Ritualized Aggression in Humans – Haka / Ben Hall (2011)

Ritualization of aggression is a beneficial strategy to tone down conflicts and avoid serious damaging consequences. Most of the time fighting is risky, wasteful and destructive. Ritualized aggression can resolve conflicts without resorting to actual violence. Besides humans ants, dogs and crayfish are known to engage in mock battles.

Analytical tools used by evolutionary biologists have been very successful in explaining emergence of complex human and non-human behavior. Ritualized aggression is among them. The workers of the Malaysian giant forest ant is famous for their “ritual fights” where workers do movements resembling boxing with their front legs. These intraspecific between colony fights take place on territorial boundaries among specialist major workers. These ritual fighters can meet repeatedly at the same spot. Fights can last very long time for many days and even months. Colonies establish “barrack” nests on the periphery of their territories where long-term conflicts occur. Check out an example for a ritualized fight from the honeypot ants below. The video was produced as a part of a special edition on Human Conflict.

Despite its overwhelming hostile appearance Haka has a wide ritual context performed to welcome distinguished guests, or to acknowledge great achievements, occasions or funerals. In 2010 the US secretary of state Hillary Clinton was greeted with a Haka when she visited the New Zealand parliament. Former US president Barack Obama was also greeted with another ritual in 2018.

Haka can also be interpreted as a ritual celebration of life over death. After the 2019 terror attack many New Zealanders publicly performed Haka as a way of grievance and respect to the dead. Perhaps one of the best known Haka of all is the one performed by the New Zealand’s All Blacks rugby team before every match. The Afro-Brazilian martial art-dance capoeira is also a similar form of ritualized aggression.

Praying, fighting, greeting, dancing, celebrating, grieving all have particular ritualistic versions in every society and cataloging those rituals can help us understand certain basics pertaining to human cultures and origins of civilization. Rituals of ancestral kinds are linked to the supernatural. For theoretical evolutionary thinkers the explanation for supernatural belief is a challenging one. One thing is certain that although it may be beneficial to the larger society, it is costly for the individual. The imagined threat of supernatural punishment can suppress selfishness and enhance cooperation. How did organized religions with moralizing high gods arise? Morally concerned supreme deities or ‘moralizing high gods’ may take this a step further and reduce free-riding cheaters in large social groups, preventing a tragedy of the commons situation in a cooperative Game Theoretical framework. One may ask “what is a non-moralizing god?” The ancestors and deities in many small societies may demand rites and sacrifices to satisfy them. However these supernatural beings may not be concerned with how people treat each other. For gods to reward the good and virtuous while punishing the bad and evil is a relatively recent construct.

The accumulating evidence from meta-analytic studies increasingly suggests that rituals helped the standardization of religious practices in very large populations. Rituals and emergence of complex megasocieties were followed by all powerful moralizing gods adorned with characteristics including the capacity for prosocial supernatural punishment. In this respect, rituals appear to be more ancestral as has been observed in striking archeological places such as the Göbekli Tepe. Göbekli Tepe is now emerging as a ritual gathering place instead of a religious structure/temple that necessitates clergy. Rituals precede and continue to exist even in places where high gods went extinct or were never created.

Ritualized aggression shows us that there’s an innate tendency for avoiding violence within humans. Highly influenced by the Thomas Hobbes’ book The Leviathan, Harvard University professor Steven Pinker argues in his book Better Angels of our Nature that violence has been on the decline especially towards more recent history of human kind. There’s a frightening body of evidence from analysis of bones that about 15 percent of the prehistoric humans died due to violent causes. The 5300 year old Ötzi the iceman discovered in the Austrian Alps for instance died because of a deadly arrow shot from his back. Civilization reduced violence through a pacification and self-domestication process.

Rituals played a big role in the evolution of social complexity. High-frequency rituals form the backbone of world religions and ideological movements. Routinized rituals help establish identities and facilitate trust and cooperation on a wide scale.

One of the largest Neolithic settlements in Southwest Asia is Çatalhöyük. It was founded around 7,300 BC, and occupied until 5700 BC. The site has been under archaeological investigation since 1958 and is continuing to provide massive volume of information on rituals where thousands of people lived side by side in closely packed adobe houses in a “streetless” town. The Neolithic peoples who established the settlement produced pictorial representations of major rituals. Remains of humans were manipulated in elaborate mortuary practices even in the earlier phases of settlement.

As the way of life shifted from hunting to farming which took place through a quite protracted long process over a few millenia, the need for periodically forming groups disappeared. Instead a higher frequency, daily forms of cooperation across the settlement emerged. Sustainable use of communal resources led to larger-scale forms of group identity, trust, and cooperation extending to tens of thousands of people living in a growing settlement.

Different from what we observe in Göbekli Tepe, the rituals became more regular, collective and frequent. Instead of seasonal cycles rituals became daily leaving their archaeological marks across the entire settlement. Çatalhöyük is a landmark UNESCO World Heritage Site forming a historical gateway to the rituals, social organization, and inter-group competition from the Neolithic until to the Bronze Age civilizations.

When we talk about rituals most people may conjure up behavior associated with exotic beliefs with supernatural elements and magical spells. It is actually a living fossil inside human nature. Rituals are with us today in myriad forms and we continue to invent new ones within families, schools, workplaces, governments, and international institutions.