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Topic: virus: Primitive society violence and murder rates. was Re: :The
Disciplinary Process of the Church of Virus (Read 6931 times) |
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Kharin
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Re:virus: Primitive society violence and murder rates. was Re: :The
« Reply #16 on: 2003-10-07 05:12:58 » |
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http://www.washtimes.com/books/20030816-105047-3673r.htm
Excerpted from a review of CONSTANT BATTLES: THE MYTH OF THE PEACEFUL, NOBLE SAVAGE By Steven A. LeBlanc
"Mr. Le Blanc's sole predecessor was Lawrence Keeley who revolutionized this debate in 1996 with an extraordinary work, "War Before Civilization." Mr. Keeley used archaeological evidence to show that prehistoric villages in both Europe and North America had almost all been constructed with fortifications and that a high proportion of the skeletal remains of their inhabitants showed they had been killed by weapons of war: spears, arrows, swords and clubs. Prehistoric massacre sites were common.
Mr. Keeley used anthropological studies to show that in most remaining tribal societies, whether Amazon Indians or New Guinea highlanders, comparative fatality rates from war were four to six times higher than even the worst experienced by modern nations, such as Germany and Russia in the 20th century. In tribal society, warfare was a recurring, annual, even seasonal occurrence.
Mr. LeBlanc's book makes one valuable contribution to the debate. He addresses a question that remained a yawning gap in Keeley's work: whether hunter-gatherers have been as warlike as tribal villagers. Mr. Keeley lumped both together under the category of primitive or tribal society. However, for at least 95 percent of the past 200,000 years, humans were hunter-gatherers.
Agriculture — even the most elementary kind such as that still practiced in New Guinea — is a comparatively recent invention, less than 10,000 years old. Tribal villagers who tend gardens have an obvious need to defend the plots in which they have invested their labor and on which their very ability to survive depends. Hunter-gatherers, on the other hand, are mostly nomadic people with fewer territorial imperatives. If challenged by rivals, they can usually move on to more congenial locales. On the face of it, villagers and nomads should have quite different propensities to go to war.
Mr. LeBlanc devotes a chapter to this issue with a detailed analysis of three hunter-gatherer populations for which there is reliable evidence: the !Kung bushmen of south-west Africa, the Eskimos of arctic America and the Aborigines of Australia. The picture that emerges of these nomads (or foragers, as Mr. LeBlanc prefers to call them) is little different from that of more sedentary agriculturalists. "From the earliest foragers found archaeologically to historical accounts of foragers from all corners of the globe," Mr. LeBlanc writes, "the evidence shows that they fight and kill in deadly earnest."
For instance, archaeologists working on the Saunaktuk Inuit site on the Beaufort Sea, in the Northwest Territories of Canada, have recovered the remains of many women and children that show violent death and dismemberment. In Arnhem Land in northern Australia, a study of warfare among the Murngin people in the late-19th century found that over a 20-year period no less than 200 out of 800 men, or 25 percent of all adult males, had been killed in intertribal warfare."
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the.bricoleur
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making sense of change
 
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Re:virus: Primitive society violence and murder rates. was Re: :The
Discipli
« Reply #17 on: 2003-10-07 07:36:27 » |
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Here is a relevant excerpt from Steven Pinker's "The Blank Slate, the Noble Savage, and the Ghost in the Machine," taken from the Tanner Lectures on Human Values - accessed as a PDF document here - www.tannerlectures.utah.edu/lectures/pinker00.pdf.
The second fear is the possibility of evil instincts. The unstated
assumption is that if deplorable behavior such as aggression, war,
rape, clannishness, exploitation, xenophobia, and the pursuit of
status and wealth is innate, that would make them “natural” and
hence good. And even if we agree that they are not good, they are
“in the genes” and therefore cannot be changed, so attempts at
social reform are futile. Aggression is objectionable, and social
reform is desirable; therefore, the argument seems to go, Homo
sapiens must be a bunch of nice guys. Only “society” is at fault.
The lunatic version of this argument is, of course, the Seville
Statement, with its fiat that all claims about biological propensi-
ties toward dominance, violence, and war are “scientifically incor-
rect.” The signatories were at least clear about their motives. They
alleged that the “incorrect” statements “have been used, even by
some in our disciplines, to justify violence and war” (they gave no
examples) and concluded that “biology does not condemn human-
ity to war, and that humanity can be freed from the bondage of bi-
ological pessimism and empowered with confidence to undertake
the transformative tasks needed in the International Year of Peace
and in the years to come.”
The Seville Statement is a textbook example of what the phi-
losopher G. E. Moore called the Naturalistic Fallacy: that what-
ever is found in nature is morally right. In this case, the fallacy is
that if people are prone to violence, that would make it justifiable.
Hence the signatories’ decision to legislate empirical claims about
people’s natural propensities was, in their minds, a tactic to bring
about peace. Apparently it was inconceivable to these leading so-
cial scientists that there could be selection for violent behavior and
that violent behavior is morally unjustifiable. Their manifesto is
especially egregious because the legislated factual claims are a bla-
tant kind of disinformation.
The notion that the human brain houses no inherent tendency
to use violence, and that violence is an artifact of some particular
culture at a particular time, has to confront an obvious fact about
human history. Winston Churchill wrote, “The story of the hu-
man race is war. Except for brief and precarious interludes there
has never been peace in the world; and long before history began
murderous strife was universal and unending.” Or as one biologist
put it, “Homo sapiens is a nasty business.”
For many years intellectuals tried to deny the significance of
history with two myths. One is the myth of the peaceful savage,
where “savages” or hunter-gatherers are thought to be representa-
tive of a human nature uncorrupted by the malign influences of
civilization. According to this myth, among preagricultural peo-
ples war is rare, mild, and ritualized, or at least it used to be before
contact with Westerners. Recent books by anthropologists, biolo-
gists, and historians who have examined the factual record, such as
Napoleon Chagnon, Richard Keeley, Jared Diamond, Martin Daly
and Margo Wilson, Richard Wrangham, and Michael Ghiglieri,
have shown that this is romantic nonsense; war has always been
hell.21
It is not uncommon among preagricultural peoples for a third
of the men to die at the hands of other men, and for almost half of
the men to have killed someone. As compared to modern warfare,
in primitive warfare mobilization is more complete, battles are
more frequent, casualties are proportionally higher, prisoners are
fewer, and the weapons are more damaging. Even in the more
peaceable hunter-gatherer societies such as the !Kung San of the
Kalahari desert, the murder rate is similar to that found in modern
American urban jungles such as Detroit. In his survey of human
universals gleaned from the ethnographic record, the anthropolo-
gist Donald Brown includes violent conflict, rape, envy, sexual
jealousy, and in-group/out-group conflicts as traits documented in
all cultures.22
references cited:
21. N. A. Chagnon, “Life Histories, Blood Revenge, and Warfare in a Tribal Popula-
tion,” Science 239 (1988): 985–92; J. Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel (New York: Nor-
ton, 1997); L. H. Keeley, War before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1996); M. Daly and M. Wilson, Homicide (Hawthorne,
N.Y.: Aldine de Gruyter, 1988); R. Wrangham and D. Peterson, Demonic Males (n.p.,
1996); M. Ghiglieri, The Dark Side of Man: Tracing the Origins of Violence (New York:
Perseus Books, 1999)
22. Brown, Human Universals
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take care and control
the bricoleur
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Mermaid
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Re:virus: Primitive society violence and murder rates. was Re: :The Disciplina
« Reply #18 on: 2003-10-07 11:27:13 » |
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The references to blank slate, the noble savage and sundry statistics are all interesting. I feel that I have to make the point that discussion began with henson's assertion that primitive societies are MORE violent than non primitive societies for which the proof lies in the extrapolation of murder figures etc. It was established way earlier during the discussion that primitive societies are NOT the noble savages, child-like, peaceful that earlier anthropologists imagined them to be.
this new thread used to be part of a older thread...for the earlier discussions, please refer to:
http://virus.lucifer.com/bbs/index.php?board=54;action=display;threadid=29437;start=15
henson: reply#15.
thank you for all the replies! an aside: i noticed that there are many mentioned blank slate... please read it if you havent already! its an interesting even if its a somewhat tedious book. sometime last month(i think) the folks at www.booktalk.org invited steven pinker to join the book discussion. the author who graced the previous chat was richard dawkins for unweaving the rainbow. It was an interesting, casual, but brief chat...the book for the months of sept and oct is red queen by matt ridley. we dont know if matt ridley can make it to the author chat.
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Blunderov
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"We think in generalities, we live in details"
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RE: virus: Primitive society violence and murder rates.
« Reply #19 on: 2003-10-07 17:47:17 » |
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[Blunderov]
Otzi the famous Ice man of the Alps was about 40 when he met his violent
end. This was a fairly venerable age for the Copper Age in those parts
according to Brenda Fowler in Her book "Ice Man". A most absorbing story
which can be found at
http://www.mummytombs.com/mummylocator/featured/otzi.news.htm
Also
http://216.239.39.104/search?q=cache:p6AFb6AEBmoJ:www.uark.edu/campus-
<snip>
Odds of living to be 100 for a baby born - in 1879: 400 to 1-
In 1980: 87 to 1
Gains in Life Expectancy since Ancient Times:
Life expectancy at birth in ancient Rome & Greece: 20 years.
In medieval Europe: 30 years.
In Massachusetts in 1850: 38 years.
In the United States in 1900: 47 years.
Current life expectancy in the U.S.: 75 years.
</snip>
Seemingly the most significant gains in life expectancy have been made
in very recent times -until the last century life expectation has been
very little different than it was in Otzi's time!
Of course this little list doesn't address the specific issue of
violence which we have been discussing but I'm feeling a little
mischievous...
What if we take the view that Otzi died of lifestyle related causes...
Or, what if we ponder that Otzi and his kith and kin did not seem to
diminish their lifespans very much in spite of the greater levels of
violence prevailing in their primitive society.
OK,I admit this is weaseling, but the figures do give some pause for
thought!
Best Regards
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