TY - JOUR
T1 - Turkana warriors' call to arms
T2 - How an egalitarian society mobilizes for cattle raids
AU - Mathew, Sarah
N1 - Funding Information: I acknowledge funding from the National Science Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant, Leakey Foundation Dissertation Grant and International Society of Human Ethology Owen Aldis Award for conducting the fieldwork. Acknowledgements Publisher Copyright: © 2022 The Author(s).
PY - 2022
Y1 - 2022
N2 - Humans are able to overcome coordination and collective action problems to mobilize for large-scale intergroup conflict even without formal hierarchical political institutions. To better understand how people rally together for warfare, I examine how the politically decentralized Turkana pastoralists in Kenya assemble raiding parties. Based on accounts of 54 Turkana battles obtained from semi-structured interviews with Turkana warriors, I describe the precipitating factors, recruitment process, exhortations and leadership involved in marshalling a raiding party. Details of this ethnographic case shed light on how voluntary informal armies are mobilized, and illustrate how culturally evolved institutions harness our cooperative dispositions at multiple scales to produce large-scale warfare. This article is part of the theme issue 'Intergroup conflict across taxa'.
AB - Humans are able to overcome coordination and collective action problems to mobilize for large-scale intergroup conflict even without formal hierarchical political institutions. To better understand how people rally together for warfare, I examine how the politically decentralized Turkana pastoralists in Kenya assemble raiding parties. Based on accounts of 54 Turkana battles obtained from semi-structured interviews with Turkana warriors, I describe the precipitating factors, recruitment process, exhortations and leadership involved in marshalling a raiding party. Details of this ethnographic case shed light on how voluntary informal armies are mobilized, and illustrate how culturally evolved institutions harness our cooperative dispositions at multiple scales to produce large-scale warfare. This article is part of the theme issue 'Intergroup conflict across taxa'.
KW - collective action
KW - cooperation
KW - informal mobilization
KW - pastoralists
KW - volunteer army
KW - warfare
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U2 - https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2021.0144
DO - https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2021.0144
M3 - Article
C2 - 35369747
SN - 0962-8436
VL - 377
JO - Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
JF - Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
IS - 1851
M1 - 20210144
ER -