Chronic problems in understanding tribal violence and warfare

Abstract

This paper discusses problems confronting researchers whose work addresses the nature, causes and functions of violence and warfare in contemporary tribal societies and the interpretation of evidence on these topics from archaeological records. A major problem is the paucity of reliable ethnographic evidence describing conflicts, causes of conflicts and numbers of casualties suffered. There are few first-hand studies of warring tribesmen and little uniformity in data collection methods or specific topics covered by the studies. A second problem is the wide range of theoretical opinion on ultimate versus proximate causes of conflict and often polemic insistence that some causes cannot even be admitted into the explanatory framework, as illustrated by the debate between cultural materialists and evolutionary anthropologists. A third problem is the widespread belief that pre-colonial conflict and warfare was either rare or did not exist at all and that where contemporary tribesmen are found to be in lethal contests this has been provoked by contact with European colonial expansion. Finally, a new problem is emerging: ethnographic descriptions of violence in tribal societies are increasingly opposed by politically correct academics who argue that it is detrimental to the goals of advocates of native cultural survival. The paper concludes with a summary of some of the main features of Yanomamö violence and warfare, based on the author's field research and publications up to 1990, and introduces new data and theoretical issues that are emerging from his most recent field studies since 1990.