In order not to clutter the text with footnotes, the references for each paragraph have been consolidated into the footnotes attached to the first or the final sentence of each paragraph.
1. See Divale 1973: 3–9; Ferguson 1988: 114–21.
2. This original spelling is used by several anthropologists as a shorthand reference to Hobbes’s vision of small-scale societies and to characterize some ethnographic situations in which violence of all kinds was extremely common.
3. This is, of course, a libel, since Hobbes “concluded” no such thing. It is interesting that the neo-Rousseauian, Brian Ferguson, repeated this misrepresentation in 1990 but neglected to acknowledge Rousseau’s precedence or even to mention his existence!
4. Ryan 1981: 49–57.
5. Sumner 1911 versus Malinowski 1941.
6. Divale 1973: xvii.
7. Herdt 1987: 47–48.
8. Keegan 1976: 36–46.
9. Divale 1973: xxii.
10. For example, the anthropology graduate student whose master’s thesis was part of the project, Harry Hoijer, later co-authored the most widely used anthropology textbook of the 1950s and 1960s (Beals and Hoijer 1965). Thus anthropologists did not need to consult Wright’s massive book to be influenced by it.
11. Wright 1942 [1964]: 7.
12. I can find nothing in his writings or in anything written about him to indicate that he ever experienced combat. He certainly would have seen much of its ugly aftermath in liberated Belgium. In any case, Primitive War was written before World War II, which was his only chance to see combat.
13. Wright 1942: 62, 69, 74–76; Turney-High 1949: 141–68; 1981: 26, 36–40. Regarding the sportive or entertainment motive among primitives, Wright offers no documentation for his statements. Turney-High’s arguments and examples on this point are rather strange: war stories are “the most entertaining stories, and in order to spin yarns there must be wars”; California Indians knew they were “athletic humbugs” but would not admit it (!); and so on. No one reading his works can doubt that Turney-High thought war was fun—an easier attitude for a rear-echelon M.P. to maintain than for a front-line “grunt.”
14. Wright 1942: 80–85; Turney-High 1949: 21–137.
15. Turney-High 1949: 85, 87.
16. Turney-High 1981: 34.
17. Turney-High 1981: 34.
18. Various places in Turney-High 1949: 25–137; summary in 1981: 35–44, 56, 58.
19. Keegan 1976: 22–23.
20. Turney-High 1981: 69.
21. Wright 1942: 85–88; Turney-High 1981: 38.
22. Wright 1942: Appendix XII, 569–70. In this appendix, Wright listed annual war death rates for four tribal societies, three of which were from three to ten times higher than ninteenth-century France’s war death rate (the highest civilized rate known to him in 1941).
23. Wright 1942: 242–48; 1964: 59–62. Ennumeration indicated that civilized battles have been becoming less deadly over the last four centuries. Thus to save his hypothesis, Wright had to include all deaths “indirectly related” to war, dismiss the figures from seventeenth-century Britain and Germany, and include some highly estimated “indices” created by sociologists.
24. Turney-High 1949: xiv-xv, 25.
25. Ferguson 1984a: 6.
26. For example, Harris 1979.
27. For example, Harris 1975; Ferguson 1984a. However, it was never claimed that casualties alone could be a method of population control.
28. For example, Harris 1984: 129; Ferguson 1990: 29.
29. Chagnon 1983 (first edition 1968).
30. For example, Chagnon 1983; Koch 1974; Hallpike 1973, 1977.
31. Hallpike 1973: 454. Another neo-Hobbesian, K.-F. Koch (1974: 159–75), accepts four of five possible explanations for warfare in highland New Guinea—every possibility except the economic one.
32. For example, Fagan 1989; Wenke 1988; Sharer and Ashmore 1987; Thomas 1988. A recent exception is Hayden 1993.
33. For example, Green and Perlman 1985; Rouse 1986; Gregg 1988; Bogucki 1988.
34. Fagan 1989: 311; Whittle 1985: 219–20. Whittle does mention that at least one camp appeared to have been attacked by archers.
35. Dixon 1988; Mercer 1988.
36. For example, palisades around Mississippian villages to keep out deer (?); the “peaceful Pueblos” of the American Southwest (see Wilcox and Haas 1991); the “peaceful” Maya.
37. This example is not completely hypothetical example since the extensive Ancient Mayan road systems now being documented in the Yucatan are being interpreted by many scholars as “ritual roads” (B. Hayden, personal communication).
38. Ferguson 1992a, 1992b. His colleague, Neil Whitehead (1990: 160), blames Hobbes directly, claiming that intruding Westerners brought with them Hobbes’s “ideology of war” (what that ideology is remains unclear since Hobbes never praised war or suggested how it should be conducted). Another proponent of prehistoric peace is Blick (1988).
39. Ferguson 1992a: 113. Except for a single clause in one sentence, Hobbes did not mention any “wild violence” by natives to support his case.
40. Gabriel and Metz 1991: 3, 19. In his latest book, the justly celebrated military historian John Keegan (1993) “buys” Turney-High “lock, stock and barrel,” probably because the latter’s book remains the only general anthropological synthesis on prestate warfare available to nonanthropologists.
41. Rochberg-Halton 1991: B6-B7.
42. Manchester 1980: 102.
1. Otterbein 1989: 21, 143–44, 148.
2. Ross 1983: 179, 182–83.
3. The Cayapa were indeed peaceful since they had no traditional memory of warfare since mythological times (HSAI vol. 4, 1948: 282).
4. Jorgensen 1980: 503–6, 509–15, 613–14.
5. The Panamint, Battle Mountain, and Hukundika Shoshone; the Gosiute and the Kaibab Paiute of the Great Basin; the Wenatchi and Columbia Salish of central Washington.
6. Harris 1989: 288–89; Meggitt 1962: 38, 42, 246.
7. Knauft 1987; Lee 1979: 387–400; Harris 1989: 288; HNAI vol. 5, 1984: 340–41, 401–402, 409, 429, 440–41, 455; J. G. Taylor 1974: 92–92; HSAI vol. 1, 1946: 94–95. Knauft’s (1987) paper on violence in “simple societies” is extremely useful, and most of the homicide rates referred to here were taken from his Table 2. He also calculates that the Semai, the archetype of a nonviolent society, had a homicide rate three times that of the modern United States.
8. HSAI vol. 1, 1946:94–95.
9. Lee 1979: 399; Harris 1989: 288.
10. To equal the Gebusi annual homicide rate of 683 homicides per 100,000 (Knauft 1987: 464), the armed forces of the United States (with an average population of 200 million and homicide rate of 10) would have had to kill 1,350,000 people each year. In nine years, this would amount to 12 million deaths; the population of South Vietnam in 1965 was less than 14 million.
11. Knauft 1987: 463. My conservative calculation (i.e., excluding deaths from disease and starvation) of the annual homicide rate of Nazi Germany (1933 to 1945) yields a figure of approximately 2,000 per 100,000 (over three times that of the Gebusi), indicating that it qualifies as the most homicidal society ever recorded.
12. HNAI vol. 5, 1984: 577–79, 585.
13. Even if only one homicide occurred every fifty years in such a small population, their homicide rate would equal that of the United States.
14. For example, Tonkinson 1978: 32, 118, 123–28; Steward 1938: 83, 91, 140, 176, 179.
15. See also Ember 1978.
16. See Ember and Ember 1992: 248–49.
17. Dentan 1979:58–59. See Knauft (1987: 458) for the Semai homicide rate.
18. Dentan (1979: 2) suggests that the Semai (and, presumably, the related Semang) tradition of flight from violence is a consequence of countless defeats and slave raiding at the hands of the more numerous and aggressive Malays. In other words, the Semai can be characterized as defeated refugees.
19. Appendix, Tables 2.1–2.4; see also Ember and Ember 1990: 255.
20. Heider 1970: 107; Chagnon 1968: 141.
21. Hackett (ed.) 1989: 140, 170, 193.
23. Pospisil 1963: 59–60; Edgerton 1988: 39, 107; Steward and Faron 1959: 190, 209, 223, 245; Grinnell 1923 (II): 44–47; HNAI vol. 8, 1978: 219, 260, 380, 547; HSAI vol. 3, 1948: 480; Vayda 1960: 41; Meggitt 1977: 98–99.
24. Chandler 1966: 1, 102, 1, 106, 1, 113–14; Perret 1989: 553; Gabriel and Metz 1991: 89.
25. For example, Dart 1957; Roper 1969.
26. (Australopithicines) Brain 1981; (Neanderthals) Klein 1989: 333–34; Vend 1991.
27. Vencl 1991; Klein 1989: 387; Jelinek 1991; Gambier and Sacchi 1991; Svoboda and Vlcek 1991; Wendorf and Schild 1986; Wendorf 1968; Greene and Armelagos 1972.
28. Wendorf 1968.
29. Vencl 1991; Frayer, in press; Price 1985. See also Appendix, Table 6.2.
30. For example, Courtin 1984; Keeley 1990.
31. Wahl and König’s (1987) exceptionally intelligent and thorough analysis of the Talheim mass grave deserves far greater notice from archaeologists than it has received.
32. O. Bar-Yosef, personal communication. (Incidentally, Bar-Yosef interprets the Early Neolithic “fortifications” at Jericho as being flood protection and a temple tower.)
33. For example, Milner et al. 1991 (eastern United States); Jurmain 1988 (California); Charters 1989 (Columbia Plateau); Wilcox and Haas 1991; Turner and Turner 1992 (American Southwest). For additional references, see Appendix, Table 6.2.
34. For example, Milner et al. 1991; Rohn 1975; Wilcox 1989; HNAI vol. 7, 1990: 348; MacDonald 1989.
1. Ferguson 1984a: 26 (referring to Otterbein 1989).
2. Rogers 1970: 14; Oliver 1974: 382; Vayda 1960: 38–40; Carniero 1990: 194–95.
3. Meggitt 1977: 67–69.
4. Turney-High 1981: 34.
5. Koch 1974: 214.
6. Warner 1931; Utley 1984: 105; Robbins 1982:187; Meggitt 1977: 86–91; Glasse 1968: 92; Heider 1970; Ferrill 1985: 22.
7. Utley 1984:99–118.
8. Malone 1991: 22.
9. Meggitt 1977: 57.
10. Turney-High 1949: 26.
11. Turney-High 1981: 69. Despite the importance Turney-High accorded to this “law” of warfare, it has not been taught to officer trainees by the modern armed forces of the United States, Britain, or the former Soviet Union since World War II.
12. Political system versus military sophistication, r = .64; but military success versus military sophistication, r = .44 (Otterbein 1989: 74, 95).
13. Otterbein’s “primary mode of subsistence” and “sociopolitical complexity” codes combined explain 52 percent of the variability (r2 = .52) in his “military sophistication index,” whereas the frequency of war (the lowest number in columns 4–6) and the “military success” codes together explain only 17 percent (r2 = .17).
14. Gabriel and Metz 1991: 56–75.
15. Driver and Massey 1957: 357.
16. See Appendix, Table 3.9.
17. Meggitt 1977: 57–58.
18. The elaborate, finely finished prehistoric axes commonly found at sites in the Southwest and Great Plains of North America—regions where both wood and woodworking were rare—may represent similar cases, especially on the Plains, where warfare victims have tomahawk traumas on their skulls (Willey 1990: 118).
19. Gabriel and Metz 1991: 72; Malone 1991: 15–18.
20. Tonkinson 1978: 32.
21. Meggitt 1977: 57; Connolly 1989: 162.
22. Gabriel and Metz 1991: 75; Handy 1923: 133.
23. DuBois 1935: 125; HSAI vol. 1, 1946: 295, 297, 425, 428; Handy 1923; Heider 1970: 285; Bohannon and Bohannon 1953; L. Bohannon, personal communication; Fadiman 1982: 116; Steward and Faron 1959: 190, 244, 249, 321, 323, 357; Spier 1930: 193–94; Gibbon n.d.; Steward 1941: 338; Aginsky 1943: 456; Stewart 1941: 385; Stewart 1942: 268; HSAI vol. 4, 1948: 4; Mercer 1980: 142; HNAI vol. 15, 1978: 112.
24. Underhill 1989: 221.
25. Gabriel and Metz 1991: 89–91.
26. Weber 1992: 229.
27. Webb 1974: 254–55; Keeley 1993; Wahl and König 1987: 178–79; D. Frayer, personal communication.
28. For exceptions, see Steward and Faron 1959: 190, 221, 358; HSAI vol.3, 1948: 35; HSAI vol. 4, 1948: 489; Morren 1984: 195.
29. Marshall 1987: 248–49. A similar calculation from Keegan’s (1976: 234, 255) figures for the British bombardment at the Somme in 1916 gives a ratio of 250 shells fired for each German casualty inflicted (from all causes).
30. Connell 1984: 259.
31. Turney-High 1981: 42.
32. The basic information and references for this section can be found in the Appendix, Table 3.2.
33. Keeley 1992; Bamforth 1994; Champion et al. 1984: 213–15, 283; HNAI vol. 9, 1979: 65–66, 136, 433.
34. HNAI vol. 8, 1978: 238; Chatters 1989: 241.
35. See Haas and Creamer’s (1993) fine study of this phenomenon in northeastern Arizona.
1. Heider 1970: 107; Vayda 1976: 18; Dozier 1967: 68; Otterbein 1967: 352; HNAI vol. 8, 1978: 130, 198, 251, 344, 454, 488, 513, 697.
2. Glasse 1968: 92.
3. Keegan 1976: 296, 309.
4. Grinnell 1923 (II): 28–38; Hoebel 1978: 75–77.
5. Mae Enga warriors who killed or seriously wounded several enemies in a single formal battle, thus determining the successful outcome of the combat, were permitted to assume a knotted cord as a mark of honor. Additional knots could be added if the feat was repeated (Meggitt 1977: 66–67).
6. Hanson 1989: 190. No one can read Hanson’s descriptions of a Greek hoplite battle and imagine it a game.
7. The Allies did parole the Sicilians among the Italian prisoners taken during the invasion of Sicily in World War II.
8. Keegan 1989: 390.
9. Edgerton 1988: 178–79; Morris 1965: 449.
10. For example, Manchester 1980: 225–26.
11. HNAI vol. 8, 1978:698.
12. For example, Grinnel 1923 (II): 45–47; Hoebel 1978: 79.
13. Of course, the frequency of battle dramatically increased under Grant and Sherman in the summer of 1864. It is interesting to note that in the fierce battles for Atlanta in July and August 1864 the proportion of Sherman’s army that was killed in action (usually half of those counted as “killed and missing”) never exceeded 2 percent (Sherman 1886: 608–11).
14. Oliver 1974: 398; Vayda 1976: 25; Carneiro 1990: 199.
15. For example, Herdt 1987: 48–55; Morren 1984: 186.
16. Vayda 1976: 22–23; Turney-High 1949: 124; Robbins 1982: 185, 188; Meggitt 1977: 75–76, 110; HNAI vol. 6, 1981: 408; HNAI vol. 5, 1984: 477; Morren 1984: 188.
17. Chagnon 1968: 141; HNAI vol. 6, 1981: 287; Chagnon 1983: 170; Hogbin 1964: 59.
18. Cannon 1992; Kent 1980.
19. (Plateau) Chatters 1989; (Illinois) Milner et al. 1991; (British Columbia) HNAI vol. 7, 1990: 58; (California) Walker and Lambert 1989; Lambert and Walker 1991; Jurmain 1988; Hohol 1982; (Egypt) compiled from Wendorf 1968 and Anderson 1968.
20. Milner et al. (1991: 583) estimate that the Norris Farms no. 36 cemetery was used only “for a few decades” (thus, let us say thirty years). Prorating the 43 homicides over 30 years gives 1.43 homicides per annum. If the base population of the group using this cemetary was 100, then the homicide rate was 1,430 per 100,000, or 140 times the U.S. rate of 10 per 100,000. If the population was 200, a more reasonable village size (R. Hall, personal communication), then the rate was 717. This latter homicide rate is seventy times that of the United States in 1980, 150 times that of the United States in 1953, and 1,400 times that of Britain in 1959 (Knauft 1987: 464).
21. Vayda 1976: 23; Heider 1970: 78, 119; HNAI vol. 8, 1978: 506, 510, 513, 674, 687; HNAI vol. 6, 1981: 286–87, 494; Slobodin 1960: 83; Chagnon 1968: 141; Herdt 1987: 54–55.
22. Heider 1970: 105; Herdt 1987: 54; HNAI vol. 6, 1981: 287; Cannon 1992: 509–10.
23. (Middle Missouri) Zimmerman 1980; Willey 1990; Bamforth 1994; (Southwest) Haas 1990: 187, and personal communication.
24. Milner et al. 1991: 595. Milner and his colleagues also provide a long list of references to evidence of warfare deaths among prehistoric Native Americans in the eastern prairies and woodlands. A popular account of the Crow Creek site is given in Zimmerman and Whitten (1980); a detailed analysis of the bones appears in Willey (1990).
25. Wahl and Konig 1987; Courtin 1984: 448.
1. Regarding the identity of the Skraelings, archaeology indicates that they were Indians ancestral to the historic Beothuk, since the Dorset Eskimo had disappeared from Newfoundland and adjacent parts of Labrador several centuries before the Norse appeared (HNAI vol. 15, 1978: 69; Fitzhugh 1985: 25–29). Given that their technology and diet were the same as the historic Beothuk, the population density (no more than one person per 25 square miles) and settlement pattern (small-band encampments scattered along the coast) of the proto-Beothuk Skraelings were probably comparable. That being the case, there would have been no more than 100 potential Skraeling warriors within a 200-mile radius of the Viking settlements. Since the Viking colony consisted of 250 men and women (Morison 1971: 54), the Vikings could never have been outnumbered or attacked by a “multitude” of Skraelings as the sagas claim.
2. Morison 1971: 32–62; see also Roesdahl 1991: 274–75; Fitzhugh 1985: 28.
3. Parker 1988: 120.
4. For examples, see Allred et al. 1960; Utley and Washburn 1977; Utley 1984; HNAI vol. 4, 1988: 128–63; HNAI vol. 10, 1983: 496.
5. For example, Utley 1984; HNAI vol. IS, 1978: 625.
6. The Narragansett fort successfully stormed by Massachusetts militia in 1675 was incomplete.
7. One would think that the repeated thrashing of better-disciplined European and fanatically disciplined Asian armies by American “rabble” (and the nasty treatment dealt the French by highly “irregular” Mexican Juaristas) would eventually disabuse these Colonel Blimps of their condescension. But it shows no signs of abating; see, for example, the works of Max Hastings and Dan van der Vat.
8. Morris 1965; Edgerton 1988 (this work, written by an anthropologist, is especially recommended). The Zulu polity was a true state, and Zulu regiments were disciplined units that fought in massed formations and thus were easier for a civilized army to defeat than hit-and-run skimishers like the Apaches.
9. Porch 1986: 120–23, 140, 165–72, 227–30.
10. Edgerton 1988: 119–213.
11. Bodley 1990:46.
12. Utley and Washburn 1977: 53, 134, 210; HNAI vol. 4, 1988: 130, 159, 162, 164, 170–72; HNAI vol. 15, 1978: 99–100; Utley 1984: 95–96; Porch 1986: 209–10; Parker 1988: 119–20, 207 n. 49; Eid 1985.
13. Eid 1985: 139; HNAI vol. 15, 1978: 99–100. Malone (1991) also makes this point in greater detail, marred only by his unsupported belief that the precontact warfare of the New England tribes did not inflict many casualties.
14. Malone 1991: 6. Apologies to Patrick Malone for appropriating the title of his fine book The Skulking Way of War to head this chapter.
15. Utley 1984: 95–96.
16. This is abstracted from accounts in Utley 1984; Utley and Washburn 1977; and HNAI vol. 4, 1988: 168, 174–76.
17. Dudley 1975: 90–91, 98, 157–70; Connolly 1989: 165–67; Dobson 1989: 205–12.
18. McGovern 1985: 311–14; HNAI vol. 5, 1984: 551–55; Fitzhugh 1985: 27–31. Some academics dismiss these Inuit and Norse accounts because they contain certain fantastic or stylized elements. This dismissal is analogous to doubting that Magellan’s expedition sailed around the world, simply because Pigafetta’s account of the voyage mentions fabulous animals and minor miracles. In any case, scholarly scepticism has not discouraged the Greenlanders (a term now used only for those of Inuit descent) from mischievously celebrating this ancestral genocide of Scandinavians in every conceivable form of art.
19. Mercer 1980: 157–58, 184–93; Crosby 1986: 79–89.
20. For example, HSAI vol. 3, 1948: 218, 467, 505, 509, 563, 618, 729.
21. (Pawnee) Weber 1992: 171; (Seminoles and Red Cloud) Utley and Washburn 1977: 128, 131–35, 211–15.
22. Crosby 1972, 1986.
23. Aztec casualties from Thomas (1993: 528–29) do not include the 170,000 estimated to have died from starvation and disease during the siege of Tenochtitlàn. Disease mortality is calculated from various estimates of the decline in central Mexico’s population cited by Thomas (1993: 609–13); Crosby (1972: 53); and Fagan (1984: 286).
24. Crosby 1986: 133–47 and 1972: 35.
25. Williams 1970: 198–99.
26. Malone 1991.
27. Schiefenhövel 1993: 327; P. Weissner, personal communication.
28. One popular folly in the antebellum American South was that the United States could “annex” Mexico proper, specifically in order to expand the slave economy. Similar southern ambitions were entertained regarding Cuba and Central America. Any such southern-supported “filibuster” would undoubtedly have been a bloody failure, as was the only actual attempt in Nicaragua from 1855 to 1857 (McPherson 1988: 47–116).
29. Updating Laqueur’s (1984: 441–42) list, my count is as follows. Guerrilla wins: Mexico (1911–1919), Ireland (1919–1922), Arabia (Ibn Saud), Nicaragua (Sandino 1927–1933), Yugoslavia (World War II), Albania (World War II), Palestine (Israelis 1944–1948), Indochina (1945–1954), Indonesia, Algeria, Cyprus (independence), Cuba (Castro), Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), Aden-Yemen, Namibia, Afghanistan, Nicaragua (Sandinista).
Guerrilla victories correlated with conventional military victories: Arabia (World War I), China (1927–1945), USSR (World War II), Greece (World War II), France (World War II), Italy (World War II).
Guerrilla losses: Boers (1899–1902), Philippines (1899–1902), Soviet Union (Basmatchi 1919–1930), Morocco (1921–1927), Brazil (Prestes), Palestine (Arab 1936–1939), Poland (1944), Iraqi Kurds (1945–1975), Philippines (Huk 1946–1956), Greece (communists 1947–1949), Malaya (communist), Kenya (Mau-Mau), Venezuela (1962—1965), Peru (1962–1965), Oman (1962–1976), Guatemala (1964–1967), Bolivia (Guevara).
Ties: German East Africa (1914–1918, surrendered only at general armistice), southern Sudan (1955–1972), Syria (1925–1936), and Yemen Civil War (1962–1970) (in the three latter cases, the guerrillas were granted considerable concessions, as were the defeated Boer commandos, the Filipino Huks, and the Kenyan Mau-Mau).
Although a number of guerrilla wars are currently unresolved, by my count, guerrilla wins outnumber losses by almost two to one. Also note that many of these “losses” amd “ties” have engendered several new and continuing guerrilla wars, such as in the Philippines (Huk) and in the Sudan.
It is difficult to classify urban terrorists as guerrillas, since their actions never intend or accomplish the slightest harm to the military strength or basic economy of their enemies, they never clear or control any territory, and they have an unbroken losing record for at least the last two centuries. Since they rely on the mass media for their theatrical effects, they seem better classified as dramatic performers (Laqueur 1984: xi).
It is fair to note that some military analysts find little to appreciate in guerrilla techniques (for example, Laqueur 1984 and Van Creveld 1989). They note the dependence of modern guerrillas on external logistic support and suitable geography. But they also denigrate guerrilla victories by attributing them primarily to the political or “moral” failings of their conventional opponents rather than the military effectiveness of the guerrillas. Thus they argue that the Dutch in Indonesia, the British and the Portuguese in countless wars of decolonization, the French in Indochina and Algeria, and the Americans in Vietnam lost because of a lack of will at home, a liberal squeamishness about human rights and the brutalities required to win, or an inability to commit their full military resources to the struggle. These arguments are merely special pleadings. In all wars, the defeated side loses its will to continue, either because it has suffered intolerable human and economic losses or because it judges continuing warfare would be more costly than making a disadvantageous peace. Guerrilla wars have been won and lost for the same reasons as conventional wars. The totalitarian, unsqueamish Soviet Union was neither hindered by a free press nor domestic political dissent in its war in Afghanistan; yet it was defeated. The division of military resources also affected the victors in some notable conventional wars: the United States in World War II and Korea (the Pacific/Asia versus Europe/NATO), Israel in 1967 and 1973 (Syria versus Egypt), and Britain in the Falklands War (Northern Ireland/NATO versus Argentina).
30. Weigley (1991) details the futility of 200-year quest by European armies for “decisive” battles.
31. For example, McNeill 1982; Parker 1988.
32. One defense analyst (Friedman 1991: 251) attributes all of Iraq’s military deficiencies to general social and economic factors and concludes: “It is difficult to escape the conclusion that military superiority is a function of social organization.”
1. HNAI vol. 5, 1984: 177, 218, 333, 477; HNAI vol. 6, 1981: 408, 455; HNAI vol. 7, 1990: 215, 336, 465, 495; HNAI vol. 8, 1978: 199, 380, 393, 488, 547; HNAI vol. 10, 1983: 329; HNAI vol. 15, 1978: 262, 278, 316, 386, 676; HSAI vol. 1, 1946: 195, 314, 391, 498; HSAI vol. 3, 1948: 88, 112–26, 188, 278, 291, 528, 647, 701, 756; Matthews 1877: 61; Slobodin 1960: 83; Stewart 1965: 381–82; Ray 1963: 143; Meggitt 1977: 89–91; Handy 1923: 133–34; Evans-Pritchard 1940: 128; Brown 1922: 85.
2. Meggitt 1977: 102–103.
3. Edgerton 1988: 130. Actually, other Nguni tribes and the Mtetwa (Zulu) a hundred years before the Zulu War sometimes took male prisoners who were later ransomed for cattle; the custom of killing prisoners was an innovation of King Shaka (Otterbein 1967: 352).
4. Oliver 1974: 395–98; HNAI vol. 8, 1978: 380, 393, 547; HNAI vol. 10, 1983: 329; HNAI vol. 15, 1978: 220, 316, 386, 628, 676; Hudson 1976: 253–57; HSAI vol. 3, 1948: 119–26, 291, 339.
5. HNAI vol. 15, 1978:316, 386.
6. Vayda 1960: 70; Handy 1923: 138; Carneiro 1990: 199; Balee 1984: 246–47; Whitehead 1990: 155; Steward and Faron 1959: 209, 236, 244, 305, 323–27, 331, 335; HNAI vol. 8, 1978: 330, 380; Morren 1984: 175, 179, 193; HNAI vol. 15, 1978: 386, 676; HSAI vol. 3, 1948: 291, 339, 701.
7. For example, Glasse 1968: 93; Pospisil 1958: 93.
8. Of the 230 or so tribal groups (worldwide but the majority in the Americas and Oceania) for which I have notes on this issue, I have found only 8 that sometimes spared adult male captives for any reason: the Shawnee and Fox of the midwestern United States, the Mojo and Baure of central South America, the Macushi Carib of Guiana, the Nandi and Meru of East Africa, and the Nguni of southeastern Africa (HNAI vol. 15, 1978: 628, 642; HSAI vol. 3, 1948: 418, 852; Huntingford 1953: 77–78; Fadiman 1982: 46; Otterbein 1967: 352). In all these cases, the ethnographic accounts indicate that such acts of mercy were at least unusual, if not exceptional.
9. Evans-Pritchard 1940: 128–29; Kelly 1985: 55–57.
10. HNAI vol. 5, 1984: 177; HNAI vol. 6, 1981: 455; HNAI vol. 7, 1990: 215, 336, 465; HNAI vol. 8, 1978: 219, 547. HNAI vol. 15, 1978: 676; Ray 1963: 143; HSAI vol. 3, 1948: 262, 710, 786; Steward and Faron 1959: 188.
11. For example, Hogbin 1964: 59; Meggitt 1977; Pospisil 1963: 59; Robbins 1982: 188.
12. Porch 1986: 80.
13. Jorgensen 1980: 514.
14. Fadiman 1982: 46; Meggitt 1962:38; HNAI vol. 7, 1990: 465; HNAI vol. 8, 1978: 380, 547; HNAI vol. 10, 1983: 329; HNAI vol. 15, 1978: 157.
15. HSAI vol. 4, 1948: 549; Steward and Faron 1959: 322; Rouse 1986: 188. Whitehead (1990) dismisses both the Island Carib traditions and the complementary reconstructions of linguists as being the result of early confusion between the Caribs of the mainland and the linguistically complex islanders. He also attributes this confusion to exclusive reliance on Spanish sources. Since the only sources on the early contact period islanders are Spanish, it is difficult to locate an alternative. He claims that the Island Carib “pidgin” was just a “trade language” shared with their friends the mainlanders. The idea that Island Carib men would use a mere trade lingo when speaking with their wives and among themselves seems far more improbable than the traditional explanation.
16. For example, Early and Peters 1990: 20, 67–70; see also Kelly 1985 on the demographic effects of the capture of Dinka women by the Nuer.
17. HNAI vol. 11, 1986: 382; HNAI vol. 10, 1983: 476; HNAI vol. 8, 1978: 199, 329, 440, 547, 694–700; HNAI vol. 6, 1981: 408, 494; HNAI vol. 5, 1984: 218, 333, 477; HSAI vol. 1, 1946: 498; HSAI vol. 3, 1948: 721; Steward and Faron 1959: 358; Slobodin 1960: 83; Oliver 1974: 398; Handy 1923: 133–34; Vayda 1960: 92; Brown 1922: 85.
18. Zegwaard 1968: 443; Morren 1984: 176. Among an Asmat population of about 5,000 people, eighty-three such raids were recorded in just one year. If each raid killed only one person (a very conservative estimate), the annual war death rate would be 1.66 percent, or higher than any group listed in Figure 6.1.
19. Pakenham 1991: 609–15; Edgerton 1988: 210–12.
20. Utley and Washburn 1977: 42, 206–7, 217–18; HNAI vol. 15, 1978: 106–7; HNAI vol. 7,1990: 586, 592; HNAI vol. 8,1978:107–108,178, 195, 205, 249, 362–63. In the United States, public condemnation of such slaughters came primarily from representatives of the federal government: Indian agents and officers of the regular army. Similarly infamous genocides of native Tasmanians and South African “Bushmen” were committed by colonial militias, commandos, and allied native tribes.
21. Some readers may be unconvinced by percentage comparisons between populations of hundreds or thousands of people and populations of millions and tens of millions—that is, they are more impressed by absolute numbers than ratios. However, consistent with such views, such skeptical readers must also disdain any calculations of death rates per patient or passenger-mile and therefore always chose to undergo critical surgery at small, rural, Third World clinics and fly on small airlines. At such medical facilities and on such airlines, the total number of passenger or patient deaths are always far fewer than those occurring on major airlines or at large university and urban hospitals. These innumerate readers should also prefer residence on one of the United States’s small Indian reservations to life in any of its metropolitan areas since the annual absolute number of deaths from homicide, drug abuse, alcoholism, cancer, heart disease, and automobile accidents will always be far fewer on the reservations than in major cities and their suburbs.
22. Lindeman 1987: 115.
23. Keegan 1976: 313.
24. Meggitt 1977: 112.
25. See Appendix, Table 6.2, for references for Figure 6.2. Several of these prehistoric war death percentages are comparable (and actually higher than) that of the Jivaro, whose high figure is claimed to be the result of the introduction of firearms.
26. Cybulski, n.d. in press.
27. Keegan 1989: 592.
28. Recent figures indicate that nearly 25 million Soviet citizens died during World War II, of whom less than once-third were military (Weinberg 1994: 894). Almost all these military casualties (about 8 million) would have been male and, given that almost 25 percent of all Soviet males were in the military, a conservative estimate of female casualties is 60 to 65 percent of the civilian deaths. By this crude estimate, the Germans killed almost 15 million Soviet males and over 10 million civilian females, giving a female: male death ratio of less than 1:2. A more complete estimate must include the millions of non-Soviets of both sexes killed by Nazi death squads and camps. In modern history, Nazi Germany is unique in both the scale and the indiscriminateness of its homicides.
30. (New Guinea) Robbins 1982: 212–13; the Auyana cited this as a high, but not extraordinary, casualty rate; (Papuans) Pospisil 1963: 45, 57; (Blackfoot) Livingstone 1968: 9.
31. The Soviet Union was 25 percent deficient in males (sex ratio 133:100) at the end of World War II, and West Germany’s population still showed a 22 percent deficiency in males (sex ratio 128:100) in 1960. Poland’s losses, amounting to 20 percent of its prewar population, were proportionally the most severe of any nation during World War II (Keegan 1989: 591–92). In its 1865 to 1871 war against Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay, Paraguay lost 65 percent of its population and 80 percent of its adult males (McPherson 1988: 856).
32. Vayda 1976: 23; Meggitt 1977: 174; HNAI vol. 6, 1981: 329, 454–56; HNAI vol. 9, 1979: 392; HNAI vol. 11, 1986: 370, 381; Ferguson 1984b: 277, 281, 285; Bean 1972: 130–31; Chagnon 1968: 129. See Kelly 1985: 19–20 for a possible African case.
33. Rhodes 1986: 779 (citing Gil Eliot).
34. This scenario is not ecologically impossible. Many horticultural tribes in New Guinea and Africa sustained population densities ranging from 100 to over 200 persons per square mile (see Brown 1978: 106; Murdock and Wilson 1972: 257–58, 266–72). In 1988, the continental population densities of Europe and Asia had still not exceeded 180 persons per square mile and those of North America, South America and Africa were approximately 60 persons per square mile. The Huron tribe of Canada (lacking plows and domestic animals) supported a precontact population density of 60 per square mile (HNAI vol. 15, 1978: 369). The 1990 Times Atlas (Plate 5) shows this same area today having a population density between 50 and 100 persons per square mile.
35. (Mae Enga) Meggitt 1977: 101; (Mohave) Stewart 1965: 377–79.
36. Hattaway and Jones 1991: 409, 725.
37. Keegan 1976: 215, 255.
38. (Gettysburg and the Somme) Appendix, Table 4.1; (Waterloo) Keegan 1976: 305; (Atlanta) Sherman 1886: 566, 607.
39. Meggitt 1977: 100, 103–104.
40. Gabriel and Metz 1991: 87. Most of these casualties, especially the deaths, were inflicted during the routs that were the common aftermath of ancient battles. The close contact involved in ancient warfare meant that those fleeing defeat had almost no head start over their pursuers.
41. For example, of the 1.3 million Frenchmen killed in World War I, 640,000 (nearly half) of them died during the first four months of fighting (McNeill 1982: 318 n. 24).
42. For example, Heider 1970: 233; Meggitt 1977: 104; Spier 1930: 128; Grinnell 1923 (II): 159, 173; Gunther 1973; Robbins 1982: 37; Warner 1937: 220–21; Stewart 1965: 378; (antibiotic plants) Gabriel and Metz 1991: 121.
43. Handy 1923: 269; Steward and Faron 1959: 100; Gabriel and Metz 1991: 113–14.
44. McPherson 1988: 486–87.
45. Grinnell 1923 (II): 147–48.
46. (New Guinea) Meggitt 1977: 104; Robbins 1982: 188; Morren 1984: 196 notes that a shaman accompanied Miyanmin war parties; (North America) Spier 1930: 128; Gifford and Kroeber 1937: 156; Drucker 1941: 134; Voegelin 1942: 109; Stewart 1942: 301; Essene 1942: 40; Grinnell 1923 (II): 141; Stewart 1965: 378.
47. After reading McPherson (1988: 477–89) on medical care during the American Civil War, I am convinced that one of the most effective innovations in nineteenth-century military medicine was the begrudging acceptance of women nurses. Victorian sexism focused women’s intelligence and practical curiosity on precisely those subjects that were eventually recognized as primary medical concerns—cleanliness (antisepsis), nutrition, convalescent care, and patient morale. The respect and gratitude that Union soldiers, from privates to generals, accorded Clara Barton, Dorothea Dix, “Mother Mary” Bickerdyke, and their less famous counterparts was as rational as it was sentimental.
1. Oliver 1974: 395.
2. HNAI vol. 7, 1990: 215, 359, 465; HNAI vol. 8, 1978: 454, 488; HNAI vol. 15, 1978: 316; Zelenietz 1983: 91–92; Steward and Faron 1959: 267, 305, 321, 338, 339; Pakenham 1991: 439; Chadwick 1971: 49–50.
3. Vayda 1960: 95.
4. For example, Frayer 1993; Drusini and Barayan 1990; Milner et al. 1991; Snarkis 1987: 111; Quilter 1991: 414; Bouville 1987.
5. HNAI vol. 5, 1984: 477, 499; HNAI vol. 6, 1981: 408; HNAI vol. 7, 1990: 215; HNAI vol. 8,1978: 199, 219, 239, 245, 251, 330, 344, 380, 440, 547, 596; HNAI vol. 9, 1979: 360, 396, 401, 414; HNAI vol. 10, 1983: 64, 107, 320, 336, 375, 437; HNAI vol. 15, 1978: 316, 696, 744; Hudson 1976: 251.
6. See Milner et al. 1991: 585 for references.
7. HNAI vol. 8, 1978: 534; Steward and Faron 1959: 209, 321, 357; HSAI vol. 4, 1948: 23; Baxter 1979: 69.
8. Steward and Faron 1959: 217–18, 281, 305; HSAI vol. 4, 1948: 306–7.
9. For example, Edgerton 1988: 44; Meggitt 1977: 24, 76, 102; Connell 1984: 160–61, 284–88; Hudson 1976: 251; (overkill with arrows) Editors of Time-Life Books 1974: 37, 117; Koch 1974: 78 (Plate 18).
10. Willey 1990; Owsley et al. 1977; Scott et al. 1989: 85–86; Bamforth, in press.
11. (Sand Creek) Utley and Washburn 1977: 206–207; (World War II) Sledge 1981: 120, 148; (Vietnam) Maclear 1981: 278; Caputo 1977: 64.
12. Arens 1979.
13. For example, Villa et al. 1986; White 1992.
14. For an excellent critical review of this evidence and a model study of one instance from the American Southwest, see White 1992. Because the subject is such an emotional (indeed mythological) one, White’s study and a few others he cites provide spectacular demonstrations that the circumstantial evidence produced by archaeology and physical anthropology can cut the Gordian knots that the verbiage and subjectivity of other social scientists have created.
15. Steward and Faron 1959: 190, 209, 219, 236, 305, 323–24, 358; Carneiro 1990: 205.
16. Carneiro 1990: 205; Vayda 1960: 70; Morren 1986: 55, 281–82; Zegwaard 1968: 430, 443–44. For archaeological evidence, see White 1992: 19–22.
17. Pakenham 1991: 447.
18. For reviews and bibliographies, see White 1992; Turner and Turner 1992.
19. Villa et al. 1986; (Fontébregoua) Villa et al. 1988; Jelinek 1957, cited in White 1992: 23.
20. Harner 1977; Harris 1979, 1989.
21. Fagan 1984: 233–35.
22. Isaac 1983.
23. For example, Edgerton 1988: 45; White 1983: 116; Handy 1923: 218–21; Steward and Faron 1959: 244, 326–27, 357–58; HNAI vol. 6, 1981: 377; HNAI vol. 15, 1978: 386.
24. (Ethnography) Handy 1923: 218–21; (Archaeology) Kirch 1984: 159; White 1992: 20.
25. For example, Handy 1923: 133; Vayda 1960: 97–100; Oliver 1974: 398; Meggitt 1977: 90, 207; Brown 1978: 208; Herdt 1987: 55; Kelly 1985: 48–49; HNAI vol. 7, 1990: 495; Kroeber 1925: 51, 220; Steward and Faron 1959: 326; Ray 1963: 137; Spier 1930: 27; Carneiro 1990: 200.
26. Adams 1989: 104; Haas 1990: 187; HNAI vol. 9, 1979: 98, 136, 143; Turner 1989; Wilcox and Haas 1991. Fish and Fish (1989: 121) note that, in the Tucson Basin between A.D. 1000 and 1300, burned houses “often exceed 60 percent” of those recorded, but they attribute these to a “mortuary practice.”
27. For example, Courtin 1984; Mellaart 1965: 112–13.
28. The Air Minister was Sir Kingsley Wood, whose attitudes concerning the economic aspects of warfare were probably colored by his former profession of insurance consultant (Deighton 1977: 56).
29. Ember and Ember 1990: 255; Otterbein 1989: 148 (col. 7, codes 1, 3, and 4).
30. Meggitt 1977: 14.
31. Kroeber 1925: 219–21.
32. For example, Kirch 1984; Handy 1923: 123; Vayda 1960: 109–16; Carneiro 1990: 201; Balee 1984: 248–49; HNAI vol. 11, 1986: 370, 381; Cannon 1992: 514.
33. Vend 1984: 124.
34. For example, Keeley 1992 (on the Early Neolithic in northwestern Europe); HNAI vol. 9, 1979: 136 (on Anasazi abandonment of Navajo Reservoir and Gobernador regions). See also Haas and Creamer 1993: 138.
35. See references in Appendix, Table 7.2; HNAI vol. 15, 1978: 198; Ross 1984: 97; Brown 1978: 127–28, 209; Wilson 1983: 85; Morren 1984: 194–97; Pakenham 1991: 352.
37. Vayda 1976: 83.
1. Ferguson 1984a and 1990 provide excellent reviews of these controversies.
2. Koch 1974: 213–16.
3. Otterbein 1989: 63–64; Jorgensen 1980: 509–15, 613.
5. Heider 1970: 100; Koch 1974: 154–55: Hallpike 1977: 230; HNAI vol. 8, 1978: 694–700; Biolsi 1984; Ferguson 1984b; HNAI vol. 15, 1978: 744–45: Fukai and Turton 1979: 9; Fadiman 1982: 42; Meggitt 1962: 42.
6. Otterbein 1989: 66.
7. HSAI vol. 1, 1946: 306–7; HNAI vol. 10, 1983: 722.
8. For example, Koch 1974: 179–224; Hallpike 1977: 211–29; Chagnon 1983: 189.
9. For example, Cohen 1985.
10. See Appendix, Table 8.3. A similar result is obtained by adding population density figures to Otterbein’s 1989 data. Recent research indicates that there is also no correlation between density and violence in rhesus monkeys (Discover, February 1994, p. 14).
11. Britain’s population in 1300 was less than 5 million, but it had risen to 50 million by 1982; see for homicide rates, Knauft 1987.
12. Chagnon 1974: 127, 160.
13. For example, Steward 1938: 254–55 (especially Owens Valley Paiute); Jorgensen 1980: compare pp. 407–409 to p. 447.
14. Henry 1985: 374–376; O. Bar Yosef, personal communication; Frayer 1993.
15. For hunter-gatherers, see Hayden 1981; Price and Brown 1985; Keeley 1988.
16. Ferguson 1984a: 17–18.
17. Ember and Ember 1990: 256.
18. HNAI vol. 5, 1984: 306, 341, 348; HNAI vol. 6, 1981: 469, 494, 582: HNAI vol. 8, 1978:168–69, 205, 213, 238, 245, 329–31, 344–45, 352–53, 363,379–80; HNAI vol. 10, 1983: 40, 719–22; Balee 1984: 257–59; MacDonald and Cove 1987: xx; Meggitt 1962: 42; Meggitt 1977: 42, 80–81; Morren 1984: 171, 183; HSAI vol. 3, 1948: 367, 850; Matthews 1877: 27; Spears 1981: 100.
19. Tefft 1973.
20. For example, HSAI vol. 3, 1948: 309, 318; Kroeber 1965: 399.
21. In aboriginal North America, the practice of salting food was highly correlated with a predominantly plant diet because a diet rich in plants, unless supplemented with mineral salt, could cause physiological problems (Driver and Massey 1957: 249).
22. HNAI vol. 8, 1978: 286; Kroeber 1925: 236.
23. For example, Ferguson and Whitehead 1992; Abler 1992: Ross 1984; Ferguson 1984b.
24. For example, MacDonald and Cove 1987: 17, 19, 187–90; HNAI vol. 10, 1983: 40, 717; HSAI vol. 3, 1948: 850.
25. HNAI vol. 10, 1983: 719–22; Spencer and Jennings 1977: 331.
26. An old Apache, with pawky wit, told one of my colleagues that his forefathers had regarded Pueblo villages as “an early kind of welfare office” to which the Apaches regularly repaired to receive free food.
27. For example, HNAI vol. 10, 1983: 721; Porch 1986: 65–82.
28. Hart and Pilling 1979: 83–84; Meggitt 1977: 13; HSAI vol. 4, 1948: 532; Pospisil 1963: 58, 61, 68–69; MacDonald and Cove 1987: 34–35; Tefft 1973.
29. Fitzhugh 1985: 31; HNAI vol. 5, 1984: 553; see also McGovern 1985. It remains a possibility that the Inuit scavenged some of these items from already-abandoned Norse settlements; radiocarbon dates indicating contemporaneity between Norse and Thule Inuit in southwestern Greenland, however, imply that some items were obtained directly from the Norse.
30. For example, Secoy 1953; Biolsi 1984; Spears 1981: 100–101; Fadiman 1982: 45.
1. Jorgensen 1980: 240–47.
2. HNAI vol. 9, 1979: 189.
3. For example, between 1890 and 1913, Germany’s population increased by 35 percent, whereas Britain’s and France’s increased by 22 percent and 3 percent respectively. Between the wars, Germany’s growth rate was higher than those of the Soviet Union, the United States, France, and Britain (Kennedy 1987: 199).
4. Kelly 1985; for an alternative view, see de Wolf 1990. The Oromo and Masai expansions in East Africa also may have been fueled by population growth (Spears 1981: 63–67).
5. For example, Mohave versus Maricopa, HNAl vol. 10, 1983: 57, 75; Mackenzie Eskimo versus Kutchin, HNAI vol. 5, 1984: 349; HNAI vol. 6, 1981: 530; Sioux versus Arikara, Secoy 1953: 74–75; Khoikhoi versus San, Elphick 1977 and Spears 1981: 52–53; Oromo and Masai versus Pokomo, Mijikenda, and Kikuyu, Spears 1981: 63, 66–67; Telefolmin expansion, Morren 1984: 183–84.
6. Spears 1981: 63–67.
7. Otterbein 1967; Edgerton 1988: 10.
8. See especially Green and Perlman’s (1985) anthology devoted to frontiers and boundaries in which warfare, conflict, and raiding are hardly mentioned. Other examples: Gregg 1988; Bogucki 1988.
9. Sioux for Bannock; Eskimo for Ingalik; Comanche for Mescalero Apache; Inuit for Hare; Hopi for Navaho; Mbya for Guayaki; (“enemies”) Yavapai for Pima; Pima-Papago for Navaho-Apache; Wintu for Yuki; Takelma for Shasta.
10. For example, Thompson and Lamar 1981; Bodley 1990; Ferguson and Whitehead 1992.
11. Spears 1981: 64–67, 99–100.
12. Colin Turnbull (1962, 1965) has emphasized the independence of the Mbuti Pygmies from their Bantu patrons. His arguments, however, are mostly special pleadings—Bantu crops are staples of the Pygmy diet only because the Mbuti have acquired “a taste for plantation foods”; Pygmies only rely on the metal weapons and utensils obtained from the villagers because this is “convenient”; Pygmy boys are initiated into manhood and Pygmy marriages arranged and sanctified under Bantu supervision and according to Bantu custom, but the Mbuti do not take these rituals very seriously; in the presence of even a single Bantu, the Pygmies behave in a “submissive, almost servile” fashion but are a “different people” when their “masters” are absent; in the presence of Bantu, Pygmy music and dances are less complex and creative than those performed among themselves; the Mbuti have an underground social, political, and religious life that they hide from their Negro “masters.” All of Turnbull’s arguments for Pygmy “independence” would apply equally well to African slaves in the Americas (except those regarding agriculture and metallurgy because native West Africans were accomplished farmers and metallurgists).
13. Bailey et al. 1989: 62–63.
14. For the general argument, see Bailey et al. 1989. Also, the Masai and Oromo pastoralists of Kenya considered the local foragers to be nothing more than an untouchable “low caste” (Spears 1981: 51).
15. Saunders 1981: 151–55; Giliomec 1981: 80, 83, 86, 113; Thompson and Lamar 1981: 18–19; Phillipson 1985: 210–11; Lee 1979: 31–32; Wilson and Thompson 1983: fig. 4 (compare San headdresses in fig. 6), 63–64, 70–71, 105–7,165; Silberbauer 1972: 272–73; Thompson 1990: 14, 28–29; Spears 1981: 52–53.
16. Oliver 1991: 195. This statement was recorded in 1926 when Bechuanaland (now Botswana) was still autonomous in internal affairs. Only later, in the 1930s, did Britain take a more direct and active role in the administration of this isolated protectorate.
17. l.ee 1979: 77.
18. Steward and Faron 1959: 432, 438; HSAI vol. 1, 1946: 250, 532; HNAI vol. 10, 1983: 14, 237, 361, 476, 497: HNAI vol. 11, 1986: 340, 354.
19. For example, Crosby 1986: 79–100; Langer 1972: 150, 375; Bodley 1990.
20. Hudson 1976: 82–84; Milner et al. 1991: 582; Bamforth 1994; HNAI vol. 9, 1979: 86–88, 136, 142–43; Wilcox 1989; Fish and Fish 1989.
21. Evans 1987; Bouville 1987; Roudil 1990; Keeley 1992, 1993.
22. Ember and Ember 1990: 255; Ember and Ember 1992. Another fascinating result of this study is that disaster- and war-prone societies also commonly socialize children to be mistrustful of both nature and other people.
23. HNAI vol. 9, 1979: 185; HNAI vol. 10, 1983: 73; Aldred 1984: 117,121–22, 151; Editors of Readers Digest 1988: 82; Morren 1984: 185.
24. Haas 1990.
25. White 1992; Wilson and Thompson 1983: 391, 395, 399.
26. Bamforth 1994; Walker and Lambert 1989; Lambert and Walker 1991; Greene and Armelagos 1972; Anderson 1968.
1. Gregor 1990: 106–107.
2. Glasse 1968: 93; Whitehead 1990: 153; Fadiman 1982: 16; Harndy 1923: 135; HNAI vol. 6, 1981: 406; Hudson 1976: 252; HNAI vol. 10, 1983: 107; HNAI vol. 7, 1990: 495; HNAI vol. 8, 1978: 160, 239, 596; see Turney-High 1971: 223–26 for further examples.
3. HNAI vol. 10, 1983: 411, 428–29, 443, 475–76; HNAI vol. 7, 1990: 213, 251–52, 276–77, 329, 401; Meggitt 1977: 8, 66–70; Brown 1978: 194–97; Moore 1990.
4. Meggitt 1977: 99.
5. (Jalemo) Koch 1983: 201; (Kapauku) Pospisil 1963: 57; (Jivaro) Karsten 1967: 307; (Apache) HNAI vol. 10, 1983: 373–76, 475–76.
6. See various papers in Rodman and Cooper 1983; Fadiman 1982: 135; Robbins 1982: 189.
7. (Auyana) Robbins 1982: 189; (Tauade) Hallpike 1977: 261.
8. Dr. J. Costigan, personal communication.
9. Oliver 1974: 390–91, 395.
10. Turney-High 1949: 226.
11. Hudson 1976: 257; see also notes 12 and 13.
12. For example, Pospisil 1963: 61; Turton 1979: 194; Glasse 1968: 98. Where paying blood money is customary, each side must pay for every death it inflicted since compensation is owed to the relatives of each victim. In other words, equal deaths on both sides do not cancel out the necessity to pay blood money.
13. Meggitt 1977: 116–20, 126.
14. See Appendix, Table 8.2c.
15. Pospisil 1963: 61; Meggitt 1977: 105, 110, 199–200; Brown 1978: 209; Herdt 1987: 47.
16. Warner 1937: 174–75.
17. Heider 1970.
18. Gregor 1990.
19. Gregor 1990: 111–112.
20. Chagnon 1983: 149–50. For some reason, Ferguson (1992b: 211) finds this story unbelievable, even though he heard Gregor’s paper describing the same kind of artificial monopolies (albeit more stable ones) among the Xingu just three years earlier.
21. Keeley and Cahen 1989, 1990; Sliva and Keeley 1994; Keeley 1993.
22. For example, HNAI vol. 7, 1990: 159–60; HNAI vol. 4, 1988: 81–95.
23. HNAI vol. 6, 1981: 411; HNAI vol. 7, 1991: 159–68; Mclnnis 1969: 397; Brown 1991: 352–56.
24. Utley (1984: 270–71) claims that the Second Northwest Rebellion was a real Indian war, comparable to those in the United States and arising from the same grievances and antagonisms. This view ignores several important facts: (1) the revolt was entirely a Métis initiative; (2) Métis grievances were quite different from those of the local Indians, a majority of whom remained neutral; and (3) the Cree did little fighting and inflicted only a handful of casualties. This half-hearted uprising of two small bands, by being a unique occurrence in the history of the Canadian West, represents the exception that highlights the rule.
25. HNAI vol. 4, 1988: 335–90.
26. HNAI vol. 4, 1988: 91–92, 202–10; Brown 1991: 347–50.
27. Utley 1984: 112–14, 142–48; Connell 1984: 147.
28. Utley 1984: 271; see also Brown 1991: 350–51.
29. For example, Utley 1984: 52, 138; Utley and Washburn 1977: 179–83.
30. For example, the Cheyenne (Hoebel 1978) or the Japanese before World War II.
31. For example, Baxter 1979: 83–84; Meggitt 1977: 110, 116; Warner 1958: 176.
32. Rodman and Cooper 1983; Dozier 1967.
33. Harris 1974: 62.
1. For example, no American academic can ignore the strong influence exerted in the humanities and social sciences by the European doctrines of existentialism, structuralism, structural Marxism, poststructuralism, and postmodernism. These successive enthusiasms have left American universities a “burned-over district” like those areas of nineteenth-century New England exhausted by a succession of religious evangel-isms.
2. In his excellent one-volume history of World War II, British historian H. P. Willmott (1989: 477) concludes that even 57 million dead might be “a small price to pay for ridding the world of depraved wickedness.”
3. Keegan 1989: 594.
4. For example, Kipling, Scott, Tennyson, and Hugo.
5. For example, Graves, Remarque, Owen, and Hemingway.
6. For example, Vidal, Mailer, Vonnegut, and Heller.
7. For example, in contrast to Parkman, Bancroft, and Prescott, Frederick Merk (1978) (the late Gurney Professor of History at Harvard), hardly mentions warfare with the Indians induced by this movement, concerning himself instead with land allocation, economic development, and frontier politics.
8. These doctrines provided Europeans and later some Asians with such an agreeable boost to their already Olympian self-admiration that many remain reluctant to abandon them even now, despite massive evidence to the contrary. Of course, the blunt racism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has become a minority opinion in modern North America and western Europe. However, the anti-Semitism resurfacing in eastern Europe and certain statements by some Asian leaders concerning the “mongrel” society of the United States indicate that crude racism is hardly extinct.
Nonracist Social Darwinism universally remains a theme in conservative political thinking (including, ironically enough, “conservative” Marxism). The core idea is that whoever or whatever is currently “successful” (whether individuals, social groups, techniques, institutions, or values) is “more fit” and worthy of emulation than any less-successful or displaced competitors.
Indeed, throughout my career, many American and European university professors of varying political persuasions have asked me why anthropologists bothered to study societies and cultures that had clearly failed to survive or were surely doomed to extinction (i.e., preindustrial non-Western cultures).
9. During my student years in western Europe in the 1970s, in Britain, France, Spain, and Belgium, I was often haragued by both rightists and leftists concerning “U.S. imperialism” in their respective countries.
10. For example, HNAI vol. 4, 1988: 545 (and references).
11. A fine popular account of these can be found in Harris 1974: 97–111.
12. Currently, the popular media prefer to portray the mentality of primitive peoples as childlike (in the romantic sense)—trusting, guileless, prerational, and intuitive. Such portrayals can also be read to imply that precivilized folks were rather dim-witted. It is tragicomic that such portraits are intended to be, and are widely accepted as, sympathetic and complimentary to those so portrayed.
13. Alas, I cannot attribute this line recalled from my school days.
1. Keegan 1987.
2. For a very acute analysis of the crisis years of the European focus on the decisive battle, see Weigley 1991. Unfortunately, this author, while delineating the foolishness of the Clausewitzian concept of a decisive formal battle, goes on to underestimate the decisiveness of modern total war. He fails to note that as military powers those modern nations who have suffered total defeats (i.e., revolutionary-Napoleonic France, the American South, Austro-Hungary, Germany, and Japan), either disappeared completely or have never again, despite the passage of generations, reached first-rank status as military powers.
3. See the very interesting report of Scott et al. 1989.