Economics plays an important role in our lives today for sure. Anthropologists often compare how different societies are impacted by economic concerns. This is a look at several concerns that can make us think about the nature of humanity itself in relation to how we interact economically. (For a brief introduction to Economic Anthropology go to this link.)

The following is taken from Marvin Harris' Our Kind. This is a chapter called: Why War. Before you explore this however, there is something that you ought to explore. The following clips are taken from the movie The Gods Must Be Crazy. These three segments relate directly to what Harris is saying in his chapter. Ask yourself as you watch these three clips what has happened to this group when the coke bottle drops is a gift of the Gods. What is the group like before the coke bottle and why do they want to give it back to the Gods when the third clip is over?

An introduction to the !Kung Bushmen

The arrival of the coke bottle with many functions - new emotions emerge

The decision is made to throw the bottle off the end of the earth and give it back to the Gods.

Now for Harris' views on Why War.

For explaining warfare, theories of innate aggression seem to me to have as little merit as they do for explaining sexism. Innate, aggressive potentials must surely be part of human nature in order for there to be any degree of sexism or warfare, but cultural selection wields the power that activates or inactivates these raw potentials and channels them into specific cultural expressions. (Or shall we believe that the !Kung San have genes for peace and equality, while the Sambia have genes for war and inequality?)

I propose, in brief, that bands and villages make war because they find themselves in competition for resources such as soils, forests, and game upon which their food supply depends. These resources become scarce as a result of being depleted or as a result of rising population densities, or a combination of the two. Local groups then recurrently face the prospect of having to reduce their rate of population growth or their level of resource consumption. To reduce their population is in itself costly, given the lack of industrial-age means of contraception and abortion. And reductions in the quality and quantity of resource consumption inevitably subvert a people's health and vigor, causing extra deaths through malnutrition, hunger, and disease.

For band-and-village societies that confront these alternatives, warfare offers a tempting solution. If one group can succeed in driving away its neighbors or thinning their ranks, there will be more land, trees, soil, fish, meat, and other resources for the victors. Since warfare as practiced by bands and villages does not guarantee mutual destruction, groups can rationally accept the risk of battlefield fatalities in return for the chance of improving their living conditions by forcibly lowering their neighbor's population density.

In his study of warfare among the Mae Enga of the western highlands of Papua New Guinea, Mervyn Meggitt estimates that aggressor groups succeeded in gaining significant amounts of enemy land in 75 percent of their wars. "Given that the initiation of warfare usually pays off for the aggressors, it is not surprising that by and large the Mae count warfare as well worth the cost in human casualties," comments Meggitt. On the basis of their study of a carefully drawn representative sample of 186 societies, anthropologists Carol and Melvin Ember found that preindustrial peoples mostly go to war to moderate or cushion the impact of unpredictable (rather than chronic) food shortages and that the victorious side almost always takes some resources from the losers. Human societies find it difficult to prevision recurrent but unpredictable drops in food production caused by droughts, floods, storms, killing frosts, and insect swarms and to adjust population levels accordingly. Incidentally, the Embers have this to say about the prevalence of warfare: "Most societies known to anthropology have had warfare, i.e., fighting between territorial units (bands, villages, and aggregates thereof). And the warfare probably occurred a lot more often than even we are used to in the modern world: in the societies we have looked at that were described before pacification, nearly 75 percent had warfare at least once every two years."

But the problem of balancing population against resources can't be solved simply by thinning out the neighbors and taking over their resources. The fecundity of the human female is so great that even if raiding reduces the density of a territory by half, all it takes is twenty-five years of unrestrained breeding for the population to reach its former level. Warfare, therefore, does not dispense with the need to control population by other costly means such as abstinence, prolonged lactation, abortion, and infanticide. On the contrary, it may actually achieve its most important demographic effects not by eliminating but by increasing one particular costly practice–female infanticide.

In the absence of warfare and its ethnocentric bias, there would be no marked preference for rearing more children of one sex than the other, and rates of infanticide for male and female infants would tend to be equal. But warfare places a premium on maximizing the number of future warriors, which leads to the preferential treatment of male infants and higher rates of direct and indirect female infanticide. So in many band-and-village societies the greatest population-regulating consequences of warfare may result not from short-term effects of raiding but from the long-term effects of female infanticide and the ill-treatment of women in general. For what counts most in the regulation of population growth is not the number of males–one or two will suffice if there is polygyny–but the number of females.

A study that William Divale and I carried out on a sample of 112 societies lends circumstantial support to the proposal that warfare leads to high rates of direct and indirect female infanticide. We found that in the age group from birth to fourteen, boys outnumbered girls 127 to 100 before warfare was repressed by colonial powers. After warfare was repressed, the sex ratio for the same age group fell to 104 to 100, which is about normal for modern populations.

Warfare among band-and-village peoples, in other words, is no mere venting of fears and frustrations generated by population pressure. By thinning out the density of people to resources, and by slowing rates of reproduction, warfare in its own right acts to slow or reverse the rise of regional population pressure. And it is because of these systemic ecological and demographic advantages, and not because of a genetic imperative, that warfare has been recurrently selected for during the evolution of band-and-village peoples.

My intention here is not to praise warfare but simply to damn it less than some of its alternatives when certain conditions prevail. As practiced by band-and-village peoples, warfare was a wasteful and brutal way to cope with population pressure. But given the absence of effective contraception or medical abortion, the alternative was also wasteful and brutal: malnutrition, hunger, disease, and short, mean, and nasty lives for everyone. Of course, the favorable accounting of the balance of effects applies far more to winners than to losers. And perhaps it does not apply at all, when, on occasion, conflicts became so endemic, remorseless, and unrelenting that there were no winners and more people died from the effects of war than would have died from the effects of malnutrition. But then, again, no system is fail-safe.

Let me pause a moment to attend to a few additional conceptual problems. First, I need to point out that population pressure is not a static condition but a process in which increasingly unfavorable balances develop between the effort people put into obtaining their food and other necessities and the output from that effort. The process begins as soon as people encounter diminishing returns, as, for example, when hunters find that they must search longer and harder to kill as many animals as they used to. If people do nothing to slow or reverse it, the process will eventually reach the point where it permanently degrades their habitat through extinctions of flora and fauna or depletions of other nonrenewable resources, and they will be obliged to find other means of subsistence.

Another issue is how signs of hunger and malnutrition relate to population pressure. One should not expect a one-to-one correlation between them. By working harder and by rearing fewer children, the adult members of band-and-village societies may avoid presenting any clinical signs of hunger or malnutrition. In such cases, the only indicators of population pressure may be the means employed to restrict numbers of children reared, on the assumption that costly practices such as infanticide, abortion, and abstinence would not be employed unless a group was pressing against its resource limits, at least to a moderate extent. Naturally, if people engage in infanticide, abortion, and prolonged abstinence and at the same time display symptoms of acute malnutrition and hunger, one would regard them as experiencing a more intense level of population pressure.

The final point concerns the relationship between population pressure and a society's overall population density. Sociologist Gregory Leavitt found a high correlation between settlement size and warfare in a sample of 133 societies of all types. But one must be careful not to assume that bigger settlements and more people per square mile always indicate greater pressure on essential resources. This relationship only holds true when comparing societies that have similar modes of subsistence. The Netherlands, with a population density of over 900 people per square mile, has less population pressure, measured by indices of malnutrition and hunger, than Zaire, with 40 people per square mile, or even some foraging societies with population densities of less than one person per square mile. Groups possessing domesticated plants and animals generally have higher population densities than hunter-gatherers. But hunter-gatherers and those who possess domesticated plants and animals are equally vulnerable to population pressure, albeit usually at different densities. _

Because of these caveats and complications, I cannot provide precise measurements of the relative degrees of population pressure found in different societies. Rough approximations must suffice. But the cumulative indications of stresses and strains strongly suggest that band-and-village societies must pay a heavy price for keeping population and food supply in balance, and warfare is part of that price. How well does this explanation of warfare fit the cases under discussion?

 PART TWO