Essays and Book Reviews on Evolutionary Psychology, Anthropology, the Literature of Science and the Science of Literature
Glossary of Yąnomamö Terms
I put together a list of terms and definitions while writing my novel about an anthropologist studying the Yąnomamö. Good for students or researchers, or anyone else looking to learn some basic terms of the language. These definitions are mostly my own paraphrasing of Napoleon Chagnon’s.
I put together a list of terms and definitions while writing my novel about an anthropologist studying the Yąnomamö. Good for students or researchers, or anyone else looking to learn some basic terms of the language. These definitions are mostly my own paraphrasing of Napoleon Chagnon’s.
...tari
suffix signaling the name of a collection of villages, like Shamatari
…-teri
suffix signaling the name of a village, like Bisaasi-teri
a brahawä shoawä
expression that means "It's still a long way off."
abawä
older brother
aîwä
also older brother
amoamo
a ritual to ensure success in the hunt, dances performed by women and girls while the men seek game
awei
yes
babracot
platform made of sticks 3 feet over a campfire for cooking/smoking meat
bädao
without cause, as in "killing without cause."
bareto
biting gnats
barröwo
to lead the way on a trail
basho
spider monkey
beshi
to be horny (something seldom admitted openly)
bisaasi
palm leaf
bore
malevolent wandering spirit with glowing eyes
boshe
small white-lipped peccary
browähäwä
politically important man
buhii
spirit or soul--particularly the will
date (dah-tay)
sweet, boiled plantain soup
dehiaö
to eat a bite of meat, then a bite of vegetables, and chew them together
duku kä misi
uppermost of four layers to the cosmos
ebene
hallucinogenic green powder shot through a tube into shaman's nostrils
habe
father
habo
come over here
he borara
term used to describe a village (shabono) that has fissioned into two, with the newer one staying close by for protection from enemy raiders
hedu kä misi
the sky layer, the underside of which we see when we look up, on top of which the dead and no badabö live
hei kä misi
the earth layer in the Yąnomamö cosmos
hei tä bebi
lowermost layer of the cosmos, the one beneath the earth we occupy
hekamaya
son-in-law or nephew (sister's son)
hekura
spirits who travel down hammock strings from the sky layer to commune with shamans (tiny light beings seen after taking ebene)
heniyomou
hunting trip
himo
shorter, but deadlier club with sharpened edges, used when nabrushi fight has escalated
hisiomö
seeds used to make ebene
hori
poor; literally, to be without tobacco
horeö
to crawl or creep, as when learning to walk
howashi
capuchin monkey
hushuwo
sad and volatile; emotional state common at reahu (funeral)
huya
young bachelor looking for adventure (and often looking for trouble)
ihiru (formal ihirubö)
infant or either sex
iro
howler monkey
iwä
caiman
kawa amou
shouted, often poetic monologue given by a man at night after most villagers are settled in their hammocks
ma
no
madohe
manufactured goods like machetes, axes, fishhooks and line, etc. brought in for trade
mashi
blood relations (as opposed to shori, in-laws), reckoned through patrilineal descent
middi
darkness
mohode
caught unawares
moko dude
a recently post-pubescent female who has never had a child
moyawe
alert, suspicious, wary
nabä
foreigner; non-Yąnomamö
nabrushi
long clubs used for duels
nara
red paint applied to the body
no badabö
"those who are now dead"; "the original humans"; mythical precursors to Yąnomamö, some of whom travel from the hedu layer to earth as hekura
no mraiha
the giving of a gift with the expectation that it will be reciprocated at some later date instead of on the spot
no owa
effigy representing a man from enemy village, used as a dummy for practice raids
nomohori
"dirty trick"; a deception, often an invitation to a feast, that can result in an ambush and several members of the visiting village killed
noreshi
animal alter ego
obo
armadillo
ohodemu
work
oka
harmful magic from a particular plant that is blown toward the enemy; suspicions of the use of this magic are the cause of many killings
öra
jaguar
oshe
a young child of either sex
owa
little brother
pajui
wild turkey
pata
"big one"; headman
patayoma
an old woman
rahaka
lanceolate arrow tip used for killing humans, often dipped in curare poison
rahara
river serpents; dragons
rasha
palm fruit
riyahäwä
beautiful
rohode
an old man; old person
shabono
the circular or ovular structure formed by joined yahis into a large communal dwelling with an open courtyard
shabori
shaman; man who communes with the hekura
shaki or shakiwä
pesky bee; name given to Shackely
shama
tapir
shoabe
father-in-law or mother's brother
shori (formal shoriwä)
brother-in-law; term used to address strangers; in-laws as opposed to patrilineal relatives (mashi)
shuwahi
woman who flees her village in search of a husband who will treat her better
sina
adjective used to describe a man who's a poor marksman with his bow and arrows
sioha
a man from another village doing bride service for his wife's family
siohamou
bride service--period of work done for in-laws' family as part of a marriage exchange
suaböya
mother's brother's daughter; cross-cousin; or wife (same term)
suhebä ukaö
a girl whose nipples are beginning to get hard
suwa härö
a female who is about the age of puberty; also, the magical charms such a female may use
suwa pata
a mature woman
tora
baboo quiver tied to hunters back
unokai
man who has killed another man (or several)
unokaimou
ritural cleansing and quarantining undertaken by a man after killing another man
urihi
jungle; nature
urihi ä rimö
having to do with beasts and animal things as opposed to humans and human things (yahi tä rimö)
Wa bei kä he shami
"Your forehead is filthy," one of the worst insults
wabu
fruit from which originated women in Yąnomamö myth
waiteri
fierce; aggressive in defending one's honor; also noun, a man who's waiteri
waiyamou
marathon competitive chanting
waiyumö
long camping trip that can last days or weeks
wara
large-collared peccary
waro pata
a mature man
wayu huu
raid
wayu itou
ritual lineup of warriors in preparation for a raid, usually performed during reahu mortuary ceremony
wayu käbä
raider
weshi
to have lots of pubic hair (a turn-on for men)
yai
"true"
yahediba
electric eels
yahi
portion of a shabono for individual nuclear families; house
yahi tä rimö
having to do with humans and human things as opposed to beasts and animal things (urihi ä rimö)
yano
small hunting tent
yaöya
mother's sister's daughter; parallel cousin; or sister (same term)
yawaremou
incest
yawäwä
a young boy who has started tying his penis to his waist string
yaya
mother-in-law
yiwä
an adolescent male whose muscles are getting hard
Violence in Human Evolution and Postmodernism's Capture of Anthropology
Anthropologists Brian Ferguson and Douglas Fry can be counted on to pour cold water on any researcher’s claims about violence in human evolutionary history. But both have explained part of their motivation is to push back against a culture that believes violence is part of human nature. What does it mean to have such a nonscientific agenda in a what’s supposed to be a scientific debate?
Anytime a researcher publishes a finding that suggests violence may have been widespread over the course of human evolutionary history, you can count on a critical response from one of just a few anthropologists. No matter who the original researcher is or what methodological and statistical approach are applied, one of these critics will invariably insist the methods were flawed and the analysis fails to support the claim. To be fair, these critics do have a theoretical basis for their challenges. By their lights, violence, especially organized, coalitional violence, emerged in complex societies as the result of differential access to prized resources. Hunter-gatherers and horticulturalists tend to roam widely, so they don’t accumulate much by way of property over their lifespans, which means there’s nothing much for them to fight over—at least according to the theory.
But these anthropologists also openly admit to a political agenda driving their engagement in the controversy. The idea that violence was rampant over the course of human evolution could imply that humans evolved to be violent—that violence is in our genes. And, if the view that humans are innately and hence irredeemably violent is allowed to take hold, war hawks can more credibly brush aside talk of peace as naively utopian. As Brian Ferguson, the single most cited advocate of the view that our hunter-gatherer past was markedly more peaceful than our civilized present, says in a documentary about the history of controversial research among the Yąnomamö of Brazil and Venezuela, “If we’re going to work against war, we need to work against the idea that war is human nature” (36:26). In other words, these scholars see a direct line connecting the science of human violence and the politics of war. If you want peace, according to this line of thinking, you must not let the contention that violence was widespread throughout human evolution go unchallenged.
Of course, admitting to an agenda like this opens you to accusations of ideological bias. Are scholars like Ferguson insisting the evidence of violence in the Pleistocene is weak because they genuinely believe it is? Or is it because they believe they can prevent wars by convincing enough people it is? If some new evidence clearly demonstrated their view to be in error, would they admit this publicly? Or would they continue singing the same tune about our notionally peaceful past while casting aspersions on whoever reported the new evidence? The inescapability of questions like these are what makes it so odd that anyone would admit to a political agenda in a scientific context. So how do they justify it?
Anthropology is an odd discipline. The political homogeneity of people in the field has made it particularly vulnerable to the encroachment of a certain set of ideas from nonscientific disciplines. Postmodernism is rife in the field, and one of the central tenets of postmodernism is that there are more or less covert political motivations driving every intellectual or artistic endeavor. From this perspective, all the scholars proclaiming their ambition to promote peace are doing differently from their seemingly apolitical colleagues is explicitly owning up to their political agenda.
(Many scholars, no matter how well the label fits, chafe at being called postmodernist, complaining that the term is too vague or that it’s too broad to be meaningfully applied to them. I suspect this is mostly an effort at muddying the waters, but here I’ll simply define postmodernism as a philosophy that focuses on the role of power relations—oppressors versus the oppressed—in knowledge formation and which thus encourages a high degree of skepticism toward scientific claims, especially those that can be viewed as in any way negatively portraying or impacting some marginalized or disempowered group.)
This is where the situation gets scary, because the flipside to postmodernists’ presupposition of political motives is that any researcher who reports evidence of pre-state conflict or any theorist who emphasizes the role of violence in human evolution must likewise have an agenda—to promote war. This must be true even if the anthropologist in question explicitly denies any such agenda. Here’s Douglas Fry in an interview with Oxford University Press:
When the beliefs of a culture hold that humans are naturally warlike, people socialized in such settings tend to accept such views without much question. Cultural traditions influence the thinking and perceptions of scientists and scholars as well. I suspect that one reason that retelling this erroneous finding is so common is that it supposedly provides “scientific confirmation” of the warlike human nature view.
The specific “erroneous finding” Fry refers to is that Yąnomamö men who kill in battle father more children than those who never kill anyone. It was published by Napoleon Chagnon in Science, and Ferguson promptly responded with his criticisms, which Fry insists completely undermine Chagnon’s analysis. Whether the finding has truly been overturned is contested to this day, but Fry’s interview demonstrates a common pattern: Yes, of course, the evidence proves the findings about violence wrong, the postmodern anthropologist will claim, but just for good measure let’s also indict the anthropologist who reported them for his complicity in perpetuating a culture of war. They never seem to realize that the second part of this formula undermines the credibility of the claim made in the first.
Whether you accept the proposition that politics percolates beneath the surface of all forms of intellectual discourse, you can see how the postmodern activist stance provides a recipe for overly politicized debates, where instead of arguing on the merits of competing views, scholars are enjoined to imagine they’re engaged in righteous combat against their morally compromised colleagues. If you’re more of a traditional scientist, meanwhile—i.e., if you don’t take postmodernism seriously—then the sanctimonious tone taken by your detractors will strike you as evidence of an ideological commitment to sweeping inconvenient evidence under the rug.
If you’ve ever debated someone who insists on arguing against your presumed ideological agenda while completely ignoring major parts of the case you’re actually making, you know how maddening and futile such exchanges can be. Indeed, many of the rules of scientific discourse—rules postmodernists believe only serve to allow justifications for oppression to fly in under the radar—exist to help intellectual rivals avoid the deadlock of competitive mind-reading and the attribution of sinister motives. Nonetheless, many scholars today take it for granted that science not only can coexist with postmodernism but that science needs postmodernism to prevent the reemergence of evils like eugenics, scientific racism, or colonialist exploitation. What they don’t understand is that you can’t take in the Trojan horse of an idea like ulterior agendas without opening the gates to the entire army of postmodern tenets. Once you let morality or politics or ideology into the debate, then that debate is no longer scientific; there’s no having it both ways.
Ah, but the postmodernist critic will object that it’s impossible not to let politics and ideology into any debate. Pure objectivity is a fantasy. So, if hidden agendas and biases are going to continue operating despite our best efforts, we may as well call them out. And, having exposed them to the light of day, we may as well admit that our disagreement is as much political as it is scientific. As Allison Mickel and Kyle Olson write in a 2021 op-ed for Sapiens titled “Archaeologists Should Be Activists Too,”
There are still some who argue that scientists maintain their authority only when they remain objective, separate from current political concerns. Many academics have decried this view for decades, demonstrating that fully objective science has always been more of a myth than a reality. Science has always been shaped by the contemporary concerns of the time and place in which research occurs.
This brings us back to the permissibility, even the moral necessity, of infusing our science with postmodernism.
But this point rests on a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of science. The point was never to thoroughly eradicate bias or to deny that individual perspectives are always shaped by forces beyond the individual’s awareness. The point is that by taking measures to reduce bias we can engage in more fruitful discussions that are more likely to lead to real insights and discoveries. True, bias can never be fully eliminated. Nor can pathogens ever be thoroughly annihilated from an operating theater. That doesn’t mean anyone should undergo surgery in a gas station bathroom. Seeing countless scientific debates degrade into petty moralizing and name-calling free-for-alls between tribalized groups of intellectuals for the past decade on social media ought to have convinced us all that at least trying to stick to the facts while avoiding ad hominem attacks has a lot to recommend it.
The public trusts science—insofar as this is still true—precisely because scientists make a point of examining evidence as objectively as humanly possible while doing whatever they can to minimize bias. But, once scientists start proclaiming their activist agendas, they forfeit that trust, giving the public no reason to see scientists and scientific institutions as any different from all the other special interest groups vying for attention and resources. Indeed, this loss of trust is already well underway, as the Covid-19 pandemic made abundantly clear.
There are at least two other major problems with the melding of postmodernism onto science. The first is that, while it may be true that we all operate on unconscious beliefs and agendas, there currently exists no method that’s even remotely reliable for determining what those beliefs and agendas are. If you accuse some anthropologist of reporting on the violence she observed among the people she’s studying merely because she favors military expansionist policies, you can expect her to reply that, no, she’s simply telling everyone what she witnessed. How, without resorting to spectral evidence, would you then go about establishing that she in fact doesn’t know her own true motivation? How can others check the work you put into uncovering this hidden agenda? The awkward reality is that postmodern anthropologists routinely insist that their rivals have some reactionary agenda even when those rivals are on record supporting progressive causes.
To see how catastrophically the attribution of unconscious motives can go awry, take a look at some of the earliest theories about the inner workings of the mind from the turn of the last century. Freud can be credited with the revelation that much of what goes on in our minds is outside of our awareness. But nearly every theory he put forth based on that revelation turned out to be wrong—and in the most grotesque ways. As the theory of the Oedipus Complex, which posits that infant boys want to kill their fathers and marry their mothers, ought to make clear, without sound methods for examining the contents of our unconscious minds, all this speculation about hidden biases and motivations all too easily morphs into fodder for the formation of cultic beliefs.
The postmodernist anthropologists counter this point by insisting they’re not interested in the contents of individual minds. Rather, they’re interested in the impact those individuals’ actions and statements have on society. Whether, say, Napoleon Chagnon really intended to bolster the rationale for sending troops to Southeast Asia is beside the point. His case for widespread violence in human evolutionary history had that effect regardless of his intentions.
But did it really?
Leaving aside the question of whether someone should be held morally accountable for outcomes he didn’t intend, we still must ask how the postmodernists know what the impact of an idea will be—or has been. How do they know Chagnon’s work had the effect they claim it had? Is there any evidence that Kennedy or Johnson or any of the top generals were even aware of Chagnon’s work among the Yąnomamö? (His infamous paper on Yąnomamö warriors having more children wasn’t published until 1988.) Are there any survey data tying beliefs about pre-state warfare to voting behavior? As is the case with their efforts at revealing an individual’s unconscious motives, the absence of any viable methods for examining the societal impact of ideas essentially gives postmodern critics a blank check to assert whatever’s on offer from their darkest imaginings.
This leads into the next flaw in the campaign to blend postmodernism with science. The connection between beliefs about human nature and the political or moral convictions one holds is hardly straightforward. Personally, I’ve gone back and forth on the issue of how violent our Pleistocene ancestors were, but I have never, and would never vote for any politician campaigning on the glories of conquest. Likewise, I believe there are consequential differences between male and female psychology, but I have never, and would never vote for a candidate who insists women should be banned from certain professions because of these differences. Indeed, I hold many views that are more compatible with the conception of human nature that gets ascribed to those with conservative politics, but I’ve never voted for a Republican in my life. In this supposed contradiction, I’m far from alone.
Survey data show that adaptationist psychologists, whose stance allegedly serves to perpetuate the political status quo, are no more likely to vote conservative than any other psychologists, all of whom tend to be left-leaning. This however isn’t to say political leanings have no connection to the beliefs of anthropologists. One large, in-depth survey showed that while people in the field are almost invariably on the left, some are much farther to the left than others. And those who identify as Radical, as opposed to Liberal or Moderate, are more likely to agree with the statement, “Foraging societies in prehistory were more peaceful.” They’re also more likely to disagree with the statement, “Advocacy and fieldwork should be kept as separate as possible to help protect the objectivity of the research.” Not surprisingly, Radicals are also more likely to agree that “Postmodern ideas have made an important contribution to anthropology.”
One of the most recent flareups over the role of violence in human evolution was fomented by Steven Pinker’s book The Better Angels of Our Nature, which argues that the story of civilization is one of progress toward greater peace. If Western societies are becoming less violent over time, then they must have been more violent in the past. To demonstrate this, Pinker includes a graph showing what percentage of various populations likely died at the hands of other people. (Like clockwork, Brian Ferguson went on record insisting the numbers for pre-state societies are exaggerated.) Many anthropologists and native rights activists believe the publication of these figures is unconscionable. But the interesting point here is that Pinker cannot be using his evidence of pre-state violence as a justification for war, because the whole point of his book is to examine the causes of the documented decline in violence. Let me emphasize this point: Pinker argues both that violence was rampant in our evolutionary past and that we as a species are entirely capable of transcending that past. Indeed, we’re not only capable of reducing violence; we’ve been doing it for centuries. Better Angels thoroughly obliterates the notion that believing violence played a significant role in human evolution makes one a de facto advocate for war in the present.
There are plenty of other instances of this disconnect. Anthropologist Agustin Fuentes recently raised a kerfuffle by writing an op-ed for Science about all the racism and misogyny on display in Darwin’s Descent of Man. Fuentes contends it’s important to see that even someone as brilliant and insightful as Darwin was still a slave to the prejudices of his day, which ought to make us all consider how big of a role prejudice may be playing in our own thinking. To make this point, Fuentes explains how Darwin got so much about race right: he knew no clear line separates one race from another and that no feature is found in any one race that’s absent in all the others. Most importantly, as an outspoken abolitionist, he knew that slavery is evil. Fuentes can’t hide his frustration with Darwin for getting so close without quite reaching the modern understanding of race as a social construct. What Fuentes is missing is that Darwin demonstrates that it’s not necessary to believe all races or all individuals are completely equal in every regard for one to insist that all races and all individuals should be treated as equally human. The scientific belief in group differences, or gender differences, or individual differences, contra the postmodernists, can live peacefully alongside a commitment to equal and universal human rights.
Politics can never be completely decoupled from science. Beliefs about human nature can’t be completely disentangled from moral reasoning. But the lines connecting theory to policy, or paradigm to advocacy, are seldom as straight as postmodernists would have us believe. The notion that you can improve the circumstances of indigenous peoples, or reduce racism, or make way for military drawdowns simply by criticizing intellectuals you disagree with and making accusations against them you can’t prove strikes me as childish and absurd. That’s because my own deepest intuition is that to solve a problem it’s best to first try to reach as thorough an understanding of that problem as possible. Any insistence that activism supersede science is based on the pretense of already having the very answer you’re supposedly seeking. What if humans really are naturally violent in some circumstances? Isn’t it better to honestly investigate what those circumstances are than to zealously promote a fantasy of violence being some civilization-induced aberration from our history of angelic communalism?
For many people, the addition of a second reason to reject an idea probably makes the criticism that much more plausible. Not only is the evidence not a hundred percent airtight, but if people believe this idea there’ll be hell to pay. But scientists ought to recognize the fallacy of an argument from adverse consequences when they see it. Plenty of anthropologists catch on to this trick when it’s played by creationists: If people believe they descended from apes, they’ll start to behave as if they had. The second part may seem plausible, but it still requires evidence to establish. More importantly, the first part may be true even if the second is. Scientists trained to recognize such flaws in human reasoning ought to know focusing on the reasons you want a claim to be true does nothing but detract from your credibility.
If your priority when engaging in science is to seek the truth, that will be reflected in your readiness to change your mind when new evidence emerges. If on the other hand your main concern is managing what ideas make their way into the prevailing culture, then you have no right to call yourself a scientist. What you’re trying to be is some sort of preacher, but what you’re probably engaging in more than anything else is censorship. Scientists are supposed to be truth-seekers first and foremost, not social engineers. Activism is well and good, but if you mix it with science, you degrade the integrity of both. Yes, neither you nor anyone else will escape bias and cultural programming, but that should make postmodernists just as intellectually and morally humble as they demand scientists be. The best way to rein in your bias after all is to engage regularly in discourse with people who hold different views and beliefs. Given postmodernism’s woeful effect on intellectual discourse of any sort, it seems a catalyst for more, not less bias, and more, not less tribalism.
Also read:
Kara and her older sister Crystal plan to leave a message in an abandoned house to prove they have more courage than Gloria, their rival at school. But Crystal does something weird before they ever arrive, and once they finally make it inside, the mysteries only deepen.