Shrove Tuesday football

I recently wrote about the ritual warfare of the Dani people of New Guinea. It was warfare because massed warriors would set upon one another with spears and bows and arrows. Its ritual elements lie in the ceremonies that preceded battle and in the withdrawal of both sides as soon as one or at most a few men were killed or wounded. The men fought not in anger but so as to appease the ghosts of their ancestors.

Reading about Dani warfare, I thought of the racket games played by American Indians. These games, which French observers called lacrosse, pitted one village against another in free-for-alls in which injury was frequent and death a possible outcome. The players participated in rituals before games began and these rituals closely resembled the ones they practiced before going to war. Some referred to the game as analogous to war (as in "little brother of war").

There's another traditional game in which participants would put limb and life at risk. It's the ancient football competition within English villages on Shrove Tuesday.

The English games, like the AmerInd ones, shared with Dani warfare a noticeable religious element. While in the former case, Indians would participate in religious ceremonies before each game and gods were seen as guiding play and determining the victor, in the latter, the game was associated with a religious requirement to be shriven, that is to confess sins to a priest, before sundown that day. (This year Shrove Tuesday falls tomorrow, February 21. One of the three days of Shrovetide, it is the day before Ash Wednesday, and thus the last day before the beginning of Lent.)

Shrove Tuesday football games were, like those of the Indians, not so much recreation, as mock warfare. Like Carnival, held in countries to the south, the games offered a release from many, though not all, cultural inhibitions. They were a letting loose of wild spirits. And it's tempting to see them, as it's common to view Dani ritual warfare and Indian lacrosse, as a means of defusing tensions between neighboring groups of men.

The rules Shrove Tuesday football were traditional ones, varying from village to village, and there were few of them. Early in the sixteenth century one observer saw the occasion as one "wherein is nothing but beastly fury, and extreme violence, whereof proceedeth hurt."[1] While this man went on to complain that "rancour and malice do remain with them that be wounded", modern sources tend to believe the games prevented worse conflict from developing and as a result generally led to better relations between opponents.

Similarly, Dani ritual battles seem to have had the character of games. As one witness wrote, "Dani battles have a conspicuous element of play, with one documented instance of a battle interrupted when both sides were distracted by throwing stones at a passing cuckoo dove."[2]

There's no way to know how ancient were the ritual warfare of the Dani and racket games of the AmerInds. The latter were first reported in the 1630s but the former not until 1938. The football contests of Shrove Tuesday can be dated back to the reign of Edward II who attempted to outlaw them in 1349 out of fear that they kept men from practicing archery and thus imperiled the nation's defense. Claims are made that the practice had antecedents in Roman or possibly Saxon Britain, but there's no real evidence for them.

In the early nineteenth century, just as football was catching on as a sport in the aristocratic public schools, it began to die out as a communal sporting competition. In 1829 a French visitor saw the Shrove Tuesday match between two parts of Ashbourne, in Derbyshire: uppers and the downers, that is to say the neighborhoods from different sides of the river that runs through the place. The Frenchman later wrote "if Englishmen call this play, it would be impossible to say what they call fighting."[3]

{Picture showing a Shrove Tuesday battle at London's Crowe Street originally drawn in the year 1721; source: Mob football on wikipedia}

Football match, 1846, at Kingston on Thames.

{Football match, 1846, Kingston on Thames; source: Kingston upon Thames on wikipedia}

Football evolving into rugby.

{Illustration of a public schools game of football in the 1860s; source: History of Football on spartacus.schoolnet}

Football evolving into what Americans call soccer.

{England against Scotland in 1877; source: History of Football on spartacus.schoolnet}

This shows a modern match of Shrove Tuesday football in Alnwick, Northumberland.

{Traditional Shrove Tuesday football in Alnwick, Northumberland; source: Radical History of Football}

The following image shows an American Indian lacrosse game by George Catlin. A source says: "Catlin was a big fan of Choctaw lacrosse, which he witnessed in Indian Territory in 1834. He described ball-play as 'a school for the painter or sculptor, equal to any of those which ever inspired the hand of the artist in the Olympian games or the Roman forum.' Lacrosse was a physical, even violent, game called 'little brother of war' in Choctaw that included no-holds-barred scuffling and wrestling as players struggled desperately for the ball."[4]

{George Catlin (1796–1872). Ball-play of the Choctaw: Ball-up, 1846–50. Oil on canvas; 65.4 x 81.4 cm. Gift of Mrs. Joseph Harrison, Jr. Smithsonian American Art Museum; source: Smithsonian American Art Museum}

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Some sources:

Ashbourne Royal Shrovetide Football Shrove Tuesday & Ash Wednesday

The history of Royal Ashbourne Shrovetide Football
Extract: "There are many versions as to the true origins of the game - but the most popular seems to be the theory that the 'ball' was originally a head tossed into the waiting crowd following an execution. ... And in 1878 the game was briefly banned after a man drowned in the Henmore. Local land-owners signed petitions and refused to let the game take place on their properties."

Royal Shrovetide Football in Ashbourne on demotix.com

'Shrovetide Football at Ashbourne', 26 February 1952 images on superstock.co

Shrovetide Football: 1 Ball, 2 Days, 3,000 Players on the New York Times, March 7, 2011.

History, topography, and directory of Derbyshire, comprising its history and archaeology: a general view of its physical and geological features, with separate historical and topographical descriptions of each town, parish, manor, and extra-parochial liberty (T. Bulmer & Co, Printed for the Proprietors by T. Snape & Co., 1895)

Old English customs extant at the present time, an account of local observances by Peter Hampson Ditchfield (G. Redway, 1896)
Extract:

Shrove Tuesday is a day celebrated for its famous football encounters, which are not, like ordinary games, fought out on a level field between goal-posts, but are entirely of another character. At Sedgefield the church clerk and sexton had, according to immemorial custom, to find a ball to be played for by the trades-folk and villagers on this day. The goal of the former is at the south of the village, that of the latter is a pond at the north end. The ball is put through the bull-ring in the middle of the village. The game always begins at one o'clock, and is fought out for three or four hours with much ferocity. There are no rules of "offside," or of "no charging or hacking allowed." All is fair in love or war, and also in the old-fashioned football of England and Scotland. At Chester-le-Street they have an annual match between the "up-street" and "down-street" folk on Shrove Tuesday. The contest takes place in the street, the windows being all carefully barricaded; and a burn lies in the course of the players, who rush into the water, and enjoy a fine scrimmage there. At Alnwick the contest used to take place in the street, but the Duke of Northumberland instituted an annual match, which now takes place in "the Pasture" every Shrove Tuesday between the parishioners of the two parishes of St. Michael and St. Paul. The committee receives the ball at the barbican of the castle from the porter, and march to the field headed by the Duke's piper, where the contest takes place, after which a fine struggle takes place for the possession of the ball.

History of Football
Extract: 'Large football games often took place on Shrove Tuesday. In 1796 it was reported that in Derby, John Snape was "an unfortunate victim to this custom... which is disgraceful to humanity and civilization, subversive of good order and government and destructive to the morals, properties, and lives of our inhabitants."'

History of football: And the Rules of the Game

Something for everybody (and a garland for the year) John Timbs (London, Lockwood & Co. Stationers, 1861)
Extract: "Football is another common Shrove Tuesday sport: it is still played in Derby, Nottingham, Kingston-upon-Thames, and a few other towns. ... The people of Kingston claim their ancient custom as a right obtained for them by the valour of their ancestors. Tradition states that the Danes, in one of their predatory incursions, were defeated at Kingston, and the Danish general being slain, his head was cut off, and kicked about the place in triumph. This happened on Shrove Tuesday; and hence the origin of their football on that day."

Ashbourne Royal Shrovetide Football Shrove Tuesday & Ash Wednesday.
The game is still carried on at Ashbourne and Derby. Extract:

Football continues to be played at in many parts of England on Shrove Tuesday and Ash-Wednesday, but the mode of playing this game at Ashbourne and Derby, differs very much from the usual practice of this sport. In the town of Derby the contest lies between the parishes of St. Peter and All Saints, and the goals to which the ball is to be taken are, Nun's mill for the latter, and the Gallow's balk on the Normanton road for the former. None of the other parishes of the borough take any direct part in the contest, but the inhabitants of all join in the sport, together with persons from all parts of the adjacent country. The players are young men from eighteen to thirty or upwards, married as well as single, and many veterans who retain a relish for the sport are occasionally seen in the very heat of the conflict. The game commences in the market-place, where the partisans of each parish are drawn up on each side; and, about noon, a large ball is tossed up in the midst of them. This is seized upon by some of the strongest and most active men of each party. The rest of the players immediately close in upon them, and a solid mass is formed. It then becomes the object of each party to impel the course of the crowd towards their particular goal. The struggle to obtain the ball, which is carried in the arms of those who have possessed themselves of it, is then violent, and the motion of this human tide heaving to and fro, without the least regard to consequences, is tremendous. Broken shins, broken heads, torn coats and lost hats, are among the minor accidents of this fearful contest, and it frequently happens that persons fall in consequence of the intensity of the pressure, fainting and bleeding beneath the feet of the surrounding mob. But it would be difficult to give an adequate idea of this ruthless sport: a Frenchman passing through Derby remarked, that if Englishmen called this playing, it would be impossible to say what they would call fighting. Still the crowd is encouraged by respectable persons attached to each party, and who take a surprising interest in the result of the day's sport; urging on the players with shouts, and even handing to those who are exhausted, oranges and other refreshment. The object of the St. Peters' party is to get the ball into the water, down the Morledge brook into the Derwent as soon as they can, while the All Saints party endeavour to prevent this, and to urge the ball westward. The St. Peter players are considered to be equal to the best water-spaniels, and it is certainly curious to see two or three hundred men up to their chins in the Derwent continually ducking each other. The numbers engaged on both sides exceed a thousand, and the streets arc crowded with lockers on. The shops are closed, and the town presents the aspect of a place suddenly taken by storm. — The origin of this violent game is lost in its antiquity, but there exists a tradition, that a cohort of Roman soldiers, marching through the town to Derventio, or Little Chester, were thrust out by the unarmed populace, and this mode of celebrating the occurrence has been continued to the present day. It is even added that this conflict occurred in the year 217, and that the Roman troops at Little Chester were slain by the Britons. — This game is played in a similar manner at Ashbourne, but the institution of it there is of a modern date.

The history of Royal Ashbourne Shrovetide Football

The every day book, or, A guide to the year, describing the popular amusements sports, ceremonies, manners customs & events incident to the three hundred & sixty-five days, in past & present times by William Hone, Volume 1 (W. Tegg, 1826)
Extract:

"FOOT-BALL.

This was, and remains, a game on Shrove Tuesday, in various parts of England.

Sir Frederick Morton Eden in the "Statistical account of Scotland," says that at the parish of Scone, county of Perth, every year on Shrove Tuesday the bachelors and married men drew themselves up at the cross of Scone, on opposite sides; a ball was then thrown up, and they played from two o'clock till sun-set. The game was this: he who at any time got the ball into his hands, run with it till overtaken by one of the opposite party; and then, if he could shake himself loose from those on the opposite side who seized him, he run on; if not, he threw the ball from him, unless it was wrested from him by the other party, but no person was allowed to kick it. The object of the married men was to hang it, that is, to put it three times into a small hole in the moor, which was the dool or limit on the one hand: that of the bachelors was to drotun it, or dip it three times in a deep place in the river, the limit on the other: the party who could effect either of these objects won the game; if neither won, the ball was cut into equal parts at sun-set. In the course of the play there was usually some violence between the parties; but it is a proverb in this part of the country that "All is fair at the ball of Scone. Sir Frederick goes on to say, that this custom is supposed to have had its origin in the days of chivalry; when an Italian is reported to have come into this part of the country challenging all the parishes, under a certain penalty in case of declining his challenge. All the parishes declined this challenge except Scone, which beat the foreigner, and in commemoration of this gallant action the game was instituted. Whilst the custom continued, every man in the parish, the gentry not excepted, was obliged to turn out and support the side to which he belonged, and the person who neglected to do his part on that occasion was fined; but the custom being attended with certain inconveniences, was abolished a few years before Sir Frederick wrote. He further mentions that on Shrove Tuesday there is a standing match at foot-ball in the parish of Inverness, county of Mid Lothian, between the married and unmarried women, and he states as a remarkable fact that the married women are always successful.

Humble yet violent beginnings
Extract: "Mob Football was a popular recreation activity recognised by its violent, uncodified and rural exterior, a far cry from the Suarez swan dives of the 21st century. The heartbeat of the game was born in these English Villages, where the locals celebrated their only days off work, known as ‘holy-days’, by taking part in ritual festivals of sport and alcohol."

Local derby on wikipedia.
Extract: "The traditional Shrovetide football match was also commonplace in the city. It was renowned as a chaotic and exuberant game that involved the whole town and often resulted in fatalities. The goals were at Nuns Mill in the north and the Gallows Balk in the south of the town, and much of the action took place in the Derwent river or Markeaton brook. Nominally the players came from All Saints' and St Peter's parishes, but in practice the game was a free-for-all with as many as 1,000 players. A Frenchman who observed the match in 1829 wrote in horror, 'if Englishmen call this play, it would be impossible to say what they call fighting'."

Mob football on wikipedia
"Mob Football has been forever imortalized by the writings of William Shakespeare in his The Comedy of Errors: Am I so round with you, as you with me, That like a foot-ball you doe spurne me thus: You spurne me hence, and he will spurne me hither, If I last in this service, you must case me in leather.[9] "

Pancakes and Football

SHROVE TIDE FOOTBALL

SHROVE TUESDAY NO-RULES FOOTBALL

Shrovetide in the New Advent encyclopedia

folk football in Britain

The Radical History of Football

Shrovetide Football, Ashbourne, Derbyshire

History - US - Lacrosse by Thomas Vennum Jr., Author of American Indian Lacrosse: Little Brother of War
Extract: "Apart from its recreational function, lacrosse traditionally played a more serious role in Indian culture. Its origins are rooted in legend, and the game continues to be used for curative purposes and surrounded with ceremony. Game equipment and players are still ritually prepared by conjurers, and team selection and victory are often considered supernaturally controlled. In the past, lacrosse also served to vent aggression, and territorial disputes between tribes were sometimes settled with a game, although not always amicably. A Creek versus Choctaw game around 1790 to determine rights over a beaver pond broke out into a violent battle when the Creeks were declared winners. Still, while the majority of the games ended peaceably, much of the ceremonialism surrounding their preparations and the rituals required of the players were identical to those practiced before departing on the warpath."

Games of the North American Indians Culin, Stewart, 1858-1929 in Twenty-fourth Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology, 1902-1903

"American Indian Games" by Stewart Culin in The Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 11, No. 43 (Oct. - Dec., 1898), pp. 245-252 (American Folklore Society) Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/534133

History of lacrosse on wikipedia - "Modern day lacrosse descends from and resembles games played by various Native American communities. These include games called dehuntshigwa'es in Onondaga ("men hit a rounded object"), da-nah-wah'uwsdi in Eastern Cherokee ("little war"), Tewaarathon in Mohawk language ("little brother of war"), baaga`adowe in Ojibwe ("bump hips") and kabocha-toli in Choctaw language ("stick-ball")."

Medieval football on wikipedia

Royal Shrovetide Football on wikipedia

Scoring the Hales on wikipedia

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Notes:

[1] Thomas Elyot quoted in Famous Football Quotes and FOOTBALL AFTER THE ORIGINAL STYLE 'PLAYED' AT ASHBOURNE ON SHROVE TUESDAY.

[2] From the article on endemic warfare in wikipedia, giving as source eider, Karl Heider's book, The Dugum Dani (Chicago: Aldine Publishing Company, 1970).

[3] From the author(s) of the Local derby on wikipedia. Reference is made to Local derby on The Phrase Finder, but the quote is not given there.

[4] George Catlin and His Indian Gallery, Autry National Center

Shangri-La

Why Are Men So Violent? in Psychology Today, by Jesse Prinz, Ph.D. (Feb 3 2012)

I read this short article and was at first disposed to think the author right. He's critiquing a paper on the "male warrior hypothesis" which uses evolutionary psychology to explain why modern men and women treat "outgroup members" as enemies. Outgroup members are, as you'd expect, people unlike themselves. The authors of the paper hope that "understanding why male outgroup members elicit particularly negative emotions, cognitions and behaviours is the first step towards a sensible policy to improving intergroup relations in modern societies." They say anthropological studies show men in pre-historic communities to have been directed by (paraphrasing) a conflict-based evolutionary strategy to perpetuate their kind. The goal of these men was "to gain access to mates, territory and increased status" by displaying "acts of intergroup aggression." These acts — raids, warfare, and the like — threatened the communities' women who, as you'd expect, therefore feared outgroup men. The paper describes this as "selection pressure for psychological mechanisms that bias women against outgroup men."[1] The main trouble with the warrior hypothesis is that it's untestable. The entire argument is based on supposition. There's no way to know whether communal male aggression was an evolutionary adaptive behavior or rather a component of cultural practices which developed as communities competed for scarce resources.

In Psych Today, Prinz says the male warrior hypothesis is one way to look at the problem of male violence, but not the best one. He says history is a better guide. Prinz isn't an actual historian however. He's a philosopher who specializes in psychology and his argument isn't any better supported by available evidence than the one he attacks. History, he says, shows that men fight each other simply because their strength gives them power and, having attained power, they must fight to retain it. He reminds us that both men and women try to obtain desirable resources and that men are naturally stronger than women. Before mankind invented agriculture, men didn't fully dominate women because they depended on women to gather plant food while they, the men, specialized in bringing home game. After the invention of farming, he says, women stopped being providers and became economically dependent on men. Having gained this economic ascendancy, men exploited it; and now — in modern times — they (paraphrasing) mistreat women, philander, and control both labor markets and political institutions. He says, "Once men have absolute power, they are reluctant to give it up. It took two world wars and a post-industrial economy for women to obtain basic opportunities and rights." These broad generalizations are given as self-evident.

Whether verifiable or not, they do not contradict the warrior hypothesis since they deal with man-woman relations, not man-man. Regarding the latter, Prinz says that having achieved dominance over women, men are forced to fight to defend it — not against women, but against other men "who find themselves without economic resources [and] feel entitled to acquire things by force if they see no other way." This is a re-statement of the warrior hypothesis in terms of cultural rather than biological adaptation. The restating isn't very intellectually satisfying. Although Prinz does a good job of criticizing the RoySoc paper, the alternative he puts forward isn't supported by better evidence. "Patterns of violence," he says, "can be dramatically altered by historical forces. Attitudes towards slavery, torture, and honor killing change over time, and this should make us realize that the biological contributions to violence may be greatly outweighed by the sociological." He says that ascribing male violence to cultural/sociological/historical causes is simpler than ascribing it to biological/evolutionary ones and that accepting his historical hypothesis leads to a superior set of predictions. To his credit, Prinz says the subject is a complex one, but his approach seems no less simplistic that the one he criticizes.

Prinz's article caught my eye because I've recently finished reading Mitchell Zuckoff's Lost in Shangri-La. It's a good read. As is often the case, reviewers on amazon.com tell its strengths and weaknesses and give useful precis along the way. This for example, says pretty concisely what it's about: Narrative History at its Best by "Man of La Book" May 3, 2011.

It's a story that can be framed quite a few different ways. The book's blurb focuses on the high drama of harrowing adventure:

On May 13, 1945, twenty-four officers and enlisted men and women stationed on what was then Dutch New Guinea boarded a transport plane named the Gremlin Special for a sightseeing trip over "Shangri-La," a beautiful and mysterious valley surrounded by steep, jagged mountain peaks deep within the island's uncharted jungle.

But the pleasure tour became an unforgettable battle for survival when the plane crashed. Miraculously, three passengers survived – WAC Corporal Margaret Hastings, Lieutenant John McCollom, and Sergeant Kenneth Decker.

Emotionally devastated, badly injured, and vulnerable to disease, parasites, and poisonous snakes in the wet jungle climate, the trio was caught between man-eating head hunters and the enemy Japanese. With nothing to sustain them but a handful of candy and their own fortitude, they endured a harrowing trek down the mountainside – straight into a primitive tribe of superstitious natives who had never before seen a white man or woman.

Lost in Shangri-La recounts this incredible true-life adventure for the first time. A riveting work of narrative nonfiction that vividly brings to life an odyssey at times terrifying, enlightening, and comic, Lost in Shangri-La is a thrill ride from beginning to end.

Newspapers at the time framed the story around the woman: a WAC corporal, Margaret Hastings, who was petite, feminine, plucky, and attractive. Nothing in her life had prepared her for the horror of witnessing the death of the plane's other passengers, the hardships she faced in descending from the mountain-side crash site to the valley below, the experience of living among savages once reaching the valley, and the fears associated with an extremely dangerous rescue plan.

Zuckhoff, himself a newsman, gives multiple frames. He provides a lot of background, enough so that the back-stories sometimes foreground themselves. These back-story frames include life behind-the-lines in the Pacific theater as the end-game of the war against Japan began to play itself out, youthful high-jinks among men and women who were close to but not immediately involved in combat, and both minor mis-steps and serious errors committed by men in high command. He shows us raw competition among commanding officers and their sometimes extravagant headline-seeking behavior. He shows the Army's eagerness to put forward a sensational story in a way that showed the stateside public its own competence and can-do ability to accomplish difficult tasks.

Zuckhoff deals as well with the story of plans and their execution: the technical problems of extracting survivors. He also turns his focus on the odd-ball personalities that are revealed when war brings together people who wouldn't otherwise have had much to do with each other. And he shows how a crisis can produce emergence of excellent military values (calm leadership under grueling conditions, stoic cooperation and mutual support shown at extremity of endurance, and the like).

He reveals as well the casual, unthinking prejudice among white Americans of the time. Thus for example the paratroopers who eventually arrive to set up the extraction of the three survivors are "boys" simply because they are Philippine Americans and their part in the dramatic rescue is for this reason ignored by the press. And the villagers of Uwambo with whom the three survivors lived for weeks are simply "natives," "stone-age tribesmen," or, worse, "man-eating head hunters."

The connection between this book and the debate over the male warrior hypothesis lies in Zuckoff's discussion of these locals, the Uwambo villagers and the Dani peoples of the Baliem Valley. The men of this valley were warriors and their culture was largely based on aggression and violence, sneak attacks and pitched battles.

With temperate climate and fertile soil, the valley can support subsistence farming and, over the many centuries of their life in it, its native inhabitants had learned to live well. The mountain walls hemming them in, however, limited the number of people that this climate and soil could sustain and — whether as an evolutionary adaptation or a cultural accretion (or a combination of the two) — the locals came to possess means to limit population growth. Their main tactics were two: married couples observed sexual abstinence for five years following the birth of a child and the men of the tribe practiced what I find is called Endemic warfare, that is they made ritualistic war against each other in pitched battles and small raids.

The five-year ban on sex was accompanied by separation of sexes. Men and women formed marriage partnerships, but they did not live in the same buildings. Instead men and women each slept in their own quarters; couples met together privately (and infrequently) for sexual intimacies. These practices contradict the evo-psych warrior thesis since it is based on the assumption that a very simplistic version of "reproductive success" is the driving force of pre-historical communities. Further, the reasons giving for fighting were not the acquisition of more sexual partners, but the appeasing of ancestral ghosts, and, in practice, warriors did not take women captive but in raids against opposing villages were more likely to kill them. In non-lethal raiding, warriors would not steal women but rather pigs.

The villagers were "stone age" in the sense that they had no metal. Their tools and weapons were made of wood and stone, but they were not hunter-gatherers. They grew root crops, mostly sweet potatoes, and raised pigs. Contra Prinz, their farming practices did not lead to male domination of women, however. Men and women cooperated in farming tasks with the men preparing fields for planting and the women doing most other farming tasks. The dominant warriors were also the most influential men in the village, but their power was greatly limited, mostly based on persuasion, and women contributed to decision-making to some extent.

Men kept their spears, bows, and arrows close at hand at all times and each village built itself a watch tower which they kept manned at all times. Villages made alliances with their neighbors and it was the resulting confederations that engaged in frequent ritual battles with one another. The warriors participating in these battles aimed at wounding or killing an enemy in order to appease the ghost of an ancestor. Much of the time a single wounding or killing would bring a battle to an end. And when an enemy was killed the warriors who had killed him would dismember the body and, sometimes, ritualistically cook and consume parts of it. Anthropologists report that actual warfare — secular battles intended to kill many enemies and destroy their villages — were rare, occurring perhaps only every ten or twenty years.

These images are stills from the film Dead Birds, a 1964 documentary produced as part of a Harvard-Peabody Expedition to study the highlands of New Guinea. Anthropologist Robert Gardner was director; Peter Matthiessen wrote the voice-over narrative.









From what I've read it seems to me the Dani culture was unusually well balanced and resistant to change. Dani do not appear to have suffered the ills of many other peoples. So far as I'm able to determine, they did not have famine, they were not subject to epidemics, their homeland was not threatened by outside forces more powerful than theirs, their environment did not include predators which threatened their livestock nor plant diseases which threatened their crops. They lived above the malarial tropics and below the unwelcoming frost line. Their climate provided more than enough rainfall and their soil was easy to keep fertile.

They seem to have realized that their self-containment was a strength even to the extent of rejecting tools, weapons, and clothing offered them by the crash survivors and their rescuers. Zuckoff writes that the Dani kept their visitors outside their village. The WAC, Margaret Hastings, who never learned any of the Dani language or even the names of those she met, nonetheless was the only caucasian able to form close acquaintance with them. Knowing very little about their culture, she perceived that they were adamant in preserving the balance they'd achieved from outside interference. He says:


Similarly, an anthropologist reports that missionaries made little headway in attempting to convert the Dani to Christianity: "In the middle of 1962 a mission post by one of the Baliem tributaries had to be evacuated, because of the hostility of the great majority of the Dani in that region. During the last months before evacuation police guarded the station in order to deter attacks."[2]

All the same, the Dani were not rigidly resistant to change. Neither the sweet potatoes that were their staple crop nor the pigs, which functioned both as food source and as repository of personal wealth, were native to the island. Sweet potatoes, for example, were crops originating on the South American continent and they are thought to have been introduced in the seventeenth century. The culture may have been "stone age" in the sense that it lacked metal tools and weapons, but its food sources and presumably also farming practices were relatively modern.[3] This may show an unusual cultural instinct to accept change, but only that which could maintain or strengthen the natural balance which this people had been able to achieve.

The inhospitable mountain peaks which guarded the Dani against incursions from the world outside, did not protect them from airborne intruders after World War II came to a close. Despite their instinct for preservation and resistance to outside influence, the balance which the Dani enjoyed did not long survive first contact with the men and women of western civilization. They still exist as a people, but now principally as objects of tourist interest and clients of the Indonesian state. Still, says an author of the wikipedia on the Dani: "Changes in the Dani way of life over the past half century are tied to the encroachment of modernity and globalization, despite tourist brochures describing trekking in the highlands with people from the 'stone age'. Observers have noted that pro-independence and anti-Indonesian sentiment tends to run higher in highland areas than for other areas of Papua. There are cases of abuses where Dani and other Papuans have been shot and/or imprisoned trying to raise the flag of West Papua, the Morning Star."

{
Unofficial Morning Star flag, used by supporters of West Papuan independence; source: wikipedia}

"Why Are Men So Violent?" Maybe it's the wrong question to ask.

This is a Google Map of Papua New Guinea. The valley is to the west (left) of the white boundary line. It runs east-west within the mountains that enclose it.

View Larger Map

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Some sources:

Why Are Men So Violent? in Psychology Today, by Jesse Prinz, Ph.D. (Feb 3 2012)

The Baliem Valley and Dani Culture West-Papua by Øystein Lund Andersen gives some handsome photographs

If Englishmen called this playing, it would be impossible to say what they would call fighting 11 February 2012

S. Glover & T. Noble, The history of the county of Derby (London, 1829, 2 vols), vol. I, p. 310.

Film: DEAD BIRDS (1963) 83 mins. Robert Gardner, a lecture by Karl Heider (pdf)

Visit to Shangri-La/Baliem Valley by Mitchell Zuckoff (photo gallery)

HERE BE CANNIBALS RECENT CANNIBALISM IN NEW GUINEA

Dani people on wikipedia

Dead Birds on wikipedia

1945 New Guinea Gremlin Special rescue on wikipedia

New Guinea Highlands on wikipedia

Richard Archbold on wikipedia

A History of Research on Warfare in Anthropology by Keith F. Otterbein in American Anthropologist, New Series, Vol. 101, No. 4 (Dec., 1999), pp. 794-805 (Published by Blackwell Publishing on behalf of the American Anthropological Association) Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/684054

Dani Sexuality: A Low Energy System by Karl G. Heider in Man, New Series, Vol. 11, No. 2 (Jun., 1976), pp. 188-201 (Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland) Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2800204


Culture Contact, Cultural Ecology, and Dani Warfare by Paul Shankman in Man, New Series, Vol. 26, No. 2 (Jun., 1991), pp. 299-321 (Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland) Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2803834
Extract:

At an altitude of 5200 feet, the Grand (or Balim) Valley is more of a plain than a valley, roughly 28 miles long and 9 miles wide; inside its walls live 50,000 Dani. The valley's most impressive feature is the complex system of gardens that covers its floor. ... A garden may take up to three months to prepare. Men, working in co-operative groups, do the heaviest work while the women do the lighter work. ... The sweet potato is, however, the major source of food for the Dani, and the labyrinthian pattern of the gardens is a result of the special needs of this single plant. Sweet potatoes are sensitive to drought and flooding. The balance between too much and too little moisture is handled by the Dani through labour-intensive drainage systems. ... [In addition] almost every man tries to maintain a pig herd, which is looked after by his wives and children. .. The garden remains made excellent pig fodder. So as the Dani came to rely more on sweet potato cultivation, they were able to cope with an expanding pig population. Sweet potatoes were first domesticated in South America and were probably introduced into New Guinea no more than 450 years ago. ... With the adoption of the sweet potato, population growth rates may have increased and a greater proportion of the forests in the Grand Valley would have been converted to arable land. In this sense, indirect culture contact, responsible for the original introduction of the sweet potato, was a major cause of the changing cultural ecology of the New Guinea Highlands.

When viewed from an ecological perspective, it is apparent that the Grand Valley Dani occupy a rather narrow environmental zone outside of which they cannot support themselves at current population levels. Below about 4000 feet is the malarial zone, while above about 7000 feet misting from clouds limits this kind of Highlands horticulture.

[Dani warfare involves] hundreds of men on each side of a designated public battleground firing arrows in a highly individualistic fashion. The rationale for ritual warfare is revenge in order to placate the ghosts of the dead. These frequent wars are generally inconclusive and casualties are low. Raids involving clandestine attack by a dozen or so warriors are also included under the rubric of ritual war (Heider 1979: 99), but are often more deadly than the great ritual battles.

Secular warfare, on the other hand, does not invoke ideological rationales concerning spirits of the dead. It is brief and infrequent, employing a co-ordinated, large-scale clandestine attack at dawn; large numbers of men, women and children are killed; property is destroyed or taken and territorial boundaries are reworked.2 But what is the relationship between these types of war?

Most Dani activities are in some way connected with pigs, gardens and war, and daily life revolves around these central themes. ... Ritual war is primarily a low risk, military strategy designed to prevent secular warfare. ... Should a group fail to make a credible showing of warriors during the ritual phase of warfare, it may seem vulnerable to its nominal allies or enemies and become the target for an all-out secular attack ... The younger men - the warriors - who occupy the watchtowers so critical to the defense of life and territory. Watchtowers overlook the frontiers where raids and skirmishes often take place. The men sitting in these 30-foot towers provide early warning against attack by the enemy.

The Dani have a five year post-partum taboo on sexual intercourse. This long period of sexual abstinence has implications for population growth, for if child-bearing does indeed take place at five to six year intervals, the population growth rate may be very low. Most women do not have more than two children and Heider reports that only one of 170 married women in the Dugum neighbourhood had even four children (1979: 80). Peters concurs with this finding and adds the possibility of high infant mortality rates (1975: 30). If the Dani are reproducing at low levels, and given an almost 30 per cent. mortality rate from all kinds of warfare (Heider 1970: 128), then population growth may be negligible. Unfortunately, at present, no accurate data are available on actual Dani population growth rates in the Grand Valley.

SOME COMPARATIVE REMARKS ABOUT THE DANI OF THE BALIEM VALLEY AND THE DANI AT BOKONDINI by A. PLOEG in Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde, Deel 122, 2de Afl. (1966), pp. 255-273 (KITLV, Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies) Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27860611
Extract: "In the middle of 1962 a mission post by one of the Baliem tributaries had to be evacuated, because of the hostility of the great majority of the Dani in that region. During the last months before evacuation police guarded the station in order to deter attacks. ... Men and women sleep separately. .. The men, either on their own or in a group, clear the tract and, if necessary, surround it with a fence to keep the pigs out. Subsequently they subdivide the tract into plots and allot each plot to one woman, either a wife or a married or unmarried adolescent daughter or sister. The members of the household to which this woman belongs consume the greater part of the yield of her plot. The rest is distributed to working parties, visitors and so on. ... In all political communities a vague hierarchy of big men exists, headed by the best warrior and war leader. In daily life they are not distinguished by clothing and finery. They work as hard as or even harder than the other men. On most occasions big men are not recognizable from the behaviour other members of the community adopt towards them. It is not quite clear what power and authority the Baliem Valley big men possess. Bromley writes that their voice is important during meetings but that they may be overruled (W.P.i.D.E., 1962, 5), Heider mentions that if a big man wants his suggestions to be accepted by the other men, he has to be very careful in choosing his suggestions and to gauge them to the feelings of the others."

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Notes:

[1] The paper is "Evolution and the psychology of intergroup conflict: the male warrior hypothesis" by Melissa M. McDonald, Carlos David Navarrete, and Mark Van Vugt, and it appears in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, March 5, 2012, pp 670-679. It's behind the RoySoc paywall but is available here as pdf for free. Abstract: "The social science literature contains numerous examples of human tribalism and parochialism—the tendency to categorize individuals on the basis of their group membership, and treat ingroup members benevolently and outgroup members malevolently. We hypothesize that this tribal inclination is an adaptive response to the threat of coalitional aggression and intergroup conflict perpetrated by ‘warrior males’ in both ancestral and modern human environments. Here, we describe how male coalitional aggression could have affected the social psychologies of men and women differently and present preliminary evidence from experimental social psychological studies testing various predictions from the ‘male warrior’ hypothesis. Finally, we discuss the theoretical implications of our research for studying intergroup relations both in humans and non-humans and discuss some practical implications."

[2] SOME COMPARATIVE REMARKS ABOUT THE DANI OF THE BALIEM VALLEY AND THE DANI AT BOKONDINI by A. PLOEG in Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde, Deel 122, 2de Afl. (1966), pp. 255-273 (KITLV, Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies) Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27860611

[3] Culture Contact, Cultural Ecology, and Dani Warfare by Paul Shankman in Man, New Series, Vol. 26, No. 2 (Jun., 1991), pp. 299-321 (Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland) Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2803834)