Authentic Tribal Warfare on Film, and What It Means

YouTube's algorithm knows me spookily well. I mostly use the site to watch whisky reviews and Rick Beato interviews (as well as reaction videos to Rick Beato interviews - don't judge me). And yet somehow it knew that my absolute visual highlight of the year would be a 12 minute long clip titled West Papua Tribal War (Original Footage 1964) - a film consisting of...well....tribal war in West Papua, shot in cinéma vérité style with no soundtrack and minimal narration - and that it should make this video pop up on the home screen this lunch time when I visited for my daily fix. 

I strongly recommend you watch this. I will even go so far as to embed it for you here, so you can simply click on it and appreciate what an astonishing piece of footage it is:

The clip is from a film called Dead Birds, which is apparently well known among ethnographers, though I had never heard of it before. (This is the cue for a hundred people to pop up in the comments demanding to know how it is possible to be so ignorant as to not know of its existence until now.) The director's description adds powerful, and poetic, context:

“Dead Birds is a film about the Dani*, a people dwelling in the Grand Valley of the Baliem high in the mountains of West Irian. When I shot the film in 1961, the Dani had an almost classic Neolithic culture. They were exceptional in the way they focussed their energies and based their values on an elaborate system of intertribal warfare and revenge. Neighboring groups of Dani clans, separated by uncultivated strips of no man's land, engaged in frequent formal battles. 

"When a warrior was killed in battle or died from a wound and even when a woman or a child lost their life in an enemy raid, the victors celebrated and the victims mourned. Because each death had to be avenged, the balance was continually being adjusted with the spirits of the aggrieved lifted and the ghosts of slain comrades satisfied as soon as a compensating enemy life was taken. There was no thought in the Dani world of wars ever ending, unless it rained or became dark. Without war there would be no way to satisfy the ghosts. Wars were also the best way they knew to keep a terrible harmony in a life which would be, without the strife they invented, mostly hard and dull. 

"'Dead Birds' has a meaning which is both immediate and allegorical. In the Dani language it refers to the weapons and ornaments recovered in battle. Its other more poetic meaning comes from the Dani belief that people, because they are like birds, must die. In making Dead Birds certain kinds of behavior were followed, never directed. It was an attempt to see people from within and to wonder, when the selected fragments of that life were assembled, if they might speak not only of the Dani but also of ourselves.”

Images like this are about as close as a modern Westerner can get to a glimpse of a fantasy world. When I say this, I do not intend for one moment to dehumanise or belittle the subjects of the film. But short of Mars, this is about as distant a place, both geographically, temporally and conceptually, as it is possible for us to go. These are human beings who are under pressures that are as different to ours as can be imagined - though of course we share the same, underlying human condition. What can we say about what is depicted in this footage of them?

The first thing is the obvious: war is hell, but some wars are more hellish than others. War for people in a 'classic Neolithic culture' looks dangerous, but also kind of exhilerating and fun. At first glance the director's observation that the Dani invented strife to distract them from the dullness of their lives seems gratuitous. But after watching the full clip, you can readily believe it. I've known men over the years who have been perfectly happy to admit that they like a good fight on a Friday or Saturday night and that it livens up their lives. And in this respect, indeed, the Dani do not appear to be so different - is this not the 'classic Neolithic culture' equivalent of a good old street barnie after an Old Firm game? 

The second: note how careful everybody is. Initially one is tempted to caricature the apparent timidity of the participants as just a bit of handbags at dawn. But then you recall that these people live in a world without modern medicine, antibiotics, or painkillers, and where surgery is performed with teeth. You'd be pretty damn cautious too if it was you. But this also contributes to the slightly ritualistic, performative nature of the proceedings. Despite hundreds of men apparently having fought each other for most of the day, off and on, nobody appears to have been killed, and only one man on each side badly wounded. This is more or less the exact opposite to how things would go if this was D&D combat.

The third: there is a thesis, advanced by Victor Davis Hanson in the book Carnage and Culture, that there is something specifically bloody about the 'Western' way of war, dating back to ancient Greece. The suggestion here is not that only Westerners wage bloody war. Rather, it is that a specific form of exceptionally murderous warfare emerged in the West, and was exported from there to the rest of the world afterwards. A big element of this would appear to revolve around the willingness to 'die in place' - to stand one's ground and risk being killed in the service of a tactical or strategic objective, and typically to ensure that one's comrades get to slaughter as many of the enemy as possible. The men in this footage do not have that willingness, entirely understandably (I refer you to point 2, above), and the result is something radically different in emphasis to what one might have seen at, say Waterloo. The men in the battle depicted here chiefly appear to want to survive without looking too cowardly. At Waterloo the aim was to win. This distinction matters.

The fourth and final: I was struck once again, watching this film, that the real world is impossibly richer and more interesting than any fantasy world could ever be. Any fantasy author or DM could dream up the concept of 'classic Neolithic culture'. But could they dream up this? And bear in mind that on West Papua (itself only half of the island of New Guinea) there are perhaps 700 different languages and tribal groupings, all with their own related but distinct cultures, beliefs, and traditional practices. No imagined world could ever hope to compete.

Yoon-Suin 2nd edition print release PRE-ORDER

First there was Yoon-Suin, and it was good

The Gods of the God River saw it, and saw it was good

The Yali of the forest danced when they saw it

The nasnas of Syr Darya saw it, and saw it was good

The dragons of the high mountains saw it and wondered

The oligarchs of the mountains saw it, and saw it was good

In the kingdoms the rakhosh saw it and knew they should not touch it

The mighty chu-srin saw it, and saw it was good 

Then another Yoon-Suin came, and it was good

The readers of noisms' blog saw the pre-order store, and saw it was good

It has been a long time coming, but the print edition of Yoon-Suin 2nd edition is shortly to head off for printing and distribution. You can pre-order it here if you missed out on the Kickstarter.

Here is the marketing blurb from the store itself, if you are not sure what Yoon-Suin is:

First, there was Yoon-Suin. Now, there is Yoon-Suin 2nd edition - featuring NEW MONSTERS, NEW APPENDICES, NEW ART and, last but not least, 12 NEW MINI-ADVENTURE MODULES featuring nearly 100 pages of playable content!

Yoon-Suin is a campaign toolbox for fantasy games, giving you the equipment necessary to run a sandbox campaign in your own Yoon-Suin - a region of high adventure shrouded in ancient mysteries, opium smoke, great luxury and opulent cruelty.

Contains:

• A bestiary of unique monsters, including self-mummified monks, liquid golems, tiger-beetle men, aphid-men, figments, and dozens more
• A new character class, the Crab-man
• A chapter for each of the major regions of Yoon-Suin, filled with random generators to brainstorm map contents, social groups, and more
• Extended rules for poisons, tea, opium, trade, deities and so on
• Extended rules for exploring the Old Town of the Yellow City, and the haunted jungles of Lahag
• Many encounter tables
• Well over 100 pre-written adventure locales to populate a regional map
• 12 Mini-adventure modules, fully keyed and usable 'out of the box'
• Nearly 400 pages of content, indexed
• Purple prose

What people have said about Yoon-Suin:

"Yoon-Suin remains for me the original OSR setting and a huge inspiration." - Tom F

"It’s not like anything anybody else could have made or will make...On reading it I really wanted to go to Sughd and find out what the hell those Nasnas are up to, or take over an abandoned fortress by a river in Lahag, or hang out with boat people and get strange tattoos. And that’s exactly how it is meant to make you feel. I think people will be very impressed, I certainly hope they will be." - Patrick Stuart

"This is probably one of the most impressive gaming supplements (let alone campaign settings) that I’ve ever come across...I can’t recommend this enough: this is a must-have for any DM or game designer. It is a fantastic work." - Necrozius

"My mind is blown. This artifact...is a labour of wonder. It is as stepping into a very idosyncratic storybook, with step by step instructions on how to have a magical adventure within. It is 300 pages of love, allowing endless adventure." - Hack Slash Master

PLEASE NOTE: This is a HEAVY book, so shipping is on the expensive side. Reassure yourself that it contains 400 pages of densely usable content, commensurate with its heftiness!

Is it possible to be Lawful Evil?

Is it possible actually to be Lawful Evil? 

This question, oddly enough, gets us to the heart of the central conundrum of 20th century legal philosophy. After the Second World War, jurisprudential thought went through some soul-searching with regard to the relationship between law and morality. To oversimplify: does law have to have some sort of connection to morality in order to be valid law? 

This debate chiefly concerned the status of the law of the Nazi regime. The West German authorities were faced with a conundrum in the period after the war when their country was undergoing a complete institutional restructuring and denazification process. Should they behave as though the laws which the Nazis had made were valid? Or should they behave as though no Nazi-made laws had any effect, and simply act as though the civil and criminal codes of the German state as they had existed prior to 1933 had continued to be the really valid law all along? 

The best way to make this abstract-sounding debate concrete is to briefly described the 'Nazi informer' case, made famous by a debate between HLA Hart and Lon Fuller that is well-known to law students everywhere. To cut a long story short, this concerned a woman who had wanted to rid herself of her husband. In order to expeditiously get him out of the picture, she reported him to the authorities in 1944, accusing him of having made statements inimical to the welfare of the Third Reich (in this case, derogatory remarks about Hitler). This was a criminal offence at that time, punishable by death, although the husband was eventually sent to serve in the front (presumably because at that point the regime was fighting for its life and needed every able-bodied man it could get). 

After the war was over the wife was indicted for the offence of 'unlawful deprivation of liberty', which was listed in the German Criminal Code of 1871, and was found guilty. She may have been doing her 'lawful' duty in respect of the 'law' which had existed at the material time. But that was not valid law, because it had been an outrage 'to the sound conscience and sense of justice of all decent human beings'. She could not plead in her defence that in 1944 she had been acting lawfully, because she had not: the 'law' in question (regarding statements inimical to the welfare of the Third Reich) had not been law at all.

This might sound intuitively like the right outcome, but there is a strong rule-of-law argument from the other direction - namely, that this was a retrospective application of law. It isn't fair, or just, to punish somebody for doing something that at the material time had not been prima facie unlawful. The wife might have behaved immorally, but that's not the same thing as saying she had done something unlawful. The answer, as you will have noticed, really just hinges on what one thinks about the nature of law itself. If law is valid because it is validly made on its own terms, then the wife had done nothing legally wrong, because the Nazi law in question had indeed been validly made on its own terms. If, on the other hand, law is only valid if it accords with some underlying moral order, then she had committed the old 1871 offence, because that was valid in the moral sense, whereas the Nazi law that had appeared in the interim was not.

Put more straightforwardly: can law be evil, or is law only law if it has moral content or rests on moral norms?

For Hart (and the other legal positivists, of which he was one) law can indeed be 'evil' in the sense that law is law as long as it is recognised as such. This does not mean that law should not, ideally, reflect morality or that there is no underlying moral order. It just means that in identifying whether law is valid, what is relevant is whether it has been made in accordance with what is recognised to be the test for validity within the legal system itself. For Fuller, law cannot be 'evil' in the sense that law is connected with morality, and immoral law is an oxymoron; it law is not founded on morality then it is not law at all.

Fuller, though, did not base his reasoning on a substantive idea of morality, but rather a procedural one. Law, he said, was only law if it was made in accordance with law's 'inner morality'. This was not a matter of determining whether its rules were right or wrong. Rather, it was a matter of determining whether they had been made in the right way. This meant that law must be (1) of general application; (2) promulgated publicly; (3) prospective rather than retrospective in application; (4) intelligible to those addressed by it; (5) consistent; (6) practicably possible to comply with; (7) stable; and (8) ‘congruent’ (meaning that there should not be a gap between the law as it exists on paper and how it is applied in practice). 

These eight principles, Fuller suggested, were important because they were the means by which respect for the subject of law - the human individual - could be enshrined. If law possesses these qualities, it is predictable, stable, and clear, and people know where they stand with it. It gives its subjects a fair opportunity to know, in advance of doing something, whether or not it will be lawful. If, on the other hand, 'law' does not possess those qualities (i.e., if it is of selective application; if it is secret; if it applies retrospectively; if it is unintelligible; if it is inconsistent; etc.) then that is tantamount to saying that those making the 'law' are really just governing by whim, which is to say, not making law at all but ruling by fiat or decree. 

Fuller's test for whether something is really 'law' or not therefore rested on a connection to morality, but he was careful about how he framed what 'morality' meant. Law's morality was not substantive. It was only to do with how it was made. What makes law, law, is that it consists of rules which possess his eight characteristics. 

However, Fuller was also clearly of the view that if law is (1) of general application; (2) promulgated publicly; (3) prospective rather than retrospective in application; (4) intelligible to those addressed by it; (5) consistent; (6) practicably possible to comply with; (7) stable; and (8) ‘congruent’ - which is to say, if it is procedurally moral - then in practical terms the law that gets made will tend to be substantively moral as well. Tyrants and dictators do not make law possessing these characteristics, for the good reason that law in this sense will constrain their actions by forcing them to rule fairly and to account for themselves to the public. Law, in other words, will by default in practice end up being connected to an underlying 'external' morality simply because that is what procedurally correct law will ineluctably produce.

Ever since he was writing, though, his critics have argued against this conclusion, calling it naive. It is perfectly possible, in the eyes of these critics, for law to possess Fuller's eight ideal characteristics but for it still to produce immoral outcomes or even to be twisted for immoral ends. And, indeed, some would even argue that the eight characteristics in question themselves will tend to be a barrier to social justice because they prevent lawmakers acting flexibly and responsively in order to do what is right in the name of higher values - equality, fairness, etc. 

Is it, then, possible to be Lawful Evil? Is law valid law so long as it is validly made in terms which the legal system recognises? Or is law only valid if it aligns with what is morally right or just? If legal morality is merely procedural, is it possible for it to produce 'evil' effects, or will the laws that are produced end up being moral by dint of the process by which they were created?

To bring us back full circle: was the wife in the Nazi informer case, when she dobbed in her husband to the authorities, being Lawful Evil? Or something else?

Do You Remember the Time? The Pattern of a Hobby

Let's for a moment, talk about the pattern of hobby involvement throughout the course of a person's life.

Typically, as small children, we don't really choose our hobbies - they are chosen for us, by our parents. They take us to trombone lessons, play football with us, make us do Irish dancing, etc., and some of the time these activities 'stick' and some of the time they don't. When they do 'stick' it is partly to do with natural aptitude and partly to do with friendship groups, and partly to do with parental bloody-mindedness. For instance, when I look back at the childhood hobbies I participated in for any length of time, it occurs to me that some of them I really enjoyed (like cricket), some of them I was chiefly involved in just because my friends were too (like cubs and scouts), and some I hated but was forced to do by my mother (piano). 

Then, when we reach adolescence - say, by age 11 or so - we develop enough independence and wherewithal to choose hobbies of our own. Of course, sometimes what is chosen still reflects parental choice (an adolescent may discover that while he or she has been taken to, say, tennis lessons since the age of five and never really questioned it, at age eleven he or she actually really wants to continue of their own volition). But very often, what is chosen is something that parents find mystifying or troubling - like being in a heavy metal band, or boxing, or street dancing, or whatever. 

As adolescence transitions into late teenager-hood (say, age 15 or 16), there typically comes a fork in the road. At this age, hobbies either get abandoned - overwhelmingly the reason for this is becoming more heavily into girls/boys - or persisted with. There are lots of factors at play here. Often hobbies are persisted with if they are perceived as 'cooler' than others. People also tend to stick with their hobbies if they aren't in 'popular' cliques and don't have many options for hanging out, partying and so forth. Naturally, people tend to keep up hobbies if they are very good at them. (I know somebody, for instance, who grew up playing squash and discovered as a teenager that he was exceptionally good at it, kept it up, and got a scholarship to a university in the US off the back of his gift for hitting a ball against a wall really hard.) 

The fourth phase begins as people transition into being adults proper, at which point hobbies naturally tend to fall by the wayside (though this is obviously not universal) as attention shifts to work, dating, home life, and so on - and, in due course, often marriage and then children. Most people during this period become too busy to really sustain hobbies or at least to devote as much time to them as they would like to, and things become attenuated as a result. 

But this, in due course, leads to a fifth phase, usually when people have made it through the intensity of early adulthood, and have got to a fairly settled position in life. At this point, they start to take up hobbies again, finding they have time at evenings and weekends and perhaps want to make new friends (or meet new spouses and partners). Here they either develop new interests, or re-familiarise themselves with old ones.

The vast, vast, vast majority of RPG gamers are those who encountered the hobby during the second phase of adolescence. And whether or not they persist with the hobby through phases three, four and five, or else re-encounter it in phase five after a long hiatus, tends to result from how much magic was involved in that initial encounter. Was it love that struck them at age 11 when they first cracked open the AD&D DMG? Or was it just lust - or mere like?

For me, it was love - and I can still remember that era of my life, the period between roughly age 11 and 13, which seemed to be imbued with a kind of sorcery. Essentially all that my friends and I did, every day after school and on Saturdays and Sundays, was hang out and play D&D, Warhammer, Necromunda, Blood Bowl, Shadowrun, or Cyberpunk 2020 - or else go to a shop (Games Workshop or a Virgin Megastore) to gaze adoringly at figures or books we could never hope to afford. During that era, something was imprinted in my psyche, such that it would never quite be able to let me go - and it was this that ensured that, even though I abandoned my interest the hobby for some years in early adulthood, I was drawn back into it later on as I matured.

Looking back, I wonder what it was about that period that was so special. What was it that set the imprinting process in train? 

A combination of factors: the escapism that fantasy literature and gaming offered for a boy growing up in a boring town with no money; the fact that I was imaginative and bookish anyway; the fact that it was something that was mine and that my parents had absolutely no involvement in. 

But also the vignettes: buying Necromunda with leftover Christmas money from relatives one Saturday morning and bringing it home and playing it all weekend stowed away in the attic with a friend. The first time I opened the Planescape boxed set - I can still remember how my small brain exploded when I saw DiTerlizzi's art. Paging through the 2nd edition DMG on a bed in an Israeli hotel bedroom after having bought it earlier that day at a shop in Tel Aviv, with Offspring and Jeff Buckley videos on MTV in the background. Reading Lone Wolf books under the covers in bed each night with a torch. Ordering figures from Citadel Miniatures by post and frantically checking the post each morning before school. Buying fistfuls of cheap little gem dice and spending hour and hours rolling them just for fun. 

Being an 11-13 year old boy, not to put too fine a point on it, sucks. But this hobby made it suck a lot less. And that gives it enough credit, perhaps, for a life time. 

Elvenised Humans

It is a feature of human social history that empires rely on a construction of a Gramscian 'cultural hegemony', whereby elite culture distinguishes itself from the 'subaltern' by casting the latter as being of low status, irrational, morally deficient, and so forth. This helps to foster the sociological or even psychological conditions by which an empire sustains itself - those in charge reassure themselves that they are right and decent and good and therefore deserving to rule, and those who are not in charge are correspondingly depoliticised, disinherited, and demoralised. 

It follows that anybody who wants to get by, or rise to the top, in an imperial context has to look and sound as though they possess the cultural trappings, values and beliefs of the hegemon. And so it is, for example, that in Britain in 2025 social climbers make strenuous efforts to ape the mores of what they perceive to be the elite culture in their current imperial overlord, the USA - following its politics, learning its history and its slang words, even watching its sports, and so on, whereas 2000 years previously the same types of people would have been donning togas, developing an interest in mosaics, and swanning around saying things like 'disce ut semper victurus, vive ut cras moriturus'.

It seems to me that we can say that, were elves to exist in the real world in any real number, they would establish empires, whether territorial or cultural. Elves have superior intellects, skills and wisdom, if fantasy literature has taught me anything - so it stands to reason that they would be able to put their superiority to good use by creating regimes in which they rule and humans, whether through conquest or vassalage or else simply cultural forcefulness (as in the example of the USA), are rendered subaltern. 

And it follows from this that in societies where elves rule, whether directly, or indirectly from a distant capital through an envoy or consul, the human population - particularly amongst the social-climbing classes - would seek to 'elvenise' itself just as the ancient Britons Romanised themselves and just as the social climbers in any imperial context model themselves after those who rule. These elvenised humans would not be half-elves, because no interbreeding is implied. Rather, they would be ordinary humans who are drive to elvenise in order to distinguish themselves from their crude, low-status, fellows.

Whether the elvenisation process would extend to deliberately sharpening one's ears with careful pruning of the flesh with sharpened knives, or would consist merely of changes in dress, adoption of mannerisms, and the extensive use of elven loanwords in their daily conservation, is a subject for considered debate. So is what the elven overlords themselves would make of all of this. For the time being I leave you with the idea to do with it as you wish.