The Better Angels of Our Nature

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The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined is a 2011 book by Steven Pinker, in which the author argues that violence in the world has declined both in the long run and in the short run and suggests explanations as to why this has occurred. The book uses data simply documenting declining violence across time and geography. This paints a picture of massive declines in the violence of all forms, from war, to improved treatment of children. He highlights the role of nation-state monopolies on force, of commerce (making other people become more valuable alive than dead), of increased literacy and communication (promoting empathy), as well as a rise in a rational problem-solving orientation as possible causes of this decline in violence. He notes that paradoxically, our impression of violence has not tracked this decline, perhaps because of increased communication, and that further decline is not inevitable, but is contingent on forces harnessing our better motivations such as empathy and increases in reason.

Thesis

The book's title was taken from the ending of U.S. President Abraham Lincoln's first inaugural address. Pinker uses the phrase as a metaphor for four human motivations – empathy, self-control, the "moral sense", and reason – that, he writes, can "orient us away from violence and towards cooperation and altruism."

Pinker presents a large amount of data (and statistical analysis thereof) that, he argues, demonstrate that violence has been in decline over millennia and that the present is probably the most peaceful time in the history of the human species. The decline in violence, he argues, is enormous in magnitude, visible on both long and short time scales and found in many domains including military conflict, homicide, genocide, torture, criminal justice, and treatment of children, homosexuals, animals and racial and ethnic minorities. He stresses that "The decline, to be sure, has not been smooth; it has not brought violence down to zero; and it is not guaranteed to continue."

Pinker argues that the radical declines in violent behavior that he documents do not result from major changes in human biology or cognition. He specifically rejects the view that humans are necessarily violent, and thus have to undergo radical change in order to become more peaceable. However, Pinker also rejects what he regards as the simplistic nature versus nurture argument, which would imply that the radical change must therefore have come purely from external "(nurture)" sources. Instead, he argues that: "The way to explain the decline of violence is to identify the changes in our cultural and material milieu that have given our peaceable motives the upper hand."

Pinker identifies five "historical forces" that have favored "our peaceable motives" and "have driven the multiple declines in violence". They are:

• The Leviathan – the rise of the modern nation-state and judiciary "with a monopoly on the legitimate use of force", which can defuse the [individual] temptation of exploitative attack, inhibit the impulse for revenge and circumvent self-serving biases.
• Commerce – the rise of technological progress [allowing] the exchange of goods and services over longer distances and larger groups of trading partners, so that other people become more valuable alive than dead and are less likely to become targets of demonization and dehumanization.
• Feminization – increasing respect for the interests and values of women.
• Cosmopolitanism – the rise of forces such as literacy, mobility, and mass media, which can prompt people to take the perspectives of people unlike themselves and to expand their circle of sympathy to embrace them.
• The Escalator of Reason – an intensifying application of knowledge and rationality to human affairs which can force people to recognize the futility of cycles of violence, to ramp down the privileging of their own interests over others and to reframe violence as a problem to be solved rather than a contest to be won." Pinker credits Peter Singer for the metaphor "escalator of reason".

Outline

The first section of the book, chapters 2 through 7, seeks to demonstrate and to analyze historical trends related to declines of violence on different scales. Chapter 8 discusses five "inner demons" – psychological systems that can lead to violence. Chapter 9 examines four "better angels" or motives that can incline people away from violence. The last chapter examines the five historical forces listed above that have led to declines in violence.

Six trends of declining violence (Chapters 2 through 7)

1. The Pacification Process: Pinker describes this as the transition from the anarchy of hunting, gathering, and horticultural societies to the first agricultural civilizations with cities and governments, beginning around five thousand years ago which brought a reduction in the chronic raiding and feuding that characterized life in a state of nature and a more or less fivefold decrease in rates of violent death.
2. The Civilizing Process: Pinker argues that "between the late Middle Ages and the 20th century, European countries saw a tenfold-to-fiftyfold decline in their rates of homicide." He attributes the idea of the Civilizing Process to the sociologist Norbert Elias, who attributed this surprising decline to the consolidation of a patchwork of feudal territories into large kingdoms with centralized authority and an infrastructure on commerce.
3. The Humanitarian Revolution – Pinker attributes this term and concept to the historian Lynn Hunt. He says this revolution "unfolded on the [shorter] scale of centuries and took off around the time of the Age of Reason and the European Enlightenment in the 17th and 18th centuries." Although, he also points to historical antecedents and to "parallels elsewhere in the world", he writes: "It saw the first organized movements to abolish slavery, dueling, judicial torture, superstitious killing, sadistic punishment, and cruelty to animals, together with the first stirrings of systematic pacifism."
4. The Long Peace: a term he attributes to the historian John Lewis Gaddis's The Long Peace: Inquiries into the history of the Cold War. Pinker states this fourth "major transition" took place after the end of World War II. During it, he says, the great powers, and the developed states in general, have stopped waging war on one another.
5. The New Peace: Pinker calls this trend "more tenuous", but since the end of the Cold War in 1989, organized conflicts of all kinds – civil wars, genocides, repression by autocratic governments, and terrorist attacks – have declined throughout the world.
6. The Rights Revolutions: The postwar period has seen, Pinker argues, "a growing revulsion against aggression on smaller scales, including violence against ethnic minorities, women, children, homosexuals, and animals. These spin-offs from the concept of human rights – civil rights, women's rights, children's rights, gay rights, and animal rights – were asserted in a cascade of movements from the late 1950s to the present day."

Five inner demons (Chapter 8)

Pinker rejects what he calls the "Hydraulic Theory of Violence" – the idea "that humans harbor an inner drive toward aggression (a death instinct or thirst for blood), which builds up inside us and must periodically be discharged. Nothing could be further from contemporary scientific understanding of the psychology of violence." Instead, he argues, research suggests that "aggression is not a single motive, let alone a mounting urge. It is the output of several psychological systems that differ in their environmental triggers, their internal logic, their neurological basis, and their social distribution." He examines five such systems:

1. Predatory or Practical Violence: violence deployed as a practical means to an end.
2. Dominance: the urge for authority, prestige, glory, and power. Pinker argues that dominance motivations can occur within individuals and coalitions of racial, ethnic, religious, or national groups.
3. Revenge: the moralistic urge toward retribution, punishment, and justice.
4. Sadism: the deliberate infliction of pain for no purpose but to enjoy a person's suffering.
5. Ideology: a shared belief system, usually involving a vision of utopia, that justifies unlimited violence in pursuit of unlimited good.

Four better angels (Chapter 9)

Pinker examines four motives that can orient [humans] away from violence and towards cooperation and altruism. He identifies:

1. Empathy: which prompts us to feel the pain of others and to align their interests with our own.
2. Self-Control: which allows us to anticipate the consequences of acting on our impulses and to inhibit them accordingly.
3. The Moral Sense: which sanctifies a set of norms and taboos that govern the interactions among people in a culture. These sometimes decrease violence but can also increase it when the norms are tribal, authoritarian, or puritanical.
4. Reason: which allows us to extract ourselves from our parochial vantage points.

In this chapter Pinker also examines and partially rejects the idea that humans have evolved in the biological sense to become less violent.

Influences

Because of the interdisciplinary nature of the book, Pinker uses a range of sources from different fields. Particular attention is paid to philosopher Thomas Hobbes who Pinker argues has been undervalued. Pinker's use of "un-orthodox" thinkers follows directly from his observation that the data on violence contradict our current expectations. In an earlier work, Pinker characterized the general misunderstanding concerning Hobbes:

Hobbes is commonly interpreted as proposing that man in a state of nature was saddled with an irrational impulse for hatred and destruction. In fact his analysis is more subtle, and perhaps even more tragic for he showed how the dynamics of violence fall out of interactions among rational and self-interested agents.

Pinker also references ideas from occasionally overlooked contemporary academics, for example the works of political scientist John Mueller and sociologist Norbert Elias, among others. The extent of Elias's influence on Pinker can be adduced from the title of Chapter 3, which is taken from the title of Elias's seminal The Civilizing Process. Pinker also draws upon the work of international relations scholar Joshua Goldstein. They co-wrote a New York Times op-ed article titled "War Really Is Going Out of Style" that summarizes many of their shared views, and appeared together at Harvard's Institute of Politics to answer questions from academics and students concerning their similar thesis.

Reception

Praise

Bill Gates considers the book one of the most important books he has ever read, and on the BBC radio program Desert Island Discs he selected the book as the one he would take with him to a deserted island. He has written that "Steven Pinker shows us ways we can make those positive trajectories a little more likely. That's a contribution, not just to historical scholarship, but to the world." After Gates recommended the book as a graduate present in May 2017, the book re-entered the bestseller list.

The philosopher Peter Singer gave the book a positive review in The New York Times. Singer concludes: "[It] is a supremely important book. To have command of so much research, spread across so many different fields, is a masterly achievement. Pinker convincingly demonstrates that there has been a dramatic decline in violence, and he is persuasive about the causes of that decline."

Political scientist Robert Jervis, in a long review for The National Interest, states that Pinker "makes a case that will be hard to refute. The trends are not subtle – many of the changes involve an order of magnitude or more. Even when his explanations do not fully convince, they are serious and well-grounded."

In a review for The American Scholar, Michael Shermer writes, "Pinker demonstrates that long-term data trumps anecdotes. The idea that we live in an exceptionally violent time is an illusion created by the media's relentless coverage of violence, coupled with our brain's evolved propensity to notice and remember recent and emotionally salient events. Pinker's thesis is that violence of all kinds – from murder, rape, and genocide to the spanking of children to the mistreatment of blacks, women, gays, and animals – has been in decline for centuries as a result of the civilizing process... Picking up Pinker's 832-page opus feels daunting, but it's a page-turner from the start."

In The Guardian, Cambridge University political scientist David Runciman writes, "I am one of those who like to believe that... the world is just as dangerous as it has always been. But Pinker shows that for most people in most ways it has become much less dangerous." Runciman concludes "everyone should read this astonishing book."

In a later review for The Guardian, written when the book was shortlisted for the Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books, Tim Radford wrote, "in its confidence and sweep, the vast timescale, its humane standpoint and its confident world-view, it is something more than a science book: it is an epic history by an optimist who can list his reasons to be cheerful and support them with persuasive instances.... I don't know if he's right, but I do think this book is a winner."

Adam Lee writes, in a blog review for Big Think, that "even people who are inclined to reject Pinker's conclusions will sooner or later have to grapple with his arguments."

In a long review in The Wilson Quarterly, psychologist Vaughan Bell calls it "an excellent exploration of how and why violence, aggression, and war have declined markedly, to the point where we live in humanity's most peaceful age.... [P]owerful, mind changing, and important."

In a long review for the Los Angeles Review of Books, anthropologist Christopher Boehm, Professor of Biological Sciences at the University of Southern California and co-director of the USC Jane Goodall Research Center, called the book "excellent and important."

Political scientist James Q. Wilson, in The Wall Street Journal, called the book "a masterly effort to explain what Mr. Pinker regards as one of the biggest changes in human history: We kill one another less frequently than before. But to give this project its greatest possible effect, he has one more book to write: a briefer account that ties together an argument now presented in 800 pages and that avoids the few topics about which Mr. Pinker has not done careful research." Specifically, the assertions to which Wilson objected were Pinker's writing that (in Wilson's summation), "George W. Bush 'infamously' supported torture; John Kerry was right to think of terrorism as a 'nuisance'; 'Palestinian activist groups' have disavowed violence and now work at building a 'competent government'. Iran will never use its nuclear weapons... [and] Mr. Bush... is 'unintellectual.'"

Brenda Maddox, in The Telegraph, called the book "utterly convincing" and "well-argued".

Clive Cookson, reviewing it in the Financial Times, called it "a marvelous synthesis of science, history and storytelling, demonstrating how fortunate the vast majority of us are today to experience serious violence only through the mass media."

The science journalist John Horgan called it "a monumental achievement" that "should make it much harder for pessimists to cling to their gloomy vision of the future" in a largely positive review in Slate.

In The Huffington Post, Neil Boyd, Professor and Associate Director of the School of Criminology at Simon Fraser University, strongly defended the book against its critics, saying:

While there are a few mixed reviews (James Q. Wilson in the Wall Street Journal comes to mind), virtually everyone else either raves about the book or expresses something close to ad hominem contempt and loathing... At the heart of the disagreement are competing conceptions of research and scholarship, perhaps epistemology itself. How are we to study violence and to assess whether it has been increasing or decreasing? What analytic tools do we bring to the table? Pinker, sensibly enough chooses to look at the best available evidence regarding the rate of violent death over time, in pre-state societies, in medieval Europe, in the modern era, and always in a global context; he writes about inter-state conflicts, the two world wars, intrastate conflicts, civil wars, and homicides. In doing so, he takes a critical barometer of violence to be the rate of homicide deaths per 100,000 citizens... Pinker's is a remarkable book, extolling science as a mechanism for understanding issues that are all too often shrouded in unstated moralities, and highly questionable empirical assumptions. Whatever agreements or disagreements may spring from his specifics, the author deserves our respect, gratitude, and applause."

The book also saw positive reviews from The Spectator, and The Independent.

Criticism

Statistician and philosophical essayist Nassim Nicholas Taleb was the first scholar to challenge Pinker's analysis of the data on war, after first corresponding with Pinker. "Pinker doesn't have a clear idea of the difference between science and journalism, or the one between rigorous empiricism and anecdotal statements. Science is not about making claims about a sample, but using a sample to make general claims and discuss properties that apply outside the sample." In a reply, Pinker denied that his arguments had any similarity to "great moderation" arguments about financial markets, and stated that "Taleb's article implies that Better Angels consists of 700 pages of fancy statistical extrapolations which lead to the conclusion that violent catastrophes have become impossible... [but] the statistics in the book are modest and almost completely descriptive" and "the book explicitly, adamantly, and repeatedly denies that major violent shocks cannot happen in the future." Taleb, with statistician and probabilist Pasquale Cirillo, went on to publish an article in the journal Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications that proposes a new methodology for drawing inferences about power-law relationships. In their reanalysis of the data, they find no decline in the lethality of war.

Following the publication of Cirillo and Taleb's article, a growing literature has focused on the claims about the decline of war in Better Angels. In a 2018 article in the journal Science Advances, computer scientist Aaron Clauset explored data on the onset and lethality of wars from 1815 to the present and found that the apparent trends described by Pinker, including the "long peace", were plausibly the result of chance variation. Clauset concluded that recent trends would have to continue for another 100 to 140 years before any statistically significant trend would become evident. A team of scholars from the University of Oslo and the Peace Research Institute Oslo, led by mathematician Céline Cunen, explored the statistical assumptions underpinning Clauset's conclusions. While they reproduced Clauset's result when the data on the lethality of war were assumed to conform to a power-law distribution, as they typically are in the conflict literature they found that a more flexible distribution, the inverse Burr distribution, provided a better fit to the data. Based on this change, they argued for a decrease in the lethality of war after about 1950.

In the first book-length response to Pinker's claims about trends in the data, political scientist Bear Braumoeller explored trends in the initiation of both interstate wars and interstate uses of force, the lethality of wars, and the impact of other phenomena commonly thought to cause conflict. The latter tests represented a new statistical implication of Pinker's claim – that the causes of war in the past had lost their potency over time. Braumoeller found no evidence of consistent upward or downward trends in any of these phenomena, with the exception of interstate uses of force, which steadily increased prior to the end of the Cold War and declined thereafter. Braumoeller argues that these patterns of conflict are much more consistent with the spread of international orders, such as the Concert of Europe and the liberal international order, than with the gradual victory of Pinker's "better angels".

R. Brian Ferguson, professor of Anthropology at Rutgers University–Newark, has challenged Pinker's archaeological evidence for the frequency of war in prehistoric societies, which he contends "consists of cherry-picked cases with high casualties, clearly unrepresentative of history in general." To Ferguson,

[b]y considering the total archaeological record of prehistoric populations of Europe and the Near East up to the Bronze Age, evidence clearly demonstrates that war began sporadically out of warless condition, and can be seen in varying trajectories in different areas, to develop over time as societies become larger, more sedentary, more complex, more bounded, more hierarchical, and in one critically important region, impacted by an expanding state.

Ferguson's examination contradicts Pinker's claim that violence has declined under civilization, indicating the opposite is true.

Despite recommending the book as worth reading, the economist Tyler Cowen was skeptical of Pinker's analysis of the centralization of the use of violence in the hands of the modern nation state.

In his review of the book in Scientific American, psychologist Robert Epstein criticizes Pinker's use of relative violent death rates, that is, of violent deaths per capita, as an appropriate metric for assessing the emergence of humanity's "better angels". Instead, Epstein believes that the correct metric is the absolute number of deaths at a given time. Epstein also accuses Pinker of an over-reliance on historical data, and argues that he has fallen prey to confirmation bias, leading him to focus on evidence that supports his thesis while ignoring research that does not.

Several negative reviews have raised criticisms related to Pinker's humanism and atheism. John N. Gray, in a critical review of the book in Prospect, writes, "Pinker's attempt to ground the hope of peace in science is profoundly instructive, for it testifies to our enduring need for faith."

New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, while "broadly convinced by the argument that our current era of relative peace reflects a longer term trend away from violence, and broadly impressed by the evidence that Pinker marshals to support this view", offered a list of criticisms and concludes Pinker assumes almost all the progress starts with "the Enlightenment, and all that came before was a long medieval dark."

Theologian David Bentley Hart wrote that "one encounters [in Pinker's book] the ecstatic innocence of a faith unsullied by prudent doubt." Furthermore, he says, "it reaffirms the human spirit's lunatic and heroic capacity to believe a beautiful falsehood, not only in excess of the facts, but in resolute defiance of them." Hart continues:

In the end, what Pinker calls a "decline of violence" in modernity actually has been, in real body counts, a continual and extravagant increase in violence that has been outstripped by an even more exorbitant demographic explosion. Well, not to put too fine a point on it: So what? What on earth can he truly imagine that tells us about "progress" or "Enlightenment" or about the past, the present, or the future? By all means, praise the modern world for what is good about it, but spare us the mythology.

Craig S. Lerner, a professor at George Mason University School of Law, in an appreciative but ultimately negative review in the Claremont Review of Books does not dismiss the claim of declining violence, writing, "let's grant that the 65 years since World War II really are among the most peaceful in human history, judged by the percentage of the globe wracked by violence and the percentage of the population dying by human hand", but disagrees with Pinker's explanations and concludes that "Pinker depicts a world in which human rights are unanchored by a sense of the sacredness and dignity of human life, but where peace and harmony nonetheless emerge. It is a future – mostly relieved of discord, and freed from an oppressive God – that some would regard as heaven on earth. He is not the first and certainly not the last to entertain hopes disappointed so resolutely by the history of actual human beings." In a sharp exchange in the correspondence section of the Spring 2012 issue, Pinker attributes to Lerner a "theo-conservative agenda" and accuses him of misunderstanding a number of points, notably Pinker's repeated assertion that "historical declines of violence are 'not guaranteed to continue'." Lerner, in his response, says Pinker's "misunderstanding of my review is evident from the first sentence of his letter" and questions Pinker's objectivity and refusal to "acknowledge the gravity" of issues he raises.

Professor emeritus of finance and media analyst Edward S. Herman of the University of Pennsylvania, together with independent journalist David Peterson, wrote detailed negative reviews of the book for the International Socialist Review and for The Public Intellectuals Project, concluding it "is a terrible book, both as a technical work of scholarship and as a moral tract and guide. But it is extremely well-attuned to the demands of U.S. and Western elites at the start of the 21st century." Herman and Peterson take issue with Pinker's idea of a 'Long Peace' since World War Two: "Pinker contends not only that the 'democracies avoid disputes with each other', but that they 'tend to stay out of disputes across the board...' This will surely come as a surprise to the many victims of US assassinations, sanctions, subversions, bombings, and invasions since 1945."

Elizabeth Kolbert wrote a critical review in The New Yorker, to which Pinker posted a reply. Kolbert states that "The scope of Pinker's attentions is almost entirely confined to Western Europe." Pinker replies that his book has sections on "Violence Around the World", "Violence in These United States", and the history of war in the Ottoman Empire, Russia, Japan, and China. Kolbert states that "Pinker is virtually silent about Europe's bloody colonial adventures." Pinker replies that "a quick search would have turned up more than 25 places in which the book discusses colonial conquests, wars, enslavements, and genocides." Kolbert concludes, "Name a force, a trend, or a 'better angel' that has tended to reduce the threat, and someone else can name a force, a trend, or an 'inner demon' pushing back the other way." Pinker calls this conclusion "the postmodernist sophistry that The New Yorker so often indulges when reporting on science."

Ben Laws argues on CTheory that "if we take a 'perspectivist' stance in relation to matters of truth would it not be possible to argue the direct inverse of Pinker's historical narrative of violence? Have we in fact become even more violent over time? Each interpretation could invest a certain stake in 'truth' as something fixed and valid – and yet, each view could be considered misguided." Pinker argues in his FAQ page that economic inequality, like other forms of "metaphorical" violence, "may be deplorable, but to lump it together with rape and genocide is to confuse moralization with understanding. Ditto for underpaying workers, undermining cultural traditions, polluting the ecosystem, and other practices that moralists want to stigmatize by metaphorically extending the term violence to them. It's not that these aren't bad things, but you can't write a coherent book on the topic of 'bad things'.... physical violence is a big enough topic for one book (as the length of Better Angels makes clear). Just as a book on cancer needn't have a chapter on metaphorical cancer, a coherent book on violence can't lump together genocide with catty remarks as if they were a single phenomenon." Quoting this, Laws argues that Pinker suffers from "a reductive vision of what it means to be violent."

John Arquilla of the Naval Postgraduate School criticized the book in Foreign Policy for using statistics that he said did not accurately represent the threats of civilians dying in war:

The problem with the conclusions reached in these studies is their reliance on "battle death" statistics. The pattern of the past century – one recurring in history – is that the deaths of noncombatants due to war has risen, steadily and very dramatically. In World War I, perhaps only 10 percent of the 10 million-plus who died were civilians. The number of noncombatant deaths jumped to as much as 50 percent of the 50 million-plus lives lost in World War II, and the sad toll has kept on rising ever since".

Stephen Corry, director of the charity Survival International, criticized the book from the perspective of indigenous people's rights. He asserts that Pinker's book "promotes a fictitious, colonialist image of a backward 'Brutal Savage', which pushes the debate on tribal peoples' rights back over a century and [which] is still used to justify their destruction."

Anthropologist Rahul Oka has suggested that the apparent reduction in violence is just a scaling issue. Wars can be expected to kill larger percentages of smaller populations. As the population grows, fewer warriors are needed, proportionally.

Sinisa Malesevic has argued that Pinker and other similar theorists, such as Azar Gat, articulate a false vision of human beings as being genetically predisposed to violence. He states that Pinker conflates organised and interpersonal violence and cannot explain the proliferation of war, genocides, revolutions and terrorism in modernity. Malesevic argues that organised violence has been on the rise since the formation of the first states (10,000–12,000 years ago) and this process has accelerated with the increased organisational capacity, greater ideological penetration and ability of social organisations to penetrate the networks of micro-solidarity.

A 2016 study in Nature found that lethal violence caused 2% of human deaths around the time of human origin, an estimated six times higher than the rate of mammal death around the time of mammal origin, and rose higher at times (such as the Iron Age) before falling to less than 2% in modern times. Douglas P. Fry of the University of Alabama at Birmingham stated that "recent assertions by Steven Pinker and others that violent death in the Paleolithic was shockingly high are greatly exaggerated. On the contrary, the findings show that social organization is critically important in affecting human violence." Pinker stated the Nature study confirms his book's claims that humans have a natural tendency to engage in lethal violence, that lethal violence was more common in chiefdoms than in prehistoric hunter-gatherer bands, and is less common in modern society.

In March 2018, the academic journal Historical Reflections published the first issue of their 44th volume entirely devoted to responding to Pinker's book in light of its significant influence on the wider culture, such as its appraisal by Bill Gates. The issue contains essays by twelve historians on Pinker's thesis, and the editors of the issue Mark S. Micale, Professor of History at the University of Illinois, and Philip Dwyer, Professor of History at Newcastle University write in the introductory paper that

Not all of the scholars included in this journal agree on everything, but the overall verdict is that Pinker's thesis, for all the stimulus it may have given to discussions around violence, is seriously, if not fatally, flawed. The problems that come up time and again are: the failure to genuinely engage with historical methodologies; the unquestioning use of dubious sources; the tendency to exaggerate the violence of the past in order to contrast it with the supposed peacefulness of the modern era; the creation of a number of straw men, which Pinker then goes on to debunk; and its extraordinarily Western-centric, not to say Whiggish, view of the world.

David Graeber found Pinker's claims to be founded on false accusations of false-dilemma thinking, and also argued that Pinker, through these very accusations, was culpable of false-dilemma assumptions himself. In particular, Graeber criticized Pinker's simultaneous claims that strivings towards utopia would cause violence while Pinker's fear of things getting worse would not. To Graeber, the latter belief's believability lay strongly in its absence of overt utopianism: Pinker merely did not say that the systems he endorsed were perfect. Graeber wrote that Pinker failed to note that the historic political systems which Pinker rejected did not overtly promise utopia in the first place as well. Pinker, to Graeber, dogmatically presupposed a single linear scale, and thereby charged any contrarians thereof of rejecting all linear scales and adopting "black and white thinking". Pinker thereby purportedly constructed a false dilemma between false-dilemma-fraught utopianism, and Pinker's own endorsements.

Awards and honors

• 2011 New York Times Notable Books of 2011
• 2012 Samuel Johnson Prize, shortlist
• 2012 Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books, shortlist
• 2012–2013 Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh
• 2015 Mark Zuckerberg book club selection, January

Media

"Prof. Steven Pinker – The Better Angels of Our Nature: A History of Violence and Humanity" on YouTube. The 2013 Gifford Lecture at the University of Edinburgh.

Pinker discusses The Better Angels of Our Nature with psychologist Paul Bloom on bloggingheads.tv, December 8, 2012.

Pinker debates why violence has declined with Economist Judith Marquand, BHA Chief Executive Andrew Copson and BBC broadcaster Roger Bolton at the Institute of Art and Ideas.

War Before Civilization

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Before_Civilization 

 

War Before Civilization

Author	Lawrence H. Keeley
Language	English
Subject	Warfare
Publisher	Oxford University Press
Publication date	1996
Media type	Print
Pages	xiv, 245
ISBN	9780199761531
OCLC	770942100

War Before Civilization: the Myth of the Peaceful Savage (Oxford University Press, 1996) is a book by Lawrence H. Keeley, a professor of archaeology at the University of Illinois at Chicago who specialized in prehistoric Europe. The book deals with warfare conducted throughout human history by societies with little technology. In the book, Keeley aims to stop the apparent trend in seeing modern civilization as bad, by setting out to prove that prehistoric societies were often violent and engaged in frequent warfare that was highly destructive to the cultures involved.

Summary

According to Keeley's book, modern western societies are not more violent or war-prone than (historical) tribes. This bar chart compares the percentage of male deaths as caused by warfare in eight tribal societies (Jívaro, Yanomamo, Mae Enga, Dugum Dani, Murngin, Huli, Gebusi) with Europe and the US in the 20th century. The chart is based on War before Civilization.

Keeley conducts an investigation of the archaeological evidence for prehistoric violence, including murder and massacre as well as war. He also looks at nonstate societies of more recent times – where we can name the tribes and peoples – and their propensity for warfare. It has long been known, for example, that many tribes of South America's tropical forest engaged in frequent warfare.

Keeley says peaceful societies are an exception. About 90–95% of known societies engage in war. Those that did not are almost universally either isolated nomadic groups (for whom flight is an option), groups of defeated refugees, or small enclaves under the protection of a larger modern state. The attrition rate of numerous close-quarter clashes, which characterize warfare in tribal warrior society, produces casualty rates of up to 60%, compared to 1% of the combatants as is typical in modern warfare. Despite the undeniable carnage and effectiveness of modern warfare, the evidence shows that tribal warfare is on average 20 times more deadly than 20th-century warfare, whether calculated as a percentage of total deaths due to war or as average deaths per year from war as a percentage of the total population. "Had the same casualty rate been suffered by the population of the twentieth century," writes Nicholas Wade, "its war deaths would have totaled two billion people." In modern tribal societies, death rates from war are four to six times the highest death rates in 20th-century Germany or Russia.

One-half of the people found in a mesolithic cemetery in present-day Jebel Sahaba, Sudan dating to as early as 13,000 years ago had died as a result of warfare between seemingly different racial groups with victims bearing marks of being killed by arrow heads, spears and club, prompting some to call it the first race war. The Yellowknives tribe in Canada was effectively obliterated by massacres committed by Dogrib Indians, and disappeared from history shortly thereafter. Similar massacres occurred among the Eskimos, the Crow Indians, and countless others. These mass killings occurred well before any contact with the West. In Arnhem Land in northern Australia, a study of warfare among the Australian Aboriginal Murngin people in the late-19th century found that over a 20-year period no less than 200 out of 800 men, or 25% of all adult males, had been killed in intertribal warfare. The accounts of missionaries to the area in the borderlands between Brazil and Venezuela have recounted constant infighting in the Yanomami tribes for women or prestige, and evidence of continuous warfare for the enslavement of neighboring tribes such as the Macu before the arrival of European settlers and government. More than a third of the Yanomamo males, on average, died from warfare.

According to Keeley, among the indigenous peoples of the Americas, only 13% did not engage in wars with their neighbors at least once per year. The natives' pre-Columbian ancient practice of using human scalps as trophies is well documented. Iroquois routinely slowly tortured to death captured enemy warriors (see Captives in American Indian Wars for details). In some regions of the American Southwest, the violent destruction of prehistoric settlements is well documented and during some periods was even common. For example, the large pueblo at Sand Canyon in Colorado, although protected by a defensive wall, was almost entirely burned, artifacts in the rooms had been deliberately smashed, and bodies of some victims were left lying on the floors. After this catastrophe in the late thirteenth century, the pueblo was never reoccupied.

For example, at the Crow Creek massacre site (in the territory of the Crow Creek Reservation in South Dakota), archaeologists found a mass grave containing the remains of more than 500 men, women, and children who had been slaughtered, scalped, and mutilated during an attack on their village a century and a half before Columbus's arrival (c. 1325 AD). The Crow Creek massacre seems to have occurred just when the village's fortifications were being rebuilt. All the houses were burned, and most of the inhabitants were murdered. This death toll represented more than 60% of the village's population, estimated from the number of houses to have been about 800. The survivors appear to have been primarily young women, as their skeletons are underrepresented among the bones; if so, they were probably taken away as captives. Certainly, the site was deserted for some time after the attack because the bodies evidently remained exposed to scavenging animals for a few weeks before burial. In other words, this whole village was annihilated in a single attack and never reoccupied.

Chapter 5, compares civilized soldiers with primitive warriors. Keeley observes that tactical methods by civilized soldiers were not very good and that primitive methods were actually better. Indigenous groups in many areas of the world successfully defended and defeated multiple European colonization campaigns for decades due to primitive unorthodox warfare techniques like smaller mobile units, using small arms as opposed to artillery, open formations, frequent uses of ambushes and raids, surprise attacks, destruction of infrastructure (e.g. villages, habitations, foodstores, livestock, means of transportation), extensive uses of scouts. European conquests were greatly helped by ecological changes like diseases, viruses, and bacteria in defeating many indigenous groups since such conditions eliminated more indigenous people than did any armed conflict. The defeat of the Inca and the Aztecs are examples. Sometimes, primitive groups had better military foresight than civilized counterparts. Keeley relates an incident in which an Eipo tribal leader of highland Irian (in Western New Guinea) quickly thought of – and wanted to immediately use – aerial bombardment of enemies shortly after seeing an airplane for the first time. Keeley says the Western developers of planes took years to develop similar ideas. Many primitive techniques are preserved in modern times as guerrilla warfare.

He makes three conclusions which The New York Times considers unexpected:

• that the most important part of any society, even the most war-like ones, are the peaceful aspects such as art
• that neither frequency nor intensity of war is correlated with population density
• that societies frequently trading with one another fight more wars with one another

Reception

When it was published, I thought my book would annoy everybody. Other than a few anthropologists whom I either ridiculed or found rather obvious mistakes in their analyses, the reception was instead surprisingly positive. This positive response was especially true of archaeologists.

Keeley, L. H. (2014). War Before Civilization – 15 Years On. In The Evolution of Violence (pp. 23–31). Springer, New York

The New York Times said that "the book's most dramatic payoff is its concluding explanation for the recent "pacification of the past" by scholars" and that "...revulsion with the excesses of World War II has led to a loss of faith in progress and Western civilization....".

American political scientist Eliot A. Cohen described the book as "At once scholarly and lucid, he paints a dark picture of human nature, although he does not believe humankind is doomed to a perpetual striving for mutual extinction. A sobering, grim, and important book." Anthropologist R. Brian Ferguson gave a mostly positive review but argued that Keeley overstated the commonality of ancient warfare and that aversion by academics to the existence of pre-historical warfare was misrepresented.

The book was a finalist for the 1996 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for History.

Selected academic reviews

Bryjak, George J. (July 1997). "Book Review: War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage". Armed Forces & Society. 23 (4): 675–677. doi:10.1177/0095327X9702300409. S2CID 144659141.

Simons, Anna (February 1997). "Two Perspectives on War and Its Beginnings War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage. Lawrence Keeley Ride of the Second Horseman: The Birth and Death of War. Robert L. O'Connell". Current Anthropology. 38 (1): 149–151. doi:10.1086/204602. S2CID 146215718.

Straus, Lawrence G. (December 1997). "War before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage . Lawrence H. Keeley". Journal of Anthropological Research. 53 (4): 505–507. doi:10.1086/jar.53.4.3631266.

Willis, Roy (February 1999). "War before civilization. The myth of the peaceful savage. BY LAWRENCE H. KEELEY. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1996. xii + 245 pp. Hb.: $25. ISBN 0 19 509112 4". Social Anthropology. 7 (1): 93–113. doi:10.1017/S0964028299280081.

Helms, Mary W. (1999). "Review of War before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage; Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War". Journal of World History. 10 (2): 431–434. doi:10.1353/jwh.1999.0011. JSTOR 20078787. S2CID 162372565.

Meilinger, Phillip S.; Wrangham, Richard; Peterson, Dale; Keeley, Lawrence H.; Keegan, John (July 1997). "Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence". The Journal of Military History. 61 (3): 598. doi:10.2307/2954037. JSTOR 2954037. S2CID 16972227. ProQuest 1296716952.

Stereotypes of Indigenous peoples of Canada and the United States

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stereotypes_of_Indigenous_peoples_of_Canada_and_the_United_States

Film poster for D. W. Griffith's 1913 film The Battle at Elderbush Gulch, showing a depiction of a Native American warrior as a depraved child murderer and threat to the purity of white womanhood

Stereotypes of Indigenous peoples of Canada and the United States of America include many ethnic stereotypes found worldwide which include historical misrepresentations and the oversimplification of hundreds of Indigenous cultures. Negative stereotypes are associated with prejudice and discrimination that continue to affect the lives of Indigenous peoples.

Indigenous peoples of the Americas are commonly called Native Americans in the United States (excluding Alaskan and Hawaiian Natives) or First Nations people (in Canada). The Circumpolar peoples of the Americas, often referred to by the English term Eskimo, have a distinct set of stereotypes. Eskimo itself is an exonym, deriving from phrases that Algonquin tribes used for their northern neighbors, in Canada the term Inuit is generally preferred, while Alaska Natives is used in the United States.

It is believed that some portrayals of Natives, such as their depiction as bloodthirsty savages have disappeared. However, most portrayals are oversimplified and inaccurate; these stereotypes are found particularly in popular media which is the main source of mainstream images of Indigenous peoples worldwide.

The stereotyping of American Indians must be understood in the context of history which includes conquest, forced displacement, and organized efforts to eradicate native cultures, such as the boarding schools of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, which separated young Native Americans from their families to educate and to assimilate them as European Americans. There are also many examples of seemingly positive stereotypes which rely on European "noble savage" imagery, but also contribute to the infantilization of Indigenous cultures.

Indigenous terminology

Further information: American Indian name controversy

The first difficulty in addressing stereotypes is the terminology to use when referring to Indigenous peoples, which is an ongoing controversy. The truly stereotype-free names would be those of individual nations. A practical reference to Indigenous peoples, in general, is "American Indian" in the United States and "First Nations" or "Indigenous" in Canada. The peoples collectively referred to as Inuit have their own unique stereotypes. The communities to which Indigenous peoples belong also have various names, typically "nation" or "tribe" in the United States, but "comunidad" (Spanish for "community") in South America.

All global terminology must be used with an awareness of the stereotype that "Indians" are a single people, when in fact there are hundreds of individual ethnic groups, who are all native to the Americas, just as the term "Europeans" carries an understanding that there are some similarities but also many differences between the peoples of an entire continent.

American Natives

Further information: Racism in the United States § Native Americans

Since the first Europeans made landfall in North America, Native peoples have suffered under a weltering array of stereotypes, misconceptions and caricatures. Whether portrayed as noble savages, ignoble savages, teary-eyed environmentalists, drunken, living off the Government, Indian princess/Squaw or most recently, simply as casino-rich, native peoples find their efforts to be treated with a measure of respect and integrity undermined by images that flatten complex tribal, historical and personal experience into one-dimensional representations that tells us more about the depicters than about the depicted.

Carter Meland (Anishinaabe heritage) and David E. Wilkins (Lumbee), professors of Native American Studies at the University of Minnesota.

Myths about American Indians can be understood in the context of the metanarrative of the United States, which was originally "manifest destiny" and has now become "American exceptionalism". Myths and stereotypes persist because they fit into these narratives, which Americans use to understand their own history. This history includes the description of Native Americans in the Declaration of Independence as "merciless Indian savages". These stereotypes have historical, cultural, and racial characteristics.

Historical misconceptions

There are numerous distortions of history, many of which continue as stereotypes.

There is the myth that Indians are a dying race, i.e. "The Vanishing Red Man", when in fact census data shows an increase in the number of individuals who were American Indians and Alaska Natives or American Indian and Alaska Native in combination with one or more other races.

There is an assumption that Indians lost possession of their land because they were inferior, when the reality is:

1. Many of the Indigenous peoples died from Old World diseases to which they lacked any immunity.
2. There were a number of advanced civilizations in the Americas, but they did lack two important resources: a pack animal large enough to carry a human; and the ability to make steel for tools and weapons.

Purchase of Manhattan

The "purchase" of Manhattan island from Indians is a cultural misunderstanding. In 1626 the director of the Dutch settlement, Peter Minuit, traded sixty guilders worth of goods with the Lenni Lenape people, which they would have accepted as gifts in exchange for allowing the settlers to occupy the land. Though Native Americans had a communal conception of property, they had no conception of a fee simple.

Pocahontas

The story told by John Smith of his rescue by the daughter of Chief Powhatan, Pocahontas, is generally thought by historians to be a fabrication. Pocahontas was most likely eleven or twelve at the time, and this popular tale of the "Indian princess" and Smith's story changed over many retellings.

Cultural and ethnic misconceptions

The Media Awareness Network of Canada (MNet) has prepared several statements about the portrayals of American Indians, First Nations of Canada, and Alaskan Natives in the media. Westerns and documentaries have tended to portray Natives in stereotypical terms: the wise elder, the aggressive drunk, the Indian princess, the loyal sidekick, the obese and impoverished. These images have become known across North America. Stereotyped issues include simplistic characterizations, romanticizing of Native culture, and stereotyping by omission—showing American Indians in a historical rather than modern context.

There is also the outdated stereotype that American Indians and Alaskan Natives live on reservations when in fact only about 25% do, and a slight majority now live in urban areas.

There is an assumption that Indians somehow have an intuitive knowledge of their culture and history when the degree of such knowledge varies greatly depending upon the family and community connections of each individual.

Indigenous women

Further information: Missing and murdered Indigenous women and Sexual victimization of Native American women

Native American and First Nations women are frequently sexually objectified and are often stereotyped as being promiscuous. Such misconceptions lead to murder, rape, and violence against Native American or First Nations women and girls by non-Native men and sometimes women.

An Algonquin word, the term "squaw" is now widely deemed offensive due to its use for hundreds of years in a derogatory context. However, there remain more than a thousand locations in the U.S. that incorporate the term in its name.

Indigenous men and sports mascotry

In early colonial writings, the most common portrayal of Native men came in the form of what Robert Berkhofer calls "savage images of the Indian as not only hostile but depraved.". In later times, particularly under the influence of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's idea of the noble savage, Native American men were portrayed by European sources as fierce warriors that Euro-American writers called braves. Berkhofer summarizes this idea as follows:

friendly, courteous, and hospitable to the initial invaders of his lands and to all Whites so long as the latter honored the obligations presumed to be mutually entered into with the tribe. Along with handsomeness of physique and physiognomy went great stamina and endurance. Modest in attitude if not always in dress, the noble Indian exhibited great calm and dignity in bearing, conversation, and even under torture. Brave in combat, he was tender in love for family and children.

The word "brave" often appeared in school sports teams' names until such team names fell into disfavor in the later 20th century. Many school team names have been revised to reflect current sensibilities, though professional teams such as American football's Kansas City Chiefs, baseball's Atlanta Braves, and ice hockey's Chicago Blackhawks continue. Some controversial upper-level Native American team mascots such as Chief Noc-A-Homa and Chief Illiniwek have been discontinued, while some such as Chief Osceola and Renegade remain. A controversy over the Fighting Sioux nickname and logo was resolved in 2012.

There have been issues with the continuation of professional team names and mascots especially in the Washington Redskins name controversy. In 2013, President Obama and NBC sportscaster Bob Costas voiced their objection to the name. After a petition, the Trademark and Trial Appeal Board ordered the cancellation of six federal trademark registrations in 2014. The Redskins are appealing this ruling. The team was renamed the Washington Football Team in 2020. And in 2022 was renamed again as the Washington Commanders.

Substance use

Because of the high frequency of American Indian alcoholism, it is sometimes used stereotypically when portraying them. As with most groups, the incidence of substance use is related to issues of poverty and mental distress, both of which may sometimes be in part the result of racial stereotyping and discrimination. This stereotype became most prominent in the mid to late twentieth century when alcoholism became the number one cause of death according to the Indian Health Services (IHS). Reports from the mid-1980s state that this was the time period when the IHS began to primarily target the treatment of alcoholism over its past treatments of infectious diseases. Treatment for substance use disorders by Native Americans is more effective when it is community-based, and addresses the issues of cultural identification.

Ecology-affiliated stereotypes

One named stereotype with affiliation to ecology is the "Noble Savage" stereotype. When referring to American Indians as "Noble Savages", it is implied that these individuals have acquired a special kinship with their "land, water, and wildlife". Furthermore, this stereotype implicitly states that American Indians do not allow themselves or their environment to be corrupted by commercialization or industrialization and that they strive to preserve their environment and keep it untouched. This stereotype has stemmed from the long-term enthrallment many non-natives have had with this particular minority group, causing American Indians to be viewed as "objects of reverence and fascination".

Kat Anderson's book, Tending the wild: Native American Knowledge and the Management of California's Natural Resources, delves into the "hunter-gatherer" stereotype which describes survival solely on hunting animals and gathering of berries and other plants. The author attempts to break this stereotype by illustrating the varied ways Indigenous peoples of California tended and supported their environment. California Natives have utilized methods, such as effective harvesting, controlled burning, and selectively pruning, in order to maintain their environment and keep many plant and animal species flourishing. Through the book, Anderson wanted to accurately spread the ecological knowledge of California natives to shed light on the impact these groups have had on surrounding wildlife areas.

Inuit stereotypes

Inuit, often referred to as Eskimos (which many see as derogatory), are usually depicted dressed in parkas, paddling kayaks, which the Inuit invented, carving out trinkets, living in igloos, fishing with a harpoon, hunting whales, traveling by sleigh and huskies, eating cod liver oil, and the men are called Nanook from the documentary Nanook of the North. Eskimo children may have a seal for a best friend.

Eskimos are sometimes shown rubbing noses together in greeting ritual, referred to as Eskimo kissing in Western culture, and only loosely based on an authentic Inuit practice known as kunik. They are also often depicted surrounded by polar bears or walruses.

Effect of stereotyping

Stereotypes harm both the victims and those that perpetuate them, with effects on society at large. Victims suffer emotional distress: anger, frustration, insecurity, and feelings of hopelessness. Most of all, Indian children exposed at an early age to these mainstream images internalize the stereotypes paired with the images, resulting in lower self-esteem, contributing to all of the other problems faced by American Indians. Stereotypes become discrimination when the assumptions of being more prone to violence and alcoholism limit job opportunities. This leads directly to Indians being viewed less stable economically, making it more difficult for those that have succeeded to fully enjoy the benefits in the same way that non-Indians do, such as obtaining credit. For those that maintain them, stereotypes prevent a more accurate view of Indians and the history of the United States.

Research also demonstrates the harm done to society by stereotyping of any kind. Two studies examined the effect of exposure to an American Indian sports mascot on the tendency to endorse stereotypes of a different minority group. A study was first done at the University of Illinois and then replicated at The College of New Jersey with the same results. Students were given a paragraph to read about Chief Illiniwek adapted from the University of Illinois' official website, while the control group was given a description of an arts center. In both studies, the students exposed to the sports mascot were more likely to express stereotypical views of Asian-Americans. Although Chief Illiniwek was described only in terms of positive characteristics (as a respectful symbol, not a mascot), the stereotyping of Asian-Americans included negative characteristics, such as being "socially inept". This was indicative of a spreading effect; exposure to any stereotypes increased the likelihood of stereotypical thinking.

In Alabama, at a game between the Pinson Valley High School "Indians" and McAdory High School, the latter team displayed a banner using a disparaging reference to the Trail of Tears for which the principal of the school apologized to Native Americans, stated that the cheerleader squad responsible would be disciplined and that all students would be given a lesson on the actual history of the Trail of Tears. Native Americans responded that it was an example of the continuing insensitivity and stereotyping of Indians in America. A similar sign was displayed in Tennessee by the Dyersburg Trojans when they played the Jackson Northside Indians.

The effect that stereotyping has had on Indigenous women is one of the main reasons why non-Indigenous people commit violent crimes of hate towards First Nations women and girls. Because Aboriginal women have been associated with images of the "Indian princess" and "Squaw" some non-Indigenous people believe that Aboriginal women are dirty, promiscuous, overtly sexualized, which makes these women vulnerable to violent assaults. Colonial culture has been foundation of these stereotypes creating a relationship of violence and hatred, which justifies the treatment of First Nations peoples to this day.

Film

Main article: Native Americans in film

Modern perpetuation of stereotypes

The mainstream media makes a lot of money-making movies that play along with stereotypes; while accurate portrayals may be critically acclaimed they are not often made or widely distributed.

Overcoming stereotypes

In the 1980s and 1990s, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) made efforts to improve the portrayals of Aboriginal people in its television dramas. Spirit Bay, The Beachcombers, North of 60 and The Rez used Native actors to portray their own people, living real lives and earning believable livelihoods in identifiable parts of the country.

Imagining Indians is a 1992 documentary film produced and directed by American Indian filmmaker Victor Masayesva, Jr. (Hopi). The documentary attempts to reveal the misrepresentation of Indigenous American Indian culture and tradition in Classical Hollywood films by interviews with different Indigenous Native American actors and extras from various tribes throughout the United States.

21st century

Reel Injun is a 2009 Canadian documentary film directed by Cree filmmaker Neil Diamond, Catherine Bainbridge, and Jeremiah Hayes that explores the portrayal of American Indians in film. Reel Injun is illustrated with excerpts from classic and contemporary portrayals of Native people in Hollywood movies and interviews with filmmakers, actors and film historians, while director Diamond travels across the United States to visit iconic locations in motion picture as well as American Indian history.

Reel Injun explores many stereotypes about natives in film, from the Noble savage to the Drunken Indian. It profiles such figures as Iron Eyes Cody, an Italian American who reinvented himself as a Native American on-screen. The film also explores Hollywood's practice of using Italian Americans and American Jews to portray Indians in the movies and reveals how some Native American actors made jokes in their native tongue on screen when the director thought they were simply speaking gibberish.

Inventing the Indian is a 2012 BBC documentary first broadcast on 28 October on BBC 4 exploring the stereotypical view of Native Americans in the United States in cinema and literature.

The American animated series Molly of Denali, which premiered in 2019, features protagonists, actors, co-creators who are Alaskan Native, with the goal of educating children about informational text as well as debunking Native stereotypes. The show has been celebrated as "the nation’s first widely distributed children’s program featuring an Alaska Native as the lead character."

Watershed delineation

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watershed_delineation

Watershed delineation is the process of identifying the boundary of a watershed, also referred to as a catchment, drainage basin, or river basin. It is an important step in many areas of environmental science, engineering, and management, for example to study flooding, aquatic habitat, or water pollution.

The activity of watershed delineation is typically performed by geographers, scientists, and engineers. Historically, watershed delineation was done by hand on paper topographic maps, sometimes supplemented with field research. In the 1980s, automated methods were developed for watershed delineation with computers and electronic data, and these are now in widespread use.

Map of the watershed of the Lost Creek Reservoir in Morgan County, Utah, United States, showing the major streams in blue and the watershed boundary in red.

Computerized methods for watershed delineation use digital elevation models (DEMs), datasets that represent the height of the earth's land surface. Computerized watershed delineation may be done using specialized hydrologic modeling software such as WMS, Geographic Information System software like ArcGIS or QGIS, or with programming languages like Python or R.

Watersheds are a fundamental geographic unit in hydrology, the science concerned with the movement, distribution, and management of water on Earth. Delineating watersheds may be considered an application of hydrography, the branch of applied sciences which deals with the measurement and description of the physical features of oceans, seas, coastal areas, lakes and rivers. It is also related to geomorphometry, the quantitative science of analyzing land surfaces. Watershed delineation continues to be an active area of research, with scientists and programmers developing new algorithms and methods, and making use of increasingly high-resolution data from aerial or satellite remote sensing.

Manual watershed delineation

The conventional method of finding a watershed boundary is to draw it by hand on a paper topographic map, or on a transparent overlay. The watershed area can then be estimated using a planimeter, by overlaying graph paper and counting grid cells, or the result can be digitized for use with mapping software. The same process can be done on a computer, sketching the watershed boundary (with a mouse or stylus) over a digital copy of a topographic map. This is referred to as "heads up digitizing" or "on-screen digitizing."

Example of an idealized watershed boundary, drawn on a topographic map with elevation contours. Any precipitation that falls inside the watershed boundary will flow toward the watershed outlet at the bottom.

For "manual" watershed delination, one must know how to read and interpret a topographic map, for example to identify ridges, valleys, and the direction of steepest slope. Even in the computer era, manual watershed delineation is still a useful skill, in order to check whether watersheds generated with software are correct.

Instructions for manual watershed delineation can be found in some textbooks in geography or environmental management, in government pamphlets, or in online video tutorials.

According to the US Geological Survey, there are 5 steps to manual watershed delineation:

1. Find the point of interest along a stream on the map. This is the "watershed outlet" or "pour point."
2. Imagine or draw surface water flow lines that point downhill perpendicular to the topographic contours (this is the steepest direction).
3. Mark the location of topographical high points (peaks) around the stream.
4. Mark the points along contours that divide flows towards or away from the stream (ridges).
5. Connect the dots to delineate the watershed.

General Rules:

• The watershed boundary should be perpendicular to contour lines where it crosses them.
• The watershed boundary must not cross rivers or streams other than at the outlet. (In some cases, a blue line representing a man-made canal or pipeline may traverse your watershed boundary.)
• The watershed boundary should run along ridgelines and connect high points.

One disadvantage to manual watershed delineation is that it is subject to errors and the individual judgment of the analyst. The Illinois Environmental Protection Agency wrote, "bear in mind that delineating a watershed is an inexact science. Any two people, even if both are experts, will come up with slightly different boundaries."

Especially for smaller watersheds and when accurate results are important, field reconnaissance may be needed to find features that are not shown on maps. "Going out into the field allows you to identify human alterations, such as road ditches, storm sewers and culverts that could change the direction of waters flow and thus change the watershed boundaries."

Automated or computerized watershed delineation

Using computer software to delineate watersheds can be much faster than manual methods. It may also be more consistent, as it removes analyst's subjectivity. Automatic methods of watershed delineation have been in use since the 1980s, and are now in widespread use in the science and engineering communities. Researchers have even used computer methods to delineate watersheds on Mars.

Automated watershed delineation methods use digital data of the earth's elevation, a Digital Elevation Model, or DEM. Typically, algorithms use the method of "steepest slope" to calculate the flow direction from a grid cell (or pixel) to one of its neighbors.

It is possible to use DEMs in different formats for watershed delineation, such as a Triangular Irregular Network (TIN), or Hexagonal tiling however most contemporary algorithms make use of a regular rectangular grid. In the 1980s and 1990s, digital elevation models were often obtained by scanning and digitizing the contours on paper topographic maps, which were then converted to a TIN or a gridded DEM. More recently, the DEM is obtained by aerial or satellite remote sensing, using stereophotogrammetry, lidar, or radar.

To use a rectangular grid DEM for watershed delineation, it must first be processed or "conditioned" in order to return realistic results. The result is sometimes referred to as a "hydro-enforced" DEM or a "HydroDEM." Most of the software packages listed below can perform these functions on a "raw" DEM, or analysts can download hydrologically-conditioned DEMs such as the near-global HydroSHEDS, MERIT-Hydro, or EDNA for the continental United States. The usual steps for hydrologic conditioning of a DEM are:

1. Fill sinks.
2. "Burn in" the stream channels.
3. Calculate flow direction.
4. Calculate flow accumulation.

3D rendering of a hydrologically-conditioned digital elevation model. This example from the U.S. Geological Survey shows “walling” or “fencing” using data from the Watershed Boundary Dataset (WBD) and “burning” of streams from the National Hydrography Dataset (NHDPlus).

Additionally, some methods allow for "fencing ridgelines" and burning in flow pathways through lakes. Some methods also enforce a small slope onto flat areas so that flow will continue to move toward the outlet. The step of "burning in" stream channels involves artificially deepening the channel, by subtracting a large elevation value from pixels that represent the channel. This ensures that once flow has entered the channel, it will stay there rather than jumping out and flowing overland or into another channel. Some algorithms infer the location of channels automatically from the DEM. Better results are usually obtained by burning in mapped stream channels, or channels derived from satellite or aerial imagery.

There are several different algorithms available for calculating flow direction from a DEM. The first method, introduced by Australian geographers O'Callaghan and Mark in 1984, is referred to as D8. Water flows from a pixel to one of 8 possible directions to a neighboring cell (including diagonally), based on the direction of steepest slope. There are disadvantages to this method as water flow is limited to 8 directions, separated by 45°, which may result in unrealistic flow patterns. Also, because all of the flow is routed in one direction, the D8 method is unable to model situations where the flow diverges, such as on convex hillsides, in a river delta, or in branched or braided rivers. Alternative algorithms have been proposed and implemented to overcome this limitation, such as D∞. Nevertheless, the D8 algorithm remains in widespread use, and has been used to create important datasets such as HydroBasins and MERIT-Basins.

Computerized watershed delineation is not always correct. Some errors stem from incorrectly placing the watershed outlet on the digital river network, or "snapping the pour point." Another class of errors stems from inaccuracies in the digital terrain data, or where its resolution is too coarse to capture flow pathways. In general, DEMs with higher spatial resolution can more realistically describe topography of the land surface and flow direction. However, there is a tradeoff, as a finer grid with more pixels increases computing time. Nevertheless, even high-resolution data may not adequately capture flow pathways in complex environments like cities and suburbs, where flow is directed by curbs, culverts, and storm drains. Finally, some errors can result from the algorithm or the choice of parameters.

Because errors are common, some authorities insist that the results of automated delineation must be carefully checked. The US Geological Survey's standards for the US Watershed Boundary Dataset allow the use of software "to generate intermediate or “draft” boundary lines," which then must be verified by the analyst by overlaying them on a computer display over basemaps (scanned topographic maps, aerial photographs) to verify their accuracy.

Software for watershed delineation

Some of the first watershed delineation software was written in FORTRAN, such as CATCH and DEDNM. Watershed delineation tools are a part of several Geographic Information System software packages such as ArcGIS, QGIS, and GRASS GIS. There are standalone programs for watershed delineation such as TauDEM. Watershed delineation tools are also incorporated into some hydrologic modeling software packages.

Software developers have also published libraries or modules in several languages (see list below). Many of these packages are free and open source, which means they can be expanded or adapted by those willing and able to write or modify code. Finally, there are web applications for delineating watersheds. Some of these web apps have extra features for science and engineering like calculating flow statistics or watershed land cover types (e.g.: StreamStats, Model My Watershed).

Standalone watershed delineation software

• TauDEM, Toolbox for ArcGIS, or command line executable for Windows.
• TOPAZ, from the US Department of Agriculture, Windows executable.

Hydrologic Modeling Software with Watershed Delineation Capability

• WMS (hydrology software)
• SWAT model
• BASINS
• BasinMaker, for use with the RAVEN software suite, for parts of US and Canada only
• WEAP Model

GIS-based software

• ESRI ArcGIS or the ArcGIS online web application
• GRASS GIS, modules r.water, r.watershed, and r.stream
• QGIS
• SAGA GIS
• Whitebox Geospatial Analysis Tools
• ILWIS
• TerrSet (formerly IDRISI)
• TNTmips
• MapWindow GIS
• Manifold System
• Blue Marble Geographics § Global Mapper

Web Applications

• Global Watersheds, web app and API
• Stream Stats, from the US Geological Survey, allows you to delineate watersheds in the US only
• Model My Watershed, by the Stroud Water Research Center, US only, can delineate watersheds based on an outlet point, and perform analyses related to water quality
• Ontario Watershed Information Tool, for the province of Ontario in Canada

Vector datasets of pre-delineated watersheds

There are a number of vector datasets representing watersheds as polygons that can be displayed and analyzed with GIS or other software. In these datasets, the entire land surface is divided into "subwatersheds" or "unit catchments." Individual unit watersheds can be combined or merged to find larger watersheds. The unit catchments have linked hydrological code data or similar metadata to create a flow network, so flow pathways and connections can be determined via network analysis.

Watershed Boundary Dataset Subregions Map for the United States, created by the US Geological Survey

This list is non-exhaustive, as many organizations and territories have produced their own watershed map data and have published via the web. Notable datasets include:

• United States Watershed Boundary Dataset, website (continually updated)
• Canadian National Hydrographic Network Watershed Boundaries, website
• HydroBasins  website (global, 2013)
• Hydrologic Derivatives for Modeling and Applications (HDMA), (global, 2017)
• MERIT-Basins, website (global, 2021)
• Hydrography90m, website (2022, global, shows smaller headwater streams)