Then this happened:

“This sets in motion the dzamalag exchange. Men from the visiting group sit quietly while women of the opposite moiety come over and give them cloth, hit them, and invite them to copulate; they take any liberty they choose with the men, amid amusement and applause, while the singing and dancing continue. Women try to undo the men's loin coverings or touch their penises, and to drag them from the ‘ring place’ for coitus. The men go with their dzamalag partners, with a show of reluctance, to copulate in the bushes away from the fires which light up the dancers. They may give the women tobacco or beads. When the women return, they give part of this tobacco to their own husbands, who have encouraged them to go dzamalag. The husbands, in turn, use the tobacco to pay their own female dzamalag partners…”

2/

In his book “Debt,” David Graeber relayed an anecdote about the Gunwinggu people of Western Amhem Land in Australia, observed by anthropologist Ronald Berndt in the 1940s. Two groups of strangers encountered each other and negotiated with each other to barter over trade goods—in this case, spears made by one group and cloth owned by the other.

Conflict between these strangers was of course possible, and the situation was undoubtedly tense. The ritual they engaged in began with a dance, followed by singing, followed by a kind of formalized bullying—women from each side insult and hit the men from the other.

1/ #thread

I bring this up because I very often encounter misconceptions about societies that we might call tribal, and because recently I’ve come across quite a few of them.

In the most general sense, many people perceive non-state societies to be brutally violent, primitive, and “barbaric” in the classical sense—uncouth and lacking proper, racialized civilization.

I’ve encountered the argument that conflict and conquest are intrinsic to human sociality, because “even tribes conquer other tribes.” (I most often encounter this from right wingers who believe that historical violence by some people can justify later violence against their descendants, a sort of cosmic “everyone’s doing it.”)

4/

Talk about plot twist.

I love this particular ethnographic anecdote, because it illustrates something really important about human interactions. When strangers meet, it’s entirely plausible they will be suspicious and hostile and that conflict will result. But it’s equally plausible that they will peacefully coexist, cooperate, or even join each other and fuse into a new community. The spectrum of human sociality is vast and the space of possible outcomes is enormous.

There are undoubtedly people in “tribal” communities that are insular, hostile, xenophobic, or even aggressively acquisitive. But there are also people and communities that aren’t.

3/

Less obviously malign is the idea that anarchism could only work at small scales, because people “naturally” trust and cooperate people like themselves—their relatives and immediate neighbors—but are suspicious of or hostile to strangers (and thus the sort of Hobbesian war of all against all they imagine non-state people to live in).

Every now and then, I’ll encounter someone who will make explicit the dog whistle at work here: they will assert that people are born racist and cannot cooperate “naturally” outside of their own “tribe.”

5/

Consider to the Khoisan-speaking peoples of Southern Africa, whose ancestors likely were the first anatomically modern humans to enter the Kalahari Desert region 150,000 years ago.

While interpersonal violence does occur among these communities, group violence is essentially unknown. That means these bands of foragers lived without war or conquest for more time than I can wrap my mind around.

If Haudenosaunee expansionism can define tribal society and suggest a universal human violence, why cannot the total absence of war and conquest among the Khoisan define the human experience?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khoisan

10/

Violence is, unfortunately, endemic to the human species. Some people interpret this to mean something like “human history is the history of war,” or something to that effect. Yet the vast majority of people do not engage in violence.

In “The Banality of Ethnic War,” John Mueller notes that we often envision conflict as “a war of all against all and neighbor against neighbor—a condition in which pretty much everyone in one […] group becomes the ardent, dedicated, and murderous enemy of everyone in another group.” In reality, he argues, war is “substantially a condition in which a mass of essentially mild, ordinary people can unwillingly and in considerable bewilderment come under the vicious and arbitrary control of small groups of armed thugs.”

11/

The tl;dr message is that violence is *not* inevitable, and that we can choose—just like many tribal peoples do—to build societies and institutions that encourage peaceful cooperation.

What we absolutely are not justified in doing is blaming modern violence on some imagined “tribal” past or primitivism.

Many of those people had or have their shit together in ways that we should envy.

14/

And, just on a final closing note, if you enjoyed this thread and are in a position to do so, please consider buying me a coffee.

I’ve got some further threads planned on the Indus Valley and Cucetina-Trypillia civilizations, two societies with complex urban life and no evidence of coercive states. Stay tuned!

https://www.buymeacoffee.com/HeavenlyPossum

15/end

@narF @RLetot

Starting to explore some options