The Yanomamö often find themselves caught in a cycle of violence, where each revenge killing demands another. Do they ever see the futility of their situation?
And the answer to that is best explicated in an incident that happened to me when the Yanomamö began being aware of Venezuelans, for example. It was a territorial capital 200+ miles away, and some of the missionaries sent young guys to the territorial capital to learn practical nursing to come back to the village and treat snake bites, and scratches, and wounds, and things like that, and to give them malaria pills. And they taught them how to use microscopes.
But one of these guys came back and he was just terribly excited when he told me that he discovered policia. I was like, “Well, what’s policia?” “They will grab people and haul them off and put them in these little separate houses, if they do something wrong. And I think we need policia, because my brother killed a man from Iwahikorobateri five years ago, and I’m always worried that the Iwahikorobateri are going to come and kill me, because he’s my brother.” And he thought that if they had law, law would be a good thing.
And ironically, the whole origin of anthropology began when early lawyers were astonished when they came to the New World and saw all of these huge populations living in harmony, and they couldn’t understand how they could do it. Well, kinship was part of the answer. But they began thinking seriously. Well, it goes back to Plato, too, about the origin of the state. But a lot of legal minds — in England and in the United States — were astonished that the political state could evolve out of primitive tribes like the American Indians.