and beliefs of others is obviously helpful, but it is not necessary to banish all ethnocentrism or eliminate all economic and social injustice. Allowing allies to specialize in the production of items that a society could produce itself also seems to help maintain peace. On the other hand, neidier trade nor intermarriage encourages peace, but often helps to rupture it. The cases discussed here are evidence that peace is as demanding a state as war, requiring for its maintenance effort, economic sacrifice, and even occasional violence. Peace is not an effortless inertial or “natural” state to which people and societies revert in the absence of perturbation.
One persistent claim made regarding the scarcity of peace is that humans (especially men) are driven by their “biology” or “nature” to war on one another. Obviously, nothing in humans’ nature inhibits them from making war, but this lack hardly creates an automatic compulsion to fight. Almost all higher animals are capable of violence against their own kind. Humans seem no more predisposed to aggressive behavior than any other species that commonly fights and occasionally kills its own kind over territory, sexual access, or social dominance. Even some species of plants may be considered as “homicidal,” since they kill other individuals of their own species in slow motion by shading or other forms of crowding. Humans are such social animals that almost any activity, however basic to individual existence or reproductive success, involves the cooperation of a group. It is hardly surprising that violence, whether against other species or against other humans, often involves group cooperation. Other highly social creatures, from ants to rhesus monkeys, also display forms of group violence that have been called warfare. Warfare is ultimately not a denial of the human capacity for social cooperation, but merely the most destructive expression of it.
One difficulty for a sociobiological explanation is precisely humans’ inborn aptitude for social cooperation, the most obvious and unique expression of which is language. Our capacity for and use of violence is neither remarkable nor excessive compared with that of many other animal species, whereas our sociability and cooperativeness are unique. The Hobbesian “war of all against all” might be used to describe some solitary species of nonhuman animals, but it cannot be applied to any known human society. All societies, however bellicose or violent, use social and cultural devices to preserve havens of peace and cooperation within a group—even if only within a small band or village. If humans can occasionally construct huge societies involving hundreds of millions of individuals within which homicide is nearly eliminated, there is no biological reason why such social units could not include all of humanity. Regarding humans’ inborn capacities, it is far easier to explain peace than war.
But the greatest problem for a biological explanation of warfare—or of almost any aspect of our behavior—is the incredible plasticity of human conduct. Human behavior is shaped by learning and decision making to an extraordinary and overwhelming degree. Several examples have already been given of people regarded as especially peaceable or warlike changing within a few generations and even within a single lifetime to the opposite extreme. In many societies, members are extremely unaggressive and nonviolent toward one another and yet are very aggressive and violent toward outsiders.30 Most groups treat certain outsiders with friendship and kindness, others with cool suspicion and reserve, and yet others with hostility and cruelty. Human history is replete with examples in which such relationships change from familiar friendship to bitter enmity and back again with remarkable rapidity. To anthropologists, who have spent over a century exploring the huge variety of human behavior and its mutability, human biology looks less like destiny and more like its absence.
To use a modern analogy, if we look at the identical microchips in two computers, there is nothing intrinsic to explain why one is playing a war game while the other is doing accounts, or why the same computer can at one moment be targeting a missile and in the next designing a toy factory. Modern computers of exactly the same architecture are capable of directing aerial battles, conning ships, performing music, formulating genealogies, and simulating thousands of other warlike and peaceable activities, but in no sense does their hardware (that is, their “nature”) require them to perform these activities. They can and will perform such tasks only if they have “learned” how to do them by being programmed and then receive the proper “social and environmental stimuli” in the form of commands and other inputs. Like computers, their far simpler and entirely passive reflections, human individuals and societies possess the “hardware” to conduct wars and create peace but will not unless they have the proper programs and stimulating circumstances.
One social reason for the existence of war is that peace is sometimes too costly. When the effects of peace are the same as those of war—loss of members to homicide and kidnapping, impoverishment by theft and vandalism, and diminished access to critical resources—people have little to lose by going to war and potentially much to gain. Like those referred to in the famous signs of the Paris zoo, humans are dangerous animals because when attacked they will defend themselves. There are situations when it is better to send men to the on their feet than have everyone live on their knees.
Many people (and some anthropologists) deny that any gains are attainable through warfare, although they do concede that, in a Hobbesian world of war, declaring unilateral peace amounts to committing social suicide. The positive benefits of war as a rule come only with success. The loot and captives commonly obtained by a victor or successful raider may amply compensate for the risks and penalties of combat. Warfare offers one way to increase supplies of food and essential materials, expand territory, and enlarge the pool of labor and sexual partners. With its hazards and hardships, warfare may be (in the Western phrase) “a hard dollar,” but it yields gains nonetheless. To encourage warfare, these benefits need not be the goal, motivation, or cause of warfare; nevertheless, they often enough reward those who decide for whatever reasons to make war.
One explanation for why young men (especially young bachelors) are usually the most aggressive in initiating and conducting warfare is that they have the least to lose and the most to gain from successful combat.31 They are (often) unmarried, possess little or no property, and have far less status or influence than do older men. If they are killed, their deaths leave behind no widows or orphans who might become a burden to fellow tribesmen or suffer the degradations of captivity in defeat. If only wounded, they recover from their injuries more readily than do older men. If they succeed, war can gain them wealth, renown, and even a wife. No wonder, then, that young bachelors must be restrained by older men and women who have more to lose from defeat and less to gain from victory.
The circumstances under which regional pacification developed is another arena in which relative costs and benefits played a role in determining the incidence of war and peace. As we have seen, in many tribal areas, peace was imposed by an external power that punished fighting with superior force. Some areas pacified themselves when repeating rifles became readily available and trade with the wider world increased—like in many areas of Melanesia and among the Kalinga of the Philippines.32 In all these cases, changes made either warfare significantly more costly or peace substantially more profitable (or both).
But the costs of peace and the benefits of war are not completely sufficient explanations for aggressive behavior. First, we have seen instances where peace has been kept even though the price borne by some of the parties to it was disproportionately high, as in the case of the Indians of western Canada during the latter half of the nineteenth century. Second, although people tend to be overly optimistic about their chances of success in war, combat is a very risky business. Peace may have its risks too—droughts, diseases, pests, and countless human errors—but these are mostly unpredictable, whereas the risks of war are expected and obvious. Third, since these costs and risks are relatively higher for tribal societies (because of their smaller populations and thinner subsistence surpluses), war should be less common among such groups than among states and empires. But, as we have seen, the opposite appears to be true. Its high frequency at all levels of social organization implies that war may be many times more profitable or less risky than peace. This implication of the cost-benefit explanation for war conflicts not only with most scholars’ expectations, but also with the opinions of all tribal peoples polled by ethnographers. The universal preference for peace is not just the product of arbitrary moral choice or deep psychology; it is practical and rational. War is frankly parasitic—absorbing the profits of peaceful endeavors while imposing additional costs. Clearly some factor beyond costs and gains must be included in explanations of war.
This additional element surely involves the difficulty that societies experience in establishing and maintaining peace with equals. When no third party exists to adjudicate disputes over marriage arrangements, personal injuries, trade, territory, and other economic concerns, or when the mediators that do exist cannot enforce their decisions on the recalcitrant, disputants regularly resort to violent self-help. Peace is unavoidably rare in settings where no institutions have the moral authority and physical power to maintain it by compelling restitution or retribution for injuries, imposing resolutions to disputes, and ensuring the survival of component social units. Any peace lacking powerful institutions to uphold it usually amounts to little more than a prolonged truce. As anthropologist Marvin Harris put it: “Primitive peoples go to war because they lack alternative solutions to certain problems—alternative solutions that would involve less suffering and fewer premature deaths.”33
But to have peace, it is not enough to establish Hobbes’s Leviathan. Institutions of mediation and enforcement merely guarantee that the costs of violence or war will be high and that the enjoyment of any gains so obtained will be limited. To ensure a peace, a society must provide rewards—or at least no penalties—for keeping it. If people are confident that their labor will provide at least the necessities of life and some access to comforts and luxuries, violence will generally attract only the pathological. At the same time, even when peace is institutionalized in the form of courts and police it will be broken by violence, sabotage, or rebellion if it becomes more costly and risky than war. To put it simply, people must be given more inducement than just fear of punishment if peace is to endure.
Why war and why not peace? War represents a method, derived directly from hunting, for getting from one group what another one lacks and cannot peacefully obtain. It also serves as a means of preserving a group’s persons and possessions from the predatory or desperate and as a way of enforcing the harsh reciprocity of the lex talionis when no other mode of satisfaction is available. However, such simple answers are of little practical use in the complex and highly various social situations in which human beings strive to prevent wars and sustain peace. The proceeds of war vary tremendously with time, place, and culture: here cattle, there petroleum reserves, elsewhere slaves or salt cakes. The price of peace can be raised by belligerent neighbors, rapid population rises, trade imbalances, climatic changes, and a host of other difficulties peculiar to a time and place. Which methods and institutions are most effective in preserving peace is a question that has exercised the minds of leaders, rulers, councils, philosophers, and visionaries for millennia, without producing any enduring or generally applicable answers.