(N.B. This entry complements the previous one, titled “We Fight Because We Die” (I): On Extra-Modern War as a Question of Social Logic.”)
We die. It can hardly be minimised. Thus the common ancient-Greek terms for men: θνητοί, “mortals.”
During the opening seconds of Robert Gardner’s beautiful ethnographic film, Dead Birds (1964), the camera follows a bird flying swiftly over the bush; meanwhile Gardner’s voiceover says:
There is a fable told by a mountain people living in the ancient highlands of New Guinea about a race between a snake and a bird. It tells of a contest which decided if men would be like birds and die, or be like snakes which shed their skins and have eternal life. The bird won, and from that time, all men, like birds, must die.(⦼)
The people in question are the Dani, whom Gardner and Karl Heider studied in the early 1960s. Above anything else, the Dani view themselves as warriors. Gardner and Heider stress, however, that they do not “fight in order to annex land or to dominate people,” but “because they want to and because it is necessary.”(Δ) In large measure “their health, welfare and happiness depend on the pursuit of aggression against their traditional enemies.”(⧀) Accordingly, ritual warfare is “positively sanctioned as any major institution in [Dani] culture.”(⧁) There is, furthermore, a place for it: a no-man’s land located in between Dani territory and the territory of their enemies, whose warfare logic is akin to theirs. Whenever both parties agree upon it, they confront themselves on that spot. A single day-long battle ensues from noon to shortly before the sunset. Except those who are too young or too old to participate in it, and those who may be ill or injured for whatever reason, all men join the battle. They put on their best headdresses made of feathers; these are so important for them that a good many men will not hesitate to withdraw from the battlefield if it starts to rain, fearing that they may get spoiled. Not many men get killed, as their fight consists in that the warriors throw spears and shoot unfletched arrows to one another at some distance. Yet a few men may end up injured more or less severely.
Why, then, do the Dani fight? And, more generally – as the model is widespread – why are the extra-modern peoples of Papua Guinea, and beyond, so bellicose?
Gardner puts forward an explanation that adds to Clastres’s theory that extra-modern societies fight one another to preserve their difference, i.e. to avoid assimilation. Men, he suggests, ought to confront death so as to empower themselves over and against it, if provisionally, precisely because they know they die; for such knowledge makes them more than birds, despite all:
Soon, both men and birds will surrender to the night. They’ll rest for the life and death of days to come. For each, both awaits, but with a difference that men, having foreknowledge of their doom, bring a special passion to their life. They will not simply wait for death nor will they bear it lightly when it comes. Instead, they’ll try with measured violence to fashion fate themselves. They will kill to save their souls and perhaps to ease the burden of knowing what birds will never know and what they, as men, who have forever killed each other, cannot forget.(⊕)
Put differently: knowing they will die, they decide not to wait for death to come, but to encounter it and defy it. If they prove successful – if they do not die yet – they can boast of having fashioned, at least once, their own fate. Warfare thus supplies the scenario in which death can be ritually confronted and, eventually, outwitted. Thus, one could argue, even if only the best warriors obtain κλέος (the “ever-lasting ‘fame’” which, according to Heraclitus, the best seek to achieve),(⊙) all those who survive the combat gain κύδος (immediate “fame” or “glory”) due to the fact that they provisionally escape death.(*) In this way, men, who are by definition those that cannot give birth, oppose death by reaffirming their aliveness before death’s terrible presence – whereas women, it must be added, oppose death and vanquish it by transmitting life through their giving birth to new generations (of men and women alike); which implies that women are somehow superior to men, since they defeat death without having to defy it.(⊗)
In an nutshell – just like Sarpedon reminds Glaucus in Iliad 12.310-328 – the Dani do not die because they fight, but fight because they die.(⊜)
In 1989 Gardner returned to Papua New Guinea highlands to visit the Dani and made a second, shorter film (Dead Birds Re-encountered) on their transformed lives.(⦿) They had been “pacified” by a modern state and they no longer engaged in warfare with their enemies. The small bamboo towers from which they used to surveil their enemies movements had been demolished. As per their own confession, men now only cared about money and clothes. A tourist camp had been built nearby the village. The former warriors would now put their best headdresses for them and collect their tips, while some tourists would take pictures of themselves wearing Dani loincloths.
It is inevitable to draw the impression from this that death had lost for the Dani its inherent sacredness, and life as well as a result; for when death is what makes of humans what they are, i.e. mortals, it is viewed as something sacred in its own right – as sacred as life itself is out of being death’s chiastic reverse.
(⦼) Robert Garner, Dead Birds https://vimeo.com/ondemand/deadbirds (digitally Remastered 2-DVD Set; Watertown [MA]: Documentary Educational Resources, 2011), 00:00:00–00:00:40.
(Δ) Robert Gardner and Karl G. Heider, Gardens of War: Life and Death in the New Guinea Stone Age (Introduction by Margaret Mead; New York: Random House, 1968), p. 135.
(⧀) Ibid., p. 136.
(⧁) Ibid., p. 135.
(⊕) Gardner, Dead Birds, 01:21:55–01:22:35. Cf. Pierre Clastres’s analysis of the Aché notion of bayja (Chronicle of the Guayaki Indians [trans. and Foreword by Paul Auster; New York: Zone Books, 1998), 15-59 on which we have written here.
(⊙) Heraclitus, frag. DK B29: “αἱρεῦνται γὰρ ἒν ἀντὶ ἀπάντων οἱ ἄριστοι, κλέος ἀέναον θνητῶν […]” (“One thing alone do the ἄριστοι choose: the ever-lasting fame of mortals […]”).
(*) Cf. the treatment of κύδος in James M. Redfield, Nature and Culture in the Iliad: The Tragedy of Hector (expanded edition; Durham [NC] and London: Duke University Press, 1994), 33-34.
(⊗) Cf. the research on which Clastres was working shortly before dying (Archeology of Violence [trans. Jeanine Herman, with an Introduction by Eduardo Viveiros de Castro; Los Angeles: Semiotext(e): 2010], pp. 279-324). It is easy to imagine, therefore, the initial incomprehensibility with which the Christian kerygma, with its emphasis in that men and women are equal before a God who awaits after death and that makes sense of it, was received among the indigenous peoples of Papua New Guinea (and beyond).
(⊜) Ada Míguez Barciela, Mortal y Fúnebre. Leer la Ilíada (Madrid: Dioptrías, 2016), p. 52.
(⦿) Robert Gardner, Dead Birds Re-encountered (digitally Remastered DVD; Watertown [MA]: Documentary Educational Resources, 2013).
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