For the ‘Fierce’ Yanomamo and on the Streets of America, Homicide Is a Resource

Among the Yanomamo Indians of Venezuela, almost half of the men have killed someone, usually as an act of revenge for a prior killing. Napoleon Chagnon, an anthropologist at UC Santa Barbara, reports this and other facts about Yanomamo violence in the Feb. 26 issue of Science magazine. One might suppose that there is a pinch of Yanomamo braggadocio in these numbers, for killing is a prestigious activity in this fierce and warlike tribe. But there is surely no bragging on the other side of the coin: Nearly 70% of people past the age of 40 report having had a close relative (parent, child or sibling) slain.

The Yanomamo are widely known as “the fierce people,” but there is reason to suspect that their homicide rate may be unexceptional among newly stateless tribal peoples. In New Guinea, comparable violence persisted among many societies until just a few years ago. Turn-of-the-century Arctic explorers described a traditional Inuit society in which mortality was largely, perhaps mostly, homicidal. Even the Kung San foragers of the Kalahari Desert, immortalized by anthropologists as “the harmless people,” had a homicide rate about equal to that of the most violent American ghettoes. In these and other tribal societies, most killings were acts of blood revenge.

In most social milieus, for thousands of years men’s security and reputation have depended in large part on the ability to maintain a credible threat of violence. Conflicts of interest pervade society, and one’s interests are likely to be violated by competitors unless the competitors are deterred by fear of retaliation. In tribal societies the constant specter confronting each male kinship group was defeat and extermination by rivals: the theft of their women, the loss of their lands, the end of their line. He who could not or would not answer violence with violence was not long for this world. Little wonder that the capacity for violence was an essential manly virtue in such societies, that heads or scalps were often valued trophies or that the commission of a homicide might even become an obligatory rite of passage to manhood--as it was, for example, among Margaret Mead’s “gentle Arapesh.” To turn the other cheek was not saintly but contemptibly weak.

Things changed with the growth of states, and with the growth of the state’s monopoly of the legitimate use of force. Preaching union against external threat, early kings and chiefs had to persuade former rivals to unite under a single banner. They did so partly by arbitrating feuds, by negotiating monetary rather than lethal compensations for homicides. The early Anglo-Saxon law codes consisted almost entirely of specifications of wergilds (homicide debts) and other cash compensations for wrongs, though homicides could still be legally avenged on the killer or his kinsmen. In the 11th Century, William the Conqueror outlawed private vengeance in England and effectively abolished the wergild as well (although it lingered vestigially for centuries). William made homicide a crime against the state instead of a private wrong, and by so doing he eliminated the killer’s incentive to negotiate a settlement with his victim’s kinsmen.

Blood revenge in traditional societies is a guarded right, but it is a burdensome duty as well. People may be relieved to forswear private vengeance, provided they can rely on a strong central power to punish and deter their enemies. However, persuading formidable men to abandon private violence can be a delicate task. Fears persist that reliance upon the power of the state is an admission of personal impotence and an invitation to further mistreatment. In the words of Andrew Jackson:

“To go to law for redress is to confess publicly that you have been wronged and the demonstration of your vulnerability places your honor in jeopardy, a jeopardy from which the ‘satisfaction’ of legal compensation in the hands of secular authority hardly redeems it.”

Remarkable sentiments indeed for a lawyer and elected head of state!

Even in a strong state society like the United States, many men still live outside the law, whether because they have no use for it or because it has no use for them.Violence is a resource for such men, just as it is for the Yanomamo: Its threat or use is the single most effective means they have to discourage those who would misuse or deprive them.

Robbery murders by strangers are a highly publicized scourge. Family homicides are often newsworthy, and so are cases involving police on either side of the gun. But studies have repeatedly shown that none of these varieties of murder is nearly so prevalent as a sort which may not be reported at all: killings involving acquainted men.

How many of America’s more than 20,000 annual homicides are matters of rivalry? Of tit-for-tat vengeance? Of displaying one’s capacity for violence to one’s peers and earning their fear and respect by so doing?

No one can say, but such motives may very well be relevant to more than half of all contemporary American killings.