Details of the 22 !Kung homicides were as follows. All of the killers, and 19 of the 22 victims, were adult men aged 20 to 55; only 3 of the victims were women. In all cases the !Kung killer knew the victim, who was a distant relative; the !Kung lacked completely the killings of strangers common in the United States in the course of robberies or road rage. All killings took place publicly in camps, in the presence of other people. Only 5 of the 22 !Kung killings were premeditated. For example, in one dramatic case around 1948, a notorious and possibly psychotic killer named /Twi, who had already killed two men, was ambushed and shot with a poisoned arrow by a man named /Xashe. The wounded /Twi still managed to stab a woman named //Kushe in the mouth with a spear and shot //Kushe’s husband N!eishi in the back with a poisoned arrow, before many gathered people shot poisoned arrows at /Twi until he looked like a porcupine, then stabbed his dead body with spears. The other 17 !Kung killings, however, unfolded during spontaneous fights. For instance, a fight broke out at N≠wama when one man refused to let another man marry the younger sister of the first man’s wife. In the resulting big argument that exploded, the husband shot an arrow at his sister-in-law; the sister-in-law’s suitor and his father and brother, and the husband and his allies, shot arrows and spears at each other; and, amidst several parallel fights, the suitor’s father was mortally wounded by a poisoned arrow in the thigh plus a spear in the ribs.
Most of the !Kung killings (15 out of 22) were parts of feuds in which one killing led to another and then to yet another over the course of up to 24 years; such cycles of retaliatory killings also characterize traditional war (Chapters 3 and 4). Among motives for !Kung killings other than that one of revenge for a previous killing, adultery is the one most often mentioned. For example, a husband whose wife had slept with another man attacked and wounded the adulterer, who then managed to kill the husband. Another cuckolded husband stabbed and killed his wife with a poisoned arrow, then fled the area and never returned.
As for other small-scale societies, some are less violent than the !Kung (e.g., Aka Pygmies, the Siriono), while others are or were more violent (e.g., the Ache, Yanomamo, Greenland and Iceland Norse). During the time that the Ache were still living in the forest as hunter-gatherers before 1971, violence was the commonest cause of death, exceeding even diseases. More than half of Ache violent deaths were at the hands of non-Ache Paraguayans, but killings of Ache by other Ache still accounted for 22% of Ache deaths. In marked contrast to the pattern of !Kung violence directed exclusively against adult !Kung, most (81%) of Ache homicide victims were children or infants—e.g., children (predominantly girls) killed to accompany a dead adult into the grave, children who were killed or who died of neglect after the death or desertion of their father, or infants killed because they were born separated by only a short birth interval from their next older sibling. Also in contrast to the !Kung, the commonest form of in-group killings of adult Ache was not a spontaneous fight with whatever weapons happened to be at hand, but instead a ritualized and pre-planned fight with clubs specially made for the occasion. As is true for the !Kung, state intervention has greatly decreased levels of violence among the Ache: since they began increasingly living on reservations after 1977 and came under the direct or indirect influence of the Paraguayan state, killings of adult Ache by other Ache have ceased, and Ache killings of their children and infants have decreased.
How do people in traditional societies without state government and police protect themselves against the constant danger of violence? A large part of the answer is that they adopt many forms of constructive paranoia. One widespread rule is to beware of strangers: routinely to attempt to kill or drive off a stranger detected on your territory, because the stranger may have come to scout out your territory or to kill a member of your tribe. Another rule is to beware of the possibility of treachery by supposed allies, or (conversely) to practise pre-emptive treachery against potentially fickle allies. For instance, a tactic of Yanomamo warfare is to invite people of a neighboring village to come to a feast at one’s own village, and then to kill them when they have set down their weapons and are eating. Don Richardson reports that the Sawi people of southwestern New Guinea honor treachery as an ideaclass="underline" better than killing an enemy outright is to convince an enemy of your friendship, to invite the enemy many times over the course of months to visit you and partake of your food, and then to watch his terror when you declare, just before killing him, “Tuwi asonai makaerin!” (We have been fattening you with friendship for the slaughter!)
Still another tactic to reduce the risk of attack is that the locations of villages are commonly chosen for the purpose of defense or maintaining a good view over the surroundings. For instance, New Guinea mountain villages are typically located on hilltops, and many late-phase Anasazi settlements in the southwestern United States were in sites accessible only by a ladder that could be pulled up to cut off the entrance. While these locations oblige the inhabitants to carry water for long distances uphill from the river in the valley bottom below, that effort is considered preferable to the risk of being surprised by an attack at a riverside valley location. As population density or as fighting increases, people tend to shift from living in dispersed unprotected huts to aggregating for defense in large palisaded villages.
Groups protect themselves by building a network of alliances with other groups, and individuals ally themselves with other individuals. A function of the constant talking that has struck me in New Guinea, and that has struck other visitors to other traditional societies, is to learn as much as possible about each individual in one’s universe of contact, and to monitor people’s activities constantly. Especially good sources of information are women who were born into one’s own group, and who were then sent in marriage to another group, in the common traditional living pattern termed patrilocal residence (i.e., brides moving to join their husband’s group, rather than new husbands moving to join their wife’s group). Such married women often warn their blood relatives in their natal society that their husbands and other relatives by marriage are planning an attack. Finally, just as endless evening campfire conversations about accidents serve not just to entertain but also to educate children (and everyone else) about environmental risks, endless conversations about raids and people alert listeners to dangers arising from people, as well as providing gripping entertainment.
Diseases
Depending on the particular traditional society, diseases collectively rank as either the leading danger to human life (e.g., among the Agta and !Kung, where they accounted respectively for an estimated 50%–86% and 70%–80% of all deaths) or as the second most important danger after violence (e.g., among the Ache, among whom “only” one-quarter of deaths under conditions of forest life were due to illness). It must be added, though, that malnourished people become more susceptible to infection, and that food shortage is thus a contributing factor to many deaths whose cause is recorded as infectious disease.