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Primitive war? NO!mike salovesh (T20MXS1@MVS.CSO.NIU.EDU)Tue, 4 Oct 1994 00:57:00 CDT
chestnut. I'm game for one shot at an approach: Let's start with a definition of "war". I find it useful to say war means organized intergroup violence WITH A PARTICULAR KIND OF PURPOSE --control of territory, or control over a population, or control of (scarce ?) resources. Simple intergroup violence, no matter how organized or how deadly, WITHOUT the purpose of one of those kinds of control is, by my definition, just plain not war. (Thus as I understand what the film "Dead Birds" is telling us, those folks have battles but they don't have war.) If you buy my definition (which I've been trying, without success, to sell to Marvin Harris for years) it follows that people who fit our traditional model of "primitive" hunter/gatherers just can't have war. Maybe a sedentary population can worry about territorial control, but nomads by definition don't hang around a fixed spot all year long. Permanent control of territory ain't their game. As for gaining control over some subject population, what could you want with captives/slaves/subjects when your way of life demands getting down to scattered and VERY small social units for significant parts of the year? For that matter, how could you feed them or even hold them and get on with the business of hunting and gathering? (Here I'm talking about band-level societies, in the manner of Julian Steward, not the sedentary folks of the Columbia River Basin or interior California. War, slaves, sedentarism, and a high degree of internal stratification all happened on the NW Coast, as we all know, and they weren't food-producers.) Same argument holds for control of scarce resources, which, it seems to me, requires some strong development of an ideology of ownership. Why do I want such a restrictive definition? Why not accept ANY form of deadly conflict between organized social groups as war? Because I have a hidden agenda, of course. The reason I developed my definition was in response to the question of whether war is an inevitable part of the human condition. I don't want to say yes to that. I can accept as fact that some humans, in any society, will turn to violence, and that some humans who engage in violence will carry it to the use of deadly force, and that some who use deadly force will form groups for that purpose. But those facts do NOT, to me, necessarily imply that we are doomed to undergo World War III--nor even what is happening in what used to be called Yugoslavia. (Yes, I see that as war: organized use of deadly force to control territory and population.) By the way, as a sort of answer to something Gene Hammel said in ANTHROPOLOGY NEWSLETTER (the October issue of AN just arrived, and it has several answers to him), of course I think WW III would be a bad thing. And rape as a policy within the struggle going on in ex-Yugoslavia is wrong, bad, evil, just as ethnic cleansing is. Saying that is not imperialism, and it doesn't contradict my belief in cultural relativism. When I condemn rape and murder, I don't concern myself with whether the rapist or the murderer believes that those acts are wrong. I don't care what the cultural backing may be, either. I am a member of my culture, and in MY culture such acts are taken to be wrong, no matter who does them or who the victims are or what rationalizations are offered to justify them. As an anthropologist, I have studied the politics of assassination. Some of my best informants are, in my judgment, murderers. For just one example, try those Indians who, as an organized group, accuse other Indians of witchcraft and kill them dead dead dead, but whose victims usually are political opponents in intra-community struggles. Or consider the fact that I try to understand the motivations of the Guatemalan army and its death squads. As far as I'm concerned, they're rotten murderers and must be stopped. But my ANTHROPO- LOGICAL understanding of Guatemala is not advanced by that judgment. As anthropologist, to understand death squads I have to understand how people come to join them and how their leaders choose victims and what purposes such groups serve for those who perpetuate them. Recoiling and condemning in the face of what they do does not get me any understanding of what THEY think they're doing, of why they do it, or of what reasons they themselves offer in justification. Cultural relativism is a tool of our profession. Its use is not optional. Judgment--moral judgment--is built into any culture. ("The existence of a social system requires the existence of a moral system in its support." -- Raymond Firth.) I don't have the option of refraining from moral judgment, either. I regard war as morally wrong. I want to believe that it is not a necessary evil. I must, therefore, define war in such a way that it is NOT inevitable and built into being human. mike salovesh <t20mxs1@mvs.cso.niu.edu>
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