Regulation of population growth through the preferential treatment of male infants is a remarkable “triumph” of culture over nature. A very powerful cultural force was needed to motivate parents to neglect or kill their own children, and an especially powerful force was needed to get them to kill or neglect more girls than boys. Warfare supplied this force and motivation because it made the survival of the group contingent on the rearing of combat-ready males. Males were chosen to be taught how to fight because armaments consisted of spears, clubs, bows and arrows, and other hand-held weapons. Hence military success depended upon relative numbers of brawny combatants. For this reason males became socially more valuable than females, and both men and women collaborated in “removing” daughters in order to rear a maximum number of sons.
To be sure, preferential female infanticide sometimes occurs in the absence of warfare. Many Eskimo groups maintain high rates of female infanticide even though they have relatively little organized intergroup armed combat. The explanation for this is that in the Arctic environment the superior muscle power of males plays a role in production that is analogous to the role it plays in warfare in other regions. The Eskimo need every extra ounce of brawn to track, trap, and kill their animal prey. Unlike hunters in temperate zones, the Eskimo find it difficult to achieve overkill. Their problem is simply to get enough to eat and to prevent their own population from falling below replacement strength. They cannot rely on the collection of plant foods as their main source of calories. In such a context sons become socially more valuable than daughters, even without frequent warfare, and both men and women collaborate in limiting the number of females, just as if males were needed for combat.
In more favorable habitats, high levels of female infanticide would be difficult to maintain in the absence of warfare. Band and village peoples are perfectly capable of understanding that the number of mouths to be fed is determined by the number of women in the group. But it is difficult for them to limit the number of females in favor of males, because in other regards women are more valuable than men. After all, women can do most of the things that men can do, and they alone can bear and nurse infants. Except for their long-range contribution to the population problem, women are in fact a better cost/benefit bargain than are men. Anthropologists have been misled about women’s labor value by the fact that among hunter-collectors women have never been observed to hunt large animals. This does not prove that the observed division of labor naturally follows from the brawn of the male or from the supposed need for women to stick close to the campfire, to cook, and to nurse the children. Men on the average may be heavier, stronger, and faster runners than women, but in favorable habitats there are few production processes in which these physiological features make men decisively more efficient than women. In temperate or tropical zones the rate of production of meat is limited by the rate of reproduction of the prey species rather than by the skills of the hunters. Women hunters could easily substitute for men without reducing the supply of high-quality protein. And several recent studies have shown that among horticulturalists women provide more calories and proteins in the form of food plants and small animals even if they don’t hunt big game. Moreover, the need for women to nurse infants does not “naturally” lead to their roles as cooks and “homebodies.” Hunting is an intermittent activity, and there is nothing to prevent lactating women from leaving their infants in someone else’s care for a few hours once or twice a week. Since bands consist of closely related kinspeople, hunter-collector women are not as isolated as modern working women and have no trouble finding the pre-industrial equivalents of baby-sitters and day-care centers.
The explanation for the near-universal exclusion of women from big-game hunting appears to lie in the practice of warfare, the male supremacist sex roles which arise in conjunction with warfare, and the practice of female infanticide—all of which ultimately derive from the attempt to solve the problem of reproductive pressure. Virtually all band and village societies teach only males how to become proficient in the use of weapons, and frequently women are forbidden even to touch these weapons just as they are generally discouraged or prevented from engaging in front-line combat.
Male military prowess is closely associated with sexually differentiated training for fierce and aggressive behavior. Band and village societies train males for combat through competitive sports such as wrestling, racing, and dueling. Women seldom participate in such sports and never compete with men. Band and village societies also instill masculinity by subjecting boys to intense ordeals involving genital mutilations such as circumcision, exposure to the elements, and drug-induced hallucinatory encounters with supernatural monsters. It is true that some band and village societies also put girls through puberty rituals but these usually involve trials by boredom rather than terror. Girls are kept out of sight in special huts or rooms for a month or more, during which time they are forbidden to touch their own bodies. Even if they develop an itch, they must use an instrument like a back-scratcher. Sometimes they are forbidden to speak throughout the entire period of their seclusion. It is also true that some cultures mutilate the female genitalia by cutting off a portion of the clitoris, but this is a very uncommon practice and occurs far less frequently than does circumcision.
One question that remains is why all women are barred from being trained as military co-equals with males. There are women who are brawnier and more powerful than some men. The winner of the 1972 Olympic women’s javelin competition set a record of 209′ 7″, which not only surpasses the spear-throwing potential of most males but also betters the performance of several former champion Olympic male javelin throwers (though they used slightly heavier javelins). So if the crucial factor in forming a war party is brawniness, why not include women whose strength matches or exceeds that of the average enemy male? I think the answer is that the occasional military success of well-trained, large, and powerful females against smaller males would conflict with the sex hierarchy upon which preferential female infanticide is predicated. Males who are successful warriors are rewarded with several wives and sexual privileges that depend on women being reared to accept male supremacy. If the whole system is to function smoothly, no woman can be permitted to get the idea that she is as worthy and powerful as any man.
To sum up: War and female infanticide are part of the price our stone age ancestors had to pay for regulating their populations in order to prevent a lowering of living standards to the bare subsistence level. I feel confident that the causal arrow points from reproductive pressure to warfare and to female infanticide rather than the other way around. Without reproductive pressures, it would be senseless not to rear as many girls as boys, even if males were looked upon as more valuable because of their superiority in hand-to-hand combat. The fastest way to expand male combat strength would be to regard every little girl as precious and not to kill or neglect a single one. I doubt very much that any human being has ever failed to grasp the elementary truth that to have many men you must start by having many women. The failure of band and village societies to act in conformity with this truth suggests not that warfare was caused by infanticide, or infanticide by warfare, but that both infanticide and warfare, as well as the sexual hierarchy that went with these scourges, were caused by the need to disperse populations and depress their rates of growth.
5
Proteins and the Fierce People
Warfare and male bravado play such a conspicuous role in Yanomamo life that anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon of Pennsylvania State University calls them the Fierce People. Dramatic monographs and films show the Yanomamo, who live in the forests along the border between Brazil and Venezuela near the headwaters of the Orinoco and the Rio Negro rivers, making virtually perpetual war against one another. I mentioned earlier that 33 percent of Yanomamo male deaths are caused by wounds received in battle. Moreover, the Yanomamo practice an especially brutal form of male supremacy involving polygyny, frequent wife beating, and gang rape of captured enemy w
omen.
The Yanomamo are a crucial case not only because they are one of the best-studied village societies in which warfare is actively being practiced, but because Chagnon—who knows them best—has denied that the high level of homicide within and between villages is caused by reproductive and ecological pressures:
Enormous tracts of land, most of it cultivable and abounding with game is [sic] found between villages.… Whatever else might be cited as a “cause” of warfare between the villages, competition for resources is not a very convincing one [Chagnon’s italics]. The generally intensive warfare patterns found in aboriginal tropical forest cultures do not correlate well with resource shortages or competition for land or hunting areas.… Recent trends in ethnological theory are tending more and more to crystallize around the notion that warfare … must always be explainable in terms of population density, scarcity of strategic resources such as territory or “proteins,” or a combination of both. The Yanomamo are an important society, for their warfare cannot be explained in this way.
Despite their cultivation of plantains, bananas, and other crops, the overall density of the Yanomamo is only about .5 persons per square mile—not very different from that of Amazonian hunter-collectors. Their villages are large by hunter-collector standards, but settlements “fission” (that is, split up) well before they reach a total of 200 inhabitants. This makes Yanomamo villages puny by comparison with Indian settlements on the mainstreams of the Amazon and Orinoco rivers, where the first European explorers encountered villages of 500 to 1,000 people and continuous rows of houses lining the banks for five miles at a stretch. If, as Chagnon claims there is an abundance of land and game, why has overall density and village size among the Yanomamo remained so low? The difference cannot be blamed on warfare itself, since mainstream peoples were if anything even more bellicose than those who live in the forests. Donald Lathrap has cogently argued that all groups who live away from the main rivers, like the Yanomamo, are the “wreckage” of more evolved societies “forced off the flood plains into less favorable environments.”
The Yanomamo make no attempt to disguise the fact that they practice female infanticide. This results in an extremely unbalanced sex ratio in the age group of fourteen and under. Chagnon has studied twelve Yanomamo villages located in the most intensive war zone, where the average ratio was 148 boys to 100 girls. In one warlike village studied by Jacques Lizot the juvenile sex ratio was 260:100. On the other hand, three villages studied by William Smole in the Parima highlands outside the most intensive war zone had an average juvenile sex ratio of 109:100.
According to Chagnon, the fact that females are at a premium, exacerbated by the practice of polygyny, is a prime source of disunity and strife:
The shortage of women, indirectly a consequence of an attitude that admires masculinity, ultimately leads to keen competition and thus reinforces the entire waiteri complex [male fierceness complex] by resulting in more fighting and aggression. In practical terms, nearly every village fissioning I investigated resulted from chronic internal feuding over women, and in many cases the groups ultimately entered into hostilities after they separated.
The Yanomamo themselves “regard fights over women as the primary causes of their wars.”
Yet not all Yanomamo villages are inhabited by fierce, aggressive men. Chagnon emphasizes the difference in ferocity between villages located in what he calls the “central” and “peripheral” areas. Among villages at the “periphery”:
Conflicts with neighbors are less frequent … the intensity of warfare is greatly reduced.… Villages are smaller.… Displays of aggression and violence are greatly reduced in frequency and limited in form.
These, then, are the facts about the Yanomamo that need to be explained: (1) the small villages and low overall population density despite the apparent abundance of resources; (2) the greater intensity of warfare and of the male fierceness complex in “central” Yanomamo land; and (3) the killing of female infants despite the need for more women because of the unbalanced sex ratio and the practice of polygyny—a need strong enough to constitute the motivation for perpetual strife and homicidal violence.
All of these features of Yanomamo social life seem to accord well with the general explanation I have given for the origin of warfare among band and village societies. I believe it is possible to show that the Yanomamo have recently adopted a new technology or intensified a preexisting technology; that this has brought about a veritable population explosion, which in turn has caused environmental depletion; and that depletion has led to an increase in infanticide and warfare as part of a systematic attempt to disperse settlements and to prevent them from growing too big.
Let us first consider the demographic situation. According to Jacques Lizot:
The indigenous settlements were traditionally established far from navigable rivers and one had to walk several days through dense unexplored forest to find them.… It is only recently, following their remarkable expansion into unoccupied areas—an expansion due as much to fissioning, war, and conflict as to an astonishing demographic increase—that some groups established themselves, around 1950, on the Orinoco River and its tributaries.
James Neel and Kenneth Weiss believe that the total number of Yanomamo villages in the area studied by Chagnon has more than doubled in the last 100 years. They estimate that the overall rate of population growth during the same period has been between 0.5 and 1 percent per year. However, the rate of growth among villages where warfare today is most intense appears to have been much greater. Starting from a single village 100 years ago, there are now 2,000 people in twelve villages studied by Chagnon. If the original village split in half when its population reached 200, the rate of growth for these settlements would be over 3 percent per year. But since the average present-day village in the war zone splits up before it reaches 166 people, I suspect that the rate of growth has been still higher in this area.
It may seem confusing that although Yanomamo have exceptionally high rates of infanticide and warfare, they have been undergoing a population explosion. After all, warfare and infanticide are supposed to prevent such an explosion. The problem is that we lack a continuous record of the changing relationship between the growth of Yanomamo villages and the practice of infanticide and warfare. I have not said that peoples who practice warfare will never undergo population increase. Rather, I have said that warfare tends to prevent population from growing to the point where it permanently depletes the environment. Accordingly, the years shortly before and after the breakup of a Yanomamo village should be characterized by a peak intensity of warfare and female infanticide. The peak in warfare results from pressure to maintain living standards by exploiting larger or more productive areas in competition with neighboring villages, while the peak in female infanticide arises from pressure to put a ceiling on the size of the village while maximizing combat efficiency. Consequently the fact that overall the Yanomamo are involved in both warfare and a population explosion does not invalidate the theory that environmental depletions and reproductive pressures lie behind both phenomena. Unfortunately, data needed to test my predictions about the rise and fall of the intensity of warfare in relation to growth and the splitting up of specific villages have not yet been collected. Nevertheless the point can be proved in a more general way by looking again at the variations in sex ratios among the more peaceful and more warlike Yanomamo groups: the juvenile sex ratio of 109:100 in Smole’s three Parima highland villages as compared with 148:100 in Chagnon’s war zone.
Chagnon’s zone is the one that is now undergoing the most rapid population increase and the most rapid dispersion into unoccupied territories. Smole’s zone, on the other hand, now has a stable or perhaps a declining population. The peak intensities of warfare and infanticide in Chagnon’s zone can be readily interpreted as attempts to disperse the growing population and at the same time to place a limit on the maximum size of villages. As I said earlier, if there were no ecological constraints
there would be no incompatibility between practicing warfare and rearing as many females as males. True, warfare by itself places a premium on the rearing of males for combat. But the quickest way for the Yanomamo to rear more males is not to kill or neglect 50 percent of their female infants but to rear them all to reproductive age. Only if population is pressing against resources does it make sense not to rear as many females as males. I’ll discuss which resources are involved in a moment.
Why did the Yanomamo population suddenly start to increase about 100 years ago? Not enough is known about the history of the region to give a definitive answer, but I can suggest a plausible hypothesis. It was about 100 years ago that the Yanomamo began to obtain steel axes and machetes from other Indians who were in contact with white traders and missionaries. Today their reliance on these instruments is so complete that they have lost all knowledge of how to manufacture the stone axes their ancestors once used. Steel tools made it possible for the Yanomamo to produce more bananas and plantains with less effort. And, like most preindustrial societies, they used the extra calories to feed extra children.
Bananas and plantains may even have represented a new means of production. These are not native American crops, having entered the New World from Asia and Africa in the post-Columbian period. Most Amazonian Indians traditionally relied on manioc for their supply of starchy calories. Evidence for a relatively new emphasis on plantain and banana trees is the fact that it is the Yanomamo men who plant them, take care of them, and own them. Women help out by transporting the heavy cuttings used to start new gardens and by bringing home backbreaking loads of ripe stalks, but gardening is basically men’s work among the Yanomamo. As Smole points out. “This is in striking contrast with many other aboriginal South American horticultural peoples,” where gardens are “an exclusively female realm.”
Cannibals and Kings Page 6
