Arcadia; the pastoral utopia where people lived a
simpler life in harmony with each other and nature. No war or violence of any kind; just happy
healthy people living the good life. The idea of Arcadia has ancient origins. We
can find references to a kind of Arcadia in the writings of the ancient Greeks
(Aristophanes) and Romans (Tacitus) and we can see the concept even in the
biblical reference to Eden. We can still see the idea of Acadia today in the
writings of Tönnies, Durkheim and Marx. [Edge]
In the UK, we have the idea of “Merry England”, a type of Arcadia which forms
the foundation of the Shire in Lord of the Rings.
We look around the world today and we can find
evidence of real peaceful people. Primitive people who live without violence,
without war and in harmony with the forest around them; giving weight to the
idea that we, as a species, lived more peaceful and harmonious in the past than
today. We see our cities and our civilisation as opposite to the Acadia ideal
we lost in the past; cities full of crime and abuse and our nations going to
war at, in what appears, an ever increasing rate. No wonder that people harken
back to the good old days.
Real Peaceful People
Yet the evidence we have appears to suggest the
opposite; that people experienced more violence in the past than today. Evidence
from archaeology, anthropology, sociology, psychology and even ethnography all
point towards a more violent past. We can even question the idea of “real”
peaceful primitive people.
“Classical Period (c. 1920-c.
1960)
This periodization is taken directly
from the writings of George Stocking, who refers to this 40-year span of time
as the Classical Period (1976, 1989:210). It is, of course, the period in
American anthropology dominated by Franz Boas and his students.
Anti-evolutionism reached its peak and cultural relativism flourished. It was
also the period in which "the myth of the peaceful savage" emerged,
to use the subtitle of archaeologist Lawrence Keeley's book (1996). The myth is
described by Keeley as the erroneous belief that primitive warfare—a term used
by Keeley—is desultory, ineffective, "unprofessional," and unserious
(1996:11). The myth includes three aspects: the notion of prehistoric peace or
the "pacified past" (prehistoric peoples did not have warfare)
(1996:17-24), the belief that hunter-gatherers or band-level societies did not
engage in warfare (disputed by Ember [1978] and Dentan [1988]),
and the assumption that when war
occurred among tribal level societies it was ritualistic, game-like in
nature—with the first wounding the battle would stop (Chappie and Coon
1942:616,628-635; Chappie and Coon, however, do not consider these assertions
to be a myth). Perhaps the most succinct statement of the third aspect of the
myth appears in the next period (Naroll 1966:17):
surprise is not a universally
applied military tactic. Some primitive tribes simply line up at extreme
missile range work
up from hurling insults to hurling rocks at each other; this tournament-like
war usually ends when the first enemy is killed. This kind of combat is a prearranged
tryst, like duels under the European code duello,
I know of no tribe that fits this
description.” [Otte2]
Much of the evidence for “real” peaceful people
comes from ethnographic studies conducted before 1980. During the late 1970s
and into the 1980s they came in to question with regard to their reliability
and validity. [Goet, Hamm]
“Although problems of reliability and validity have
been explored thoroughly by experimenters and others quantities researchers,
their treatment by ethnographers has been sporadic.” [Goet]
Although ethnographers have many problems with their
work, two of the most import has to do with time for learning the culture and
their own cultural bias. Ethnographers
make conclusions biased on a few years study. Such a few years often falls far
short of the time a person really needs to learn a new language and
culture. Yet they make general
conclusions based on a small window into a culture. We can take Colin
Turnbull’s work on the Mbuti pygmies and the Ik peoples in Africa. He studied
the Mbuti for three years and then the Ik people and concluded the Mbuti
exemplify real peaceful people and the Ik the opposite. Yet, other studies show
that the Mbuti do have a history of violence and warfare and the violence of the
Ik people resulted from a period of starvation, once their food supply recover
they reverted to a more peaceful way of life. [Edge] As another example,
Elizabeth Marshall’s work on the Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert, where she
described them as a “harmless people”. Yet, other studies show they have a
higher murder rate. [MarFry] Or we could look at another “real” peaceful people
like the Semai people of Malaya who also carry out murders. [Edge, Fabb]
Either the evidence shows “real” peaceful people as
having some degree of violence or we have insufficient evidence to support the
“real” peaceful conclusion. [Edge]
Bias in ethnographic studies can go either way.
Either the ethnographer inappropriately interprets actions in terms of our own
culture or they dismiss actions as they assume they result for their own
cultural bias. For example, ethnographers can dismiss actions of violence in
primitive people as resulting from Western influence and therefore not a result
of the people themselves.
“This may sometimes occur because anthropologists
believe that the cruel, harmful, or ineffective practices they see in a folk
society are the result of social disorganisation brought about by colonialism”
[Edge]
Of cause, if you rationalise away violence in a
primitive people only a “real” peaceful people remain!
“… with the re-analysis of hunter-gatherer and
horticultural population dynamics, it has become apparent that many pre-state
societies do not fit their peaceful “harmless” stereotype. … It is evident that
one reason for the underestimation of the level of violence and homicide in
pre-state societies relates to past theoretical expectations about the
harmonious nature of hunter-gatherer societies” [MarFra]
Violent People, Peaceful People
At this point we should look at what we mean with
the terms “violent people” and “peaceful people”. We could easily see a people
as violent [Eckh]; if we see murders or warfare then we class the people as
violent. However, we have more
difficulty with the term “peaceful people”. People do not spend all day, every
day, 365 days a year, year in, year out engaged in violence.
“… there is great variability among recently observed
hunter-gatherers in terms of the frequency of war (Otterbein 1991), homicide,
and capital punishment (Otterbein 1988a).” [Otte]
Even the most violent people spend most of their
time at peace and we humans have various methods of resolving conflicts without
the resort to violence. So, if we observe a group of people not engaging in
violence we cannot conclude that they exemplify a “real” peaceful people. But even engaging in regular warfare does not
make a people violent. For example, if the warfare has a defensive nature. In the end, what differs a peaceful people
from a violent people comes down to degrees. “Peaceful” people use violence to
a lesser degree than “violent” people and more defensive violence than
offensive violence.
“”The question has been raised whether the
traditional view of early society as one of constant warfare is really
justified by the facts. There is, in fact, no doubt that to speak of a state of
war as normal is in general a gross exaggeration,” Hobhouse, Wheeler and Ginsberg (1915)
conclude in their extensive survey of some 650 primitive peoples. Similarly,
Quincy Wright (1942) stated “No general golden age of peace existed at any
stage of human history nor did any general iron age war. Neither the
Rousseauian nor the Hobbesian concept of natural man is adequate”” [MarFra]
“War like people are capable of peacefulness, while
peaceable people are capable of waging war under the appropriate circumstances
… Many people who value peace positively still have relatively high rates of
intergroup violence, e.g., Gebusi of New Guinean (Knauft 1987) and San
(“Bushmen”) of Africa (e.g., Thomas 1994).” [EibSal]
Evidence for a More Violence Past
The evidence for a more violent pass comes from a
multiple of sources. Archaeology, for
example, gives plenty of examples for violence with fortifications, weapons,
bodies and evidence of mass murders and genocide. [MarFra] Unlike modern
warfare where we try and minimise the killing of non-combatants, ancient
warfare did not appear to have such restrictions as we find evidence of whole
villages wiped out; men, women and children.
“Archaeologically, there are four basic sources on prehistoric
violence: skeletal trauma, defensive architecture and settlement patterns,
weaponry and related artefacts and iconographic representations” [MarFra].
“Warfare played an important role in the structure
of historic Northwest Coast [of America] society and recent archaeological
research demonstrates that warfare has a long history in the region. The first evidence for conflict on the
Northwest Coast occurs by 3000 BC …” [MarFra].
Cave paints can show us glimpse of ancient warfare.
“Rock art in Arnhem Land, Northern Australia, shows
the development of armed combat over a 6000-year period (10,000 to 4000 years
ago).” [Otte]
Other evidence comes from our closet genetic
relative; the chimpanzee. Only two of the great apes engage in organise
warfare; us and the chimpanzees. Jane Goodall noted that young male chimpanzees
often display great keenness when it comes to joining in with an attack on a
neighbouring group. [EibSal] Evidence suggests that warfare goes back before
humans even evolved [McNe].
“We don’t know when human warfare --- defined as
socially sanctioned, organized, lethal intergroup conflict (Mead 1968) ---
originated. The earliest evidence of warfare among hominids comes from the
analysis of the fossil remains of six homo
antecessor --- an extinct hominid species that lived between 1.32 million
and 800,000 years ago …” [Pitm]
“Humans and chimpanzees are the
only members of the great ape family that engage in warfare (Goodall 1986,
503-14, 519-21; Wrangham 2006; Boesch and Boesch-Achermann 2000, 129-57). …
This implies that warfare among humans and chimpanzees originated in their
common ancestor that lived between approximately 13 and 7 million years ago,
and has been named as Pan prior (Wrangham 2001) and Chororaphithecus
abyssinicus (Suwa
et al. 2007).” [Pitm]
Conclusion
“Man is neither, by nature, peaceful nor warlike.
Some conditions lead to war, some do not.”[Otte]
Human begins have the potential
for violence and for war and we have the potential for peace too. We actually
spend more time at peace than war. The frequency of violence can change from
people to people or from time to time within the same people as does the nature
of the violence.
However, the idea of a golden age
in the past where people lived in harmony with one another does not stand;
Arcadia exemplifies a myth. We have, in general moved form a more violent past
to a more peaceful present. Understanding the myth of Arcadia and our
progression to less violence today becomes important if we want a more peaceful
future. If we believe in Arcadia and want to go backwards to a simpler past,
taking inspiration form “real” peaceful people we run the risk of deluding
ourselves and creating the opposite of what we aim for.
Instead of following the myth and
getting lost in the delusion of a golden age, we should look more at those
factors that increase peace; look at the evidence even if it doesn’t fit with
how we want to see the World. Why have we becomes more peaceful? What leads to
more peace at certain times and war at other times?
References
[Eckh] William Eckhardt. “Primitive
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[Otte2] Keith F. Otterbein.
“A History of Research on Warfare in
Anthropology”. American Anthropology. 10 [4]. Pp 794 – 805. 2000.
[Fabb] David Fabbro. “Peaceful
Societies: An Introduction”. Journal of Peace Research. No. 1 Vol. VX. 1978.
[Goet] Margaret D. LeCompte and
Judith Preissle Goetz. “Problems of Reliability and Validity in Ethnographic
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1982.
[Hamm] Martyn Hammersley.
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[Edge] Robert B. Edgerton. “Sick
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[McNe] William H. McNeill.
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[EibSal] Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt
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[MarFra] Ed. Debra L. Martin and
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