Politics & Violence

 The Yanomamo most fights begin over sexual issues: infidelity and suspicion of infidelity, attempts to seduce another man's wife, sexual jealousy, forcible appropriation of women from visiting groups, failure to give a promised girl in marriage, and rape-sounds pretty western to me. Yanomamo describe their feelings of the bereaved as hushuwo, aka "anger verging on violence. The consequences for breaking these rules differ from western cultures because Yanomamo act out of vengeance, we do to but the whole city isn’t involved taking out half a city block. But we do protest and rally together. We have the justice system to take care of those kinds of things.

 The process of revenge killings in Yanomamo population’s revenge and blood revenge here to mean a retaliatory killing in which the initial victim's close kinsmen conduct a revenge raid on the members of the current community of the initial killer. Although Yanomamo raiders always hope to dispatch the original killer, almost any member of the attacked community is a suitable target.

 Unokais are those who have killed. A man would choose to be a unokais because many men strive to be unokais but die trying and that the apparent higher fertility of those who survive may be achieved at an extraordinarily high mortality rate. Men who do not engage in violence might have a lower risk of mortality due to violence and produce more offspring on average than men who tried to be unokais.

 Political leaders, therefore, usually have, on average, many more kinsmen in the village than do other men of comparable age. All Yanomamo villages have several patrilineal descent groups: males and females of all ages who are related to each other through the male line of descent. Members of these groups must find their spouses in some other patrilineal descent group, preferably within the village. Headmen are usually polygynous. Kinship in most villages well over 80% of the members are related to more than 75% of the village. Marriage and Reproduction for Men who are killers may gain marital and reproductive benefits by having more wives than the non unokais or by customary marriage alliance.

 We need laws against something that no one should want to because it is difficult for us to imagine the terror that might characterize our own social lives in the absence of laws prohibiting individuals from seeking lethal retribution when a close kinsman dies at the hands of another human, be it premeditated murder or the consequence of an irresponsible accidental act, such as a drunk driver causing the deaths of innocent people.