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Продолжение свиноводства иными средствами
Джон Киган о десятилетнем цикле войн у марингов:
‘True’ fighting could bring its own result, which was an acceptance of stalemate; ‘raiding’ might have the same effect. ‘Routing’, however, normally resulted in the displacement of the victims from their settlement, and in the destruction of their houses and gardens. It was the ultimate test, therefore, of which was the stronger party and who might encroach on the territory of a neighbour, an important assessment in a society short of land. Maring fighting, it would seem, was thus ‘ecological’ in motivation: it redistributed land from the weak to the strong. But Vayda also points out that important features of Maring warfare contradicted this. One is that victorious Maring rarely occupied all or even some of a defeated clan’s territory, out of fear that lingering bad magic made it unsafe to do so. Another is that the timing of warmaking always coincided with the readiness of a clan cluster to offer the necessary sacrificial thank-offering to their ancestor spirits for assistance in the fight.
Such thank-offerings took the form of killing and eating mature pigs, in the ratio of one for each member of the clan cluster. Since it takes about ten years to raise and fatten such a number of surplus pigs, fights only occurred about every ten years; and, strangely, it was only toward the end of a ten-year period that neighbouring clan clusters began to offer each other the slights and injuries which were the occasion of war. To undertake war without the means of thanking ancestor spirits was to court defeat; on the other hand, to have a surplus of pigs without an excuse to eat them was to lose the point of fattening them. Vayda noted that Maring population densities had actually been in decline during their last extended period of fighting, thus calling into question his own explanation that it was shortage of land that caused the Maring to fight. It might indeed be thought that the Maring fought out of habit, perhaps even for the fun of it, rather than for any reason that anthropological theory can advance. |