Abstract
Raymond Kelly’s widely cited Warless Societies and the Origin of War (University of Michigan Press, 2000) seeks to explain the origins of two central signatures of human society: war and segmented—i.e., multilevel—societies. Both, he argues, arose with the emergence of a social-substitutability principle, a rule that establishes a collective identity among a set of individuals such that any one member becomes equivalent to, and responsible for the actions of, the others. This principle emerged during the Holocene, when population increase gave rise to the first lethal ambushes. By its nature, ambush obscures attackers’ identities. Those attempting to retaliate for the ambush were therefore obliged to target members of the ambushers’ group indiscriminately—i.e., based on a social-substitutability principle. Kelly’s proposals draw welcome attention to a widespread, deeply influential, and unsettling human behavior, the disposition to hold everyone in a group culpable for the actions of a few, a proclivity that all too often results in mass slaughter. His general argument, however, is logically and empirically deficient, and cross-cultural evidence on ambush in contact-era New Guinea undermines his anonymity-of-ambush hypothesis. What then accounts for war and multilevel society? The New Guinea evidence strongly supports a contention that social-substitutability behavior arose not from offensive military action (i.e., ambush) but from the defensive military response to ambush. These findings render the social-substitutability argument’s unconventional definition of war superfluous, undermine its chronology for the emergence of war, and underwrite an alternative scenario for the origins of multilevel, segmented society.
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The datasets analyzed in this submission are available in the Electronic Supplementary Material (ESM) file associated with this contribution.
Notes
Although unsegmented societies are all foragers, Kelly is at pains to emphasize that not all forager societies are unsegmented. This is an important stipulation because it excludes as valid pre-Holocene analogues fishing-dependent and equestrian forager societies, which are widely recognized as segmented societies inclined to warfare (e.g., Kelly, 2013, pp. 205–6, 241–68). This proviso also protects his hypothesis from familiar criticisms that historically known hunter-gatherer analogues are heavily skewed towards groups in marginal environments: so long as the groups at issue are unsegmented, the hypothesis applies to foragers in both “rich and sparse environments” (Kelly, 2000, p. 129).
Kelly also draws on Ericksen and Horton’s (1992) cross-cultural survey of kin-group vengeance to support his claim that, in “unsegmented societies…[r]etaliatory vengeance is only directed against the perpetrator of a homicide (or an injury or insult), not against a member of the perpetrator’s family, bilateral kindred, or local group” (2000, p. 54). The survey included all eight of the societies in Kelly’s “unsegmented” sample, but it contains two flaws. First, the survey investigates how vengeance should be organized and targeted, not how it actually was. Second, the data support Kelly’s claim in just two instances: Copper Eskimo and Yahgan ideology stipulated that vengeance should be taken only on a malefactor, not his or her affiliates. The remaining six cases were classified as practicing an ideology of “Individual Self-Redress”—in other words, “the responses of individuals to transgressions are determined on a case by case basis (i.e., self-redress)” (Ericksen & Horton, 1992, pp. 61–62). This explanation is less than enlightening, but it seems that these groups lacked an ideology of group-responsibility for taking vengeance, and Ericksen and Horton presumed that they therefore also lacked an equivalent group-ideology for targeting vengeance, an assumption that does not necessarily follow.
As frontline defenders against attack, males bore a heavier mortal toll, falling in 232 (86%) of actions and making up 63% of the 931 victims.
The only other behavior of New Guinea polities noted ethnographically is that they mounted ceremonial displays, a feature congruent with evidence that ceremonial displays in New Guinea functioned to deter attacks by serving as honest signals of fighting strength (Roscoe, 2009, pp. 89–101).
What went for the egalitarian and trans-egalitarian polities of New Guinea may also apply to hierarchically organized polities. Some political scientists propose that, as Tilly put it, “War made the state, and the state made war” (1975, p. 74; see also Collins, 1999; Hintze, 1994, p. 178; Porter, 1994, p. 1; Skocpol, 1979, p. 22). These studies fail to address whether the state is forged on the anvil of offensive warfare, defensive warfare, or both, but evidence suggests that, as in New Guinea, defensive concerns were the main driver. In the case of the United States, for example, a rare instance in which a documentary record of state formation exists, the very first proposal presented to the Constitutional Convention concerned the defensive benefits of union: Jay’s “Concerning Dangers from Foreign Force and Influence” (Federalist 2 through 5; see https://guides.loc.gov/federalist-papers/full-text). “Let us therefore proceed to examine whether the people are not right in their opinion that a cordial Union, under an efficient national government, affords them the best security that can be devised against HOSTILITIES from abroad” (Jay, Federalist 3; emphasis in original). In fact, of the first 36 articles in The Federalist, 25 stressed the issue of national security (Langton, 1988). Similarly, Cronin (1999) attributes the unification of Italy to the threat of Austrian domination and Parent (2011, p. 91; see also Birch, 2022) the formation of Switzerland to foreign threats.
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Acknowledgements
Warmest thanks to Ulrike Claas, Ray Hames, and Terence Hays for extremely helpful comments on previous draughts. I particularly appreciate the extensive comments and suggestions of two anonymous reviewers, both of whom went far beyond the duties of a reviewer to improve this contribution. My thanks as well to Human Nature’s editor for his encouragement. I must emphasize that none of these people bears any responsibility for mistakes I have made or the arguments I present.
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Roscoe, P. Social Substitutability and the Emergence of War and Segmental, Multilevel Society. Hum Nat 34, 621–643 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12110-023-09465-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12110-023-09465-z