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

209 Pages·2020·7.258 MB·English

by  William P. Kiblinger

William P. Kiblinger  Editor
Human Conflict
from Neanderthals
to the Samburu:
Structure and
Agency in Webs
of Violence
Human Conflict from Neanderthals to the
Samburu: Structure and Agency in Webs
of Violence
William P. Kiblinger
Editor
Human Conflict from
Neanderthals to the
Samburu: Structure and
Agency in Webs of Violence
Editor
William P. Kiblinger
Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies
Winthrop University
Rock Hill, SC, USA
ISBN 978-3-030-46823-1 ISBN 978-3-030-46824-8 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46824-8
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature
Switzerland AG 2020
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Foreword
The collection of essays in this volume derives largely from ongoing research that
has been presented by a variety of anthropologists, sociologists, historians, and
paleo-anthropologists around the globe at the biennial Warfare, Environment, Social
Inequality, and Peace Studies (WESIPS) 2015 Conference held at the Center for
Cross-Cultural Study in Seville, Spain.1 From this group of connected scholars, a
call for similar-minded scholars to contribute to the volume was made, yielding the
collection of chapters in this volume. The scholars involved in this volume recog-
nize that warfare, environmental degradation, and social inequality have brought
much suffering to humankind, but that too often scholarly attempts at understanding
the nature of these problems have been conducted through the prisms of their
respective disciplines. In order to facilitate interdisciplinary cross-fertilization, the
conference and the scholarship that grows from it address the underlying causes of
warfare, environmental degradation, and social inequality from a host of interdisci-
plinary and theoretical perspectives with the ultimate goal of uncovering effective
solutions to foster peace, altruism, cooperation, social equality, and sustainable use
of natural resources.
To that end, the essays in this volume aim to satisfy the most demanding stan-
dards and expectations of scholarly research for anthropologists, but they also aspire
to connect the anthropological inquiry into human conflict to broader modes of
inquiry beyond the field. The scholars providing the substantive research in the vol-
ume represent an extensive variety of subfields in anthropology, ranging widely in
the time periods, cultures, and geographies that they study. However, all share a
common concern to understand the roots, causes, and effects of human conflict as
well as ways to address those problems. The editor of the volume, Dr. William
Kiblinger (Winthrop University), brings an outside perspective to the entire project,
casting the questions in new light and opening up connections for scholars to recog-
nize in other disciplines such as sociology, religious studies, psychology,
1 Since 2017, the WESIPS acronym stands for “Warfare, Environment, Social Inequality, and
Pro-Sociability.”
v
vi Foreword
evolutionary biology, and philosophical ethics. Because of this innovative interdis-
ciplinary approach, the volume has the potential to reach a broad audience of schol-
ars and non-scholars alike.
Winthrop University Richard J. Chacon,
Rock Hill, SC, USA
Contents
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
William P. Kiblinger
The Mammoth Steppe in Relation to the Fate
of Modern Humans and Neanderthals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
Valerius Geist
The Meaning of Projectile Points in the Late Neolithic of the Northern
Levant: A Case Study from the Settlement of Shir, Syria . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
Laura Dietrich, Dörte Rokitta-Krumnow, and Oliver Dietrich
Was There a Method to Their Madness? Warfare, Alliance Formation,
and the Origins of the Irish Medieval State . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39
D. Blair Gibson
Seeking Justice, Preserving Honor: War and Peace Among
the Western Dani . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57
Douglas Hayward
Forced Labor and Disciplinary Control: A History of Indigenous
Peoples’ Treatment and Agency in the City of Manaus, Brazil . . . . . . . . . 81
Ana Luiza M. Soares
Culpability for Violence in the Congo:
Lessons from the Crisis of 1960–1965 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105
A. C. Roosevelt
Killing, Mercy, and Empathic Emotions:
The Emotional Lives of East African Warriors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 175
Bilinda Straight, Amy Naugle, Jen Farman, Cecilia Root,
Stephen Lekalgitele, and Charles Owuor Olungah
Conclusions and Commentary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 193
William P. Kiblinger
vii
Introduction
William P. Kiblinger
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, inter-
tribal, 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 overem-
phasis on the empirical in an effort to stay grounded in the reality of human experi-
ence 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 explana-
tion but often becomes too speculative to verify. In the first case, when we concen-
trate 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
W. P. Kiblinger (*)
Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, Winthrop University, Rock Hill, SC, USA
e-mail: [email protected]
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to 1
Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
W. P. Kiblinger (ed.), Human Conflict from Neanderthals to the Samburu:
Structure and Agency in Webs of Violence,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46824-8_1
2 W. P. Kiblinger
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 signifi-
cance” 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 empiri-
cal 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 ‘evi-
dent’ interpretation becomes a valid ‘understandable explanation’” (Apel 1987:131).
If this volume is to make progress in understanding human conflict, its interpreta-
tions must always be checked by the usual methods of anthropology, but its inter-
pretations 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 interdis-
ciplinary 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, psychol-
ogy, 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 inter-
preting 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 physio-
logical 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 situa-
tions in which these natural characteristics manifest themselves.
Introduction 3
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 think-
ing 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 cul-
tures (Engel Merry 2009). To amplify this point, researchers have discovered that
intrafamilial violence against women and children can be linked to the broader soci-
ety’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 sub-
groups within the society), as is often found in theorizing about violence in crimi-
nology (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 vol-
ume 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 conse-
quential 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 vol-
ume 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