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The birth of war: an archaeological survey concludes that warfare, despite its malignant hold on modern life, has not always been part of the human condition
Natural History, July-August, 2003 by R. Brian Ferguson
Anthropology can offer an alternative view on such terrible disasters as the Rwandan genocide or the civil wars in the Balkans. Case studies of modern-day conflicts show that a broad range of factors may be interacting, including subsistence needs and local ecological relations, but also political struggles over the government, trends in globalization, and culturally specific beliefs and symbols. Moreover, when hard times come, they are experienced differently by different kinds of people. Who you are usually determines how you're doing and where your interests lie: identity and interest are fused. Once a conflict gets boiling and the killing starts, all middle grounds get swept away, and a person's fate can depend on such simple labels as ethnic, religious, or tribal identity. The slaughter of Tutsis in the Rwandan genocide of 1994 is only one of the latest examples of that horrific effect. But such differences are not the cause of the conflict.
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My view is that in most cases--not every single one--the decision to wage war involves the pursuit of practical self-interest by those who actually make the decision. The struggle can be joined over basic subsistence resources, but it can just as easily erupt over goods available only to elites. The decision involves weighing the costs of war against other potential hazards to life and well-being. And most definitely, it depends on one's position in the internal political hierarchy: from New Guinean "big men" to kings and presidents, leaders often favor war because war favors leaders.
Of course, those who push toward war do not make their case in terms of their own selfish interests. Around Amazonian campfires and within modern councils of state, their arguments invoke collective dangers and benefits. But even more, those advocating war always define it in terms of the highest applicable values, whether that involves the need to retaliate against witchcraft, defend the one true religion, or promote democracy. That is the way to sway the undecided and build emotional commitment. And always, it is the other side that somehow brought war on.
Such drumbeating is not only, or even primarily, cynical manipulation. Perhaps owing to a basic human need for self-justification, those who start wars usually seem to believe in the righteousness of their chosen course. It is that capability that makes human beings such a dangerous species.
Whether surveying the archaeological evidence of humanity's first armed conflicts, or evaluating biological theories about aggression in chimpanzees and in humans, R. BRIAN FERGUSON ("The Birth of War" page 28) keeps one goal in mind: to help address current crises by expanding anthropological theory and linking it with other disciplines. A professor of anthropology at Rutgers University in Newark, New Jersey, Ferguson directs the Working Group on Political Violence, War and Peace at the university's Center for Global Change and Governance. He recently edited a collection of case studies of modern violence, The State, Identity and Violence: Political Disintegration in the Post-Cold War World (Routledge, 2002).
COPYRIGHT 2003 Natural History Magazine, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning
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