[Hud955]

I'm familiar with these quotes YMS, but they don't go anywhere near revealing the core of Chomsky's position which is that the language faculty did not evolve into existence but was installed fully formed.  In other words, the relationships of human beings to each other and their environment had no part in its origin. By his own admission, he is a Cartesian and pretty much always has been.His fundamental need to keep social interaction out of the theory of language has forced him over and over again into absurd positions of this kind. 

[Hud955]

HI Adam.  No Chris is not a conspiracy theorist (or is that a cover-up theorist?) by any stretch of the imagination, and he has a strong regard for Chomsky as a political commentator.  His aim is to explain this apparent conflict, not to resolve it by writing him off as an Pentagon insider.  His conclusions are much more interesting and consequential than that.  But you will have to wait for the book…

[Hud955]

Hi LB.  You have made your logical point.  In its own abstract way it is a valid one, so thank you for that.  The discussion, though, is not about abstract logic; it's about violence among hunter gatherers, and the reiteration of your single point in post after post in ways which do not advance this discussion is not, therefore very helpful.Rather than devoting your energy to the solitary pursuit of criticising others for their supposed logical failing and telling them they need to think about things differently, it would be much more useful  if you chose to apply your understanding of this principle to the subject of hunter gatherers and do some substantive thinking about it yourself.  Anything which postively advances this discussion is to be welcomed.  Holding up hoops and demanding that others jump through them because you claim to know something about conceptual logic they don't, definitely isn't.  Nor is leeching onto the subject as a means of demanding  attention for your own abstract concerns.  You have pretty much lost my interest.  (I'd add that you won't regain it by your rapidly increasing habit of flinging patronising insults at anyone who disagrees with you.)Let me start the ball rolling then with a question.  How would you pursue the issue of understanding violence among hunter gatherers and in particular how would you develop a set of parameters we could use to discuss this in ways that are relevant to socialists? 

[Hud955]

 Hi Robin The simple answer is don't expect consistency of usage even within a single writer.  There isn't any.  As any biological anthropologist will tell you (with eyes in the air), social anthropology is plauged with this problem.  (Biological and Social anthropologists are hardly on speaking terms any more – I mean that very literally – and this is one of the reasons.)   The problem lies deeply in the history of the discipline.  Although a few researchers were vaguely aware that egalitarian immediate return hunter gatherers existed before the 1960s, these societies were really only 'discovered' after that date by people like Richard Lee and James Woodburn.  And once they were,  the term hunter gatherer acquired new significance and researchers began to conceptualise it more carefully.  (Even so, the term is still very loose.  When does a hunter gatherer become a horticulturalist?  When s/he tends gardens for 10% of their energy input? 40%?  Over 50%?)  As anthropologists started to investigate these societies they began to make distinctions.  The terms, 'immediate-return' and 'delayed-return'  were introduced by James Woodburn when he noted that this kind of model mapped very well onto the levels of egalitarianism, stratification and violence found within them.  The term 'Complex hunter gatherers' was then introduced to define those groups that did not fit into either category.  These cateogries are fairly clear.  The terms 'tribe', and 'chiefdom' however, are much older.  They emerged before most anthropolgists knew that egalitarian hunter gatherer groups as we now understand them existed.   The terms  also belong to a period when the conceptual apparatus for defining pre-state societies was as yet undeveloped.  'Cheifdom' in its broadest sense simply means a society which has a chief.  The term could at that time be applied to pretty much all known non-state societies but it was often reserved for those that had a chief but did not have the level of fixed status relationships found in more formally organised tribes. The chief in a chiefdom can have real power or none. That's not part of the definition.  If this caused confusion then, it can cause even greater confusion now.  'Chiefdom', in its broader literal sense of a society with a chief, can apply not only to a tribal society but also to many of what we would now term delayed return hunter gatherer groups.  In other words it can span two separate categories which for other purposes we would prefer to distinguish.  Worse still, in this broader sense, it can also be quite rationally applied to complex hunter gatherers (all the ones I know of, at least).  All these categories have chiefs.  On the other hand, it would be quite consistent with normal practice to use the term in a more restrictive sense and apply it only to non-tribal societies with chiefs.  I'm simplifying here, and you'll have to accept my comments within the limits of my understanding of the history fo the subject, which is not extensive, but I hope this goes some way to illustrating the general nature of the problem.I'd recommend that you will save yourself a lot of headscratching by reconciling yourself to this situation, and not spend time looking for a consistent usages where none actually exist.  When you read an anthropological text, don't make assumptions but look for clues to how a writer is using his/her terms.  Sometimes (maybe even often, and particularly in popular works) you won't get any clues, and when that happens you just have to live with it, and make of it what you can.I heard a biological anthropologist at the RAI put it like this: you can put ten social anthropologists in a room and sit them down to listen to a lecture by another social anthropologist, and they will come out with ten different ideas of what they have just heard.  And it's getting worse not better.  Social anthropology is overrun these days with post-modernists who deny that we can establish a category of truth or that there can be a progression of knowledge, and therefore they claim it is not worth bothering about such terminological matters anyway. Fortunately, within anthropology as a whole, hunter gatherer specialists and ethnographers form a small, embattled group, which has largely rejected this view, and do try to keep some kind of consistencey in their terminology, at least within their own area – not that they always succeed.  Most of what I have written above is representative of their perspective. You could call my comments normative if you like, or you could call them sectarian, but they provide the only thing I can find to cling on to.  I don't have a lot of time to trawl back through texts right now, but I will try to see if I can find you some references. I tend not to rely on the internet.  Iwould say, though, that I'm not sure how useful they will be to you.  I think you just have to take anthropological texts as they come and when making up your own mind, take a position on this.That all sounds pretty miserable, doesn't it!Cheers  

[Hud955]

Hang on!  No serious academic linguist outside Chomksy's immediate circle has taken his theories seriously for decades, as the mountain of papers demolishing his views demonstrates.  I say 'views' in the plural because as each of his theories has proved unworkable he has simply responded by producing another one.  If you are talking about disproof of his theory, it has to be asked 'which one'?  His theory of universal grammar is probably the best known outside academia.  Yet few people realise that this has long since been thoroughly discredited. In fact, Chomsky has never been able to produce a single 'universal' rule to which there are no exceptions.  He retains a level of pre-eminence only because he is backed by funding and support from The Pentagon. Through this, and through this alone, he has achieved an unassailable position which bears no relation to the lack of support which his theories actually attract. All it means is that other linguists are obliged to identify their views in relation to (and usually in opposition to) his.  He is a kind of touchstone, but is hardly anyone's guru.It seems that few leftists or socialists actually understand Chomsky's reputation within academia or his  relationship with the Pentagon.  I've only begun to get a grip on it myself in recent months.  The fact that the Pentagon has been the main paymaster for his research is, as Chomsky would say, completely uncontroversial. Chomsky recognises it in the acknowledgement section of every book on linguistics he writes. The Pentagon funds him to do research into the supposed underlying universal grammar of language (a kind of human linguistic machine code) because of its potential use in developing computer systems to control American weapons programmes.  As Chomsky himself would say, there is noting controversial about this.  He refers to 'The Language Lab', the MIT department where the Pentagon first set him up as 'The Death Lab' in recognition of its intended purpose.  He has frequently sought to justify his work there by claiming that pure research cannot be held responsible for the use to which it is put.   Chomksy's theories of language have always been bizarre in the extreme.  He believes, for instance, that language did not evolve in humans over time but was installed instantaneously, whole and complete, in the mind of a human ancestor at some unspecified moment in our distant past. When asked how this occurred, Chomsky has always declined to be specific, but when pushed, replies with a metaphor:  It was, he has said, as though our ancester had been hit by a 'cosmic ray shower'.  From this moment our minds contained not only all the grammer we would ever need or use, but also every concept.  For Chomsky, the concept 'carburetor', for example,  did not emerge culturally in response to developments in machine engineering but was, like all other concepts, installed in our minds millennia back in that initial moment of langague acquisition.  ('Carburetor' is Chomsky's own chosen example, by the way, not mine.)  Chomsky also believes that language has nothing to do with communication.  It purpose, he claims is to provide us with a means of talking to ourselves in the privacy of our own heads.Although Chomsky has produced one bizarre version of this linguistic theory after another throughout his career, all of them thave one interesting thing in common, they all deny the idea that language has any social origin or any social application or function – perfect for a machine code, but not a very good model to explain how it actually functions in human society.      

[Hud955]

LBird wrote:

 

Hud955 wrote:

Once again, whether or not tribes are violent is a question to be settled by observation and has nothing to do with the way they are classified.

Now I'm not so sure that you are aware.The separation of 'observation' from 'classification' is not possible. The only theorists who maintain this are positivists.

  Observation and classification may be interlinked, LB but there are not identical  They are separate variables even if they are not independent ones, and they can be meaningfully discussed as such.  A moment's though should show you that you would not be able to identify them as linked if you could not first identify them as separate. The effect of your claim, repeated so indiscriminately, would, in this instance, be to render all research impossible.    It does not seem to occur to you that the principle to which you are so deeply attached is well understood and used by anthropologists.  (In fact, they spill gallons of ink discussing such methodological matters – check out the titles on the anthropology shelves of any university library.)  In this instance James Woodburn first established a definition of 'immediate return hunter gatherer' precisely because he recognised a link between just such a defined entity and a statistical tendency to non-violence.  In other words, he established the definition because his observation led him to believe that it could be a useful one.  Having once established it as part of his conceptual apparatus, the link with non-violent encounters then follows, not by definition, but by observation – which is my point.  He could have constructed his model the other way round but he chose not to for practical reasons.   Recognising the potential use of his definition, other researchers have made further empirical observations to verify or contest his claims.  If at some point it is concluded that no clear link is observable, then the definition might well be discarded as not useful – unless some other useful connection is discovered.  The issue you raise is already embedded in the concept and the practice of anthropology here and elsewhere.The most useful definition of 'violence' is another matter, one which is currently being energetically contested by anthropologists like Douglas Fry and ethologists like Richard Wrangham.  These two (and others)  are having a useful scientifically conducted argument over specific issues including conceptual ones of the kind you raise.  What they are not doing is sitting at a distance making  abstract and unproductive judgments on matters of well-understood principle.. 

[Hud955]

Young Master Smeet wrote:

Hud955,Do those immediate return bands who share a kill wit otehr groups share a language with them, or are there examples of co-operation across language barriers?And I believe it is undisputed that personal homicide may occur within those bands (from time to time), and that occasionally (especially to dispose of a bully and a wanna be leader) maybe even the odd conspiracy and group slaying?  As you say, hunting accidents with poisons do happen…Your mention of Gorillas does also  bring in the question of other great apes…This article may be interesting (haven't had much time to go beyond the abstract):http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/2743815?sid=21105482636741&uid=2&uid=3738032&uid=4

Hi YMSHunter gatherer social organisation and culture varies widely from one area to the next, but it is truly astonishing how much all groups have in common.  The structural elements of their mythology, for example, and they way these relate to their social organisation, tend to be extrarodinarily similar whether they originate in Northern Canada or the tip of South Africa.  Because hunter gatherers share the same fundamental social structures and world view there is usually nothing to stand in the way of  cooperation between different language groups.   To illustrate, the aboriginal peoples of Australia are divided by a great many mutually unintelligible languages and by many dialects, yet well over two-thirds of the country shares a common kinship and moiety system.  It is perfectly possible for an individual who had grown up on the west coast to walk right acorss to the east coast and on arrival be told who are his 'mothers', his 'fathers', his 'sisters and brothers', whom he can 'marry' and whom he cannot.  With that, he can be rapidly integrated into his new kinship group. One remarkable story was told to me a few weeks ago by an anthropologist who works among 'Pygmy' peoples in Africa. He had recorded the music of the Mbuti who live on the eastern side of the continent and played it back to some Aka who live on the west.  He was astonished, he said, when within ten seconds of his switching on the recording, the Aka were confidently proclaiming that 'these are our people.'  And, indeed, their cultures are remarkably similar.  Yet these groups previously knew nothing of each other's existence and we know from genetic evidence that the Aka and Mbuti have not been in contact for something like 20,000 years.The same anthropolgist also told the story of a hunter gatherer who could not stop bragging about his hunting skills.  This is very un-hunter gatherer like behaviour. Bragging is wholly unacceptable in almost all hunter gatherer communities, and the women in the camp where he was resident, would ceaselessly mock him for it.   Unable to stand the taunts, the poor guy had been for years temporarily attaching himself to one band after another and across many different language groups, trying to gain acceptance.  The point is, there is no real barrier to his doing this.  In a society where no-one can tell anyone else what to do, no-one can be directly rejected either, whoever they are or wherever they come from.  (Taunting is a very powerful social control, usually carried out by the older women of a hunter gatherer camp.) But yes you are right (up to a point), if an individual will not leave a band and becomes a liability, then the band may agree to dispose of him quietly.  I say 'up to a point' because while this would be acceptable in some groups, like the Ju/'hoansi for instance, it would be inconceivable among others like the Paliyan.  Much would depend on the individual group's cultural values.Haven't looked at your link yet.  Will do as soon as I have some time and headspace.

[Hud955]

LBird wrote:

Hud955 wrote:

Most on-line stuff about hunter gatherers is very dodgy.  It's highly politicised and therefore a contested area, so you need to go back to academic texts for security.

You seem to be suggesting that there are 'non-political' academics out there, merely conducting a non-ideological 'search for The Truth' of hunter gatherers.Anyone thinking that 'academic texts' offer any non-political 'security' is fooling themselves.And to suggest so, is completely ideological, Hud. If you're not suggesting this, and I've misread your intentions, surely the way forward is to expose ideology, both in us reading and in academics writing?To echo your view about 'hunter gatherers', anthropology itself is 'highly politicised and contested'.Academics are not providing us with the view from nowhere, the pre-Einsteinian 'objective truth'. This is the 21st century, not the 19th.

Why am I not surprised that this is what my comment 'suggests to you', LB.  Your desire to manufacture controversy wherever you can is getting tedious.  Of course everyone will have a political view in some sense of the word and interpret the world through it.  But I'm sure you know as well as I do that academic papers are peer reviewed and examined within paramaters designed to reduce error, confusion and individual bias in a way that popular works aren't. There is the futher problem that many, though not all, popular works are written by non specialists dealing with secondary material which they may not fully understand or which is informed by structures they may not be aware of. Nothing is pure, LB but there are nevertheless degrees of trustworthyness. And being non-specialists ourselves without first hand work to call on or an extensive knowledge of the field a certain degree of critical trust is necessary. If you devoted yourself to applying this ideological obsession of yours to the details of arguments under consideration, showing whether and to what extent such biases influenced them, and whether as a result we should assess such influence as significant or trivial, then I would have a lot more respect for your views.  As it is, your entirely negative, carping and absolutist approach is utterly sterile and clearly of interest only to yourself.  As you have contributed next to nothing of positive value to this discussion, so far, I'm starting to regard you as a species of troll.

[Hud955]

robbo203 wrote:

  Christopher Boehm is the guy you need to read in this connection with his theory of "Reverse Dominance Hierarchy".  This link here discusses Boehm's theory  in nice easy straightforward terms, showing how "egalitarian societies maintain their structures and the emergence of hierarchies and inequalities are blocked and thwarted via the use of levelling mechanisms": http://egalitarian.wikispaces.com/Reverse+Dominance+Hierarchy+-+Boehm

I'd endores that.  This is a really important book that everyone interested in this subject should read.

robbo203 wrote:

there are serious difficulties with projecting what is the case today backwards onto a remote past because one of the key factors that would have tended to mitigate violence – the unrestricted freedom to "vote with  your feet" and simply  move on – something that might have profound significance in a future socialist society –  is no longer generally available to modern hunter gatherers.  This is to say nothing of the direct impact of hundreds of years of colonialism and genocide on contemporary HG groups

Really glad you made this point, Robin. I think it needs to be made strongly and often.  Although we cannot 'go back' to a hunter gatherer lifestyle there are several principles underlying  hunter gatherer egalitarianism which on the face of it would translate rather neatly into the mass social production of socialist society.  One of them is the freedom of movement provided by common ownership and free access.  (On a small point – while few hunter gatherers are now free to relocate collectively, the ability of individuals to move from band to band still exists in many areas and remains an essential factor in their ability to maintain some sort of egalitarian relationships despite the incursion of commodities into their societies.)

robbo203 wrote:

3) the universal availability of potentially lethal weapons. The knowledge that if you killed someone it is quite likely that his or her close relative would seek revenge and would have the means to inflict revenge on you by slaying you, would surely act as an effective deterrent to committing acts of violence.  Conversely , it is  where the means of  violent coercion are monopolised by only a section of the population  – which is precisely how some would define the state –  that you are more likely to see these actually being used to cause deathsI realise this argument is one that is used by the gun lobby in America  but of course there is a world of a difference  between the availably of potential lethal weapons  in a modern capitalist society like America  in  which there is a massive asymmetry of power and a traditional hunter-gatherer which is fundamental egalitarian to its very core

This seems to be the case in real terms among hunter gatherers in Africa, at least according to the accounts of some ethnographers like Jerome Lewis.  Other groups elsewhere, particularly in Asia, seem to operate to a different principle, maintaintaining very low levels of violence by developing ideologies which place enormous value on the life of the individual.  There are various possibilities that could be explored here.   

[Hud955]

Hi Robbo, yes, you will see these terms used in all sorts of ways, by all sorts of anthropologists.  As I said, there is no commonly agreed terminology.  The schema I have given is that used by most hunter-gatherer ethnographers in the UK.  They find it useful to make the distinction between complex hunter gatherers and tribal societies,  because while complex hunter gatherers are still hunter gatherers (even though very unusual ones) tribal peoples are generally not, though again there are exceptions.  Complex hunter gatherers seem to achieve their unusual structures through control of exceptionally rich resources.  Some even have incipient or undeveloped class relationships.  The Indians of the Pacific North-West – the classic example – were slave raiders. Complex hunter gatherers are rare, though perhaps not as rare as was once thought.  Evidence of several ancient ones has turned up in recent years.  Most on-line stuff about hunter gatherers is very dodgy.  It's highly politicised and therefore a contested area, so you need to go back to academic texts for security.  I'll try and find you some references for this.Kelly and others lijke him use this terminology for their own rather different purposes.  Just to be clear on this though, band hunter gatherers are simply defined as those that are mobile and hunt in small groups.  Immediate return hunter gatherers are those that do not store goods.  It is a pretty clear empirical fact that these two groups very largely map onto one another.You are right when you say that complex hunter gatherers are not band organised, but neither are the vast majority of delayed-return hunter gatherers.  That means tribal forms of society and band societies are not simple and comprehensive opposites in the way that your distinction suggests. Delayed return hunter gatherers do not form bands, yet neither are they remotely tribal. Making this distinction is important for this discussion because delayed return hunter gatherers, do engage in warfare, certainly far more than immediate return hunter gatherers, but not nearly as much as tribal, agricultural or state societies.  They generally have some fixed status roles within them, and these roles carry varying degrees of ritual or actual power. Mostly, though, they only have the power to influence.  In many cases they don't even have that. The opinions of chiefs are often derided.  That's often because they remain largely egalitarian in their everyday relationships.  They are usually sedentary.  The Canela of South America are a fascinating example, since the structure of their villages gives a very clear example of their matrilocal kinship arrangements, based on coalitions of women.American anthropology is largely the creation of Franz Boas and is deeply mired in the American imperial project.  It eschews theory and restricts itself mainly to cataloguing the detailed social relationships of individual societies.  (Useful for the Pentagon but rather sterile and not very enlightening to the rest of us.)  US anthropology also reacted strongly against unilinear explanations of social development.  This was a good thing, initially.  It challenged the hierarchical and essentialist structures of British Imperialist anthropology of the nineteenth century and pointed out that societies can develop in many ways, including diffusion of culture, and do not necessarily evolve along a single line of development. We have examples of some societies for example which have returned to a hunting and gathering way of life after having been farmers.  There are intriguing examples in Indonesia where some members of farming communities did this to take advantage of a coastal trade in Aloes and other forest products.  American anthropology goes too far though in asserting that no patterns of development can be presumed or discovered.  it is clearly the case, for obvious reasons, that you are never going to discover a palaeolithic capitalist society which later develops into a hunting and gathering one. Though there is no 'Royal road' from hunter gatherer societies to capitalism, there are certainly limiting material factors in the way societies can develop.Kelly and others like him prefer the term 'forager' to 'hunter gatherer' because there was a period at which research seemed to be showing that hunter gatherers tended to gather more than hunt.  This line of argument has now been shown to be incorrect, though it is true in some instances.  Kelly is a post-modernist in the American tradition and seeks to undermine any attempt at classification.Pastoralists are sometimes egalitarian and sometimes have status relationships of varying degrees of development.  There do not appear to be any generalisations you can make about them in this regard, and many anthropologists look to their ecological relationships to explain the differences. 

[Hud955]

LBird wrote:

Someone has already mentioned the issue of 'band' versus 'tribe', as the basis of h-g society.Problem is, if 'band' is defined as 'non-violent small group', and 'tribe' is defined as 'bit violent large group', and one lot of anthropologists 'discover' 'bands' and equate them with h-g, whilst another lot 'discover' 'tribes' and equate them with h-g, then the anthropologists who seek violence to justify capitalism as natural, and the anthropologists who seek non-violence to justify socialism, will find the 'objective evidence' to support their respective 'scientific' positions.This is only a simple example of the intertwining of frameworks of definition, evidence and sought-after results being 'discovered'.It's simpler to understand what one is reading, if one knows 'up-front' what the anthropologist is seeking to justify. That's usually a function of the anthropologist's ideology, which they've picked up from the society in which they live.Perhaps we could move forward simply be producing a list of problematic terms, definitions, like 'violence', etc.?

I've been trawling back through this debate and keep finding some very contentious statements and strange pieces of reasoning.Social anthropology has never established a technical vocabulary for itself and so miscommunication is always a potential problem within the discipline.  There are numerous issues: hunter gatherer specialists tend to use common terms for kinds of social organisation differently to other anthropologists, the meanings of these terms have changed over the years along with theoretical positions, and British anthropologists use them differently to American anthropologists.   That all said, most hunter gatherer specialists (a discipline within the discipline) use the classifications established fifty years ago by James Woodburn and elaborated by others.  These are principally: immediate return (band) hunter gatherers, delayed return hunter gatherers and complex hunter gatherers.  These are distinguised from chiefdoms, tribes and states.  So, no, complex hunter gatherers are not tribes.  In simple terms, tribes have formal leaders, are highly stratified and are most commonly horticulturalists, not hunter gatherers.  The term chiefdom', is vaguer.  It is an intermediate category.  It applies to a stratified (though not a class) society and can overlap with 'tribe' if the chief has significant actual or ritual power.  I assume 'state' speaks for itself.With that all in mind, band (immediate return) hunter gatherers are not defined as 'non-violent small groups', they are defined as mobile, non-sedentary or largely non-sedentary groups which consume produce more or less immediately.  Assuming we agree on what violence means, then whether immediate return hunter gatherers are violent or not is a matter for empirical investigation. Similary, tribes are defined in terms of their internal social organisation, not as a 'violent large group'.  Once again, whether or not tribes are violent is a question to be settled by observation and has nothing to do with the way they are classified.As a matter of fact, hunter gatherer specialists, whether left wing, right wing or  no wing, tend to agree closely on the essential facts of hunter gatherer life.  They argue mainly over the finer details of interpretation, and there is a general process of convergence among them.  The greater conflict within anthropology arises not among hunter gatherer ethnographers who live among these people, study them and report on them,  but between the ethnographers and the university-bound academics who tell them their findings cannot be correct because they contradict established social theory.  If the names of Pinker or Wrangham or others in their school should be raised at this point, it should be pointed out that none of them are anthropologists.As far as defining the term 'violence' is concerned, no definition is ever final.  The way you define something will depend on the work you want your definition to do, and that in turn will depend on the questions you are asking.  A lot of different questions have been asked here, and it seems to me that until people agree on what they want to know there will be no agreement on definitions, even though they debate until the cows come home.  (I'm a country boy… ) 

[Hud955]

Young Master Smeet wrote:

Hud955 ,that's interesting, particularly:

Quote:

Ethnographers are now coming to appreciate, for instance, that a great number of apparently warlike encounters between hunter gatherers (not between tribal societies or chiefdoms)  are best understood as sophisticated conflict management techniques.  Those working with Australian aborigines have noted that spear throwers are trained to be very skilled at missing.  They have also noted that many apparently violent encounters between bands are highly ritualised and aimed at avoiding conflict and death rather than expressing it.  If death does inadvertently occur, as it can, how then should we view this?

That was the sort of encounter I was particularly envisaging.  More specifically, say, two immediate return hunting bands are chasing the same mammoth?  I think you're right that they aren't going to stand and fight to the last man, and would more likely threaten and try and chase each other off.Likewise what you say about raiding is interesting.  I think the key is the definition of war not lying in violence, but in power, specifically the question of imposing ones will upon another. 

Hunter gatherer bands are profoundly egalitarian..  Sharing is fundamental to their way of life, and though there may be some individual grumbling, they would not think of disputing a kill in the way you suggest. Their traditions and social structures would not support it.  These people are extremely conscious of their egalitarian status and go to very great lengths to preserve it.  For many groups, even the responsibility of sharing out meat amongs the camp does not belong to the hunter that actually killed the animal.  And you should not think of their bands in territorial or boundaried terms.  Bands are very fluid with constant movement of individuals between them (even between different language groups), which means that their internal customs of sharing extend outwards from their own bands. Archeological evidence suggest that in many parts of the world their communities were once continent wide.  Again there have been reassessments on this recently.  In sub-Saharan bands of the Ituri forest for example, it would be normal for say Efe hunters to ask permission to hunt in Mbuti country.  This was once cited as evidence of territoriality. It is now understood, though, that it is merely etiquette, and a means by which the two groups can coordinate their hunting activities.  The Mbuti could no more refuse permission to the Efe to hunt in any part of the forest than they could refuse to hand over anything that was demanded of them.  (Hunter gatherers have an all but universal system of 'demand sharing').   The 'territory' is merely their traditional area of operation.  This is why such groups have been so easy to decimate and encapsulate.  In their view the land is for everyone and every species to use.   Having no conception of property in land or in anything else, they have allowed loggers and farmers to come in as of right, only then to discover that they are violently excluded from their usual hunting areas.  They are only now beginning to get to grips with propertarian ideas and to fight back legally.  To get a sense of how profound is their propertyless condition it might be worth mentioning the Mbendjele from the Congo basin who get really very  angry with gorillas because of their territorial behaviour, and shout at them furiously when they come running at them out of the forest thumping their chests. It's for this reason that they use the term 'gorilla' to describe adjacent Bantu communities who are farmers and who therefore have territorial practices.   Hunter gatherers are very adept at not ending up hunting the same game.  Their skill at logistical reasoning (calculation of movement of herds at various times of year and in various weather conditions and the movement of other bands, is reputedly phenomenal.)  Should it happen, though, the most likely result would be that they would share the kill.  If it were big game like an elephant, both camps would simply move to the site of the kill and settle down to feast on it together – and probably put the word around for others to join them too.I think this becomes clearer when you remember that these people almost invariably live in conditions, not of scarcity, but of abundance.  They have no Hobbsean fears that the world will not provide for them.  And there is no fear of sharing. Their understanding of their environment is so detailed that even when forced onto marginal land as the San have been in the Kalahari they can always provide an abundance for themselves of what they choose to need.    

[Hud955]

"Lets take a scenario. Two tribes of humans live near each other, maybe on opposite sides of a big valley.  From time to time hunting parties of males (about ten in each) meet….5) or, one party plans to cross the valley, and attack the encampment of the other.Now, obviously, 5 is what we would undersand as definitely war, it has the intentionality and awareness of the enemy as the Other who must be attacked.  But, 2-4 demonstrate to some degrees what many would see as warfare, even if the engagements come about by happenstance.Now, we know from ancient warfare that the prominant mode was one on one combat, and so chances are in these encounters as bands what would be seen would be the biggest and mopst agressive males would engage while their mates stood by (this is a theory, that's as good as any other) rather than fighting as a co-ordinated unit.The problem is, such encounters would constitute war, and would lave no record in the archaeology."There are a number of issues here, YMS.   Theoretical scenarios are all very well, but it is much better to deal with what we actually know.  On this matter, can I first suggest we keep the terminology clean to avoid confusion.  If we are talking about palaeolithic or modern hunter gatherers we should not be referring to them as 'tribes'.  Tribes are generally clan-based, patrilineal, status societies, of relatively recent origin, and they are almost invariably horticulturalists, drovers or pastorlists.  Most are at least semi-sedentary.  They are quite unlike bi- or matrilocal hunter gatherer societies which are egalitarian, having no chiefs, or elders or status positions of any sort.Immediate return hunter gatherers are invariably non-territorial.  This is also true for many delayed return hunter gatherers.  In itself this fact raises all sorts of issues about the kind of encounters you propose in your scenario.  Ethnographers are now coming to appreciate, for instance, that a great number of apparently warlike encounters between hunter gatherers (not between tribal societies or chiefdoms)  are best understood as sophisticated conflict management techniques.  Those working with Australian aborigines have noted that spear throwers are trained to be very skilled at missing.  They have also noted that many apparently violent encounters between bands are highly ritualised and aimed at avoiding conflict and death rather than expressing it.  If death does inadvertently occur, as it can, how then should we view this?You cannot interpret the scenarios you suggest above without taking into consideration both the immediate social origin of the conflict and the social relationships within which it is embedded.  Take your scenario number 5, for instance.  In a conflict between members of two tribal groups this may be interpreted as an act of war, or it could be a matter of limited clan raiding, depending on who was involved and on the purpose of the conflict.  Both clan raiding and warfare are wellnigh impossible between immediate return hunter gatherer bands, and are difficult between dalayed return hunter gatherers.  Immediate return hunter gatherers are generally bilocal.  That is, they trace their lineage through both male and female lines.  The result is that their kinship ties are not linear, but form complex and irregular networks.  This is complicated further  by the nature of  kinship itself within these societies which is only roughtly based on blood relationships: anyone can become your kin just by joining your band and contributing to your social life and provisioning.  As a result, clans, which are based on strict patrilineal descent do not exist.  As feuding is a clan-based activity, it simply doesn't exist among hunter gatherers.    In an immediate return hunter gatherer society, if someone kills another either in the heat of the moment (and when everyone carries poisoned hunting weapons, that is bound to happen from time to time)  or kills them deliberately, revenge, if it is taken at all,  is almost invariably carried out by a member of the victim's kin on the murderer himself, not on a member of the murderer's family as is common in clan feuding, and the matter generally ends there.  It is only among groups that have developed strong status relationships such as the highland pig-keeping and semi-sedentary communites of Indonesia (so beloved of Pinker) where interminable feuding occurs.Warfare among immediate return hunter gatherers is also almost completely unknown in the ethnographic record, and there are obvious structural reasons for this.  These are communities of extreme individualists which have no collective means of organising conflict.  Their egalitarian ethos of non-interference in the business of others is a further barrier.  (In a hunter gatherer society it is generally bad form even to ask questions of another or to say goodbye as this is seen as either implying status or interfering in someone else's independence of action.)  I read an amusing story relating to the Yanomami which illustrates these issues.  The Yanomami are not hunter gatherers, they are horticulturalists, and may even be the descendents of valley farmers from the Amazon basin, but they have a semi-egalitarian structure in some respects similar to genuine hunter gatherers.  One ethnographic account desribes an occasion where a group of Yanomami set off to attack a neighbouring community to avenge some previous act of violence.   Before they reached their intended target, though, one by one, every single member of the groups had turned back.  When asked the reason for not continuing with the attack, two reasons stood out above others:  sore feet and belly ache.     There are of course, some bands and sedentary groups whose behaviour runs contrary to these general observations, but in each case the history and detailed structure of the group needs to be considered.  Some,  for instance,  are known to have been predated upon by neighbouring warlike agruculturalists or by colonial slave raiders, or have suffered genocidal attacks by post-colonial governments, commercial operations, and so on.   Territorial freedom also palys a part.  These groups generally have had nowhere to run to when attacked.  (Hunter gatherers who do have a forest or other location to disappear into when attacked often do just run.) Each case needs to be carefully examined in its own right.Finally, the warring practices of ancient tribal and early-state societies have no relevance to hunter gatherer behaviour or organisation.

[Hud955]

"YMS, your list of "material bases" of ISIS and other similar groups is no answer to the point I was trying to make. A conventional historical-materialist analysis of war in modern times asserts that the "real" cause of war is conflict between different capitalist classes, or between fractions of a capitalist class, over markets, trade routes, economic resources and the like – all of which comprise the "material" base of class society. It's a straightforward base-superstructure model."I'm not at all sure what is the source of your idea that there is a 'conventional' historical-materialist analysis of war, PGB, or that this is the view adopted by the SPGB.  Marx did not elaborate on his proposition.  He did, though, descrbe it as a working model and did not, himself, take a mechanistic view of it  (See his '18th Brumaire' for an example).  So, if you want to argue with someone who interprets it in the rigid and metahistorical way you insist on, then you will have to find someone who understands it in that way.  'Robbo's definition is , as you say, a reasonable summary account of the SPGB position.  The real causes of war are economic.  But 'cause' is a philosophically complex term.  Your insistance on using it narrowly in the sense of 'proximate' cause (and insisting on a limited application even of that) is inadequate.  Any efficient use of the term also has to include the concept of 'ultimate' cause as well as 'necessary' and 'sufficient' cause.   As has already been pointed out to you, there are reasons to believe that religion is not the principal factor 'driving ISIS to kill', nor, from what we know, does religion even seem to be providing an ideological framework for the killing.  The behaviour of ISIS is neither consistent with any particular Islamic doctrine, nor is it in conformity with Islamic doctrines in general (none of which sanction burning people alive, for example).  But even if religion were identifiable as the primary cause driving individuals or groups to join ISIS and kill in its name, that would not demonstrate religion to be the determining cause of ISIS's actions, any more than the patriotism that encouraged people to join European armies on the eve of the first world war was the reason why the war was fought.  The base-superstructure proposition is an analytic tool to help us understand why things happen in the material world; it is not a rigid or simplistic model, at least not in the hands of Marx (or the SPGB).  It recognises both material ('economic') factors and ideological ones and allows for a many layered intereaction between the two.  It implies only that to achieve anything we first have to provide for our immediate and longer term material necessities.  Following Marx's proposition then, two things, at least, can be said about religion: all the religious enthusiasm in the world will not start or maintain a war unless that war is being materially provisioned; and religions movements are themselves dependent on and motivated by material/social circumstances.  You say YMS's comment is no answer to the point you were trying to make.  That may well be so, but that's because the point you were trying to make has no bearing of the SPGB's case.First warning: 1. The general topic of each forum is given by the posted forum description. Do not start a thread in a forum unless it matches the given topic, and do not derail existing threads with off-topic posts.  

[Hud955]

Oooops!  Mod.  Just seen your post.  Will do!

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