1. Introduction Page 1
2. Cross-Cultural Methodology
Page 2
3. Societies with Women Warriors
Page 3
4. The Exclusion of Women from War
Page 4
5.Type of Warfare Determines Marital Residency
Pages 5-6
6. The Prehistory of Warfare
Pages 7-8
7. Interaction of Biology and Culture
Page 9
8. Conclusion
Page 10
Rather than drawing up an entirely new sample of cultures, the sample for this study was drawn from the sum of the samples used by nine previous investigators who have used cross-cultural techniques to examine the relation of warfare and marriage.1 All of the 204 cultures cited by those investigators were used providing they met the following criteria: (1) they had to be included in the Ethnographic Atlas (Murdock, 1967) and coded there for type of marriage and political complexity (all but 10 societies met this criterion) (2) they had to be stateless cultures, coded as 0 or 1 on column 33 of Murdock, since it was assumed that state systems might involve other complicating factors (44 cultures were excluded on these grounds) (3) when more than one source was available, the data had to be consistent in al1 of them or else the culture was excluded {the following six were excluded because of such contradictory information: Aymara, Chukchee, Cuna, Siwans, South Ute, White Knife) and {4) data had to be available on both the frequency and type of warfare (internal, external), as well as feuding (see below). Warfare was judged to have a low frequency if war and feuding were coded by previous authors as "rare," "infrequent," 'never ," or "absent," or if there was no mention of warfare despite considerable evidence about related aspects of the culture including economic structure or relations with neighboring cultures and communities. There were 29 societies excluded because of lack of adequate information about frequency or type of warfare. All told, there were 115 cultures that met all of the criteria and were included in the sample.
In the previous literature two different definitions have been used for warfare. A broad definition has been used by the Embers: "fighting that involves two or more territorial units so long as there is a group of fighters on at least one side. " A narrower definition has been used by Divale, Tefft, and Otterbein: for Divale and Tefft, warfare is "armed aggression between political communities or alliances of political communities" for Otterbein, it is 'an armed contest between two independent poIitical units, by means of organized military force, in the pursuit of a tribal or national policy." Since the narrower definitions insist upon the political community as the unit of war, they exclude feuding. In the present study the broader definition, including feuding, will be used because it would be expected to relate to marriage residency rules in the same way as other internal warfare. Therefore, in order to adapt the findings of Divale, Tefft, Otterbein and Horton to the present study, it was necessary to check for feuding in the cultures they listed and to reclassify four cultures in which there was frequent feuding and include them among cultures with internal warfare (Copper Eskimo, Monachi, Maria Gond and Papago).
The determination of whether or not women take part as warriors was made on a subsample. The subsample consisted of those cultures that: (1) had frequent or occasional warfare, (2) were surveyed in the Human Relations Area Files, and (3) had sufficient material in the Area Files so that it could be determined if women fought as warriors. Of the 83 cultures with frequent or occasional warfare, 71 were found in the Human Relations Area Files and all but four could be coded for female participation in warfare (the exceptions were the Lesu, Maria Gond, Copper Eskimo, and Yavapai for which there were insufficient data). All of the material in the Human Relations Area File was read by the author and searched for descriptions of women taking part in warfare within the following sections of the files: 628, inter-community relations 669, revolution 70-708, armed forces and 72-729, war (Murdock et al., 1967).
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