118 Zeitschrift für Ethnologie 115 (1990)
whether Chagnon has not defined Yanomamö geographic “centers” in terms of re-
gions of warfare, and “central personality traits” as those prevailing in regions of war-
fare: a kind of Hobbesian behavioral tautology.
The attempt by Divale and Harris (1976) to generalize a set of the key variables of a
“male supremacy complex”, including warfare and brideprice as well as a number of
elements stressed in Chagnon’s ethnography (polygyny, preference for male children,
female infanticide, male control of weapons, headmanship, patrilocal and avunculocal
residence, patrilineality) is probably the best-known dispositional and “culture of
violence” view of the causes of warfare in band and village societies. Since critical re-
views by Kang, Horan, and Reis (1979), Dow (1983), Fjellman (1979), and Parker and
Parker (1979) have discredited the theoretical assumptions, measurements, empirical
correlations, predictions, and conclusions of the Harris-Divale Study, it will not be
further discussed.
Structures of violence: a network view of world-system linkages
While anthropologists began broader systematic research on conflict as early as the
1960s, the dominant view in anthropology remained one in which conflicts at the local
level were presumed to arise from strictly local level processes. International relations
theories (e.g., Waltz 1959), in contrast to dispositional views of the causes of conflict?
stress linkages between societies as a source of conflict. Subsequent studies by Waller-
stein (1974, 1980) and others, drawing from the historical perspective of political econ-
omy, provided the foundation for a network view of world-system linkages that views
conflicts as intermeshed with processes at the global level, such as conflicts of interest
generated between and within societies in different positions (such as core, semipe-
riphery, and periphery) in world-systems.
It 1s incontrovertible that among the major pressures for warfare worldwide are the
competitive pressures that emanate from the cores and semiperipheries of the world
trading and conquest systems of civilizations. Some of the shifts in perspective and hy-
potheses advanced in this study are designed to test whether warfare can be under-
stood in part out of consideration of world-system and regional pressures and their
potential consequences.
The *World-Systems and Ethnological Theory? project (White, Burton and
Bradley n.d.; Bradley, White and Burton n.d.), funded by the National Science
Foundation, yielded initial findings (Bradley, Moore, Burton and White 1990) that
provide relevant background to our world-systems hypotheses about warfare:
namely, that 84% of the societies in this sample have changed aspects of their subsis-
tence base as a result of *world-system impacts" in the 100 years before the date which
* Ross does not take the more extreme dispositional views of either an invariant human nature, of disposi-
tional traits that are fixed in certain populations.