Cattle Bring Us to Our Enemies: Turkana Ecology, Politics, and Raiding in a Disequilibrium System

5. Cattle Bring Us to Our Enemies

chapter 5 Cattle Bring Us to Our Enemies 7 Nuer say that it is cattle that destroy people, for more people have died for the sake of a cow than for any other cause. —E. E. Evans-Pritchard, The Nuer My focus has been on the importance of ecology, especially arid land ecosystems as nonequilibrium systems, in understanding how the Turkana people use the land. Now I want to turn to the second force that shapes decision making and use of natural resources: raiding, violence, and the threat of raiding. Raiding among East African pastoral peoples has been the subject of much debate and discussion, especially concerning its motivations and impacts. The topic of intertribal and intratribal hostilities was one of the central themes in the first major anthropological study of an East African pastoral people, The Nuer by Evans-Pritchard (1940). Since then numerous articles and book chapters have been written about the role of raiding in East African pastoral societies. The debate concerning warfare and raiding among East African peoples is one aspect of a much larger literature that is geographically global, covers a million years of human history, and questions the very nature of human beings. Before addressing the East African context in more detail, I feel it would be useful to provide a brief sum81 mary of some of the larger issues and debates within which the Turkana and other East African material can be contexualized. Warfare and Raiding outside of East Africa Questions about why people have wars and kill each other have been the subject of social science inquiry and debate for over a hundred years. In the past many researchers have often viewed raiding and warfare among small-scale societies as an aberration, only to be mentioned in passing. Others have viewed warfare as constituting one of the most important influences in the development of complex societies . According to Carneiro, “Warfare has had a profound effect on human history—indeed, it has been the principal means by which human societies, starting as small, simple autonomous communities, have been transformed, step by step, into vast and complex states and empires” (1994:5). The evolutionary perspective that frames Carneiro’s discussion harkens back to the early part of the twentieth century when social scientists incorporated raiding and warfare into their ladder of cultural evolution. Of course, at that time, warfare was not viewed as a process, but the type of war was one characteristic of the evolutionary stage of a particular culture. “Customs, practices, or weapons were placed in sequences or they were linked or related to stages of an evolutionary typology, such as levels of subsistence technology” (Otterbein 1999:795). Over the course of the next eighty years the theoretical frameworks used to frame discussions and explain behavior related to war and human aggression increased dramatically; for example, Otterbein identifies sixteen theories or approaches being debated during what he calls the “Classic Age” (1960–80). Conflict and Controversy Today the debate continues, fueled by current accounts of ethnic genocide and accusations of ethical misconduct on the part of researchers that may have exacerbated the level of conflict that they were supposedly studying. The practice of warfare, raiding, and violence has always precipitated passionate discussions. In the words of Anna Simons: “War is a fraught subject. Those who study it often 82 cattle bring us to our enemies fight about it” (1999:74). She goes on to cite the writings of Hallpike (1973), Ferguson (1996), Chagnon (1997), and Keegan (1997) as examples of the kind of invective found in this body of literature. Chagnon’s work among the Yanomami, in particular, has served as a lightning rod for much of the criticism. According to Sponsel: “There has been a disproportionate amount of controversy, debate, and criticism, some surprisingly aggressive and personal, surrounding Chagnon’s characterization of the Yanomami as ‘the fierce people’ as well as around his sociobiological explanation of their aggression and other matters” (1998:98). What was primarily an academic discussion became distinctly personal with the publication in 2000 of Darkness in El Dorado by Patrick Tierney. In this book Tierney accused geneticist James V. Neel of possibly causing, and certainly exacerbating, a measles epidemic among the Yanomami by deliberately administering an out-of-date vaccine. He also charged Chagnon with misrepresenting the Yanomami people and promoting intertribal violence. In the words of Fernando Coronil, “Tierney argues that Chagnon created the...