Science Friction_ Where the Known Meets the Unknown - Michael Shermer [56]
They will grab a woman while she is out gathering and rape her. They don’t consider it a crime or a horrendously antisocial thing to do. It is simply what happens. It’s standard behavior. In such a small, enclosed community this (together with affairs) is the only way unmarried men have of getting sex.37
Good’s worries were justified and the universal emotion of jealousy was no more attenuated in this highly civilized, educated man than it was in any of the people he was studying to earn his Ph.D. In short, Good was on an emotional roller coaster from which he could not extricate himself.
I felt the tension, and I tried to deal with it. I wanted to think that Yarima would be faithful to me. But I knew the limits of any woman’s faithfulness here. Fidelity in Yanomami land is not considered a standard of any sort, let alone a moral principle. Here it is every man for himself. Stealing, rape, even killing—these acts aren’t measured by some moral standard. They aren’t thought of in terms of proper or improper social behavior. Here everyone does what he can and everyone defends his own rights. A man gets up and screams and berates someone for stealing plantains from his section of the garden, then he’ll go and do exactly the same thing. I protect myself, you protect yourself. You try something and I catch you, I’ll stop you.38
Many antisocial behaviors, such as theft, are kept at a minimum through such social constraints as shunning, or personal constraints as fear of violence and retaliation. But, as Good explains, “sex is a different story.”
The sex drive demands an outlet, especially with the young men. It cannot be stopped. Thus the personal and social constraints have less force, they’re more readily disregarded. As a result, a woman often has no choice. And if a woman is raped, she will not tell her husband, because she knows that her husband will beat her, or worse. In most cases the husband will become extremely angry, at both his wife and at the man who has raped her. But his anger will most likely not have the intensity or duration to provoke a village-shattering conflict, unless perhaps his wife is young and has not had a child yet. In that case the husband might find he cannot tolerate it; he might lose control utterly and embark on violent action. He badly wants to at least get his family started himself, rather than have someone else make her pregnant.39
How different is Good’s analysis from Chagnon’s description of a raid triggered by a desire to seek revenge for an earlier killing that also included the abduction of women.
Generally, however, the desire to abduct women does not lead to the initiation of hostilities between groups that have had no history of mutual raiding in the past. New wars usually develop when charges of sorcery are leveled against the members of a different group. Once raiding has begun between two villages, however, the raiders all hope to acquire women if the circumstances are such that they can flee without being discovered. If they catch a man and his wife at some distance from the village, they will more than likely take the woman after they kill her husband. A captured woman is raped by all the men in the raiding party and, later, by the men in the village who wish to do so but did not participate in the raid. She is then given to one of the men as a wife.40
It’s all in how one spin-doctors the data. Chagnon carefully parcels it into contextualized units as quantitative data. Good uses it anecdotally as part of a literary narrative, and Tierney uses Good to weave it into an indictment. For example, Tierney accuses Chagnon of acting “fiercely” around the Yanomamö, dressing up like them, using their drugs, pounding his chest, and screaming. Tierney gleefully explains how “Chagnon suddenly went from being an impoverished Ph.D. student at the bottom of