Tired of war's bloodshed, tribe resorts to its old traditions

[Jim__]

From NBC News:

The Enga people of Papua New Guinea have long been used to a culture where small-scale wars were common, short-lived and ended in peaceful relations between clans. But in 1990, the younger generation ditched their bows and arrows for shotguns and semiautomatics, and the Enga experienced 20 years of runaway violence that claimed nearly 5,000 lives.

Now, research shows that clan elders have restored peace by using their traditional tribal court system. As a result of the state-sanctioned system, relatively few wars took place in 2010 and 2011, and the death toll per war has dropped dramatically. For example, from 2006 to 2010, 74 percent of wars ended after only one to five deaths, compared with 23 percent of wars from 1991 to 1995.

The results suggest complex societies don't always evolve from simpler societies that are much more violent, as some psychologists and anthropologists contend, researchers said.

"These simple face-to-face societies have very effective means of making peace," said study leader Polly Wiessner, an anthropologist at the University of Utah. "It's when societies coalesce and are driven into larger societies, when they become no longer face-to-face, that these peace mechanisms no longer work."

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[Warpy]

1. Savagery is in the eye of the beholder

Take the Plains people, for instance, and their war tradition of counting coup, humiliating an enemy by touching him with a coup stick and reminding him that the blow could have been fatal, but that his adversary had decided to let him live. It was considered superior to killing him and probably kept the death toll from territorial squabbling a lot lower.

Yet the Europeans who flooded into the region, killing everything and everyone in their path, considered themselves the civilized ones and the Plains tribes savage.

That has always amazed me.

[AnotherDreamWeaver]

2. +1 Not long ago I read the life of Mary Jemison

Who was captured by Indians and ended up choosing to live with them.

[Warpy]

3. I was a squirrely kid who watched westerns in the 50s

and decided if I was alive back then, I'd join the Indians. The last things I wanted were corsets, high buttoned shoes, and enforcing the moral order in a frontier town or being the town saloon floozie with even tighter corsets.

I haven't read the book. I don't wonder at the choice. It's likely what I'd have done.

[AnotherDreamWeaver]

4. I first picked up a book called "Ride the Wind" about a girl captured in Texas

She also stayed and married the guy who captured her. He first gave her to a woman who had lost a child, after she grew up she ended up liking the guy she at first hated. Her Brother was captured at the same time she was, but went with a different band of Indians. She would see him from time to time. Her son ended up being the last Cherokee War Chief, who after all the buffalo were killed, finally went to a reservation. Don't recall their names right now, but enjoyed the book, and when I heard about the Jemison story I ordered a used copy. She was captured further East, before the War with the British for Independence. I recommend both books.

[Igel]

5. Yes and no.

Most societies had ways of limiting the damage of warfare. They evolved over centuries or more and worked.

New Guinea had a lot of wars and a lot of ways of making truces. Their wars typically weren't as bloody simply because arrows aren't usually as lethal, esp. in wooded areas, as guns.

On the other hand, most such truces weren't long-term stable. They may go for a year. They may go for 50 years. But they usually break down over transgressions involving land, game, water, or women. Or simple honor. Humiliation could be borne as long as it can't be reclaimed, but once you're powerful enough to plausibly reclaim it you eventually have to do so. The definitive way of resolving a war was genocide. And New Guinea as traditionally had a really high genocide rate. Kill off all the males over a certain age and claim the women as your tribe's.

That's actually humanitarian in an odd sort of way, if "humanitarian" means 'minimize the loss of life'. If you kill 200 adult males in a genocide that can easily be fewer deaths than if every 20 years you kill 40 males and the war goes on for over 100 years.