Ritual warfare (sometimes called endemic warfare) is a state of continual or frequent warfare, such as is found in (but not limited to) some tribe societies.
Description
Ritual fighting (or
ritual battle or
ritual warfare) permits the display of
courage, masculinity, and the expression of emotion while resulting in relatively few wounds and even fewer deaths. Thus such a practice can be viewed as a form of conflict-resolution and/or as a psycho-social exercise. Native Americans often engaged in this activity, but the frequency of warfare in most
hunter-gatherer cultures is a matter of dispute.
Examples
Warfare is known to every tribal society, but some societies developed a particular emphasis of warrior culture. Historical examples include the
Nuer people of
South Sudan,
the
Maasai people of East Africa,
the
Zulu people of southeastern Africa,
the
Iban people of Borneo,
the
Naga people of Northeast India and Myanmar, the Māori of
New Zealand, the
Dugum Dani of Papua,
the
Mapuche of Patagonia,
and the
Yanomami (dubbed "the Fierce People") of the Amazon.
The culture of inter-tribal warfare has long been present in
New Guinea.
Communal societies are well capable of escalation to all-out wars of annihilation between tribes. Thus, in Amazon Basin, there was perpetual animosity between the neighboring tribes of the Jivaroan peoples. A fundamental difference between wars enacted within the same tribe and against neighboring tribes is such that "wars between different tribes are in principle wars of extermination".
It is documented that large war parties of the Bororo, Kayapo, Munduruku, Guaraní and Tupi people conducted long-distance raids across the interior of Brazil. Most Bororo groups were continually at war with their neighbors.
The Yanomami of Amazonas traditionally practiced a system of escalation of violence in several discrete stages.
The chest-pounding duel, the side-slapping duel, the club fight, and the spear-throwing fight. Further escalation results in raiding parties with the purpose of killing at least one member of the hostile faction. Finally, the highest stage of escalation is Nomohoni or all-out massacres brought about by treachery.
Similar customs were known to the Dugum Dani and the Chimbu of New Guinea, the Nuer of Sudan and the North American Plains Indians. Among the Chimbu and the Dugum Dani, pig theft was the most common cause of conflict, even more frequent than abduction of women, while among the Yanomamö, the most frequent initial cause of warfare was accusations of sorcery. Warfare serves the function of easing intra-group tensions and has aspects of a game, or "overenthusiastic football".
See also
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Captives in American Indian Wars
-
Communal violence
-
Flower war
-
Irregular warfare
-
Mock combat
-
Napoleon Chagnon
-
Prehistoric warfare
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Religion and violence
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Ethnic violence in Papua New Guinea
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Sudanese nomadic conflicts
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Ethnic violence in South Sudan
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Oromo–Somali clashes
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Tinku
-
War dance
Further reading
-
Zimmerman, L. The Crow Creek Site Massacre: A Preliminary Report, US Army Corps of Engineers, Omaha District, 1981.
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Chagnon, N. The Yanomamo, Holt, Rinehart & Winston,1983.
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Keeley, Lawrence. War Before Civilization, Oxford University Press, 1996.
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Timothy Pauketat North American Archaeology 2005. Blackwell Publishing.
-
Wade, Nicholas. Before the Dawn, Penguin: New York 2006.
-
S. A. LeBlanc, Prehistoric Warfare in the American Southwest, University of Utah Press (1999).
-
Guy Halsall, 'Anthropology and the Study of Pre-Conquest Warfare and Society: The Ritual War in Anglo-Saxon England' in *Hawkes (ed.), Weapons and Warfare in Anglo-Saxon England (1989), 155–177.
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Diamond, Jared. The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies?, Viking. New York, 2012. pp. 79–129
External links
