War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage Author: Visit Amazon's Lawrence H. Keeley Page | Language: English | ISBN:
0195091124 | Format: PDF
War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage Description
Amazon.com Review
Throughout much of this century the notion has been gaining ground, bolstered by genocide and Holocaust, that modern warfare is more barbaric than war has ever been. Alongside this view has grown a romantic impression that primitive cultures were, and are, more peaceful. Lawrence Keeley, an anthropologist at the University of Illinois, aims to dispel this inversion of the connotations of "civilization." He cites the historical evidence that humans have always been just as bloodthirsty as they are today, and that indeed in the days when death was less clinical it was often nastier. War, it seems, has always been with us.
Review
"The evidence that Mr. Keeley marshals is vivid, varied, and often complex."--The New York Times Book Review
"[Keeley] skillfully shows that pre-state peoples fought as cleverly and cruelly as we moderns, and for the same ostensibly `rational'reasons. The `primitives' were not innocent, nor are we moderns uniquely depraved."--Lingua Franca
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- Hardcover: 272 pages
- Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA; y First edition edition (February 22, 1996)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0195091124
- ISBN-13: 978-0195091120
- Product Dimensions: 1.2 x 6.5 x 10 inches
- Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
"In the aftermath of the Battle of Little Bighorn, Indian women used marrow-cracking mallets to pound the faces of dead soldiers into pulp." - Lawrence H. Keeley
For Lawrence Keeley, the study of prehistory (a period which, for some peoples, ended only a few dozen years ago) has been torn between two paradigms: the Hobbesian and the Rousseauian. According to the former, primitives are warlike, and need the institution of the state to put an end to the nastiness and brutishness of their lives. According to the latter, civilization is the corrupter, subverting the harmony and peacefulness of primitive life with overpopulation, greed and the encouragement of exploitative behaviour.
For several decades, the Rousseauian myth has ruled academia, where swords have been "beaten into metaphors": omnipresent fortifications are interpreted as expressions of "the symbolism of exclusion" and weapons as a form of money or status symbols, so that- to paraphrase Keeley- the obviously bellicose becomes the arcanely peaceable.
But what the civilization-bashers had not counted on was that their Big Lie would ultimately be exposed by objective scientists working on the basis of incontrovertible facts: the archeologists, whose patient, reality-oriented detective work completely refutes the fashionable whitewashing of primitive peoples.
What bones tell us is that wars were more common among the primitives than among modern nations, that proportionately more people were involved in them and died in them. Admittedly, those wars were waged on a smaller scale than modern man's, because primitive economies could neither support the large populations nor the impressive logistics that enable modern nations to sustain long-term and wide-ranging war efforts.
In an era where cooperation, compassion and empathy are touted as neglected, even denied, aspects of human behavior, it is refreshing to have someone point out in vivid detail that humans are neither intrinsically violent nor non-violent but that our prehistoric past is littered with evidence of some pretty nasty behavior. Frans de Waal would have our monkey heritage rife with empathy in contrast to what he felt had been a universal portrayal of humans as just another species in the war of one against all. The Age of Empathy: Nature's Lessons for a Kinder Society The Dalai Lama sees us as intrinsically compassionate. Now Keely bludgeons us with the evidence that prehistoric folk may have been proportionately more violent than the Nazi's or the US in Vietnam. Those ancestors of ours engaged in warfare and did it with all the vigor their fragile productive systems and hand-held weapons allowed them. Example after example of archeological and recent anthropological evidence are presented of slaughter, torture, resource devastation, slavery, etc. and the proportion of victims was much higher than in modern warfare.
Prehistoric folk exercised tactical planning, invasion, denial of sustenance, all the practical aspects of war. The greatest difference between then and now is that they did it in more frequent and shorter encounters and they did not engage in warfare to dominate another people as tax farmers for food, male producers or canon fodder. They killed their male enemies right away or took them home to be tortured and maybe consumed. The extent to which captives were used as food is not clear.
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