R. Brian Ferguson

Materialist, cultural and biological theories on why Yanomami make war

For decades, there have been three primary anthropological perspectives on why people make war: materialist, cultural, and biological. Each has a long history of application to the Yanomami. This paper considers these three alternatives. First, it summarizes the authors materialist models and what they are purported to explain. Second, it discusses more cultural explanations offered by several field researchers, concluding that some might be synthesized with a materialist perspective, while others seem irreconcilable. Finally, a range of hypotheses invoking evolved predispositions are considered and found to be directly contradicted by Yanomami ethnography, even if limited to the works of Napoleon Chagnon.

Born to Live: Challenging Killer Myths

This chapter is an anomaly in this volume. It is about cooperation among primates, but cooperation for deadly violence against others of the same species. It is about warfare by chimpanzees and by humans. Whether chimpanzees make war depends on your definition. Mine has always been elementary: organized, potentially lethal violence against members of another group. Using this definition, there is no question that chimpanzees have the capability to make war and have done so on occasion. The patrols that often precede attacks, and the attacks themselves, display a high degree of intelligent cooperation. Male coalitional aggression is the label that has been aptly applied to chimpanzees and humans too.

History, explanation, and war among the Yanomami: A response to Chagnon’s Noble Savages:

Why do people make war? Is it in human nature? Publication of Napoleon Chagnon’s Noble Savages resurrects old arguments, largely displaced in recent times by study of larger scale political violence, and sidelined by more contemporary theoretical currents. This shift ceded the human nature issue to a variety of biologistic approaches, for which Chagnon’s image of the Orinoco-Mavaca Yanomamo is foundational. Chagnon proposes that war is driven by reproductive competition, with men fighting over women, revenge, and status, among a ‘Stone Age’ people living as they had for countless generations, in a tribal world untouched by larger history or the world system. This paper challenges each of those claims, and offers alternatives that provide a very different view of Yanomami warfare, and why men fight wars.

Restudying Cañamelar of The People of Puerto Rico

This article discusses an unknown restudy of one locale of the People of Puerto Rico Project–my own. From 1980 to 1982 the author did ethnographic fieldwork in Bo. Jauca, Santa Isabel, the research site of Sidney Mintz. Building on Mintzs work, my goal was to take our shared historical materialism further, into a broader analysis of capitalism, colonialism, class, politics, and power. Where Mintz framed his study within production units, such as Colonia Destino and Central Aguirre, my study began with analysis of the oligarchic structure of the United States sugar industry as a whole, and how it shaped colonial policy. Where the People of Puerto Rico Project reconstructed insular class and political patterns as context for local studies, the restudy took islandwide class structure and political positions as a focus of analysis in itself. Where the earlier work chronicled the rise of a plantation system and rural proletariat, the later study explored their decline—why did the Puerto Rican sugar industry collapse, and how did seemingly homogenous Jauquenos differentiate into a graded system of stratification? The years from 1948 to 1982 saw other class transformations, as the rural proletariat was recast into the larger, more diffuse, and less politically potent category of “the poor” and life circumstances of all Jauqenos became more individuated and dependent on state power centers in San Juan and Washington.