Preprint of article published in:

JOURNAL OF ANTHROPOLOGICAL RESEARCH

(Formerly Southwestern Journal of Anthropology), Vol. 45, No. 2,

Summer 1989, pp. 159-177.

EXPLAINING WHY MARINGS FOUGHT

Andrew P. Vayda

Warfare among the Marings of New Guinea is reexamined to show that the original analysis

suffered from process reification and from the attribution of unwarranted or exaggerated

explanatory import to the territorial annexations which were occasional consequences of fighting.

Criticisms of the original analysis are shown to be defective also, and an appeal is made, on the

one hand, for greater attention to the variability and context-relatedness of purposeful human

behavior and, on the other hand, for a recognition that some differences in answers to why-

questions are a result of differences in assumptions about what the questions mean.

IN SEVERAL RECENT publications (Vayda 1986, 1987a, 1987b, 1988), I

have taken others to task for committing certain errors of

reification and fallacies of functional explanation which occur

also in some of my own studies that were published in the 1970s

(Vayda 1970, 1971, 1974, 1975, 1976). Warfare was the subject of

those studies, and I return to it here partly to end the

unseemliness of pointing the finger at the sins of others without

acknowledging my own.1 However, my principal reason for returning

to the subject is to deal with some issues of explanation which

are raised by certain criticisms of my earlier studies. Since the

main target of attacks by my staunchest critic, C. R. Hallpike

(1973, 1977b, 1986), has been my analysis of warfare among the

Marings of the Bismarck Mountains of Papua New Guinea (Vayda 1971,

1974, 1976), I use the Maring case here for illustrating both my

own past errors and some explanatory problems that remain. Like

some philosophers (Garfinkel 1981; Kincaid 1986; van Fraassen

1980), I will be concerned with explanations which are answers to

why-questions, and, further, I will be concerned to show that in

conformity with what has been called explanatory relativity, a question

such as why Marings fought can be given different correct answers,

depending on our assumptions about what the question means. This

will be made clearer after a summary of Maring warfare, a

discussion of how I erred in analyzing it, and a reconsideration

of land shortage as a cause of fighting by Maring groups.

2

THE MARING CASE2

My fieldwork among the Marings was conducted in the early and

mid 1960s. At that time the total Maring population of 7,000 was

unevenly distributed within a rugged forested area of 190 square

miles; in the more densely settled parts, a dozen autonomous local

groups ranged in size from about 200 to 850 people, but some

smaller Maring groups inhabited the less densely settled lower

altitudes of the area. Slash-and-burn cultivation of tuberous

staples and other crops was the main subsistence activity of the

people, who also engaged in pig husbandry, pandanus tree

cultivation, gathering wild plant foods, and hunting feral pigs,

small marsupials, and birds.

In Maring wars the main belligerents were always autonomous

local groups with adjacent territories. Most groups seem to have

averaged one or two wars per generation. The last wars were fought

just a few years before my arrival among the Marings in 1962, and

I was able to reconstruct the nature of the wars from informants'

accounts. The informants specified the antecedents of thirty-nine

Maring wars for me, and, in almost every case, some offense by the

3

members of one group against the members of another was involved.

Murder or attempted murder was the most common offense, having

occurred in twenty-two of the cases. Other offenses mentioned

included poaching, theft of crops, and territorial encroachment;

sorcery or being accused of sorcery; abducting women or receiving

eloped ones; rape; and insults. Sometimes these other offenses led

directly to war and sometimes first to homicide. At times offended

groups committed homicides deliberately as, in effect, war

declarations.

The transition from peace to war was marked by the

performance of prefight rituals which included offerings to the

spirits of ancestors who had died in previous wars. The first

phase of hostilities in the wars often consisted of a series of

"nothing fights," daylong bow-and-arrow encounters at a

prearranged battleground. This phase could continue for many days

and even weeks. The succeeding phase consisted of "true fights,"

in which the arms employed at the battleground were expanded to

include weapons of close combat and the warriors sometimes made

quick charges into the enemy lines. However, in most of the

fighting of this phase, the combatants remained in static

4

positions behind large shields, and, accordingly, engagements

could take place day after day for weeks and even months without

heavy casualties. Moreover, hostilities could, by mutual

agreement, be suspended for a day or more during this phase in

order to allow the combatants to repaint their shields, to attend

to rituals in connection with casualties, to rest, or to attend to

agricultural tasks. As a rule, mortality became heavy only with

escalation to routing. In this the warriors of one side went to

the enemy settlements, burned the houses there, killed

indiscriminately any men, women, or children that they found, and,

after having put the survivors to flight, destroyed gardens,

fences, and pandanus groves and defiled the burial places.

Escalations, it should be noted, were not inevitable in

Maring wars. A return to peace was possible from nothing fights,

from true fights, and from the raids which were alternative

antecedents to routing, especially in the low-density parts of the

Maring area. Raids usually consisted of stealing in the right to

the houses where the men of an enemy clan slept. At dawn the

raiders would make fast the doors of as many of these houses as

possible and then shoot arrows and poke long spears through the

5

leaf-thatched walls at the men inside. If the latter succeeded in

undoing the doors, they might be picked off by raiders waiting

behind the house fences. After killing some men, the raiders were,

as a rule, forced to retreat because of counterattacks by warriors

from houses other than those raided.

Decisions by both sides in Maring wars in favor of armistice

were influenced by assessments of relative fighting strength,

numbers of casualties, and the nature of previous relations

between the antagonists. Even from the refuging that followed

routing, there could be a return to the status quo ante bellum. It

might be expected that the land of a routed group whose members

had gone into refuge would have been immediately taken by the

victorious warriors, and sometimes, as will be discussed in a

later section, it was. Often, however, the victors were

constrained by Maring notions about the continuing dangerousness

of the ancestor spirits of displaced enemies. Accordingly, they

would not attempt to move into enemy land until a later time,

perhaps many years later, when they could count on the support of

their own ancestor spirits because of having made appropriate

sacrifices of pigs to them in a long sequence of ceremonies

6

(described in detail in Rappaport 1968). If, however, the routed

group succeeded in rehabilitating itself and returning to its old

lands before any move by the victorious warriors, no territorial

annexations would take place.

In my publications in the 1970s, I argued that the features

of Maring war summarized above should be regarded as a process

consisting of recurrent, distinguishable phases. Making

territorial conquests ("peace with land redistribution") the final

phase, I diagrammed the process (see Figure 1).

My claim was that important understandings can result from

viewing war not simply as something that either does or does not

occur, but rather as a process (Vayda 1974:185, 1976:2). Examples

which I gave of such understandings, based at least partly on my

analysis of Maring warfare, included statements that the causes of

entry into war are not necessarily the same as the causes of

moving from one phase of war to another; that, by escalating to

territorial conquests, war processes can be effective in

counteracting stresses associated with population pressure; and

that, "even if territorial conquests had been only an infrequent

rather than a regular aftermath of Maring warfare for a

7

considerable time, the warfare remained the kind that could,

through an already institutionalized systemic process, lead again

to population dispersion and land redistribution whenever

demographic and ecological conditions changed sufficiently to make

it appropriate for this to happen" (Vayda 1976:42, 103).

RECANTATION

How had I gone wrong in analyzing Maring warfare? Like other

anthropologists, I was using the concept of "process" without

paying systematic attention to how regularly and in what ways the

events regarded as constituting a process were linked.3

Accordingly, how the Maring war process culminates in territorial

conquests could, as Hallpike has noted, be made to look "very

impressive" in my diagram, but what is represented may in fact be

nothing more than that a group, again as Hallpike has noted, "may,

if sufficiently determined and strong, chase another group off its

land permanently, instead of allowing them [sic] to return as is

usually the case" (Hallpike 1986:107–8). I would say now that

using process diagrams and jargon, rather than plain English

prose, to describe such possibilities not only does not advance

8

analysis and understanding but also may often get in their way. A

danger is that which Thompson (1978:75), commenting on a work in

Parsonian sociology, has described as a "reification of process

entailed by the very vocabulary of analysis." This is a danger I

did not avert. As indicated in the preceding paragraph, I had the

war process, not people, responding to demographic and ecological

changes, escalating to territorial conquests, and counteracting

stresses associated with population pressure. And by incorporating

such events as territorial conquests in a reified process, I could

give short shrift to human agency in treating them. If I appealed

for more data, it was for data on the demographic and ecological

changes assumed to trigger process responses (Vayda 1976:41) and

not for data on the actual motives and intentions of those who

were taking land or on the social and political as well as

ecological contexts in which they were doing so.

If, with due attention to context and human agency, we now

look more closely at the taking of enemy land, what, if anything,

may we infer from it for explaining Maring warfare? Contrary to

the assumptions made by me in the 1970s and by other

anthropologists more recently (e.g., Ember 1982; Ferguson 1984:30–

9

31), the fact that victorious warriors sometimes take enemy land

and benefit from doing so has, by itself, no necessary explanatory

import. To think that it does is a fallacy, not because it

involves putting consequences forth as causes but rather because

it involves putting them forth without due concern for mechanisms,

as if the mere fact of their being beneficial automatically

conferred causal efficacy upon them.4 The mechanisms to which I am

referring are not hypostatized ones in a reified process, but

rather such mechanisms as intentional action, reinforcement, and

natural selection, ontologically grounded in the actions,

properties, and experience of individual human beings. Thus, land

may be there for the taking as a result of fighting and may indeed

be taken, but to claim territorial annexations as not a mere by-

product of fighting requires showing in particular cases that

those fighting were doing so with intentions of taking land or

else that, even in the absence of such intentions, territorial

annexations were affecting fighting through the operation of

reinforcement, natural selection, or some other feedback mechanism

(see Elster 1980:125–28 and 1983a:Chapter 2 on the defects of

functional explanations in which such mechanisms are not

10

specified). The next section will include further, more concrete

discussion of these points in relation to particular Maring wars.

With respect to reinforcement as a mechanism, a point that I

have recently made elsewhere is that its operation cannot be taken

for granted but must rather be supported with evidence and

argument (Vayda 1986:304–5 and 1987a:505). If, on the contrary, it

is assumed that any rewarding outcome serves automatically to

reinforce the behavior that led to it, we may be invoking

reinforcement only ceremonially and thus in effect still be

committing the fallacy of imputing causal efficacy to certain

consequences simply because they are beneficial (see Jochim

1981:199–201 on warfare and reinforcement). We would likewise be

committing the fallacy if natural selection were ceremonially

invoked as a feedback mechanism every time we sought to explain

items of behavior by their particular beneficial outcomes (cf.

Gould 1987:26–50 on "cardboard Darwinism"). Once we admit that

benefits may, as often as not, be the products of happenstance

rather than design, it cannot be taken for granted that a

particular mechanism, whether reinforcement, natural selection,

intentional action, or something else, is operating in a

11

particular case. Indeed, it cannot be taken for granted that any

such mechanisms at all are in force.

Although these points are clear to me now, they were not

clear to me when I published my studies of war in the 1970s.

Accordingly, adequate specification of mechanisms to justify

ascribing causal significance to territorial conquests was not a

concern in those studies.

I have no sure answer to why such unwarranted ascription

should have ever seemed plausible or acceptable to me and others.

It may be worth noting, however, that my earlier explanatory

claims regarding territorial conquests exemplify a common, even if

unsatisfactory, frictionless mode of functional explanation and

that Elster (1983b:101–5, 1985:28) has speculated that this has

its roots not only in individual psychology but also in the

history of ideas, including notions about the goodness and

omnipotence of God or Nature despite apparent evil, sin,

suffering, and monstrosity in the world. Thus, if confronted by

the horrors of war, we may be predisposed to try to make sense of

them by seeing them as necessary for one or another beneficial

outcome.

12

I erred not only in too readily ascribing causal efficacy to

territorial conquests but also in assuming that population

pressure or land shortage must be what made conquests beneficial.

The acceptability or plausibility of this assumption may have

lain, at least partly, in widespread and erroneous Malthusian

notions that population pressure or the threat of it is a problem

in all societies (see the references cited in Vayda 1976:5) or

that, as Jochim (1981:1) puts it, current dangers of resource

depletion and overpopulation "are but special and magnified

variants of similar problems that have faced pygmies, peasants,

pastoralists, and princes." Actually, in the introduction to my

1976 book on war, I cited Cowgill's arguments (1975) against taking

population pressure for granted, and I then recommended the

following: "Instead of starting with the assumption that all

populations have to contend with the same problems (whether these

be problems of overpopulation or whatever), we need to find out

what problems particular populations actually are or have been

confronted with" (Vayda 1976:5–6; cf. Vayda, Colfer, and

Brotokusumo 1980:186). However, as Hallpike (1977b:557) remarked

in a review of the book, I ignored my "own good advice" and

13

without adequate evidence assumed that either actual or potential

population pressure was a problem for all Maring groups and that

relief from it was the critical benefit which warfare provided to

them. I did acknowledge an absence of clear indications of

pressure for all except two Maring groups, but still, as Stilltoe

(1977:74) noted, I begged the question by arguing that pressure

was a threat to every group because of the continuing possibility

of changes in demographic and ecological fortunes and that this

possibility made the institutionalization of warfare advantageous

or adaptive for Marings in general (Vayda 1971:20–23, 1976:39–42).

LAND SHORTAGE AS A CAUSE OF FIGHTING BY TWO MARING GROUPS

Let us now consider actual, rather than potential, population

pressure. By saying in his review that I had no evidence at all

for the former, Hallpike was exaggerating. For two Maring groups,

the Kauwatyis and the Kundagais, indications of past pressure

(described in Vayda 1971:20–21, 1976:39–40, and Lowman 1980:139–

49) included the fact that their territories, unlike those of

other Maring groups, had extensive tracts of permanent grassland

and degraded secondary forests. Furthermore, aerial photographs

14

and/or informants' statements indicated that, at the time of my

field research, the two groups were short of primary forest, which

was needed not only for new swiddens but also as foraging areas

for pigs and as sources of game, firewood, building materials, and

various wild food plants. The Kauwatyis had gone so far as to

impose upon themselves a taboo against making swiddens in their

primary forest. I stated in my book as well as earlier (Vayda

1971:21 and 1976:40) that shortage of primary forest may have been

important in promoting land encroachments and aggressions by the

Kauwatyis and Kundagais. In recent times these were the only two

groups committing land encroachments that led to warfare.

I argued, moreover, that they were the only two large Maring

groups which, if not for the intervention of the newly established

Australian administration in 1956, might have succeeded in

permanently displacing other groups and taking over all or part of

their territory in the aftermath of the Maring wars of the 1950s.

And I suggested that if the Kundagais and Kauwatyis had taken

enemy land, it would have been because they had attained

thresholds of population pressure not reached in recent times by

other Maring groups (Vayda 1976:40–41).

15

With my changed ideas about explanation, I no longer would

look for some regularity in the relationship between population

pressure and actual or attempted territorial conquests and then

expect to use that regularity mechanically to explain the course

of wars like those of the Kundagais and Kauwatyis. However, I

still regard population pressure or land shortage to have been a

factor in the Kundagai and Kauwatyi wars of the 1950s.

Accordingly, a consideration of some details of two of those wars

can be useful for bringing out differences between acceptable and

unacceptable modes of explanation.

The Kundagais fought their last war against the Ambrakuis, an

enemy from ancestral times. Kundagai and Ambrakui informants

agreed on the cause of the war. When Kundagais began to make

swiddens on Ambrakui territory, the Ambrakuis were enraged and

killed a Kundagai man who was hunting in forest belonging to the

Ambrakuis. Then the Ambrakui warriors carried the corpse to their

border with the Kundagais and shouted, "Why have you taken our

land? We are not yet extinct. Our bellies are hot with anger. We

killed your man in our forest and now you can come and get him and

bury him." As noted earlier, such proceedings constituted a

16

declaration of war (cf. Rappaport 1968:119). The Kundagais

collected their corpse the next day and then, three days later,

went off to the designated, borderland fight ground where the

Ambrakui warriors were waiting for them. The ensuing "nothing

fights" continued on a day basis for several months without

fatalities. However, with escalation, there came a day when the

Ambrakuis killed four Kundagais and the Kundagais killed five

Ambrakuis. Instead of going to the fight ground the next morning,

the Kundagais rushed down upon the Ambrakui settlements and

destroyed gardens and killed whom they could. The Ambrakuis fled

across the Jimi River to take refuge with friends and affines

among the Mimas, a non-Maring group. An Australian patrol officer

and his police repatriated the Ambrakuis in the latter part of

1957, about three years after the people had gone into refuge.

Similar in genesis to the last Kundagai-Ambrakui war was the

war which was fought between the Kauwatyis and the Tyendas in

1955. For the second year in succession, Kauwatyi men had been

making swiddens on Tyenda land. While they were cutting down

trees, some Tyenda warriors came on the scene, angrily gave chase

to the Kauwatyis, and caught one of them in the back with a fatal

17

arrow. The Kauwatyis collected their corpse and wailed, and the

Tyendas, shouting exultantly, returned to their houses. The

passage of more than a year made the Tyendas regard the issue as

settled, but then some Kauwatyis suddenly appeared and butchered

seven Tyendas (three men, three women, and a child) who were

working in their swiddens. The next dawn, Kauwatyi warriors

appeared en masse and fully armed at the Tyenda settlements and

proceeded to wreak death and destruction. This was the only time

in recent Maring military history that the fighting force of a

large group from the more densely settled parts of the Maring area

attacked its foes in their settlements without having engaged them

previously in prearranged fight-ground battle. Tyenda houses were

set afire and pigs were killed, as were twenty-three of the

approximately three hundred Tyenda people. The rest fled for

refuge, mostly to nearby Kundagai territory where affines and

friends lent them land and planting material for making swiddens.

As will be discussed below, the refuging Tyendas subsequently gave

a substantial portion of their territory to these Kundagai

friends, whose own land shortage can be seen to have been a factor

in the last Kundagai-Ambrakui war. While in refuge the Tyendas

18

also continued to harvest crops from their own land, to which they

returned permanently in 1956 after an Australian patrol officer

and a complement of rifle-armed New Guinea policemen began to

extend Pax Australiensis into the Jimi valley.

If not for the newly established Australian administration in

the Jimi valley, a consequence of the wars just described might

have been the permanent annexation of enemy land by the Kundagais

and Kauwatyis. Both groups, after routing their foes, continued to

farm the land which had been the object of the encroachments

leading to war. No fear of enemy ancestor spirits (see above, p.

161) was indicated by informants from either group. My Kauwatyi

informants in 1963 justified their actions by saying simply that

the land they took was good land and belonged to an enemy—as if

taking such land were an appropriate venting of hostility. My

Kundagai informants boasted that only they, and not their enemies,

were capable of annexing another group's land after warfare.

One factor which might have deterred both the Ambrakuis and

Tyendas from returning to their settlements and repossessing their

land was numerical weakness. Both of them had enemies more than

twice as numerous as they: the Kundagai group had some 600 people

19

and the Kauwatyis had 850, while there were approximately only 250

Ambrakuis and 300 Tyendas.5 Indeed, the Ambrakuis were skittish

about being repatriated even with Australian help. In September

1956, some of them accompanied a patrol led by an Australian

officer to their abandoned territory. The officer instructed the

Ambrakuis to resettle there and left a few policemen in the

general area to help in the work. He also held discussions with

both Kundagais and Ambrakuis about their lands and then affirmed

boundaries which, according to what I was told by Ambrakui

informants in 1963, corresponded to the ancestral ones between the

lands of the two groups. However, when the officer revisited the

territory in June of 1957, he saw that resettlement was still far

from complete: the men had simply been visiting their old lands,

while the women, children, and pigs had, for the most part,

remained in their Mima refuges. New gardens had not been made in

the old lands. Only with increased police supervision and further

warnings to the Kundagais was the full return of the Ambrakuis to

their territory finally effected later in 1957. Less than five

years later, the Kundagais made new land encroachments. In

response to the complaints of the Ambrakuis, a new Australian

20

officer sent policemen to destroy Kundagai plantings on Ambrakui

land and to arrest leaders of the offending Kundagais and take

them to jail at the Jimi River patrol post. How effectively such

punishment would deter the Kundagais was not clear at the time of

my field research.

The Tyendas were less timid about being repatriated under

Australian aegis. In mid-1957, when the Ambrakuis were still

staying close to their Mima refuges, the Australian patrol officer

found that the Tyendas were going ahead well with resettlement and

had prepared extensive new swiddens in their own territory. This

difference in the pace of resettlement may be related to the fact

that the Tyendas, unlike the Ambrakuis, had support from two

powerful Maring groups. One of these groups, the Kundagais, had

given refuge to the Tyendas. The other, the Manambans, a

traditional foe of the Kauwatyis, had shown its support by its

response to a Tyenda kinsman's pleas for revenge against the

Kauwatyis who had killed his children and brothers: the Manambans

had gone en masse to challenge their old enemies by killing a

Kauwatyi man. This killing led to the Kauwatyi-Manamban war of

1956. A reasonable speculation is that without Australian

21

intervention the Ambrakuis would not have repossessed any of their

territory but the Tyendas would have repossessed at least some,

and possibly most, of theirs.6

On the basis of the events just described, what may

justifiably be said and what may not be said about land shortage

as a cause of war among the Marings? Even if there is some warrant

for saying that the Kauwatyi and Kundagai encroachments which led

to war were a result of land shortage, I now agree with my critics

(e.g., Sillitoe 1977:74; Hallpike 1973:458; King 1976:313–14)

about the fallaciousness of using these cases to support the claim

that Maring groups in general were apt to suffer from land shortage

and that this is what made institutionalized warfare adaptive for

all of them. It is, however, equally fallacious to argue, as

Hallpike has seemed to at times, that land shortage cannot have

been a factor in any Maring wars since it was, as I acknowledged,

not directly a factor in many of them. Thus, in his 1973 paper

Hallpike cited me on the absence of population pressure among

Maring groups who fought just as frequently as the Kundagais and

Kauwatyis, and he concluded from this that there was not "any

significant relationship between aggression and land shortage"

22

among the Marings. However, on the next page of the same paper, he

conceded my having established that in some cases Marings fought

over land and that warfare might be the means whereby groups short

of primary forest for new swiddens acquired land from other groups

(Hallpike 1973:457–59).

Committing fallacies of undue generalization may go hand in

hand with inattention to agency and to the variability of the

contexts in which agents act. In accord with persisting

uniformist, typologizing, culture-as-norms tendencies in

anthropology (Pelto and Pelto 1975), attempts have been made in

New Guinea studies to pigeonhole the warfare of whole regions like

the New Guinea highlands (Berndt 1964) or, only a little more

modestly, the warfare of ethnolinguistic units whose total

populations comprised numerous warring local groups (Sillitoe

1977).7 A partial corrective to such endeavors and their neglect of

context-dependent variations is the recognition of local

differences in how and why fighting occurred among members of a

single ethnolinguistic unit. But even when, in refutation of gross

generalizations, some local differences are noted (as, for

example, they have been by Meggitt [1977:178–79] among the Engas

23

and by Morren [1987:484] among the Miyanmins), too much may be

taken for granted concerning context and agency and it may be too

simply assumed that the variations worth noting are those which

correspond to some broadbrush dichotomy such as that between

fringe or frontier areas and more densely settled central areas.

These points are well illustrated by the feature that I have

been discussing in this section: going to war because of being

short of land. This has been claimed by Sillitoe (1977) to

distinguish the warfare of an entire ethnolinguistic unit (Abelam

warfare as compared with the warfare of other New Guinea peoples)

and has been used by Meggitt (1977:178–79) to make distinctions

between Fringe Enga and Central Enga warfare. However, on the

basis of the accounts given in this section, it could be argued

that differences with respect to the feature may occur among the

belligerents in a single war. In other words, the statement that

they were fighting because they were short of land may be

warranted about the Kundagais and Kauwatyis but not about their

enemies, the Ambrakuis and Tyendas. There is no evidence that

either of these latter groups was short of land. In fact, after

their defeat at the hands of the Kauwatyis, the Tyendas gave about

24

30–40 percent (1.8 square miles) of their total territory to

Kundagai friends, including those who had provided them with

refuge (see Vayda 1976:32 for details). Using a concept of

"economic density" in my earlier publications, I defined as "more

densely settled" those Maring groups that had either close to a

hundred people or many more per square mile of land under

cultivation or in secondary forest (Vayda 1971:n. 23, 1976:n. 23).

This is noteworthy because Tyenda density prior to the land

transfers was only about 69 people per square mile of such land.

This density was the lowest among the ten Maring groups whose

territory was within the 55 square miles for which aerial

photographs were available and whose density could accordingly be

calculated (Lowman-Vayda 1968:202–3). No comparable calculations

could be made for the Ambrakuis, but Kundagai informants did state

that the Ambrakuis had suffered considerable population decline

prior to their last war. They were said to have been as big a

group as the Kundagais at one time.

Indeed, far from having land in short supply and fighting for

it, the Ambrakuis and Tyendas might be seen as having retaliated

against the Kundagais and Kauwatyis in order to show that their

25

having more land than they could use did not mean that their old

enemies could act against them with impunity. When groups became

extinct, their land was in fact taken over by other groups among

the Marings, and the Ambrakuis, Tyendas, and Kundagais themselves

had annexed the territories of groups that had become extinct in

the more malarial, lower altitudes along the Jimi River. By

fighting back, the Ambrakuis and Tyendas were telling their

enemies that they were not dead yet and that their land was not

there for the taking. They might well have been fighting more for

honor and reputation than for the land which the Kundagais and

Kauwatyis were trying to get from them. Honor and reputation were

important. Small groups without men who, having distinguished

themselves in warfare, could attract wives from other groups were

disparaged by Marings as "vulnerable seeds, not deeply rooted

trees." By contrast, groups like the Kauwatyis commanded respect

because of their size and military prowess, and their men were

sought after as affines (Lowman 1980:13, 182, and passim). If we

are not blinkered by uniformist, culture-as-norms assumptions, we

should hardly expect groups as different in size, prowess, and

demographic situation as were either the Kauwatyis from the

26

Tyendas or the Kundagais from the Ambrakuis to have been fighting

for the same cause.

Indeed, a better guide than many anthropological theories and

assumptions for explaining why particular people fought at

particular times is an old anecdote about two men who asked each

other why their respective groups were waging war. The man from

the first group said, "We fight for plunder: we are poor and hope

to get booty. And what do you fight for?" The man from the second

group answered, "We fight for honor and glory." The first man's

rejoinder to this was: "People fight for what they do not have."8

The lesson to be drawn here is simple. By attending to

contexts and their variability, we can see what things or

properties are absent or in short supply for particular human

beings at particular times. And by attending to agency, we can

determine whether these are things or properties which those human

beings are fighting for, even if their enemies should be fighting

for something else. This lesson, interestingly enough, is not

denied by Hallpike (1973:459), who acknowledges that, at least in

some cases, people "fight over land, or anything else which they

fancy and which is in short supply." Oddly, however, Hallpike goes

27

on to say in his next sentence that this does not constitute an

explanation of why fighting occurs. Somewhat similarly, Koch

(1974:8–9), although avowedly rejecting ecological explanations in

which land shortage is emphasized, states that wars in the New

Guinea highlands may result from "conflicting interests in land,

especially in valleys without surplus of arable ground." These

apparently antithetical assertions will be dealt with below.

But, first, the relation between land shortage as a cause of

war and territorial annexation as a consequence of it will be

considered to underscore points made in the preceding section. As

stated earlier, explanatory import may, in particular cases, be

claimed for such annexation if it can be shown either that those

fighting were doing so with intentions of taking land or else

that, even in the absence of such intentions, territorial

annexations were affecting fighting through the operation of

reinforcement, natural selection, or some other feedback

mechanism. In their last wars against the Tyendas and Ambrakuis,

the Kauwatyis and Kundagais may be said to have been fighting for

land insofar as intentions of taking it by force from their

enemies may be attributed to them on the basis of the evidence of

28

land shortage and encroachments and the statements which Kauwatyi

and Kundagai informants made about why they had fought.

Territorial conquest thus has explanatory import in these cases

because it was a goal for which the Kauwatyis and Kundagais may be

said to have consciously provoked and conducted war.

A different scenario is suggested by the accounts which

informants from other large Maring groups, the Tukumengas and

Yombans, gave of two wars in which their side had been victorious.

The offenses giving rise to these wars were unrelated to land

shortage or encroachments. In both wars, weeks of fight-ground

battle culminated in the killing of several enemy warriors by the

ultimate victors, who thereupon decided to escalate to routing so

as not to give their enemies a chance to even the score quickly.

Routed and with their houses, swiddens, and pigs destroyed, the

enemies could be kept from being a threat to the victors for some

time. While the informants gave no indication that the routing had

been undertaken with the intention of permanently displacing their

enemies, they allowed for the possibility of territorial

annexation if the enemies failed to return from refuge.

29

Although the enemies did in fact return in these cases, it

may be instructive to consider a hypothetical case conforming to

the actual ones except in two respects: the enemies do not return

and their land is annexed. In such a case, benefits accruing to

the victors might include not only having a territorial buffer

against their enemies but also obviating population pressure and

its stresses in the future, even if the victors suffer from no

shortage of land at the time of the annexation.9 This hypothetical

case is offered here as an illustration to underscore points made

in the preceding section. Since those fighting are not doing so

with intentions of gaining land, intentionality cannot be invoked

here to justify ascribing causal significance to territorial

conquests. And any inclination to invoke some other mechanism like

natural selection to justify such ascription must be tempered by

my earlier warning against invoking mechanisms ceremonially and

without evidence and argument to support claims of their being in

operation. In the absence of support for such claims, any benefits

eventually gained by the victorious side as a result of taking

enemy land in the hypothetical case would have to be regarded as

by-products of fighting rather than as somehow its cause.

30

EXPLANATORY RELATIVITY

As stated at the beginning of this article, a question such

as why Marings fought can be given different correct answers,

depending on our assumptions about what the question means.

Divergent assumptions may be made, for example, about the scope of

the question. Garfinkel (1981:21ff.) illustrates this with the

felonious Willie Sutton's answer in prison to a priest who was

bent on reforming him and had asked him why he robbed banks. By

saying, "Because that's where the money is," Sutton was answering

a question much narrower in scope than that intended by the

priest, whose concern was why Sutton robbed at all instead of

leading an honest life and not why Sutton robbed banks instead of

newsstands. On the other hand, an answer may be to a much broader

question than that intended by the questioner. Garfinkel's

illustration of this is a murder suspect's evasive answer to the

detective who has asked him why the victim has died. By saying

that "everyone has to go sometime," the suspect is answering not

the detective's intended question of why the victim died when he

did instead of living to die at another time but rather the

31

question of why the victim died at all instead of living forever

(Garfinkel 1981:22). These illustrations conform to Garfinkel's

general claim that explanations are both made and either accepted

or not accepted with at least implicit reference to specific

alternatives or contrasts. This claim is what Garfinkel (1981: 28–

34) calls “explanatory relativity" (cf. Kincaid 1986: 505).

Recognizing explanatory relativity helps to make sense of

such initially puzzling assertions as Hallpike's statement that

the fact that Marings sometimes fought for land "does not explain

why the Marings fought" (Hallpike 1973:459). Evidently the

question of why they fought is, for Hallpike, not something as

narrow as the question of why some Marings, like the Kauwatyis or

Kundagais, fought at a particular time and not at another time. To

that question, Hallpike might accept, as at least a partial

answer, that at that time the people in question needed more land

and had weak neighbors from whom they could expect to take it by

force. Just what broader question Hallpike has in mind is not made

exp46t in his discussion of my New Guinea studies, but two

possibilities may be noted. One is the question of why Marings or

some other people fought at all (in contrast to never fighting),

32

and the other is the question of why they fought frequently (in

contrast to fighting infrequently). That the first is Hallpike's

true question is suggested in his review of Meggitt's book (1977)

on warfare among the Mae Enga people of the New Guinea highlands:

the grounds for his objection to Meggitt's explanation of Mae Enga

fighting as responses to land shortage are the likelihood that the

people "would still fight even if land shortage were not the

principal occasion of conflict" (Hallpike 1977b: 556). Thus, he

seems to be saying that land shortage can be accepted as an

explanation of why Mae Engas fought only if without land shortage

they did not fight at all (cf. Feil 1977).

Other statements made by Hallpike suggest, however, that his

real concern is explaining why people fight frequently. Thus, in

his recent book, he refers to the "high levels of warfare" in New

Guinea as a challenge to ecological explanations (Hallpike

1986:106). In his earlier monograph on the Tauade people of New

Guinea, their "large amount of violence" or "violence of

considerable intensity" is explicitly the main object of

explanation (Hallpike 1977a:82, 275). Although thefts of pigs and

other specific causes of hostilities are noted in Hallpike's

33

detailed accounts of Tauade warfare, he refers, in the concluding

chapter of his monograph, not to these but rather to such

purported factors as the Tauades' Heraclitean mentality and their

ethos of aggression and destruction. I have expressed skepticism

about these factors elsewhere (Vayda 1979a), but my point here is

simply that it makes sense to regard Hallpike's reference to them

as an attempted answer to the question of why Tauades fought

frequently and not to the question of why they fought at some

particular time. When Koch (1974) considers warfare among the

Jalés and other peoples of the New Guinea highlands and emphasizes

similar factors (e.g., "patterns of socialization that develop an

aggressive and vindictive personality"), it may well be that he

too is trying to answer the question of why fighting was frequent

and not some narrower question which might be treated under the

heading of the explanation of fighting or war. In line with this

suggestion is that another factor emphasized by Koch is the

purportedly general absence in the New Guinea highlands of

institutionalized and traditional third-party authorities to keep

intergroup quarrels from escalating to warfare. If Koch were also

to make some explicit reference to the frequency of these

34

quarrels, it would be quite clear that the question he is

concerned with is why people fought frequently.

The question is important, but of course this does not mean

that questions about what people were fighting for in the case of

particular wars are not important. Thus, if we wish to explain the

frequency of fighting by referring, inter alia, to the frequency

of intergroup quarrels, then obviously it is important to have

data showing that particular wars resulted from such quarrels

(whether over land, pig thefts, or something else), rather than

simply being, as has been suggested for some New Guinea fighting

(Feil 1987:68–69), expressions of pervasive and perpetual

intergroup enmity which were not linked to specific incidents or

provocations to fight. Furthermore, if a practical concern is to

control or put an end to fighting, it can be important to know

what its occasions are. Thus, if intergroup fighting is viewed as

an expression of abiding, reasonless enmity, then governments,

like the Australian administration confronted with resurgent

warfare among some New Guinea highlanders in the late 1960s and

early 1970s, may see no solutions other than the use of mobile

riot squads and similar police measures; however, if specific

35

intergroup quarrels are recognized as leading to war, then their

resolution by such means as litigation may be encouraged, and if

it is seen that some (even if not necessarily all or most) of the

quarrels in question are over land and that the courts are

inadequate to deal with them (as has been the case in some New

Guinea highland areas since the 1960s), then consideration can be

given to making more land available by such means as providing

people with opportunities for resettlement (Meggitt 1977: Chapters

8–10; Vayda 1979b: 194–96; cf. Gordon and Meggitt 1985: 10 and

passim).

Another argument for the importance of the question of why

people fought at particular times is one which I have, in effect,

already presented, namely, the need to give the variability and

context-relatedness of purposeful human behavior their due and to

avoid the errors of uniformist, typologizing, culture-as-norms

approaches whereby people like the Marings who sometimes fought

for land are assumed, because of the categories in which they have

been placed, never to have done that. In this connection I have

indicated that the Kundagai and Kauwatyi actions described in the

preceding section were of a kind which, according to Sillitoe's

36

typology (1977), occurred only among a single New Guinea people,

the Abelams, and not at all among the Marings. Lesser (1968:95),

another of my critics, has assigned all New Guinea societies to

the category of "primitive stateless societies" without "organized

offensive warfare to conquer people or territory," and this has

made him deny that Marings or members of any other New Guinea

societies ever fought for land. As Koch (1974:8) has noted, errors

like Lesser's have been made by many writers committed to

evolutionary typologies.

It would be appropriate to close this article with a set of

concise recommendations on how to avoid errors such as those I

have charged others with and those which I myself have committed

in the past. In fact, something close to such a set may be found

in the briefs that I have recently presented elsewhere concerning

explanation (Vayda 1987a:500, Vayda 1988), although, as will be

indicated, a qualification is necessary. In these briefs I have

argued, on the one hand, for regarding human actions and their

intended and unintended consequences as appropriate objects of

explanation in anthropology and human ecology and, on the other

hand, for explaining them in what I have called a "contextual

37

mode." The procedures that I have set forth as constituting this

mode include the following: explaining actions or their

consequences by contextualizing them without a priori demarcation

of contexts; including in the explanantia for actions not only

features of the physical and institutional contexts but also the

intentions, purposes, knowledge, and beliefs of the actors, all of

which may themselves be made objects of explanation; supporting

the explanations of actions in particular cases with

generalizations that are not necessarily covering laws but may

instead be experiential judgments about intelligible connections

between the actions, the reasons that the actors have for them,

and the contexts in which they occur;10 and, when explaining the

unintended consequences of intentional actions, not making any

assumption that the actions are teleologically controlled by

hypostatized higher-level processes or by communities, societies,

ecosystems, or any other higher-level units within which the

actions of individuals might be regarded as occurring. These

procedures may be recommended for avoiding such errors of

reification, functional explanation, and undue generalization as

have been discussed in this article, provided that a qualification

38

is made in light of what has been said about explanatory

relativity. Specifically, it is important to understand that, by

having particular contrasts or alternatives in mind, we may in

effect be regarding as the object of contextualization and

explanation not simply an action or consequence but rather an

action or consequence in contrast to some definite alternative.

NOTES

1. That those who substantially change their views have an

obligation to give testimony of their conversion is well argued by

McKinley (1977:436) in a review of Marshall Sahlins's Culture and

Practical Reason.

2. The summary of Maring warfare is drawn mainly from Vayda

1974:186–87 and 1976:13, 22–23. Throughout the present article, I

use the English s for the plurals of New Guinea group names (e.g.,

"why Marings fought" rather than "why the Maring fought") in order

to avoid undue suggestions of uniformity in the ideas and behavior

of actors. The fact that, in the accounts of wars later in this

article, I nevertheless speak of Kundagais, Ambrakuis, and members

of other Maring local groups as if all members of any particular

39

group did and felt the same things at the same time (e.g., "the

Ambrakuis were enraged" or "the Ambrakuis fled") may reflect not

so much actual uniformity in actions and feelings as my not having

asked more about interindividual variation when I was receiving

informants' accounts of past wars. On the other hand, insofar as

warfare is comprised of concerted actions, there are grounds for

expecting greater uniformity of behavior in warfare than in some

other areas of human activity.

3. The loose, unreflective use of the concept of process in

social science has been examined by Harrison (1958:243–52); for

arguments against such use in anthropology, see Barth (1981:77–

79).

4. This is a fallacy that I have discussed recently elsewhere

(Vayda 1987a: 502–7, 1988:3).

5. These figures are estimates based on a 1963 census. In the

case of the Kauwatyis, the number of people living on their

territory in 1955 may have been swelled to over 1,000 by an influx

of war refugees (Rappaport 1968:143). The account of Ambrakui

repatriation in this paragraph is taken from Vayda 1976:28.

40

6. I have previously put forward this speculation (Vayda

1971:16, 1976:29–30).

7. Some examples of the estimated total populations of

ethnolinguistic units whose warfare has been typologized by

Sillitoe (1977) are: Maring, 7,000; Abelam, 30,740; Chimbu,

55,000.

8. In the version of this anecdote which the Yugoslav

political leader and writer Milovan Djilas (1962:80) reports as

having told to Stalin, the first man was, like Djilas himself, a

Montenegrin, and the second was a Turk. I avoid ethnic labels in

my own version because any suggestion of a single distinctive goal

as characteristic of all the fighting of all the people belonging

to a particular ethnic or ethnolinguistic unit is of course

directly contrary to what I am arguing for here. The statement

that people fight for what they do not have may be regarded as an

example of what I have elsewhere referred to as "generic

assertions of appropriateness" and "generic assertions of

intelligible connection" (Vayda 1988, 1989). These are statements

of the appropriateness (rather than the universality) of having

certain kinds of reasons for certain kinds of actions in certain

41

kinds of circumstances (Martin 1977:115 and passim; Berlin

1960:19–21; Hart and Honoré 1959:53). Martin (1977:Chapter 11) has

cogently argued that these generic assertions may be usefully made

cross-culturally and transhistorically for the purpose of

explaining actions.

9. Costs as well as benefits might, of course, accrue to the

victors. Their enlarged territory might, for example, make them,

like the Tyendas and Ambrakuis, the target of the aggressions of

land-hungry neighbors.

10. See the reference to an example in note 8, above.

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