Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Humanities/2014 December 21

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December 21

Prehistoric wars

Do women ever die in wars among hunter-gatherers? --98.232.12.250 (talk) 10:54, 21 December 2014 (UTC)

I take it you mean did. Anyway this is another case where we can take the lessons of Rule 34 (Internet meme). Given the number of wars there must have been, and the number of women, the answer is surely yes. Nil Einne (talk) 12:35, 21 December 2014 (UTC)

On the contrary, our article on Prehistoric warfare claims that there was probably no warfare during the prehistoric hunter-gather period:

This period of "Paleolithic warlessness" persisted until well after the appearance of Homo sapiens some 0.2 million years ago, ending only at the occurance of economic and social shifts associated with sedentism, when new conditions incentivized organized raids upon settlements.

Of the many cave paintings of the Upper Paleolithic, none depict people attacking other people. There is an equal paucity of skeletal and artifactual evidence of intergroup conflict in the Paleolithic.

I suppose I could answer that absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence, but there's a stack of respectable-looking cites against me there. --Antiquary (talk) 14:48, 21 December 2014 (UTC)

It probably comes down to the definition of war. Certainly there would have been deadly battles over scarce resources, but perhaps only with a few dozen or hundred people on each side. Is this enough to call it a war ? Fighting between modern humans and Neanderthals may have also taken place. As for cave paintings, maybe those were pictures of what they wanted to happen, a sort of prayer, and they did want to hunt animals but wanted to avoid war. StuRat (talk) 17:46, 23 December 2014 (UTC)

See WP article on Lawrence Keeley's War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage (Oxford, 1999) for a countervailing view. Two selective citations in WP's Prehistoric warfare article do not appear to do his arguments and evidence justice.

An abundance of scholarly reviews of that book may be a better source for assessing the naturalness and ubiquity of violent scholarly conflict. (You're free to read 3 such articles every 2 weeks via JSTOR's Register and Read option.) -- Paulscrawl (talk) 15:55, 21 December 2014 (UTC)

Scan ch. 6, "The Harvest of Mars: The Casualties of War" (pp. 83-97) of Keeley's book, War Before Civilization, for the most relevant passages on OP's question of female war casualties in hunter-gatherer societies. p. 92 has numbers garnered from best evidence available, studies of once surviving prestate societes studied in the last couple centuries:

The male:female war death casualty "ratio for prestate societies range from about 1:1 to 1:15 (with a median of 1:7)" (p.92), citing (n.19), T. Pakenham (The Scramble for Africa) 1991: 609-15; R. Edgerton (Like Lions They Fought) 1988: 210-12.

At the least, this book reinvigorated a perennial debate, too long silenced by anthropological mythmakers.

If you like cognitive linguist Steven Pinker's snarky writing style, and don't mind that he is writing essentially as a journalist in a field in which he has no particular authority or academic qualifications, you might be interested in his The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (2011) - at least it is good for culling contemporary citations. -- Paulscrawl (talk) 17:39, 21 December 2014 (UTC)

Good links, but your "1:1 to 1:15 (with a median of 1:7)" ratios should be female:male, not vice-versa. (Keeley, P. 82) -- ToE 15:35, 26 December 2014 (UTC)

lamellar armour of the type worn by native Siberians and Eskimos. These are Koryak people

• The current death-by-violence rates among male hunter gatherers like the Amazonians and indigenous New Guineans is comparable to that of Pan troglodytes, about 30%. See Nicholas Wade's Before the Dawn. This does not amount to systematic warfare but in societies where the only division of labor is between men and women (maybe with a shaman) you don't have full-time soldiers per se. Warfare was well known among the Eskimo before Western contact, and they were not farmers. The Tlingit people were so fierce they were never fully subjugated by Europeans, but they might be considered sedentary. Battle of Sitka. μηδείς (talk) 17:49, 21 December 2014 (UTC)

Neither most Amazonians nor indigenous New Guineans are hunter-gatherers. 18:20, 21 December 2014 (UTC)

See Carlston Annis Shell Mound and Ridgeway Site, a couple of Archaic sites (predating sedentism) in the eastern USA with numerous burials. Evidence of violence is present in many of the burials (Ridgeway was originally thought to be a prehistoric battlefield), and while it's not mentioned in either article, I think I remember rightly that there's no suggestion in the sources (I wrote both articles) that violence was restricted to males. Indian Knoll likewise has a large number of violent burials, but as I'm not familiar with the sources, I can't comment on it there, although archaeologist W.S. Webb's book Indian Knoll apparently has lots of data that would be relevant to your question. Nyttend (talk) 20:23, 21 December 2014 (UTC)

PS, Antiquary, the bit that you quote may be accurate for the Old World, but it's grossly inaccurate for the New; I've added a {{globalise}} to the article, since the whole page seems to ignore the existence of the New World, where evidence of Archaic-period warfare is overwhelming. For example, speaking of the Green River Shell Middens Archeological District and related sites in the area, Cheryl Claassen remarks about the "obvious evidence of raiding and violent death in the shell mounds" on page eight of "Archaic Rituals: Rebalancing with Dogs". Nyttend (talk) 21:01, 21 December 2014 (UTC)

When will I learn that Wikipedia isn't an authority? --Antiquary (talk) 21:26, 21 December 2014 (UTC)

The problem isn't what with Raymond C. Kelly says; the problem is that the article applies his words universally, and misuses it somewhat. Run a search for "Otterbein argues that" — Otterbein says that agriculture developed in places where war wasn't likely, i.e. war necessarily predated agriculture, at least in some places. Nyttend (talk) 22:07, 21 December 2014 (UTC)

The Bloody Falls Massacre was part of the ongoing warfare between the Inuit and First Nations. CambridgeBayWeather, Uqaqtuq (talk), Sunasuttuq 00:17, 22 December 2014 (UTC)

Nyttend, I've added some balancing references (Gat, Keeley - not Keely -, LeBlanc, Lambert, Vencl) for starters) and a bit of content (using Gat & superb Vencl article in Paleolithic section) to that lopsided article.

Including an informative and accessible literature review on North American archaeology of war (Lambert) -- you might look at & incorporate where you will.

Overall, article needs to address the long-standing controversy head on, in lead, which I'm working on.

Thanks to OP's question for making us see this sorry article with fresh eyes. One of the best reasons to hang out on Ref Desk! -- Paulscrawl (talk) 01:23, 22 December 2014 (UTC)

I just want to point out in case there was some confusion that I wasn't suggesting that women necessarily died often (nor the contrary) nor that wars were necessarily common (again nor the contrary). Simply that if there was even 20 "wars" among such people, it's very hard to believe that in none of them did a single women die. This would require a degree of care and protection which is frankly unrealistic. Therefore the answer to the OPs stated question is "yes". Even if "wars" were relatively very uncommon, given the length of time we are referring to, it's not hard for there to have been 20 "wars" although it does depend how you define the term, which is probably the first issue here. If you define "wars among hunter-gatherers" to require a degree of organisation etc in these wars then perhaps under some scenarios you really can't come up with 20 "wars" (although considering the examples given like Inuit for example, I'm not sure even then. If you use it more loosely to refer to somewhat sustained violent conflict between groups (perhaps either until they come to some sort of "peace", one group gives up in some way, or one group is destroyed), then I would suggest even under the most generous views of peaceful hunter-gatherer society, it's quite hard to imagine there wasn't at least 20 "wars". P.S. I started this reply with 200 before considering this was way more than necessary. I cut it down to 20 but I feel even that's way to generous. I would suggest even if there were only 5 wars, it's difficult to imagine not a single woman died in any of them. Nil Einne (talk) 12:10, 22 December 2014 (UTC)

Why is it hard to imagine? In most battles in history, zero women died. There were no cities in prehistoric times. If a woman wanted to be perfectly safe from a war, she could simply walk 5 kilometers in a random direction and the enemy wouldn't find her. --Bowlhover (talk) 18:09, 22 December 2014 (UTC)

If anything, women would have been more likely to die in prehistoric conflicts. The beginning of history coincided with the emergence of writing and civilization. Since the emergence of civilization, wars have largely been conducted between male military specialists from two opposing states meeting on a battlefield. In this context, few women die. (Though this pattern never extended to regions that did not develop states, and the rise of asymmetric conflict and guerrilla warfare over the past century or so has probably increased women's share of war-related deaths.) Before states with military specialists emerged, conflicts between groups would likely have pitted entire communities against one another. Yes, it would have been primarily males who undertook the aggression, but if a community's defense was breached, then its women would have faced aggression, too. Most typically, this would have involved rape and abduction, but surely some women who tried to resist would have been killed. The suggestion that women "simply" needed to flee into the woods to survive ignores just about everything that we know about human nature and real societies. In times of danger, people, and especially women, band together for mutual protection. Also, while the men were fighting, it was typically women's job to look after and protect children. It would have been counterintuitive, frightening, and probably quite dangerous to head off alone in such a context. The chances of being found are greater than you think. People who live by hunting are extremely good at following tracks, especially those of as large an animal as a human being. And what would such a refugee do if she returned to find her community destroyed and/or abducted? Very few, if any, people are able to survive for long completely on their own. We are social animals. Marco polo (talk) 21:29, 22 December 2014 (UTC)

I have to disagree with the statement "In most battles in history, zero women died". Women may not always have been soldiers, but they have been involved in pretty much every war, in some way or another, in recorded history. Sometimes they were wives, servants, or camp prostitutes following the army. If their camp was attacked or their men were defeated some of these women most likely were killed or abducted. Field hospitals full of nurses were not exempt from being bombed. Some women disguised themselves as men and joined the fighting (see List of wartime cross-dressers), and some women sat at home waiting to be raped, enslaved, or murdered if their side lost. These days women have been almost fully integrated into the US military and stand just as good a chance as being killed in combat as men do. If women throughout recorded history have been involved in warfare, then why should prehistory be any different? See Women in the military for further reading.146.235.130.59 (talk) 17:27, 23 December 2014 (UTC)

How often did armies have female camp followers? I was under the impression that it was the exception rather than the rule, but I don't actually know.

Your statement that "women [...] stand just as good a chance as being killed in combat as men do" is definitely false. Only 140 American women have died in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, compared to a total death toll of 5200. 140 out of 280,000 female veterans is extremely low. Women in the US military are extremely safe by any military standard, and even by historical civilian standards during peacetime. --Bowlhover (talk) 09:11, 24 December 2014 (UTC)

Who is the minister Nelson Mandela names in this interview?

At this juncture of the Evita Bezuidenhout interview with Nelson Mandela, the then-president names a politician he admires for having paid serious attention to the ANC. I can't even transcribe the name he says, and searching as been fruitless. Who is he? ± Lenoxus (" *** ") 20:42, 21 December 2014 (UTC)

It's Kobie Coetsee, the article on him is a bit short on detail. -- Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 22:00, 21 December 2014 (UTC)

Hierarchy in the Roman Catholic Church between cardinal and archbishop

In the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church, which title is considered superior and which is considered inferior, when comparing the positions of cardinal and archbishop? Specifically, I am referring to Blessed Alfredo Ildefonso Schuster and his two titles: Cardinal and Archbishop of Milan. Thanks. Joseph A. Spadaro (talk) 23:16, 21 December 2014 (UTC)

Cardinal is a "key person" in the church, and only Cardinals elect a Pope. Archbishops are far more common, and lower in rank than Cardinal. The Pope, though, is "Bishop of Rome" as an historical title. Collect (talk) 23:25, 21 December 2014 (UTC)

Thanks. So, his position/title as a cardinal is more important/more prestigious than his position/title as an archbishop. Correct? Joseph A. Spadaro (talk) 23:48, 21 December 2014 (UTC)

I'm not saying Collect's answer is incorrect but there were cardinal-bishops, cardinal-priests, cardinal-deacons, and even (in the past) lay cardinals. Are you saying that say a lay cardinal or a cardinal-priest who is not even a bishop had/has precedence over an archbishop who's not a cardinal? Maybe you're right but I'm wondering. Contact Basemetal here 00:01, 22 December 2014 (UTC) Never mind. I've just realized cardinal-priests etc. were not really priests etc. but could be bishops or even archbishops. The question remains for lay cardinals but those do not exist anymore. Contact Basemetal here 00:34, 22 December 2014 (UTC)

To be extra clear, the Pope isn't just Bishop of Rome as a historical title: that is what it means to be Pope. In the same way, all archbishops are "Bishop of (Somewhere)". In terms of ordination, there are only deacons, priests, and bishops. When the old Catholic Encyclopedia, which Medeis links, was written, there were also some ordained ranks below that, but they were done away with: the Catholic Encyclopedia information on this topic is outdated. Titles like "Archbishop" and "Cardinal" and "Monsignor" are administrative and honorary, in that they don't really exist in a heirarchy with the terms "Deacon", "Priest", and "Bishop": they form a sort of separate hierarchy with little, if any, religious significance. These administrative and honorary titles have also been reduced since the old Catholic Encyclopedia was written, so one must use any information on this topic cautiously. 86.156.148.98 (talk) 09:06, 23 December 2014 (UTC)

Although an archbishop has charge of an archdiocese and the bishops therein, and so has a clearly defined role. Alansplodge (talk) 11:47, 23 December 2014 (UTC)

Yes, that would be an administrative role. Being an archbishop doesn't come with any additional religious duties or religious capabilities: in that sense, an archbishop is just a bishop. Administratively, being an archbishop means that your diocese is an archdiocese, which may come with administrative power over other bishops. But a bishop is a bishop, religiously speaking. The Pope is a bishop. He doesn't have any greater ability to, for example, ordain or absolve than any other bishop. The stuff about precedence and prestige is separate from the hierarchy of deacon, priest, bishop, was my point. 86.156.148.98 (talk) 11:09, 24 December 2014 (UTC)

For hours of fun on your own: The Catholic Encyclopedia. μηδείς (talk) 04:57, 22 December 2014 (UTC)

Thanks. So, his (Schuster's) position/title as a cardinal is more important/more prestigious than his position/title as an archbishop. Correct? Joseph A. Spadaro (talk) 17:23, 23 December 2014 (UTC)

In his diocese and archdiocese, the fact that he's the archbishop matters much more. In Rome (for instance, during pontifical elections) his cardinal status is everything. Here in London, it's customary for the Archbishop of Westminster to be made a cardinal, but it doesn't make him any less archbishop if he isn't, or any more so when he is. AlexTiefling (talk) 23:54, 23 December 2014 (UTC)

By and large, except for those offices which are traditionally also more or less "automatic" cardinalships (or whatever the word is), a cardinal is slightly "higher ranking" than an archbishop. I know for instance that here in the US the title cardinal is at this point only bestowed on the archbishops with the largest archdioceses. Having said that, there is also the apples and oranges question here as well. Archbishops actually have automatic authority over issues in their archdioceses. Cardinals for the most part only display any power or authority at certain times. So the comparison is sort of similar to that of governors of US states and US senators or cabinet secretaries. While the latter may have slightly broader authority in one sense, the former has the most direct and significant impact on his own area. John Carter (talk) 23:59, 23 December 2014 (UTC)

If a cardinal and an archbishop who's not a cardinal both attend an official function (e.g. a dinner), what's the order of precedence? Contact Basemetal here 00:07, 24 December 2014 (UTC)

Thanks, all. Joseph A. Spadaro (talk) 20:04, 26 December 2014 (UTC)