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A Window on War:
Women and Militarism in Ancient Greece
Linnda R. Caporael
Department of Science and Technology Studies
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Troy, NY 12180
Caporael,
L.
R.
(1987,
November).
A
window
on
war:
Women
and
militarism
in
ancient
Greece.
In
S.
Beckerman
(Chair),
Primitive
War.
Symposium
conducted
at
the
meeting
of
the
American
Anthropological
Association,
Chicago,
IL.
2
Abstract
Evolutionary ecologists presuppose a common, widely used, and empirically dubious
psychological foundation- -humans are fundamentally self-interested- -for theories on the causes
of war. By focusing on women, a novel window for assessing the psychological components of
such theories can be developed. The Greeks are of special interest in this exercise because
1) women have a prominent role in Greek tests, and 2) the ancient Greeks are transitional
between kin-level and state-level organization. Social identity theory, which is largely concerned
with how cultural categories and social structures engage an evolved cognitive bias, is introduced
as an alternative that is better able to explain anomalies and deviations from fundamental
selfishness assumptions. The analysis undertaken here suggests that 1) an important function of
war is to provide a cultural basis for establishing a uniquely masculine social identity. 2) the
organizational transition from kinship to state also establishes a reorganization of social identity
category boundaries.
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A Window on War:
Women and Militarism in Ancient Greece¹
Linnda R. Caporael
The Greeks were present, in spirit, at a historical point that came to inform our current
beliefs about war: Thomas Hobbes’ first publication was a translation of Thucydides’ history of
the devastating Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta. Hobbes’ slogan of a “predatory
warre of all against all” was echoed in the 19th-century slogan of “survival of the fittest” and
reverberated again as the 20th century’s “economic man.” These views of human nature are
built on a common foundation, a psychological assumption that presumes individuals are
fundamentally self-interested. Egoistic incentive theories are the “scientific” version of this folk
psychology. They organize a catalogue of desirable things, goals, and aspirations around the
psychological principle that people try to maximize their chances of obtaining them (Kitcher,
1985). Materialist anthropology organizes exotic customs; psychoanalysis adds unconscious
pains and pleasures; economics substitutes cash incentives, and sociobiology traces it all to
reproductive success.
In evolutionary ecology, the analysis of premodern war assumes individuals engage in
war to obtain various resources (e.g., Ferguson, 1984). The items in the catalogue can include
greater genetic representation in the next generation’s gene pool, more economic and material
resources, or improved access to intangible rewards, with the last frequently linked to indirect
access to material or genetic resources. Combatants may acquire tangible payoffs such as food,
its means of production, slaves, women, or other commodities, or similarly valued intangibles,
such as prestige, vengeance or supernatural rewards. The apparent cooperation of men
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engaging in war is interpreted as the convergence or aggregate outcome of individuals pursuing
their self-interests; hence we speak of war as the activity of a society. But all social theories
explicitly or implicitly presuppose a psychological theory (Jahoda, 1982). This one tacitly
adopts a widespread omnibus theory, which is that the human cognitive-motivational system
can be characterized as ultimately individualistic and self-interestedly rations: ² explanation
focuses on what is to be gained by the individual choosing to engage in combat.
This initially clear account muddles very quickly when women are added to the picture.
Claims for the universality of war take on a paradoxical cast in view of the fact that half the
human population does not typically engage in the activity: why don’t women act like men?
Token references to women’s passivity or “natural sentiments” for peace reveal the conundrum
by feeble reference to a fundamentally different, albeit inexplicable, psychology. Nevertheless,
like men, women do have reproductive, material and social interests. Moreover, under certain
condition, they also engage in group conflict. When we allow that societies- -not just men- engage in war, theoretical explanations must account for women’s behavior as well.
The divergence between men’s and women’s behavior provides an unexploited
opportunity for viewing warfare. The usual analytic framework pivots on men as the central
actors in war; women are marginal. The ubiquity of this framework can be easily explained: the
most salient feature of warfare is combat, and men are the most salient actors. By recasting this
framework so that women are pivotal although men remain salient, the adequacy psychological
underpinnings (e.g., fundamental selfishness or aggressive tendencies) of war that are
proposed, implied, or assumed can be assessed. Given the working assumption that the
fundamental psychological processes of males and females are the same, theoretical
propositions can be evaluated comparatively by insisting they address within a single
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framework why women do not fight and men do. In this way, women provide a novel window
for viewing war, one from which we can assess current propositions and develop new
hypotheses.
The primary limitation of this approach is practical. The saliency of males so dominates
research questions on warfare that investigators are more likely to turn to “animal war” for
hypothesis testing and generation than to human females. Few data have been collected
specifically on women and war, and what does exist must be ferreted out from entries under
other headings.³ This situation is particularly acute for pre-modern warfare. One approach to
facilitate data recovery is to examine women and warfare within the context of a single culture
for suggestive trends and patterns that may be significant on a broader scale. I have chosen the
Greeks for this preliminary exercise because, “There is, in fact, no literature, no art of any
country, in which women are more prominent, more carefully studied and with more interest,
that in the tragedy, sculpture and painting of fifth-century Athens” (Gomme, 1925:4).
There are, however, other compelling reasons to select the Greeks. In the introduction to
Turney-High’s book Primitive War, David Rapaport observed that “true” war- -characterized
by tactics, the organization of supply lines, coercive recruitment, and territorial objectives- requires a “revolutionary reconceptualization of possibilities” for human social organization.
The ancient Greeks were self-consciously transitional in this revolution, showing elements of
both primitive and true war. Finally, as the opening paragraph indicates, there is a sense in
which the Greeks are “our” primitive culture; we derive from them components of a shared
cultural tradition.
Greek women and war
Historical accounts by Greek and Roman authors (e.g., Herodotus, Thucydides, and
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Plutarch) are predictably sparse but surprisingly familiar in their observations about women and
war. (A review of these sources is available in Schaps [1992].) War was justified as defense of
women, or especially by Herodotus, as the avenging of insults to women. Women might also
urge their men to go to war or urge them to greater efforts in an ongoing conflict. In a doomed
city, the women might be enslaved by the victors, accompany their husbands into exile, or most
rarely, be slaughtered alongside the men. And as a last resort, women fought or otherwise
provided active support in the crisis stage of defensive warfare.
Existing Greek prose suggests that women had neither social nor legal status and lived
their lives in the seclusion of the household. Much of their activity must be inferred from
fragmentary or indirect evidence. The interior landscape of warfare, as women might
experience it, however, does not derive from historical or prose sources, but from dramatic
sources. In contrast to the secluded image in the other texts, women have a prominent active
and central role in drama. The link between prose and drama is the relationship between oikos,
the household, and polis, the city-state. In both written sources this relationship is a central
concern, prescriptively in the prose texts and descriptively in the drama. Drama, as Foley
(1981) concludes from her analysis, exposes the contradictions between these two social
structural entities.
A clearer egoistic incentive analysis of women and war has yet to be written- -or to be
reproduced in reality- -than Aristophanes’ Lysistrata. Among the costs of war are the potential
destruction of Athens, the drain on the state treasury to support war, the nuisance of aggressive
soldiers in the market place, the loss of sons, the lack of marriage partners for daughters, and
the disruption of long-distance trade providing food and luxuries. Notably, the Lysistrata- -the
word means “disbander of armies”- -is a comedy.
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The women of Greece pay their “taxes” in sons, which are “wasted” by plans so poor the
women can scarcely believe them. These plans are drawn up by men in the assembly where
women, much to their chagrin, have no voice. With no other option, the women temporarily
reject their subordination, seize the treasury that will go to fund men’s wars rather than the
public life of Athens, and go on strike. The very clarity of the means-ends analysis strains the
credibility of egoistic incentive theory. Why don’t real women, like their fictional Greek
counterparts, use whatever means of informal power and influence they have to end wars?
What engages real women’s support, which can be active and bloody in premodern groups?
And perhaps most importantly, why are men at war in the first place? For the Lysistrata is a
catalogue of collective interests that men and women share.
One clue to the flood of questions may lie in the Ecclesiazusae, another comedy where
women mobilize for action, this time in response to economic abuse and mismanagement by
men in the assembly. The women take over the city-state and institute economic and political
reforms modeled on the household, including the elimination of warfare. Men, having no
function, can only indulge in the pleasures women provide in their domestic sphere- -food, sex,
and festivals. One might be reminded of Mead’s (1949) observation that, whereas biology
guarantees for women a uniquely functional feminine identity, one of the problematic tasks
within a culture is to specify what it is that men do that uniquely corresponds to masculine
identity. In the Greek world, men fought.
The issue of appropriate male and female behavior, highlighted by their inversion in the
Ecclesiazusae, is perhaps relevant to the Lysistrata. As an anti-war play, the Lysistrata ends
paradoxically, with a reminder that Greeks should not be fighting Greeks when there are
barbarian hordes to battle; with a paean, not to peace, but to the glories and honors of past wars;
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and with ritual praise to Athens, the goddess “unvanquished in war.” In the end, the women
return to their familiar traditional roles, and the men continue to be warriors, presumably
against non-Greeks.
Ultimately, women appear to support a set of collective interests that sustains the
continuity of their social group, including the cultural attributes of masculine identity- -even if
the if the cost is their subordination to men and the risks of death to the men as warriors.
Superficially, this could appear to be yet another variant of egoistic incentive theory, but I think
a better psychological foundation, one with considerable empirical support, can be drawn from
social identity theory (Turner, 1987). 4
Social identity theory
The tendency to evaluate positively and reward preferentially one’s own group, know s
the ingroup bias effect, is a remarkably robust and labile psychological phenomena: it can be
reliably engaged in very brief periods of time among total strangers. Indeed, the effect is
obtained even in laboratory “minimal groups,” (Tajfel, 1970; 1981) where research participants
have no contact at all with each other and group membership is purportedly based on similarity
on a trivial judgment task (e.g., having a preference between two abstract painters; being
overestimates or underestimators of the number of dots in a display). Cultural categories and
social structures engage this psychological bias in the mediation of group behavior by a
redefinition of personal self-identity in terms of category membership, or social identity. When
a particular social identity is salient, people react to themselves and others as exemplars of the
group rather than differentiated individuals. The category boundaries that people use can be
almost as trivial as those studied in laboratory situations- -hair color (e.g., “blondes have more
fun,”), for example, or team spectator sports.
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Self-categorizations exist as part of a hierarchical psychological system of classification
that invoke intra- and inter-category discriminations and consequent class inclusions and
exclusions. Social identity takes the form of cognitive groupings of oneself and others, forming
an ingroup, along a dimension of contrast or opposition to some other group. One’s own group,
hence social identity, is evaluated more positively to the extent that it is perceived as
prototypical of the next more inclusive category.
A familiar illustration of the working of this comparison-categorization process comes
from the names pre-modern groups use for themselves. The self-appellation many peoples use
means “human being,” in contrast to all others, who are somewhat slightly less than human
(Durham, in this volume, reports the Mundrucú identify their outgroups as game animals). The
ease with which cross-cutting categorizations can be made, especially as the diversity and
numbers of possible social roles within and between groups expand, explains why the notion of
tribe is so problematic as a descriptive category (Fried, 1975).
That same cognitive lability may make self-categorization cognitively difficult and
uncertain. Vernant (1980), in a discussion of Greek religious festivals where groups gather to
affirm their unity by ritual combats within and between sex, age, and territorial affiliations,
concludes, “It was through battles and competitions that the group became aware of its unity, as
if the social links that bound it together were the same as those stressed by the rivalries between
the different groups” (p.22).
Put another way, social identity theory posits a labile cognitive bias that is engaged when
group boundaries are salient. Why the Lysistrata is not reproduced in reality begins to make
more sense. One of the features of warfare is that the perception of a shared fate heightens a
sense of perceived similarity among ingroup members- -in this case, all of Athens. If Greek
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history is any guide, Lysistrata’s call for an end to the war- -far from uniting women for a
common cause- -would have been branded traitorous.5 Herodutus (9.5.3) reports how the
Athenian wives, on their own initiative, stoned one wife and her children to death because her
husband spoke in favor of a peace proposal. (The proposal was rejected, the Athenians
evacuated, and the city was sacked.)
It also becomes clearer why masculine identity is a problematic task for a culture. There
is no “natural,” in the sense of biological, contrast that correspondingly- -for all time and for all
audiences- -defines the consequence of the category “male” on behavior as childbearing does
for female. (“not childbearing” is not a unique behavioral consequence- -the aged, the young,
virgins, and males and women much of the time are “not childbearing.”) Masculine social
identity, “what men do,” must be culturally constructed by opposing and contrasting it to an
equally culturally constructed feminine social identity consisting of prohibitions on and
prescriptions for women. These differences are always open to debate, as for example, in
Aristotle’s (Pol. 1260a20) conclusion that, “…the courage and justice of a man and of a woman
are not, Socrates maintained, the same; the courage of a man is shown in commanding, of a
woman in obeying.”
There are certain circumstances in which women do fight that does suggest a connection
between social identity and war. The most familiar of these occurs when war is literally at the
threshold; gender (i.e., the social construction of femininity or masculinity) disappears as a
salient category for who may and may not bear arms in defense of home. Gender is central to
other kinds of conflict. Although feminine social identity (at group rather than personal levels)
is rarely threatened, such threats may occasion loosely organized violence by women—riots,
rebellions, or “women’s wars.” The Igbo women’s war (Sanday, 1981), the babski bunty
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rebellions (Conquest, 1986), the femmes sans-culottes of the French Revolution (Levy &
Applewhite, 1980) and American women’s protests in the 1950s against strontium-90 milk,
share a common defense of resources that are necessary for women’s roles in food production
and procurement. Most suggestive is Ardener’s (1973) account of anlu call, not for sexual
insult, but to protest colonial policies regarding women’s traditional control over farming and
farming techniques.
It will take considerable more research to help explain why warfare rather than some
other, less potentially costly activity, is so frequently associated with masculine identity. Sandy
(1981) and Turney-High (1971) among others report that males in premodern groups claim
they “are no longer men” because European intervention ended traditional war activity. The
association is also explicitly identified as defended in the contemporary American military
(Golightly, 1987). I suspect the final explanation will be partly historical (i.e., cultural
evolutionary) and partly psychological. By definition, the diversity of available distractive
cultural roles in ancient pre-state small-group cultures was relatively lower than in modern
cultures. Hence, routes to positive social identity (e.g., prestige, the possession of desirable
attributes) could be separately maintained between males and females, resulting in a
complementarity or parallelism. If the diversity of social roles is limited, then the most salient
features of childbirth (regardless of its evaluative measure within the group) such as life and
death, blood and pain, might be expected to be a central axis for developing category
distinctions for male and female social identity. Tacitus (Ger. 30) reports, for example, a
Germanic barbarian group in which it was customary for youth to remain unkempt like a child
until they paid for their birth pangs by killing an enemy. When women do take the role of
warrior, it appears they are required to reject functionally female and social feminine identity
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by vowing to remain virginal and adopting the attributes of masculine identity. Joan of Arc is
probably the most familiar example. Among certain Germanic groups, a woman could reject a
potential husband chosen by her family by swearing virginity and adopting the clothing and life
of a warrior alongside male warriors. The Dahomeans, who had a state-level social
organization, had a corps of women warriors- -all sworn (albeit imperfectly) to remain virgins
until receiving the king’s permission to marry. Such vows are probably anachronistic in modern
states, although the expectation to adopt masculine identity may express itself more subtly.
Toward the end of World War II, Soviet women flyers, recruited to an all female regiment and
trained as fighter bombers, began their missions under the leadership of a woman. She tolerated
small, hidden infractions of regulations related to feminine identity (e.g., long hair hidden
under a cap, bows on underclothes [Myles, 1981]). However, after her death on a combat
mission and the assumption of the command by a man, such practices were vigorously
prohibited.
According to Vernant (1980), some early Greek religious rites counterposed and linked
war and marriage as the fulfillment of the respective nature of males and females. Both sexes
ritually confirmed their social identities by temporarily participating in the nature of the
opposite sex (including combat as a test of virginity for women) as part of becoming its
complement by virtue of eventual separation between the two genders in the transition from
childhood to adulthood. A female refusing marriage renounces her female identity and is forced
toward warfare and becoming a warrior, because there is no other definitive thing a woman
does. “…[T]his deviation both from the normal state of women, who are destined for marriage,
not warfare, and from the normal state of warriors who are men, not women, gives a special
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intensity to warrior values when these are embodied in a girl. They cease, in a way, to be
merely relative or confined to a single sex and become ‘total’” (p. 24).
In summary, social identity theory posits fundamentally identical psychological systems
for males and females that may produce sexual asymmetries in behavior. Functional differences
in physiology are significant to the extent that they are identified as a cognitive category
boundary along which group discriminations may be made. The articulation between individual
and social group behavior is a function of the salience and positive evaluation of discriminating
attributes given a variety of potential category discriminations. This analysis suggests that
differences in the evaluation and salience of different features, possibly at different levels, of
social group identity. More problematic than how males and female “parse” the social
environment is why those parsings result in lower political status for women and, hence, lower
ability to influence war-related decision making in the service of egoistic incentives that are
equally applicable to men and women. There are many provocative pieces to the puzzle, of
which I’d like to mention a few.
Kinship and the state
The Greeks themselves were obsessed by the problem of social identity, at a time when it
was necessary to achieve something like Rapoport’s notion of reconceptualizing human
possibilities. In order to make a transition from small, primitive kin groups where mere
proximity would be sufficient to establish collective identity, some cultural means was required
to engage social identity across kin lines and in large groups. By the classical period, drawing
group boundaries was a central concern in the Athenian city-state. Aristotle’s (Pol. 1319),
discussion the safeguarding of democratic institutions, claimed fresh tribes and brotherhoods
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should be established, the private rites of family should be restricted and converted to public
rites and rituals, and every means should be invoked to sever old connections (i.e., kinship) and
mix the citizens. The old loyalty to the clan was a challenge, perhaps a danger, because in
moments of crisis many men stood by kin even if it meant civil war or the betrayal of the polis
(Knox, 1964). One attempt to sever the old connections was an Athenian law that required men
to identify themselves by the name of their deme rather than their familial patrynomic. In
effect, the Greeks seem to be attempting to “reassign” old ties of social identity and,
consequently, loyalty to the state.
Much of Greek tragedy explores the conflict between the ties of kinship and the state.
Women were active participants in the conflict, frequently representing old blood ties. For
example, Antigone, in Sophocles’ play, uses a linguistic form of self-reference that refers to
ego and kin as a unit until her sister refuses to help in the burial of their traitorous brother. The
burial was required by the “unwritten law” of kinship, but forbidden by the rules of the state
(Knox, 1964).
Frequently, the dramatic conflict centers on the response of women to male violations or
betrayal- -almost all of which are related directly or indirectly to warfare- -of either the values
of the oikos or the ideals of the polis (Foley, 1981). In prose and drama, the two units are
similar, with the oikos a smaller version of the polis. In both, thrift, self-sufficiency, and the
pooling of common resources were valued. Oikos and polis were complementary, mutually
defining institutions where order in one sphere was inextricably related to order in the other. In
addition to meeting economic needs, the well-managed polis protected the integrity of the oikos
and provided a forum for the male conduct of political and intellectual life (Foley, 1982). Many
of the conflicts are double-edged because the women’s reaction- -no matter how justified- -may
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be, as the supporting cast is quick to note, “masculinized.” These women inevitably meet death,
suicide, or exile.
The drama suggests that masculine identity was linked to the oppression of women, but
the contrast between masculinity and femininity is asymmetrical. Greek men had a horror of
feminization, and to observe that a man was like a woman was both a humiliation and an insult
that could be wielded by men and women alike. The dramatic sources suggest the female to
male comparison was very different. There is public approbation, sometimes fear, but not
humiliation. Curiously, in both comedy and tragedy, women reject their nominal subordination
(Foley, 1978), but only those who adopted masculine aspirations and roles came to a bad end.
Drama admits what prose sources denied. Although the prose picture is one of
confinement to the house, women did play an active role in the religious festivals of the
community. Given that almost a third of the calendar year was marked with religious festivals
(Parke, 1977), and that women had active roles in births, marriages, and funerary rites, their
seclusion must have been more theoretical than real. Interestingly, many of the festivals were
fertility rites that were exclusively for women, and the image here is also one of rejecting
nominal subordination. Similar to the Lysistrata, “married women used, as in the sex strike
here, temporary sexual segregation, neglect of domestic duties, and abstinence, as well as
invective, to promote fertility and the public welfare” (Foley, 1982:8). It seems that at one
level, the Greeks allowed women could act like men, but they should not; and at another level,
considerable energy was expended on why women were unsuited to public life.
There seems to be no necessary connection between militarism and the oppression of
women. Compared to the Spartans, the Athenians were gentleman-soldiers. Yet Spartan women
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enjoyed a high degree of social status and respect within their culture. Here again is a
connection to masculine identity, but it seems the cultural attributes of femininity were
assimilated to the attributes of masculinity on the grounds that women had a critical role in
producing soldiers for the state, not for the family. Marriage customs purportedly involved a
ritual “capture” of the wife, who was prepared by having her hair cut and being dressed as a
man. Among the Spartans, only two categories of people had their personal names inscribed in
stone at their deaths: men who died in battle, and women who died in childbirth.
A similar association between war and childbirth is made by Sophocles’ Medea: quite
bitterly, she concludes after her betrayal she would rather have died a warrior. The Spartan
comparison is that of both sexes enduring pain and risking death for the state. In other cultures,
it is posed as a polarity between “making like” and “taking life.” (Examples are in Turney-High
[1971] and Sanday [1981].) Whatever the precise form of expression, it appears to be in terms
of what it is that women do- -bear children- -and men do- -bear arms. This widespread analogy
suggest a social identity analysis because the connection appears to involve polarizing the most
perceptually salient difference between males and females. Nevertheless, not all men fight.
Among the early Greeks, as among medieval Europeans, war required leisure and an excess of
resources.
Among the Homeric Greeks, where distinctively masculine identity was associated
almost exclusively with heroism, war was the activity of men who had the resources for
outfitting themselves as warriors and the time, because women, slaves, or servants did much of
the work. Even here, there seemed to be constraints- -until the latter part of the Peloponnesian
War, battles were fought “in season.” Men would embark for war after the spring planting,
camp out in the battle field for the summer, and hostilities would cease in time for the harvest.
17
The earliest wars do not appear to be costly to the community. Garlan (1975) characterizes
Homeric conflict as “personal wars,” launched for the private reasons of kings and princes,
their companions and servants. The relations among communities could not be described as a
true state of war because conflict coexisted with unbroken ties at other levels at the same time
that champions engaged in the tradition of “stealing and capturing each others’ women, without
ever converting such behavior into a reason for total war” (Garlan, 1975:24) My gestalt
impression of women’s perspectives-- -reported through the eyes of men- -is that they at least
supported the definition of masculinity as warrior, and accepted the consequences of defeat.
To the extent myth and fact can be separated, the Homeric wars were “primitive” wars:
they did not require the mandate of the community, they did not mobilize its entire material and
human resources, and they were not aimed at obtaining a new legal situation affecting the
people. In fact, the direction of obligation was reversed- -the mandate of the community
required victorious heroes to parade their wealth, power, and courage as the common people
grouped themselves compactly on the battlefield or agora to applaud and support the chivalry
of the warriors. Such demonstrations are as much a part of war as its initiation. We might
hypothesize that for women, the parade of heroes engages social identity at a superordinate
collective level that encompasses all members including the women, whereas for men the
parade engages collective identity, but one where the salient collective is male. Even though
only a few men may actually go to combat, because they are representative of the group, their
actions- -in all areas of their conduct- -would have a disproportionate effect for defining what it
is that men do that contrasts with what women do. 6
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Summary and conclusions
Women do provide a window war, bit it opens into a rocky and unfamiliar terrain. In the
Greek territory, it covers the transitional tension between kinship and statehood; the nominal
subordination of women versus their oppression; women’s exclusion from war and politics
when they obviously can do both; the association between childbirth and warfare, and the
support and frequent glorification of war heroism by men and women alike. I have argued that
social identity theory is a better vehicle for exploring this terrain than is egoistic incentive
theory.
This is not to say that egoistic incentives do not work, but that egoistic incentives are
neither necessary nor sufficient for explaining group cooperative behavior of the sort that
characterizes men at war and men and women in wartime (Caporael, Dawes, Orbell & van de
Kragt, 1987). Nor is it sufficient to characterize premodern war, as does Turney-High (1971),
as emotional, cathartic, or irrational until humans reach a “military horizon” where they can
conceive of instrumental means and economic objectives.
Finally, I am not rejecting a Darwinian framework: elsewhere I have argues that the
ingroup bias is part of a class of adaptive specializations for sociality (Caporael, 1987;
Caporael, Dawes, Orbell & van de Kragt, 1987). The argument, briefly sketched, is this:
Paleoanthropological evidence indicates that social group living precedes other adaptations that
might be called “uniquely human.” To the extent that collective exploitation of the habitat is a
collective process, it is not only more successful groups that would prevail, but also individuals
that are better adapted to group living. We should expect the evolution of mechanisms that
functioned (as they do now) for the development and maintenance of group membership and
19
for the manipulation of social interaction. Once these mechanisms are evolved, they may be
accessed by other adaptations, most notably language, and extended to solve problems in
domains for which they are not adapted- -including large-scale social organization. From an
evolutionary point of view, social identity theory is about an evolved mechanism and its
engagement by cultural categories.
Future research on women and war and how they are included and excluded within
various category boundaries, should help clarify the psychological formulations that inevitably
must underlie higher order analyses of warfare. As Aristotle (1269b25) observed (in a
completely different context), “The man who made up the story seems to have had some reason
when he joined Ares to Aphrodite.”
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Notes
1. I am especially grateful to Helene P. Foley of Barnard College for her time, thoughtful
advice, and efforts to introduce me to the intellectual delights of the Greek world. Any
errors in interpretation and judgment of classical sources, however, are entirely my own. K.
Jack Bauer, whose untimely death, regretted by his colleagues, was a constant source of
encouragement and correction. I am indebted to the American Museum of Natural History
for their kind hospitality during my sabbatical year, and to Robert Carneiro and Stanley
Freed of the Department of Anthropology for provocative conversations on warfare.
Portions of this paper were presented at the meeting of the American Anthropological
Association, November 19, 1987, Chicago.
2. The specific features of this common theory are: 1a) the “self” (ego) is securely bounded at
the level of the individual; 1b) the individual self is the locus of cost-benefit accounting; 2)
the motivational vector is ultimately maximal advantage to the individual self; 3a) cognition
is normatively rational, i.e., individuals are capable of assessing their self-interest and
preferences, and of identifying influential and relevant environmental contingencies; 3c)
deviations from rational choice are explicable as random situational error or the disruption
of behavior by emotional arousal; 4) social behavior is the aggregation of individuals
pursuing their self-interests; 5) the cognitive-motivational system can function without
conscious awareness.
3. A sense of the magnitude of the problem can be garnered from any library on-line computer
catalogue. At the end of 1985, New York Public Library had over 15,000 entries on war
recorded since 1973. The category, women and war, had 14 entries. Less than a year later, it
21
had increased eight-fold, but the entries were almost exclusively for women and 20th
century war.
4. Social identity theory derives from an extensive experimental and cross-cultural line of
research on ethnocentrism, ingroup biasing effects, and resource distribution. Illustrative
investigations are reported by Brewer and her colleagues (Brewer & Campbell, 1976;
Brewer, 1979; Brewer & Kramer, 1986; Kramer & Brewer, 1986).
5. It is interesting to recall a modern event in this context. When their call for peace did unite
women in a common cause, Women Strike for Peace, a loosely knit organization composed
mostly of well-educated housewives and evincing little more structure than that of the
Greek women, was investigated by the House Un-American Activities Committee
(“Communist activities,” 1963). The women testified that the men questioning them should
be grateful to them for trying to make the world safe for their (i.e., the men’s) children and
grandchildren, not brand the women as traitors. A reading of the hearing transcripts is
highly recommended, if only to demonstrate that real life can be more comic than comedy.
6. The process here may be the same as Boyd and Richerson’s conformity transmission, but
the underlying psychological mechanism is radically different. See Boyd and Richerson
(1985).
22
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PROVENANCE NOTE: submitted for publication 2/88 (rejected Journal of Archaeological
Research as part of a group submission by Steve Beckerman)
(transcribed from original copy 8/24/08 by Anne Borreo, STS, RPI)