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WHY MEN Kill
Discover, Dec, 1998 by Mary Roach
The Achuar Indians of Ecuador have, by one count, the highest murder rate in the world. To anthropologists, that makes their society a good place to understand the violence within us all.
There are many reasons to be nervous in the village of Conambo in the Ecuadoran Amazon. You can be nervous about crossing a large swift river in a tiny wobbling canoe. You can be nervous about the sand flies that carry Leishmania parasites, which bore through your sinuses and eat out your brain. You can be nervous about the giardia in the manioc beer that can wreak havoc with your bowels, the tarantula in the outhouse, the vampire bats in the schoolhouse.
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The Achuar people of Conambo are not especially nervous about any of these things. The Achuar are nervous about the Achuar. The Achuar hold the dubious distinction of having had, in recent generations, one of the highest murder rates on Earth. In 1993 a poll of villagers revealed that 50 percent of their immediate male ancestors had died from shotgun blasts. (The traditional Achuar greeting is Pujamik--"Are you living?")
If you weren't born here, you for damn sure wouldn't live here. Unless you were John Q. Patton. Patton, an anthropologist at the University of Colorado and the Center for Evolutionary Psychology at the University of California at Santa Barbara, studies the roots of war and killing. He takes a biological approach to human behavior, which is to say he expects Darwinian theory to explain it. And from that evolutionary perspective, war is something of a problem, because it appears to be an altruistic act: you are risking your life for the good of the community. Taking chances with one's life does not, at first glance, appear to be a good way for a young man to pass on his genes. As Patton puts it, "You die, and then where are you reproductively?"
Patton was drawn to the Achuar for a couple of reasons, the first being the insights they may offer into early human society. For hundreds of thousands of years, our ancestors lived in small bands that got their food by hunting or gathering, and it was during this time that evolution may have fixed much of our underlying psychology. Unlike our own culture, in which millions of people live within a tangle of political structures, the Achuar live in small villages without any central leadership, and they still get a lot of their food by hunting.
Another reason Patton chose to study the Achuar is that they defy the most commonly accepted reason for war among tribal people: food. According to the "protein hypothesis," tribes fight against each other to gain new territory because there isn't enough to eat in their own. Patton doesn't think the truth is that simple. The rain forest where the Achuar live is sparsely inhabited and teeming with game. According to data collected in the early 1980s, the average Conambo adult consumes 104 grams of protein a day (the U.S. recommended daily allowance is 30 grams). They often eat 4,000 calories a day. The Achuar clearly don't have to fight: for their dinner--yet they most certainly do fight.
We are sitting in the Conambo schoolhouse, which serves as Patton's base. Besides the meeting hall, the school, and the church (a former helicopter repair shed built by an oil company), the town is no more than a scatter of thatch-roofed homes, linked by muddy jungle footpaths.
While we talk, Patton fills Ziploc bags with everyday medical supplies, which he will distribute to each household we'll visit today to interview subjects. To compensate villagers for their help, Patton serves as de facto medic. By decree of the Human Subject Review, a sort of Miss Manners for the field-research set, Patton is obligated to provide a net benefit to the community over the course of his stay. "So I held a meeting when I came in," recalls Patton. "`You can help me or not,' I told them. `But everyone will get medical treatment.'" To barter my welcome (and room and board), Patton hooked me up with Direct Relief International and had me bring in medical supplies: Vermox dewormer for 500.
"Altruism is the conundrum of Darwinian theory," Patton is saying as he opens up boxes of petal pink worm pills. A small crowd has gathered to watch. (It's not hard to be fascinating in Conambo: Wear contact lenses! Have red hair! Eat a Power Bar!) The way most anthropologists have made sense of altruistic acts on the battlefield, Patton continues, has been to think in terms of the survival of the behavioral trait, not the man. The concept is known as kin selection. You'll do something for others if you're closely related; the capacity for altruism gets replicated not by your passing it along to your offspring but by your saving the lives of others who share it.
Kin selection may work as an explanation for war in patrilocal societies, which are centered on fathers and sons and brothers who stay together even when they marry. But it doesn't work for the Achuar. Theirs is a matrilocal society: the men move into the homes and villages of their wives. They fight and die for their fathers-in-law, though they share no blood.
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