Cannibals and Kings (8 page)

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.

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 women.

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:

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 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”:

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:

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.”

A factor promoting the shift to or the intensification of banana and plantain production may have been the European pacification and extinction (possibly due to malaria and other European-introduced diseases) of the Arawak and Carib groups who previously dominated all the navigable rivers in this region. In aboriginal times, large gardens with fruiting trees would have constituted an inviting target for these more populous and better-organized groups. An important point to keep in mind is that Yanomamo wars are being fought mainly between villages that have broken off from common parental settlements. The Yanomamo are expanding
into territories formerly occupied by more powerful riverine peoples.

I have suggested that in general the adoption of a new means of production—steel tools and bananas and plantain gardens in this case—leads to population growth, which through intensification leads to depletions and renewed pressure against resources at a higher level of population density. The average size of the villages studied by Chagnon has more than doubled—to 166 in the twelve groups reported on. Smole indicates that the typical village in the Parima highland core of Yanomamo territory has between 65 and 85 people and that “populations much over 100 are exceptionally large.” Other estimates place the average pre-contact villages in the 40-to-60 range.

What resources have been depleted by permitting villages to grow to 166 people instead of the previous limit of 40 to 85? With the exception of the groups who live along major streams and who depend on narrow flood plains for their garden lands, Amazonian band and village peoples’ most vulnerable resources are not forests or soils—of which there are vast reserves—but game animals. Even without much hunting by human beings, tropical forests cannot support an abundance of animal life. As I have said, in pre-Columbian times large Amazonian villages were situated along the banks of the major rivers, which provided fish, aquatic mammals, and turtles. The Yanomamo have only recently occupied sites close to such rivers, and they still lack the technology for exploiting fish and other aquatic resources. But what about Chagnon’s statement that the areas between villages are “abounding in game”? In earlier observations, Chagnon gave the opposite impression: