Greendruid
Jan 15th 2009, 01:44 AM
We are not the only species that wages war, however-- our closest relative, the chimpanzee, also engages in tribal warfare. Something interesting in chimpanzee warfare is the fact that warring chimps fight differently than chimps engaging in dominance struggles. Warring chimps attack their enemies more akin to how they hunt for food-- they attack them like non-chimps-- and often continue to display aggression by mutilating corpses.
The fact that violence and warfare occur universally in all human cultures-- though it is admittedly rarer in some-- indicates to me that it is not a cultural phenomenon.
On a different point, you mention the violence necessary for eating meat. But in our society, how many people actually get to engage in that violence? Aside from professionals and dedicated hunters, very few people have a hand in stalking, killing, or dressing their own meat.
Combine that with widespread cultural prohibitions against fighting-- even non-lethal fighting with fists-- and the fact that, upon reaching adulthood, most people only watch sports, you have millions and millions of people with almost no experience with or outlet for their natural violent impulses.
Do you not need it, or do you suppress your need for it in the same fashion that Catholic priests suppress their need for sex, and then deny that it is a human need?
I saw this post a while back and wanted to weigh in on it considering that it touches a topic of what I do for a living. However, I think it warrants a separate post because I think my comments will bring the discussion outside of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. Out of everyone on the board I'm going to bet that as a physical anthropologist I've seen more wild and captive chimpanzee footage than anyone else. I've seen stuff that's never been produced for public consumption and I've seen the slicker versions of stuff produced for the Animal Planet channel.
I think that chimpanzees are a very useful species to study in order for us to learn about ourselves. Our natural relationship to them is undeniable if you accept the validity of all major methods of comparisons available to biology, physiology and chemistry today.
In terms of chimpanzee behaviour though, this is where I have a problem making direct comparisons to humans. Korimyr points out the presence of what he refers to as "inter-tribal warfare" amongst chimpanzees and I wanted to address this framing of the behaviour and the problems inherent in doing so. One of the things that is extremely difficult, and maybe even impossible for us to do is to describe what other animals do in non-human terms. This is the problem early anthropologist's recognised as a conflict between emic and etic perspectives of another culture. The emic being the insider and the etic being the outsider perspectives. The anthropologist could live with and observe the customs and rituals of another human group and yet still be unable to describe what (s)he was seeing in terms other than what (s)he used in her/his own language and using her/his own cultural reference points.
We have this same problem with other animals and we even ignore it when describing those all too human characteristics of chimpanzees or other "great apes". However, the consequence is the same. We are not chimpanzees and to describe their behaviours in human terms causes us to make the error of anthropomorphising. Likewise, we have to be overly cautious not to commit what the Belgian anthropologist Frans de Waal calls "anthropodenial", that is the opposite of anthropomorphising. We cannot deny the similarities in our most closely related cousins such as the chimpanzees and bonobos.
For us to characterise the undoubted and unquestionable killing of chimpanzees from outgroups by chimpanzees from ingroups as tribal warfare is putting a human set of terms on the situation. This assumes a few things that are dangerous to assume:
1) That chimpanzees organise themselves and recognise their organisation as a tribe in human terms
2) That chimpanzees know the violence they commit in these circumstances as warfare and that they understand their actions as warfare in the way that humans characterise warfare
Even we are careful about the use of both of these terms when describing ourselves.
As for the frequency of the occurence of violence in our multitude of various cultures, you can bet this is indeed a human universal. So is an incest taboo, so is religion, so is marriage, and there are many others that every culture ever encountered by anthropologists have as part of their cultural practices. This does not mean that these are biological or innate. In fact, the only common thread to all of these is the existence of a single thing that is the central component of my own dear discipline - culture.
The one thing that makes us different in quantity rather than kind from the chimpanzee and all the other animals is our utter reliance on culture as the best means of adaptation. It is the only biologically based characteristic of our species that is in fact a non-biologically based method of adaptation. In other words, we require a biological component to have culture (a big, complex brain) but the means of adaptation the this biological component comes up with the adapt to any situation we are in is non-biological. Culture is the main means and it is, I'm convinced, the hardest thing in the world to wrap one's mind around. I would submit that when we see similarities or even universals in humans, this is evidence not of an instinct (because we really don't have these) or some innate characteristic of our humanness but rather the result of our one common biologically-based characteristic of Culture.
The fact that violence and warfare occur universally in all human cultures-- though it is admittedly rarer in some-- indicates to me that it is not a cultural phenomenon.
On a different point, you mention the violence necessary for eating meat. But in our society, how many people actually get to engage in that violence? Aside from professionals and dedicated hunters, very few people have a hand in stalking, killing, or dressing their own meat.
Combine that with widespread cultural prohibitions against fighting-- even non-lethal fighting with fists-- and the fact that, upon reaching adulthood, most people only watch sports, you have millions and millions of people with almost no experience with or outlet for their natural violent impulses.
Do you not need it, or do you suppress your need for it in the same fashion that Catholic priests suppress their need for sex, and then deny that it is a human need?
I saw this post a while back and wanted to weigh in on it considering that it touches a topic of what I do for a living. However, I think it warrants a separate post because I think my comments will bring the discussion outside of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. Out of everyone on the board I'm going to bet that as a physical anthropologist I've seen more wild and captive chimpanzee footage than anyone else. I've seen stuff that's never been produced for public consumption and I've seen the slicker versions of stuff produced for the Animal Planet channel.
I think that chimpanzees are a very useful species to study in order for us to learn about ourselves. Our natural relationship to them is undeniable if you accept the validity of all major methods of comparisons available to biology, physiology and chemistry today.
In terms of chimpanzee behaviour though, this is where I have a problem making direct comparisons to humans. Korimyr points out the presence of what he refers to as "inter-tribal warfare" amongst chimpanzees and I wanted to address this framing of the behaviour and the problems inherent in doing so. One of the things that is extremely difficult, and maybe even impossible for us to do is to describe what other animals do in non-human terms. This is the problem early anthropologist's recognised as a conflict between emic and etic perspectives of another culture. The emic being the insider and the etic being the outsider perspectives. The anthropologist could live with and observe the customs and rituals of another human group and yet still be unable to describe what (s)he was seeing in terms other than what (s)he used in her/his own language and using her/his own cultural reference points.
We have this same problem with other animals and we even ignore it when describing those all too human characteristics of chimpanzees or other "great apes". However, the consequence is the same. We are not chimpanzees and to describe their behaviours in human terms causes us to make the error of anthropomorphising. Likewise, we have to be overly cautious not to commit what the Belgian anthropologist Frans de Waal calls "anthropodenial", that is the opposite of anthropomorphising. We cannot deny the similarities in our most closely related cousins such as the chimpanzees and bonobos.
For us to characterise the undoubted and unquestionable killing of chimpanzees from outgroups by chimpanzees from ingroups as tribal warfare is putting a human set of terms on the situation. This assumes a few things that are dangerous to assume:
1) That chimpanzees organise themselves and recognise their organisation as a tribe in human terms
2) That chimpanzees know the violence they commit in these circumstances as warfare and that they understand their actions as warfare in the way that humans characterise warfare
Even we are careful about the use of both of these terms when describing ourselves.
As for the frequency of the occurence of violence in our multitude of various cultures, you can bet this is indeed a human universal. So is an incest taboo, so is religion, so is marriage, and there are many others that every culture ever encountered by anthropologists have as part of their cultural practices. This does not mean that these are biological or innate. In fact, the only common thread to all of these is the existence of a single thing that is the central component of my own dear discipline - culture.
The one thing that makes us different in quantity rather than kind from the chimpanzee and all the other animals is our utter reliance on culture as the best means of adaptation. It is the only biologically based characteristic of our species that is in fact a non-biologically based method of adaptation. In other words, we require a biological component to have culture (a big, complex brain) but the means of adaptation the this biological component comes up with the adapt to any situation we are in is non-biological. Culture is the main means and it is, I'm convinced, the hardest thing in the world to wrap one's mind around. I would submit that when we see similarities or even universals in humans, this is evidence not of an instinct (because we really don't have these) or some innate characteristic of our humanness but rather the result of our one common biologically-based characteristic of Culture.