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Learning Non-Aggression: The Experience of Non-Literate Societies
Essays by various anthropologists promote the theory as observed in non-literate societies that non-aggression is correlated to early conditioning in cooperative behavior and loving maternal care
- GenresNonfictionAnthropology
Hardcover
First published April 20, 1978
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About the author
Ashley Montagu
206 books69 followersBooks, such as
The Natural Superiority of Women
(1953), of Ashley Montagu, originally Israel Ehrenberg, a British-American, helped to popularize anthropology.
As a young man, he changed his name to "Montague Francis Ashley-Montagu". After relocating to the United States, he used the name "Ashley Montagu."
This humanist of Jewish ancestry related topics, such as race and gender, to politics and development. He served as the rapporteur or appointed investigator in 1950 for the The Race Question , statement of educational, scientific, and cultural organization of United Nations.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashley_...
As a young man, he changed his name to "Montague Francis Ashley-Montagu". After relocating to the United States, he used the name "Ashley Montagu."
This humanist of Jewish ancestry related topics, such as race and gender, to politics and development. He served as the rapporteur or appointed investigator in 1950 for the The Race Question , statement of educational, scientific, and cultural organization of United Nations.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashley_...
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September 20, 2018The title of this book is a trick. After reading ,it is seems highly doubtful that one could learn non-aggression from its examples without aggressively sweeping the planet clear and starting again at the level of the environment, perhaps even the geology, even before one began to day dream about human social structures. The short answer of this book it seems to me, is that if you are troubled either by your own aggression or and that of people around you, and you want to learn or encourage in others non-aggression, is that it is probably too late. Non-aggression, if it exists, according to these essays, exists in highly specific social circumstances in relation with certain environmental factors which mutually work against competition and aggressive behaviours. Because of that inter-relationship we might also suspect that non-aggression as a 'natural' human phenomenon is under threat and as much under threat of extinction as the eco-systems which gave rise to to it. On the other hand if you want to know if naturally non-aggressive human societies exist, then the answer might be a qualified yes.
The book consists of seven case studies each looking at one specific society, varying between dozens of people up to tens of thousands, with an introductory essay by Ashley Montagu. Each of these pulls in different directions with differing degrees of subtlety, and each seems to have a different conception of non-aggression.
I wondered as I read if given its age this was a specifically cold war book. If humans are inherently aggressive, then we are all off the hook and indeed there are no grounds for criticising the President of the USA or anyone else for failing to make peace, the pursuit of war in Vietnam, Angola or elsewhere, is only natural and indeed if you personally haven't clubbed anyone to death today you are doing exceptionally well . On the other hand if humans' are by nature non-aggressive the we are all in the dock potentially pleading for mercy. Of course once my thoughts started to drift in that direction I swiftly felt this wasn't a mere transitory matter of the Cold War but the ancient and ongoing argument about human nature. Are we Chimpanzees or Bonobos . Indeed there is a sense in these case studies of Diderot and Rousseau circling St Augustine in the Ring, the Noble savage versus the intrinsically sinful nature of man, you may think this an unfair contest, but the Bishop of Hippo, with both hands tied behind his back, gives out Glasgow kisses freely and brings any number of optimistic opponents to their knees. Indeed the very subtitle of the book suggests that if man is good, civilisation is the problem and so producing books is itself a symptom of the problem, but perhaps the simple answers are not worth knowing.
Naturally this book exists in a specific context, questions about the nature of man had reached a certain point and I am at a certain remove from all that, I did not, for example, recognise what was said about Konrad Lorentz and his views from my memory of reading On Aggression.
All of the societies considered in this book were on the margins, possibly even marginalised by bigger (more) aggressive societies. I noticed that while in Erikson's Childhood and Society breast biting seemed to be the original sin which ended the Eden of breastfeeding and thus set off the youngster on a life path of anger and aggression, here weaning was not such a big issue, often stopping carrying the infant on the back was far more significant...maybe it was purely co-incidental that around half the authors of the case studies were women ?
A common theme, (maybe the only one) was that across these societies there was a fear of aggressive emotions, also it seems that in the earliest years the mother was never alone with a little wailing tyrant, even while primary carer others would intervene to distract, amuse or play with the new born.
In the case of Australian aborigines Catherine H. Berndt said that tribal conflict was avoided because it was universally felt that tribal territories were God given, it seems on that continent God was not in the habit of saying, here is this land of milk and honey, that I'm giving to you people to take. Among the South Fore in New Guinea E. Richard Sorenson said that conflict among these hunter gardener peoples was avoided by moving southward into unsettled territory, when they ran out of virgin forest, conflict did begin but typically of a feuding type between groups of aggrieved individuals rather than whole villages and adultery Helen of Troy style was typically the driver. The tahitians Robert I. Levy tells us are very gentle, except for a period of transition when Christianity was introduced, however historically it had also been a warlike chieftain society and Levy never addressed that, since presumably their chiefs and warriors must have been choleric enough, even if the peasants were phlegmatic. Two groups of Canadian Inuit were strikingly non-violent according to Jean L. Briggs but there was a fair degree of cruelty to animals, strikingly children and non-Inuit were perceived as not fully human, though in time Inuit children would grow up to be completely human, while white people didn't. The Semai of Malaysia says Robert Knox Dentan had two homicides among 16,000 or so people over a 22 year period, they were peaceable, but recounted violent fantasies of poisoning everybody else in Malaysia, possibly as a result of the trauma of the Malayian insurgency of the 1950s. The !Kung, otherwise the bushmen of the Kalahari,says Patricia Draper were non-violent but verbally incredibly aggressive, forever swiping and digging at one another, the custom is that when a man brings hunted game back to the camp it has to be shared among everybody, the banter in such situations so extreme that younger hunters will beg an uncle or a father to do the butchering and divide the beast in order to avoid the quips and witticisms which would be made at their expense . Colin M. Turnbull's lyrical account of the Mbuti pygmies struck me as like an Ursula Le Guin story, for him the Mbuti passed through a series of concentric worlds, the womb, the hut, the tribal enclosure, the forest. The dominant emotion at all times was love and the experience of a caring, giving, abundant existence, when he described that even childbirth was painless, I felt a degree of uneasiness and wondered quite how objective his account was, what with it's story of a boy having sex with a goat understood by his fellow pygmies as very good, a profound act of love with the forest, but inappropriate. Besides as everyone knows, how can the pygmies be non-aggressive when they have been at war with the cranes for such a long time ?
A curious problem relevant to almost all the societies was that while children were socialised to be non-aggressive towards people, this was not true of animals - they were mostly hunting communities, among both the Inuit and the Australian Aborigines the authors saw examples of very cruel treatment of animals by children before they were killed. What was unacceptable was for similar violence to be used on people.
It was all very interesting, but in a way inconsequential, if you believe that humans are born aggressive, there is nothing to challenge that view here - all the societies have developed mechanisms and cultures to produce and support specific kinds of non-aggression, it doesn't happen by itself, at the most such a person might be obliged to admit that in certain circumstances people can be brought up to be non-aggressive. In wider perspective all these non-aggressive peoples have been pushed to the margins by aggressive peoples so one might wonder how sustainable non-aggression is. Finally with the exception of Taihti these were hunter-gatherer or hunter gardener peoples, one is left with the question of whether non-aggression is scalable to other kinds of societies and if it can exist in societies in which people are also socialised to be competitive?
So the experience of reading is less optimistic than the title implies.
The book consists of seven case studies each looking at one specific society, varying between dozens of people up to tens of thousands, with an introductory essay by Ashley Montagu. Each of these pulls in different directions with differing degrees of subtlety, and each seems to have a different conception of non-aggression.
I wondered as I read if given its age this was a specifically cold war book. If humans are inherently aggressive, then we are all off the hook and indeed there are no grounds for criticising the President of the USA or anyone else for failing to make peace, the pursuit of war in Vietnam, Angola or elsewhere, is only natural and indeed if you personally haven't clubbed anyone to death today you are doing exceptionally well . On the other hand if humans' are by nature non-aggressive the we are all in the dock potentially pleading for mercy. Of course once my thoughts started to drift in that direction I swiftly felt this wasn't a mere transitory matter of the Cold War but the ancient and ongoing argument about human nature. Are we Chimpanzees or Bonobos . Indeed there is a sense in these case studies of Diderot and Rousseau circling St Augustine in the Ring, the Noble savage versus the intrinsically sinful nature of man, you may think this an unfair contest, but the Bishop of Hippo, with both hands tied behind his back, gives out Glasgow kisses freely and brings any number of optimistic opponents to their knees. Indeed the very subtitle of the book suggests that if man is good, civilisation is the problem and so producing books is itself a symptom of the problem, but perhaps the simple answers are not worth knowing.
Naturally this book exists in a specific context, questions about the nature of man had reached a certain point and I am at a certain remove from all that, I did not, for example, recognise what was said about Konrad Lorentz and his views from my memory of reading On Aggression.
All of the societies considered in this book were on the margins, possibly even marginalised by bigger (more) aggressive societies. I noticed that while in Erikson's Childhood and Society breast biting seemed to be the original sin which ended the Eden of breastfeeding and thus set off the youngster on a life path of anger and aggression, here weaning was not such a big issue, often stopping carrying the infant on the back was far more significant...maybe it was purely co-incidental that around half the authors of the case studies were women ?
A common theme, (maybe the only one) was that across these societies there was a fear of aggressive emotions, also it seems that in the earliest years the mother was never alone with a little wailing tyrant, even while primary carer others would intervene to distract, amuse or play with the new born.
In the case of Australian aborigines Catherine H. Berndt said that tribal conflict was avoided because it was universally felt that tribal territories were God given, it seems on that continent God was not in the habit of saying, here is this land of milk and honey, that I'm giving to you people to take. Among the South Fore in New Guinea E. Richard Sorenson said that conflict among these hunter gardener peoples was avoided by moving southward into unsettled territory, when they ran out of virgin forest, conflict did begin but typically of a feuding type between groups of aggrieved individuals rather than whole villages and adultery Helen of Troy style was typically the driver. The tahitians Robert I. Levy tells us are very gentle, except for a period of transition when Christianity was introduced, however historically it had also been a warlike chieftain society and Levy never addressed that, since presumably their chiefs and warriors must have been choleric enough, even if the peasants were phlegmatic. Two groups of Canadian Inuit were strikingly non-violent according to Jean L. Briggs but there was a fair degree of cruelty to animals, strikingly children and non-Inuit were perceived as not fully human, though in time Inuit children would grow up to be completely human, while white people didn't. The Semai of Malaysia says Robert Knox Dentan had two homicides among 16,000 or so people over a 22 year period, they were peaceable, but recounted violent fantasies of poisoning everybody else in Malaysia, possibly as a result of the trauma of the Malayian insurgency of the 1950s. The !Kung, otherwise the bushmen of the Kalahari,says Patricia Draper were non-violent but verbally incredibly aggressive, forever swiping and digging at one another, the custom is that when a man brings hunted game back to the camp it has to be shared among everybody, the banter in such situations so extreme that younger hunters will beg an uncle or a father to do the butchering and divide the beast in order to avoid the quips and witticisms which would be made at their expense . Colin M. Turnbull's lyrical account of the Mbuti pygmies struck me as like an Ursula Le Guin story, for him the Mbuti passed through a series of concentric worlds, the womb, the hut, the tribal enclosure, the forest. The dominant emotion at all times was love and the experience of a caring, giving, abundant existence, when he described that even childbirth was painless, I felt a degree of uneasiness and wondered quite how objective his account was, what with it's story of a boy having sex with a goat understood by his fellow pygmies as very good, a profound act of love with the forest, but inappropriate. Besides as everyone knows, how can the pygmies be non-aggressive when they have been at war with the cranes for such a long time ?
A curious problem relevant to almost all the societies was that while children were socialised to be non-aggressive towards people, this was not true of animals - they were mostly hunting communities, among both the Inuit and the Australian Aborigines the authors saw examples of very cruel treatment of animals by children before they were killed. What was unacceptable was for similar violence to be used on people.
It was all very interesting, but in a way inconsequential, if you believe that humans are born aggressive, there is nothing to challenge that view here - all the societies have developed mechanisms and cultures to produce and support specific kinds of non-aggression, it doesn't happen by itself, at the most such a person might be obliged to admit that in certain circumstances people can be brought up to be non-aggressive. In wider perspective all these non-aggressive peoples have been pushed to the margins by aggressive peoples so one might wonder how sustainable non-aggression is. Finally with the exception of Taihti these were hunter-gatherer or hunter gardener peoples, one is left with the question of whether non-aggression is scalable to other kinds of societies and if it can exist in societies in which people are also socialised to be competitive?
So the experience of reading is less optimistic than the title implies.
Read
October 30, 2009There's a glut of books about why people are violent and agressive--every information source is full of 'studies of the criminal mind' (Shades of Lombroso! As if 'the criminal mind' were fundamentally different from any other mind...).
This book is nowhere near enough to counterbalance the rip current of standard theorization--but it's a start. It explores how people learn to be amiable and inoffensive.
There need to be dozens more such books, and there are some--just not enough.
One thing, though--this book doesn't deal with nonagressive hermits. There's a prevailing assumption that anybody who's nonsocial is (by that fact alone) hostile and violent. As an easygoing hermit, I have to say I don't think that's well enough thought out, or researched...though I grant you, it's hard to get hermits to sit around and chat, so you can find out how they feel about others.
This book is nowhere near enough to counterbalance the rip current of standard theorization--but it's a start. It explores how people learn to be amiable and inoffensive.
There need to be dozens more such books, and there are some--just not enough.
One thing, though--this book doesn't deal with nonagressive hermits. There's a prevailing assumption that anybody who's nonsocial is (by that fact alone) hostile and violent. As an easygoing hermit, I have to say I don't think that's well enough thought out, or researched...though I grant you, it's hard to get hermits to sit around and chat, so you can find out how they feel about others.
Want to read
March 26, 2018When did aggression start?
goodreads.com/trivia/details/266041-t...
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May 22, 2025
3 pages in & im hooked, i can feel my brain expanding & my inner Indiana jones' excitement.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews