Both politics and warfare are ways of managing competition between social groups.

Question: Why do humans fight?

Answers:

• inherent aggressiveness

 
• competition over reproduction (Yanomamo)

 
• competition over resources (land, wealth, other humans)  (Dani)

 
• ideological reasons (Jivaro)

• Intra-tribal warfare:
• revenge killing for witchcraft, wife stealing, etc.
• assassination of a single individual, usually from ambush
• raids over relatively short distances
• carried out by small groups of raiders

• Inter-tribal warfare:
• organized by kakaram 'fierce one'
• carried out by quite large groups of raiders
• against whole complexes of houses
• over long distances
• large numbers of people wiped out at a time
• only against other Jivaroan speakers, only ones whose heads are worth while

• The ideological basis of Jivaroan warfare:
• situation: the best insurance policy is someone else's head
• people with arutam spirits cannot be killed
• people with arutam spirits are fierce and have enormous personal aggressiveness
• you acquire arutam spirits by killing other people
• if you don't kill someone in a long while, your arutam will leave you and make you vulnerable to being killed
• head shrinking is a prophylactic against the avenging spirit of the deceased, by sewing the lips shut it can't escape through the mouth
• you can't brag about your arutam, you just have to show it
• the value of a reputation for fierceness
• Sidebar: Jivaroan greetings

• Sidebar: The Protestant Ethic

 
• Sidebar: How to shrink a human head

• Query:
• How are cultural systems like this self perpetuating?

• Answer:
• Easy! It would be in the best interests of a Jivaro to go along with the system even if he didn't believe it.

• Why did it stop?

• Grisly relation to the rest of the world: the world head trade
• There was for a long time a substantial market in shrunken heads started by Jivaro shrinking heads, and selling them to mestizos and trading them for shotguns.
• Started as a curiosity, then gathered momentum.
• Probably the majority of heads were not genuine Jivaroan heads, but those of corpses in latin american city morgues, or hapless tribesmen: victims of head harvesting.
• However weird or bizarre the practice of head shrinking is in Jivaroan culture, it doesn't come close to people's willingness to harvest heads for a profit or for others to buy those heads.
• Market for heads greatly accelerated the course of Jivaroan head taking: Jivaroans would trade heads for shotguns, as conflict escalated and shotguns became vital, more heads were shrunk
• Result: half the men ended up with shotguns, the other half headless (seen in genealogies).
• At this point, the cultural system collapsed. Don't need to posit external force (although there was some), rather it would have collapsed on its own accord. How?
• What does this tell us about our own practice of warfare?

Chapter 21

Band
Band organization
Chief
Chiefdom
Codified laws
Complimentary opposition
Crime
Feuding
Headman
Oath
Ordeal
Raiding
Segmentary lineage system
State
Tribal organization
Tribe
Warfare