The Yanomamö — the fierce people — don’t like to fight actually, Napoleon Chagnon says:
They prefer to be friendly, amicable, and live life in harmony. But they’re caught in a conundrum of the following sort. The only way you can live that nice happy free life is if you’re in a small community, like 25 people, most of whom are children. So everything is happy and friendly. People get along with each other. But a village of 25 people is extremely vulnerable to raids from the outside, and the men will come in and steal the women, and send the men packing, or shoot the men and take the women. So they’re constantly being pressured to maximize the size of their village. And as you increase the number of people in the village, you get increasing amounts of conflict.
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And occasionally they’ll explain to me, I mean the question I always ask in all villages, why did such and such a group fission away from such and such a group? And occasionally they’ll say, “We’ve just got so damn many people that we’re on each other’s nerves all the time, so we just split apart.” But when the intensity of warfare is high, it would be really hazardous to split apart. And what I often found is, you know, the garden that might be 20 acres large, this is a big garden, and a fight might occur in the village that might be 200 people, and instead of picking up and moving the next valley over, they can’t, because they’re too dependent on their gardens. So they split the group into two parts, each locating in a different part of the garden. Then they begin transplanting their plantain cuttings, their banana cuttings, and tubers to some other location, maybe a day’s walk away, until they get that garden developed to the point that it can feed them. Then they move away. But they may rejoin and move away again.
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Big villages lord over small villages. So if you’re seeking an ally who will protect you from the people up the hill who are bigger than you, you’re at a disadvantage because in order to get allies, you’ve got to give women to them. It’s an economics game where the smaller village has to pay up front for the privileges of the alliance, and the bigger village tends to default on many of its agreements. So big villages tend to exploit small villages. It’s always a good idea to live in a big village; however, it’s like living in a powder keg.
Please tell me why do I think the author would not be so understanding and matter of fact describing, say the Reconquista or the quarrels of greek city states?
LMN, from what I’ve read Dr. Chagnon might be one of the few modern scholars of his field who would describe those things with an equivalent level of understanding.
Granted, Scipio. But even he might feel quite free to throw adjectives around, much like late 19th century writers threw words like savage around quite cavalierly.
As to his successors…
This explains quite well why early great states, such as the Egyptian Old State, didn’t need any military technology.
When a king could govern hundreds of villages and keep them in peace, he didn’t need anything special to conquer or destroy individual squabbling tribes similar to Yanomamo. Masses of conscripted men with bows and clubs were quite enough.
Such tribes are the natural state of humanity. The great states are very much unnatural.
However, in the modern times the question what keeps those states together was avoided by nearly all researchers. Voegelin is one of the few who wrote on this topic.