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Waorani Grief and the Witch-Killer’s Rage: Worldview, Emotion, and Anthropological Explanation CLAYTON ROBARCHEK CAROLE ROBARCHEK ABSTRACT This article analyzes a complex of grief, rage and homicide among the Ecuadorian Waorani, tracing the relationships among worldview, values and concepts of self, and envy, rage and homicide, especially witch-killing. We contrast the results with the position taken by Rosaldo in his widely cited paper “Grief and the Headhunters Rage” (1989). We hold that Waorani individuals’ experience of rage during bereavement is not, as argued by Rosaldo for the Ilongot, a thing sui generis, immune to further explanation. Rather, it is explained as a product of people defining their experience on the basis of cultural constructions of self and reality and acting in accord with those definitions. We also argue that this explanation, coupled with the similarities in the Waorani and Ilongot complexes, suggests the operation of similar socio- cultural and psychological processes in the two societies and supports, contra the assertions of postmodernists and others, the continued value and validity of cross-cultural comparative research. [ethnology, Amazonia, Waorani, emotion, motivation] INTRODUCTION In 1989, Renato Rosaldo published Culture and Truth. Subtitled “The Remaking of Social Analysis,” the book took issue with the traditional ETHOS, Vol. 33, No. 2, pp. 206–230, ISSN 0091-2131, electronic ISSN 1548-1352. C 2005 by the American Anthro- pological Association. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions website, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals/ rights.htm.

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Waorani Grief and theWitch-Killer’s Rage: Worldview,Emotion, and AnthropologicalExplanationCLAYTON ROBARCHEKCAROLE ROBARCHEK

ABSTRACT This article analyzes a complex of grief, rageand homicide among the Ecuadorian Waorani, tracing therelationships among worldview, values and concepts of self,and envy, rage and homicide, especially witch-killing. Wecontrast the results with the position taken by Rosaldo in hiswidely cited paper “Grief and the Headhunters Rage” (1989).We hold that Waorani individuals’ experience of rage duringbereavement is not, as argued by Rosaldo for the Ilongot, athing sui generis, immune to further explanation. Rather, itis explained as a product of people defining their experienceon the basis of cultural constructions of self and reality andacting in accord with those definitions. We also argue thatthis explanation, coupled with the similarities in the Waoraniand Ilongot complexes, suggests the operation of similar socio-cultural and psychological processes in the two societies andsupports, contra the assertions of postmodernists and others,the continued value and validity of cross-cultural comparativeresearch. [ethnology, Amazonia, Waorani, emotion, motivation]

INTRODUCTION

In 1989, Renato Rosaldo published Culture and Truth. Subtitled “TheRemaking of Social Analysis,” the book took issue with the traditional

ETHOS, Vol. 33, No. 2, pp. 206–230, ISSN 0091-2131, electronic ISSN 1548-1352. C© 2005 by the American Anthro-pological Association. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce articlecontent through the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions website, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals/rights.htm.

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methods and goals of anthropology as a social science. Rosaldo’s argu-ment revolves around and regularly returns to the introductory chapter,entitled “Grief and a Headhunter’s Rage,” an account of how the authorcame to an intuitive understanding of an ethnographic conundrum—theequation of grief with rage by Ilongot headhunters—through the expe-rience of his own wife’s untimely death. The chapter is a very personaland moving account of profound grief and loss; its writing was, he says,therapeutic.1

But Rosaldo’s objectives in writing the book went beyond the per-sonal and therapeutic to question what he saw as traditional modes ofanthropological knowledge and explanation. The book, and particularlyone or another version of that first chapter, have been widely cited, bothby those concerned with the anthropology of emotion and by those sym-pathetic with the “postmodernist” challenge to the methods and objec-tives of traditional social science (see, e.g., Clifford 1986; Denzin 1996;Hastrup 1995; Leavitt 1996; Lutz and White 1986; McNeal 1999; Reddy1997, 1999; Stephan 1999).

The force of Rosaldo’s argument flows directly from his account of acomplex of grief, rage and headhunting among the Ilongot of Luzon, amongwhom he and his wife, Michelle Rosaldo, worked in the 1960s and ’70s,and from his assertion that the Ilongots’ concatenation of the emotionsgrief and rage in the experience of bereavement is a thing sui generis thatcan only be experienced and apprehended, but not explained: “If you askan Ilongot man why he cuts off human heads, his answer is brief and oneon which no anthropologist can readily elaborate: He says that rage, bornof grief, impels him to kill his fellow human beings” (1989:1). Althoughhis informants repeatedly told him this, he reports that he “. . . brushedaside their one-line accounts as too simple, thin, opaque, implausible,stereotypical, or otherwise unsatisfying” (1989:3). And, echoing Geertz(1973:24), “Either you understand it or you don’t. And, in fact, for thelongest time I simply did not” (1989:1–2).

In 1981, Michelle Rosaldo slipped over a precipice and fell to herdeath while doing fieldwork in Luzon. The author says he experiencedan overwhelming flood of emotions; grief, but also intense anger, wereelicited by that devastating loss. Only then, he says, was he finally able tounderstand what his Ilongot friends had been telling him about the rageinherent in grief.

That epiphany led him to two conclusions. The first was that theIlongots’ concatenation of grief and rage is an irreducible brute ethno-graphic fact that is the crucial motive for headhunting and that is imper-vious to further explanation:

In all cases, the rage born of devastating loss animates the older men’s desire to raid.This anger at abandonment is irreducible in that nothing at a deeper level explains it.

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Although certain analysts argue against the dreaded last analysis, the linkage of grief,rage and headhunting has no other known explanation. [Rosaldo 1989:18]

Second, he concluded that such unexplainable phenomena could onlybe understood by the empathetic “positioning” of the observer throughsimilar experience:

The ethnographer, as a positioned subject, grasps certain human phenomena better thanothers. He or she occupies a position or structural location and observes with a particularangle of vision. . . . In the case at hand, nothing in my own experience equipped me evento imagine the anger possible in bereavement until after Michelle Rosaldo’s death in1981. Only then was I in a position to grasp the force of what Ilongots had repeatedlytold me about grief, rage, and headhunting. [Rosaldo 1989:19]

A crucial implication of all this for Rosaldo and for many postmod-ern (if not “postmodernist”) anthropologists is that the interpretation ofall ethnographic events is dependent on the cultural/political/theoreticaland/or experiential “position” of the observer. Rosaldo’s intuitive under-standing of Ilongot grief/rage was possible only after he was experientially“repositioned” by the death of his wife (cf. McGee and Warms 2000:525–526, fn. 13). That understanding, and by implication all ethnographicunderstanding, is contingent on such “positioning;” thus, there are po-tentially as many alternative understandings as there are “positions,” andall are equally valid:

Such terms as objectivity, neutrality, and impartiality refer to subject positions onceendowed with great institutional authority, but they are arguably neither more nor lessvalid than those of more engaged, yet equally perceptive, knowledgeable social actors.[Rosaldo 1989:21]

Carried to its extreme, as some have done (e.g., Tyler 1986a), such aposition of epistemological relativism maintains that there exist only mul-tiple incommensurable realities that have no “objectively” definable com-monalities. Cross-cultural comparison—ethnology—thereby becomes im-possible. As Richard Shweder put it:

[Anthropology cannot be a] science designed to develop general explanatory theoriesand test specific hypotheses about objectively observable regularities in social andmental life, . . . [but must devote itself] . . . to the ethnographic study of multiple culturalrealities and alternative ways of life. [Shweder 1996:1]

Objective knowledge, generalizations and cross-culturally valid ex-planations are thus delusions, and social science a chimera (e.g., Clifford1986; Tyler 1986; cf. Kuznar 1997; Lett 1997).

Although we certainly would not presume to question Rosaldo’s as-sertion that the tragedy of his wife’s death gave him insight into Ilongotbereavement, we do question both his assertions that the cultural com-plex of grief, rage and homicide is a brute fact immune to further expla-nation and that such phenomena can only be grasped by the empathetic

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“positioning” of the observer through similar experience. In so doing, wealso question the implications for anthropology and anthropological re-search that many have seen as deriving from those assertions.

GRIEF, RAGE, AND HOMICIDE AMONG THE WAORANI

The argument that follows derives from two field research projectsthat we conducted among the Waorani of Amazonian Ecuador in 1987and 1993–94. From the outset, that research has been explicitly compar-ative, undertaken to provide data for comparison with that derived fromour earlier research among the Malaysian Semai, one of the world’s mostpeaceful societies. We chose the Waorani for this comparison because, un-til relatively recently, they had the highest homicide rate known anywherein the world. Over at least the five generations prior to the current one,more than 60 percent of Waorani deaths have been homicides (Robarchekand Robarchek 1989, 1992, 1998; Yost 1981).

There are about 1,300 Waorani (Smith 1993) who, like both theIlongot and the Semai, are upland tropical forest swidden gardeners andhunters. Their traditional territory lies between the Napo and CurarayRivers in Amazonian Ecuador. The first peaceful contacts with them be-gan in the late 1950s, and some of the bands we visited were still at warwith all outsiders into the 1960s and ’70s. Their fearsome reputation andnine-foot hardwood spears allowed them to maintain control over some8,000 square miles of densely forested ridges, valleys and swamps. Eventoday, one or more small bands still resist contact, hidden deep in theremote and disputed region along the Peruvian border, at war with alloutsiders and all other Waorani.2

Prior to the cessation of large scale raiding engineered by Protestantand Catholic missionaries in the 1960s and ’70s, the Waorani were at warwith all surrounding groups whom they raided for iron tools, for excite-ment and, very occasionally, for women. They were raided in retaliationand for captives—mostly children—who were taken to work, and usu-ally to die, on the haciendas that persisted into the 1970s in the Andeanfoothills (Robarchek and Robarchek 1998). Nearly 20 percent of Waoranideaths were the result of those violent clashes with outsiders (Yost 1981a).

They also raided each other. Lethal vendettas rooted in previouskillings and accusations of sorcery accounted for more than 40 percentof all deaths (Robarchek and Robarchek 1989, 1998; Yost 1981a). Thiscomplex of warfare and raiding was the focus of our field research and, assoon as our language competency permitted, we set about documentingthe vendettas, their raids and retaliatory raids.

One of the things that impressed us when we first read a reprint of“Grief and a Headhunter’s Rage” was the striking similarity in Ilongot

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and Waorani explanations for their raiding. When we asked, “Why didhe (or you, or they) go spearing?” the answer was almost always thesame: “pıınti- bakandapa,” which, roughly translated, means, “raging hebecame.”3 People seldom mentioned a precipitating incident, even thoughwe probed for one; that seemed irrelevant to the accounts. From the Wao-rani perspective, just as Rosaldo reported for the Ilongot, rage was bothreason enough and explanation enough for wholesale homicide.

EXPLAINING WAORANI RAGE AND VIOLENCE

The central theoretical premises guiding our research are that peo-ple’s behavior is explainable, and that people’s actions are motivated bywhat they want to achieve in their world as they perceive and understandit. Within their experienced realities, people make choices based on theinformation available to them about themselves, the world around them,and about possible goals and objectives in that world.

We see individual and social behavior as governed by schemata, sys-tems of information and control that constitute both maps of the worldand plans for action in it (Laszlo 1969, 1972; cf. D’Andrade 1995; Strauss1992; Strauss and Quinn 1997).4 Most relevant here are the schemataoperating on individual and social levels, the structures and processessometimes designated by the terms personality and culture. These sys-tems of information generate the assumptions, values, meanings, options,possibilities and constraints that individuals and societies use in defining,making sense of and acting in their worlds.

From this perspective, raiding (or any other behavior) occurs when itis selected from a set of perceived alternatives as a viable means of achiev-ing specific culturally constituted goals within a particular culturally con-stituted reality. Explaining Waorani homicide thus requires attending topeople’s purposes and intentions—to what they want to achieve—and tocultural and individual assumptions, beliefs and values, and the socialorder in which they are embedded. These constitute the behavioral envi-ronments within which people make their choices and chart their coursesof action (cf. Hallowell 1967).5

Organizing and giving structure to the vast body of informationthat constitutes a society’s culture is a set of underlying assump-tions and premises about what is and what should be—the society’sworldview—core assumptions about the nature of human beings, theworld around them, and the relations that should and do obtain amongthem (Kearney 1984; Kluckhohn and Strodtbeck 1961; Robarchek 1977a,1980; Robarchek and Robarchek 1992, 1998).

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THE CULTURAL CONSTRUCTION OF WAORANI REALITY

Because all people are born into social worlds that are already cul-turally constituted, much of the information that comes to constituteindividuals’ cognitive and affective schemata is incorporated from thatpreexisting body of cultural knowledge. Just as people enculturated in aparticular linguistic context acquire the information and the behavioralhabits that allow them to speak the language spoken around them, so alsodo they acquire other information about their world and habits of dealingwith it.

These fundamental existential and normative assumptions are dis-tributively located in the personalities of the individual members of asociety (Schwartz 1978; Spiro 1951), embodied (along with a great dealof additional cultural knowledge) in individuals’ beliefs, attitudes, values,habits, expectations, motives and goals. They constitute individuals’ as-sumptions about the nature of their reality and about how to deal with it.They tell people what they and others are like, what the world is like, howthey should feel about it, what is good and to be sought after, what is badand to be avoided, and so on, and are acquired by each new generationfrom the sociocultural milieu, largely during the processes of socializa-tion and enculturation. Because those processes and the resulting cogni-tive/affective schemata remain open to new information, however, thoseassumptions can be modified—even transformed—by novel experience(see Robarchek and Robarchek 1996a, b: 1998 for a case in point). Thusthey become widely (but not necessarily universally) shared componentsof the next generation’s knowledge systems.

Waorani culture defines a world where people are not subject tostronger or more powerful beings and forces, a world that people canmaster and turn to their own ends. The vast forest poses little threat andevokes no fear; rather, it exists to be exploited for human purposes. Thisis an environment over all of which except the human component theyhave mastery, and within which every person is ultimately responsible to,and for, himself or herself.

A people’s worldview assumptions are seldom readily available tothem for conscious reflection; rather, they are implicit in thought andaction. Thus, worldview must be abstracted from observations of people’sactions: from their responses in various situations, from their voiced atti-tudes and values, from religious and ethnomedical beliefs and practices,from censorious gossip, and so on.

As we immersed ourselves in our primary study community, wewere able to identify six fundamental clusters of Waorani worldviewpresuppositions6:

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1. The world exists for humans to exploit. It is not inherently threatening, dangerousor hostile to humans or to human intentions. It offers few dangers beyond the humanthreats of sorcery and spearing.

2. People are powerful and effective. They are fully capable of controlling a world thatis tractable to human purposes, and thus are, and should be, in control of their ownexperiences.

3. People are independent and autonomous. A person should be self-reliant, and everyperson’s survival and wellbeing is primarily his or her own responsibility.

4. People are equal, politically and economically. No one can compel another to doanything, except through the threat or application of force. There are no rank distinc-tions on the basis of gender, kinship, wealth, or anything else. Therefore, everyone, andespecially kin, should be equal in terms of all desired “good,” material or immaterial.

5. There are fundamental differences between Waorani (“people”) and kowudı (“for-eigners”), and between girınani (kin) and warani (non-kin). Only among a restrictedset of girınani are there definite obligations and responsibilities; all the rest are actualor potential enemies.

6. There are no accidents here. An important implication of this empowered and op-timistic construction of a world under human control is that most serious misfortunealso has its origins in human action. Serious misfortunes, especially illness, snakebitesand other injuries and deaths, are products of purposive human action rooted in rageand expressed either directly at the point of a spear or, now more commonly, indirectlyin the all-too-human malevolence, envy and rage of sorcerers and those who employthem (Robarchek and Robarchek 1998).

THE CULTURAL CONSTRUCTION OF A WAORANI SELF

A crucial component of the cultural construction of reality at the indi-vidual level is the cultural construction of self. Waorani cultural construc-tion of personhood emphasizes, as we have seen, individualism, autonomy,self-reliance and egalitarianism. Both men and women are expected to be,and for the most part are, independent, self-reliant, and self-sufficient.

Even within kindreds, support is conditional on one’s own capacityto be self-reliant. The elderly, when they became a burden, were often al-lowed to starve or were even speared to death by their own kin (Robarchekand Robarchek 1996, 1998; Yost 1981a). A man partially paralyzed duringthe polio epidemic that struck shortly after contact starved to death whenhis wife refused to feed him. Another woman allowed her grandmother,who had adopted and raised her after her parents were speared, to starve todeath when she could no longer get food for herself. When raiders struck,men often abandoned their wives, and women their children, as they fledinto the forest.

Cultural values such as self-reliance and autonomy are, of course,ideals, and it cannot simply be assumed, as is often done, that they arenecessarily isomorphic with individuals’ perceptions and understandings

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of what they themselves are like.7 But, although they may not be iso-morphic, neither are they unrelated. Cultural values, as ideals, largelyconstitute the standards against which people are judged, both by theirneighbors and by themselves. People see themselves evaluated in the eyesof (and through the responses of) others, and they evaluate themselves interms of how badly or well they approximate these ideals. Cultural ide-als thus inform individuals’ ideals, helping to shape central componentsof their selves and self-images (cf. Hallowell 1967; Lewis 1995). In fact,individual Waorani, both men and women, are typically independent, au-tonomous, self-reliant, confident and pragmatic; they see themselves liv-ing in a world they feel fully competent to control and exploit.

THE CULTURAL CONSTITUTION OF WAORANI EMOTION

A cultural knowledge system not only has implications for how indi-viduals think about the world, but it also shapes how they feel about it. Thecultural emphases on egalitarianism and on the primacy, autonomy andeffectiveness of the self have psychological implications—both cognitiveand affective—as well as implications for social action.8

Such cultural assumptions, incorporated as individual ideals, not onlydescribe how things are, but they also define how things should be. Theirviolation contradicts the natural, proper, moral order of things and callsinto question the basic assumptions and values that give life meaning,stability and coherence. For Waorani the appropriate emotional responseto such violations is homicidal rage pıınti-—“raging.”

Autonomy

Because the autonomy and effectiveness of the self are paramountassumptions and primary values, any interference with autonomy andeffectiveness violates the image and expectation of a self that is in controlof its own experience, and is felt as an assault on the self itself.

It is tempting to use the word frustration to label what we are describ-ing, but that term carries too much theoretical baggage. In the Frustration-Aggression theory of violence, “a frustration” is taken to be any interfer-ence with a goal-directed activity, a situation that triggers the emotion ofanger, which in turn generates an aggressive response (Berkowitz 1969).

Such a view of “frustration” is not very useful here; first, it includesany sort of interference with a goal, and second, it entails a conceptionof emotion, specifically of anger, as part of a “prepackaged” response se-quence that is triggered by, but otherwise independent of, the context inwhich it is elicited. Neither of those assumptions applies to the Waoranicase.9

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One of the things that most impressed us while we were living with theWaorani was their typically good humor, even in the face of what wouldusually be considered “frustration.” Many frustrations, as we ordinarilythink of them—a man spends a week building the structure for a newhouse and a storm blows it down; a woman slips and falls, dumping thebasket of plantains she has carried for a mile; a flood washes away half ofa woman’s manioc garden—provoked not anger, but laughter, both frombystanders and from the “victims.”

For Waorani, it is not simply the interruption of a goal-directed ac-tivity that provokes rage. Rather, it is active human infringement of one’sautonomy and the resulting experience of helplessness and powerless-ness, in other words, the inability to be effective and in control of one’sexperiences. A sibling is shot and killed when a raid goes wrong; a sor-cerer causes a child to die; a suitor’s marriage plans are blocked when anold woman objects to the proposed marriage of her grandchildren—thesekinds of situations are seen as deliberate assaults by another person on theautonomy of the self, and they are the kinds of incidents that precipitatehomicidal rage. (Each of these did, in fact, result in one or more killings).

Questioning one of our neighbors about a fairly recent killing, we gotthe following explanation:

In regard to Gamı, her grandchildren wanted to marry and Gamı refused. Angry, theyspeared her and she died. Her grandson said, “Like that grandmother refuses, and I willkill her.” Her grandchildren wanting to marry, they speared Gamı.

“Why did the grandmother refuse?” we asked.

The grandmother, why might she have refused [meaning, “who knows why”]? She toldthem: “Do not marry!” For that reason they killed her and she died. Even though shewas their own grandmother, they cut her head off and put it on a stake and threw herbody into the river. Like that they did it.

In a case such as this, the concept of “frustration” as it is typi-cally understood ignores the crucial feature for the Waorani: the percep-tion of one person’s deliberate infringement of another’s autonomy. Inso doing, it also ignores the crucial role of cultural and individual valuesand assumptions in giving such events their emotional and motivationalpower.

The conception of emotion implicit in the Frustration-Aggression the-ory is similarly deficient. It sees emotion generally, and anger specifically,as things that exist independently of the culturally defined contexts inwhich they occur. As Rosaldo argues for the Ilongot, it just is.

We found, in contrast, that the experience of a particular emotion,in this case of anger/rage, is a part of a person’s evaluation and definitionof a situation in terms of a set of cultural values and assumptions. Theemotion, then, is a function not only of the “objective” situation (e.g.,

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of some intervening event), but of the interpretation of the event bya whole person—including his or her own biological processes, cultur-ally structured history, cognitive/affective schemata and learned responsepatterns—in interaction with an environment that is, itself, culturally con-stituted. From this perspective, the subjective experience of emotion is,among other things, a part of the process of making experience compre-hensible by assigning meaning to it.

The relationship between the attribution of meaning and the experi-ence of emotion can be seen clearly in situations in which, for most of us(i.e., non-Waorani), the most dominant and persistent emotion would begrief: one’s child is bitten by a snake and dies; a sibling contracts polio andis dead in a few days; a man’s wife is stung by a scorpion, goes into shock,and dies in hours. In all of these cases, the almost immediate reaction onthe part of surviving kin was homicidal rage.

In situations such as these, the relationship between culture andemotion enters into the processes of definition and evaluation in at leasttwo ways. First, all of these situations were culturally defined as theconsequences of the actions of other persons, as acts of sorcery. Thuseach was defined and perceived by surviving kin as a human attack ontheir autonomy.

Second, all of these situations violated the assumptions of the au-tonomous and effective self that has the capacity to control its experience;they generated the subjective experience of powerlessness. The emotionthat is culturally appropriate to that experience is, for Waorani, rage, andit was in terms of rage that the survivors defined their feelings. The emo-tional response, in all of these cases, was rage, and the behavioral responsewas homicide.10

Individuals’ belief—derived from the cultural knowledge system—in the existence and malevolence of sorcerers provides a framework fortheir understandings of, and responses to, such misfortunes. At the sametime, the belief in sorcery itself is subjectively validated: the felt affectivearousal, defined and experienced as rage, reinforces the cultural assump-tion that the situation is a result of the deliberate hostile action of anotherperson. It is obviously true because it coincides with the emotional re-sponse of rage. It feels true; therefore, a human agent—a sorcerer—mustbe responsible (cf. Garro 1997).

Curiously (to us), however, the rage and violence elicited in thesekinds of situations are not necessarily directed at the perceived “guilty”party. As the Rosaldos described for the Ilongot, an innocent person mayserve just as well as a target. Returning from a raid in which a siblinghas been killed by kowudı, a Waorani youth sees his elderly grandmotherlying in her hammock, and drives a spear through her where she lies(Robarchek and Robarchek 1998).

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This “displacement” of rage is comprehensible if the rage elicited inthese situations is not so much a response to a specific act as it is an unfo-cused emotional reaction to a violation of autonomy and of the capacity tocontrol events, in other words, to the experience of powerlessness. Suchunfocused rage may, it seems, be as easily directed at an innocent by-stander. In the Waorani psychological map, the natural reaction to suchrage, one that restores a sense of autonomy and control, is homicide. Aswith the Ilongot, the identity of the victim is largely irrelevant.

Similarly, the difficulty that we encountered in eliciting what we con-sidered to be coherent “reasons” for particular spearing raids becomescomprehensible if the fundamental cause of the raiders’ rage is the chal-lenge to the self posed by the perceived loss of autonomy and control; theprecipitating event is, again, largely irrelevant.

Egalitarianism

The Waorani egalitarian assumption is, as we have seen, manifestedsocially in political and economic equality, but it also has implicationsat the individual level in relation to autonomy. People are unwilling toconcede authority to anyone else, and no one, not even the smallest child,can be forced to do anything. Every person is ultimately a free agent,responsible to, and for, no one but himself or herself. This was exemplifiedfor us by one of our informants’ account of his mother’s abandonment ofhim when he was a child:

My mother now lives at Pavacachi [a Quichua village far downriver on the Curaray].Oruga [a Quichua woman married to a Waorani] said she saw her there. She is marriedto an Oruna [Quichua]. She left after Moipa speared Kento. She was angry and fearfulover that; she said, “My brother is dead and I am going to the place of the kowudı(foreigners).” Having said that she left permanently. She feared that she too would bespeared. From her sleeping-place, abandoning me when I was in my early childhood,she fled into the forest. She went empty-handed, taking nothing. She was pregnant whenshe fled. [Robarchek and Robarchek 1998:118]

Economically, egalitarianism is reflected in the normative assump-tion that no one should have more of anything than anyone else. Fromthe perspective of any individual, this implies that “No one should haveanything that I do not have.”

Prior to contact, there was, in fact, little variation in material wealthamong individuals, because all resources were equally accessible to ev-eryone; however, the end of large-scale raiding brought an influx of manu-factured goods and the opportunity to work for the oil companies that areoperating in the region, and economic differences have begun to appear.This violates the egalitarian principle, and when people see themselves asmaterially deprived in relation to others, especially to their own kin, theresult is malignant envy.

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Envy necessarily indicates a violation of the egalitarian premise be-cause, by definition, it entails the idea that “someone has something de-sirable that I do not have.” This violates both the existential assump-tion that equality is “normal” and the normative assumption that it ismorally “right.” And, like the violation of autonomy, inequality is inher-ently rage inducing. In the Waorani psychological schema, envy and therage it evokes in others find their expression in attacks by sorcery.11

THE ETHNOPSYCHOLOGY OF RAGE

If we examine their own explanations for raiding and their attribu-tions of homicidal rage to others, Waorani ethnopsychology supports theforegoing analysis. This can be most clearly seen in people’s explanationsof why sorcerers bewitch others, that is, in people’s understanding of oth-ers’ rage as that understanding is revealed in accusations of sorcery. Wehold that these explanations of others’ motives for sorcery make cognitiveand emotional “sense” to Waorani because they represent people’s gener-alization and projection onto others of their understandings of their ownfeelings and motives: people know how they feel in similar situations.

So, why do sorcerers bewitch people? Because they (or the peoplewho employ them) are enraged, of course.

Digging deeper into specific accounts of sorcery, we found two pri-mary reasons given for the rage that is believed to motivate it. Most com-monly it was, again, because of someone’s interference with the achieve-ment of another’s objectives: a woman refuses another’s request for foodfrom her garden, for example.12

The second kind of explanation for sorcery sees it rooted in envy. Aspearing raid that occurred just prior to our last visit was precipitated bythe sudden death of a Quichua woman who had married into a Waoranicommunity. Her death, probably from anaphylactic shock following a scor-pion sting, was immediately attributed to sorcery. The alleged motive wasthat her relatives in her home village were envious of the things, espe-cially her four gold teeth, that her husband had purchased with moneyhe earned working for one of the oil companies. One of our neighborsrecounted to us the universally accepted account of the event:

Now, Iteka’s wife was an Oruna [Quichua] from the Curaray, and she took many ofthese gifts from The Company home to her mother. There, all her relatives saw hergold teeth and became very envious and angry that she should have gotten so manygood things from The Company whereas they had nothing. Her mother’s people wentto the sorcerer—Manwedo [Manuel] was his name—and gave him money and he senta scorpion to sting her. Having been stung, Maria went into her house; it hurt all nightand bled. Before she died, she said, “For my gold teeth, my pots and my axes, I am goingto die!” By morning she was dead.

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The raid mounted soon after by her husband and his kin killed thesuspected sorcerer, his wife and two of his three children. Only a teenageddaughter managed to scramble out a window and flee to safety. (SeeRobarchek and Robarchek 1998 for a more detailed discussion of thisepisode.)

In another case, what sounds like a stroke was attributed to sorcerythat was inspired by envy. Omaka, an old man whom we had interviewedand whose hunting songs we had recorded in his hamlet, a Christianizedvillage on the Tzapino River had, we heard, disappeared while hunting.“Maybe he was speared by the Tageiri” (a still “wild” band), people said.

Some time later, we met a young man from his hamlet in the frontiertown of Puyo; we asked if there was any news of Omaka. He told us thatthe old man had gone hunting and been attacked by jaguars sent by asorcerer. He was missing for five days and when he found his way homehe couldn’t remember anything and he couldn’t speak. His mouth and onearm were affected. For three days and nights his relatives gathered aroundhim and prayed to God, and then he could speak, but not very well.

Who did it? we asked.

People at Tonyempadı- did it; they bewitched him.

Why did they do sorcery?

They are raging.

Why are they raging?

Because at Tzapino we have lots of food, lots of meat. What they did is very bad.

Inequities in material goods are, however, not the only source of envy,as is illustrated by an accusation of witchcraft that occurred some yearsago.

We were talking with a neighbor one day about the deaths of hergrandmother, Akawo, and Akawo’s sister, Gamı, both of whom had beenspeared within the previous several years. This was her account:

“Those two are witches,” they said. After people become old, they always say that aboutold men and old women. Now they are saying the same thing about Dyiko because sheis old. Now she behaves well, but in former times she was a witch. For example, shebewitched the child of her sister-in-law, Omengki-di-, and she died. The child, a girl, wasvery beautiful and Dyiko, seeing her, said, “How can she be so beautiful? I will bewitchher and she is going to die!”

They lived in the same house at that time. One day Dyiko was swinging in her hammockback from the doorway and Omengki-di-’s child came jumping into the house. Dyikobewitched her, perhaps it was as if she was bitten by a snake, and the child cried outin pain. As Omengki-di- came in after her child, carrying her back basket, she heard herchild cry out, but there was nothing to be seen. As she set the basket down, the childcried out, then she died. She was about as old as my sister’s child, Gımari (about 4 yearsold).

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“How did she do it?” we asked

With mıı [ayahuasca] she did it. She drank; while drinking, she said, “She will not growmore beautiful, she is going to die!” After drinking the mıı, she went to the house wherethe child would be. She drank; then Omengki-di-’s child came in through the door and“Yeee!” she cried out in pain. Omengki-di-, coming in, said, “Why does she cry out?” Shecried out again and again, suffering, and finally died. Like that she did, Dyiko, in heryouth.

“Why did she do it?”

After seeing this beautiful person, perhaps she thought, “She is growing so beautiful,everyone will want to marry/sleep with her,” and she became enraged. “I don’t have achild like that,” she said. So saying, being enraged, Omengki-di-’s child she bewitched,and she died.

This attribution of rage and murderous intent to those who are pre-sumed to be envious reflects Waorani perceptions of the psychodynamicsof anger. Implicit in these accusations of sorcery is the assumption thatinequality, like powerlessness, is inherently rage producing. Envy is thusintrinsically hostile and, like powerlessness, the rage it generates finds itsexpression in sorcery.

RAGE/GRIEF EXPLAINED

In summary, our argument to this point is that the Waorani experienceof rage in grief is, contra Rosaldo, amenable to explanation in terms ofother social, cultural and psychological variables and processes, and thatthese variables and processes can be discovered and explored through theapplication of standard ethnographic methods by researchers who needassert no particular claims to exceptional empathetic understanding.

In the Waorani case, social relations and the assumptions and valuesimplicit in them comprise the context of enculturation for each new gen-eration. Culturally structured experiences within that social milieu shapethe cognitive and affective cores of developing individual personalities asthose cultural assumptions and values become embodied in individualbeliefs, attitudes, values, habits, expectations, motives and goals. At themost fundamental levels—the construction and perceptions of self and ofthe world around oneself—the processes are culturally informed.

Given that individual personalities are premised on these values andassumptions, which impart meaning and coherence to experience, theirviolation or contradiction is experienced as a violation of the natural andmoral order of things.

For Waorani, the ability to project one’s expectations onto and torealize one’s goals in the world is the essence of the autonomous, effectiveself. Powerlessness, the experience of events that are beyond one’s control,

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events such as the unwanted and unexpected death of a spouse, child orsibling (always seen to be caused by the actions of another), violates thatcore assumption about how the world is and how it should be.

In a similar way, the experience of envy signals a violation of the egali-tarian assumption. Both perceived powerlessness and perceived inequalityare experienced as assaults on the self, situations where the appropriateemotional response is rage and where the culturally and psychologicallyappropriate behavioral response, one that restores the sense of power andeffectiveness, is homicide.

Both of these can be seen in the attribution of homicidal motivesto others in accusations of sorcery. Sorcerers’ motives for murder bysorcery are seen to be expressions of their anger and envy, rooted in thesame existential and normative assumptions. Rage and homicide are theassumed natural consequences of a refusal to grant a request or to accedeto a marriage, of envy of someone’s beautiful child or of a woman’s goldteeth.

RAGE, HOMICIDE, AND THE ETHNOLOGICAL ENTERPRISE

It was the striking similarity in Waorani and Ilongot explanations forraiding that first led us to think about writing this article. Contemplatingthat similarity raised a question that, although it is not directly relevantto the argument that we made above, bears on the larger issue of the ap-propriate methods and goals of anthropology. Is it possible, we wondered,that similar psychological and sociocultural processes might be at workin these two societies half a world apart?

Because the crux of our argument thus far has been that the Waoranigrief/rage/homicide complex can be explained in terms of their culturalconstructions of selves and reality, we felt it would be helpful to knowsomething about Ilongot world view, values and concepts of self. That, inturn, led us to the Rosaldos’ earlier monographs on the Ilongot: IlongotHeadhunting (R. Rosaldo 1980) and Knowledge and Passion (M. Rosaldo1980) and to their other publications (e.g., M. Rosaldo 1982, 1983), wherewe found some striking correspondences between Ilongot and Waoraniconstructions of self and reality.

Although autonomy, independence and self-reliance may not be cul-turally emphasized to the extremes that they are among the Waorani, theydo seem to be important components of Ilongot self-constructions, par-ticularly for men. Renato Rosaldo observed that: “Coordination amongautonomous individuals requires a particularly high degree of flexibil-ity and responsiveness. . . . Ilongots can try to persuade their fellow hu-mans to do as they wish, but they cannot simply tell them what to do”

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(Rosaldo 1989:117). And: “In their everyday lives, Ilongots were relatively‘anarchistic’: they often said that no person has the right to tell anotherwhat to do” (Rosaldo 1989:65).

Similarly, Michelle Rosaldo describes autonomy, equality indepen-dence, self sufficiency, self-direction and self-control as adult male values(1980:75, 91, 175, 226; 1983:149–150) central to a “sense of self,” observ-ing that:

One might well claim that the individual man’s most intense ‘sense of self’ is won when,casting off a victim’s head, he establishes himself forever as an ‘angry’ man—autonomousbecause constrained by none, ready to pursue and later give direction to a wife becausean ‘equal’ in angry force to his fellows. [1980:226]

Renato Rosaldo also reported that the rage that motivates Ilongotheadhunting derives not only from grief, but from other situations thatcould be construed as interference with one’s autonomy or sense of self,including “one’s wife running off with another man” (1989:18).

Both monographs emphasize the value placed on egalitarianism andthe importance of its correlates, envy and anger, whose psychological andsociocultural significance may be as great as they are among the Waorani.Michelle Rosaldo titled one chapter “Knowledge, Identity and Order in anEgalitarian World” and in it, she stressed the causal relationship betweenthe violation of egalitarianism and the arousal of envy and anger:

Liget (anger, passion) derives from insults, slights, and other intimations of inequality.Typically born of ‘envy’. . . liget grows through the heart’s reflections on the successesof an ‘equal’. . . as it notes that ‘I have less.’ In a world in which equivalence is orderand social precedence and domination constitute an inevitable source of strain, ligetis the natural response to the vagaries of fortune, the ups and downs of social life andfate. . . . A woman is made envious and angry when her neighbors finish planting longbefore her, or if they reap a more impressive yield. . . . Similarly, a man’s heart rises withliget when he notes that other men, in every way his equals, outdo him in their hunts.One person’s boasts, news of another’s happy fortune, may stir the heart with ‘angry’musing—as can severe misfortune, which leads people to wonder why they alone mustsuffer loss. The things that people strive for and desire are things they want becauseother people have them. [M. Rosaldo 1980:47; see also 1982:210]

Both authors also repeatedly stress the causal relationships (appar-ently well recognized by the Ilongot themselves) among envy, anger andheadhunting: “. . . Ilongots had said that they went headhunting becauseof their emotions, because grief, envy or humiliation had laid a weight thatthey would cast off with their hearts” (M. Rosaldo 1980:34).

And: “. . . in fact, informants told me, if men were not envious of oneanother’s exploits, no Ilongot would have enough ‘anger’ to want to kill”(M. Rosaldo 1980:46–47).

Renato Rosaldo also emphasizes that, although adult men’s motivesfor headhunting are rooted in rage derived from grief and loss, young menare motivated to kill by angry envy of the hornbill earrings worn by those

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who have already taken a head (1980:140, 157, 161–68,177, 257, 254;1989:17–18).

This rage, derived from envy and violations of autonomy and senseof self, though intense is, as is the case with the Waorani, also diffuse andunfocused: “Born of insult, disappointment, envy and irritation, liget isthe source of motions in the heart that may, unfocused and unsatisfied,produce no more than wild violence, social chaos.” (M. Rosaldo 1980:47).

And when this rage eventuates in homicide, the identity of the vic-tim is, according to Renato Rosaldo, utterly irrelevant, merely a target ofopportunity (1980, 1989).

All this suggests at least the possibility that the similarities in Waoraniand Ilongot grief/rage and homicide might be explainable, at least in part,in terms of similar fundamental existential and normative assumptionsabout themselves and the worlds they inhabit.

That possibility raises yet another question: If the Ilongot grief/ragecomplex is, in fact, a product of people operating under a particular set ofcultural assumptions that have been incorporated as components of theirown individual knowledge systems, how could the complex suddenly makecoherent emotional “sense” to Rosaldo after the tragic death of his wife?

We have elsewhere discussed the similarities between fundamentalWaorani and Western (especially American) conceptions of self and realityand the values that derive from them:

It is difficult for an American observer not to admire them [Waorani] because, in manyways, they are an extreme version of us. Their worldview and value system are strikinglysimilar to our own: humankind is seen as being dominant over nature and in chargeof its own destiny; independence, autonomy, self-reliance and courage are all highlyvalued. Moreover, their culture, like ours, is suffused with violence. Although their masskilling has largely ceased, violence lurks just below the consciousness of even thoseyoung people who did not experience it directly. Waorani fascination with the spearingsof the past mirrors the obsession of our mass media, itself a reflection of our culturaland individual ambivalence about violence. [Robarchek and Robarchek 1996b:75; Cf.also Bellah 1985; Hsu 1972; Inkles 1979; Kluckhohn and Strodtbeck 1961; Nottingham1971; Spence 1985]13

The argument that anger in western culture is related to the values ofindependence and self-determination has also been advanced by Kitayamaand Markus (1994):

Anger is a central and natural emotion in Western cultures primarily because thesecultures stress independence and the expression of one’s internal attributes such asrights, goals or needs, and because anger is most closely associated with the blocking ofthese rights, goals, or needs. [1994:8]

Because it appears that we also share some similar constructions ofself and reality with the Ilongot, these similarities in Ilongot and Americanworld views may help to explain why the Ilongot concatenation of grief

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and rage made cognitive and emotional sense to Rosaldo, and why hisaccount has seemed so natural and convincing to so many of his Western,especially American, colleagues.14

It is critically important to recognize that this conjunction of envy,grief and rage, although it may be common to Waorani, Ilongot and Amer-icans, and probably to others whose individual and cultural knowledgesystems are premised on similar existential and normative assumptions,is not, contra Rosaldo, universal. Nothing even remotely resembling thatcomplex exists among the Malaysian Semai (among whom we have alsoconducted extensive ethnographic fieldwork), whose view of themselvesand their world is radically different. They see themselves as powerless ina hostile universe that is entirely beyond their control (Robarchek 1977a,1980, 1986; Robarchek and Robarchek 1989, 1992). In that experientialcontext, grief is typically conjoined not with anger or rage, but with fear asthe community draws itself together to resist the malevolent forces thatmenace from without. (Robarchek 1977a, 1979a).15

Finally, we must emphasize that this (or any) constellation of cog-nitive and affective orientations does not determine people’s behavior.Rather, it defines a behavioral context within which people make deci-sions based on the totality of the information available to them. Americansdo not typically respond to grief with violence, and even Waorani, whennew information permitted them to envision and formulate new goals,largely abandoned their generations-old pattern of revenge killing almostovernight.

The first peaceful contacts, mediated by a small group of Americanmissionaries and by two Waorani women who had fled the vendettas andreturned after years of living among the Quichua, opened a world of newpossibilities to Waorani: access new goods—shotguns, axes, machetes andother tools, snakebite anti-venom and other medicines—access to poten-tial spouses in previously hostile groups and, perhaps most important, animage of a world without the constant threat of attack. This new informa-tion and new perceptions of reality allowed the formulation of new indi-vidual and social goals, and people responded by choosing new coursesof action based on what they wanted from this new reality. Once con-vinced that other groups would do the same, individual bands, one by one,abandoned raiding within a matter of months after contact. The homiciderate plunged by more than 90 percent, yet their basic worldview assump-tions remained essentially unchanged (Robarchek and Robarchek 1996a,1998). The old cultural and psychological schemata of envy, grief and ragepersist but, in this new reality, they are only infrequently manifested inhomicidal raiding. The speed with which the transformation from violenceto relative peacefulness occurred can only be explained as a consequenceof the Waorani’s conscious striving to achieve what they themselves had

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long wanted: an end to the killing. When the opportunity presented itself,they seized and implemented it, a powerful demonstration of the capacityfor human beings to take their destinies into their own hands.16

CONCLUSION

We began by questioning the assertions that the Ilongot complex ofgrief, rage and homicide is an irreducible fact impervious to further ex-planation, and that such phenomena can only be understood—but notexplained—through the empathetic “positioning” of the observer by sim-ilar experience. If these assertions are valid, then, many have argued, theimplication is that generalizing, comparative social science is impossible.

If, on the other hand, the grief/rage complex can be explained withreference to other phenomena such as existential and normative world-view assumptions, cultural beliefs such as sorcery, cultural values suchas autonomy and egalitarianism, and individuals’ culturally conditionedcognitive and affective orientations, and if such analyses are dependenton data that can be derived from (at least theoretically) replicable op-erations that are not contingent on observers’ empathetic identity with“the natives,” then that implication seems, at the very least, to be opento serious question.

And beyond that, if there is any validity to our admittedly superficialexamination and analysis of the Ilongot grief/anger/homicide complex,then it is reasonable to suggest the hypothesis that similar psychologi-cal and sociocultural processes may underlie the violence in these twosocieties (and, as we have argued elsewhere [Robarchek and Robarchek1996b, 1998] in American urban street gangs as well).

The mere possibility that such cross-cultural regularities may existand be discoverable suggests that, contrary to the claims of some of ourcolleagues, comparative research and cross-cultural generalization may bepossible after all. That possibility is, in itself, more than sufficient to justifythe continuation of the ethnological enterprise, despite the prematurereports of its demise.

CLAYTON ROBARCHEK is Professor and Graduate Coordinator of Anthropology at Wichita State University.CAROLE ROBARCHEK is Research Development Specialist at Wichita State University.

NOTES

Acknowledgments. This article is based on a paper of the same title presented at thesymposium “Indigenous Amazonia at the Millennium: Politics and Religion,” January 11–

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14, 2001, New Orleans. Fieldwork among the Waorani in 1987 and subsequent data analysiswere supported by research grants from the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation. Supportfor fieldwork in 1992–1993 was provided by the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation andthe United States Institute of Peace. We gratefully acknowledge their support, without whichour research would not have been possible. We want to thank our colleagues Robert Lawlessand Donald Blakeslee and the Editor and reviewers for Ethos for their thoughtful reading ofthe manuscript and for their helpful suggestions.

The names of all living Waorani individuals used in this article are pseudonyms.1. An earlier version of the chapter was published as “Grief and a Headhunter’s Rage:

On the Cultural Force of Emotions,” in Text, Play and Story: The Construction and Recon-struction of Self and Society (Bruner 1984).

2. We recently received a report that one such band recently speared to death two Quichuasettlers on the lower Curaray River (Camille Tipton-Allaband, personal communication). Stillmore recently, we heard an Ecuadorian news report that one of the “pacified” bands raidedand wiped out the Tageiri (Tage’s group), probably the last uncontacted band of Waorani.

3. We are not assuming that pıınti- and “raging” are necesarily subjectively identical statesbut, at the very least, there appears to be substantial overlap between them. Based on ourexperience, “raging” seems to us to be the best English gloss for the term.

4. The concept of schema first entered anthropology in the 1970s with the rise of cyber-netics, information theory and General Systems Theory. After a flurry of interest, it largelydisappeared from anthropology, reemerging again in the early 1990s (e.g., D’Andrade 1992,1995; Strauss 1992; Strauss and Quinn 1997). The concept as we are employing it herederives from that earlier incarnation, specifically from Laszlo (1969, 1972), who proposedan hierarchy of schemata at different organizational levels from the genetic to the sociocul-tural, information and control structures that, in toto, operate to constitute the processes ofadjustment and adaptation (see Robarchek 1977a).

5. We are, of course, not claiming that all motivational processes are necessarily fullyconscious and “rational.” Intrapsychic processes (e.g., projection) are clearly motivation-ally important but operate below the level of consciousness. Similarly, learned behavioralpropensities (e.g., dependency), cognitive constructs (e.g., worldview assumptions), andaffective orientations (e.g., fearfulness) all inform decision-making processes but are them-selves generally not accessible for conscious reflection (cf. Robarchek 1979a, 1985, 1986,1989).

6. For a discussion of the methods we used to elicit these assumptions, see Robarchek1977a, Robarchek and Robarchek 1992.

7. Spiro (1993) emphasizes the necessity of grounding models of the self in observations ofthe behavior of real people rather than simply assuming an isomorphism between normativecultural ideals and individuals’ perceptions of themselves. See Robarchek and Robarchek1998 for a discussion of the methodology we employed in deriving this model.

8. Our primary purpose in writing this article was to address one aspect of the post-modernist challenge to ethnology. Because emotion is central to our argument, however,several reviewers suggested that we should locate it within the constructionist/essentialistcontroversy over the nature of emotion. Toward that end, the position we take, could becharacterized as a “moderate constructionist stance” (Reddy 1997:346) that:

Drawing on the work of Cannon 1927, 1929, Selye (1956) and others [it sees emotionbuilt on] . . . a generalized state of physiological and psychological arousal. This arousalstate prepares the organism for a variety of possible responses. . . . This response systemis probably phylogenetically very old. Indeed, it is unlikely that survival would be pos-sible without some mechanism that, in the presence of a noxious stimulus, instigates abehavioral response directed toward avoiding or overcoming the stimulus. Some suchmechanism clearly exists in the most primitive organisms and phylogenetically pre-dates the evolution of higher nervous systems with their more complex psychological

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processes and cognitive functions. That some such mechanism is also ontogeneticallyprior to the development of complex cognitive processes in humans is suggested by theexistence of so-called “innate fears” in human infants: the undifferentiated agitationinduced by loud noises or loss of support (cf. Bridges 1932; Watson 1920). The basic re-action can thus apparently operate without the operation of higher cognitive processes,even in humans. . . . In humans, this complex state of arousal is ordinarily perceived asemotional arousal, perhaps, in the absence of adequate situational cues, as generalizedanxiety. . . . The specific emotion an individual experiences is determined on the basisof a cognitive appraisal and interpretation of the situation in which he finds himself.This “situation” includes both the objective stimulus and the arousal state itself. Theindividual evaluates and interprets these in the light of his personal history of culturallypatterned and idiosyncratic experience, including his knowledge of the situation and[his] culturally learned beliefs and values. . . . Culture, then, though not the only source,is a major source for the attribution of meaning to situations inducing arousal. Thisattribution of meaning is central to the process of evaluation and interpretation that de-termines which specific emotion is experienced. . . . Emotion, then, is a function not onlyof the “objective” situation, but rather of the whole person, including his past historyand stable response patterns, in interaction with an environment that is itself culturallyconstituted. . . . The subjective emotion, once defined, does, as Berkowitz [1969] andothers have argued, motivate behavioral responses. It does not, however, determine aspecific response. The cultural milieu defines the appropriate behavioral response toa particular emotion. The individual learns, in the course of his enculturation, whichbehaviors are appropriate to particular situations and it is these behaviors that aremotivated by the emotional state (cf. Bandura 1973). Thus in one cultural setting theappropriate response to fear may be flight, in another, attack. (Robarchek 1977b:774; forfurther discussion and applications of this biocultural model of emotion see Robarchek1979a, 1980, 1985, 1986, 1992, 1998; cf. Hinton 1999; Spiro 1951; inter alios).

9. They did not apply in the case of the Malaysian Semai either. See Robarchek 1977b,1979a.

10. Chagnon describes what appears to be a similar grief/rage/homicide complex for theYanomamo: “. . . they describe the feelings of the bereaved as hushuwo, a word that can betranslated as ‘anger verging on violence’. . . . It is common to hear statements such as ‘If mysick mother dies, I will kill some people.’ ” (1988:986).

Schiefflin (1983) also saw a relationship among grief, anger and retaliation among theKaluli, but the psychocultural dynamic, premised on different cultural assumptions, differsfrom that of the Waorani.

11. Numerous researchers have described affects associated with egalitarianism, glossingthem variously as “shame,” and “anger” (Schiefflin 1983); “shame,” “anger,” “envy,” and“grief” (M. Rosaldo 1983); and “anger” (Myers 1988). Shoek (1966) argued for connectionsamong an ideology of equality, envy and violence.

12. See Robarchek and Robarchek 1998:110–112 for an example of just this sort of per-ceived motive for sorcery.

13. Hollan (1992), Spiro (1993), and Holland and Kipnis (1994) have raised serious ques-tions about recent constructions of the concept of “self” and have particularly criticized thedichotomization of “selves” into an individualistic “western” self and a sociocentric “Other,”characteristic of the rest of the world (e.g., Geertz 1984; Shweder and Bourne 1984; Markusand Kitayama 1991). The argument that we are presenting here would seem to lend supportto those criticisms.

14. This, of course, supports the postmodernist argument about the importance of “po-sitioning” (in this case, cultural) in offering insight into ethnographic realities. We have noquarrel with that argument, only with the often-asserted corollary that no other kind ofunderstanding or explanation is possible.

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15. Benedict described yet another possibility, headhunting as a response to the death ofa close relative among the Kwakiutl, but there it was motivated not by anger, but by shame:“Death, like all other untoward accidents of existence, confounded man’s pride and couldonly be handled in terms of shame” (1959[1934]:216).

16. For descriptions of these first contacts from the missionary perspective, see Wallis1960, 1973. For analyses of the processes of change in cultural and psychological schematathat resulted in the Waorani’s abandonment of raiding, see Robarchek and Robarchek 1989,1996a, b; 1998

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