WHY MEN Kill

A third visitor has arrived, a shaman from a nearby village. He carries a shotgun, and you get the sense it's not for monkeys. There was a time, during the 1950s, when the Achuar and their enemies the Shuar didn't set down their guns until they went to sleep. Populations were decimated not just by intertribal raids but by fierce feuding within communities. Making matters worse, deaths by natural causes were often attributed to shamanic foul play. A man would die of say, a stroke. His son, seeing no outward cause of death, would visit the local shaman to find out if someone had put a curse on his father. The shaman would go into a hallucinogenic trance and very often come out of it with the source of the curse. A revenge assassination invariably followed.

These days, with the help of outside arbitrators called in to settle feuds, things have quieted down. Raids between the Shuar and the Achuar have all but disappeared, supplanted by trading between the two. The last murder here occurred around 1988. Though it's also true that just a few weeks back, members of the community were talking about killing a man who misspent community funds on prostitutes in Puyo.

With intertribal raids and revenge murders becoming less common, will warriorship still confer status among the Achuar, or will something else take its place? Patton concedes that other skills--speaking Spanish, for example--will factor into a man's overall status. Spanish enables a man to travel and earn money outside the community and to be involved in rain forest politics. "But will it or something else replace warriorship? I suspect not. Yes, the ability to interact with the outside is important, but guess what? You do these rankings and who are the high-ranking men? They're Mirunzhi. They're Kaiyashi. These men don't speak any Spanish at all. They're high-ranking warrior guys."

Even in our society, where status is tied to income and address, wartime exploits will carry a man a long way. "I have this slide that I use in lectures that was the cover of the National Enquirer," comments Patton. "It says STORMIN' NORMAN SCHWARZKOPF, SEXIEST MAN IN AMERICA. We still have this tribal psychology about our warriors."

Ushpa is finishing up the warriorship task, but Patton has a new line of questions for him: "If a conflict arose here in Conambo, who would side with whom?" Patton is aware that the town's social alliances can skew the men's rankings of one another. There's a natural tendency to underrate the status of men who aren't part of one's clique. But in mapping the social structure of Conambo, Patton is also measuring a phenomenon called triadic awareness: the ability to triangulate political loyalties and make informed decisions about the likely consequences of violence. The men of Conambo have a keen sense of whom they can and can't trust in the event of conflict. Patton would argue that this is an evolved trait. "There's a strong selective pressure to be able to make good who-to-trust decisions: you're wrong, you're dead."