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By Lizzie Wade
Imagine you’re a Yanomamö man, grow-
ing crops and hunting in the Amazon
rainforest of southern Venezuela and
northern Brazil. Someone from your
village has been murdered, and you’re
organizing a raiding party to do a re-
venge killing. Whom do you choose to fight
alongside you?
Your brothers, guessed cultural anthro-
pologist Shane Macfarlan of the University
of Utah in Salt Lake City. But he got a sur-
prise when he and famously controversial
anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon took a
new look at data from Chagnon’s pioneering
studies of the Yanomamö from the 1960s and
1970s. Men who became “unokais” together—
meaning they participated in the same
killing—were largely related by marriage
rather than blood. At best, they were cousins,
and often they were brothers-in-law. Among
married warriors, 70% had a
wife directly related to one of
their co-unokais.
The paper, published on-
line this week in the Pro-
ceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences, offers
a twist on Chagnon’s origi-
nal ideas about how being a
warrior boosts men’s fitness,
and fits current notions
that war is a mode of coop-
eration. “Humans are able
to cooperate even in costly
settings like warfare beyond
the residential community
and beyond kin,” says Sarah
Mathew, an anthropologist
at Arizona State University
(ASU), Tempe, who stud-
ies the evolution of human
cooperation. That’s “a real
exceptional feature of Homo
sapiens,” notes Kim Hill, a
human behavioral ecologist
also at ASU who has studied
small-scale societies in South America.
During 3 decades of living with and
studying the Yanomamö, Chagnon, now
at the University of Missouri, Columbia,
gathered reams of information about their
marriages, wars, alliances, and other rela-
tionships. But some anthropologists said his
1968 ethnography, Yanomamö: The Fierce
People, exploited the tribe by breaking their
taboo on using the names of the dead; oth-
ers argued that the book’s emphasis on
violent encounters helped governments
justify invasions of Yanomamö territory.
Chagnon also faced criticism for infractions
such as giving gifts, including machetes, to
his closest Yanomamö associates, and thus
distorting the social structure he aimed to
analyze. In 2000, journalist Patrick Tierney
even accused him of worsening a measles
epidemic among the Yanomamö as part of a
biomedical experiment. (The American An-
thropological Association, however, cleared
Chagnon of that and most other charges in
2001 and rescinded their remaining criti-
cisms in 2005 [Science, 8 July 2005, p. 227].)
For his part, Macfarlan calls Chagnon’s
data “one of the most unique data sets in
the world,” capturing the Yanomamö at a
time before outside influences had altered
their way of life. Listening to Chagnon’s ex-
tensive recorded interviews with his Yano-
mamö informants assuaged any doubts he
had about data collection, Macfarlan says.
Macfarlan believes that his new view of
how men benefited from becoming unokais
could explain one of Chagnon’s most con-
troversial findings. In 1988, Chagnon re-
ported that unokais of every age had more
wives and children than their nonunokai
counterparts (Science, 26 February 1988,
p. 985). He hypothesized that being a war-
rior gave men high social standing and so
made them more attractive as marriage
partners and fathers. His suggestion that
warfare and violence are “adaptive” be-
haviors that help drive human evolution
quickly attracted fiery criticism.
Some of Chagnon’s ideas are no longer so
startling. But in contrast to Chagnon’s focus
on warriors’ reputations, Macfarlan found
that the key advantage held by unokais
was that they “are plugged into this social
scene” that allows them to make strong al-
liances outside of their immediate paternal
family, often in different villages. That gives
them access to their friends’ female rela-
tives as potential wives. They are “getting
the resources and marriage opportunities
of [their] allies,” not their defeated enemies,
Macfarlan says.
The study shows that for the Yanomamö
and possibly other small-scale societies,
“warfare is about coop-
eration,” agrees Stephen
Beckerman, an anthropolo-
gist and professor emeritus
at Pennsylvania State Uni-
versity, University Park. He
plans a similar analysis of
alliances among the Wa-
orani, another small-scale
society in the Amazon with
a tradition of waging war.
Macfarlan acknowledges
that Chagnon’s data don’t
rule out the possibility
that Yanomamö warriors
formed raiding parties with
men who were already their
in-laws, confirming existing
bonds rather than forging
new ones. In fact, Hill notes,
men in many small-scale
societies often prefer to ally
with their brothers-in-law
because by definition these
men aren’t competing for
access to the same women.
Although Hill doesn’t expect the new
paper to sway any of Chagnon’s most com-
mitted critics, he says it represents “a more
subtle and nuanced view of human society”
than the anthropologist has articulated in
the past. “It’s nice to see Chagnon reanalyz-
ing some of his data 30 or 40 years later
and coming up with a slightly different
view of things.” ■
SCIENCE sciencemag.org
PH
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ANTHROPOLOGY
Friends, not foes, boost warriors’ success New analysis of Yanomamö data suggests that alliances among in-laws raise fighters’ fitness
Controversial anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon lived with the Yanomamö for decades.
31 OCTOBER 2014 • VOL 346 ISSUE 6209 535
NEWS | IN DEPTH
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