ETHNOGRAPHY AND THE VIOLENCE HYPOTHESIS Although the three-stage evolutionary framework of savagery–

barbarism–civilization popular with early anthropologists was clearly built on the notion of the inevitability of human progress and the superiority of Western society, its adherents did not universally believe that the lowest level was the most violent stage. Many of them actu-ally considered hunter-gatherers, which they called “savages,” to be less violent than barbarians and sometimes less than contemporary Westerners. For example, Morgan (1877) observed that cultures at the stage of “barbarism” (that is, subsistence agriculture) are rather more prone to violence and warfare than those at the stage of “savagery,”

making no pretense about any trend towards decreasing violence over time or with increasing cultural complexity. Morgan elaborated that more complex societies have more at stake and also possess superior technology and tactics for making war on one another. Other early evolutionists echoed these sentiments. Augustus Pitt-Rivers (1867;

1906), for example, in his discussion of “primitive warfare,” made it clear that more effective and sophisticated warfare, not pacifi sm, is actually the hallmark of civilization.

For example, the veneration of effective warfare as a distinc-tive feature of civilization could be seen as successful European and American powers patting themselves on the back for their military successes and colonial conquests. In other words, they thought, their superiority to peoples living in small-scale societies stemmed from their intelligence, discipline, moral fortitude, and sophisticated tech-nologies, all of which related directly to their military prowess. Thus, one’s capability and willingness to wipe out one’s adversaries was a mark of high civilization and the outcome of the process of cul-tural evolution itself. In this area, the Hobbesian idea that civilization was good for everyone was perhaps more popular than his violence hypothesis or even his quite reasonable idea that less violence is good for people.

Some of the earliest ethnographers, who went into the fi eld to observe small-scale stateless societies, did not fi nd them to be prone to unaccept-ably high violence. In our review of early ethnographic descriptions of hunter-gatherers from the New World, Africa, and Australia, we were unable to fi nd any clear-cut instances of extreme interpersonal violence.

In fact, most early accounts of hunter-gatherer societies emphasize the opposite tendency toward peacefulness and social harmony (Kropotkin 2011: 175). For example, Baldwin Spencer and Francis James Gillen, in their highly infl uential description of the hunter-gatherers of the Central Desert of Australia, offer the following account:

As a general rule the natives are kindly disposed to one another, that is of course within the limits of their own tribe, and, where two tribes come into contact with one another on the border land of their respective territories, there the same amicable feelings are maintained between the members of the two. There is no such thing as one tribe being in a constant state of enmity with another so far as these Central tribes are concerned. (Spencer and Gillen 1899: 32)

Although Spencer and Gillen’s ethnography is rather infamous for its unfl attering portrayals of Australian aborigines, they obviously did not consider their subjects to be particularly violent; and certainly not unacceptably violent, as required by the Hobbesian perspective.

Furthermore, this view of hunter-gatherer societies appears to have been shared fairly broadly by evolutionary anthropologists at the turn

of the twentieth century. For other examples from Australia, Southern Africa, and around the world, see respectively Parker (1905) and Stow (1905), and Kropotkin (2011).

The fi rst major goal of American anthropology in the early twen-tieth century was to overcome this inherent tendency towards eth-nocentrism in conducting ethnographic research. To this end, Franz Boas, often considered the “father of American anthropology,” advo-cated the principle of cultural relativism, or the belief that all forms of cultural diversity are equally valid and none is “better” than any other (Powell and Boas 1887). One of anthropology’s great contributions is the demonstration that all peoples are equal in terms of intelligence and other capabilities. Therefore, evident differences between human groups in terms of cultural behavior and social organization may be understood in external terms, such as historical patterns of interac-tion, ecological adaptainterac-tion, and so on. Cultural relativism, while obviously diffi cult to put into practice during the conduct of social scientifi c research, has formed the basis for modern anthropology and allied fi elds ever since.

Taken together, early ethnographic investigations contributed to a common view of hunter-gatherers as being relatively free from violence in both its interpersonal and intergroup forms. For example, Elizabeth Marshall Thomas (1959), translated the Ju/’hoansi people’s name as

“the Harmless People,” and allowed the interpretation that they lived in social harmony without interpersonal violence or intergroup war-fare. This description echoed through the popular culture of the later twentieth century. When combined with other aspects of egalitarian social systems, this fed a trend of golden-age-style depictions of the Ju/’hoansi as a utopian hunter-gatherer society replete with boundless personal dignity and rich social lives now lost to the alienation of mod-ern society (Sahlins 1974). Thus, as Carol R. Ember (1978) observed in her well-known essay on myths about foraging societies, research of this type coalesced into a somewhat fanciful view of hunter-gatherer societies as being virtually free from violence.

In playing culture critic, Keeley (1996) argues that studies such as Thomas’s (1959) formed an element of a pacifi st tradition within the fi eld of anthropology which grew up during the 1960s in response to the Vietnam War—a sentiment strongly echoed more recently by Steven Pinker (2012). Indeed, beginning in the 1970s, skepticism about the nonviolent nature of hunter-gatherer societies began to

accumulate, in part forming the basis for the subsequent develop-ment of current neo-Hobbesian social theory. One real problem recognized at this time concerning investigations such as those of Thomas (1959) was that they were largely anecdotal. Up until the 1960s anthropology lacked any real data about the levels of violence in stateless societies, making it impossible to form comparisons with large-scale state societies. Finally, a generation of researchers sought to quantify just how violent hunter-gatherer societies actually are.

When real data at last started to become available, levels of hunter-gatherer violence seemed surprisingly high to many (see Chapter 9 for discussion).

Some ethnographers went to the opposite extreme. For example, Napoleon Chagnon (1968) observed extraordinary levels of inter-group violence among the Yanomamö and labeled them the “fi erce people,” in what would seem to be a self-conscious inversion of the descriptions of the Ju/’hoansi by Thomas (1959). Chagnon’s studies of the Yanomamö have achieved a degree of infamy for arguing that participation in intergroup aggression provided both functional ben-efi ts for whole Yanomamö groups and evolutionary fi tness benben-efi ts for individuals. While we would strongly repudiate the evolutionary claims made by Chagnon, discussions of the Yanomamö have exposed the rather Hobbesian logic underlying the causes of “primitive war-fare” within non-state societies. For example, in an early comment on Chagnon’s work, C. R. Hallpike observes:

The Yanomamo . . . and other acephalous societies, engage in warfare because among other reasons they cannot stop, not because they necessarily as a culture derive any benefi t from fi ghting. In the absence of any central authority they are con-demned to fi ght for ever [sic], other conditions remaining the same, since for any one group to cease defending itself would be suicidal. (Hallpike 1973: 6)

Obviously, Hobbes would be sympathetic.

Hallpike is not alone in the return to the Hobbesian belief in an inherently violent human nature and the Kantian ideal of prog-ress in Western society through humane rationality. A wide range of modern scholarship on violence and warfare across the diversity of social science fi elds shares this general philosophical orientation

(Goldstein 2011; Kegley and Raymond 2011; Tertrais 2012; Gat 2013; Pagden 2013). This line of thinking has generally served as a justifi cation of a wide range of modern social institutions, as well as the overall structure of the modern world and the historical pro-cesses that brought it about.

This line of thought is allied with the “sociobiological perspective,”

which attempts to apply Darwinian ideas of natural selection to social behaviors. Many evolutionists have employed an increasingly sophisti-cated theory of the dynamics of biological evolution to suggest that the evolutionary processes responsible for the origins of humanity favor vio-lence as a behavioral trait in humans or at least human males. Through Raymond Dart (1953: 209; 1957), Louis Leakey and Robert Ardrey (1971), and other researchers, this view of human nature entered the increasingly scientifi c evolutionary theory of its day (such as Washburn 1959), which held that the biological and cultural evolutionary pro-cesses responsible for the origins of humanity were driven by the hunt-ing of large animals and, therefore, this innately violent predatory “killer instinct” (Sussman 1999). One infl uential outgrowth of an increasingly sophisticated view of the evolutionary process was E. O. Wilson’s (2000 [1975]) Sociobiology: A New Synthesis, which argued for the evolu-tionary basis of spousal infi delity, the division of human societies into classes, and the adoption of religion. Wilson (2000 [1975]: 573) also made a clear case for the evolutionary advantages of innate violence at the levels of both the individual and group. Margo Wilson and Martin Daly (1985) outlined what they refer to as the “young male syndrome,”

in which patterns of risk-taking, violence, and other forms of aggressive behavior exist among males today because they conferred evolution-ary benefi ts on males in our deep early hominin past. Such perspec-tives within the fi eld of evolutionary psychology have infi ltrated what might be considered popular science in works such as Demonic Males, by Richard Wrangham and Dale Peterson (1996), which builds on this model of the evolutionary basis of male violence with a heavy emphasis on the role of male competition for mates. See the online appendix for a more detailed discussion of sociobiology.

It is also clear that such scholarly work straddles the line between social science and the history of political philosophy that inspired it.

Its roots trace back directly to Hobbes. Therefore, we have chosen to assign to this line of scholarship the label of neo-Hobbesianism.

By this, we mean that this body of literature shares the belief in a

fundamentally violent human nature, as well as the notion that sov-ereign states function to mitigate this inherent tendency, but that label should not be taken to imply that these philosophers necessarily endorse the two hypotheses in question.

4. POP ANTHROPOLOGY AND THE VIOLENCE HYPOTHESIS