Professor Compares a Violent Tribe to Gangs

It was in the 1950s that anthropologists first identified the tiny Waorani tribe near the Amazon River in Ecuador as the most murderous people on Earth.

Virtually no one lived to old age. Entire families were routinely wiped out with 9-foot spears. And the notion of killing a child was no more abhorrent than the notion of killing a snake. A staggering six out of 10 Waorani deaths came at the hands of another Waorani.

In a new book, an anthropologist who spent years studying the tribe asserts that today’s urban gang violence is no less routine.

“Killing a non-gang member for a pair of sneakers or a leather jacket is as easy and inconsequential for a gang member as it was for a Waorani to kill . . . for an ax or a machete,” writes Wichita State University professor Clayton Robarchek in “Waorani: The Contexts of Violence and War.”

But after generations of killing to resolve the smallest conflict, the Waorani changed, convinced by missionaries that less violent behavior had worthwhile benefits. Virtually overnight, the murder rate in the tribe of 700 fell by more than 90%.

Robarchek, whose book was recently unveiled at a conference of anthropologists in Washington, holds that this near-miraculous conversion in a remote corner of the world offers a lesson for an urban America struggling to end gang bloodshed.

“The blood vendettas between the Upriver and Downriver Waorani are mirrored by those between [such U.S. gangs as] the Insane Crips and the Junior Boys,” Robarchek writes. “The Waorani deserve much closer examination, particularly in view of the fact that they were able very rapidly to transform their culture of violence.”

The mere comparison of urban gangs to a jungle tribe is explosive on its face, evoking racial stereotypes of savagery certain to offend. It likens a primitive people who eat smoked monkeys, carve their own weapons and live in near isolation to urban adolescents who are economically deprived, racially segregated, jobless and growing up in a consumer-driven culture.

But Robarchek said the two jungles, as he calls them, are similar in what they each lack--a community acting as a moral force more powerful than personal impulse. Among the Waorani, as in many large U.S. cities today, there was no obligation to any group other than a small, territorial band whose members knew only one way to get what they wanted--violence.

Several Los Angeles gang experts dismissed Robarchek’s theory as “a stretch.” Still, after years of battling a Los Angeles County gang culture that is the nation’s largest and most violent, even the most skeptical experts found something compelling about the saga of a people who killed for generations and were suddenly compelled to stop.

“I’ll read him if he’ll read me,” said USC sociology professor Malcolm Klein, an expert in street gangs.

The Waorani story began about 40 years ago when five missionaries landed along the Curaray River in an attempt to save the murderous tribe from itself. They were speared to death as soon as they got off the plane.

Two relatives of the dead missionaries went to finish the work, Robarchek said. Because they were women, they presented no threat and were spared. They learned the language and discovered a world in which the only means of resolving a conflict was to ignore, move or spear.

The Waorani lived in small bands of 10 to 20 blood relations and all those outside the group were real or potential enemies. Disagreements over marriages, petty jealousies or axes were all settled by homicide.

When one Waorani woman died from a scorpion sting, her husband decided she had been cursed with witchcraft by people jealous of her four new gold teeth. The husband gathered the wood for her coffin, then went down the river and killed the suspected sorcerer, his wife and two young children.

Robarchek argues that although such killing suggests a fundamental lack of regard for human life, anyone existing outside the small band is not considered a life. And with no larger community in place to punish or even cast shame on such conduct, there was no reason to stop.

“It’s not that life is disvalued, it’s just that the only life you care about belongs to the very small community, not unlike the Crips and Bloods,” Robarchek said.

Once the missionaries made contact, it was not talk of a punishing God that changed the Waorani. It was recognition of the benefits--trade, a better selection of spouses--that the tribe missed out on as band killed band. The Waorani warmed to such advantages almost immediately, and the killing virtually ceased.

“The new information, new cultural knowledge, allowed people to envision new possibilities. What is required in our urban jungles is precisely the same kind of re-orientation,” said Robarchek, who received his doctorate at UC Riverside and later taught at Cal State L.A., Bakersfield and Chico.

He points to the successes of the Black Muslims and charismatic Christians as models that gave their members a sense of accountability to a larger society--the same kind of loyalty that gangs inspire, but with nonviolent values.

“We should be searching our cities for charismatic leaders in the mold of Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X,” he said. “Rather than demonizing these leaders and the groups they lead, we need to devise ways to make society’s resources available to assist them.”

Several gang experts said the anthropologist isn’t telling them anything they don’t already know. Establishing a restored sense of community is the solution, they agreed, but it is easier said than done. They dismissed as naive the suggestion that complex, troubled adolescents might be turned around as quickly as tribal members living in a primitive world.

“When you start comparing the jungle with urban life, you are going way out on a limb,” said James Diego Vigil, a UCLA professor of anthropology who studies urban youth. “Just getting children to walk the straight line takes job development, training, acquiring basic skills to keep a job. . . . The objective is great, but in a complex U.S. society, it’s not that easy to pull off.”

Robarchek may have answered a burning question in his field--whether violent people can change--but the Rev. Leonard Jackson of the First AME Church in Los Angeles said that’s a puzzle he has already solved.

“There is no doubt in my mind young people are capable of change when you present them with a level playing field--jobs, education, right on down the line,” Jackson said. “I would quit the ministry today if I did not believe that.”