It's easy to consider the beginning of warfare this way. Without a whole lot of support, we've been teaching it like fact for a long time. We all know men are violent and women helpless in these situations, right? There are a lot of things about this idea that work for a lot of very sound reasons.
But...I also urge us to consider the sum of the following factors:
- the simplest explanation is most likely to be correct
- in a crisis, warfare may require more resources and people than a stressed society would have
- our early groups weren't all that big to begin with, and women probably outnumbered men pretty significantly (anyone with numbers support on this? I forgot Anthro101)
Then consider Diamond's theory (my rough paraphrase, so forgive me) as to how isolated societies are absorbed into one another or survive as subgroups:
A starving woman looks over hill and sees another group, and how much fatter they are. A few days later, she's at the fire, thinking about it. She puts down her mixing stick, and says something about going out to get some more berries. She washes her hair in the nearest creek (making herself a "resource"?), goes to pay the guys in fatter tribe a visit, and stays.
I'd never make it through a feminist theory course with this mess, but I'm pretty sure I'm safe in the current company.
So we're back to resources, one way or the other, but I am more likely to consider factors like water, grazing, and arable land as the sort of resources over which groups would go to war. Use of resources for the purposes of the continuation of your group, as Greyhawk suggests, is secondary or tertiary, I think. A better guess: the use of resources for survival now...right now...of myself and people immediately connected to me. I imagine what looks like a gangfight over a rotten carcass, between two starving family groups.
What if the conflict happens between groups of women who discover another group in their blackberry patch- their last reliable food source? Do they go get the men? This just occured to me, thought I throw it out there...
The visceral, id-level reason a soldier gives for fighting (anybody heard "for me and the guy next to me" before?) is probably a better indication of the origin of war as anything else. So we are really probably dealing with a direct, immediately preceeding, insult to survival of a small extended family group...?
Thread-starter, are we helping or hurting?
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