ETHNOGRAPHIC EVIDENCE OF VIOLENCE IN MODERN SMALL-SCALE, STATELESS SOCIETIES

About the time of the Man the Hunter conference in 1966, ethnogra-phers fi nally started the diffi cult effort to systematically collect demo-graphic information about hunter-gatherer societies. Ethnographers had to live with band societies for fairly long periods of time, and take account of the number of births and deaths. Some ethnographers extended the reach of their demographic accounts by asking the current members of the band about past members of the band, and from the answers, trying to piece together an account of when people were born, how long they lived, and how they died. For some bands, researchers using this method have collected very detailed data covering nearly a century (Hill and Hurtado 1996). For most bands, researchers have only been able to collect much more limited data. In some cases, statis-tics are based on as little as a few years of observation.

This era has not been an easy time to collect such data. By the 1960s, the vast majority of band societies that had ever existed had long been incorporated into nation-states and had ceased to practice their tra-ditional lifestyle or to function autonomously. Most of the remaining groups were under considerable demographic pressure and were disap-pearing rapidly. The result is that only a few spotty records are avail-able, and most of those records are of peoples in their last generation(s) as stateless societies or already in a gradual process of incorporation into state societies. Records of the last generation of a band might not be representative of a typical generation in that band or of a typical band society. But we don’t exactly know how they might differ. They might be experiencing the benefi ts of state institutions or the harm of state territorial encroachment. They might have changed over time in ways that have nothing to do with their proximity to states but that nevertheless make them signifi cantly different from earlier generations of nomadic foragers.

Yet, these few spotty, potentially unrepresentative records are the only demographic records we have—and possibly the only demographic records that we will ever have. Very few stateless societies are left. Some of those that remain uncontacted are probably intentionally avoiding contact. Modern hunter-gatherers often maintain their economic status by virtue of their exclusion from more mainstream means of production (Wilmsen 1989). By the end of the twentieth century many anthropolo-gists had begun to look at the ethnographic investigation of newly con-tacted tribes as a potentially harmful step toward colonization. Little ethnography of band societies is still being conducted, and so there is little hope for a major improvement of our ethnographic records of this lifeway. Therefore, not only are the conclusions we draw from the evi-dence presented below tentative, we can expect that conclusions about life in band societies might always be tentative.

One of the earliest and most famous of the post-Man the Hunter investigations was conducted by Richard Lee (1979). He found that the Ju/’hoansi, who had been labeled “the harmless people” by Thomas (1959), actually had a violent death rate of around 29.3/100,000 (see Chapter 8). Later, the East African Hadza, a group that Woodburn (1979) had found to be peaceful, were found by Blurton Jones et al.

(2002: 196) to have a violent death rate of around 40/100,000. Find-ings such as these surprised many hunter-gatherer researchers, because these two groups were often held up as exemplars of peaceful foraging communities. Two groups thought to be less violent than most con-temporary Western states turned out to be substantially more violent.

Not only were the Ju/’hoansi not “harmless people,” their homicide rate was nearly three times the rate for the United States as a whole at that time (10.7/100,000) and about the same as one of its most violent cities (Detroit with 58.2/100,000) (Knauft 1987: 464).

Contrary observations notwithstanding, Lee’s (1979) study now seems to have been the tip of the iceberg for fi ndings of violence in small-scale stateless societies. Many modern hunter-gatherer and hor-ticultural societies have been observed to have much higher levels of violence than the Ju/’Hoansi. Some small-scale societies have shock-ingly high rates of violence. Such observations forever undermined the

“harmless people” myth (Thomas 1959), which might actually have its roots in Enlightenment-era views about savagery and barbarism.

Kim Hill et al. (2007) estimate that the violent death rate for the Hiwi of Venezuela is around 1,018/100,000—more than thirty times higher than the violent death rate documented among the Ju/’hoansi

and far more violent than even the most violent cities in the world today. Furthermore, other similar studies among the Ache of Paraguay, the Yanomamö of Brazil, the Agta of the Philippines, and a number of highland horticultural groups of New Guinea have all yielded results comparable to those found for the Hiwi and many orders of magni-tude greater than those of most modern states (Headland 1989; Hill and Hurtado 1996; Keeley 1996; Early and Headland 1998; Blurton Jones et al. 2002; Hill et al. 2007). Thus, some very violent stateless societies—both at the band level and at the autonomous village level of organization—have been observed through ethnographic research during the twentieth and twenty-fi rst centuries.

On top of this, there are also a number of hunter-gatherers and other small-scale societies that have high levels of what has sometimes been called “primitive warfare” (Pitt-Rivers 1867; Pitt-Rivers 1906; Turney-High 1949; Hallpike 1973; Keeley 1996; Gat 1999; Ferguson 2000).

This term, which basically refers to violence carried out between distinct social groups at more of a regional spatial scale, has frequently been invoked as the evolutionary ancestor of the forms of warfare known between nation-states in the modern world (Keeley 1996; Gat 1999;

Ferguson 2000; Bowles 2009; Pinker 2012). In an early consideration of this issue, Ember (1978) found that, while some societies like the Ju/’hoansi basically lack intergroup aggression altogether, the majority of observed hunter-gatherer societies experience warfare events with considerable frequency (i.e. more than once every two years). Thus, this study and its subsequent counterparts demonstrated another signifi cant source of violent death among modern hunter-gatherers.

However, ethnographers have also observed band societies with low levels of violence. Although the quality of the evidence varies, band societies with little or no recorded violence and little or no evidence of violence have been observed in diverse climates and terrains all over the world. These include several neighboring and/or related groups in the Malay Peninsula, the Batek, the Chewong, the Semai, and the Semang;

the Buid of the Philippines; the Paliyan of India; the G/wi of south-west Africa; the Mbuti of central Africa^; the Polar Inuit of northern Greenland; the Shoshone and the Paiute of the western United States;

the Bakairi of Brazil; and the Mardudjara of Australia (Silberbauer 1981: 174–5; Keeley 1996: 30–1; Bonta 1997: 317–20; Gardner 2000:

93–9; Gurven and Kaplan 2007: 241; Endicott and Endicott 2008: 50;

Kelly 2013: 202). The Chewong, for example, have no mythology of violence and no words for quarreling, fi ghting, aggression, or warfare

(Howell 1984: 34–7; Bonta 1997: 318). Their neighbors, the Batek, have similar norms. Kirk Endicott and Karen Endicott (2008: 50) described hearing from a Batek man how his ancestors had fl ed from rather than confronted slave-raiders in their territory years earlier. Kirk Endicott asked why their ancestors had not shot the attackers with poisoned blowpipe darts. Endicott wrote, “The man looked shocked at the question, ‘Because it would kill them!’”

With caution we reproduce data from two tables summarizing violence estimates for small-scale stateless societies. Table 9.1 uses data from Robert L. Kelly’s (1995: 203) synthesis of hunter-gatherer cultural variability. It compiles homicide rates from the fi ndings of several different ethnographic studies of violence in hunter-gatherer societies. Kelly reports very different fi gures for the Hadza and the Ju/’Hoansi than we mention above. He explains the difference in each case. His fi gure for the Ju/’Hoansi (42/100,000) is higher than Lee’s fi gure for that group (29.3/100,000), because Lee (1979) counts the period both before and after murders virtually ceased because of the

Table 9.1 Hunter-gatherer homicide rates per 100,000 person-years

Group Homicide rate

Batek 1

Hadza 6.6

Andamanese 20

Ju/’Hoansi 42

San Ildefonso Agta 129

Gidjingali 148

Tiwi 160

Yahgan 169

Yurok 240

Casiguran Agta 326

Murngin 330

Modoc 450

Ache 500

Piegan 1000

Hiwi 1018

Source: Adapted from Table 7-8: Hunter-gatherer homicide rates (Kelly 1995: 203)

infl uence of an outside police force, while Kelly reports fi gures only before that change. Kelly’s fi gure for the Hadza (6.6/100,000) is far lower than Blurton Jones’s fi gure (40/100,000) because Kelly chose to exclude while Blurton Jones (2002) chose to include three murders of Hadza committed by outsiders—the Datoga people, who were a rela-tively larger-scale society with closer ties to the state. Only four Hadza homicides were reported during the study period, but because of the small population size, the decision to include or exclude three murders committed by outsiders accounts for the enormous jump from 6.6 to 40 when extrapolated to a rate per 100,000 person-years (Lee 1979;

Kelly 1995: 203; Blurton Jones et al. 2002: 196).

Kelly does not make a similar adjustment for the Hiwi or the Ache, even though these fi gures include suicide, infanticide, and mur-ders by Venezuelans (Hiwi) or by Paraguayans (Ache). Of course, Venezuelans and Paraguayans are people from state societies. Accord-ing to Hill and Hurtado (1996: 159), who conducted the study of the Ache, only 40 percent of Ache violence was attributed to internal violence and that included infanticide; 60 percent was attributable to external confl ict with Paraguayans or non-Ache indigenous people.

Excluding outsider confl icts would, therefore, drop the Ache fi gure from 500/100,000 to 200/100,000. Of course, one cannot say what would have happened to the Ache without the encroachment of Para-guayans. Perhaps the confl icts with Paraguayans would have been replaced by equally violent confl icts with other stateless peoples; or perhaps those confl icts would have disappeared. Perhaps their con-fl icts with other indigenous people would have increased with the indirect infl uence of state power, or perhaps they would have reduced without the pressure of state encroachment.

Territorial encroachment is not the only state infl uence that might increase violence. For example, consider alcohol, which is absent in almost all hunter-gatherer societies without signifi cant ties to a state society. According to Kelly (1995: 203), alcohol was a signifi -cant contributing factor in fi ve of the eleven murders among the San Ildefonso Agta. If we could imagine that these murders simply would not have happened without the alcohol, their homicide rate of 129/100,000 would drop to roughly 70/100,000. If we further subtracted two murders by outsiders, the rate would drop again to roughly 55/100,000. But, of course, we cannot know what would have happened in the absence of the alcohol introduced by outsiders

or the murders committed by outsiders. Ethnography has accumu-lated only limited information about life in societies outside of direct state authority, and since all ethnographers are from state societies, ethnography is inherently incapable of observing societies beyond all state infl uence.

Michael Gurven and Hillard Kaplan (2007: 341) use a different sort of statistic to compare violence rates in Table 9.2. They report homi-cides as a percentage of all deaths rather than in relation to person-years. Their study uses a different sample of stateless societies, some of which are horticulturalists living at a slightly larger scale than the hunter-gatherer bands in Kelly’s table, but all (except the settled Ache added for reference) lived essentially in stateless conditions. Despite these differences, a similar pattern is evident in both tables. There is a wide range of violence from very low to very high levels. In Table 9.2, the percentage of deaths from violence ranges from 0 to more than 50 percent. The typical group in Gurven and Kaplan’s study com-pares unfavorably with typical state societies today. A contemporary study of the causes of death in state societies found that there were 456,300 deaths from interpersonal violence out of 52,769,700 total deaths worldwide in the year 2010. Simple division gives 0.8 percent of deaths from interpersonal violence for the world as a whole in 2010. Adding the 1,340,000 deaths from self-harm (i.e. suicide) to the number of deaths from interpersonal violence gives 2.54 percent of all deaths from violence. Suicide tends to be very low or even negligible in stateless societies, and as mentioned above, it is often included in vio-lence statistics of hunter-gatherer societies. Even including suicide as violence for state societies, the levels of violence in all but one of these stateless societies is higher than the global average of state societies (Lozano 2012: 2105–9).

Table 9.2 suffers from the same diffi culty with the Hiwi and Ache data as Kelly’s table (Table 9.1). The fi gures include suicide, infanticide, and murders by outsiders. Although violence of one form or another accounts for 30.2 percent of all Hiwi deaths, murders by the Hiwi themselves account for only 7 percent of all deaths (Kelly 2013: 204).

Gurven and Kaplan’s (2007: 341) table reports an average of 12.5 percent of deaths from violence, nearly fi ve times as high as the global average including suicides for state societies in 2010. Readers should be cautious about interpreting the table’s average. As Gurven and Kaplan point out, it is only the “percent of all deaths in study.” The

study does not contain a statistically representative group of all state-less society, and so the average is highly infl uenced by the groups that happen to be in the study.

Kelly does not even report an average for his table, probably because it would be so highly infl uenced by the particular societies that happen to be included. As we have said, the observed stateless societies are likely to differ from typical stateless societies in ways we do not understand. Notice that both studies include one society with very low levels of violence, but each study includes a different low-violence society. Kelly (1995) includes the Batek from Malaysia;

Gurven and Kaplan (2007) include the Bakairi of Brazil. Had both of these studies included both of these groups, they would have given an impression that stateless societies with extremely low levels of violence were twice as common. As mentioned above, several other observed stateless societies also have extremely low levels of violence.

Had some of these been included in either study, it would have given an impression of much lower “typical” rates of violence. But, there are also other violent societies that might have been included.

This issue also affects the interpretation of a study by Wrangham et al. (2006: 19), who calculate the “median annual mortality from

Table 9.2 Percentage of deaths from violence

Group

Percent of deaths from violence

Bakairi 0

Agta 3

Hadza 3.2

Machiguenga 3.4

Ache (settled) 4.2

Northern Territory Aborigines 5.7

Tsimane 7.5

Percent of all deaths in study 12.5

Yanomamo 12.6

Hiwi 30.2

Ache (forest) 55.5

Number of violent deaths in study 354

Source: Adapted from Table 5: Causes of death among study popu-lations (in percent) (Gurven and Kaplan 2007: 341)

intergroup aggression [for thirteen foraging societies] at 164 deaths per 100,000.” This study includes only two stateless societies with lit-tle or no intergroup aggression. According to Kelly (2013: 206), there are at least thirteen documented societies with little or no intergroup aggression. Adding eleven societies without warfare from Kelly’s study into Wrangham et al.’s study would cause the median to drop from 164/100,000 to 20/100,000. Thus, selective sampling can clearly infl u-ence the outcome of this sort of study. Likewise, Bruce Knauft (1987:

464) lists several (mostly horticulturalist) stateless societies that have high rates of violence and that do not appear in the aforementioned studies. Including some of these would have driven the median at least partly back up. We do not mean to imply that 20/100,000 is the “right”

fi gure. There are not enough good demographic studies of representa-tive groups to draw many fi rm conclusions about rates of violence.

Two simplifi cations that we have made so far might well exagger-ate the relative violence of stexagger-ateless societies. We have used homicides as our only measure of violence, and we have lumped all homicides together. We have done so partly because homicides are fairly easy to count in stateless societies, but we should consider some of the prob-lems of this focus.

Bands’ homicide levels tend to be higher than their levels of most other crimes and other forms of violence. They have virtually no property crime, and nonlethal violence tends to be low. Some researchers argue that rape and other forms of violence targeting women are relatively low in band societies (Leacock 1998; Boehm 2001). Lee (1982) argues that women in band society have high political equality and personal autonomy, which might account for low rates of violence. Among the Ju/’hoansi, for example, a woman being targeted by a man (including a spouse) can ask the group for protection, and women and men will join equally in the discussion of what to do (Draper 1975; Lee 1979; Lee 1982; Howell 2010).

Many state societies have not given this level of resource to women, even today. Larger and more complex societies tend to have propor-tionately greater gender inequality, apparently in proportion to their level of hierarchy (Barnard and Woodburn 1988: 19; Kelly 1995:

298–300; Leacock 1998: 139, 141, 147; Woodburn 1998: 61; Lee and Daly 1999: 5; Boehm 2001: 93; Endicott and Endicott 2008: 50, 59, 63). One possible reason is that violent males become a valued asset in the context of intergroup confl ict, which is more common among complex agricultural societies.

Lumping all homicides together ignores the moral distinctions that most state societies make between many different categories of homicide such as murder, manslaughter, justifi able homicide, negli-gent homicide, non-neglinegli-gent homicide, wrongful death, accidental death, suicide, death in war, and executions. Band societies have not historically operated within legal systems that make these distinctions.

Ethnographers are understandably cautious about making the moral judgments needed to disaggregate existing information on homicides in stateless societies into all these categories to make for fully compa-rable fi gures.

One aspect of the homicide issue makes them harder to count in state societies. Although in bands, it is often very easy to tell whether a death (even an accidental death) is a homicide, it is not as easy in state society. Poisonings that pass for illness and murders that pass as accidents are obvious examples. But perhaps the largest example is the policy-related death by seemingly natural causes. Deaths from famine, starvation, and severe malnutrition are rare among hunter-gatherer societies. Within states, such deaths are usually attributable to policy decisions, often those that make food unaffordable to some rather than unavailable to all (Sen 1981). In modern states, famines often stem from disregard of policy effects (more akin to negligent homicide than murder), but they have also been used intentionally as large-scale weapons of war (Snyder 2012). The inherent preventability of many poverty-related deaths in state society is a good reason to consider them to be akin to violence.

Similarly, cancer and other diseases are often caused by toxins that only appear as the byproducts of state societies, but statistics seldom,

Similarly, cancer and other diseases are often caused by toxins that only appear as the byproducts of state societies, but statistics seldom,

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