Tribal Warfare Research Articles

Agency in Removal: How the Iowa Tribe Navigated War and Colonization Between 1812 and 1824

This thesis examines how the Iowa Tribe preservedits survival from 1812 to 1824. Rather than being victims of tribal warfare, asearly histories portrayed, it argues that Ioway leaders actively negotiatedwith rival tribes and colonial powers in the decade leading up to their firstremoval. Prior to the nineteenth century, the Iowa Tribe lived in most of themodern-day State of Iowa and Northern Missouri. The War of 1812 divided theIoway between allegiances to the United States and Great Britain but emergedunited under the leadership of Chief Hard Heart. The following decade sawincreased pressure from American settlement, and relations between the Iowayand Sauk and Meskwaki tribes deteriorated to the point where the Iowa Tribeleft behind their old villages on the Des Moines and Mississippi Rivers toreside with the Otoe in Northern Missouri. In 1824, in wake of Missouriachieving statehood, Ioway chiefs White Cloud and Great Walker signed awaytheir lands in Northern Missouri, beginning a long period of removal andattempts by the United States to assimilate the Iowa Tribe. Although they losttheir lands as a result of this agreement, the Iowa leaders’ pragmatismultimately preserved the tribe.

Interpersonal violence in colonial era in Papua, Indonesia: A case study of trauma patterns of a Biak individual

AbstractIn many world regions, conflict resulting from power struggles can lead to interpersonal violence. In the recent colonial past, tribes in Papua and Papua New Guinea engaged in war and raiding that resulted in interpersonal violence, abduction, slavery, and casualties. This case study focuses on the analysis of a colonial period individual from Biak Island, Papua, Indonesia, using a biocultural approach. Only the cranium was available for analysis. Standard osteological methods were used to determine that the individual was likely a young to mid‐aged (26‐ to 42‐year‐old) adult female. Skeletal lesion type and patterning were observed macroscopically with digital photography and a newly developed ultraviolet light photography technique. Multiple sharp force trauma injuries were identified on the frontal, temporal, and occipital bones of the cranium. Interpreting the pattern of trauma within the context of the colonial period in Papua, it is suggested that this female individual may have been murdered, possibly as a slave taken during tribal warfare. This report is a significant resource for future bioarchaeological studies in Papua as it provides one of the only accounts of skeletal trauma during the colonial period in the region.

Chinese Folk Story of Chang'e Flying to the Moon from the Perspective of "Totem Theory"

Myth is an empirical response to the lives of ancient ancestors. "Chang'e Runs to the Moon" records the story of people flying to the last month, but it cannot explain the relationship between this and the life experience of the ancestors. In the pre Qin literature, the author first deduced that the age of Chang'e's birth and development was in the late Neolithic period, and then used the "totem theory" to demonstrate that Houyi and Chang'e were originally people belonging to different totem tribes of the Sun and the Moon. Due to the tribal warfare, Chang'e's tribe was captured and fled back to the Moon tribe. Through generations of oral transmission, such deeds have transformed into the myth of "Chang'e running to the moon" as we know it today.

The Land of Painted Bones: Warfare, Trauma, and History in Papua New Guinea’s Hela Province

ABSTRACT This paper is an analysis of organised armed conflict, as occurs among the Huli speaking population of Papua New Guinea’s Hela Province. I argue that Huli warfare is viewed from a Huli perspective in historical terms, and that Huli wars are fundamentally fought over the control and authority over the historical narrative, and therefore the control and authority over resources into the future. Most importantly warfare is understood as an undesirable and avoidable failure of dispute resolution mechanisms. I also argue against the common view that pre-colonial warfare was conducted according to rules that prevented the more egregious acts that occur today, especially when it comes to the killing of women. Warfare needs to be understood in terms of trauma, and the consequences of its lived experience. Finally, the link between warfare and the presence of extractive industry is in the historical agency of that industry, and persistent and erroneous views about tribal warfare serve to deny that link.

NOMADIC AND SEDENTARY LIFE IN THE TIME OF PROPHET MUHAMMAD

The Bedouins who live nomadically have existed for a long time in the desert region of Arabia. They existed before and during the time of Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him), when the cities in Arabia were still limited in number and level of population. They led a pastoralist life by herding livestock, especially camels. The Bedouins often appear in stories relating to Prophet Muhammad(PBUH),usually anonymous, with their typical characters of rudeness, discourtasy and lack of knowledge. They came to Makkah and Madīnah from time to time. Sometimes they involved in tribal warfare among themselves or against the emerging Islamic sovereignty. Urban society may play an important socio-political role and has more prominent leadership in the region, but the existence of the Bedouin society cannot be said to be unimportant in the structure of society at that time. Understanding the characteristics and the relation between the Bedouins and the sedentary people is actually important to understand the development of society and civilization, as suggested by the explanation of Ibn Khaldūn in his Muqaddimah. The objective of this study is to elucidate the characteristics of nomadic and sedentary societies and the relationship between the two in the era of the Prophet (PBUH) as well as the Islamic attitude towards these two patterns of life. This research is a historical study that uses the Qur’an and Hadīth as its main sources.

Pedagogy of Peacefulness as an Effort of Peaceful Education at School

Based on the phenomenon occurred at all level of education, it was found that the circumstances of the schools were unsafe and uncomfortable for students and academics. There were a number of direct and indirect violence carried out at schools and it had impacts on physical and psychological health of students. There was no existence of positive peace in the form of structural violence, socio-cultural violence, ecological violence and negative peace such as tribal warfare, fights and aggression. What happened actually although the nature of man in conscience had the basic harmony and desire to live together in tranquility? Therefore, the common perception of the concept of peace and peace pedagogy was needed to be created. Teachers as peace educators, thus, played an important role as a figure that had the personality of peace in the classroom and at school. The teacher as a peaceful personality consisted of three components: peaceful states, attitudes, and behavior that were consistent across one’s life spaces and life span. Moreover, the school also needed to develop an educational approach in the curriculum in synergy with the goals of education.

The Proximate Causes of Waorani Warfare.

In response to recent work on the nature of human aggression, and to shed light on the proximate, as opposed to ultimate, causes of tribal warfare, we present a record of events leading to a fatal Waorani raid on a family from another tribe, followed by a detailed first-person observation of the behavior of the raiders as they prepared themselves for war, and upon their return. We contrast this attack with other Waorani aggressions and speculate on evidence regarding their hormonal underpinnings. On-the-ground ethnographic observations are examined in light of the neuroendocrinological literature. The evidence suggests a chain of causality in launching lethal violence, beginning with a perceived injury, culminating in a massacre, and terminating in rejoicing. Although no blood or saliva samples were taken at the time of this raid, the behaviors were consistent with a deliberate initiation of the hormonal cascade characterizing the "fight-or-flight" response, along with other hormonal changes. We conclude with observations on the stratified interrelationships of the cognitive, social, emotional, and neuroendocrinological causes of aggression leading to coalitional male homicide.

Race, Ethnicity, and Gang Violence: Exploring Multicultural Tensions in Contemporary Danish Cinema

ABSTRACT: One of the most striking genre conventions to emerge in Danish cinema in recent years is the gangster motif. Replete with gritty social realism, urban decay, and tribal warfare between different ethnic groups, these films reflect a growing discontent in the Danish welfare state, particularly regarding multiculturalism and inclusion. This article follows these trends from the mid-1990s, focusing specifically on the themes of ethnic division in four films: Nicolas Winding Refn’s Pusher (1996), Michael Noer’s Nordvest (2013) [Northwest], Omar Shargawi’s Gå med fred, Jamil (2008) [Go With Peace, Jamil], and Michael Noer and Tobias Lindholm’s R (2010) [R: Hit First, Hit Hardest]. The article explores racial division in these films by examining how they reflect or subvert cultural and political approaches towards diversity in Denmark over the last two decades.

“Black” Comics as a Cultural Archive of Black Life in America

Set in the fictitious African nation of Wakanda, the six volumes of the Black Panther comic book weave plots that are faithful to superhero tropes and aware of Black nationalist discourses. The storylines focus on deterring white dominance, tribal warfare, and mineral exploitation. Creating characters conscious of the threats to their autonomy is an opportunity to reframe the “Black power” trope. This photo essay explores how iterations of raced and gendered figures in mainstream and independent comics are used to mediate and meditate on certain social anxieties. The images and their associated captions explore how Afrofuturism in “Black” comics not only provides illustrative cases of actual Black social life and political crossings engaged with cultural Black archives, but stimulates complex engagements with Black feminist thought in order to advance the liberation struggles of mutant, racialized, and gendered bodies seeking empowerment and social justice.

Inequality and Changing Masculinities Among the Gende in Papua New Guinea: The ‘Good’, the ‘Bad’ and the ‘Very Bad’

This article examines Gende socio-economic history from before 1932 to the present, a history marked by extreme inequality and challenges to traditional concepts of masculinity. Centuries ago, the Gende lived in New Guinea’s interior. Forced from their lands by tribal warfare, they escaped to the less populated northern Bismarck mountains (in what is now Madang Province) and re-established themselves, marrying Chimbu and Ramu neighbours and favourably positioning themselves in a north-south trade route. First encounters with Westerners (1932) and capitalist enterprises set off waves of migration to towns and plantations with recent mining developments generating return mobilities as migrants hope to cash in on jobs and royalties. ‘Big men’ who strove to hold society together by using development and other means to even out rural and urban inequalities that threatened Gende society represent Marshall Sahlins’s ‘developman’. Today, such men are contested by others more interested in personal aggrandisement than social cohesion. Women’s continuing role in shaping masculinities and society is highlighted throughout, demonstrating the limits of R.W. Connell’s ‘hegemonic masculinities’ (and similar concepts based on male dominance) in understanding intergenerational conflicts and violence against women. While the seeds of global hegemonic masculinities have been planted, the Gende case is one of active local resistance.

Uneven development in the Papua New Guinea highlands

Over the last 20 years, Papua New Guinea has been at the center of a resource development boom as mining, petroleum, and logging companies extract the rich resources of this tropical Pacific island. As 97 percent of the country is owned by customary groups who correspondingly receive benefits from extraction, resource development has the potential to integrate local communities into the global economy in beneficial ways. Often, though, this is not the case, as small factions of landowners control the bulk of development proceeds. In this article, I examine the development of a coffee growing scheme adjacent to the world-class Porgera Gold Mine, intended to help local people who are marginal to mining benefit streams. Tragically, however, instead of engaging in coffee production, many disenfranchised young men in Porgera prefer to work in the “life market”—a term they use to describe tribal warfare in which groups not receiving benefits attack benefit-receiving groups in the attempt to extort monetary payments. Not only are individuals' lives at stake in the life market, but so too are the economic conditions—coffee and gold mining—that allow the life market's very existence.

The use of Amerindian charm plants in the Guianas.

BackgroundMagical charm plants to ensure good luck in hunting, fishing, agriculture, love and warfare are known among many Amerindians groups in the Guianas. Documented by anthropologists as social and political markers and exchangeable commodities, these charms have received little attention by ethnobotanists, as they are surrounded by secrecy and are difficult to identify. We compared the use of charm species among indigenous groups in the Guianas to see whether similarity in charm species was related to geographical or cultural proximity. We hypothesized that cultivated plants were more widely shared than wild ones and that charms with underground bulbs were more widely used than those without such organs, as vegetatively propagated plants would facilitate transfer of charm knowledge.MethodsWe compiled a list of charm plants from recent fieldwork and supplemented these with information from herbarium collections, historic and recent literature among 11 ethnic groups in the Guianas. To assess similarity in plant use among these groups, we performed a Detrended Component Analysis (DCA) on species level. To see whether cultivated plants or vegetatively propagated species were more widely shared among ethnic groups than wild species or plants without rhizomes, tubers or stem-rooting capacity, we used an independent sample t-test.ResultsWe recorded 366 charms, representing 145 species. The majority were hunting charms, wild plants, propagated via underground bulbs and grown in villages. Our data suggest that similarity in charm species is associated with geographical proximity and not cultural relatedness. The most widely shared species, used by all Amerindian groups, is Caladium bicolor. The tubers of this plant facilitate easy transport and its natural variability allows for associations with a diversity of game animals. Human selection on shape, size and color of plants through clonal reproduction has ensured the continuity of morphological traits and their correlation with animal features.ConclusionsCharm plants serve as vehicles for traditional knowledge on animal behavior, tribal warfare and other aspects of oral history and should therefore deserve more scientific and societal attention, especially because there are indications that traditional knowledge on charms is disappearing.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s13002-015-0048-9) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Battle lines in the Hot Lakes District, New Zealand, c.1900: tourism development and the contested nature of place

In the nineteenth century, European visitors flocked to see the silica formations known as the Pink and White Terraces in the central North Island of New Zealand. The history of this visitation illustrates the contested nature of tourism development in a colonial context. Tribal warfare for control over the natural resources was a feature in the 1850s with Tūhourangi emerging victorious. Increasing visitation in the 1870s and 1880s shifted the battlefield into an economic sphere with indigenous entrepreneurship and agency a key factor of development. Tūhourangi met this challenge and controlled most of the commerce and kept their land-holdings intact. The Native Land Court became a new battleground for Tūhourangi as they successfully argued their case and were recognised as the legal owners of the Terraces. Despite acknowledgment of indigenous ownership, Tūhourangi would have had to engage in ongoing battles in order to keep their lands. The eruption of Mount Tarawera and the subsequent damage it caused, including the destruction of the Pink and White Terraces, stifled tourist activity in the region and left Tūhourangi virtually landless. The Crown were then able to purchase vast tracts of land without competition thus controlling any future development.

Ethnicity, intra-elite differentiation and political stability in Kenya

Politics in Kenya remains vulnerable to ethnic tensions despite its openness and vibrancy, but it can also be argued that Kenyan politics is becoming increasingly mature. This article explains the political economy dynamics behind the first two orderly presidential successions in post-colonial Kenya. It proposes a conceptual framework that shows how instrumental ethnicity plays out in a quasi-differentiated society in which ethnic organizations are the key conduits for the flow of rents between political and economic elites. More specifically, it shows how the internal fragmentation of ethnic groups intensifies the structural uncertainties that are commonly associated with intra-elite pacts in weakly institutionalized polities. It is argued that the 1978 and 2002 presidential successions in Kenya were orderly, paradoxically, because some of the crucial political and ethnic organizations were fragmented to the extent that they created conditions of great uncertainty for the elite. In this context, the rule of law was upheld as a last-ditch strategy to mitigate uncertainties in the face of rampant fragmentation. This shows that ultimately elite fragmentation can generate political stability provided that there is enough at stake for the elites. HORRIFYING IMAGES OF THE POST-ELECTION VIOLENCE in Kenya in 2007–8 have been used by some in the media to portray Kenya as a country teetering on the verge of tribal warfare. The fact that such a dramatic deterioration of order occurred in a country that was considered to be one of the most stable in the region has led many to examine the underlying fractures in the Kenyan state. Indeed, Kenya’s plight attracted so much *Biniam E. Bedasso (biniam.bedasso@econrsa.org) is a Policy Research Associate at Economic Research Southern Africa. I am grateful to John J. Wallis for reading and critiquing draft versions of this article. I would like to thank Adam Szirmai, Kaj Thomsson, three anonymous referees and the editors of this journal for comments and suggestions. I gratefully acknowledge financial support from the Robert S. McNamara fellowship programme of the World Bank and Agence Francaise de Developpement. 1. Mike Pflanz and Richard Holt, ‘Kenya on the brink amid “genocide” claims’, The Telegraph, 2 January 2008, (16 March 2015). 2. See, for instance, Susanne D. Mueller, ‘The political economy of Kenya’s crisis’, Journal of Eastern African Studies 2, 2 (2008), pp. 185–210; Daniel Branch and Nic Cheeseman, African Affairs, 114/456, 361–381 doi: 10.1093/afraf/adv020 © The Author 2015. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Royal African Society. All rights reserved Advance Access Publication 11 June 2015

Editorial

Violence, defined as the intentional inflicting of injury and damage, seems to always have been a fact of human life. Whether in the shape of raids, ambushes, wars, massacres, genocides, insurgences, terrorism, or gang assaults, socially organized violence, that is, human groups orchestrating and committing violent acts, has been a steady companion of human life through the ages. The human quest to make sense of violence is probably as old as violence itself. Academic conflict research both continues and advances this quest. As long as wars were waged between nations, the research on armed conflicts focused on international relations and great power politics. This paradigm was kept alive even when the asymmetrical warfare of decolonization spread across the world, because by then the frame of analysis was the binary system of the Cold War and regional conflicts were classifi ed as proxy wars. After the end of the Cold War, the academic interest in forms of organized violence other than international conflict became more general in the social sciences, not least in anthropology, a discipline whose long-standing research interest in violent conflict previously had been directed almost exclusively towards “tribal warfare.” But, following their research tradition, anthropologists also began to conduct field studies in contemporary war zones and other violent settings.

Explaining the Evolutionary Dynamics of an Insurgency : T. E. Lawrence and the Art of Tribal Warfare

Despite the advances made in social and industrial life hundreds of millions of people world-wide live in social groups that can be described as tribes. These groups translate into segments of societies that have little to do with political entities. Enemies with tribal identity are difficult to defeat, which is due to the inherent dynamics of primitive or tribal warfare that feature a strong similarity with biological evolution. In the case favourable conditions exist, these dynamics can accumulate into victory of the weaker and defeat of the stronger. In order to support this statement the authors use the Arab Revolt (1916–18) as an example, which is excellently explained in the “Seven Pillars of Wisdom” written by T. E. Lawrence.

Rape as a War Crime Prosecution of Sexual Violence in the International Community

Rape has been present in armed conflict since tribal warfare, yet it was not formally determined to be a war crime or a crime against humanity punishable under international law until 1992, after the wars and conflicts in the former Yugoslavia. This paper will cover the existence of rape (committed largely against civilian women and children) as a form of torture, domination, and genocide in armed conflicts, and the international response. The paper will focus specifically on the conflicts and the subsequent International Criminal Chambers for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda (ICTY and ICTR). The ICTY was the first international court to include rape as a crime against humanity, and the first court to find a person guilty of rape as a crime against humanity. Both Chambers have found the rapes committed as acts of genocide that were ordered, encouraged, or committed by military forces. The paper will examine some of the major cases of each Chamber, and compare the outcomes and interpretations of each body to determine what the overarching legal doctrine is.

“Vistas of Simultaneity”: Northern Irish Elegies for Yugoslavia

“Vistas of Simultaneity”:Northern Irish Elegies for Yugoslavia Margaret Greaves When asked in a PBS NewHour interview in 2000 if the “honor-bound, blood-stained, vengeance-driven” culture of Beowulf reminded him of Ireland, Seamus Heaney refused to take the bait. He replied diplomatically but unequivocally, “Well, no. Ireland . . . [is] in a different kind of cultural situation.” Instead, he suggested resonances between Beowulf and another fringe region of Europe, one often aligned with Ireland in the British and Anglo-Irish literary imaginations: the Balkans. Heaney compared the ethnic violence of the 1990s with the tribal allegiances of the Anglo-Saxon world; what does strike the contemporary reader of “Beowulf,” he said, is that sense of small ethnic groups living together with memories of wrongs on each side, with a border between them that may be breached. I mean, after the breakup of the former Yugoslavia, after Bosnia and Kosovo and so on, the feuds between the Swedes and the Geats, these little dynastic, ethnic, furious battles strike a chord.1 Heaney allows that “there is of course an ethnic energy and a vengefulness from the past” in Northern Ireland, but that these impulses are “more widespread than that”—emanating at least as insistently from southeastern Europe. By displacing his response onto former Yugoslavia, Heaney suggests that Ireland’s historically specific situation should not be read too faithfully into the primitive landscapes of Beowulf. In contrast to Heaney’s insistence on cultural specificity, the mainstream media and some scholars have explained the Northern Ireland “Troubles” and the Yugoslav Wars in strikingly similar terms: as tribal conflicts rooted in the blood feuds of primordial, savage Europe.2 Indeed, this “tribal warfare thesis” has been applied persistently to these two conflicts. Since the nineteenth century, the [End Page 31] Balkans and Ireland have frequently appeared as distorted doubles in British and Anglo-Irish literature, imagined as primitive backwaters in the margins of Europe. Count Hermann Keyserling’s immortal remark in his 1928 book Europe— “If the Balkans hadn’t existed, they would have been invented”—now resonates with the opening of Declan Kiberd’s Inventing Ireland: “If Ireland had never existed, the English would have invented it.”3 Although balkanization is most apparent in English literature through the fin de siècle, Andrew Hammond’s British Literature and the Balkans (2010) places the Yugoslav Wars on a continuum with earlier balkanist discourse.4 For that matter, it is striking that Irish Gothic readings of Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula, which find the plight of colonial Ireland in Dracula’s Romanian landscape, became trendy just as war in the Balkans broke out and peace talks in Northern Ireland began.5 The branding of the “Troubles” and the Yugoslav Wars as tribal warfare no doubt has roots in fin de siècle balkanization. But we have yet to consider the intersections between Northern Ireland and Yugoslavia, despite the richness of the texts—particularly in poetry, a genre generally neglected in most literary studies of the Balkans.6 Yet the genre of poetry in general, and Irish-themed elegy in particular, has responded powerfully to the superficial paralleling of sectarian violence in Northern Ireland and Yugoslavia. The 1990s saw multiple individual poems and volumes of poetry dedicated to victims of former Yugoslavia that implicitly or explicitly bring in Irish, and especially Northern Irish, themes. These volumes include Klaonica: Poems for Bosnia (1993); In the Heart of Europe: Poems for Bosnia (1998); and Scar on the Stone: Contemporary Poetry from Bosnia, edited by [End Page 32] Chris Agee (1998).7 Not all of these poems come from Northern Ireland or the Republic of Ireland. But all of the poems considered here are transnational elegies that mourn the dead of Yugoslavia through Northern Irish contexts.8 In the rhetoric of tribalism in postwar Europe, the tribe is imagined as a base unit of human groups, an almost oppressively intimate collectivity. Intimacy is also an underlying concern in the theory of lyric. Intimacy takes on additional force when brought to bear on the lyric “I” and addressed or implied “you” of the elegy. Experiments with intimacy between poet and addressee—particularly the circumstances in which these overtures break...

Zenobia or al-Zabbāʾ: The Modern Arab Literary Reception of the Palmyran Protagonist

Historical sources present us with two Zenobia of Palmyra characters. In the Greco-Latin sources she is the leader of a great rebellion against the Roman Empire. That is the most commonly known version. There is, however, a second historiography of Zenobia. This Arab version presents us with a very different tale, in which Zenobia (al-Zabbāʾ) struggles in the context of Arab tribal warfare. This article is concerned with the way modern Arab authors have revived the memory of Zenobia. A key question will be which version of history was adopted by modern Arab authors, and why. This will involve a close reading of texts that will bring into play discussion of ideology, (anti-)colonialism and gender equality.

Among African apes: stories and photos from the field

List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction: Who, What, Where, and Why Martha M. Robbins 1. Discovering Apes Martha M. Robbins 2. Life and Death in the Forest Christophe Boesch 3. Encounters with Bili Chimpanzees in the Undisturbed Gangu Forest Cleve Hicks 4. Is Blood Thicker Than Water? Gottfried Hohmann and Barbara Fruth 5. Our Cousins in the Forest--or Bushmeat? Christophe Boesch 6. Discovering Chimpanzee Traditions Crickette Sanz and David Morgan 7. Keeping it in the Family: Tribal Warfare between Chimpanzee Communities Josephine Head 8. Winona's Search for the Right Silverback: Insights into Female Strategies at a Natural Rain Forest Clearing in Northern Congo Thomas Breuer 9. The Long Road to Habituation: A Window into the Lives of Gorillas Chloe Cipolletta 10. Among Silverbacks Martha M. Robbins 11. The Diversity of the Apes: What Is the Future? Christophe Boesch Contributors Index