Tickle-fight Diplomacy, and Other Methods of Greeting and Conflict Management
There is an ambivalence to physical contact. The comforts that come from contact between friends, or between family, or between lovers, is contrasted most severely with the threat or enactment of violence from an adversary. Encounters with strangers or frenemies may thus pose a dilemma, between the potential benefits and costs of a fruitful alliance or a damaging attack. In such circumstances, greeting rituals and other methods of conflict management among males may be particularly likely to emerge and persist as conventions, which can convey non-hostility and aid coalition formation, but may also be vulnerable to deceitful manipulation.
Anthropologist Pierre Clastres describes a particular manner of navigating the possibility of violent conflict between men among the Guayaki-Ache hunter-gatherers of Paraguay. Clastres begins by noting their perception of the ambiguity of touch in connection with food practices, writing,
I was very aware of how extremely repugnant the Indians found the idea of touching one another; it was clear when food was given out: instead of passing the food directly from hand to hand, whoever is giving the food puts the fistful of grubs or piece of meat on the ground, and the person he is giving this gift to picks it up. This reserve is certainly a kind of good etiquette. But there is something else in it: the conviction that physical contact is a form of aggression.
The problems of touch, and of the possibility of aggression, then, are managed among Guayaki-Ache men with a form of greeting ritual involving tickling. Clastres offers an extended description of the process,
Now if you want to deny what seems to be an aggressive appearance, what better way is there than to accept what would ordinarily be interpreted as an act of hostility — bodily contact? If the men welcome this now, it means they really are not enemies. So they enter into a ceremonial game, the necessary prelude to all phases of the ritual, the kyvai: the tickling. Two by two, putting their arms around each other, the warriors run their fingers into the armpits and down the ribs of their partners. It is a sort of competition to see who will be the last to laugh. They try to hold back as long as possible and endure this tickling, which is a form of torture they are not used to. By allowing men to touch each other, the true function of the kyvai becomes clear: to establish or strengthen friendship between two men. Fairly often in the camps, an Atchei Gatu would approach a Stranger and ask him to sit down beside him. The two men would put their heads together and begin the kyvai, murmuring in wheedling voices like lovers: “You see, cheygi, we are doing the kyvai. We are doing it so that we will laugh, so that we will be happy. I am tickling you, and you will not be able to resist. You will burst out laughing and free yourself. We are friends.” The man being subjected to this hunches up, squeezes his arms against his sides (he would have trouble trying to tickle the other man), holds his breath, and contorts his face with great effort, but he does not fight it for very long. All of a sudden he explodes, he is shaken by a spasm and breaks out in hysterical laughter. This is too much, and he gets up and tries to escape; the other man tries to stop him, and this goes on for a few minutes. At last the cheygi, hiccuping, sick with laughter, and nearly suffocating, manages to ask for mercy in a shrill voice: “Enough! A lot of tickling! It makes my stomach hurt!” They are friends. When I had a favor to ask, it was better not to risk the embarrassment of being refused. I would therefore address myself to a cheygi, and in order to establish a friendship I would imitate the Indians and give myself up to the pleasures of the kyvai. The happiness would be shared by everyone. The partner I chose, whom in other circumstances I would certainly never have challenged, would collapse after several minutes of tickling, a Hercules flailing about on the ground and whimpering like a newborn child.
As conveyed above, the tickle-fights appear to function, “to establish or strengthen friendship between two men,” operating as a non-threatening way of maintaining physical contact between men and ideally reducing the possibility of conflict.
Sometimes such practices take on an even more intimate character. Anthropologist Ann McLean describes anthropologist Reo Fortune’s fieldwork experiences learning about the greeting rituals of the Kamano of New Guinea, writing that,
Fortune was somewhat nonplused by some of the customs and behaviors confronting him. One such concerned the niceties of greeting. The precontact courtesy between persons in certain familiar relationships was by reference to and handling of the genitals. Essentially a prudish person, he records with obvious relief that he was only once put to this test. in presenting an account of the greeting, he hedges with various formulations to convey the meaning of the utterance accompanying the gesture—"thy virility greeting"—"thy male member greeting"—before finally settling for "thy penis greeting," and a clinical account of its usage and abusage.
In such a context, it is not unreasonable to think the handling of intimate and vulnerable parts of the body in this fashion may function to convey trust and reduce possible hostility. In fact, genital fondling appears to be a relatively common component of male rituals in some baboon species as well, and such behaviors seem to exhibit other important similarities to human rituals. Dal Pesco & Fischer (2018) write that,
Greetings in Guinea baboons appear to signal commitment among party members, test relationships among spatially tolerant partners, and accentuate relationship strength among highly affiliated males. Although ritualized baboon greetings lack the symbolic component of human rituals, they appear to serve similar functions, specifically to strengthen in-group affiliation and promote cooperation.
At the same time, while these practices can have prosocial functions, individuals and groups can learn to take advantage of them in a more self-interested fashion. Among Kaingang hunter-gatherers of Brazil, men follow similar social institutions to establish or reinforce coalitions, with physical caresses, offerings of food, and finally beer, being provided to put potential allies or adversaries at ease. Yet once established as convention, such social norms can be vulnerable to deceit by cheaters. Thus, treacherous feasts were so common among the Kaingang at the time of ethnographic description that the phrase "Let us make beer for him," had developed a sinister connotation. Descriptions of the abuse of peacekeeping practices to ambush adversaries are not uncommon cross-culturally. Anthropologist Reed Wadley writes that,
In several societies, treacherous ambushes have occurred in the context of formal peacemaking and ritual feasts. On some occasions, peacemaking becomes the express pretext for ambush: in 1852, Tlingit from Sitka ambushed a group of enemies who had been lured there for a meeting to end a feud. "While in the heat of the dance, and handicapped with their dancing costumes on, they were fallen upon and all put to death with knife and club”
Methods of navigating inter-individual conflict through regulated ritual violence are also commonly found cross-culturally. Reo Fortune described ritual conflict resolution among the Kamano of New Guinea, noting a typical pattern where "the contestants reached for strakes of wood and attempted to batter each other's head and shoulders. When an argument reached this stage it was normal for the man who drew the first blood on his opponent to claim a victory at law, and it was normal for his opponent to concede the lady, the land, or whatever it might be to his fellow."
Fight with Cudgels, Francisco Goya, c. 1820.
Similarly, anthropologist Charles Hart gives describes the ‘trial’ process among Tiwi hunter-gatherers of North Australia below, involving a kind of spear-throwing duel between—inevitably, in this gerontocratic polygynous society—a young man being attacked by an elderly male accuser. See below for an extended description, with certain particularly salient parts highlighted if you want to skip:
The basic shape of all Tiwi trials was standardized in the form that we have been calling the duel. Everybody present—men, women, children, and dogs—formed a rough circle in an open space, sitting or standing according to their degree of excitement at the moment. At one end stood the accuser, the old man, covered from head to foot in white paint, with his ceremonial spears in one hand and a bundle of the more useful hunting spears in the [Page 81] other. At the opposite end stood the defendant, with little or no paint on him, perhaps holding a hunting spear or two in his hand (a sign of insolence), perhaps holding only throwing sticks (less defiant, since the stick was an inferior weapon more appropriate to young men), or perhaps entirely weaponless (a sign of proper humility and the deference to his seniors that all bachelors ought to show in such situations). The accuser, with many gestures, particularly with much stamping of the feet and chewing of the beard, told the young man in detail precisely what he and all right-minded members of the community thought of him. This angry, loud harangue went into minute detail, not only about the actual offense, but the whole life career of the defendant, and paid particular attention to occasions in the past when the old man even remotely, or some of his relatives, even more remotely, had performed kindnesses toward either the young man or some of his relatives. It is difficult to summarize briefly one of these harangues, but the general formula, subject to much variation by each individual accuser, appeared to be the building up of as much contrast as possible between the criminal or antisocial character of the young man's actions and the fact that he was a member of a network of interpersonal relationships in which mutual aid and reciprocal obligations were essential. The Tiwi orators, of course, did not put the matter in such abstract terms. They listed the long catalogue of people who had done things for the young man since his birth, and for his ancestors and relatives, until the catalogue took in practically the whole tribe—past, present, and future. And what had he done to repay his obligations to all these people? “Why, the miserable, ungrateful wretch spends his time hanging around my camp, etc., etc. And not only my camp, but last year it was widely believed that he was indulging in similar actions around the camp of my esteemed fellow-elder, So and So.” We do not think that we are overintellectualizing the content of these harangues if we say that they involved the old man's reminding the young man of his debt to society, and his attempting to convey the idea that social life needed mutual aid and trust between all its members.
After twenty minutes or so of this sociological abuse and blame pinning, the old man threw aside his ceremonial spears and began to throw his hunting spears at the defendant. This active phase of the duel conformed to a stereotyped pattern which in some respects resembled baseball. The old man stood about ten feet farther away from the young man than the pitcher stands from the plate. The young man had to avoid being hit by the spears. To do this he was permitted to jump from side to side or into the air, or to duck, but he was expected always to land on approximately the same spot as he had been standing on when the first spear was thrown. Thus there was no marked strike zone, but an implied one. If the accused jumped well away from the strike zone, he was jeered by the crowd. If the old man was wild, he was jeered too, but more respectfully. Under such rules a modern baseball hitter, having no bat in his hand to worry about, would almost never be hit by a pitched ball, and the Tiwi young men were similarly never likely to be hit by an old man's spears. The main danger was the spear that pitched in the dirt. Although clearly outside the strike zone and hence an indication that the old man was [Page 82] really wild, such a spear was apt to carom off the ground at an unexpected angle and inflict a severe wound before the spectators (as collective umpires) had time to call it—in which case the duel was over and the accused was punished
Usually this baring of its teeth by society-at-large was enough. The group of elders did not need to throw many spears simultaneously. The accused capitulated by throwing aside his spears or throwing sticks, or if the defiance had been only of the mildest form—namely, an undue prolongation of the dodging—he allowed his accuser to score a direct hit and the duel ended in the normal way. In the rare cases of the accused refusing to give up, even when confronted by a menacing line of several elders, a concerted volley or two from them quickly knocked him out, and in pre-white days, usually killed him. Crime thus paid even less for the accused who chose defiance than it did for the accused who allowed himself to be wounded in a duel by a doddering ancient three times his age. The greater the amount of defiance, the more clear it became that the doddering ancient, acting ostensibly as an outraged husband, was the responsible agent of society dispensing public justice. If he needed help, all responsible elders went to his aid, and the kinsmen of the accused stood aside and let justice take its course.
Thus for the accused, what was key in many respects was allowing the older man to save face while not being significantly harmed yourself, dodging only minimally, following proper procedure, and in some cases perhaps taking an (ideally) mild blow to assuage gerontocratic fury.
“Ochre-drawing of spear-boomerang duel,” of Arunta hunter-gatherers of Australia. From Basedow (1925).
The possibility of violent conflict between men—and the utility of having allies in such contexts—has been something societies throughout human history have had to navigate, with diverse cultural institutions emerging and persisting as a consequence. Such practices may have broad prosocial functions in some cases, but can also be vulnerable to manipulation by self-interested individuals and groups.