The answer to that question may depend on the purpose of one’s study. To future soldiers in training at a state-sponsored military college, it may be appropriate to exclude from a definition of warfare Chapter 3’s stories of violence between rival Dani alliances. However, for our purposes in this book, which is concerned with the whole spectrum of related phenomena observed from the smallest human bands of 20 people to the largest states of over a billion people, we must define warfare in a way that doesn’t define traditional warfare between small bands out of existence. As Steven LeBlanc has argued, “Definitions of war must not be dependent on group size or methods of fighting if they are to be useful in studying past warfare…. Many scholars define warfare in such a way that it refers to something that only complex societies employing metal tools can have [i.e., pitched battles and professional soldiers]. Anything else—say, a raid or two now and then—is not ‘real’ warfare, they believe, but is something more akin to game playing and not a subject of much concern. Such an approach or attitude, however, confuses the methods of war with the results of war…. Does conflict between independent political units lead to significant deaths and loss of territory, while resulting in some territory being rendered useless because it’s too dangerous to live in? Are people spending a great deal of time and energy defending themselves?…If fighting results in significant impacts on people, it is war regardless of how the fighting is conducted.” From that perspective, war should be defined sufficiently broadly so as to include the Dani fighting described in Chapter 3.
Consider one fairly typical definition of war, that from the Encyclopaedia Britannica’s 15th edition: “A state of usually open and declared armed hostile conflict between political units, such as states or nations or between rival political factions of the same state or nation. War is characterized by intentional violence on the part of large bodies of individuals who are expressly organized and trained to participate in such violence…. War is generally understood to embrace only armed conflicts on a fairly large scale, usually excluding conflicts in which fewer than 50,000 combatants are involved.” Like many other apparently common-sense definitions of war, this one is much too restrictive for our purposes, because it requires “large bodies of individuals who are expressly organized and trained,” and it thereby refuses to admit the possibility of war in small band societies. Its arbitrary requirement of at least 50,000 combatants is more than six times the entire population (men warriors, women, and children) involved in Chapter 3’s Dani War, and far larger than most of the small-scale societies discussed in this book.
Hence scholars studying small-scale societies have come up with various alternative broader definitions of war, similar to each other and usually requiring three elements. One element is violence carried out by groups of any size, but not by single individuals. (A killing carried out by one individual is considered a murder, not an act of war.) Another element is that the violence is between groups belonging to two different political units, not belonging to the same political unit. The remaining element is that the violence must be sanctioned by the whole political unit, even if only some members of the unit carry out the violence. Thus, the killings between the Hatfield and McCoy families didn’t constitute war, because both families belonged to the same political unit (the U.S.), and the U.S. as a whole did not approve of that family feud. These elements may be combined into a short definition of war that I shall use in this book, and that is similar to definitions formulated by other scholars of small-scale as well as state societies: “War is recurrent violence between groups belonging to rival political units, and sanctioned by the units.”
Sources of information
Chapter 3’s account of Dani warfare might suggest that it’s straightforward to study traditional war: send out graduate students and a film crew, observe and film battles, count the wounded and dead warriors being carried back, and interview participants for more details. That’s the evidence available to us for Dani warfare. If we had hundreds of such studies, there would be no arguments about traditional war’s reality.
In fact, for several obvious reasons, direct observations of traditional war by scholars carrying cameras are exceptional, and there is some controversy about its extent in the absence of European influence. As Europeans expanded over the globe from AD 1492 onwards and encountered and conquered non-European peoples, one of the first things that European governments did was to suppress traditional warfare: for the safety of Europeans themselves, and to administer the conquered areas, and as part of a perceived civilizing mission. By the time that the science of anthropology entered the era of abundant well-funded field studies and graduate students after World War II, warfare among traditional small-scale societies had become largely confined to the island of New Guinea and to parts of South America. It had ended much earlier in other Pacific islands, North America, Aboriginal Australia, Africa, and Eurasia, although modern forms of it have recently been resurfacing in some areas, especially in Africa and New Guinea.
Even in New Guinea and South America, recent opportunities for anthropologists to observe traditional warfare first-hand have been limited. Governments don’t want the problems and publicity resulting from unarmed vulnerable outsiders being attacked by warring tribespeople. Governments also don’t want anthropologists to be armed, to be the first representatives of state societies to enter an unpacified tribal area, and to try to end fighting by force themselves. Hence both in New Guinea and in South America there have been government restrictions on travel until an area is considered officially pacified and safe for anyone to visit. Nevertheless, some scholars and missionaries have succeeded in working in areas where fighting was still going on. Notable examples were the observers in 1961 in the Dani area, where there already was a Dutch patrol post established in the Baliem Valley, but where the Harvard Expedition was permitted to operate beyond the area of government control; the Kuegler family’s work among the Fayu people of western New Guinea beginning in 1979; and Napoleon Chagnon’s work among the Yanomamo Indians of Venezuela and Brazil. Even in those studies that did yield some first-hand observations of warfare, however, much or most of the detail was still not observed directly by the Westerner writing about it, but was instead acquired second-hand from local informants: e.g., Jan Broekhuijse’s detailed accounts of who in each Dani battle was wounded under what circumstances in which part of the body.
Most of our information about traditional warfare is entirely second-hand and based on accounts given by participants to Western visitors, or else is based on first-hand observations by Europeans (such as government officers, explorers, and traders) who were not trained scientists gathering data for doctoral dissertations. For instance, many New Guineans have reported to me their own experiences in traditional warfare. However, in all my visits to Australian-administered eastern New Guinea (now independent Papua New Guinea) and Indonesian-administered western New Guinea, I have never personally witnessed New Guineans attacking other New Guineans. The Australian and Indonesian governments would never have permitted me to enter areas where fighting was still going on, even if I had wanted to do so, which I didn’t.