THE CONSENSUS VIEW OF VIOLENCE IN STATELESS SOCIETIES

Although disagreements on some issues remain, we believe that in recent decades anthropologists have settled into a broad consensus about the level of violence in stateless society, and we believe that rec-ognition of how little we know is central to it. A claim of consensus is somewhat forward, but we make it with six simple statements:

1 Levels of violence in observed small-scale stateless societies vary considerably, with recorded homicide rates ranging from less than 1/100,000 to more than 1,000/100,000.

2 Although some observed small-scale stateless societies have had lower incidences of violence than contemporary state societies, most observed small-scale stateless societies have had substan-tially higher rates of violence than contemporary states but not necessarily higher than all or most past state societies.

3 Ethnographic observations are insuffi cient to say that we know what the typical level of violence in small-scale stateless societ-ies is in general, because (a) few good observations exist, and because (b) observed small-scale stateless societies are not a representative sample of all stateless societies that have existed since the appearance of modern humans 200,000 years ago or even of those that have existed since the beginning of the Holocene 12,000 years ago.

4 Archaeological and historical evidence is insuffi cient either alone or in combination with ethnographic evidence to say that we know what the typical level of violence in small-scale state-less societies is in general.

5 Available evidence is suffi cient to reject the claim that small-scale stateless societies are always or almost always essentially peaceful.

6 Available evidence is suffi cient to reject the claim that small-scale stateless societies are always or almost always excessively violent.

The fi rst of these statements is probably the most controversial, as some researchers might suggest that the very low homicide rates in certain societies would have been higher had they been observed for longer periods or had modern state policing not been present. In con-trast, we doubt that any contemporary anthropologist would reject this or any of the other fi ve statements outright, and while there is controversy about the specifi c details of each of these points, there is a broader consensus about their generalities.

Of course, this is primarily a consensus about how little, rather than how much, we know. It is a consensus over some very tentative statements, but that is what the evidence allows, and we fi nd that all or most contemporary anthropologists are willing to live within the limits of the available evidence. It seems that only philosophers, politi-cal theorists, and politipoliti-cal practitioners—who do not study stateless societies—cling to the belief that several strong, broad claims about statelessness are obvious.

One issue is an illusion of disagreement created by anthropologists’

efforts to debunk the extreme views such as either Thomas’s (1959)

“harmless people” or Chagnon’s (1968) “fi erce people.” Social scien-tists, such as Hill (1996), Knauft (1987), and Keeley (1996: 29–31) have set out to debunk the idea that all or most foragers live in a peaceful utopia. Others, such as Woodburn (1982), Endicott (2008:

66–7), and McCall and Shields (McCall and Shields 2008; McCall 2009), have set out to debunk the idea that all or most foragers live in extreme violence. But all of them have done so by arguing that the truth is in the middle. No social scientist we are aware of would con-tinue to argue for either of the extreme views we reject in statements 5 and 6. Hill and Hurtado (1996: 151), for example, identify two

views: “The pessimists have viewed primitive life as essentially ‘nasty, brutish, and short’ (as Hobbes wrote in 1651), while the romantics have suggested that primitive peoples can often be characterized as living in an ‘original affl uent society.’” Although they recognize the original affl uent society as the idea most in need of debunking, they state plainly, “Neither view is accurate.”

Even Marshall Sahlins (1968; 1974) was primarily interested in debunking the idea that life in foraging societies was intolerably bad.

He coined the phrase, “the original affl uent society,” which gave many people the impression that anthropologists viewed foraging life as a utopia or workers’ paradise (largely in terms of leisure but also in terms of peacefulness). But according to Kelly:

Sahlins’ primary purpose . . . was to counter the prevailing argu-ment in anthropology that hunter-gatherers did not have “elabo-rate culture” because they did not have the time to develop it. . . . To overturn this deeply held misconception, Sahlins felt it neces-sary to use the “most shocking terms possible”—thus the over-statement of the original affl uent society. (Kelly 1995: 17)

Kelly’s interpretation of Sahlins might be generous, but if the utopian view ever became standard in anthropology, it was extremely short-lived. It had already begun to unravel with Lee’s (1979) monograph on the Ju/’hoansi, which was in many ways a modifi cation of his ear-lier utopian views of Kalahari forager societies. By the 1990s, anthro-pologists had settled into the cautious and conservative consensus that we believe prevails today, even if they are yet to agree which of the extreme views still held by laypersons needs more debunking.

For example, the book you’re reading now and Keeley’s (1996) book, War Before Civilization, might seem like polar opposites, like Thomas’s (1959) and Chagnon’s (1968) respective “harmless” and

“fi erce” peoples, but our work and Keeley’s have more in common with each other than with either of those. Although we have some substantive disagreements with Keeley, the primary difference between our book and his is in which extreme view they debunk. While Keeley (1996: 31) argues that war—or some scale-analogous form of inter-group violence—can exist in small-scale societies, his ultimate point is,

“there is nothing inherently peaceful about hunting-gathering or band society.” We agree. Although we have tended to emphasize that band societies are not as violent as contractarians claim them to be, we just

as strongly oppose the idea that they are inherently or innately peace-ful. We have no need or desire to claim that they are. Although Keeley (1996: 29–31) emphasizes that band societies are more violent than what was once believed in a utopian view, he seems to have no need or desire to say that they are excessively violent. In fact, he admits to the existence of at least six mostly or entirely nonviolent foraging societ-ies. His position appears to be fully consistent with the six consensus issues we mention above.

The second problem that clouds this consensus is that social sci-entists do disagree substantially about issues for which the evidence is less conclusive. One such area of disagreement is worth discussing.

We have argued that there is strong reason to believe that prehistoric band societies had levels of violence comparable to those at the lower end of the range in Table 9.1: if not as low as the Chewong and the Bakairi, perhaps as low as the Ju/’hoansi or the Hadza. Other hunter-gatherer researchers tend to think that typical levels of violence must have been higher.

Keeley (1996: 29–31), for example, claims that these few peaceful groups identifi ed around the world are exceptional. Likewise, Hill and Hurtado (1996: xiv, 165–6, 476–8) are inclined to believe that higher homicide rates have tended to be the norm in pre-contact forager soci-eties, effectively discounting the role that state encroachment and other state infl uences might have in increasing violence. Both viewpoints, in part, rest on the observation that the prevalence of observed violence in small-scale societies before incorporation into a state was usually greater than that observed among small-scale societies after inclusion into a state. Diamond (2012) makes a similar argument based on the differences between small-scale societies in New Guinea before and after colonial “pacifi cation,” and he also extends this argument into a broader neo-Hobbesian justifi cation of modern states as peacemakers.

We see several fl aws with this argument for the prevalence of vio-lence among forager societies prior to contact and inclusion in colonial states. For one thing, we are actually inclined to believe that homicide rates, in fact, tend to spike in the decades just before indigenous societ-ies come under state authority, both because of violence directly from people in state societies and because of an increase of inter-ethnic vio-lence brought on by territorial pressure and related problems. Rather than being inhibited by the presence of the police, murder rates among peoples have at times been amplifi ed by dynamics of colonialism and the various vagaries of the postcolonial world.

Next, inclusion in modern states has likely increased violence in other less direct ways. For example, the majority of violent incidents in George McCall and Patricia Resick’s (2003) study of the Ju/’hoansi occurred under the infl uence of alcohol and happened among popu-lations that had been resettled in government housing in an urban-ized setting largely without access to traditional means of economic production. From Greenland to Australia, hunter-gatherer societies have struggled with these kinds of problems as larger-scale societies introduced alcohol into their social context. Drug abuse, poverty, and other similar factors have obviously caused enormous social problems and we see no reason to think that this situation did anything but increase the prevalence of interpersonal violence. Finally, it would be both absurd and insulting to suggest that the forcible colonial incor-poration of small-scale indigenous societies into modern states was somehow doing them a favor by reducing violence.

No one can go back and do ethnographic studies of stateless societ-ies prior to any territorial pressure from state societsociet-ies to settle these issues defi nitively. We believe that all sides in this debate accept the limits of existing knowledge. This disagreement is small relative to the more major issues of agreement, especially as they pertain to the violence hypothesis in question here.

4. APPLYING THE ANTHROPOLOGICAL DISCUSSION