Human Conflict from Neanderthals to the Samburu: Structure and Agency in Webs of Violence

This book examines human conflict throughout history, the reasons behind the struggles, and why it persists. The volume delves into the causes of human conflict and what can be done about them. Based on detailed descriptions that support insightful interpretations, the book explores significant historical events in the course of human history. 
By pursuing a “web of violence” approach, it raises and answers questions about the sources of conflict and how it may or may not be resolved through investigations into human agency and practice. It evaluates lessons learned concerning human conflict, violence, and warfare. To illustrate these lessons, the book presents a broad geographical and temporal set of data, including research on the time of Neanderthals in Europe (20-30 thousand years ago); the Late Neolithic civilization on the Mediterranean (6-8 thousand years ago); medieval Ireland; contemporary history of the Western Dani peoples of West Papua; and, finally, recent issues in Brazil, Congo, and Kenya.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Springer
• Release date: Oct 20, 2020
• ISBN: 9783030468248

Book preview

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020

W. P. Kiblinger (ed.)Human Conflict from Neanderthals to the Samburu: Structure and Agency in Webs of Violencehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46824-8_1

Introduction

William P. Kiblinger¹  

(1)

Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, Winthrop University, Rock Hill, SC, USA

William P. Kiblinger

Email: [e-mail]

William P. Kiblinger

is an associate professor of Philosophy and Religious Studies. He holds a Ph.D. in the philosophy of religion from the University of Chicago. His research focuses on continental philosophy and theology as well as issues in religion and science. He has published work on evolutionary theory and subjectivity in Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science as well as on religious imagination in the International Journal of Philosophy and Theology. He teaches courses in philosophy and religious studies, and he has co-taught interdisciplinary courses in biology, anthropology, and political science.

Why has there been so much human conflict throughout history, and why does it persist? What causes it, and what can we do about it? These are seemingly simple questions, but easy answers are difficult to find. Part of the problem has to do with the complex nature of the concepts involved: human conflict and human nature. When we think of conflict, we may readily imagine violent warfare, but what kind of warfare precisely? In political terms, we may ask whether it is internecine, intertribal, or interstate; whether it is endemic warfare, a mercenary war, or a proxy war; and so forth. To complicate matters further, we must ask whether the violent conflict necessarily involves warfare per se. A survey of violence of all types will also find instances of bodily injury, verbal assault, cultural destruction, political oppression, and even injurious magic. Thus, human conflict may be personal, interfamilial, or coalitionary; it may be economic, psychological, or spiritual; and so forth.

The concept of human nature is, if anything, even more vexed. When we seek causes and explanations for human conflict, two tendencies often arise: an overemphasis on the empirical in an effort to stay grounded in the reality of human experience but often at the expense of useful explanatory power or an overreaching into metaphysical territory that promises to give the true ground of a genuine explanation but often becomes too speculative to verify. In the first case, when we concentrate on producing detailed descriptions of particular phenomena such as a single historical instance of human conflict, we risk losing sight of the connections among events in other times or places and what this instance might mean for future events. In the second case, we may explicitly or implicitly ground our insights in some universal category like human nature in the attempt to rectify the problem, but here we may find that our answers can become untethered from empirical fact, as when a dogmatic account of human nature (e.g., strict versions of Rousseauan or Hobbesian perspectives) is assumed and then counterevidence in the data must be distorted or ignored to fit the metaphysical preunderstanding (Gat 2015).

To avoid either extreme, the chapters in this volume attempt to offer thick descriptions and interpretive explanations of various human conflicts throughout human history and across the globe. Following Clifford Geertz, the authors endeavor to provide the reader with enough cultural context to navigate the webs of significance in which these forms of human conflict occur so that our analysis can be an interpretive one in search of meaning (Geertz 1973). However, to avoid the problem of frontloading our search for meaning with metaphysical assumptions, the essays in this volume follow the advice of Max Weber: That an interpretation possesses a particularly high degree of evidence does not itself prove anything about its empirical validity…. Rather our ‘understanding’ of the context must always be checked by the usual methods of causal correlations as far as possible, before an ever so ‘evident’ interpretation becomes a valid ‘understandable explanation’ (Apel 1987:131). If this volume is to make progress in understanding human conflict, its interpretations must always be checked by the usual methods of anthropology, but its interpretations must nevertheless endeavor to find meaning in events that can easily seem senseless. Without trying to do so, we forfeit the opportunity to learn.

Furthermore, the disparate authors assembled in this volume endorse an interdisciplinary approach as affording the best opportunity to accomplish this learning. Rather than apply a single method or focus on a single form of evidence, the essays combine the methods of archaeology, ethnography, cultural anthropology, psychology, and history, and their subjects span the globe and the timeline of human history. A common theme running through each research focus is the web of violence that the researchers have uncovered, described, and explained (Turpin and Kurtz 1997; Hamby and Grych 2013). This concept of a web of violence is designed to capture and integrate the full extent of both discrete acts of overt violence and forms of systemic violence that permeate a culture in ways that agents in the culture do not fully recognize or understand. As Turpin and Kurtz argue, there is a dialectic between macro- and microlevels of violence such that interpersonal and collective forms of violence are connected in complex ways. The task of identifying and interpreting this dialect of human conflict requires the multifaceted set of integrative techniques presented in this volume, which follow the examples of researchers who have sought the optimal way to frame such complex situations (e.g., Goffman 1974; Snow et al. 1986).

Various frames for analyzing violence have risen to prominence in the scholarly literature. The authors in this volume eschew straightforward biological or physiological theories of violent behavior and opt for a frame in which social factors retain the power to override innate tendencies or traits. The authors do not deny that some form of natural aggression may be endemic to human beings (e.g., Lorenz 1966; Eibl-Eibesfeldt 1979), but the ascription of a violent nature to human beings requires commensurate attention to the macrolevel conditions that frame the situations in which these natural characteristics manifest themselves.

Within the framework of the social sciences, the notion of a web of violence has gained support as a means of defining the situation of human conflict. By thinking of violence as a web, this concept underscores the interconnectivity of micro- and macrolevels of violence (e.g., domestic violence and warfare) and its consequences for individuals, groups, communities, and nations (Turpin and Kurtz 1997:12). Such links between the levels of violence have been observed and reported by gender scholars, whose research reveals a connection between, on the one hand, microlevel violence against women and children in patriarchal cultures and, on the other hand, macrolevel violence such as gang violence or warfare in the same cultures (Engel Merry 2009). To amplify this point, researchers have discovered that intrafamilial violence against women and children can be linked to the broader society’s laissez-faire attitude toward the household (Elias 1997:141). The framing employed in a web of violence approach recognizes structural violence (the way social structures can foster a system that causes harm to individuals or subgroups within the society), as is often found in theorizing about violence in criminology (Pepinsky 1991; Elias 1993; Turpin and Kurtz 1997:10). In its broadest framing, such structures can create a pathological cosmology that underlies the action-guiding norms of an entire culture (Galtung 1997). The authors in this volume examine a range of these deep structures as they evolve in history, and yet they attempt to treat the agents within them as sufficiently sui generis to make consequential choices that can affect the course of history.

To elaborate on this point, the concept of a web of violence may seem to suggest a position in the well-known structure/agency debate, implying that the structure of a web determines the actions—or, at least, the meaning of the actions—that occur within it. The rise in the popularity of evolutionary and genetic models to explain human behavior has fostered this preference for structure over agency. However, the present volume resists the attempt to treat agency as an epiphenomenon or, worse, a psychological or ideological illusion. Any model that so discounts agency will have to reckon with the question as to why its privileging of a particular set of objects of study is relevant, why the proposed explanations matter, and for whom they purport to matter (Keane 2003:242). For this reason, the scholars in this volume follow an alternative trend in anthropology found in the work of Marshall Sahlins (Sahlins 1976, 1985, 2000[1988]), which resists the turn away from agency and self-interpretation toward entities, forces, and causalities (Keane 2003:238), instead appealing to the concept of agency (i.e., the order of autonomy within the context contingent events) to describe the kinds of self-realization and opposition to oppression that are fundamental to situations of human conflict (High 2010:766; Mahmood 2005; Kockelman 2007; Carter and Sealey 2002).

The Studies of Human Conflicts

Arguably, the best place to begin is with the first form of human conflict, which occurred between two species of humans, the Neanderthals and the modern human beings, as they coevolved during the extreme Riss glaciation between 300,000 years ago (300 ka) and 130,000 years ago (130 ka), Neanderthals in rich ecosystems in Europe, moderns in the deserts of Africa. According to the research of Valerius Geist (University of Calgary), the two groups were destined to meet after Neanderthals and the northern fauna moved south into the Levant area of the eastern Mediterranean following the Riss Ice Age, at the same time that the first modern humans were migrating north from Africa into the same region. They remained in contact for over 30 thousand years, without one besting the other.

Meeting Neanderthals must have been a terrifying challenge for modern human beings. The Neanderthals could not be defeated militarily due to their brute strength, speed, and agility as well as their apex predator adaptations of stealth and nocturnalism, which robbed modern humans of the protection of darkness. Furthermore, the Neanderthal proclivity for cannibalism only made confrontations with them more ominous. Only during daylight could groups of moderns hold off Neanderthals using throwing spears. While modern humans could not occupy the living space of healthy Neanderthals by force, the Neanderthals could not follow the moderns into the resource poverty of deserts. These boundaries maintained the separation of the two populations for the most part, though some hybridization occurred during times of Neanderthal decline. Neanderthals kept moderns out of Europe for at least 20 thousand years. The stalemate continued as long as both species had similar economies, hunting the same prey.

The turning point came about 40 thousand years ago when moderns crossed the huge east-west mountain chain of the Zagros Mountains and entered the interior of Europe during a time of Neanderthal misfortune. At that time, Europe and Asia had become the world’s most extensive biome known as the mammoth steppe, making it home to a variety of large mammals. Significantly, this lengthy radiation of moderns into Europe generated a luxury economy based largely on reindeer that lasted to the end of the Wurm glaciation. This economic flourishing is reflected in the exceptional phenotype, cultural developments, and population growth of these hunters. Their activity overlapped minimally with the Neanderthal economy, which was that of an apex predator of all other megafauna. However, moderns could interfere with the seasonal migrations of the megafauna out of the mammoth steppe, denying Neanderthals access to the supply of the all-important fat in spring time that otherwise would be provided by pregnant mammoths, rhinos, or horses. As evidence of the effects of such interference, terminal Neanderthal populations exhibit starvation diets. The mammoth steppe limited the expansion of Upper Paleolithic hunters throughout Eurasia for the duration of the Wurm glaciation and allowed entry into the Americas only after the mammoth steppe fragmented and gave way to taiga at the end of the glaciation.

The work of Geist explores the evidence of these early encounters between Neanderthals and moderns, and it characterizes the types of conflicts—both direct and indirect—that arose between the two groups. His conjecture about the nature of this long-term conflict suggests a web of violence approach to the study of warfare and violence. Such an approach provides a needed corrective to the account of human conflict that is too focused on the single dramatic event rather than the slow, pervasive impact of systemic violence.

Picking up where Geist’s work leaves off, coauthors Laura Dietrich, Dörte Rokitta-Krumnow, and Oliver Dietrich (German Archaeological Institute) explore the changing nature of human conflict in the late Neolithic period. This topic has received little attention in the field until now, much of which has focused on the identification of markers for hostilities in the archaeological record in the Late Neolithic, e.g., site abandonments, the existence of fortifications, or the presumed alliances of settlements, all of which indicated generalized, intergroup conflicts. Their chapter, The Meaning of Projectile Points in the Late Neolithic of the Northern Levant: A Case Study from the Settlement of Shir, Syria, explores the possibilities of inferring the functions of Early Neolithic projectile points, made from flint and bone, from the settlement of Shir, Syria. The chapter draws on recent archaeozoological studies to classify the newly developed nonhunting weapons of the period, and they focus on their uses in conflicts that related to the individuality and personhood of warriors in the Late Neolithic. Both use-wear and metrical values are applied to determine possible functionalities of arrowheads for darts and spears, followed by a discussion focusing on their use for hunting or as weapons for intrapersonal conflict. They observe that weapons get larger and more visible exactly in the moment when hunting declines as basis for subsistence. This transformation would have produced considerable change regarding the social roles of individuals who before defined themselves through their role as hunters. They reason that the best explanation for the development of personalized prestige weapons is that interpersonal conflict gradually replaced the social practice of hunting as a means to form and perpetuate identities.

The next chapter shifts the focus from the role of personal identity in human conflict to the strategies of interpolity conflict in the political context by examining the developing forms of human conflict in the medieval era of Ireland. In Was There a Method to Their Madness? Warfare, Alliance Formation, and the Origins of the Irish Medieval State, Blair Gibson (El Camino College) addresses the patterns of warfare in early medieval Ireland, which seems at first glance to have been awash in a random and unceasing web of violence among warring chiefdoms. These chiefdoms seem to fit the cycling repetition of ceaseless coalescence and collapse as observed by many scholars of these political systems. However, Gibson finds that the Irish ethnohistorical sources pertaining to the province of Munster reveal that their warfare was highly patterned. During the period 600 to 900 C.E., political violence was employed to attack neighboring chiefdom confederacies. Victories were followed by the replacement of the ruling lineages of individual chiefdoms of the losing confederacy with those of the victor. Following the appearance of the Vikings in Munster, warfare assumed a new character that here is termed hegemonic. From 900 to 1100 C.E., the paramount leaders of powerful confederacies followed a strategy driven by status rivalry whereby they waged war in combination with alliance formation in order to elevate their personal power above that of rivals of similar stature. Though Irish chiefdoms retained their traditional character in the first phase, during the hegemonic phase Brian mac Cennétig (nicknamed Bóroihme) and his descendants were able to enact internal organizational changes in the core of their Dál Cais polity that supported the intensification of warfare. This intensification in turn led to qualitative changes to power relationships within their polity that would eventually result in the emergence of a true state system.

The following chapter continues to ask many of the same questions about the sources and resolutions of interpolity conflict, examining the practices of the Western Dani people who reside in the highlands of what is now known as West Papua, Indonesia. In Seeking Justice—Preserving Honor: War and Peace Among the Western Dani, Douglas Hayward (Biola University) draws on decades of firsthand experience as well as a considerable body of research to address three key questions: (1) why the Dani live in a nearly constant state of conflict; (2) how often and for what duration this general condition sparks pronounced incidences of aggression; and (3) how the Dani forge a sustained peace in the aftermath of these outbreaks. He then concludes with some broader observations about the nature of conflict in stateless societies. As a point of departure, Hayward refers to the work of Marshall Sahlins (1963), who describes the Western Dani as living in constant state of warre prior to the arrival of missionaries in the mid-twentieth century. In this condition, all members of the society were expected to pursue justice and defend their honor from the smallest infractions up to those that required large-scale alliances. As a result, the Western Dani formed graduated social alliances with appropriate levels of conflict resolutions culminating in full-scale war if peace and honor could not be resolved earlier. This state of warre continued to exist up and until the arrival of third party interventionists first in the form of missionaries who promoted peace-building, offered up an alternative to conflict management, and whose role and influence was later replaced by the arrival of civil authorities and the presence of an Indonesian police and military deployment. His research provides instructive criticism of the Hobbesian conception of the state of nature—a war of all against all, revealing instead the notion of peaceful warriors who stand ready to deter aggression but do not seek it.

The next chapter shifts the focus to a different kind of conflict but also one that occurs at the margins of a colonial society in its interactions with the native population. Ana Luiza M. Soares studies the Amazonas region of Brazil, especially the city of Manaus, during the nineteenth century as the country transitioned from a monarchy to a federal republic, and her work reveals the often untold story of the Indigenous people who underwent systematic marginalization and lived in a web of violence that included routine abuses, arbitrary arrests, sexual violations, kidnappings, and forced labor. According to the elite version of the history of Manaus, the nineteenth century was the so-called Belle Époch of the city—a period of modernization and progress to embellish the city’s culture and institutions—and this account of the history tends to minimize the presence of Indigenous people, much less their plight and resistance in an oppressive system. To counter this sort of narrative, Soares carefully documents the laws, policies, and institutions that created these conditions of invisibilization and violence, and she exposes the reality of this hidden social system through an exploration of news reports, court records, and hospital archives. Her work shows that understanding human conflict often requires meticulous investigation of hidden histories as a first step in recognizing that and how certain kinds of violence have arisen. Only with such exposure can we understand the web of violence and begin to address it.

The final two chapters extend the analysis of contemporary forms of human conflict by focusing on different areas of Africa. Anna Roosevelt (University of Illinois at Chicago) presents an African case within the full geopolitical context of the web of violence that modern Africans have experienced in the colonial and postcolonial eras. As with the previous chapter on the history of Indigenous peoples of Brazil, Roosevelt seeks to correct some common misunderstandings about supposed character traits by clarifying the historical record and the distortions in it that have undergirded these misconceptions. In Culpability for Violence in the Congo: Lessons from the Crisis of 1960–1965, Roosevelt analyzes the aftermath of colonial rule in Central Africa, specifically in the former Belgian Congo. During the disastrous violence that followed the end of Belgian rule, a series of coups, political assassinations, civil wars, and mass killings caused disorder, inequality, and economic failure there, with global ramifications of epidemics, displacements, and degraded environments. Western literature tends to attribute such trends to Africans’ supposed political inexperience, radicalism, corruption, tribal divisions, and innate violence. Roosevelt argues that a significant part of this literature, however, was covertly underwritten by Western security services in order to frame Africans for crimes that Western functionaries carried out to maintain white political control as well as a monopoly of the region’s rich minerals. Furthermore, she notes the epistemological problems in asserting such unfalsifiable claims about the African character as the underlying cause of these problems.

To undergird her claims, Roosevelt draws on extensive research of declassified documents, media, academic studies, memoirs, diaries, and interviews with witnesses on the mid-twentieth century Congo crisis, all of which reveals clear Western, not Congolese, perpetration in the coups and killings of the period. Very different cultures, alliances, funding, communications, and technology were at work in the actions of Western state functionaries compared to those of the Congolese with and against whom they worked. Working within their countries’ NATO alliance, Western agents employed bribery, prevarication, forgery, press suborning, and false flag operations and, when these failed their goals, extrajudicial detentions and murders of Congolese politicians they opposed and massacres of their supporters. In contrast, Congolese leaders followed much less violent strategies, combining negotiation, collaboration, and delay with propaganda, deception, graft, and, finally, armed resistance against the secessions set up by Western governments in the mining areas. Some Congolese originally employed by the security service of the Belgian colony did serve as fronts and sometimes collaborators for some Western operations and puppet regimes, but there is no clear evidence they took the initiative in the coups, murders, and mass killings. Roosevelt’s chapter illustrates these contrasting patterns of behavior and resources in the mid-twentieth-century decolonization process in the large, central African state of the Democratic Republic of Congo, revises old explanations with the new evidence, and highlights the implications for future policy to lessen instability, violence, poverty, and environmental degradation there in the future. Many lessons can be learned from this case study, not the least of which is the pernicious effect of flawed essentialism in explaining the roots of a web of violence.

In Killing, Mercy, and Empathic Emotions: The Emotional Lives of East African Warriors, Bilinda S. Straight (lead author from Western Michigan University) draws on the work of a team of researchers to examine the empathetic experiences of Samburu warriors in a small-scale society in northern Kenya. This study provides a complement to the study of peaceful warriors in the Western Dani context. In the Samburu case, Straight et al. argue that empathy is a prosocial emotion implicated in the evolution of cooperation but is insufficiently addressed with respect to warfare. Straight’s chapter aims to rectify that shortcoming in the research, presenting findings of an empathy experiment conducted with Samburu warriors (lmurran), who are young unmarried men universally initiated into warriorhood in their teens and twenties. Using realistic narratives of injury during organized raiding, the study elicited self-ratings of empathy toward fellow Samburu in comparison to ethnic enemies. The results showed no statistically significant differences between Samburu empathy toward their fellows versus enemies. However, the study did find a statistically significant association between affective-emotional self-ratings (putting oneself into another’s shoes) and the number of raids the warrior had experienced. Straight situates these results within anthropological, psychological, and neuroscientific studies of empathy and cooperation, and she also highlights Samburu ambivalence toward killing as evidenced in oral traditions and cleansing practices, drawing attention to the behavior of warzone mercy—sparing enemies during coalitional lethal violence. Pointing to empathy’s Janus-faced nature of potentially inducing altruistic helping for any human or, conversely, motivating individuals to harm one individual or group in the name of protecting another, her chapter concludes that some degree of empathy toward enemies is unsurprising. Empathy is at the core of warfare’s moral conflict. Humans kill, but they do so at a cost to themselves that encompasses the psychological, culturally metaphysical, and physiological. Empathy studies can reveal the mechanisms for the emotional costs of warfare and their physiological entailments. This study corrects some of the misguided understandings of human conflict, particularly those that assume intrinsically aggressive traits in those engaged in forms of human conflict.

As a collection, these essays provide numerous lessons for engaging the debate about human conflict. By tracing back to the earliest roots of human conflict in the Paleolithic and Neolithic eras, questions about evolutionary forces and selective adaptations arise, and we begin to think about the deep-seated traits that have been forged in human beings over thousands of generations. The relation of evolutionary explanation to moral theory also emerges as a source of further debate, especially in connection to the cultural influence of honor ideology as it emerges as a potent force in human behavior. The essay focused on medieval Ireland turns our attention geographically and historically to the European context, but it also introduces a different method of study: ethnohistory. Throughout each of these studies, the web of violence approach provides a useful way to understand the historical events and to recognize some of the adaptations that persevere from earlier generations. Meanwhile, the study of Ireland brings the political dimension to light, showing how conflicts may generate new forms of power relations as the conflicts grow in size and complexity. Turning to Indonesia, the essay on the Western Dani emphasizes cross-cultural comparisons by analyzing native forms of conflict and the results of later contact with Europeans. This essay also adds methodological lessons to the study of human conflict, providing ways to challenge previous interpretations of the history. Finally, the essays on Brazil and Africa bring us into contemporary times, and they explicitly raise a set of complex moral questions about human conflict: What role does emotion play in moral action? How does moral agency operate within a system of cultural and historical forces? How do subjects justify assigning blame for moral failings? What are the prospects for moral improvement? The essays in this volume raise these questions and many more, and they offer rigorous scholarly methods for addressing them.

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