Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches

by Marvin Harris

  Amazonian specialists Jane and Eric Ross suggest that protein scarcities and not libidinal surpluses account for the constant fissioning and feuding among Yanomamo villages. I agree. The Yanomamo have “eaten the forest”—not its trees, but its animals—and they are suffering the consequences in terms of increased warfare, treachery, and infanticide, and a brutal sex life.

  The Yanomamo themselves have two words for hunger—one denotes an empty stomach, while the other denotes a full stomach that craves meat. Meat hunger is a constant theme of Yanomamo song and poetry, and meat is the focus of Yanomamo feasting. In Helena Valero’s account of her captivity, one of the few ways that a Yanomamo woman could make a man cringe was to complain about his poor performance as a hunter. Hunters must range farther and farther from Yanomamo villages in order not to return empty-handed. Expeditions of ten or twelve days are required in order to bring back substantial numbers of large animals. Chagnon himself tells of going along on a hunting expedition lasting five days in an area that had “not been hunted in decades” without collecting enough meat to feed even the members of the expedition. Since the typical Yanomamo village is less than a day’s walk from its nearest neighbor, extended expeditions inevitably cross and recross hunting territories that are used by villages other than one’s own. These villages compete for the same scarce resource, and that resource is not women but protein.

  I prefer this solution to the riddle of the savage male because it explains in practical terms why Yanomamo women actively collaborate in their own exploitation by killing and neglecting more female than male babies. It is true that Yanomamo men prefer sons to daughters. A woman who disappoints her husband by not rearing sons would undoubtedly fall into disfavor with him and risk being beaten more often. Yet I think that Yanomamo women could easily reverse the sex ratio to favor females against males if it was in their interest to do so. Women give birth in the forest, away from the village, with no men present. This means that they could practice selective infanticide against males with impunity after the birth of their first son. In addition, they have endless opportunities to practice selective neglect against all their male children without risk of discovery or retaliation by their husbands.

  I can cite at least one good example of how women could exercise sovereign control over sex ratios in the Yanomamo nursery. Chagnon says that he once saw a “plump, well-fed young mother” eating food (probably plantain mash) that could easily be eaten by an infant. Next to her was her “emaciated, filthy, and nearly starved” two-year-old son, who kept reaching out for some of this food. Chagnon asked the mother why she wasn’t feeding her baby, and she explained that it had gotten a bad case of diarrhea some time previously and had stopped nursing. As a result, the woman’s milk had dried up and there was nothing to give it. No other foods would help, she said, because “it did not know how to eat other foods.” Chagnon then “insisted that she share her food with the child.” The baby ate the food ravenously, leading Chagnon to the conclusion that “she was letting the baby die slowly of starvation.”

  The practical and mundane reason for the systematic killing and neglect of more female than male children can’t be simply that the men force the women to do it. There are too many opportunities, as the example I have just given illustrates, to evade and circumvent the men’s wishes in this matter. Rather, the effective basis of Yanomamo women’s nursery practices is their own interest in raising more boys than girls. This interest is rooted in the fact that there are already too many Yanomamo in relation to their ability to exploit their habitat. A higher ratio of men to women means more protein per capita (because men are the hunters) and a slower rate of population growth. It also means more warfare, but for the Yanomamo, as for the Maring, warfare is the price paid for raising sons when they can’t raise daughters. Only, the Yanomamo pay more heavily for this privilege, since they have already degraded the carrying capacity of their habitat.

  Some women’s liberationists who acknowledge the role of warfare in relation to sexism insist nonetheless that women are the victims of a male conspiracy because only men are taught how to kill with weapons. Why, they wish to know, should women not also be taught warrior skills? Would not a Yanomamo village in which both men and women wielded bows and clubs be a more formidable fighting force than one in which women merely huddle in the shadows awaiting their fate?

  Why should the effort at brutalization be concentrated on the males? Why not teach both males and females how to handle the technology of aggression? These are important questions. I think the answer has to do with the problem of training human beings—either male or female—to be mean and ferocious. As I see it, there are two classical strategies by which societies make people brutal. One is to encourage brutality by giving food, comfort, and bodily health as rewards to the most brutal personalities. The other is to allot the greatest sexual rewards and privileges to the most brutal personalities. Of these two strategies, the second is the more effective because the deprivation of food, comfort, and bodily health is militarily counterproductive. The Yanomamo need highly motivated killers, but they must be strong and robust if they are to have redeeming social functions. Sex is the best reinforcement for conditioning brutal personalities because sexual deprivation enhances rather than diminishes the ability to fight.

  My argument here runs counter to much pseudoscience conceived in the image of our own tribal male chauvinists such as Sigmund Freud, Konrad Lorenz, and Robert Ardrey. Our received wisdom in this matter is that males are naturally more aggressive and ferocious because the male sex role is naturally an aggressive one. But the link between sex and aggression is as artificial as the link between infanticide and war. Sex is a source of aggressive energy and brutal behavior only because male chauvinist social systems expropriate sexual rewards, allocate them to aggressive males, and deny them to passive, nonaggressive ones.

  Frankly, I see no reason why the same sort of brutalization could not be imposed on women. The myth of the instinctively passive, tender, motherly female is simply an echo set up by male chauvinist mythology concerning instinctively brutal males. If only fierce “masculinized” females were permitted to have sexual relations with males, we would have no trouble in getting everybody to believe that females are naturally aggressive and brutal.

  If sex is to be used to energize and control aggressive behavior, then it follows that both sexes cannot simultaneously be brutalized to an equal degree. One or the other must be trained to be dominant It cannot be both. To brutalize both is to invite a literal war of the sexes. Among the Yanomamo this would mean armed struggle between men and women for control over each other as a reward for their battlefield exploits. In other words, to make sex a reward for bravery, one of the sexes has to be taught cowardice.

  These considerations lead me to a slight emendation of the liberationist’s paradigm “Anatomy is not destiny.” Human anatomy is destiny under certain conditions. When warfare was a prominent means of population control, and when the technology of warfare consisted primarily of primitive hand-held weapons, male chauvinist lifestyles were necessarily ascendant. Insofar as neither of these conditions is true of today’s world, liberationists are correct in predicting the decline of male chauvinist lifestyles. I would add that the rate of this decline and the ultimate prospects for sexual equality depend upon the further elimination of conventional police and military forces. Let us hope that this occurs as a result of the elimination of the need for police or military personnel rather than as a result of perfecting battle tactics that don’t depend on physical strength. We should have gone little beyond the Yanomamo if the net outcome of the sexual revolution is a secure position for women at the head of the mace squads or in the nuclear command posts.

  Potlatch

  SOME OF the most puzzling lifestyles on exhibit in the museum of world ethnography bear the imprint of a strange craving known as the “drive for prestige.” Some people seem to hunger for approval as others hunger for meat. The puzzling thing is not
that people hunger for approval, but that occasionally their craving seems to become so powerful that they begin to compete with each other for prestige as others compete for land or protein or sex. Sometimes this competition grows so fierce that it appears to become an end in itself. It then takes on the appearance of an obsession wholly divorced from, and even directly opposed to, rational calculations of material costs.

  Vance Packard struck a responsive chord when he described the United States as a nation of competitive status seekers. Many Americans seem to spend their entire lives trying to climb further up the social pyramid simply in order to impress each other. We seem to be more interested in working in order to get people to admire us for our wealth than in the actual wealth itself, which often enough consists of chromium baubles and burdensome or useless objects. It is amazing how much effort people are willing to spend to obtain what Thorstein Veblen described as the vicarious thrill of being mistaken for members of a class that doesn’t have to work. Veblen’s mordant phrases “conspicuous consumption” and “conspicuous waste” aptly convey a sense of the peculiarly intense desire for “keeping up with the Joneses” that lies behind the ceaseless cosmetic alterations in the automotive, appliance, and clothing industries.

  Early in the present century, anthropologists were surprised to discover that certain primitive tribes engaged in conspicuous consumption and conspicuous waste to a degree unmatched by even the most wasteful of modern consumer economies. Ambitious, status-hungry men were found competing with each other for approval by giving huge feasts. The rival feast givers judged each other by the amount of food they provided, and a feast was a success only if the guests could eat until they were stupefied, stagger off into the bush, stick their fingers down their throats, vomit, and come back for more.

  The most bizarre instance of status seeking was discovered among the American Indians who formerly inhabited the coastal regions of Southern Alaska, British Columbia, and Washington. Here the status seekers practiced what seems like a maniacal form of conspicuous consumption and conspicuous waste known as potlatch. The object of potlatch was to give away or destroy more wealth than one’s rival. If the potlatch giver was a powerful chief, he might attempt to shame his rivals and gain everlasting admiration from his followers by destroying food, clothing, and money. Sometimes he might even seek prestige by burning down his own house.

  Potlatch was made famous by Ruth Benedict in her book Patterns of Culture, which describes how potlatch operated among the Kwakiutl, the aboriginal inhabitants of Vancouver Island. Benedict thought that potlatch was part of a megalomaniacal lifestyle characteristic of Kwakiutl culture in general. It was the “cup” God had given them to drink from. Ever since, potlatch has been a monument to the belief that cultures are the creations of inscrutable forces and deranged personalities. As a result of reading Patterns of Culture, experts in many fields concluded that the drive for prestige makes a shambles of attempts to explain lifestyles in terms of practical and mundane factors.

  I want to show here that the Kwakiutl potlatch was not the result of maniacal whims, but of definite economic and ecological conditions. When these conditions are absent, the need to be admired and the drive for prestige express themselves in completely different lifestyle practices. Inconspicuous consumption replaces conspicuous consumption, conspicuous waste is forbidden, and there are no competitive status seekers.

  The Kwakiutl used to live in plank-house villages set close to the shore in the midst of cedar and fir rain forests. They fished and hunted along the island-studded sounds and fiords of Vancouver in huge dugout canoes. Always eager to attract traders, they made their villages conspicuous by erecting on the beach the carved tree trunks we erroneously call “totem poles.” The carvings on diese poles symbolized the ancestral titles to which the chiefs of the village laid claim.

  A Kwakiutl chief was never content with the amount of respect he was getting from his own followers and from neighboring chiefs. He was always insecure about his status. True enough, the family titles to which he laid claim belonged to his ancestors. But there were other people who could trace descent from the same ancestors and who were entitled to vie with him for recognition as a chief. Every chief therefore felt the obligation to justify and validate his chiefly pretensions. The prescribed manner for doing this was to hold potlatches. Each potlatch was given by a host chief and his followers to a guest chief and his followers. The object of the potlatch was to show that the host chief was truly entitled to chiefly status and that he was more exalted than the guest chief. To prove this point, the host chief gave the rival chief and his followers quantities of valuable gifts. The guests would belittle what they received and vow to hold a return potlatch at which their own chief would prove that he was greater than the former host by giving back even larger quantities of more valuable gifts.

  Preparations for potlatch required the accumulation of fresh and dried fish, fish oil, berries, animal skins, blankets, and other valuables. On the appointed day, the guests paddled up to the host village and went into the chiefs house. There they gorged themselves on salmon and wild berries while dancers masked as beaver gods and thunderbirds entertained them.

  The host chief and his followers arranged in neat piles the wealth that was to be given away. The visitors stared at their host sullenly as he pranced up and down, boasting about how much he was about to give them. As he counted out the boxes of fish oil, baskets full of berries, and piles of blankets, he commented derisively on the poverty of his rivals. Laden with gifts, the guests finally were free to paddle back to their own village. Stung to the quick, the guest chief and his followers vowed to get even. This could only be achieved by inviting their rivals to a return potlatch and obliging them to accept even greater amounts of valuables than they had given away. Considering all the Kwakiutl villages as a single unit, potlatch stimulated a ceaseless flow of prestige and valuables moving in opposite directions.

  An ambitious chief and his followers had potlatch rivals in several different villages at once. Specialists in counting property kept track of what had to be done in each village in order to even the score. If a chief managed to get the better of his rivals in one place, he still had to confront his adversaries in another.

  At the potlatch, the host chief would say things like, “I am the only great tree. Bring your counter of property that he may try in vain to count the property that is to be given away.” Then the chiefs followers demanded silence from the guests with the warning: “Do not make any noise, tribes. Be quiet or we shall cause a landslide of wealth from our chief, the overhanging mountain.” At some potlatches blankets and other valuables were not given away but were destroyed. Sometimes successful potlatch chiefs decided to hold “grease feasts” at which boxes of oil obtained from the candlefish were poured on the fire in the center of the house. As the flames roared up, dark grease smoke filled the room. The guests sat impassively or even complained about the chill in the air while the wealth destroyer ranted, “I am the only one on earth—the only one in the whole world who makes this smoke rise from the beginning of the year to the end for the invited tribes.” At some grease feasts the flames ignited the planks in the roof and an entire house would become a potlatch offering, causing the greatest shame to the guests and much rejoicing among the hosts.

  According to Ruth Benedict, potlatching was caused by the obsessive status hunger of the Kwakiutl chiefs. “Judged by the standards of other cultures the speeches of their chiefs are unabashed megalomania,” she wrote. “The object of all Kwakiutl enterprises was to show oneself superior to one’s rivals.” In her opinion, the whole aboriginal economic system of the Pacific Northwest was “bent to the service of this obsession.”

  I think that Benedict was mistaken. The economic system of the Kwakiutl was not bent to the service of status rivalry; rather, status rivalry was bent to the service of the economic system.

  All of the basic ingredients of the Kwakiutl giveaways, except for their destructive aspects, ar
e present in primitive societies widely dispersed over different parts of the globe. Stripped down to its elementary core, the potlatch is a competitive feast, a nearly universal mechanism for assuring the production and distribution of wealth among peoples who have not yet fully acquired a ruling class.

  Melanesia and New Guinea present the best opportunity to study competitive feasting under relatively pristine conditions. Throughout this region, there are so-called big men who owe their superior status to the large number of feasts that each has sponsored during his lifetime. Each feast has to be preceded by an intensive effort on the part of an aspiring big man to accumulate the necessary wealth.

  Among the Kaoka-speaking people of the Solomon Islands, for example, the status-hungry individual begins his career by making his wife and children plant larger yam gardens. As described by the Australian anthropologist Ian Hogbin, the Kaoka who wants to become a big man then gets his kinsmen and his age-mates to help him fish. Later he begs sows from his friends and increases the size of his pig herd. As the litters are born he boards additional animals among his neighbors. Soon his relatives and friends feel that the young man is going to be a success. They see his large gardens and his big pig herd and they redouble their own efforts to make the forthcoming feast a memorable one. When he becomes a big man they want the young candidate to remember that they helped him. Finally, they all get together and build an extra-fine house. The men go off on one last fishing expedition. The women harvest yams and collect firewood, banana leaves, and coconuts. As the guests arrive (as in the case of potlatch), the wealth is stacked in neat piles and put on display for everyone to count and admire.