Chagnon fragment

Chagnon argues that the Yanomamo are satisfying primal human urges rather than secondary, cultural or economic ones. Their societies are not evolved to compete with other Yanomamo societies, but to spread the genes of the winners. He argues against Harris that the motive forces of Yanomamo violence is not competition for resources, at least not directly. Instead, he understands it as competition between kin groups. The ferocity is the point, and the ecological benefits the by products. Neither party to this argument considers a third possibility: that this ferocity might have arisen as a result of competing social strategies within villages, rather than between villages.

Chagnon's position is deeply controversial in all sorts of ways: for one thing, the Yanomamo, since their discovery in the late Sixties, and their first description by Chagnon have become the victims of a gold-rush around the headwaters of the Orinoco. Their lands have been stolen, some of the have been massacred by miners, and they have suffered dreadfully from imported diseases. This has led to their reinvention as cuddly endangered savages, with consequences that are partly ludicrous. You can even buy a children's book about their lives in the unspoilt rainforest, whose publishers say "This stunning photo-essay follows the lives of the Yanomano people in their daily routine--hunting, fishing and playing--giving children a glimpse of the lives of a vanishing people. This will teach children to respect the ways of another culture and perhaps even to help it survive."

The two most famous images of the Yanomamo in early films made by Chagnon, show the sudden outbreak of a mass axe fight, and a group of warriors getting a hallucinogenic powder blown up their noses by a shaman, after which they reel to the nearest upright post, hang on to it with both hands, and vomit. If these are the inhabitants of Eden, the anthropologists reached them millennia after the serpent.

There is a further irony in this reinvention of the Yanomamo as Edenic. The Westerners who see them as noble and the Westerners who see in them only savages actually agree on one fundamental point: that primitive people are closer to their real nature than we are. Chagnon would argue that under the skin we are all Yanomamo. This is not because the Dawkinsians believe that primitive tribes have less culture, or a less culturally mediated experience of the world than we do: what they believe is that Stone Age tribes have the sort of culture we have evolved the emotions to deal with.

This argument depends on two steps: the first is that the Yanomamo behaviour is best understood by aggregating their individual urges. They do not act because they are moulded by their culture: their culture is merely the sum of their acts. The second is that for most of human history we evolved in societies rather like those of Stone-Age tribes today. where the were no social bonds tighter than kinship, and the largest villages or groups might have 200 inhabitants. Very high rates of homicide reported are reported from such primitive populations all around the world. A recent study, quoted by Chagnon , gave some astonishing cross-cultural figures. The homicide rate in modern Britain is roughly 0.5/100,000; in the USA it is about 20 times as high, at about 10.5. The highest death rate recorded in a nation, as opposed to a tribe, is 34 / 100,000, in Colombia. Though it is difficult to calculate exact correspondences for much smaller populations, about whom much less is known, it is still clear that Stone Age tribes make up in enthusiasm what they lack in the technology of murder. Even the !Kung bushmen, popularised as "The Harmless People", had a had a homicide rate of 41.9 on this scale; the Yanomamo come in at 165. The record appears to be held by the Hewa people of New Guinea, with a score of 778.

There are problems with these figures. None of the societies studied are, or could be, quite unspoiled or unaffected by the distant presence of the Western cultures whose representative study them.. The Yanomamo even have a few metal implements, traded in form the distant coasts, and one theory about their war-making is that it is all really about the acquisition of these tools. More importantly, their entire economy is based on bananas and plantains, both plants which have diffused to the region as a result of European settlement elsewhere in South America. It is probably true that the invention of agriculture has changed every ecosystem where man can live in the last 10,000 years, even among those tribes who do not practice it. It is possible to argue that hunter-gatherers are not as violent as agriculturalists, though the Murngin hunter-gatherer aborigines of Northern Australia come in with a score of 330.

Chagnon argues that the essential fact about these societies is not their technology, but their social structure, in which everything is based around kinship groups. If Stone age tribes today are close to the social environment in which humanity and its immediate ancestors have lived for most of the past 100,000 years, then you would expect us to have evolved some traits to cope with an environment in which being killed by your fellows was a notable statistical risk. He believes that we have an emotional adaptation to violence in certain circumstances. This is not the same as supposing that there is such a thing as a quota or reservoir of aggression inside everyone. It also has very little to do with the circumstances of modern war. The argument is at least partly about whether people can discover, under certain circumstances, that they enjoy violence and the infliction of pain and fear. Chagnon has taken an anthropological route to the conclusion that Hamilton thought he had discovered by introspection and which Price intuited by mathematics.

It's hard to see how it could have become controversial to anyone at the end of this century that human beings can take pleasure in the infliction of pain and in the extermination of others. Yet the subject is still largely taboo when it is conjoined with adaptationism.