Word: nomam
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That was in 1964. Chagnon eventually stayed 15 months with the 15,000-member tribe, which is spread out over 75,000 square miles in southern Venezuela and northern Brazil. Since then, Chagnon, now a Penn State professor, has spent four years among the Yãnomamõ, learning the language and chronicling a culture built around persistent aggression-browbeating, goading, ritual displays of ferocity, fighting and constant warfare. One village he visited conducted 25 wars in 19 months against neighboring villages, and a quarter of all adult Yãnomamõ males die in battle...
Chagnon's findings are anything but quaint notes on a primitive people. For one thing, the Yãnomamõ culture challenges the reigning academic theory that primitive wars are mainly fought over land, water or some other natural resource. What makes the Yãnomamõ anthropologically interesting is that all their wars are waged to capture women or in retaliation for such abductions...
Like many primitive peoples, the Yãnomamõ practice female infanticide -on the grounds that males are more valuable to a people always at war. Yet infanticide sets up fierce competition for marriageable females, both within and among villages, and this in turn produces chronic warfare...
Implied in Chagnon's findings so far is a notion startling to traditional anthropology: the rather horrifying Yãnomamõ culture makes some sense in terms of animal behavior. Chagnon argues that Yãnomamõ structures closely parallel those of many primates in breeding patterns, competition for females and recognition of relatives. Like baboon troops, Yãnomamõ villages tend to split into two after they reach a certain size...
Through wife capture and polygamy, aggressive Yãnomamõ males produce the most children. Says Chagnon: "What the Yãnomamõ are doing makes a good deal of sense if you view it as a strategy to maintain reproductive fitness." The winners in Yãnomamõ wars -the largest villages-have the highest birth rates and the most inbreeding...