Blood Feud and Table Manners: A Neo-Hobbesian Approach to Jivaroan Warfare.

1. Blood Feud and Table Manners:A Neo-Hobbesian Approach to Jivaroan Warfare. James S. BosterUniversity of Connecticut

2. Puzzle Why is it polite to spit on the floor when visiting a Jivaroan house?

3. What needs to be explained? Peace or War?

4. Smithian Approach • Assume peace as human default condition. • Take warfare as condition to be explained. • Interpret war as competition for a limiting resource: • Territory • Wealth • Protein • Reproductive Opportunities

5. Hobbesian Approach • Assume warfare as the human default condition. • Take peace (or the reduction in violence) as the condition to be explained or the state to be achieved. • Interpret the form of warfare as a means of reducing losses.

6. Approaches are complementary not contradictory • Chagnon argues in both modes: • Retaliation enhances reproductive success. • Retaliation reduces future aggression.

7. Jivaroan beliefs as coercive ideology(Harner, 1972) • If you have an arutam spirit, you cannot be murdered. If you have two, you cannot die, even through infectious disease (1972:135). • If you have an arutam spirit, you are fierce and have an enormous desire to kill. Killing shows that you have it (1972:139).

8. Although you acquire arutam spirits through a vision quest, killing other people “entitles” you to one (1972:140). • If you don't kill someone every few years, your arutam will leave you and make you vulnerable to being killed (1972:141, 142).

9. If you tell other people that you have an arutam spirit, it will leave you and make you vulnerable to being killed (1972:139). • The only way to show you have an arutam spirit is through your actions, by showing great interpersonal energy, assertiveness, and aggressiveness and by killing (1972:139).

10. The ideology is coercive because it creates a situation in which one’s best insurance policy is someone else’s head. • Defectors from the ideology who shrank from taking another’s head would risk losing their own.

11. “By their fruits you shall know them.” (Matthew 7:16)

12. Patterns of coalitional violence • Intra-tribal feuding • Avenging death of kin, wife-stealing, etc. • Usually one person killed • Raids over short distances by small groups • Inter-tribal warfare • No specific motive • Usually many persons killed • Raids over long distances by large groups, lead by kakaram

13. Tsantsa: shrunken head trophy • Prophylactic measure against the avenging spirit of the deceased or muisak. • After year of periodic feasts, trophy head was often traded for a shotgun. • This gave ideology a material basis, killing gave men both arutam and a shotgun. • Accelerated until half the men had arutam and shotguns and half the men were dead.

14. Contrast of intra-tribal feudingand inter-tribal warfare • Strict norms govern intra-tribal feuding, but not inter-tribal warfare • Reputation for arutam power and invulnerability much more likely to be established with an Achuar death than a Shuar one. • Protection of in-group members at the expense of the out group.

15. Rules of retaliation • “An eye for an eye only ends up making the whole world blind.” — Mohandas Gandhi • In this case, a rule for limiting aggression for in-group members, not applied between groups. • Ideology of arutam furtherslows cycle of intra-tribal feuding and enhances probability that feud could be ended.

16. Rationality of system depends on starting assumptions • If one expects peace, a system that motivates the demise of half the adult men (and many others) is horrific. • If one expects endless war, a system that motivates the protection of half the adult men is an attractive option.

17. Towards a Behavioral Ecology of Spitting What should someone who expects war but wants peace do?

18. Two messages • I am so fierce and powerful that you dare not attack me. • I am not an immediate threat to you, so you do not have to.

19. Greeting and leave taking rituals • Empty of meaning • Message conveyed by forcefulness of manner. • Signals both “don’t mess with me” and “I didn’t come to harm you”

20. Manioc beer serving • Woman sticks thumb in beer and sucks the beer off as she serves the bowl to the guest. • Signals that the beer is not poisoned.

21. Spitting • Men continuously and copiously spit while visiting and conversing. • Signals non-violent intentions.

22. Sympathetic Nervous System Arousal • Increase in respiratory rate, heart rate, and blood pressure. • Increase of blood flow to the heart and muscles. • Dilation of the pupils, the bronchioles and the GI tract. • Inhibition of the salivary glands, or “dry mouth.”

23. If a visitor came to murder his host, he would not be able to spit to save his life. • Serves as an honest signal of pacific intent, not because it is costly but because of the details of human physiology.