Fear of unavenged spirits drove the Dani’s institutionalized warfare

Evidence

The Dani believed that when a dead warrior was cremated, a ghost was released that had the power to cause accidents, sickness, crop damage, and other mis-fortunes for living relatives until it was avenged by the taking of an enemy’s life. Another method of placating malicious ghosts involved the amputation and burning of a finger of a little girl. In addition to the threats of unavenged ghosts, goading by women who sought retaliation for family deaths and the status rewards bestowed on adept fighters also motivated fighting. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 165

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• XREF: Connects to the earlier reading on ritual human sacrifice (Dido, suttee, Lindow Man) — a parallel mechanism where the dead’s claims on the living stabilize social violence.
• ADDENDUM: Supplementary to ‘On Sacrifice: The Real Kind, with Corpses’ — another ethnographic instance of the dead compelling ritual violence, complementing the Dido and Norse funeral accounts.
• SHARE: Worth sending to a friend into comparative religion/anthropology of the dead.

Related

• Perceived supernatural moral imperatives can compel groups to kill (similarity 0.89)