Triangle Institute for Security Studies

“THE STUDY OF WAR”SESSION TWO: ANTHROPOLOGY AND SOCIOLOGY

Wednesday, June 11, 1997

Moderator:

. . . trenches. Dick Kohn went through and swept all the way from World War I to the Gulf War

to get all of our members out of the labyrinth there and I think it looks like we have everybody

back. So without further adieu, we will proceed and we will conduct ourselves this afternoon in

exactly the same fashion; that is, we will have our two presenters, we’ll have our four

commentators, we’ll take a break at 3:00 and then we will reconvene for discussion.

And so to start us off is Brian Ferguson, talking on anthropological perspectives on moral crime.

Brian Ferguson:

Well, I would like to start off . . . by acknowledging that this paper is more than a little bit self–

referential. It’s a first attempt to pull together a number of works by myself that have been

summaries and syntheses and explorations and arguments that have sort of been all over the map,

and I was using this as an opportunity to try and take a step towards a more unifying framework.

The other works are themselves filled with citations of other scholars, but under the time

pressure to get this thing done most of those dropped out of the paper that I ended up writing, but

they will be in the final version. Here I am going to be talking about, not about modern war, not

about the wars that have occurred involving European nations in the past century or two, but

rather I am going to be focusing on issues of war in relationship to non–state societies, or

sometimes called tribal societies in a loose sense of the word, some information on ancient states

and conclude with some observations on contemporary conflicts that are sometimes called by the

label tribal warfare in places like Africa. The presentation I’m going to do right now is a quick

overview of the topics in the paper. There’s a lot of ground covered, so I am just going to run

through them and hopefully these will all be picked up in the discussion period.

Part one deals with anthropological approaches to war mainly over the past 30 years or so, which

is when anthropologists have really focused on this subject. One approach, the first one that’s

discussed is sometimes called a culturalist approach to war. In this view war is understood as the

expression of the normative system of a people. Many old ethnographies described war as

pursuit of prestige or revenge or taking heads, or whatever it is that the culture was interested in,

that’s why they went to war. It was left at that pretty much.

In the past decade this has gotten much more refined. There are a number of very detailed

hermeneutic studies of war which try to tease apart the logics of violence in different cultures.

There are many variations on this culturalist approach, but in most of the variations a culture

itself is taken as a given, something not to be explained; it just is there. In some forms this

constitutes a direct challenge to some of the ideas of rationality involved in war, ideas that I use

in my own approach and that other papers here have employed. We may come back to that later

on. That actually was a point I was going to bring up before the discussion period ended before.

The next approach is evolutionism. This is the longest analytic tradition in anthropology, going

well back into the late last century. This asks two sets of questions: how does war contribute to

the process of sociocultural evolution? and how does the process of sociocultural evolution

change the practice of war? Despite the fact that this has been researched for a long time, there is

really not all that much that has been demonstrated beyond argument in regard to these

questions.

The next two approaches, the ecological approach and social structural approach, were main

lines of research developed in the 1960s, ‘70s and up til, today although they have changed

somewhat in their emphases. The ecological approach was very widespread in the ‘60s and ‘70s.

It sought to understand war as a kind of adaptation to the natural environment. This functionalist

approach is itself out of vogue now. There is not much of it being done. But there is still a lot of

interest in how aspects of the natural environment enter into the processes that lead up to war.

The social structural approach, the other main line from back in the ‘60s onward has looked at

variations in practice of war related to variations in social structure. Melvin and Carol Ember

have been leaders in this field. It often comes down to a debate about the nature of the

connections between social structure and war. Does the social structure lead to war or does a

certain kind of war lead to social structure?

Evolutionary biology, under which I lump somewhat uncomfortably two approaches, ethology

and sociobiology, has changed also in recent years. I don’t know anyone who is positing war as a

result of an aggressive instinct anymore. The issue that often comes up is whether humans are

evolved to favor in groups and be congenitally hostile to out groups; in group amity, out group

enmity. I believe in the paper that Dr. Jervis was referring to where I have some skepticism about

that. We can come back to that. There is also an issue in sociobiology about whether wars result

of an attempt to maximize inclusive fitness, about which I am also skeptical.

In the 1980s a new line developed, and coming out of peace studies it has a very activist bent to

it. They look at peace not just as the absence of war, but as a positive condition, what undergirds

peace, and they see peace as also the absence not just of war but of structural violence.

And finally the structural history approach, this is a new term, not very widely used or accepted

at present. It lumps the number of diverse works that look at multipolity fields interacting over

time, a lot of attention to power and agency. My work on the Yanomami has been in that line.

Part two, the natural history of war, raises one set of questions, the kind of human nature

questions, of why people fight. I begin with a discussion of archeological evidence as I see it,

and there are different ways to see this evidence. I do believe with enough skeletons, in

particular, if war is being practiced, it will show up. And if you don’t have the skeletons you

might not see it. If you have got a lot of skeletons you generally do.

My conclusion, looking at the evidence, is that homicide itself may be as old as Cain. There are

very old indications of interhuman violence, which I have a hard time believing was accidental,

and that war was always possible as long as we were human beings and even before we were

human beings, but it was a rare occurrence during the Paleolithic. I think there was not much

worth fighting over and typically there was a possibility of exit in conflict situations. We have a

number of cases of war, clear–cut war, in the Mezolithics around the world. This is when people

are not yet agricultural but they are exploiting resources that are more sedentary, and war

becomes the norm sometime after the transition to agriculture. We see it more and more places

all over the world.

But there is a long absence I see of war in human history and I argue that this can be taken as

evidence against explanations which posit a continuous unbroken thread of group violence in our

evolutionary past, and I detailed, or I mention, the different theories which I think are undercut

by what I see as this absence.

I take a rationalist view of what leads people to war. People go to war when the decision–makers

perceive it is in their practical material interests to do so. I think with sedentism this becomes a

more common situation. Also, when you have concentrations of material value, this can be

irrigation works, trade, any number of different things, things worth fighting over, things worth

defending, and also a developing political structure contributes to this process. More

centralization, more hierarchy, more boundedness, I think, leads to a greater tendency to war.

I do see war as an evolved capacity of human beings and I do see the relevance of talking about

human nature in this circumstance. When structures and conditions are right, or, better, wrong,

people opt to go to war. I just think that those structures and conditions were not very common in

early human history. The interests I look at are very broadly defined, in terms of what material

interests matter. I talk about resources at people’s disposal, I talk about the costs of getting them

and about issues of security. These boil down into what I propose to be seven strategic

objectives, which do not exhaust all possibilities, the explanation of war, but I think exhaust most

of them. And these always have to be looked at, these strategic objectives, in terms of who is

making the decisions. It’s one thing when you have got an egalitarian society, it is another thing

when you have a king. And also these interests are always converted into moral terms for public

discourse and I think also to avoid cognitive dissonance by decision–makers.

Part three, war and sociocultural organization, looks at the general question of what’s the

relationship between war and society both within polities and between polities. This is an attempt

to deal with the obvious complexity of relations that have been examined and explored and also

to deal with the academic practice of positing your hypotheses and ignoring all others. I’m

trying to find a way to fit these together. I have in mind a unified field theory, of the kind

described by Robert O’Connell. I use a modified culture material as framework of infrastructure,

structure and superstructure. I see these as a nested hierarchy of progressively more limiting

constraints. All of them are essential for any social act to occur. Any level can be seen as having

causal elements if other elements are held constant. But I think that the different areas can be

directed to answering different kinds of questions. This framework I hope is useful for sorting

and comparing data if you are looking from one case to another, of finding a common framework

to talk about different cases, and also for looking at war as a total social fact within one case,

what makes one society militaristic or peaceable.

Infrastructure is the physical aspect of human existence. It includes the physical environment,

relationships with that, population characteristics, technology and work patterns, and I see

infrastructure as being most important in explaining major variations between different cultures.

I won’t go into just for time reasons the different specific topics that are included in this section

under infrastructure.

Structure looks at human society as social existent, patterned social relations between people.

Structure is the medium for normal historical process. It is where history and war occurs. This, in

my breakdown, includes social organization, economics and politics. Social organization itself

ranges from kinship to class, and it is the general patterning of groups and relationships between

them and society. Again, I am not going to go on into the specific topics under each one of these

headings. Economics, the patterning of distribution of resources within society, gives substance

to positions in the social organization. It makes them into interests. I won’t go into the details.

Politics is how interests are transformed into action, including the action of war.

Superstructure looks at human beings as sentient beings, as thinking beings. It looks at the

meaning and justification of war. It looks at the psychodynamic processes that lead up to and

through war, and I do believe has some effect on the course of events, although I have tried to

specify what that is and I think it is less than the structural factors that I have been stressing.

Part four, the last part, looks at war as historical process in complex fields. This is based on a

series of analyses of actual cases. It has four parts.

Part One, on western contact in war, looks at the way anthropological theory has suffered by

taking indigenous warfare out of the history of contact. By taking indigenous warfare as timeless

patterns, implausible theories have sometimes been argued and compelling explanations and

historical record have been overlooked. Generally, but not always, the impact of Western contact

has been more war before it leads to pacification; so there is not a one way trajectory, more war

and then less war. The examples that are used in this case are Amazonian. I talk about

Amazonian cases, as well as a study of Pacific northwest coast societies. Both are examples of

precontact war and how it changed with contact. And finally the Yanomami of Brazil and

Venezuela; a very important case because they have been the subject of so much attention as the

supposedly pristine example of tribal warfare.

One important point in this section I think is that even though I am stressing how much the

circumstances have been shaped by external contact, it is the Yanomami themselves who act as

agents who make the history, who make the war. It’s not something that is determined by the

outside, it is something that structures the decisions that they make.

Part Two looks at European and other expansions. This is a step towards a general theoretical

mapping of areas that I and other people have called tribal zones. A tribal zone is an area not

under direct state control but affected by the proximity of a state, usually an expanding state, but

not necessarily. In this section I make a comparison of European expansion since 1500 to earlier

cases of state expansion. There are many similarities, although the earlier cases of state

expansion have far less well described tribal zones, but European expansion seems to be more

generally disruptive and war generating, a fact which I attribute primarily to the distance

involved in this contact, and as functions of that distance, some of the major infrastructural

transformations that were brought along with European exploration around the world compared

to old land–based expansions. Both old and new cases of expansion have comparable process of

tribe creation or tribalization and ethnic group creation or ethnogenesis.

Section Three I’ll just mention is a case application of the holistic model to the Yanomami of the

Orinoko area. I try to show not just why they go to war, but why they are so violent in so many

ways, including men against women, is related in various ways to changes having to do with

exogenous contact.

And, finally, Section Four, collapsing states in the modern world, is preliminary comments based

on two conferences that I have organized over the past couple of years, looking at areas in Africa,

eastern Europe and elsewhere where we have seen a real explosion of seemingly cultural or

religious violence since the end of the Cold War. The general point is that recent external inputs,

mostly at the structural level, have shaped the playing fields in very dramatic ways. There may

be no such thing as a purely local war, but then within those playing fields local agents are the

ones who are making decisions, who are generating the conflicts, and in that, and this is

something which may not be anticipated by much political theory, what seems to be the object of

contention is control of the state itself. The state doesn’t act as something which guarantees

peace. The control of the state is what is bringing about war and very often it is in that conflict

that ethnic or tribal divisions are deliberately manipulated.

To close, I say it is not cultural difference that leads to war. I do not think that people fight just

because they are culturally different. And I don’t think that it is environmental scarcity that leads

to war in the way that it has been suggested by say Thomas Homer Dixon, although I do think

that there are possibilities of environmental scarcities leading to war in more subtle ways than

has been considered in that environmental security project.

Moderator:

Okay. Next is Lionel Tiger speaking on Durkheim, sociology and the science of bodies in

conflict.

Lionel Tiger:

Thank you very much. It is never clear whether one should actually presume that everyone has

read a paper, I having been profoundly guilty myself on occasion, not this one, I may add, of

failing to read papers when they were delivered in good time. I’m not sure whether I can

presume that you have read the paper. I will therefore assume that you’ve kind of hazily

skimmed it or heard about it and I will talk to it or about it given what we have already been

discussing here in this context.

I am here to represent sociology principally because I am either victim or exiled from it and now

teach anthropology principally because I am interested in biology, if that makes any sense, and

yet I think that the casting directors who put me on this spot actually did an interesting thing

because sociology is an extremely important central social science of our time. It probably is the

only major social science to have developed during this century, and in a sense therefore it is the

paradigmatic social science of the industrial way of life, and I specify the industrial way of life

because of basically sociologists have heretofore focused principally on the industrial

communities. When students used to ask, as they always did, when I first started teaching at

British Columbia, “Sir, what’s the difference between anthropologists and sociologists,” I would

say, “Sociologists study white people,” and that was a reasonable rule for that period. It has not

changed because of declining employment opportunities and other grubby factors. Nonetheless,

it’s very important, I think, to understand how sociologists approach this issue because it seems

to me that one consequence has been a failure of the sociological imagination to grip the kind of

complex and grainy issues at the heart of war and of course its study.

I already mentioned the elephant story, the Jimmy Durante story, because it seems to me that one

of the things that sociologists have avoided is discussing the elephant, and here we are tasked

with--and I noticed a couple of elephants over there helpfully provided in a picture—we are

tasked with examining this elephant and I think that it is therefore appropriate for us to do so

with perhaps a different focus than usual. I am rather interested, not only in what we can learn

about ourselves from evolution, but what we can learn about evolution from ourselves; that is to

say not prediction, which scientists regard as really wonderful, but retrodiction, which in fact is a

more interesting, more dangerous kind of procedure, but may have virtue given the fact that we

are now this enormous species in numbers, tremendous variety of different niches we occupy and

different social forms we have. If we continue under all the circumstances to still maintain this

cranky kind of behavior we call war, that may be a very interesting insight into what we were

before this.

I am compelled, therefore, by the law of large populations to say if 5.2 billion people in the

world are busily acquiring muskets and missiles and whatever as they clearly do, this may tell us

something about who we were, let alone who we are, at least on an empirical basis. So it seems

to me we do have a responsibility, which is to look at our own history, yes, but also our

prehistory, and it is the prehistory element of this which I think sociologists have largely ignored.

I titled the paper, using Durkheim’s name. Durkheim is probably the widely acceptable founder

of sociology, and he wrote a book called The Rules of Sociological Method in which he explicitly

said you couldn’t do human nature kinds of discussions, you had to look for social explanations

in other social explanations. That is what the law of parsimony was for him essentially, and I try

to point out why he did this.

There were various reasons apart from the technique, the methodological technique he used,

which guided sociology both in Europe and in North America, and that was partly that it was

associated with a generally meliorist point of view about the community; that is, in England, for

example, it was the sociologists who were very associated with the Fabians, with the origins of

the Labor Party. The London School of Economics was partly established in order to actually

find out what was happening. That’s a first step to then doing something about it. So, there was a

kind of implicit general activist agenda that was a constituent feature of sociology, and it had

obviously major social impact, but it had I believe some intellectual costs because in this

glistening sense of the glistening future, the elephant was ignored.

One of the problems was the lack of a causative mechanism. I go on in the paper a little bit, I

must say I enjoyed writing that part, about the social constructivist point of view in

contemporary social science because it is rather interesting when you look back at where it came

from. It came really from Pavlov. It came from Lysenko. It came from Skinner. In essence, the

model is this: Humans are culturally determined; what we do is how we were trained. We have

heard some talk on this already this morning. It’s obvious that’s so in good measure, that what

we are is what we learned and how we learned it from whom and so on. And the model for this

was really the learning theory created by the psychologists around the turn of the century and

thereafter, up until Skinner and associates in the ‘60s.

Meanwhile, there’s this work on primatology, other animals. George Barlow and Robert Hinde

talked about these and we will have perhaps more commentary on the other species. Very

vigorous, lively movies about whole animals dealing with whole social issues in their natural

habitat, and when any of us try to impose this as a specter or as a possible analog, we were told

by our colleagues, “You can’t do that, that’s reductionist. You can’t go from humans to other

animals. It’s not so.” And we invoked all the specters of the usual villains here and it became and

still is very difficult in fact to talk about these sorts of things in polite company.

However, if you are doing a study of pigeons or you’re doing a study of rats and you find that

they learn according to X or Y schedule and if you change the light levels you will get a certain

result, then you can make an announcement as Skinner and others did and people will accept that

as learning theory. And so what you had was this sort of almost farcical situation in which

learning theory based on rats and pigeons was an acceptable model for human behavior, whereas

the analog in other primates of behavioral systems was seen as threatening and remote. Very,

peculiar technically, and I stress it only because I think it’s very important as we look cross–

disciplinarily here that we try to see how mechanisms function to provide a movement from one

part of the kind of structure that Robert Hinde outlined this morning from one part of the

structure to another.

I think George Barlow mentioned Robin Fox’s phrase “ethnographic dazzle” as one of the things

we have had to endure, which is that essentially I tell you that 5.2 billion people in the world are

doing X and you will say, “Aha, but the Taciday1 45 people in the Philippines, they don’t do X at

all. In fact, they do Y and that disproves your entire statistical sample of the rest of the planet.”

And that’s a real problem for us, both technically and in a compassionate sense, because we do

not want to condemn human variety to be explicated solely by the central tendency. And this

again presents a real problem for those of us trying to look at human behavior, and if asked,

allows us to only rarely make a comment which might be of some use to those who operate the

planet. It’s very difficult for us to be able to go beyond this ethnographic dazzle and say, “Well,

the fact that that’s the only culture in the world doing this doesn’t mean that therefore it is

abnormal and aberrant and we shouldn’t pay attention to it.” We have to because, as I said this

morning, the essence of biology is variation. That was essentially Darwin’s insight. He showed

how variation in people or individual in animals became variation in species. It remains the

central statistical insight of our time, I believe.

Well, can we reduce this ethnographic dazzle? Robin Fox and I in our book The Imperial Animal

try to adapt Chomsky’s notion of the universal grammar based on the linguistic model to

1 EN: This appears to be a made up word.

behavior in a broad sense and talked about what we call the biogrammar. That is, there were

certain kind of ways in which people make sentences — subject, verb and so on — which had

analogs in behavioral terms. We tried to sketch these out, I think with some reasonable

robustness, and in fact it’s rather pleasing that the book is now coming out for the third time this

summer. So the argument has had some durability and I think because it both deals with variation

and it allows for the inspection of a central tendency.

Now, how much time do I have?

[Unknown, possibly Moderator]:

. . .

Brian Ferguson:

9:20, okay.

I want now to deal with a couple of specific issues that may have this biogrammatical feature,

and one of them of course we have already discussed and it should and does come up frequently,

and that has to do with sex, or gender as it’s more delicately called in academic discussions.

There are no genders; gender’s a phenomenon. There are sexes. You’ve got your males and you

got your females and then you have your adventurers, but basically it’s a bit of an evasion.

Let’s look at what’s happening. I made a comment this morning about contraception. It seems to

me that we are looking at a major shift in the way males and females are operating, which has

already had in the United States particularly, an impact on warfare. It seems to me if we want to

study warfare, certainly as American people, and elsewhere in the world too, we are going to

have to study sex more and more.

Notwithstanding the current scandals about the sexual enthusiasms of various people here and

there, which is predictable once you put males and females together, there are and there will be

greater issues having to do with the fact that by and large, as we have seen, overall warfare has

been a largely male enterprise; not exclusively, but largely male, and there are various reasons

for this. One has to do with the dispensibility of males. They are not as necessary reproductively.

Females are the limiting resource in any community.

I remember interviewing when we were doing our book on the women in the kibbutz, the

commanding general of the women’s units in the Israeli army. Interestingly enough the acronym

for the women’s army was “Chen,” which translates as “charm.” When I talked to her, I said,

“Well, what are you doing here? What kind of people are you trying to train?” She said, “We are

not training killers, we are training mothers.” And this was something which of course were

anyone in the U.S. military currently to say would be the basis for some sort of serious action,

because it is out of sync with the current sexual ideology of our community, which is fine.

Communities can do and have the organization they want, but for the study of warfare there may

be some very interesting implications, and I don’t think that as academics even we have been

systematically thoughtful enough in trying to bring to people in the military system some sense

of what this may mean.

There was, for example, and I refer to it in my paper, a fabulous test generated by a woman

named Sandra Bem, I believe at Cornell, which was an androgyny test. It was designed to pick

out people who were the most androgynous, and you could be really androgynous and you’d get

very high scores from this test. It seemed to me that I couldn’t quite get the point of it, but it was

certainly part of the Zeitgeist in order to try to deny that male or female, maleness and

femaleness, had any authority beyond their merely superficial, if you will, ethnographic kind of

character. And the whole social constructionist position says that if you are a male or if you’re a

female you’re merely the product of the magazines you read, what you were told by your

grandmother, that there is nothing internal, intrinsic, part of a vivacity that you can’t control

because it is the essence of your life. But there is some sort of conspiracy to make you either

male or female, and that really is the operating social science paradigm, at least in political

activity in this country in large measure.

I want to make just a couple of other brief points as I await the one minute warning and that has

to do with a pro social bias in the social sciences. It’s not that it’s a mystery why this should be.

But, for example, when kids are given tests or have report cards, plays well with others as kind

of important. There’s no test, to my knowledge, which will identify somebody who will really

hate in an effective and desirably efficient manner if you are operating a war machine. That is,

we do have some notion of choosing people or the furniture of our daily lives has to do with

essentially pro social behavior, not that we shouldn’t do this, but I think that it allows us to

ignore the elephant which is there, the elephant being a whole lot of people that really enjoy

conflict, really enjoy hating. And I think one of the bright spots of our discussion so far, though it

was hardly bright, more incandescent, was Leslie Green’s comment about the fact that

sometimes you fight because if you don’t somebody will kill you. And that is both real and very

exciting. And one of the things that I think we have to face as a species is the fact that people

very often enjoy warfare. They very often enjoy killing. They very often enjoy savagery. And if

you look at what happens improbably in Rwanda and Bosnia and in the concentration camps and

so on, we have to say, “Now, these people had the opportunity to take a small baby and bang its

head against a brick wall. Why did they think this was fun?” or “Why did they think this was

desirable?” And unless we can answer that question there is going to be an elephant in the

background, and we should pay him some mind.

Moderator:

Okay. We are beginning our commentary now, and Carol Ember had agreed with Mel to be here

and participate and then she found herself caught in one of those conflicts that we’ve all had

where the calendar didn’t quite overlap and she realized she couldn’t be in two places at once, so

Mel Ember is going to speak for himself and for Carol.

Mel Ember:

I presume because we have combined our comments, that I have twice the amount of time, but I

promise to take less than 30 minutes. I’m mostly here to comment on Brian Ferguson’s paper,

although I am going to say something about Alex, too.

The bulk of Ferguson’s paper is devoted to his model of war and how it relates to society. While

we agree with some of his conclusions, we think that the systematic evidence available does not

support other ones. In general, we differ from him about the kinds of evidence that are needed to

support theory. Conclusions based on a few selected cases or a particular region can often be

wrong. We do not deny the importance of such research for generating theory or for refining

generalizations. However, the best way we think to minimize the possibility of drawing wrong

conclusions is to test theory against data collected for representative worldwide samples. I’m not

just speaking as the president of HRAF now. That way we can go beyond explanations that may

be culture bound. The explanation that fits many times and many places is more likely to be true

than the explanation that fits one or just a few cases. Our comments here are based on what we

know from our own and other’s cross–cultural tests of hypotheses about war in the anthro-

pological or ethnographic record.

First, let me deal with war and social complexity or the evolutionary issue. Ferguson says that

war is absent in the simple societies of archeology and ethnology because in those cases it

generally does not pay. We don’t think that the evidence supports such a statement. What cross–

cultural evidence does Brian cite?

Early in the paper he cites Carol Ember’s 1978 survey of hunter–gatherers showing that they do

have fairly frequent war, contrary to what most anthropologists have supposed. If anything, then,

it does not appear that war is absent in the simplest societies described in the ethnographic

record. Ferguson also cites Ottobein’s finding that political centralization predicts more

sophisticated weapons, but this second finding also does not indicate that more complex societies

have more war; nor are politically centralized societies more successful militarily, as measured

by expansion of territory. This Keith Ottobein showed. In short, the cross–cultural evidence

Ferguson cites does not indicate that simpler societies are less likely to go to war than more

complex ones.

We also have problems with Brian’s reasoning about the archeological record. Why does he say

that the archaeological record is mostly peaceful? Referring to a few selected cases to support

such a conclusion is not enough, we think. Indeed, Ferguson’s conclusion is to be doubted, as

you will undoubtedly hear from Larry Keeley in the back of the room subsequently and

according to the archeological contributors to a forthcoming volume on widespread osteological

and archeological evidence of prehistoric violence.

Ferguson says that war should be visible archeologically if we have large skeletal populations

which might exhibit the effects of combat, like arrows and the associated arrowheads. Yes, it is

possible that a large skeletal population might show evidence of war, but only if war victims are

recovered and buried back home. In many cultures, particularly of course those that did not

recover and bury their war dead, the absence of evidence of war is not sufficient to allow us to

infer that war was absent. The absence of indication of war means just that. There may be no

sign of war, but it still could have been present, particularly of course if we are dealing with a

nonagricultural site whose warriors typically fought at a distance.

Ferguson infers that war became more frequent only when people began to farm. But the logic of

this inference is questionable. Farming peoples are more likely to be settled peoples and settled

peoples are more likely to have cemeteries or burials beneath house floors or in family crypts,

like in Samoa where I did my field work. Hence, farming peoples are more likely than

nonfarming peoples to leave archeological evidence of war. But just because they are is not

enough reason to infer that nonfarming peoples are less likely to have had war.

The faulty logic, this is what I think lies behind Ferguson’s claim that war became more frequent

only after farming and imperialism developed. Judging by the ethnographic record, there are

many cases that had frequent warfare in the absence of social complexity and in the absence of

colonial powers on the scene. We usually have an ethnographic report only because a Western

observer has been there. But in most cases there is no reason to think that the warfare reported

had become more frequent after contact with the West. In any case, our published multiple

regression analysis indicates that the major predictor of more war in the ethnographic record is a

variable in the natural not social environment. It is doubtful, therefore, to us that Western contact

could account for much of the prepacification variance in war frequency. If anything, the usual

effect of Western contact would seem to have been a reduction in war frequency.

We have some new cross–cultural evidence on the relationship between foraging, hunting and

gathering and war. On the face of it, this evidence might seem to support Ferguson’s argument

that more complex societies have more war, but a more sophisticated look suggests that the

relationship between foraging and war frequency is largely spurious.

As part of our larger study, we measured war frequency for 186 cases, more or less; the cases in

the Murdoch and White sample. Our statistical tests of possible causes of war, and we tested lots

of theories, omitted those sample societies that had been partially or completely pacified by

external powers. Societies that were pacified at the time of description that had peace imposed

upon them by external powers are falsely low on the frequency of war. They are falsely low

because they might still have the conditions that would otherwise make for a high frequency of

war.

When we compare unpacified foragers with all other types of unpacified society we find that

foragers are not particularly peaceful, which we knew before, from Carol’s 1978 survey. As

before, the median war frequency for foragers is one war every two years. It is true that food

producers on the average, farmers, are of significantly higher on war frequency than food

collectors, but the difference is small. So why do foragers fight somewhat less frequently?

The reason appears to be that foragers are somewhat less likely to exhibit the two general

predictors of higher war frequencies. As I’ll talk about later, our cross–cultural tests have

identified two general predictors of frequent war in the ethnographic record. The stronger one is

an ecological factor and the other a socialization factor.

When we look at foragers in comparison with others, we find that foragers are generally lower

on those predictors. But when we add the variable of foraging versus food producing to the

multiple regression equation we find that it adds virtually no predictability. This result suggests

that the relationship between lower levels of war frequency and foraging is spurious.

Before we leave the topic of war among foragers we want to mention one classic foraging case.

The San, sometimes called Bushmen in the old days, of the Kalahari Desert. They were

described as peaceful in the 1950s by the Harvard people. The frequent mention of this case and

some other classic cases like the Imbuti has helped foster the general impression that foragers are

peaceful. But their apparent peacefulness may be an artifact of pacification. The San may have

been peaceful in the ‘50s, but they have not always been so harmless. They are one of the cases

in the Murdoch and White sample that we used. Our coders found that there was frequent armed

combat between San bands in the 1920s according to the ethnographers at the time. I won’t

mention it directly, but there’s one special unique translation in HRAF that indicates it.

Why were they peaceful in the 1950s? Our coders could not say reliably that the San had

definitely been forced to stop fighting. The information wasn’t clear enough. But we do know

that South African government forces periodically patrolled the area by the ‘50s. In any case, by

the 1950s and 1960s there was no warfare among the San bands. Subsequent to that time, San

were again involved in warfare as mercenaries in the employ of the South African army against

rebels in what is now Namibia.

The San case reminds us that war frequency can change drastically over time, in simpler as well

as in more complex or historically known cases. Some language groups that were exceedingly

warlike in the past are not now and vice versa. Not so long ago Sweden was the scourge of

eastern Europe. Japan has clearly changed recently in its attitude toward war. And just because

war has been endemic does not mean it is hopeless to try to discover why. I guess we’re all

agreed about that. In any case, we should not casually generalize from a few ethnographically

known foraging cases to the archeological past, more than 10,000 years ago, when all humans

were foragers. Few if any societies described in the ethnographic record, even those described

shortly after contact with the West, were pristine in the sense of being completely unaffected by

that contact. We know that lots of changes occurred.

There are all kinds of differences between the recent foragers and people in the past. Recent

foragers generally live in environments not desired by food producers, environments such as the

Arctic, deserts and tropical forests. Instead of extrapolating to the past from distributional

frequencies in the present, we need to test theories about the past with data collected from the

past, from archeology and from written history. For example, Peter Peregrin has presented some

cross–cultural evidence—it needs to be replicated—for an archeological indicator of war

frequency that could be used in comparative archeological tests of hypotheses about war in

prehistory.

Turning now to social structure, and particularly war and so–called paternal interest groups.

Ferguson mentioned some cross–culture work linking war to kinship structure in non–state

societies, particularly the research relating patrilocal residents to internal war, war within the

society or language group. And there is also research linking natural local residents, couples

living with the wife’s kin, to purely external war, war only with speakers of other languages. He

fails to mention our work on the subject, which he admitted. He is correct to point to the

relationship we and others have found between post–marital residence, where couples live after

marriage and type of warfare. The two most common residence patterns in noncommercial

societies are patrilocal and matrilocal. Four different researchers or teams of researchers have

now found that internal war, war within the society, is associated with the patrilocal residents and

purely external war, fighting only with speakers of other language groups, speakers of other

languages. Purely external warfare is associated with matrilocal residents.

We should note that most warfare in the ethnographic record is internal war with speakers of the

same language group. People may also fight with parts or all of another language group, usually

at a distance, but most warfare in the ethnographic record occurs between bands or villages or

districts of the same language group.

Type of war is related to other aspects of kinship structure too. In the absence of centralized

states, war in conjunction with patrilocal versus matrilocal residents predicts patrilineal and

matrilineal descent and we can predict the kinds of descent groups they’ll have from the type of

warfare.

All right, what comes first, kinship structure or type of war? Brian says that these are chicken

and egg issues. Ah, but even that one has a solution logically. It’s true that correlations cannot

readily show causality, but Carol has shown that type of warfare, internal versus external, is

strongly linked to the size of the society. The warfare is likely to be purely external when the

whole society numbers less than 21,000 people. If type of war is so strongly linked to size of the

society, it is unlikely that the type of residence causes the type of warfare. It is more plausible we

think that the type of warfare develops first and then the pattern of residence develops.

Additional evidence that patrilocal residence is not a cause of internal war comes from a recent

study we did with Bruce Russett. In that study we tested whether participatory, so–called more

democratic, polities in the ethnographic record are unlikely to go to war with each other, as is

nearly universally the case in the cross–national record.

The ethnographic universe differs from the cross–national in a number of respects, perhaps the

most important is that about half the societies known to anthropology do not have or did not have

political organization beyond the local community, band or village. The community in these

situations was the politically autonomous unit, just like the nation usually is in the modern

international system. In order to test the democracies do not fight each other hypothesis against

data from the ethnographic record we transformed it into the hypothesis that political units with

wider political participation will be less likely to go to war with one another than less partici-

patory units. The frequency of internal war then became our dependent variable in this test.

Measures of three different aspects of political participation appear to be independent predictors

of low frequencies of internal war. Those predictors are extensive participation by adults in

decision–making, ease of removing leaders and the absence of fission or group splitting after a

dispute, which we use as a gross measure of agreeing to disagree. We reason: if you don’t have to

split after you disagree, then you agree to disagree. All of these were significant predictors of less

internal war and the three together predicted most of the variance.

Note that exit in the Axelrod sense did not increase peacefulness in our data. The result rather

was the opposite. Exit, or this agreeing to disagree measure, was the strongest predictor of more

internal war. When we added patrilocal residence to the multiple regression formula we found

that it was nowhere near a significant independent predictor of more internal war, so contrary to

what Brian and others assume, it appears that fraternal interest groups as indicated by the

presence of patrilocal residents is not an independent cause of more internal war in the ethno-

graphic record, but it does seem very strongly that democracy or more participation makes for

more peace in the ethnographic record just as in the cross–national record.

Incidentally, I should note — how much time do I have? I’ve got time. I’m good. Incidentally, it

should be noted that the cross–cultural evidence is consistent with Brian’s suggestion that people

don’t go to war with each other just because of cultural or religious difference. If anything, the

ethnographic record suggests the opposite. If most war in that record is internal to the society,

combatants are usually speakers of the same language. Hence the opposing sides in most

ethnographically described wars share the same language and culture, including religion.

Turning to resource scarcity and warfare. Brian appears to believe that resource reasons lie

behind much of warfare. We, based on our own research, concur; however, we believe that

resource problems need to be measured in precise ways to give us a better handle on the causes

of war.

In our own research we have measured resource scarcity in a variety of ways. One of the

surprises in our research was that chronic scarcity had no independent effect on war frequency,

but unpredictable resource problems, because of natural disasters such as droughts, locust

infestations and the like, that destroy food supplies, unpredictable resource problems very

strongly predict war frequency; by far the strongest predictor. We have suggested in the

publication that the major reason is fear of resource uncertainty. It appears to us that when people

anticipate but cannot predict shortfalls in resources and can’t prevent them that they are likely to

go to war to cushion themselves against the expected shortages. Empirically this scenario is

supported by the cross–cultural finding that people nearly always take resources from defeated

enemies, even in the simplest societies. It looks like you don’t have to be a capitalist to fear

expected but unpredictable disasters, and it looks like people try to reduce their fear of such

disasters by taking resources ahead of time from enemies. Does that ring any bells?

Given our cross–cultural findings, we are not surprised that Brian believes that war has little to

do with reaching environmental limits. If that were the case, chronic scarcity should be

predictive of more war. But it’s not. We think the fear of unpredictable but anticipated shortages

is the most powerful motive for people deciding to go to war.

It’s interesting that people with just a memory of natural disasters that destroyed food supplies,

without any recent disaster, but a memory of it within the previous 25 years, go to war almost

constantly; year in/year out, at any time of the year, in the ethnographic record.

I mentioned that we tested a large number of possible causes of more versus less war. They

included a variety of social and psychological variables. Most did not predict higher frequencies

of war in binary tests and only two of those that did prove to be significant predictors in the

multiple regression analysis. I mentioned the one, what we called the “threat of disasters

predictor.” That’s by far the stronger predictor. The other variable that significantly predicted

more war in the multiple regression analysis was socialization from mistrust. The codings on this

variable came from a study by others and it means that people, parents particularly, tell children

to stay away from neighbors’ houses, even in simple societies. People, parents particularly, warn

the kids about witchcraft and sorcery and tell the kids to guard their possessions. This is in

noncommercial societies, simple societies sometimes.

People with more fear of resource uncertainty may also be more likely to fear other people.

Threat of disasters that destroy food supplies and socialization from mistrust are independent

predictors, but they are somewhat related. We have suggested in fact that people with resource

uncertainty who fear others may be more willing to go to war than think of peaceful ways of

dealing with their difficulties.

Finally, let me suggest why foragers go to war somewhat less frequently than food producers

with a little more detail. Foragers are significantly less likely than food producers to have

unpredictable natural disasters that destroy food supplies. This is probably because foragers rely

on flora and fauna that are adapted by natural selection to the environments in which they live.

The same predictors of more war among foragers are the predictors of more war in general. The

slight difference between foragers and farmers with regard to war frequency seems to be

explained by the foragers’ somewhat lower likelihood of resource uncertainty.

Our theory of war is supported by the available evidence as of now, but that hardly proves it.

Others should try to replicate our cross–cultural research, our results, and we and others need to

test the theory in other ways as well, particularly on data for cases in the cross–national record.

More on this proposal and how we could test other theories at the same time later on, if I have

some time. How much time do I have?

[Unknown, presumably Moderator]:

. . .

Mel Ember:

Nine minutes. I’ll try to make it short.

Brian mentions that combat requires training. He also mentions that cross–cultural research has

implicated war in the creation of aggressiveness. I want to spell out some of the details now.

Quite a few cross–cultural studies have shown links between all kinds of aggression. Warlike

sports, severe punishment of crimes, body mutilation, malevolent magic, all of these predict each

other. Higher rates of personal crime are also associated with more war in the ethnographic

record, as well as in the cross–national record. There is a relationship between war frequency and

homicide rates in our data set as there is in Archer and Garten’s data set for nations. Higher

frequencies of war, in other words, are associated with higher rates of homicide, cross–culturally

as well as cross–nationally. All of these correlation results are consistent, but by no means proof,

are consistent with the view that violence is primarily learned; maybe not completely, but

primarily.

But what are the mechanisms? The most obvious one may be that parents and other adults

encourage aggression, that there may be a culture of violence. We are not the only ones who have

used this term. We found that socialization progression in boys in late childhood is a significant

predictor of more war as well as higher rates of homicide and assault. But other results in our

project suggest that socialization for aggression in boys is not a cause of war but rather a

consequence of it.

For example, this is just one of the results. Pacified societies are significantly lower on

socialization for aggression, which suggests that pacified societies no longer need to socialize for

aggression because they no longer need warriors. Very clean result.

This finding and others lead us to suspect that more war is a cause, a cause, not the only one, of

more aggressiveness in general and more encouragement of aggression in boys in particular.

Societies with more war socialize their boys to be more aggressive by rewarding aggression and

by punishing failures to act aggressively. We presume they do so because the more aggressive

warrior is likely to be the more successful warrior. Once encouraged, the heightened aggres-

siveness may inadvertently spill over into interpersonal relations, with the result being higher

rates of homicide and assault. We don’t think people want to create higher rates of crime or

interpersonal violence, but we think that perhaps the encouragement of aggression spills over

into that effect.

The fact that homicide rates seem to go up during and after wars in nations is consistent with the

theory that more war favors more socialization for aggression, which in turn may result in higher

rates of homicide and assault. Needless to say, this theory needs to be tested further too before

we can have a lot of confidence in it.

Now let me turn to the future a little bit because I think that’s where we are heading. Well, we are

definitely heading that way, but what can we do.

What kinds of research could be done to increase our understanding of the causes and conse-

quences of war? First is the obvious. All of the results I’ve mentioned need to be replicated on

new samples and by new researchers and in new domains. But more importantly, that last point is

the issue. We think we should look to see if the predictions that are supported in one domain, the

ethnographic record in particular, may be supported in other domains. For example, for all we

know now the predictors of war frequency in the ethnographic record will also when

appropriately translated or generalized, will also predict in the cross–national record. For

example, we may not be afraid only of unpredictable food shortages in the modern world. The

fear of curtailment of other resources, for example, oil, may also motivate us to go to war. We

will also soon be able to make comparative archeological tests of some hypotheses. The human

relations area files is now building annual electronic installments of a random sample of the

world’s archeological record with the increasing awareness that we can develop archeological

indicators of environmental and behavioral variables. We will soon be able to test predictions

about war frequency and many other things on the time series data available in the archeological

record. The only way we can find out if one domain’s predictors work in other domains is to

look. Wouldn’t it be nice to show policy–makers how useful social science can be if you give it a

chance?

We think that interdisciplinary multi–method research is needed to try to get at some of the

mechanisms underlying the correlations that we have found and others have found in the cross–

cultural and cross–national domains; In particular, if we are right, that predictable scarcity does

not have the same affect as unpredictable scarcity. We can only find out by analyzing the

historical timing of events.

Let me conclude now.

Alex Roland has reminded us in his paper of the early 20th Century faith that problems could be

resolved by simply gathering a mass of information. That was not only the faith motivating

Quincy Wright, it was also the faith behind the creation of the cross–cultural survey at Yale in the

1930s. But what later developed into the human relations area files was coupled with the

realization that naive realism or mindless empiricism was not sufficient in scientific research. We

also had to direct our empiricism in theoretically motivated ways. We have to look only where

strong reasoning points the way.

This conference I think is testimony to the fact that we now have an abundance of strong

reasoning about the possible causes of war, the conditions under which war is more likely. We

should get on to putting those ideas together and doing the parallel kinds of research that will

give us more reliable understanding of the causes of war. The time is ripe for this kind of

interdisciplinary research which was just a utopian ideal in the ‘30s. The time is right now to do

it again, and to do it better, to do it with all the sophistication of modern social science.

Technology may help us win wars. In Alex’s words, technology may be the dominant factor

shaping the nature and character of war. But it may be that only social science knowledge can

help us prevent wars. We should stop arguing and counter–arguing. We should stop relying on

words and persuasion. Let’s start to use the methods of social science to resolve our disagree-

ments, to test the competing theories and build a more reliable database and more reliable set of

knowledge.

Okay, that’s all I have to say.

Moderator:

Okay, thank you Mel. You made it with two minutes to spare.

Bob O’Connell is going to present next, for the second time today.

Bob O’Connell:

I thought about mentioning my evil twin this morning but it wouldn’t be plausible. Let me begin

with Brian Ferguson’s paper.

Reading Ferguson’s lucid, well–argued paper examining war from an anthropological per-

spective served to reinforce in my own mind the strengths and weaknesses of our present

understanding of the subject. On the plus side I was particularly impressed with Ferguson’s firm

grasp of other areas besides his own, particularly military history, which is something I know a

bit about. And to the best of my ability to judge, his use of examples was always accurate and

characteristically pertinent and judicious.

The essay begins, as Brian said, with a survey of anthropological theory, which I thought was

really quite remarkable in its brevity and clarity and in a lot of ways a sort of example of what

we should be doing. My original sole concern which I raised to him and was the apparent

absence of the cultural materialist position, which Brian explained rather adequately by saying,

“I am a cultural materialist.” So we will let him off the hook on those grounds.

I was also pleased in the next section on the natural history of war and Ferguson’s belief that the

conditions under which war began among humans could tell us a good deal about the nature of

the beast. Once again, I think to some degree there really is a renewed interest in the notion that

origins can tell you something about how things eventually evolve, which I think probably in the

‘50s, ‘60s and ‘70s was certainly absolutely out of style if not considered absurd. I mean, I ran

across some quotes when I was writing my book saying that there could be no worse use of one’s

time, which of course when you are studying the origins of war was discouraging to say the least.

Having written a book on the subject, I want to take slight issue with Brian’s sequence of events,

and it really is slight, and it has a lot to do with maybe how we should treat origins in the future.

There are many possible origins of wars. For one reason, you can adopt various definitions of

war. I personally believe, and I talked to Larry Keeley about this and he pointed out to me if we

were to get too concerned with defining war then we might as well eliminate the rest of the

conference because we would be fighting about that endlessly. But I do think there is a wide

divergence in the way we are looking at war in terms of social phenomenon. I believe that the

Embers, for instance, when they talk about war, they had a very short, maybe one sentence

definition of war, which allows for very small societies, very large societies, and again I think

that kind of data can be somewhat misleading in believing that the cast and character of war is

always the same even though you are having tiny societies versus very large ones.

But I think the point is that at the margins we may want to narrow the definition somewhat. But

again, I think that a definition of origins is to some degree useful to the degree that it helps

explain things. I happen to choose a definition of when war started at a point when it became

“self–sustaining.” I certainly don’t argue that something that very neatly fits my definition of war

didn’t happen in the Mezolithic. It certainly did. The problem with Mezolithic societies was that

usually the supply of shellfish ran out and the societies collapsed, as did war. I look upon war in

some ways much like Bill McNeill does in terms of its spread; that it spread almost kind of like

an epidemic because it seems like force sort of obeys the line of least resistance, which is you

either fight, you flee or you submit, and the argument tends to be “Let’s fight.”

So anyway, I bring that up in large part because I think definitions are important, I think origins

are important. But I think we can be fairly liberal in this sphere.

I have more mixed feelings about the holistic model which Ferguson presents in section three.

On one hand it provides a ready medium to display what many of us here believe; that war must

be understood on several levels, and as with Hinde’s model too, I think they’re similar models,

and I think there is a real important role for that. As a historian, I find myself, as I said, bouncing

around from one level of causation to the other, just largely for narrative reasons.

Clearly such models are more systematic. However, as in the case of Hinde’s presentation, I

think this sort of typology works better as a descriptive rather than as an analytic tool. Since I am

favorably disposed toward an anthropological approach, I found much that was described under

the various categories highly interesting, and as far as I could see comprehensive. But in the end

of the process I was left with much the same feeling provoked by Hinde’s paper. There is a lot of

insightful and important stuff here, but how do I go about applying it? Which of it is more or less

important under what circumstances? How does the time dimension or any other number of

variables play into it?

Ferguson himself is helpful in this regard in that he seeks to use his own theory to explain several

specific examples of bellicosity. His explanations are interesting and plausible, but his choice of

factors seems to me at least to be, to me at least, selective; analogous to the application of the

wrench from a very large tool chest. Also, his section seems open to some debate, which I think

was clear.

For example, in the case of the conflicts in Africa he does not mention, say, overpopulation as a

primary cause of violence in this very recent spate of wars. This despite the fact that these wars

in central Africa have taken place in some of the continent’s most densely populated areas, and

the military objectives, such as they are, could easily be interpreted as aimed at killing as many

people as possible. I realize this statement alone is highly debatable, but my point is that our state

of theorizing is only slowly moving forward beyond matters of opinion, which I think backs up

what Mel Ember just said.

Finally, in both Ferguson and Hinde’s paper, well, I talked about specialized phraseology in my

works. I won’t go into that any more except to say I think we have to try to develop if not a

common language something that we can all more easily understand each other.

As I read more deeply into Lionel Tiger’s extraordinarily eloquent paper on the role of sociology

in understanding human warfare I felt an increasing sense of disquiet that eventually bordered on

near panic. I was potentially faced with the nightmare of all commentators, the ultimate

admission of incompetence; nothing basically to disagree with or to complain about. Thankfully,

the author, perhaps out of deference to his own surname, eventually rewarded me with some

meat, or at least some scraps to gnaw on. But before I begin my mastication, let me raise some of

the reasons why I like this paper so much.

The novelist Kurt Vonnegut once commented that all human tragedies are based on a few very

bad ideas. I can only partially accept this notion, but I must say that Tiger’s paper goes a long

way towards demonstrating its validity, for not only does he fasten on certain key intellectual

foibles of sociology, but in his excursion on the net effect of putting women in the military and

some of the premises under which they were put, he very effectively demonstrates how these few

ideas operate to produce some fairly ridiculous consequences.

Coherence is one of this paper’s very strongest points, for Tiger sets forth some key presump-

tions—sociology’s rejection of the law of parsimony being the most important—and then moves

relentlessly to show how this is operated to minimize the discipline’s impact on the study of

modern war. The critique as far as I was concerned was devastating; so devastating that at one

point he even stops for preemptive apologies. His quote, “I oversimplify here seemingly

ruthlessly.” In fact I would have to say that it’s slashing logic and laser scalpel may in fact be the

kindest way to cut away dead tissue and breathe some life into a discipline which lately has

begun to show times of terminal illness. But that is another matter entirely.

It is my understanding that Tiger’s intent in flaying sociology is to effectively argue the case that

any subject as complex as war can only be explained through a thoroughly multidisciplinary

approach and that any self–referential effort in this direction can only lead to disaster. I

thoroughly agree, as do most of us here I am sure. But to do this will require, as Tiger effectively

demonstrates, further consensus on some basic points. His entertaining discourse on the

nature/nurture issue and its ultimate banality is a case in point. A bigger issue and one far less

close to resolution, according to my limited understanding, is the sort of “take no prisoners” fight

between the culturalists and the materialists.

I had a funny experience at one point being asked to deliver a paper at a very good university. I

was invited there because I wrote a book on battleships which essentially said that naval officers

of the late 19th and early 20th Century had basically manipulated technology according to their

cultural presumptions. Well, rather than do the simple thing and just reiterate the thesis, I had to

be a wise guy and start talking about my sort of modified cultural materialist approach towards

the origins of war. I was lucky to get out of there alive. But at any rate, I was, at that point, very

impressed with the fact how could I be in such opposition to myself? And what I think enabled

me to resolve it was there was a hell of a difference between 19th Century gentlemen floating

around on steam–fired ships and having all they wanted to eat supplied by the U.S. Government

and relatively primitive societies where failure in war or failure to garner food at the appropriate

moment meant death. And in that consequence, I think that serves to illustrate how things may

change, how motives for war may change over time, which is my argument — essentially war

grows more obsolescent — because I’m essentially a utilitarian. I believe war evolved initially

because it solved certain societal problems and that those problems, in very advanced democratic

and wealthy societies, really can be addressed by much less costly social institutions.

But anyway, back to Tiger, I have just a few negative comments that I want to bring up for no

other reason than it seems everyone should get their fair share of abuse.

After what seemed to me an exemplary 28 or so pages out of 30 pages of argumentation on the

side of the angels, Tiger suddenly falls prey to what looks like a demonic urge to undermine his

own laudable construct with a poison phrase: “in my opinion, it should be banned from the

public discourse in this country.” Talk about biting into the wrong apple. It doesn’t matter that

this subject is that most dubious of intellectual categories raised. The fact is that he has drifted

into the same pattern of thought he has been effectively condemning throughout the paper.

Nor did this prove to be a single miscue. Just a few pages later he followed it up with “The only

way brain tissue could have been added as rapidly as it did, was for the selection to favor those

able to identify those with us, those against us, and then for females to be willing or unable to

avoid engaging in reproductive acts.” Now the point of this, and Lionel later explained this

phrase to me. He certainly didn’t necessarily mean this literally. But I think, once again, phrasing

is important in these issues because they are so highly contentious.

So with that I think I should probably close, but I certainly was very impressed with this paper

and I don’t want to, I just felt somehow they’re paying me to be a commentator, I should say

something nasty. So with that note I’ll leave.

Moderator:

. . . trying to do that. Jim Davis no doubt got you to take those away.

Okay, our fourth commentator is going to be James Davis. James.

James Davis:

Two preparatory remarks. First, when I heard Professor Holsti’s first question this morning I

almost had a heart attack, since that was my talk. Luckily, nobody, none of the speakers

responded to it, so I’ll go ahead. Secondly, my comments were prepared ahead of time and deal

with Professor Tiger’s paper rather than his remarks. The difference is mostly in tone. The tone

of the paper is a bit more like O’Connell than the Tiger you just heard.

At the least, Professor Tiger cannot be accused of proselytizing for sociology. Unlike other

papers, his is not a genteel advertisement for the virtues of the discipline. Instead, he charges us

with “disciplinary parochialism . . . failure to contribute robustly to modern studies of human

warfare . . . a kind of malpractice . . . bumbling confusion and well meaning regret . . .” and

“being like pediatricians unwilling to establish a subspecialty in effective torture.” Ouch. Thank

God we are not alone, and one of the few times the three have been bracketed, academic,

sociology, the outer shores of feminism and the U.S. Army stand accused together of what

crime? “Avoiding human nature.”

I am certainly not here to defend feminist social constructionism, as I am highly allergic to horse

feathers. Others in the room are much better qualified to defend the military’s inability to tame

cupid, though I do not see many of them leaping to the opportunity. My hands, I am afraid, will

be full defending sociology.

Let me begin by trying to decant Tiger’s argument into smaller bottles, perhaps losing some of

the effervescence in the process.

First, “Sociology has not contributed much to the study of war.” I’ll plead guilty here, provided

one distinguishes between studies of war and studies of the military. As Professor Tiger notes,

from Samuel Stelfer to Charles Moskas, sociologists have contributed substantially to knowledge

about military life. And this excludes the astounding volume of in–house sociological research

which is not well–known among civilians. When, however, one turns to war per se, there’s an

almost total blank. Revolutions, yes, we study. Wars, no. Perhaps there is a clue in the difference.

I’ll go back to that.

Second accusation: “Sociology avoids biological variables with a beady–eyed, almost Lysenkoist

fanaticism.” Actually this is pretty much true, although one should note we also avoid electrical,

geological, astronomical, hydrological and subatomic variables, which is to say that sociologists

tend to favor sociological variables, which is a pretty fair operational definition of an academic

discipline. The question is not whether we do, but whether we should. More on that coming up.

Third: “Durkheim is the pied piper who led us astray.” I am prepared to quibble here. Speaking

of American sociology, and I think it is not just hard–wired pugnacity that leads me to say that

American sociology dominates the world discipline today, the history does not quite fall out that

way. As Tiger’s footnote 4 — see I did read the damn thing — as Tiger’s footnote 4 reminds us,

suicide was not translated into English until 1952 and no one needs to remind me that reading

foreign languages is not a high priority for American sociologists. Until the 1950s, American

sociology was a home–grown blend of diluted Protestant meliorism and defanged Herbert

Spencer. Human nature in its biological roots loomed large in this world in the ideas of Cooley,

Meade, Ferris, Thomas and their students. The trouble was that they didn’t have much to say

about the topic because they didn’t know anything about human nature beyond common sense

and anecdotes about wolf –children. Remember, this is long before any contemporary

developments in biology and the like. Sociological interest in human nature was there from the

beginning, but it died of boredom, not European infiltration.

Why then is sociology antibiological? Simple explanation is that serious peer review type

biosocial research requires extensive training and hard science we lack where there’s no shortage

of research problems that don’t require it. Another obvious candidate would be ideology. Until

recently, in the flourishing corporate–oriented organizational research, as Tiger notes, sociol-

ogists have sided with the weak rather than the strong, the poor rather than the rich, minorities

rather than majorities, revolutionaries rather than regimes. Biological approaches to inequality

are not only unpalatable to meliorists, but these days they are likely to be professionally fatal.

When one combines a history of poor success wrestling with human nature, an ideological

minefield, and any discipline’s self preoccupation, I doubt that sociology’s focus on non-

biological variables can be attributed to Durkheim being sent down to the minors.

The fourth and most important claim is that sociology could tell us all we need to know about

war if it would just become more biological. I doubt it. First of all, if this is true, the credit would

belong to biology, not sociology. Hitching a ride on the winning float is a dubious goal for an

ambitious discipline. Second, it is far from clear exactly which specific biological principles will

do what for us. Professor Tiger emphasizes human nature. His colleague Professor Ferguson tells

us “old instincts theories that people wore because they’re internally driven to aggression have

been so thoroughly critiqued that they’re without serious exponents in the literature.” I know.

Much more current is another view with ethnological roots, “This lacks support from eth-

nography.” In other words, I am not quite sure what part of biology is acceptable.

Third, there is a crucial methodological issue here, and here we come back to the question.

Constants cannot explain variation. When we compare species, biology can undoubtedly explain

why people have boxing matches and goldfish do not. But a common human nature simply

cannot explain differences among animals who share it. If biology can account for differences

among humans belligerence and belligerencies, we need the name, rank and serial number of the

specific organs, hormones, bodily fluids and hard data on how they vary from person to person

or group to group. I would be astounded to find a biological explanation of why Jews used to

loom large in professional boxing but are now as pacific as goldfish. Have Scandinavian

testosterone levels declined so much they no longer wander around in sailboats raping and

pillaging? Did General Powell’s reluctance to invade every little country that miffed us stem

from a deficiency in human nature? I doubt it.

I am not defending or even attempting to explain sociology’s indifference to war, or for that

matter peace, or its fanatic denial of firm differences in human abilities. I didn’t say genetic, I

said firm. We should be grateful to Professor Tiger for pointing them out, if not for rubbing it in.

If, however, the job of academic sociology is to account for differences among humans and

human groups with scientifically kosher variables we need specific suggestions about specific

measurable biological Xs and specific measurable sociological Ys.

In sum, if sociology is to be rescued by biology, it would benefit more from standard deviations

than from standard denunciations.

Moderator:

With wonderful self–discipline, our group has concluded at 2:58. We are exactly on time. So

while our two panelists think about what they would like to say in rebuttal after our break, we

will adjourn for 15 minutes, and please reconvene at 3:15.

[a brief recess occurs]

Moderator:

While we have a moment and we’re waiting to sit down, could I just ask the commentators, both

those who have already made their presentations and those who are going to, if you have written

comments, which we hope you do, if you’ll leave a copy with us, because we are going to be

using them, as you might expect.

Okay. As we did this morning, we will begin with our presenters offering rebuttal to com-

mentary. Brian, would you like to begin?

Brian Ferguson:

Thank you. Well, Mel Ember has given a very close reading of my paper and offered a number of

stimulating criticisms. I’d like to respond to some of them, major ones.

Triangle Institute for Security Studies Page 47"THE STUDY OF WAR" — SESSION TWO: ANTHROPOLOGY AND SOCIOLOGYWednesday, June 11, 1997

One issue is whether foragers are more peaceful. And I do say in the paper that in the ethno-

graphic record foragers are not generally peaceful. This is partly expected according to my model

because I think that contact situations increase warfare. I would note that of the unincorporated

peaceable societies, a large number of them are small–scale foragers. And there are other

scholars like Bruce Knoft who have made a cogent case that if you have a more narrow

definition of what is the simplest society, these are without war, although they do have

interpersonal violence.

The archeological evidence, I am sure Larry Keeley will have something to say about this. I

would point out that one thing that was not in this critique is evidence of an archeological period

when foragers were as warlike as they are in the ethnographic record. He points out that the

absence of skeletons may conceal a war record. In the paper which I have written which is the

end paper for the volume that he mentioned, a paper on early violence, I indicate that as an

indicator of war. If men of combat age are not buried there, then they have died and “remained

elsewhere” and that can be taken as reasonable evidence of war.

But there are other sorts of more positive evidence on this subject. In prehistoric Japan of about

5000-plus skeletons of foraging populations, the indications of traumatic death are at .002%. In

the agricultural period that follows it goes up to 10%. These are embedded projectile points and

other traumatic injuries.

And I would also point out in my comments on the archaeological record, I was not focusing on

Triangle Institute for Security Studies Page 48"THE STUDY OF WAR" — SESSION TWO: ANTHROPOLOGY AND SOCIOLOGYWednesday, June 11, 1997

the archaeological record en masse, just on foragers. I think we can find very strong evidence in

early farming communities. These have lots of evidence left around—skeletons, house structures,

etc., etc. And what we find in the ancient Middle East if you go back far enough, no evidence of

war. Early neolithic China, no evidence of war. Later on evidence all kinds of evidence comes in.

It is absolutely unmistakable. But for long periods of time all of that evidence is not present.

There are also very good cutting–edge archaeologists such as Jonathan Haas and Anna Roosevelt

who have been doing a lot of work and a lot of sort of multimedia archeology, and what they

both assert is that, yes, you do see archaeological evidence of war. And one thing that Larry

Keeley has very effectively pointed out is that archaeology has had a bias against recognizing

this kind of evidence in the past. These people are looking at it, they find it, they find it coming

in at a certain point in time. It is not there, and then you see it come in.

And I would also suggest to Mel Ember to read the other papers in the volume that he referred to

if he thinks that this demonstrates that war was ubiquitous in the past. It does not. A number of

the papers in that volume, while they show violence, are showing violence, seemingly male

violence against women, a very interesting phenomenon, without any indications of war. And

arrows, about one in four arrow points sticks in the bone and gets buried. So if enough people get

killed by these things, they generally show up.

On the ethnographic record, he says there is no reason to believe that there was more violence

with Western contact, and I beg to differ. There are dozens and dozens of ethnohistoric studies

Triangle Institute for Security Studies Page 49"THE STUDY OF WAR" — SESSION TWO: ANTHROPOLOGY AND SOCIOLOGYWednesday, June 11, 1997

that have gone into great detail documenting just this, so the evidence is there. Also,

archaeological research on the North American continent shows that there is an increase in

fortifications in the protohistoric and early historic periods.

Turning now to the epistemology of the statistical method, I do like the idea of cross–cultural

statistical research, but there are some problems with this. One is in the nature of the statistics;

take the Yanomami, for example. I’ve got a book that’s about 500 pages going through every

recorded instance of the warfare from any Yanomami group anywhere, and so I think that as

much as there is evidence of the frequency of war I’ve got it together. What I found is that while

the Yanomami are coded in the statistical sample as having war every year, and that is not an

unreasonable inference from the one book that is cited on this, in fact they have war on an

average of something about one every ten years. Also the coding and the sample shows the

Yanomami war is not seasonal and it is seasonal. So there are questions about that.

The issue of pacification, how this is coded, is also something that is unclear to me. Now,

Dr. Ember refers to the Kung as an example that are frequently cited, and he said the Kung had

war in the past. Yes, they did have war in the past. We know they had war in the past because the

Kung have now become one of the most extensively documented historical studies ever in

anthropological literature. The idea that somehow a government pacification occurred and has

not been mentioned in any of the studies that have been pouring over Kung history is difficult to

accept. They had war at one time. They didn’t have war at another time. What happened? What

changed? I don’t see pacification as being the explanation. We can’t assume pacification if

Triangle Institute for Security Studies Page 50"THE STUDY OF WAR" — SESSION TWO: ANTHROPOLOGY AND SOCIOLOGYWednesday, June 11, 1997

people are not fighting.

The issue of paternal interest group, I will defer to Dr. Ember when he says that it has now been

disproven that paternal interest groups are an independent predictor of warfare intensity. He’s

one of the experts on this. But I will also point out that this knocks out one of the firmest

statistical conclusions that has stood for 30 years in anthropology. So if statistics is going to

demonstrate things to us and get us beyond argument, this is not a very good example, because

this is what statistics showed us. This is what we believed we could learn from the statistical

method and now we learn it is not true.

I have had the pleasure of being on panels with Dr. Ember before, and one of my more enjoyable

moments was in Chicago when Mark Howard Ross, another cross–cultural researcher, was there,

and Mel was sitting there and Ross was talking about the different things that he had thought he

had found in his work, and Mel said, “Nope, nope, doesn’t work, nope, doesn’t work, nope, that

too, nope.”

So what I would like to see is some statistics showing that statistical reasoning does produce this

agreement on the truth that it is alleged to do. The theory that is advanced here about

unpredictable resource scarcity, this is one area where both Mel Ember and Larry Keeley and

myself are in agreement. This is a rare event. Unpredictable resource scarcity I would think we

all agree can lead to intense war.

Triangle Institute for Security Studies Page 51"THE STUDY OF WAR" — SESSION TWO: ANTHROPOLOGY AND SOCIOLOGYWednesday, June 11, 1997

But there are some problems even with this theory. As I remember this argument, while unpre-

dictable resource scarcity is a very strong predictor of war, the statistic for famine has no

predictive value. Also, there’s trouble with the kind of evidence used to back up this assertion. I

believe that the evidence that was being advocated to be collected was signs of anxiety and fairy

tales from the cultures under question. And I think that there are other sorts of evidence that are

stronger than that. But I do believe that unpredictable resource scarcity can lead to war. I think it

is very important to investigate this, particularly archaeologically, but I don’t think this is going

to explain all war.

And I will also say one thing while Dr. Ember, Mel, can criticize a case approach for not being

cross–culturally generalizable, that is certainly a valid criticism. But as someone who has been

reading cases for years and years, I must say I find a strong element of unreality in the argument

that the intensity of war, the lack of intensity of wars of the different groups, when you see all the

factors that go in, that what it is boiling down is that they have some kind of a memory that they

were hungry in the past. It just doesn’t seem to work for me on a case approach. Now, of course

that doesn’t matter if you are looking at the statistics, but that’s the way I work.

Two last things. I hope that you noticed that there were also a lot of similarities in Dr. Ember’s

work and mine. We haven’t been talking about that mainly, but there is a great deal of overlap. I

generally agree that war causes social structures rather than social structures causing war. It is a

chicken and egg problem, but I have my opinion and it is the same as his. Also, very important in

spite of all these differences of opinion, we are in agreement that people who are very closely

Triangle Institute for Security Studies Page 52"THE STUDY OF WAR" — SESSION TWO: ANTHROPOLOGY AND SOCIOLOGYWednesday, June 11, 1997

related to each other in culture and language and many different ways fight like hell. And the

Yanomami give a great example of this. The Yanomami are fighting literally their brothers.

But in one instance when they are getting ready to do to war, here’s how in group/out group

works. Two groups have been together for other 80 years. They are heading towards war. It is a

process that goes on over about six or seven years. They were all known as the Nomoay, and

right before war breaks out one guy says to another, and an exceptional source we have on this

period, “You know, they are not Nomoay after all. They crossed the river at a different time.” So

a line is drawn, but it is not the cultural difference that is leading them to fight.

Last, to respond to Bob O’Connell’s point about not dealing with overpopulation in Africa, true. I

didn’t. I only looked at recent structural inputs, but I would say that in the Rwandan case, this is

where the final point in my paper comes in. The Rwandan case has been studied by Thomas

Homer Dixon. It seems to be at the surface a classic example of overpopulation leading to war.

He looks at, he finds it doesn’t work that way. I think overpopulation may have played a role in

that, but not in the kind of overt way of causing mass migrations or water scarcity. I think if you

look at how resource scarcities get translated into interpersonal conflicts, you might find that

there is an underlying resource base for the Rwandan War.

Moderator:

Okay. Thank you very much Brian. Lionel.

Triangle Institute for Security Studies Page 53"THE STUDY OF WAR" — SESSION TWO: ANTHROPOLOGY AND SOCIOLOGYWednesday, June 11, 1997

Lionel Tiger:

A few comments. The first, Bob O’Connell already acknowledged that our conversation cleared

up his problem with my assertion we should not use the term race or discuss it. I didn’t mean not

to discuss it. I think we should use it and not at all as a legal entity. The fact is that the use of the

term “race” is a profound perversion of biological knowledge. There are no races in the classical

sense. The use of the word “race” in the census in this country used to be only joined by the

South Africans and now that is, I believe they have stopped using it, and it is to me a scandal that

there aren’t social scientists standing up and saying, “We cannot use this term any more. It is

preposterous.”

I had the experience when it became very clear to me how grave it was when a student of ours at

Rutgers was applying to the University of Santa Cruz in the Anthropology Department. And as it

happened he was from Sri Lanka, but one couldn’t tell that from his name. His name was

Fernando, Daniel Fernando. It could be almost a name from anywhere. But in any event, he was

asked the usual thing by the woman who was chairing the department to provide a CV and three

representative papers and an ethnic identity card.

Now, the reason for that of course was that this could be converted into saleable job opportuni-

ties. And that at that point made it clear to me that we were here willy–nilly taking biology and

applying it to the most sensitive areas of public policy in a completely stupid and I think

Triangle Institute for Security Studies Page 54"THE STUDY OF WAR" — SESSION TWO: ANTHROPOLOGY AND SOCIOLOGYWednesday, June 11, 1997

irresponsible manner. So that was the reason for that. I think that it should not be acceptable. And

now in fact I no longer use the word “race,” I use the term “skin shade” and I call myself a

person of skin shade. When I have to sign fill in forms, I always sign Native American, and I find

that that works quite well. So that’s my rap on that.

But I think that is another case of how we can see how a misplaced idea can cause endless

problems. And there is no question, at least in my opinion as a citizen maybe only that, that in

this country the relations between so–called races or skin shades has deteriorated over time rather

than improved. And I think that all that tends to do is affirm the value for creation of antagonisms

of making clear boundaries. And again it is that in group/out group thing we’ve all talked about,

and lo and behold, unhappily it works.

Professor Davis’s commentary was first of all so hilarious to me that I was prepared to accept

anything he said. I would have gladly given him my social security number, my TIA Cref

account, simply because it is so rare to have such well–timed and well–presented jokes on a

serious issue, and I won’t make light of what he said on that account.

But I do think that it is important to acknowledge two things. One, being critical is not

necessarily to be destructive. That sort of obvious, and I don’t think he was implying that. I was

in some despair about the discipline of sociology and having to look at it in terms of what I was

asked to do by the organizers. It is not a subject I would have chosen with which to non–entertain

myself for whatever period of time it took me to write this damn paper. So I don’t feel particu-

Triangle Institute for Security Studies Page 55"THE STUDY OF WAR" — SESSION TWO: ANTHROPOLOGY AND SOCIOLOGYWednesday, June 11, 1997

larly culpable for having said what I thought. Maybe this is not appropriate, but there you are.

On the question which is much more important about constants and variation, here I think the

sociology discipline does have a problem. I made the comment in the paper that we have in the

university two separate units. We have Natural Science and Social Science. And there is

somehow the implication that social science is unnatural. It sort of follows at a semantic level

almost, and I can’t see the sense to that. But let’s assume it’s an administrative given. Now what?

Does that mean that our species has no natural behavior? This is why I raised the human nature

problem. I think it’s just profoundly unlikely that we, all of us sitting here in the room, they’re all

looking at a speaker. I mean, it is standard primate behavior. They’re all slightly oriented here,

nobody is making any noise, nobody is talking. It’s a very predictable human organic pattern.

This is non–random and this is, if you will, human nature at academic conferences, not the most

important subject, but it is one that nonetheless that tells us something about ourselves. And I

think with my comments about sociologists, I fear that they did not have that innocent eye that

would allow them to say, “Hey, this is how human beings act in conferences.”

Now, some did. I mentioned Irving Goffman and Goffman was just brilliant at this sort of thing,

but he really refused, and I know because we discussed it at enormous length, he refused to

accept that the causative mechanism might be “human nature.” And that is really a problem for

anyone who says—now I may not know as Dave has correctly criticized me for—I may not

know what it was that caused General Powell to do X or Y in day five of the Gulf War. I may not

know what brain mechanism was involved. But sure as hell there was something going on that

Triangle Institute for Security Studies Page 56"THE STUDY OF WAR" — SESSION TWO: ANTHROPOLOGY AND SOCIOLOGYWednesday, June 11, 1997

wasn’t based on what he happened to read in the newspaper two years ago or what he happened

to see on television the night before that was not about the war. I think there are certain

mechanisms that operate, and maybe it isn’t in fact irresponsible not to pay any attention to them.

So again, the whole history of—and I will make one further and final comment which is positive.

When I was a student at university and studying these issues, we were told that the difference

between humans and other primates was the opposable thumb. I remember sort of looking,

sitting in the classroom and this lecture was going on and on—it was . . .—going on about the

opposable thumb. And I thought, “Well, is this what separates me from Bongo?” But now look at

the discussion we’re having. We’re talking about brain mechanisms, we’re talking about the

endocrine systems, we’re talking about resource scarcity. We’re talking about some very, very

serious, very complicated things. So we’ve come a great deal of distance and we have a much

more practical sense of what we are that we share with other creatures. If you will, therefore,

social sciences become less unnatural in our purview. And I think the next big arena to move on

this will be among the economists, because they have managed to completely escape any

pollution by biology which could possibly be why they got the better jobs.

Moderator:

Okay. I think we are ready for discussion, and I see, Don, Larry Keeley has asked first, Robert

Jervis will be second, Don Higginbotham’s third and I might say that this morning Richard

Garwin, Mel Ember and Bruce Russett were all cut off, so any time any of you three have

Triangle Institute for Security Studies Page 57"THE STUDY OF WAR" — SESSION TWO: ANTHROPOLOGY AND SOCIOLOGYWednesday, June 11, 1997

anything to offer you’ll move to the top of the list. No, that’s just to say we sort of owe you a

priority if you want to join in this conversation. And we have more coming up. So we’ll start

with Larry Keeley while I get the hands.

Larry Keeley:

I have some problems obviously with some of the statements that have been made here. And I

was trying to think of an analogy to describe my difficulty. I suppose it goes like this. If you’re

standing here and you tell me there are no mountains between me and the Pacific Ocean, what

am I supposed to say? I have a problem. There are mountains between here and the Pacific

Ocean and there are lots of them.

So when I read statements about periods and places where we do have a great deal of arche-

ological evidence. There are not many such places, but we do have some. This area happens to

be one of them, by the way. And I read statements about certain things in the past that are

supposed to work this way or that way.

For example, now Brian just alluded to something which you won’t see very often but you see in

a lot of literature, it is an old thing in literature, which are hypotheses which attribute war to

agriculture or the origins of agriculture. Now, the problem is if you are an archeologist. You’ve

got a problem. That’s like saying there are no mountains between here and the Pacific Ocean,

because here is our problem. We have two areas of the world where we have, in one case we

Triangle Institute for Security Studies Page 58"THE STUDY OF WAR" — SESSION TWO: ANTHROPOLOGY AND SOCIOLOGYWednesday, June 11, 1997

finally have a survey of burial populations, several thousands of burials and several, and perhaps

a hundred, different cemeteries of different periods in the same region. That is this area.

Now, the periods we have to worry about are archaic, which is all hunter–gatherer. Those are the

post–glacial hunter–gatherers. Then we have woodland, and we have the introduction of

agriculture there and perhaps sedentary agriculture. We also seem to have the formulation of

some sort of large–scale system in the area we call the Hopewell. And then we have Mississip-

pian, which is village agriculture and that Mississippian pattern breaks up sort of before the first

Europeans arrive. But it is more or less the same . . . that continues to the European contact.

Now, here is the problem. During the Archaic, of course archeological visibility is increasing

because sedentism is increasing. People who are sedentary have cemeteries. So we get more and

more cemeteries. In any case, when we look at the proportion of those with violent traumas or

showing evidence of violent death, we see a great increase during the Archaic. In fact, the peak

comes amongst the hunter–gatherers; that is the Late Middle Archaic and Late Archaic. And then

when some kind of agriculture appears here in a hopewell, boom, the pattern drops almost to

nothing, and it begins building again and it builds to a peak a few hundred years, a couple of

hundred years, before European contact, in fact, slightly before Columbus, and then it falls

slightly. Okay, so that’s the best evidence we have from one area.

Another area is the oldest agriculture area of the world, which is the ancient Near East,

particularly the land of Anti–Near East. There we have sedentism developing during the

Triangle Institute for Security Studies Page 59"THE STUDY OF WAR" — SESSION TWO: ANTHROPOLOGY AND SOCIOLOGYWednesday, June 11, 1997

Nutufean Period, where you have permanent houses and villages, and then they begin farming,

what we call PPNA, PPNB. And then the Neolithic begins, Middle Neolithic, Later Neolithic and

Bronze Age. Now, we don’t have a great survey their, but we do have an anecdotal pattern that is

very clear, meaning if you look at any, and we have large collections of bodies. If you look at any

large collection of bodies in the Nutufean, PPNA, PPNB you will not find a low incidence of

violent traumas, you will find none. And I didn’t believe this when I was first told it. I checked.

Okay, now, here is the problem. If you say that warfare starts with agriculture, so far as we know,

you’re not just in error, you’re completely wrong. You know, we have other cases where we say,

“Oh, well, hunter–gatherers don’t show much evidence of warfare,” not in the archeological

record, not in the apparently ethnological record or something. Well, that’s just wrong. I mean,

we have lots of it, wherever we look.

We do have a problem in visibility, and I will finish with that. Which is that warfare only

becomes visible under certain conditions; that is, you need large cemeteries and you need

permanent facilities to have to be defended; that is, people are stuck in one space, usually with

food stores and you get fortifications. And you also need stone projectile points or bone

projectile points. Now, if you have those conditions, you get evidence of warfare very clearly.

But where the evidence is weak it’s a problem.

So let’s take a place like Egypt. The earliest human specimen, modern human particularily, that

we have in Egypt is 35,000 years old. There is no evidence of violent trauma. The next specimen

Triangle Institute for Security Studies Page 60"THE STUDY OF WAR" — SESSION TWO: ANTHROPOLOGY AND SOCIOLOGYWednesday, June 11, 1997

we have is 20,000 years old. It’s got embedded projectile points. The next evidence comes

12,000 to 14,000 years ago amongst hunter–gatherers in the middle part of the upper Nile, and

there we have a number of cemeteries. If we dug only one of these cemeteries we would find

only about 5% had violent traumas. But we dug another cemetery. In that one 40% of them had

violent traumas; in fact died from multiple wounds. So this is the problem of visibility.

And I’ll leave with the Neanderthals. We have a problem with the Neantherthals. Did they

practice interpersonal violence or not? The answer is, who knows? Because they have an unusual

number of head injuries, head traumas. Now, is that from violence or not? Well, their bones are

thicker than ours, they were more heavily muscled and they more often broke their bones than

modern humans, so what we can say is that we don’t know. But it’s still a mystery why the

Neantherthals so often forgot to duck. And, you know, I’ve been asked for than explanation, I

was saying, “Well, you know, there’s a lot of reasons for believing the Neanderthals are a little

bit dim, from our point of view. And so maybe they forgot to duck because they are, you know,

Neantherthals. All right?” So I finally leave with saying, “Okay, we have archeological evidence

and when we have archeological visibility we very, very often, no matter what kind of society it

is, have evidence of sometimes a lot, sometimes very little, but we many times have lots of

evidence of warfare.

Now, here is the problem. If you want to support your contentions about relationships between

warfare, certain levels of society, certain kinds of economies, you’ve got a problem because

you’re going to have to throw out ethnography, particularly the cross–cultural research that is

Triangle Institute for Security Studies Page 61"THE STUDY OF WAR" — SESSION TWO: ANTHROPOLOGY AND SOCIOLOGYWednesday, June 11, 1997

based on it, you’re going to have to throw out much of archeology. Then I ask you the question,

what’s left for the early. . . . Thank you.

Larry Keeley:

I don’t say war started with agriculture. I didn’t say it in the comments, I didn’t say it in the

paper.

Brian Ferguson:

I know

Larry Keeley:

I didn’t say it in comments, I didn’t say it in the paper. Mezolithic, I think sedentism is when you

begin to get warfare. War settles in as a regular pattern in later Neolithics sometimes centuries

after the agriculture has come in. So I am not saying that agriculture starts warfare. I don’t say

that. The ancient Near East, well, the Jebelsohaba site that you mention I do also cite and I’ll

give you another one.

Upstate New York, there is an area that is well–known by many sites and many skeletal remains

studied by Ritchie, I believe, in his archeology of New York State. Paleolithic group, mobile,

Triangle Institute for Security Studies Page 62"THE STUDY OF WAR" — SESSION TWO: ANTHROPOLOGY AND SOCIOLOGYWednesday, June 11, 1997

although they are beginning to settle down in the Finger Lakes region. These people appear to be

isolated. There is a lot of empty space at this time. This is about 3,000 years ago, but dates I

always have to see on paper, I can’t remember them. The Lorentian group comes in, which later

populated the Northeast. We have lots of evidence of them moving together, very similar in the

subsistence orientation, also a paleolithic group, but also focusing on the same Finger Lakes

area. In one particular area, in one particular time, we find about three or four sites where

everybody’s stuck full of arrows. And then that stops. And in the other areas where these people

are coming in, what we find is merging of cultural traditions. So, yes, it does happen. I’m not

saying that war can’t happen, but it seems to be rather unusual. And the final statement you made

about “everywhere we look we find evidence” seemed to have been contradicted by the

statement you made earlier about no evidence in many of the sites. So that’s it I guess.

Moderator:

Okay. Richard Garwin is someone we owed a question to from this morning, so he’ll move to the

top of the list and then we go to Bob Jervis.

Richard Garwin:

Well, I’m a scientist and technologist, so of course I have been learning a lot from these discus-

sions, but I wonder what we will do with the information if we can ever agree on some of the

causes of war. I suppose we are trying to find ways to prevent war or at least to prevent the wars

Triangle Institute for Security Studies Page 63"THE STUDY OF WAR" — SESSION TWO: ANTHROPOLOGY AND SOCIOLOGYWednesday, June 11, 1997

which are not to our advantage, but it seems to be that we ought to ask that question before we

expend a lot of resources on solving some of these problems.

Now, it seems to me that war, from what I have heard, is not homogeneous. There are wars that

come from different belief systems and the purpose may be simply to destroy the enemy, not so

that they will go to our heaven, but someplace else. And there are wars of conquest, where

somebody has something that you want, which you may need or may just want, and that kind of

war is not going to happen until people acquire things that can then be taken from them. So we

may be confusing the different wars, which may have different origins, and it’s less homogene-

ous perhaps than we imagined.

But I wanted to comment on Paul Berenson’s comment and paper that he circulated. His question

was, “To what extent are biological roots of dominance and power wired into human beings; not

the average human but the one who becomes the despotic leader.” And I ask to what extent is

that a tautology? The despots do exhibit dominance and power, that’s why we call them despots.

But how else is that expressed? And how could you answer this question empirically? If it is

hard–wired, it seems to me that means it is not environmentally created, whatever else it may

mean, although it may be influenced by environment.

So does it show up in the youth of these despots? For instance, was Hitler a person who

demanded dominance and power when he was a kid? And how about these other folks? I know

nothing about this, but the history of a lot of these people, the biographies are available and one

Triangle Institute for Security Studies Page 64"THE STUDY OF WAR" — SESSION TWO: ANTHROPOLOGY AND SOCIOLOGYWednesday, June 11, 1997

could ask. How about siblings and family? If it is hard–wired, is it inherited? Is it an accident of

birth? And what would be the consequence anyhow of answering that question, that we should

accept only benevolent dictators or that we should educate people to beware of those seeking

dominance and power? And to what extent should we be wary of Bill Gates? Do these people

who have dominance and power in one field then exhibit it in the making of war?

But I really do wonder what we would have if we answered that question and really what we can

do, what the decision–makers and the democracies, the populace can do with any wisdom that

comes out of this meeting. Thank you.

Moderator:

Okay. Thank you, Dick. Dick Kohn has suggested something that I think might help us to ensure

that everybody gets a chance to get their views out, and that is unless an observation or a

question is made specifically directed at one of the panelists, perhaps you all could take notes

and close up for us at the end and we will let people make their observations unless they’re in the

form of a specific immediate question. Okay, so with that we will go to Bob Jervis.

Bob Jervis:

. . . in another conference . . . I am not sure you want to answer it now or hold it or . . . but it

follows in some ways on Dick’s point, and also it reflects on our discussion earlier. I wonder if it

Triangle Institute for Security Studies Page 65"THE STUDY OF WAR" — SESSION TWO: ANTHROPOLOGY AND SOCIOLOGYWednesday, June 11, 1997

would be useful for each of the paper–givers to take a crack at this question. I know we are really

talking about the study of war generally, not how do we influence the future, but I agree with

Dick, and part of what drives it obviously is how one might make the world less warlike in the

future. And I wonder if you can think from what you think your discipline has found, what do

you think might be the change that would have the greatest impact on increasing or decreasing

incidence of war either in general or say among some subset of countries in the future? And if

you find this an interesting question, I’d further subdivide it a bit. One would be how do you

think you would answer as a “representative” of your discipline? I’m sure I can see how much

anthropology obviously agrees. They all agree among themselves just as is true of course of

political science or economics or any other discipline. But still to the extent you think there is a

received wisdom. Second, what would your view be if you did not agree with that?

A second question related, though, would be what changet, perhaps a policy–driven change,

could have the most impact on war? Because, for instance, I could imagine certain changes, like

you might say, “Oh, if the world were more, or if these countries, were more prosperous, they’d

fight less.” That might be true, it might not be very helpful as a policy guide. “Oh, get rich!” You

know, “Great!” But earlier I think Professor Hinde talked about, say, giving up war toys. I’m not

saying he said that would make a big difference, but some people have said that would make a

big difference or something like that. But can you think again what your disciple might say if

you could whisper in the ears of princes or princesses things that actually governments could do

that would make a difference to increase or the chance of peace. And again you could do it two

ways, what your field would say and what you would say. And, third, what research questions,

Triangle Institute for Security Studies Page 66"THE STUDY OF WAR" — SESSION TWO: ANTHROPOLOGY AND SOCIOLOGYWednesday, June 11, 1997

you know, if you were the director of the NSF and had lots of money to sprinkle around, what

questions that are in principle answerable, even in five, ten years of hard research, do you think it

would be most important for us to answer to be able to give better guidance on that second point.

So if you’d care to take a crack at this, I’m glad to say I’m only a commentator, so when

tomorrow I don’t have to try it.

Moderator:

Okay. Peter Feaver just wanted to make an observation, and then Lionel wants to try and answer

that.

Peter Feaver:

Just add one more question to his list, which I thought was very helpful, and that is identify what

are questions or findings from their field that are universally rejected. I thought that was an

interesting point when you said that nobody in that field buys into this argument anymore. That

is usually a sign to me either of the correct truth that then will be discovered next month or it

may in fact be wrong. But in political science we have a few of those points that have been

thoroughly rejected, you know, empirically, and those findings since Quincy Wright and the

other subfields would be very helpful.

Triangle Institute for Security Studies Page 67"THE STUDY OF WAR" — SESSION TWO: ANTHROPOLOGY AND SOCIOLOGYWednesday, June 11, 1997

Moderator:

Very good point. Lionel.

Lionel Tiger:

. . . I think I may just reply to the first of your four questions here. Rather simply, it speaks to

Richard Garwin’s point as well. It seems to me that one of the useful things that a discipline like

sociology or anthropology or any other could contribute to the discussion of warfare was essen-

tially to medicalize the story; that is, to turn this into not a question of “join the army, be a man,

serve the nation” and so, but essentially a problem of epidemic control. And I think if it becomes

possible to locate the etiology of warfare, not solely in economic interests, not solely in political

hegemony, not solely etc., etc., but located in something that is like the vulnerability of the

organism to viral attack, then I think we might have leaders or we might select for leaders or we

might influence leaders to have less hubris about what they are doing and a little more questions

about the kind of physical nature of warfare. That’s a rather vain, possibly a rather vain hope.

But I think that there’s a good model, two models here. One is the World Health Organization

model (not that the WHO is a paragon), and the other is the pollution metaphor. It took us a very

long time as a species to say, “Hey, we are polluting the planet. We can’t keep doing it.” And it’s

been a struggle and strenuous and everything else, but finally we agreed that somehow we are in

this together and we’ve got to make do. And I think medicalizing warfare in that sense might

Triangle Institute for Security Studies Page 68"THE STUDY OF WAR" — SESSION TWO: ANTHROPOLOGY AND SOCIOLOGYWednesday, June 11, 1997

have some virtue.

Moderator:

Okay. Michael Howard had a specific comment on this.

Michael Howard:

This is a very quick intervention on the question of the identification of possible aggressive

dictators. What is important is not so much to recognize them in youth as to understand the

circumstances under which they do grow and flourish. Alan Pullock in his excellent double

biography of Hitler and Stalin showed how it had been out of the question for either of them to

have achieved positions of dominance if they had not lived in totally anarchic situations within

their own countries. It is the situations under which such people emerge that are really

significant, rather than their existence.

Moderator:

Okay, and one other.

[Unknown]:

Triangle Institute for Security Studies Page 69"THE STUDY OF WAR" — SESSION TWO: ANTHROPOLOGY AND SOCIOLOGYWednesday, June 11, 1997

May I just add a very, very brief comment to Professor Tiger’s suggestion? If we do follow the

path you recommend and we do instruct and teach and educate our leaders not to be warlike

anymore, what do we do when we need to defend ourselves in an absolutely just cause. Suddenly

we have very decent people who can’t lead, so I mean I think to equate war as the illness is really

a dreadful mistake. It often is, but it often is not.

[Unknown]:

There’s no evidence whatever that the closing down of hospitals improves medical care. It seems

to me that precisely the notion that there is a kind of medicalized nature of warfare would mean

that you’d want to have means to prevent it and to protect yourself. I don’t see this as a pacifist

statement at all. In fact, practically speaking, it might be the contrary. But it seems to me that the

point of departure from which you move gives you, in my view anyway, a more humane and in

fact a more practical way out of this. But I am not suggesting that disarmament is the answer. It’s

armament, but with an understanding of armament with respect to what?

Michael Howard:

But surely comparing war and illness weighs the question, weighs the issue.

[Unknown:

Triangle Institute for Security Studies Page 70"THE STUDY OF WAR" — SESSION TWO: ANTHROPOLOGY AND SOCIOLOGYWednesday, June 11, 1997

It’s an empirical question whether it would.

Moderator:

Okay. Dick Kohn.

Richard Kohn:

. . . I would just comment about Bob’s observation about looking for ameliorating factors in this

context of medicalization and say that that analogy has been used for the study of war, but it is

usually used in such a fashion as to try to understand the disease before you try to prescribe

therapy. And so from a methodological standpoint, and I would admit to a not so hidden agenda

for myself, and for Alex perhaps too, although I won’t speak for him, in organizing the

conference and the broader project project that we are hoping to help prevent, avoid or

ameliorate war. I think we started from the assumption that the first step, as it has been with

scholarship for many generations, is to understand it. And so without regard to choosing

therapies, until a fuller understanding is possible, and from that standpoint the medical analogy

may be useful.

Moderator:

Okay. We have one more intermediate intervention.

Triangle Institute for Security Studies Page 71"THE STUDY OF WAR" — SESSION TWO: ANTHROPOLOGY AND SOCIOLOGYWednesday, June 11, 1997

[Unknown]:

. . . short and in essence will reply to both of those last two questions about some policy change

and one that would be impossible, and that is of either controlling population growth or even

reducing it. In anything approaching a democratic society you can’t do that because, as Indira

Gandhi found when she tried to do that. And it is only under circumstances of a totally total-

itarian government such as China where that policy can even attempt to be implemented. Even

there it’s breaking down. . . . And the reasons in evolutionary thinking are quite simple. It is the

one most important thing for any animal to reproduce.

Moderator:

Okay. We will return to our regular list now. I think we might keep Bob Jervis’s notion in mind.

I’m sure going to try and do it and also in some ways it is our agenda for Friday to talk about, but

I think to the extent that people as we perceive can address those questions in their presentations

it would be very helpful.

All right, let me review the bidding again so that you know where you are. We have Don

Higginbotham, Robert Hinde, Peter Klopfer, Jack Levy, Cori Dauber, Bob O’Connell, Tim

McKeown. Okay, Don.

Triangle Institute for Security Studies Page 72"THE STUDY OF WAR" — SESSION TWO: ANTHROPOLOGY AND SOCIOLOGYWednesday, June 11, 1997

Don Higginbotham:

. . . don’t necessarily have to elicit a response right now, but like him I want to move from

prehistory and antiquity up into the modern age. I wonder if our anthropologist and sociologist

friends would consider that people become more warlike partly out of chance, good fortune,

luck, etc. You win a war or two and you find that that’s the way to go. One might suggest

something about Prussian and German history in this fashion and British history, at least in the

period of the early British empire. And you could argue this about American history, the Indian

wars, the Imperial War, the War of Independence, the 19th Century wars, the first two world

wars. And then you arrive at a kind of arrogance of power or super–power mentality, which can

get you in trouble in Korea and Vietnam because you don’t think it is possible you can lose.

I would suggest England suffered from this kind of winning tradition, which became an

arrogance of power, in 1776. She didn’t consider alternatives to dealing with her colonial

problem in a political way. So I would suggest that this is another way that countries and peoples

get in the habit of solving their problems by means of war.

And I think one could also say in the case of American history, whether it is conscious or not,

while you are winning these wars, you disguise the downside, the negative effects, the suffering,

the death and all of that. And I think some writers in recent years have brilliantly written on this

subject, people like Thomas Leonard, Gerald Linderman, and Roger Spiller, tell us how the

veterans come home and they know how bad the wars are, but the people don’t want to hear that.

Triangle Institute for Security Studies Page 73"THE STUDY OF WAR" — SESSION TWO: ANTHROPOLOGY AND SOCIOLOGYWednesday, June 11, 1997

They want to treat them as heroes, so there is just a big cover up so that the winning psychology

is never really challenged.

Now Joe Cox may say occasionally it is in literature, but hardly. The Red Badge of Courage

didn’t turn off a lot of people. After all, in 1898 Carl Sandberg and Theodore Roosevelt both felt

a war would be morally uplifting. Somehow they forgot the 600,000 people who died in the Civil

War. And I think some of the work of John Shy and Russell Wygley has emphasized how this

winning tradition in America has led to choosing war as a way of dealing with national problem.

Moderator:

Okay, thank you. Robert Hinde.

Robert Hinde:

. . . this biology business, but I was a little perturbed by what Dr. Davis said and I felt that his

levity really concealed a basic prejudice which I find amongst social scientists. And I think that it

is really very important that we should join the natural sciences and the social sciences, and that

joining provides a way forward. I want to suggest that his prejudice is due to the use of analogies

between animals and humans which are nearly always in my view misleading. And that’s not

what’s really being talked about.

Triangle Institute for Security Studies Page 74"THE STUDY OF WAR" — SESSION TWO: ANTHROPOLOGY AND SOCIOLOGYWednesday, June 11, 1997

Let me give a very simple example. If you have two groups with a common origin who have

common biological properties and one of them encounters scarcity and the other does not and the

one that encounters scarcity evolves a hierarchical social system and the other does not, the

difference between those two can only be understood by reference to the biological characteristic

of status seeking shared by both of them, which is made explicit in the one and not in the other.

When he argued that biological differences were irrelevant to social differences, he was

forgetting, in my view, the interaction between biology and circumstances.

Moderator:

Thank you. Peter Klopfer is next.

Peter Klopfer:

I’d like to follow up on what Robert said because when we talk about the biological factors that

contribute to behavior we hear from our colleagues in the social sciences in particular repeatedly

the terms hard–wired, predisposition, human nature, and I take these all to be synonymous with

the now somewhat adjured term “determined by the genes.” But really that’s what everybody

means I think with these terms.

[Unknown]:

Triangle Institute for Security Studies Page 75"THE STUDY OF WAR" — SESSION TWO: ANTHROPOLOGY AND SOCIOLOGYWednesday, June 11, 1997

No.

Peter Klopfer:

Well, I don’t know what else hard–wired means since you are not produced, your brain isn’t put

together in a factory according to some blueprint. I think perhaps Lionel has another explanation,

but certainly the context of every other discussion I’ve read would suggest that hard–wired

means it is the expression of some kind of information that somehow is coded in the DNA. I just

want for a moment to explicate this point because it bears on the concept of the dialectic between

levels of organization that Robert Hinde described in his talk.

I am going to just read a very few lines: “Molecular geneticists are finding genetic databases

insufficient to explain function either in development or in evolution and the holes in genetic

determinism grow larger and demand more revision. Genetic predispositions to the extent they

exist are dependent on all the other genes and on the natural life history of the individual.” We

just don’t yet understand how it all comes together. As we struggle to find out how it all comes

together, the author goes on to say, “This will reemphasize the need for us to think about higher

levels of control,” and so on.

The author of this, by the way, is a preeminent Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology who

knows whereof he speaks; it’s Richard Stroman from the University of California at Berkeley.

The point regards the focus on behavior of an organism, whether it is reproductive behavior or

Triangle Institute for Security Studies Page 76"THE STUDY OF WAR" — SESSION TWO: ANTHROPOLOGY AND SOCIOLOGYWednesday, June 11, 1997

aggressive behavior, agonistic behavior, any other particular aspect. The point is that the

assumption that understanding how that animal might have evolved that behavior and then using

that understanding to explain an analogous pattern of behavior in humans misses the point. As

often as not, the analogy is based on faulty assumptions, but it misses the relevance of biology to

the discussion on the origin of war. Biology is not relevant because it gives us explicit examples

of comparable phenomena in nonhuman organisms. It is relevant because it deals with

mechanisms of development which are fundamentally interactive, not depending on any kind of

innate mechanisms or code that is read off and translated into some kind of central cerebral

structure but involves processes that are best described by a continuing and discontinuous series

of feedback loops that operate at different levels of complexity.

Moderator:

Okay. Lionel wanted to say something. Did you?

Lionel Tiger:

Yes. I just wanted to say I just think that is a caricature, and an unfair one, of what we are trying

to do here. We are assuming nothing more than that, for example, in order to make sound you

have to have a voice box. The characteristics of a voice box are fairly general. It doesn’t mean

that knowing the voice box means that you will be able to say what your sentence is going to be

like. And I think it is no more complex than that. And to then go to say that we are being genetic

Triangle Institute for Security Studies Page 77"THE STUDY OF WAR" — SESSION TWO: ANTHROPOLOGY AND SOCIOLOGYWednesday, June 11, 1997

determinists just seems to me severely unfair.

Moderator:

Okay. Brian?

Brian Ferguson:

I’d like to suggest another way of taking on this question of human nature and its relevance to

war that could possibly be agreed upon by most people here. If you take out a number of the

things that have been positive about sociobiology in the past, such as the unconscious drive to

maximize inclusive fitness, or the aggressive instinct, or an innate fear of strangers, if you take

those things out, there’s still something here that I think is human nature and it is the material

interests that I premise my model upon. Now, I am simplifying this a lot here for time, but I think

that there are connections in this between a lot of thinking in a lot of the papers here. As regards

Jack Levy’s paper, there are questions about it in political science, sure, but I think that it is

widespread.

This is challenged in anthropology. I believe material interests are an evolved thing. When you

are hungry, you want to eat. When you are afraid, you want to run or do something about it. I

think that these are part of what every one of us feels inside ourselves. There is a challenge to

this in anthropology from the constructionist point of view. Now, I do not dismiss

Triangle Institute for Security Studies Page 78"THE STUDY OF WAR" — SESSION TWO: ANTHROPOLOGY AND SOCIOLOGYWednesday, June 11, 1997

constructionism. I think that it is very necessary, within limits. In military studies, probably

nothing is more important than perception of the power of one’s adversary. That is a social

construction. It is not what the real power is. It is your perception of it, but it is based on realities.

So it has its place.

In anthropology there is a very strong tradition developing now which is saying that

constructions are independent, even contradictory, to any kind of material rationality. I am

attacked for being a vulgar materialist because I posit that people want to keep alive and well.

People might want to die for their country. People do this all the time. This approach, which is

spreading, as I read in Jack Levy’s paper, into political science, is a view of human nature which

is infinitely plastic and which I think gives you a very different view on what war was all about.

If they are right, then a lot of what I’ve said is wrong. So I think that this is another way we can

take a look at the question of human nature that might have some common ground there.

[Unknown]:

You’ll forgive me for making one other intervention on this. It seems to me that the idea of total

plasticity is precisely what dictators most love. And the entire scheme of the Chicoms and the

Stalinists and all of those people was to say that “we will have posters in front of you when you

go to sleep and when you wake up in the morning and you will turn out to be the new Soviet

person,” “the new Chinese person,” and so on. The notion, in fact, that there is a human nature

provides, it seems to me, a profound basis for human rights. And it is completely missing the

Triangle Institute for Security Studies Page 79"THE STUDY OF WAR" — SESSION TWO: ANTHROPOLOGY AND SOCIOLOGYWednesday, June 11, 1997

point and yielding to an irresponsible optionality to say that there is nothing here that’s charac-

teristically human, because you can get a Lenin, you can get a Mao, you can get anybody you

want to tell you how to live. I just don’t think that’s so. You can’t run a zoo on that basis, and you

certainly can’t run a human community on that basis. So I completely reject that idea as

essentially and profoundly antisocial.

Moderator:

Okay. Next on our list of commentators, Jack Levy. Jack?

Jack Levy:

First, a comment and then a question. The comment is on Higginbotham’s notion that one can

learn the usefulness of war in the process of fighting a victorious war and seeing that it works.

And just a comment on that is that one can also learn from not fighting wars, from crises, and

one can learn from failure as well as success. Bob Jervis has written a lot about learning.

But there’s been some interesting work in political science on how one learns from crises, and

the conclusions seem to be, tentatively at least, that if the other guy backs down you learn, or the

inferences you draw, or the reasons he backed down is that you pursued a hard–line bargaining

policy and he backed down for that reason. But if you back down, you learn that you did not

pursue a hard enough bargaining line, so both people basically learn the same lesson, that you

Triangle Institute for Security Studies Page 80"THE STUDY OF WAR" — SESSION TWO: ANTHROPOLOGY AND SOCIOLOGYWednesday, June 11, 1997

have to ratchet up the coerciveness of your bargaining strategy in the next crisis. So, when a

series of sequential crises between the same adversaries occurs over time, each guy has a

tendency at least to pursue more hard–line bargaining strategies, which increases the probability

of war. That is just a comment.

My question refers to, and it sort of builds on a point that Jervis made earlier also, that one

important research program in political science that’s been getting a lot of attention over the last

few years is on the diversionary theory of war or scapegoating, the use of external force against

an external enemy for the primary purpose of bolstering their internal political support,

particularly under conditions of political insecurity or economic downturns. Quincy Wright

talked about this, Shakespeare talked about it, political philosophers too, and I was just surprised

to see that there wasn’t more discussion on it in the anthropology and sociology, though I know

we each mentioned it. Is there much systematic research on this, and particularly to Ferguson,

why do you seem to be skeptical of this scapegoating hypothesis?

Brian Ferguson:

I’m not. Why do you think I am? I think that scapegoating happens. It happens in very

documented ways. You’ve got an upstart prince, you send him off to a war—well, scapegoating

to divert attention like Argentina, yes, but a lot of other ways as well. An upstart prince is a

challenge. You send him off to a war where you know he is going to get killed. That’s even in the

Bible. So I don’t think that that’s impossible, it’s in other stuff that I write about. If it is not

Triangle Institute for Security Studies Page 81"THE STUDY OF WAR" — SESSION TWO: ANTHROPOLOGY AND SOCIOLOGYWednesday, June 11, 1997

somehow in my paper, it is an oversight.

[Unknown]:

Is there a systematic body of research on this that tries to identify the conditions under which this

scapegoating . . .

Brian Ferguson:

No.

[Same Unknown]:

. . . is most likely to happen, or is it just sort of anecdotal, sometimes it happens, sometimes it

doesn’t.

Brian Ferguson:

That.

Moderator:

Triangle Institute for Security Studies Page 82"THE STUDY OF WAR" — SESSION TWO: ANTHROPOLOGY AND SOCIOLOGYWednesday, June 11, 1997

Okay. Next is Cori Dauber. Cori?

Cori Dauber:

This is probably on the unfair side, but what the hell, that’s never stopped me before. There is a

tendency on the part of social scientists who work in this area to use the term “social constructiv-

ism” as a broad umbrella term under which you all lump anyone who has made what I would

refer to as the critical turn or the linguistic turn. And I just wanted to say sort of as a caveat, I

think that conflates an awful lot of difference and lumps together a lot of people who don’t like

one another all that much, bottom line.

For example, I think no one was more entertained than I by the whole Sokol business, but I think

the good people at Social Text would be somewhat shocked to hear themselves described as

social constructivists. And the reason why I think that’s important is because the source of

conflict within that crowd is very often precisely where the line between the material and the

symbolically–mediated ought appropriately be drawn. And I think that’s the nuance that gets lost

when we get lumped together.

As an example, a couple of times today issues regarding women, either in terms of aggressive-

ness or in terms of the military, have come up. And God knows, I don’t know all that much about

feminist scholarship, but my friends do, and they would say, as an example, that sex, male versus

female, is hard–wired, its plumbing, it’s what you are born with, but that is to be distinguished

Triangle Institute for Security Studies Page 83"THE STUDY OF WAR" — SESSION TWO: ANTHROPOLOGY AND SOCIOLOGYWednesday, June 11, 1997

from gender, which is a series of socially mediated, socially constructed traits, masculinity and

femininity, and they would normally, one would go with the other but not all the time.

By the same token, you talk about the notion of skin tone or skin pigmentation, most critical race

theorists would say pigmentation is an immutable characteristic like eye color, like being right–

or left–handed. The way we give meaning to that characteristic is socially mediated or socially

constructed. There are more radical folks who would suggest that even our perception of

pigmentation may be socially constructed. I’m not willing to go down that road, but I just

thought, you lump a lot of us together and sometimes I think there are some fairly important

nuances that gets lost when that happens.

Moderator:

Okay, good. Bob O’Connell.

Bob O’Connell:

Yes, I just want to bring up one other issue. I know we want to get off the anthropology and the

ancient world, but something that has come up which I thought was very interesting when I was

doing my research on the presence or absence of war, and that was the issue of fortifications,

which has been mentioned tangentially here, but I thought was a very good indicator of the

presence or absence of war simply because building fortifications, especially around dwellings,

Triangle Institute for Security Studies Page 84"THE STUDY OF WAR" — SESSION TWO: ANTHROPOLOGY AND SOCIOLOGYWednesday, June 11, 1997

certainly said something about the kind of pressure that societies were under, but also said a lot

about the amount of energy they were willing to devote to their protection. And what I found

highly interesting was that what appeared to be, I focused, rather than the North American

evidence base, I focused on a Meso–American and Latin American evidence base and the same

Near Eastern one that Larry Keeley talked about, and what seemed to occur in the Near Eastern

one was that with the inception of agriculture there was not fortification for quite a while, several

thousand years before it became generalized. But then something happened. And I posited that

this might have to do with what I called an agropastoral split. Pastoral was actually moved out

and away from the agricultural societies and then ended up coming back to raid them, and that

this raiding took a particularly vicious form because frankly the two societies didn’t like each

other, and that these people living in agricultural environments were forced to build

fortifications. But what was fascinating to me was if you impose that model on the New World, it

didn’t work, because while there were certainly fortifications in the New World, some in North

America, there was much less in South America in terms of building fortifications around settled

areas. And there was also a real absence, not an absence, but a paucity, of pastoral animals. And

it struck me that this issue of fortifications/no fortification was quite interesting and suggestive.

And to my knowledge I’ve gotten no response from the archaeological community on that issue.

And I’m really, again, this is to some degree a question as much as a comment.

Moderator:

Okay. Tim McKeown.

Triangle Institute for Security Studies Page 85"THE STUDY OF WAR" — SESSION TWO: ANTHROPOLOGY AND SOCIOLOGYWednesday, June 11, 1997

Tim McKeown:

I had a question. Actually I had this question this morning, and now I have the question even

more. The question pertains to the meaning of the terms adaptive and maladaptive. Where I come

from, which is political science, we don’t talk that way, and I’m not used to hearing those terms,

and the one I am a little unclear on is how do we get to assign those terms?

When I think about war, particularly if I think of it as a “rational choice” in which elite decision–

makers decide that they are going to go out and get some goodies or do something like that, then

I think of each side as having a strategy. And if each side has a strategy, then you can only

evaluate whether a strategy is good or bad by knowing the opponent’s strategy. If you don’t

know the opponent’s strategy, then you can’t really evaluate your own strategy or evaluate one

side’s strategy without evaluating the other’s.

So I guess where I’m trying to go with this is trying to understand whether this notion of

adaptation or maladaptation is tied to any kind of understanding of decision–making in an

environment of strategic interaction or is this simply what I suspect might be the case, just sort of

a summary label for the outcome, that when there is an outcome in which the society grows and

prospers and its population increases, then what it must have been doing must have been

adaptive. And if there is an outcome where the society is subjugated or disappears, then what it

must have been doing must have been maladaptive. So either now or later, could you speak to

Triangle Institute for Security Studies Page 86"THE STUDY OF WAR" — SESSION TWO: ANTHROPOLOGY AND SOCIOLOGYWednesday, June 11, 1997

this issue?

Moderator:

Okay, good. Thank you. And one last comment from Dick Kohn, and then we’ll ask our panelists

to close for us.

Dick Kohn:

I’m having a real problem in looking at these four fields and related fields in terms of under-

standing the unit of measurement. It seems to me that some fields, like biology and psychology,

look at this problem in breadth, regardless of time, across species, across all peoples at all times

and yet seem to be an assumption concerned about frequency, frequency of behaviors that we

might call war, as an attempt to answer questions about to some degree whether it’s adaptive,

whether it’s — I hate to use these terms because they are so slippery for a historian that I know I

am liable to be misinterpreted, — whether human beings are predisposed to do it under some

circumstances or over others.

The unit of measurement I seem to be hearing amongst anthropologists and to some degree

sociologists sounds suspiciously and disturbingly to me like historians; that is, they want to talk

about change over time and so we keep going backwards and forwards along a time continuum

that goes back into a great distance, a distant path over the course of human development. And

Triangle Institute for Security Studies Page 87"THE STUDY OF WAR" — SESSION TWO: ANTHROPOLOGY AND SOCIOLOGYWednesday, June 11, 1997

then the question becomes: has there been change over time or what is the frequency of it in this

period or that period, and does change occur, and in fact what does it mean? I don’t yet hear any

assumption about some measure or standard of frequency that would have some meaning to the

conclusion about its ubiquity in the human condition or in human experience.

And so perhaps it would be helpful to me, I don’t know if to others here, either as a research goal

or just as a way of grounding the discussion in these fields to talk about units, standards of

measurement, parameters of discussion at some point. Perhaps it has been done and it is assumed

here and I haven’t heard it. But it is disturbing to try to get your arms around these slippery

concepts to know just whether the standards are not constantly being shifted in the course of the

discussion.

Moderator:

Okay, good. Thanks. We have five minutes left and so let’s ask our two panelists to make any

concluding remarks they’d like to.

Brian Ferguson:

Okay, just a response to a couple of questions, the last one first. You are right. I think, Dick, that

the questions of frequency and change over time and scale, these are areas where a lot of

information is very fuzzy. One of the things that I mentioned is that the efforts to find some kind

Triangle Institute for Security Studies Page 88"THE STUDY OF WAR" — SESSION TWO: ANTHROPOLOGY AND SOCIOLOGYWednesday, June 11, 1997

of really clear-cut examples of what happens to war with sociopolitical evolution over centuries

or millennia, basically almost everything about it is argued. And how you measure units and

frequencies, well, Mel Ember could speak more to it than I could.

My work on the Yanomamis might be very historical, getting what kinds of conflicts occur, what

places and what time and what else is going on over about a 300–year period, but beyond that I

don’t. . . . [trails off, unintelligible]

The question about what is adaptive, in anthropology one early definition was promoting

“goodness of fit” to the natural environment. Goodness of fit is very vague. If you could posit

some kind of consequence of war that, say, distributed population more evenly or slowed

population growth or something you could argue that war was adaptive. It is very debatable, all

of those things. I started off in that tradition and moved away from that tradition because I didn’t

think the evidence was there. It really doesn’t look much at the social environment, means of

survival among other political groups. That term adaptive has not been applied in that kind of

sense.

The final thing, the original Jervis question about three things that anthropology could say, I

think that one, as regards the question of what would the field agree upon, and there’s nothing

that the field would entirely agree upon, I don’t think. But one salient conclusion I think most

people would agree upon is that cultural difference itself does not cause violence. People do not

fight each other just because they are culturally different.

Triangle Institute for Security Studies Page 89"THE STUDY OF WAR" — SESSION TWO: ANTHROPOLOGY AND SOCIOLOGYWednesday, June 11, 1997

My view of what I would try and tell, if I could whisper in a policy–maker ear, is to pay better

attention, realize that the local conflicts that we are seeing all around the world are a result of

interaction of local agency and global processes and that we have to realize there is not a

situation here and then we come in. We are there from the beginning. We are there before we

come in. The interaction is what we have to better understand.

Finally, NSF funding, I would say one thing that we really need to have is greater funding. This

may surprise Larry perhaps, or Mel, too, I think what we really need is greater funding for

archeological research on the possibility of intensification of war during ecological crises. I think

that looking at possibilities of global warming and other future environmental catastrophes, one

of the best sources of information we are going to be able to find out is what happened in the past

and what was the military result of it. So I would say that that is something I would prioritize.

Moderator:

Okay. Lionel.

Lionel Tiger:

First of all, to Cori Dauber, I have to not only accept but embrace the criticism, because it is

perfectly fair. This is by no means a herd of cats that go in the same direction, and I take the

Triangle Institute for Security Studies Page 90"THE STUDY OF WAR" — SESSION TWO: ANTHROPOLOGY AND SOCIOLOGYWednesday, June 11, 1997

point, and it is a very important one. But I do think at the same time there is in the culture at

large, in the social science community in particular, if you had to designate a tendency, toward

some view of life as transcendental rather than real. And that is possibly part of American

intellectual history, I don’t really know. But if you attend as occasionally I am compelled to do

the anthropology meetings; for example, it is literally astonishing what people will write about

and think about. And it reflects just that heterogeneity, but it is a tendency and it is a very strong

one.

Let me try to deal with Dick Kohn’s question about frequency and so on. If we assume that we

broke off from the other chimps, 1.9 million, the estimates don’t really matter, but we share 98%,

99% of our genes with them and we can look at them as comparative veterinarian scientists and

say, “What do we need to run the good chimp place in the zoo?” And then see if we can use that

same veterinarian metaphor, which is a kindly one, for humans. Let me give you a quick list. I

just made it up, what would be a high frequency set of expectations about our species based on

what we know about human nature. Okay?

The opportunity for large muscle movements. I would say that that was something that is generic

to our species and to withdraw from people the opportunity for large muscle movements is

antihomonid, anti human nature, and in fact it is usually described as torture, as in the cages in

Vietnam and so on. I would say that one of the high frequency behaviors that is human nature is

the need for and the enjoyment of social contact, particularly verbal interaction. And when one

looks at how difficult it is to stop verbal interaction, for example, in the Benedictine tradition and

Triangle Institute for Security Studies Page 91"THE STUDY OF WAR" — SESSION TWO: ANTHROPOLOGY AND SOCIOLOGYWednesday, June 11, 1997

the monastery tradition, you realize that these people are actually giving up something extra-

ordinarily vital and they are making a sacrifice for what they believe in, so here are two

characteristics.

I would say that the opportunity for reproductive interaction is another human natural

phenomenon, and we already heard about Indira Gandhi and her effort to curtail that, and we see

what happens in China about the one–child policy and so on. And we see that when, for example,

the Catholic Church wants to restrict reproductive opportunity for people it has to give them a

position in heaven, prestigious jobs, clothing, usually decent housing, and an important

contribution to make to the community. So interfering with reproductive interaction constitutes

an interference with human nature.

The opportunity for parental behavior. We have as one of our strongest values the notion that you

likely cannot have your children taken away from you. That is just a value. And I think that’s not

based on some high falutin’ legal theory. It is based on a very profound notion of what consti-

tutes the nature of this kind of social organism.

I would say further that contact with nature, clean air and other plants and animals, other animals

and plants would constitute yet another form of human natural right or human nature, and that if

you deprive people of the opportunity to be in nature, to see other animals, to smell clean air, you

are in fact depriving them of something that has a very high frequency and is directly related to

where we evolved, which was in nature. And that’s why perhaps gardening is now the most

Triangle Institute for Security Studies Page 92"THE STUDY OF WAR" — SESSION TWO: ANTHROPOLOGY AND SOCIOLOGYWednesday, June 11, 1997

popular recreational form in America. People really in this world that we live in seek to go back

to what in fact animates their sense of pleasure.

And finally, and more complicated perhaps but I think it is really at the level of the human

dignity question, I think all human organisms should have an opportunity to make a contribution

to the communal good. And the notion that we can be disenfranchised politically is of course

fatal to the notion of democracy, and it seems to me that the more individuals either in the form

of democracy in the political sense, but even in the social sense, if human organisms are able to

make a contribution to the welfare or to the life of their wider community, they generally feel

better about themselves and the community is better for it.

Now, this is just a small little laundry list, but it seems to me not implausible, not eccentric and

something you could go with.

Moderator:

Okay. Thank you, Lionel. One quick comment, George.

George Barlow:

To document Lionel’s comment about the inability to stop talking, and I can’t help but resist to

respond to the question about adaptation and maladaptation. In evolutionary biology they have

Triangle Institute for Security Studies Page 93"THE STUDY OF WAR" — SESSION TWO: ANTHROPOLOGY AND SOCIOLOGYWednesday, June 11, 1997

relatively precise meanings, although it is difficult to measure these things. That is adaptive

which leads to increased reproductive success. That is maladaptive which leads to reduced

reproductive success. It is an oversimplification, but George C. Williams in his 1966 book,

Adaptation of Natural Selection, has a wonderful clear passage on the subtleties of it and how

you distinguish between traits you might see, whether they are adaptive or not. I recommend it to

all of you.

Moderator:

Good. Thank you very much. First of all, join me please in thanking our panelists and our com-

mentators. A wonderful session. Our buses are waiting for us, and I know you will want to start

to talk, but remember everything we’re doing we can be doing on the bus on the way back to

alcohol. So let’s move expeditiously.