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COPYRIGHT 2003 Natural History Magazine, Inc.
Thirty years ago all the anthropologists studying war would have fit into one small room. Granted--and guaranteed--that room would frequently erupt in heated debate, but few outside would notice or care. Tribal warfare? Exotic, maybe, but so what? Anthropologists see war as potentially lethal violence between two groups, no matter how small the groups or how few the casualties. But how much light could such a broad definition of conflict, or cases of precivilized human strife, shed on modern warfare, the struggles that have flared in Iraq, Kosovo, Rwanda, Vietnam, Korea--and on and on?
How times have changed! The anthropological study of war has expanded and matured. Ideas from academic debates are finding their way into foreign policy journals and, yes, the mass media. The questions raised by anthropologists and the once-academic disputes within the discipline have become important public issues, to be debated by pundits and politicians.
To appreciate how much things have changed, consider how the understanding of one famous ethnographic case has been transformed: that of the Yanomami of Venezuela and Brazil. Following the publication of Napoleon A. Chagnon's study Yanomamo: The Fierce People, in 1968, the book began to appear frequently and prominently on lists of readings for college students in introductory anthropology--often the only anthropology they would ever learn. And what an object lesson! Engaged in endless wars over women, status, and revenge, the Yanomami were supposed to exemplify the natural human condition of eons past. Some people took Chagnon's work to imply that aggression is in our genes--disturbing news if true.
In 1974 the anthropologist Marvin Harris offered a different view. Yanomami warfare, Harris argued, was an adaptive response from a population stressed by limited food resources, specifically game animals. But detailed examination of Yanomami ecology failed to support Harris's hypothesis.
In 1995, in Yanomami Warfare: A Political History, I described how the Yanomami have been coping with European intrusions since the 1700s. As I read the evidence, Yanomami wars were tightly linked to changes in the European presence. Recent wars, including the ones described by Chagnon, seemed to have been fought over access to steel tools and other goods distributed by Westerners. Yet despite such basic disagreements within anthropology, the discussion of the Yanomami remained confined to academic circles.
Then came a media frenzy. In the fall of 2000, Patrick Tierney, a journalist, published Darkness in El Dorado: How Scientists and Journalists Devastated the Amazon. The book essentially blamed Chagnon himself for instigating war. Now it was the anthropologists' turn to be fierce. Opponents and defenders of Chagnon exchanged bitter broadsides. Not a few anthropologists felt that the resident missionaries, for all their good intentions, were more at fault than any anthropologists. One outcome of the episode, though, is that no one paying attention to this controversy still claims that Yanomami wars can be understood without taking into account the tribe's highly disrupted historical circumstances.
What is more, studies that go far beyond the Yanomami are questioning the idea that war has always been part of the human condition. It looks as if, all around the world, what has...
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