Funny Wars

[David Casseres]

Juan Cires Martinez sez

>I remember a spanish photographer that spent the last few years in Papua
>living and photographing the native tribes there telling how a war broke
>out between two tribes.  He asked for permision and went to the
>battlefield with a movie camera.  As he told it, he set up his
>equipement in the middle of the battlefield and watched as the two
>sides, twenty to thirty warriors each, spent two to three hours
>insulting each other.  When they got tired of this, a fight broke out
>between a few warriors on either side.  As they passed in front of the
>camera in their charge to attack the other side they slowed down and
>smiled to the camera.  The final body count was three warriors dead and
>a few wounded.

I believe this is completely typical of the "incessant tribal warfare" 
one reads about in several parts of the world.

I once traveled for a few days in the Papua New Guinea highlands, where 
the Stone Age was alive and well in many different ways.  On arrival in 
Goroka, a major town, we saw that many people had their faces painted 
yellow with ochre.  We learned that this signifies mourning, and that 
these people were a local tribe that had come to town to settle a tribal 
conflict in which one of their people had been killed.  The next day we 
saw several hundred people, half of them with ochred faces, sitting in a 
great circle under a big tree.  Someone was standing and talking to the 
people, and there was a pile of paper money in the middle of the circle.  
Everybody was very quiet and still, and I learned no more because I 
didn't want to be a snoop.

Next day we rode a rural bus through the countryside to Mt. Hagen, the 
other major town.  The bus had heavy mesh covering the windows, and 
someone told us that if we passed through an area where the people were 
at war with the bus driver's people, someone might shoot an arrow at the 
bus.

In other words, the level of violence during a "war" was unimpressive 
compared to what goes on every day in a moderately tough high school in 
the United States.

Of course there are also places where tribal warfare is limited in its 
genocidal scope only by insufficient supplies of weaponry from more 
advanced countries; and there have been tribes down through history that 
efficiently exterminated large populations of rival tribes.  But I think 
it is really clear that what we usually have in mind when we say "war" is 
by no means a constant of human history, in spite of diligent campaigns 
to teach us that it is and that we must accept it as the natural state of 
humanity.


Cheers,
David