Chagnon states that Yanomamo women expect to be manhandled by their husbands and that they measure their status as wives by the frequency of minor beatings their husbands give them. Once he overheard two young women discussing their scalp scars. One of them was saying how much the other’s husband must really care for her since he had beaten her over the head so often. Referring to her own experience, Dr. Shapiro says that her unscarred and un-bruised condition was a source of concern to the Yanomamo women. She says that they decided “that the men I had associated with did not really care for me enough.” While we cannot conclude that Yanomamo women want to be beaten, we can say that they expect to be beaten. They find it difficult to imagine a world in which husbands would be less brutal.
The peculiar intensity of the Yanomamo male chauvinist syndrome is best expressed in their duels, which require two men to try to hurt each other to the limit of their endurance. Chest-pounding is the favorite form of inflicting this mutual punishment.
Picture a shouting, milling crowd of men, bodies painted in red and black designs, white feathers glued to their hair, and exposed penises tied with string upright against their bellies. They brandish bows and arrows, axes, clubs, and machetes, rattling and clacking them as they threaten each other. The men, divided into hosts and guests, have assembled in the central clearing of a Yanomamo village, anxiously watched by their women and children, who stay back under the eaves of the large circular communal dwelling. The hosts accuse the guests of stealing from the gardens. The guests shout that the hosts are stingy and that they are keeping the best food for themselves. The guests have already been given their farewell gifts, so why haven’t they gone home? Now, to get rid of them, the hosts challenge them to a chest-pounding duel.
A warrior from the host village pushes into the center of the clearing. He spreads his legs apart, puts his hands behind his back, and thrusts his chest toward the opposite group. A second man pushes forward from among the guests and enters the arena. He looks his adversary over calmly and gets him to change his stance. He crooks the target’s left arm so that it rests on the head, assesses the new stance, and makes a final adjustment. With his opponent properly situated, the guest puts himself at correct arm’s length, firming and deepening his toehold on the hard-packed earth, feinting forward repeatedly to test the distance and check his balance. Then, leaning back like a baseball pitcher, he puts his entire strength and weight behind his clenched fist as it thuds against the target’s chest between nipple and shoulder. The struck man staggers, knees buckling, head shaking, but silent and expressionless. His supporters yell and scream, “Another one!” The scene is repeated. The first man, a huge welt already rising on his pectoral muscle, puts himself back into position. His adversary lines him up, tests for distance, leans back, and delivers a second blow to the same spot. The recipient’s knees buckle and he sinks to the ground. The attacker waves his arms victoriously over his head and dances around the victim, making fierce growling noises and moving his feet so fast that they are a blur lost in the dust, while his screaming supporters clack their wooden weapons together and bounce up and down from a squatting position. The fallen man’s comrades again urge him to absorb more punishment. For every blow that he receives, he will be able to return one. The more he takes, the more he can give in return and the more likely it is that he will be able to cripple his adversary or make him give up. After taking two more blows, the first man’s left chest is swollen and red. Amid the delirious howling of his supporters, he now signals that he has had enough, demanding that the adversary stand still to receive his due.
The particular scene I have been describing is based on Napoleon Chagnon’s eyewitness account. Like many other chest-pounding duels, it led to an escalation of violence as soon as one group began to get the better of the other. The hosts ran out of usable chests but were unwilling to initiate any peace overtures. So they challenged the guests to another kind of duel: side-slapping. This involves standing still while your opponent strikes you with his open hand just below the ribs. Blows delivered to this area paralyze a person’s diaphragm, and the victim sinks to the ground gasping and unconscious. In this particular case, the sight of favorite comrades lying prone in the dust soon enraged both groups, and men on both sides began to arm their arrows with tips of poisoned bamboo. It was getting dark, and the women and children started to wail. Then they ran behind the men, who formed a protective screen. Breathing hard, hosts and guests faced each other across the clearing. Chagnon was watching at the back of a line of bowmen. With intense relief, he saw the guests grab glowing brands of firewood and slowly back out of the village into the blackness of the jungle.
Sometimes there is an intermediate stage in the escalation of chest-pounding duels. The adversaries hold rocks in their fists and strike blows that make the contestants spit up blood. Another way hosts and their allies entertain each other is by holding machete duels. Fairs of adversaries take turns striking each other with the flat of the blade. Even a slight slip results in a serious injury and further violent confrontations.
The next highest level of violence is the club fight. A man with a special grudge against another challenges his adversary to hit him on the head with an eight-to-ten-foot-long pole shaped like a pool cue. The challenger sticks his own pole in the ground, leans on it, and bows his head. His adversary holds his pole by the thin end, whipping the heavy end down on the proffered pate with bone-crushing force. Having sustained one blow, the recipient is entitled to an immediate opportunity to wallop his opponent in the same manner.
Chagnon reports that the typical Yanomamo pate is covered with long ugly scars. Like the Prussians of former times, the Yanomamo are proud of these dueling souvenirs. They shave the top of their heads to keep them in view and rub the bald area with red pigments so that each scar stands out clearly. If a Yanomamo male lives to forty, his head may be crisscrossed by as many as twenty large scars. Viewed from the top, notes Chagnon, the head of a veteran pole dueler “looks like a road map.”
Duels are as common between men of the same village as between men from neighboring villages. Even close relatives frequently resort to armed combat to settle disputes. Chagnon observed at least one encounter between a father and son. The young man had eaten some bananas that his father had hung up to ripen. When the theft was discovered, the father became furious, ripped a pole from the rafters of his house, and smashed it down on his son’s head. The son ripped out a pole for himself and attacked his father. In a flash, everybody in the village had chosen sides and was flailing away at somebody else. As the fighting became general, the aim deteriorated, resulting in many bashed fingers and bruised shoulders as well as lacerated skulls. These brawls are likely to break out during any duel as soon as the bystanders catch sight of copious quantities of blood.
The Yanomamo recognize one further level of escalation short of a total commitment to homicide—the spear fight. They make spears which consist of six-foot-long saplings that have been peeled, decorated with red and black designs, and sharpened to a long point. These weapons can inflict severe wounds but are relatively inefficient for producing fatalities.
War is the ultimate expression of the Yanomamo’s lifestyle. Unlike the Maring, the Yanomamo seem to have no way to establish any kind of secure truce. They enter into a series of alliances with neighboring villages, but intergroup relations are marred by unending mistrust, malicious rumors, and acts of consummate treachery. I have already suggested what kind of entertainment allies offer each other at their feasts. These occasions are supposed to consolidate friendships, but even the best of allies behave in a fierce and aggressive manner in order to leave no doubt about the value of each group’s contribution to the alliance. Because of all the strutting, boasting, and sexual display that goes on during a supposedly friendly feast, the outcome remains unpredictable until the last guest has returned home. All participants are also keenly aware of certain celebrated incidents when host villages deliberately planned to massacre the
ir guests or when the guests, anticipating such a possibility, planned to massacre the hosts. In 1950 many kinsmen of the village that hosted the chest-pounding duel I have just described were victims of a famous treacherous feast. They had gone to a village two days’ traveling distance from their own to establish a new alliance. Their hosts let them dance on as if nothing were wrong. Later they went inside the house to rest, and were attacked with axes and clubs. Twelve men were killed. As the survivors rushed out of the village they were attacked again by a force that had remained hidden in the jungle. Several more men were killed and injured.
The Yanomamo are always worried about treachery; they make alliances on the basis of the latest ups and downs of military fortune rather than because of any shared set of interests in people or resources. If a village suffers a severe military setback, it can expect to be attacked repeatedly, even by former allies. The best hope for a village that has lost several males in combat is to go to live with its allies. But no group gives shelter for sentimental reasons. In return for temporary food and security, allies expect the defeated group to make gifts of their women.
Ambushes, treacherous feasts, and stealthy raids at dawn—these are the characteristic modes of Yanomamo warfare. Once they get over the boasting and dueling phase, their object is to kill as many enemy men and capture as many enemy women as possible, with no loss whatsoever to themselves. On a raid, the Yanomamo warriors approach the enemy stealthily at night, light no fires, and shiveringly await the dawn in the damp jungle darkness. In an extreme act of bravery, a warrior may slip into the enemy village and kill somebody who is asleep in a hammock. Otherwise, the raiders content themselves with killing males who have come out with the women to fetch water from the river. If the enemy is alert and moves about only in large groups, the raiding party blindly showers the village with arrows and then flees back home without waiting to learn the results. Raiding seems to go on incessantly. During Chagnon’s stay, one village was raided over twenty-five times in fifteen months. Chagnon’s ability to survive under these conditions is nothing short of remarkable—a great tribute to his skill and courage as an ethnographer.
Why do the Yanomamo fight so much? Professor Chagnon himself has not offered satisfactory reasons. Essentially he accepts the explanation that the Yanomamo offer. They say that most duels, raids, and other outbreaks of violence are caused by disputes over women. Women are definitely in short supply. Despite the fact that a quarter of the males die in combat, males outnumber females by 120 to 100. To make matters worse, headmen and others who have a special reputation for fierceness keep as many as four or five wives at one time. Altogether, about 25 percent of the men have two or more wives. Since fathers betroth their infant daughters to senior influential figures to gain favors or to reciprocate their own marriages, all the sexually mature women in the village are married. This leaves many young men without any source of heterosexual gratification other than adultery. Young fierce-males-to-be make trysts with disgruntled or intimidated wives in the evening. The next morning they meet under cover of the jungle when many people leave the village to defecate and urinate.
A Yanomamo husband will gladly share one of his wives with junior brothers and comrades. But males who obtain access to women through wife-lending place themselves in debt to the husband and will have to repay him with services or women captured in battle. A young man seeking a reputation must not put himself in a position of dependency; he prefers instead to cajole and intimidate the village’s married women into clandestine arrangements. Since Yanomamo girls are betrothed even before they begin to menstruate, all young Yanomamo males actively covet their neighbor’s wives. Yanomamo husbands become enraged when they discover a tryst, not so much because of sexual jealousy but because the adulterous male should have compensated the husband with gifts and services.
The capture of women during raids on enemy villages is one of the prime objectives of Yanomamo warfare. As soon as a successful raiding party feels safe from pursuit, the warriors gang-rape the female captives. When they reach the raider’s village, they hand the women over to the men who stayed home and these gang-rape them again. Later after much haggling and arguing, the raiders assign the captives to be wives to particular warriors.
One of the most terrifying stories to come out of Yanomamoland is that told by Helena Valero, a Brazilian woman who was caught by a Yanomamo raiding party when she was ten years old. Soon afterward, the men who had captured her began to fight among themselves. One faction routed the other, killed all the small children by bashing their heads against the rocks, and marched the surviving females home. Helena Valero spent most of the rest of her childhood and youth running away from one group of raiders only to be caught by another, then running away again, hiding in the jungle from her pursuers, and being recaptured and assigned to different husbands. She was wounded twice by curare-tipped arrows, and bore several children before she finally managed to escape to a missionary settlement on the Orinoco River.
The shortage of women, infant betrothal, adultery, polygyny, and the taking of female captives all seem to point to sex as the cause of Yanomamo war. Yet I find one nagging, stubborn fact that this theory cannot explain: the shortage of women is artificially created. The Yanomamo steadily kill off a large percentage of their female babies, not only through selective neglect but through specific acts of murder.
Men demand that their first-born child be a male. Women kill their daughters until they can present a male child. Thereafter, infants of both sexes may be killed. Yanomamo women kill their babies by strangling them with vines, by standing on both ends of a stick placed on top of the baby’s throat, by banging the baby’s head against a tree, or by simply leaving the infant to fend for itself on the jungle floor. The net effect of infanticide and more benign forms of sexual selection is a juvenile sex ratio of 154 males to 100 females. Given the hardships that men must endure to get a wife for themselves, there must be a very strong force—a force other than sex and more powerful—that leads them to destroy the very source and object of all their lusts and struggles.
The mystifying feature of infanticide and warfare in Yanomamoland is the apparent absence of population pressure and a seeming superabundance of resources. The Yanomamo derive their main source of food calories from the plantains and the banana trees that grow in their forest gardens. Like the Maring, they must burn the forest to get these gardens started. But bananas and plantains are not like yams or sweet potatoes. They are perennials that provide high yields per unit of labor input for many consecutive years. Since the Yanomamo live in the midst of the world’s greatest tropical forest, the little burning that they do scarcely threatens to “eat up the trees.” A typical Yanomamo village has only 100 to 200 people in it, a population which could easily grow enough bananas or plantains in nearby garden sites without ever having to move. Yet the Yanomamo villages are constantly on the move, splitting up and moving their gardens at a much higher rate than other slash-and-burn Amazon forest peoples.
Chagnon says that they split up and move so often because they fight over women and are always at war. I suggest that it is more nearly correct to say that they fight over women and are always at war because they move so often. The Yanomamo are not typical cut-and-burn horticulturalists. Their ancestors were nomadic hunters and gatherers living away from the main rivers in small scattered bands that relied on wild forest products for their chief source of subsistence. We can be certain that only in more or less recent times did they begin to depend on bananas and plantains as their staple foods, since these plants were brought to the New World by Portuguese and Spanish settlers. Until recent times, the mam centers of the American Indian populations in the Amazon were located along the major rivers and their tributaries. Tribes like the Yanomamo lived in the backlands and kept out of sight of the riverine peoples, who had big permanent villages and canoes that made them highly mobile. Toward the end of the nineteenth century the last of the large riverine Indian villages were destroyed as
a result of the rubber trade and the spread of Brazilian and Venezuelan settlements. The only Indians who survived over extensive areas of the Amazon were “foot” Indians, whose nomadic way of life protected them from the white man’s guns and diseases.
To this day the Yanomamo exhibit unmistakable signs of their recent “foot” Indian way of life. They do not know how to construct or paddle canoes, although their main settlements are now on the banks of or close by the Orinoco and Mavaca rivers. They do little fishing, although such waters are usually rich in fish and aquatic animals. They lack knowledge of how to make cooking pots, although plantains are best prepared by boiling. And finally, they don’t know how to manufacture stone axes, although they are now dependent upon steel axes for making their plantain gardens.
Let me give a somewhat speculative account of recent Yanomamo history. The nomadic Yanomamo who lived in the remote mountains between Venezuela and Brazil began to experiment with banana and plantain gardens. These crops yielded a great increase in the amount of food calories per capita. As a result, the population of the Yanomamo also began to increase—today they are one of the most populous Indian groups in the entire Amazon basin. But plantain and bananas have one striking defect: they are notoriously deficient in proteins. Formerly, as nomadic hunters, the Yanomamo had easily satisfied their need for protein by eating forest animals, including tapir, deer, peccary, anteaters, armadillos, monkeys, pacas, agoutis, crocodiles, lizards, snakes, and turtles. With the increase in human population density caused by the efficient garden crops, these animals were hunted with unprecedented intensity. As is well known, forest animal populations are easily exterminated or driven away by intensive hunting. In pre-contact times, Amazonian tribes with dense populations avoided a similar consequence by exploiting the fish of their riverine habitats. The Yanomamo, however, were not able to do this.
Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches Page 8