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.