Our Kind: Who We Are, Where We Came From, Where We Are Going by Marvin Harris

Author:Marvin Harris [Harris, Marvin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, General
ISBN: 9780060157760
Google: djydQgAACAAJ
Publisher: Harper & Row
Published: 1989-11-15T00:36:18.570551+00:00

Why War?

For explaining warfare, theories of innate aggression seem to me to have as little merit as they do for explaining sexism. Innate, aggressive potentials must surely be part of human nature in order for there to be any degree of sexism or warfare, but cultural selection wields the power that activates or inactivates these raw potentials and channels them into specific cultural expressions. (Or shall we believe that the !Kung San have genes for peace and equality, while the Sambia have genes for war and inequality?)

I propose, in brief, that bands and villages make war because they find themselves in competition for resources such as soils, forests, and game upon which their food supply depends. These resources become scarce as a result of being depleted or as a result of rising population densities, or a combination of the two. Local groups then recurrently face the prospect of having to reduce their rate of population growth or their level of resource consumption. To reduce their population is in itself costly, given the lack of industrial-age means of contraception and abortion. And reductions in the quality and quantity of resource consumption inevitably subvert a people’s health and vigor, causing extra deaths through malnutrition, hunger, and disease.

For band-and-village societies that confront these alternatives, warfare offers a tempting solution. If one group can succeed in driving away its neighbors or thinning their ranks, there will be more land, trees, soil, fish, meat, and other resources for the victors. Since warfare as practiced by bands and villages does not guarantee mutual destruction, groups can rationally accept the risk of battlefield fatalities in return for the chance of improving their living conditions by forcibly lowering their neighbor’s population density.

In his study of warfare among the Mae Enga of the western highlands of Papua New Guinea, Mervyn Meggitt estimates that aggressor groups succeeded in gaining significant amounts of enemy land in 75 percent of their wars. “Given that the initiation of warfare usually pays off for the aggressors, it is not surprising that by and large the Mae count warfare as well worth the cost in human casualties,” comments Meggitt. On the basis of their study of a carefully drawn representative sample of 186 societies, anthropologists Carol and Melvin Ember found that preindustrial peoples mostly go to war to moderate or cushion the impact of unpredictable (rather than chronic) food shortages and that the victorious side almost always takes some resources from the losers. Human societies find it difficult to prevision recurrent but unpredictable drops in food production caused by droughts, floods, storms, killing frosts, and insect swarms and to adjust population levels accordingly. Incidentally, the Embers have this to say about the prevalence of warfare: “Most societies known to anthropology have had warfare, i.e., fighting between territorial units (bands, villages, and aggregates thereof). And the warfare probably occurred a lot more often than even we are used to in the modern world: in the societies we have looked at that were described before pacification, nearly 75 percent had warfare at least once every two years.

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