The gist of the debate is that Mead broadly argued there was a great deal of sexual freedom in 1920’s American Samoa, with a relative lack of jealousy, sexual shame, or sanctions for promiscuity during adolescence. In contrast, during his fieldwork decades later, Derek Freeman asserted Samoa was a much more rigid and moralistic society, with substantial prohibitions against premarital sex. Freeman would go as far as to argue that Mead was tricked by her informants, and her depiction of significant premarital sexual activity was a hoax.

While anthropologists have already discussed this topic to death over the decades, it recently occurred to me that it’s possible to tackle debates like this from a unique and largely unexplored angle.

Over at D-PLACE there are publicly available codes for thousands of variables across hundreds of societies. One such society is Western Samoa.

Now, for better and for worse, Western Samoa is not strictly the same society as the Samoa where Mead did her fieldwork. On D-PLACE Western Samoa is linked to the A’ana Kingdom in Western Upolu Island, with the focal year set as 1829, while Mead did her fieldwork on the island of Taʻū, nearly 300km away and a century later in 1925.

However, both populations speak the same language and broadly fall under the same cultural grouping, making these codes useful for comparative purposes at minimum. Additionally, the fact that the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample codes are linked to ethnographic works older and independent of Mead’s fieldwork is a benefit in terms of allowing for independent comparison between accounts of Samoa, beyond just rehashing the Mead vs Freeman disagreement.

I picked five SCCS variables related to adolescent sexual permissiveness and looked at where Samoa and other Polynesian societies fell on these scales. The five variables are: 1) talk about sex (SCCS159, how openly sex is discussed), 2) & 3) premarital sex frequency, female and male (SCCS167 & SCCS166, how commonly unmarried females and males actually have sex), 4) premarital sex attitude, female (SCCS165, how approving the society's stance is toward female premarital sex), and 5) premarital sex sanctions, girls (SCCS282, whether and how harshly girls' premarital sex is formally punished).

As you can see, compared to the rest of the world Samoa and other Polynesia societies do tend to be relatively sexually permissive across these five variables. The one exception in Samoa is premarital sexual sanctions, where Samoa is categorised as having extant but weak prohibitions.

I also performed ancestral state reconstruction using the phylogenetic supertree from Minocher et al. (2019), which estimates the trait values at the unobserved common ancestors by working backward up the tree from present-day societies. I used this method to see if sexual permissiveness could be inferred to be the ancestral Polynesian condition. The reconstructed common ancestor of the Polynesian societies lands on the permissive half of the scale, suggesting this pattern isn’t particular to Samoa but may represent an older Polynesian baseline.

The trait carries only weak phylogenetic signal (Pagel’s λ = 0.132) though, indicating that closely related societies resemble each other a bit more than chance, but premarital sex norms change readily across the tree. That makes deep reconstructions like trying to capture ancestral states very far back in human history impossible. The Polynesian estimate seems suggestive though since the clade is shallow having diverged relatively recently in human history, with only a handful of closely-related societies with less time for the trait to wander.

From what I can tell from the SCCS Focused Ethnographic Bibliography, the main source for the Western Samoa codes on sexual permissiveness is George Turner’s Samoa, A Hundred Years Ago And Long Before (1884). Turner describes a society where some degree of chastity is ideal, but in practice contains a good deal of sexual permissiveness;

Chastity was ostensibly cultivated by both sexes; but it was more a name than a reality. From their childhood their ears were familiar with the most obscene conversation; and as a whole family, to some extent, herded together, immorality was the natural and prevalent consequence. There were exception, especially among the daughters of persons of rank; but they were the exceptions, not the rule (Turner 1884: 91).

Importantly though Turner also alludes to a public virginity check during wedding ceremonies, which he is too scandalized by to describe; “The obscenity to prove her virginity which preceded this burst of feeling will not bear the light of description.” (Turner 1884: 94).

Turner notes how the virginity ideal is widespread but particularly concentrated among higher-rank families, and there can be exceptions among more ‘common people;

The marriage ceremonies of common people passed off in a house, and with less display; but the same obscene form was gone through to which we have referred--a custom which, doubtless, had some influence in cultivating chastity, especially among young women of rank. There was a fear of disgracing themselves and their friends, and a dread of a severe beating from the latter after the ceremony to which the faithless bride was sometimes subjected, almost as if the letter of the Mosaic law had been carried out upon her. But there were many marriages without any such ceremonies at all (Turner 1884: 95) [emphasis added].

You can see how similar Turner’s account is to Mead’s take on the matter, where she first notes a pattern of sexual permissiveness, describing clandestine love affairs, “usually of short duration and both boy and girl may be carrying on several at once” (Mead 1928: 91), but later on describes the virginity cult and the institution of the taupo among the higher-ranks;

From this free and easy [sexual] experimentation, the taupo [ceremonial virgin of high-rank] is excepted. Virginity is a legal requirement for her. At her marriage, in front of all the people…the talking chief of the bridegroom will take the tokens of her virginity. In former days should she prove not to be a virgin, her female relatives fell upon and beat her with stones…Although this virginity-testing ceremony was theoretically observed at weddings of people of all ranks, it was simply ignored if the boy knew that it was an idle form…The attitude towards virginity is a curious one. Christianity has, of course, introduced a moral premium on chastity. The Samoans regard this attitude with reverent but complete scepticism…But virginity definitely adds to a girl’s attractiveness, the wooing of a virgin is considered far more of a feat than the conquest of a more experienced heart…Where parents of lower rank complacently ignore their daughters’ experiments, the high chief guards his daughter’s virginity as he guards the honour of his name…The taupo may not visit in other houses in the village, or leave the house alone at night…The prestige of the village is inextricably bound up with the high repute of the taupo… (Mead 1928; 98-100).

Freeman, for his part, saw this same passage as evidence Mead had it backwards. Of her account of the taupo he wrote that she had depicted the system as “a curious appendage to the general practice of ‘promiscuity before marriage,’” which he called “a confused travesty of the traditional taupou system of Samoa” (1983:228). Freeman considers the taupo ideal to represent the ‘real’ Samoa, and Mead’s account of widespread sexual permissiveness among adolescents to be a fraud.

Reading Turner and Mead side by side though what strikes me overall is how much they agree on. Both describe a society where premarital sex was relatively common and casually regarded for many people, but both also describe the ‘cult of virginity’ attached to girls of rank, complete with a public test and violent sanction. Turner, writing decades before and independently of Mead says chastity “was more a name than a reality,” yet there were “exceptions, especially among the daughters of persons of rank.” Mead says the same thing from the other direction, with “free and easy experimentation” for most, from which “the taupo is excepted.”

The disagreement then is primarily about which aspect to emphasize. Mead led with the permissive behavior and considered the virginity cult as the rank-bound exception, while Freeman emphasized the virginity cult and thought Mead’s impression from her conversations with her adolescent girl informants was nonsense. The SCCS codes, principally drawn from Turner and pinned to Western Samoa in 1829, with no input from Mead, seem to capture both sides. Samoa sits at the permissive end on how openly sex is discussed, how often it occurs, and how it’s regarded, but falls on the more restrictive side when it comes to the formal sanctioning of girls’ premarital sex. Permissive behavior existing along with more strictly sanctioned ideals.

All told, having read both Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa (1928) and Freeman’s Margaret Mead and Samoa: The making and unmaking of an anthropological myth (1983), I think both works have a lot merit and it’s really more a disagreement over points of emphasis than either one of them being completely wrong, though Paul Shankman has shown pretty clearly there’s no evidence Mead was tricked and Freeman was deceptive with that claim.

I think Meleisea & Schoeffel sum it up well in their commentary on Shankman’s paper:

Mead’s data on female premarital sexual experience was probably accurate (see Orans 1996), but she was wrong to claim that adolescent female promiscuity was socially accepted in Samoa, and Freeman was equally wrong to insist that actual behavior reflected Samoan social values.

In other words, Mead probably accurately described certain behavioral norms that weren’t necessarily considered as acceptable as she may have implied, while Freeman excessively took certain strongly stated and widely acknowledged ideals as evidence against the behaviors Mead catalogued. Turner’s account seems consistent with both, though it does make Freeman’s view that Mead was hoaxed impossible to sustain considering his remarks about “obscene conversation” and “immorality”.

One final odd sidenote though: Mead’s argument was actually a bit more conservative in some respects than she’s given credit for, in ways that may actually conflict somewhat with our ancestral state reconstruction results. In an appendix to Coming of Age (pg. 273-275), Mead argues that the permissiveness she documented was partly a recent development. She writes that “aboriginal Samoa was harder on the girl sex delinquent than is present-day Samoa,” and that missionary and naval authorities had, by her time, abolished the harshest enforcements: the beatings, the head-shaving, and “the defloration ceremony, formerly an inseparable part of the marriages of girls of rank.” By this description the sexually permissive Samoa Mead saw in the 1920s was to some degree a softened, post-contact version of a previously stricter society where “the most potent inducement to virginity has been abolished.”

This is partially at odds with my ASR results which suggests that some degree of broad sexual permissiveness represents older Polynesian society and was not a new phenomenon. Plausibly both are partly true at different levels: a broadly permissive Polynesian ancestral state—though the low phylogenetic signal means this is suggestive rather than certain—overlaid by the rank-linked virginity cult. Notably Samoa has the most restrictive coding in the premarital sex sanctions variable of the four Polynesian societies, so this is possible. Then enforcement of the virginity cult declined under missionary pressure, which is what Mead is describing. I know rank-linked virginity, high-status women with related ceremonial roles, and public proof-of-virginity at elite marriages appear in several Polynesian societies as well, so it’s still unclear what the full package of these sort of practices looked like in the past.

Wallace described some particularly important beliefs and practices found in the Amazon among Tucanoan natives living along the Uaupés River. Of particular interest to me are the practices associated with music and gender roles. Wallace writes,

One of their most singular superstitions is about the musical instruments they use at their festivals, which they call the Jurupari music. These consist of eight or sometimes twelve pipes, or trumpets, made of bamboos or palm-stems hollowed out, some with trumpet-shaped mouths of bark and with mouth-holes of clay and leaf. Each pair of instruments gives a distinct note, and they produce a rather agreeable concert, something resembling clarionets and bassoons. These instruments, however, are with them such a mystery that no woman must ever see them, on pain of death. They are always kept in some igarapé, at a distance from the maloca [house], whence they are brought on particular occasions: when the sound of them is heard approaching, every woman retires into the woods, or into some adjoining shed, which they generally have near, and remains invisible till after the ceremony is over, when the instruments are taken away to their hiding-place, and the women come out of their concealment. Should any female be supposed to have seen them, either by accident or design, she is invariably executed, generally by poison, and a father will not hesitate to sacrifice his daughter, or a husband his wife, on such an occasion [emphasis added].

The key elements here are 1) the men have special musical instruments which are kept secret from the women, 2) the instruments are used by the men to control access to space and ritual celebrations (women must flee when they hear them being played), and 3) should any female be suspected of having seen the instruments, they are to be killed, even by their own father or husband.

Wallace also described some other important gender dynamics:

They have many other prejudices with regard to women. They believe that if a woman, during her pregnancy, eats of any meat, any other animal partaking of it will suffer: if a domestic animal or tame bird, it will die; if a dog, it will be for the future incapable of hunting; and even a man will ever after be unable to shoot that particular kind of game. An Indian, who was one of my hunters, caught a fine cock of the rock, and gave it to his wife to feed, but the poor woman was obliged to live herself on cassava-bread and fruits, and abstain entirely from all animal food, peppers, and salt, which it was believed would cause the bird to die; notwithstanding all precautions, however, the bird did die, and the woman got a beating from her husband, because he thought she had not been sufficiently rigid in her abstinence from the prohibited articles [emphasis added].

Essential elements here are 1) women are forbidden from eating certain particularly nutritious and perhaps desirable foods, especially during pregnancy, and 2) if they are thought to have violated this prohibition they may be punished with beatings.

In the descriptions above we have two themes commonly found across societies which have been central to much of my research: men using cult practices and food taboos to exercise control over women, monopolizing physical space and desirable foods, and punishing women who violate these restrictions with beatings and even death. As I discussed in my paper on disguises in hunter-gatherer societies:

Four of the 10 societies (Arunta, Bororo, Mbuti, and Ona) have cult practices in which adult males impersonate mythical beings for purposes of deceiving uninitiated women and children, and for three of these societies (Arunta, Bororo, Mbuti) musical instruments are used in secret to mimic the voices of these spirits and add to the credibility of the illusion. In each of these societies the men have secret feasts forbidden to uninitiated women and children (Colbacchini, 1942:286; Gusinde, 1931:1512; Murdock, 1934:35; Spencer & Gillen, 1927:298; Turnbull, 1962:184), often with the claim that the food is consumed by the spirits [emphasis added].

Other cross-culturally common practices in relation to the poor treatment of women are domestic abuse, rape, and wife capture. Across many societies in New Guinea, Amazonia, and Australia, gang-rape was a common punishment for women who, inadvertently or not, intruded on the men’s secrets. Gang rape was even reportedly a kind of ritualized rite of passage for young men in youth-abbeys in early modern southeast France.

Violence towards captured women has also been common. E. Lucas Bridges wrote of the Ona hunter-gatherers that after women were captured,

if they were caught by their new husbands before they could get back to their own people, they ran the risk of being soundly beaten or arrowed through the legs with arrows from which the barbs had been removed—generally. A wife of long standing, if she obstinately refused to do her husband’s will, was just as likely to be thrashed or arrowed.

According to the Lieutenant Governor of the colony of New South Wales in the late 18th century, the practice of wife capture among locals was reportedly quite violent:

the poor wretch is stolen upon in the absence of her protectors; being first stupified with blows, inflicted with clubs or wooden swords, on the head, back, and shoulders, every one of which is followed by a stream of blood, she is dragged through the woods by one arm, with a perseverance and violence that one might suppose would displace it from its socket; the lover, or rather the ravisher, is regardless of the stones or broken pieces of trees which may lie in his route, being anxious only to convey his prize in safety to his own party, where a scene ensues too shocking to relate. This outrage is not resented by the relations of the female, who only retaliate by a similar outrage when they find it in their power. This is so constantly the practice among them, that even the children make it a game or exercise; and I have often, on hearing the cries of the girls with whom they were playing, ran out of my house, thinking some murder was committed, but have found the whole party laughing at my mistake [emphasis added].

Kenneth Good described fairly normalized rape among the Yanomami; “If a woman left her village and showed up somewhere else unattached, chances were she’d be raped. She knew it, they knew it. It was expected behavior.” He even gives one graphic description of a group of boys fighting with a group of elderly women over a younger woman, and tugging her away to rape her.

Among the Tsimané forager-horticulturalists of Bolivia an estimated 85% of women have been subject to intimate partner violence, which men appear to use strategically to increase their own fertility.

Anthropologist Bruce Knauft discussed the violent and coercive dimensions of polygynous marriage in parts of South Coast New Guinea, writing that,

Polygyny and control of female labor in sago production were a significant dimension of male status differentiation, and in cases of polygynous marriage, second wives “may be little more than drudges” unless they were sisters to the first wife (Eyde 1967:194; cf. Trenkenschuh 1982a:46). Wife-beating was assessed by Eyde (1967:192) to have been quite common among central Asmat, and he says, “only where a wife-beating becomes near-murder, or actually results in murder, will her brothers intervene.” He documents four cases that came to his attention in which men in fact murdered their wives. Unmarried women could be beaten by their fathers or brothers for promiscuity (ibid. :220).

Sex-biased infanticide is another obvious one, with female-biased infanticide being much more common cross-culturally than male-biased.

Another practice I discussed in a recent commentary is sex-biased sacrifice among the Ache of Paraguay. As Pierre Clastres noted, when a man in the prime of his life dies,

One of his children is killed, almost always a girl. This is the hunter’s jepy, the vengeance with which the Atchei honor him. He carries his daughter off crouching on his shoulder, just as he carried her so many times when he was alive. Through eternity, she will be her father’s faithful companion [emphasis added]. (Clastres, 1998, p. 250)

I bring all this up because, in a recent preprint titled ‘Why Incels Capture Attention’1, Costello & Acerbi reference what they refer to as the ‘harm hypothesis’ and the ‘greater protectiveness of females theory’, which, they write,

suggest[s] that humans evolved heightened sensitivity to harm directed at women, given their higher reproductive value and centrality to offspring survival (Stewart-Williams et al., 2024). This protective bias is robust across domains (see Graso & Reynolds, 2024 for a review). For example, people are less willing to harm women than men (e.g., FeldmanHall et al., 2016), are more punitive toward people who victimize women than men (e.g., Curry et al., 2004), and are less willing to accept harm befalling women compared to men (e.g., Graso et al., 2023)

This idea that humans have evolved to be especially protective and sensitive to harm directed towards women appears to be becoming an increasingly popular belief within evolutionary psychology.

In my view the ethnographic evidence discussed above, as well as innumerable other accounts that could be brought to bear here, conflict with this perspective. The ‘harm hypothesis’ strikes me as being deeply rooted in contemporary WEIRD values rather than being the result of a specific ‘evolved’ or ‘innate’ instinct or psychological mechanism. And indeed the literature cited to support it seems to suggest this.

Costello & Acerbi cite 5 papers in the paragraph above to support the model:

Stewart-Williams et al., 2024: the sample here consists of Prolific users mostly in the UK.

FeldmanHall et al., 2016: the samples were MTurk users in the US and volunteers in the UK.

Curry et al., 2004: the sample is convicted offenders in Texas in 1991.

Graso et al., 2023: US MTurk users again.

Graso & Reynolds, 2024: this is a review paper which does make some cross-cultural claims, but when you check the references you can see some important limitations. For example, they write that “Across cultures, women were perceived as less powerful than men but were seen more positively,” and when you check the reference it goes to Glick et al., 2004, which samples from 16 nations. However, when you read that paper they note in the methods that, “Most samples consisted primarily of college students participating for extra credit.”

Internet users, college students, and English speakers, even if they come from different countries, are going to share various cultural norms and practices in important ways. Such samples are not nearly as ‘cross-cultural’ as taking ethnographic evidence from small-scale societies in different parts of the world which haven’t had any contact with each other.

I think we can be certain from ethnographic evidence that the claim that ‘women are seen more positively than men across cultures’ is not remotely universal, and the opposite belief has historically been found in many parts of the world. Anthropologist Donald Tuzin, describing the ideology of the Ilahita Arapesh men’s cult in New Guinea, wrote that,

By their very nature, it is said, women are the source of nearly all discord and litigation within the community. Through their ceaseless enticements to adultery, their notorious insensitivity to the sensible commands of father, husband, and brother, and their mindless passion for gossip and intrigue—in these and countless other ways women are the bane of a peaceful society.

Additionally, the argument that women’s “higher reproductive value” is expected to lead to greater sensitivity to harm towards them can actually go in the opposite direction: domestic abuse, rape, and violent capture can be motivated in part by men’s reproductive interests, and such practices often don’t evince much concern for women’s well-being.

Now, let me extend an olive branch or two to the evolutionary psychologists: I do think these patterns, found particularly among college students and English speaking internet users, are quite notable, but I think it’s better viewed from a cultural evolutionary perspective than being assumed to be reflective of an evolved bias towards women. This doesn’t make it any less interesting or important to investigate, but I think attributing it to an evolved cognitive bias is simplistic in light of the ethnographic evidence.

I think to a large degree these reflect post-feminist WEIRD norms characteristic of reduced sex-segregation. In many deeply patriarchal societies you have a rigid separation between men and women, with men viewing women as intruders into their spaces and reacting with hostility. The men’s cult contexts described above clearly reflect this phenomenon. College students in contrast are living in much more sexually integrated contexts. Of course not all sex-segregated contexts involve violence and disdain towards women and not all sexually integrated contexts are egalitarian or view women more favorably than men, but I suspect WEIRD norms of integration are an important factor here.

Samples from contemporary industrial contexts are certainly useful, particularly when it comes to generating hypotheses or for initial explorations of them, but ultimately ideas such as the ‘harm hypothesis’ and the ‘greater protectiveness of females theory’ must be consistent with the ethnographic evidence, or else they require substantial refinement or should be scrapped entirely. Evolutionary psychologists need ethnography, and the field is stronger when there is greater engagement with it.

Rather than starting from the premise that humans evolved to be more protective of and sensitive to harm towards women, the evidence suggests there is massive variation in this regard, and we have to look towards the particular cultural and ecological contexts that can help explain this diversity.

Ultimately nearly all of my disagreements with evolutionary psychology stem from this concern about theories that are often built off of patterns found in contemporary industrial societies and aren’t sufficiently checked against the ethnohistorical record. I think the ‘harm hypothesis’ and ‘greater protectiveness of women theory’ are examples of this. I’d really love to see it become a norm for evolutionary psychologists to bring more of the ethnographic evidence to bear when proposing or endorsing particular models.

Related Posts: Dynamics of Polygyny in Hunter-Gatherer Societies, Part 1, Extractive polygyny and ‘evolved psychological’ mate preferences, Gebusi Homicide and the Cultural Influence of Violence, Ongoing series on male cults, Women’s secrets.

There is another method, however, that has been historically widespread, but less widely discussed, and less palatable to those schooled in the modern sciences. That of aggression channeled through supernatural means.

Among Tucano horticulturalists of the northwest Amazon, there was an extended process by which a shaman could lead his intended victim to their death. The shaman would procure pieces of the unfortunate target—fingernails, a lock of hair, or bits of skin—and boil it with capsicum (a pepper). Once the brew was heated the victim would begin to suffer stomach cramps. Boiling would continue on and off for three days—while heated, the victim would experience pain, which would dwindle as the concoction cooled.

On the third day, the shaman would hover over the pot and sing, commanding his unknowing target to eat parts of their own body, accompanying these instructions with extensive gestures. The victim would start to vomit continuously. As the pot boiled the shaman would perform a stilted dance around it. The victim staggers and bites their tongue. The spirit of the victim would now appear over the pot in the form of a butterfly, before falling into the potion. The shaman then breaks the pot and the victim immediately falls to their death.

Among Ovambo pastoralists of southern Africa, a similar method is utilized. A resentful adversary procures some spittle, or a piece of clothing, or even urine, from his hated foe, and brings it to a sorcerer he has solicited the services of. The sorcerer takes the detritus of his intended prey and puts it in a pot over a fire, along with some special herbs and grasses, reciting ‘So-and-so, may he soon die’. The ashes from materials are then buried in a hole and covered with sand. A stick is placed at the location to resemble a grave, and soon the person will die.

While these elaborate methods of supernatural destruction have many culturally specific details, they reflect common practices of magical killing across diverse societies.

I’ve been building a dataset of black magic practices across cultures using the eHRAF World Cultures database, and currently have information from 77 societies around the world.

Overwhelmingly, the most common material a sorcerer uses to cause supernatural harm is the hair of their target.

Among the Bakairi of Brazil, “All illnesses are caused by sorcery; “there are said to be people who commission the medicine men to poison their enemies.” On the Schingú [Xingu River] one must not make an enemy of one's hairdresser.”

While hair is the most common material used, effectively any element from the target can be utilized—clothing, fingernails, feces, even dirt that was covered by their footsteps or bathed in their shadow.

Among the Lepcha of India,

To kill a particular person by sorcery it is necessary to have some of their ‘dirt’. The collective noun, used by Lepchas to indicate the exuviae, the portions of a victim's body or clothing which can be used for malicious sorcery, is mari, which means literally ‘body dirt.’ —that is hair clippings, finger nails, or clothes that have been long worn.

As a precautionary measure, clippings of hair and fingernails are often disposed of in some secret place, to avoid falling into the hands of a malicious enemy.

Among the Maori of New Zealand, “To further prevent hair being used as a medium in sorcery, the hair was laid at the tuahu, burnt, or concealed.”

An Ojibwa informant of Canada told anthropologist A. Irving Hallowell, “When my hair was cut I always burnt the part that was cut off. I was afraid that someone with power [magic] might get hold of it. If he wanted to, such a person could make me sick or even kill me.”

Among rural Egyptians, “In Egypt, as in many other countries, hair-cuttings and -combings and nail-parings are carefully kept, for if anyone else obtained possession of them he would, by their means, be able to gain an influence over, and so injure, the original owners.”

Among Maasai pastoralists of east Africa, “Hair and nail cuttings are thrown away or hidden at some distance from the kraal, so that they will not fall into the hands of an evil sorcerer, who would be able to make from them sorcery leading to a sickness for their former wearer.”

In a previous post discussing umbilical cord rituals among hunter-gatherers, I also noted examples where umbilical cords were buried, to avoid a vindictive witch cursing the new born.

The key process of many traditions of black magic, and the focus of the dataset I’m building, is that of sympathetic magic. You can harm a person by supernatural means through manipulation of some material that was once connected to them. Or, as in cases of effigies, through a symbolic representation of them.

In his work The Golden Bough, James Frazer defines sympathetic magic as having two key components: the Law of Similarity and the Law of Contagion:

First, that like produces like, or that an effect resembles its cause; and second, that things which have once been in contact with each other continue to act on each other at a distance after the physical contact has been severed.

And more recently Kevin Hong has provided a formal model to help explain why practices involving sympathetic magic are such a recurrent phenomena across human societies, viewing it as “a combination of environmental regularities (i.e., things that are similar and/or physically proximate tend to co-vary) and human causal cognition (i.e., the tendency to mistake correlation as causation).”

I’m still collecting data on this, and want to do some phylogenetic analyses to see where particular beliefs and practices cluster, but the key point to understand for now is that these practices are found across independent societies all over the world, and emerge predictably due to universal facets of our evolved cognitive systems. Frazer’s recognition of the prominence of activities rooted in sympathetic magic remains a key insight. This is something evolutionary psychologists really ought to be exploring, but other than Kevin Hong’s great paper and older work by Paul Rozin it remains woefully underexplored.

In any case, even recognizing the attraction notions of sympathetic magic have on our cognitive systems, many puzzles remain. The fact that these sort of practices are so widespread and manage to persist for many generations, despite what one would assume to be frequent visible proof of failures (targets not dying after being cursed), is notable. Let’s walk through some possible explanations for why these beliefs maintain.

First, as a student socialized into the norms and perspective of Western science, the idea that you can kill someone with these supernatural methods naturally strikes me as implausible. These are not beliefs I have been enculturated into, and they run quite contrary to the sort of scientific and rationalist beliefs I have been enculturated into, so I logically am skeptical of the possibility that these beliefs and practices are widespread simply because they work as stated.

A second possibility is that a person thus cursed coincidentally dies soon after often enough for these beliefs to persist (a conflation of correlation and causation). Perhaps some sorcerers even skew the odds in their favor by actually killing their target, in secret.

While that may happen in some cases, I do think there is a more subtle middle ground between these possibilities that best explains the ubiquity and persistence of these beliefs.

Imagine you have grown up in a context where nearly everyone strongly believes these methods exist and work (this may already be the case for some readers), and you yourself have learned to believe in these ideas as well. Now imagine that, one day, you hear through gossip, and perhaps even stumbling upon your own symbolic grave or effigy, that you yourself have been cursed!

This would likely cause a great deal of anxiety and fear. Consumed with worry, you start to experience to cold sweats, and perhaps other psychosomatic symptoms. Deeply paranoid and afraid for your life, you retreat to your home to rest and hope you ‘recover’. Your compatriots witness this, convinced you will soon be dead. Desperate, you solicit the services of a shaman, who provides you with their own supernatural cure and assures you that you will be fine. Relieved, you start feeling better. Thus yourself and all observers are convinced of the reality of these beliefs—after being supernaturally cursed, you were gravely ill, and after being supernaturally cured, you recovered.

We see the clearest illustration of this in parts of Aboriginal Australia, where there are ‘wizards’ who harm people by supposedly supernaturally inserting pieces of quartz into their body, and ‘doctors’ who cure people by supposedly extracting these pieces of quartz from the patient’s body, through sleight-of-hand. See my paper ‘A Deceptive Curing Practice in Hunter-Gatherer Societies’ for more on this. It seems like psychosomatic illness induced by putative supernatural harm naturally lends itself to placebo responses induced by supernatural healing.

A prediction that follows from this perspective is that these beliefs should work best when victims believe they have been cursed. At the same time, the one doing the cursing might not want their activities to be known, as they may risk reprisal. Gossip and symbolic markers left in view of the victim then represent useful ways to spread the idea.

I plan to turn this into a preprint later on, once I’ve completed my search and done some analyses on how these practices are distributed around the world. But if you’ve found this post useful feel free to share and cite.

Other Relevant Posts: A Warrior’s Reputation, Appeasing the Dead, Cannibalism in Human Societies, Couvade, Cutting the Cord, Devotion, Gebusi Homicide and the Cultural Influence of Violence, Hostile Diffusion, People’s Vengeance on a Disagreeable Medicine Man, Symbolic Reciprocity, The Oldest Trick in the Book

Sources for this post: Link

Note: Two other cool relevant papers are Peacey et al., 2024, The cultural evolution of witchcraft beliefs and Singh, M., 2021, Magic, Explanations, and Evil.

My arguments have been based on my read of the ethnohistorical evidence, however I have not formally tested these ideas. Here I provide a brief reanalysis of Marlowe (2003) and make some predictions which I will test further with a larger dataset (Binford, 2001) in Part 2.

In his 2003 paper Frank Marlowe investigated patterns of polygyny among the hunter-gatherer societies in the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample (n=36). Marlowe used the existing SCCS codes for his analysis, and also helpfully provided some of the data he used in that paper. I have taken the data from his paper as well as the SCCS codes available on D-PLACE to replicate his work. There are two key patterns he found which I want to discuss here.

First, Marlowe found a significant negative relationship between mean male contribution to subsistence and the percent of married women who are polygynously married (r = -.44, p = 0.014, n = 30). Since my emphasis here is on female subsistence I used mean female contribution instead. Marlowe actually used the EA code for female contribution to subsistence and subtracted it from 100, so I am essentially just using the original variable. I found the exact same result that he did (positive rather than negative though, obviously, since I’m using female contribution rather than male).

Note that many of the graphs I made below say something like “Percent of Females Polygynously Married” but should instead say something like “Percent of Married Females Who Are Polygynously Married” to more accurately reflect the code, as the code only includes those who already married rather than all females more generally as my graphs might erroneously imply (I use the term female rather than women because many of those already married may still be very young girls, while women implies adults). I regret the imprecision, but I’m not going to redo all the graphs, so just keep that in mind.

Ethnographic descriptions from societies within our dataset describe the pattern well. Among the Shavante of Brazil, where 49% of married women are polygynously married according the SCCS code, Maybury-Lewis (1967) notes that, "wives are an economic asset,” and discusses Lévi-Strauss’ work among the nearby Nambikwara, where “A man with a number of wives could acquire a food surplus which enabled him to be generous to others, or alternatively to devote his time to matters of public concern rather than to the domestic business of providing for his family.”

Next, Marlowe found a significant positive correlation between arranged marriage of females and percent of married women polygynously married (r = 0.502, p = 0.009, n = 26). The SCCS arranged marriage scale is an ordinal variable with six levels which Marlowe transformed into three. I think this was legitimate since the original variable makes various more subtle distinctions which are not especially relevant here, while Marlowe simplifies it so, “1 = individual selects or parental approval highly desirable; 2 = individual suggests partner and then others arrange, individual choice or arrangement are alternatives, or parents choose but individual can object; 3 = parents choose, individual cannot reject.”

Essentially, 1 is complete or nearly complete free choice, 2 is some choice, and 3 is no choice.

Marlowe treats the variable as continuous, which I also do here, and again I find the exact same result (r = 0.502, p = 0.009, n = 26). To better visualize the relationship I plotted it with a linear fit and the level means included below:

Obviously there is an important nonlinear relationship here, another way of showing it is visualizing the fit from a quadratic model:

As you can see the most salient category is level 3, where females have no choice in marriage arrangements. Where there is full choice or some choice you aren’t generally seeing a lot of polygyny, but where there is no choice at all you have the highest rates. Note there is one outlier in the no choice category at 0% which—along with the small sample size—is driving the wide confidence interval. That is the Vedda of Sri Lanka. Notably their female subsistence contribution is coded in the SCCS as only 20%, so despite their stringent marriage arrangements their lack of polygyny is not entirely unexpected considering the important role of female subsistence contribution, as I will discuss further towards the end of this post.

You may also notice the 50% outlier in the free choice category, which I suspect is a flawed code. That society is the Aweikoma of Brazil, and based on the sources provided on D-PLACE to support the codes (Jungle People: a Kaingang tribe of the highlands of Brazil, Henry 1964 and The Caingang, Metraux 1946) I think the percent of polygynous marriages may be incorrect and the arranged marriage code should be at least a 2.

According to the SCCS codes 30% of married males and 50% of married females are married polygynously, although I’m not sure where those figures come from exactly. I may have missed it, but the only numbers I could find on polygyny are not directly comparable. Henry (1964) notes that “An analysis of 308 marriages taken from genealogies that represent about 100 years of Kaingáng history past and present, yields the following percentages: 60 percent monogamous, 18 percent polygynous, 14 percent polyandrous and 8 percent joint.” He does not give more information on sex. I suspect the issue of polyandry and “joint” marriages may have confounded the polygyny variable in some way.

Further, there appears to be less total free choice involved than the arranged marriage variable implies. Metraux (1946) discusses child betrothals:

According to Baldus' census (1937 c, p. 43), men are generally older than their wives, in some cases as much as 15 to 20 years; among 37 percent of the couples there was a difference of 10 years. A man marries when 18 to 20 years of age. If his bride is not yet of age, he stays with her parents, waiting for the first signs of puberty. In case of child betrothal, the lad's parents have to provide for the girl's subsistence.

And he further notes one such case of an apparently very coercive arranged marriage,

A marriage ceremony witnessed by Manizer (1930, p. 776) took place during a drinking bout. Some old men seized the bridegroom and bride and pushed them toward each other in spite of the woman's resistance. Then they dragged them into the bridegroom's hut and left them there under a blanket. The following day the woman ran away, but was brought back by force.

I may go through many of these codes in more detail in a future post to evaluate their accuracy, but here I’m mostly just going to stick with what we’ve got.

A key point raised by the ethnographic example of the Aweikoma noted above is the importance of age in relation to both arranged marriages and polygyny. Since young girls are generally going to have less social power and/or ability to exercise choice than adult women, you would expect arranged marriages to be more coercive and more oriented towards polygyny among them.

Among the Yolngu of Australia high rates of polygyny are enabled by infant bestowal, "Put simply, Yolngu men and women spoke of a woman being 'given' to a man rather than the other way round. Many marriages were arranged when the prospective husband was young, and even before the birth of the girl who would be the wife." (Keen, 1994). And many women may unsurprisingly not prefer these kind of arrangements. Keen (1994) cites Janice Reid’s work interviewing Yirrkala women of Australia, where despite a history of normative polygyny, women prefer monogamy, at least in more recent years, “The preference for monogamous marriages is now quite strong, at least among women. When I asked 41 women of the community how many wives a man should have, 32 said one and nine said two or more.” (Reid, 1983).

Among the Shavante, marriages are arranged when the girls in particular are very young and have little say in the matter,

The arrangements are made initially by the parents of the parties concerned...Since the prospective bride and bridegroom are so young, their wishes are not usually taken into consideration. The girls are frequently too small to understand the negotiations anyway. The boys, on the other hand, may manage to have their preferences considered by their elders (Maybury-Lewis, 1967).

I wanted to test if there’s a relationship between female age at first marriage and the percent of married females married polygynyously, so I got the SCCS codes from D-PLACE on age at first marriage and compared them to the polygyny data provided by Marlowe. Unfortunately there is a lot of missing data, so we only have 12 societies with data on age at first marriage and polygyny, however we do see the predicted pattern (r = -0.57, p = 0.053).

Obviously that p value isn’t very compelling, but with n = 12 that is to be expected, and we do see a moderate effect, with polygynous marriages being more common where age at first marriage for females is younger. Notably that 50% outlier is the Aweikoma again—according the SCCS codes the age at first marriage for females is 19.5! This is obviously wrong in light of what Metraux said above, so even this moderate relationship we found may undersell things. Because of the small sample size I can’t do much more with this, but when I make use of the Binford dataset in Part 2 I’ll look into the impact of age on polygyny.

Playing around with the Marlowe data further, I performed a multiple linear regression assessing the impact of arranged marriages and female subsistence contribution on polygyny:

I standardized the coefficients (β) for ease of comparison because we’re working with variables on different scales (female subsistence contribution is a percentage and arranged marriage is a three-point scale). As you can see in the table above the model has a moderate effect size (R² = .37) and both predictors remain individually significant when holding the other constant.

Of course, as the plots I posted further above indicated, there is a nonlinear relationship between our arranged marriage scale and the percent of married females married polygynously, so I also performed an explicit quadratic regression model:

This is a stronger model and captures that the main impact of arranged marriages on polygyny is coming from no choice rather than a linear trend. Since the quadratic term is capturing most of the variance in the relationship between polygyny and arranged marriages it’s not surprising the linear term is nonsignificant, as they overlap.

Now one very important point, which I haven’t raised until now, is the issue of Galton’s problem. Societies that are more closely related to each other historically or that have interacted with each other previously often share beliefs and practices that don’t reflect independent origins, meaning treating societies as independent datapoints poses some difficulties, confounding the correlations and models I described above. It could be that these patterns reflect a shared cultural history of societies in particular regions rather than independent causal effects.

D-PLACE has latitude and longitude data for each society, and I also made use of this language phylogeny, to measure spatial autocorrelation (Moran’s I) and the phylogenetic signal (Blomberg’s K) for the three key variables I’ve been discussing:

The results indicate that the percent of females married polygynously and female subsistence contribution each exhibit moderate phylogenetic signal and evidence of spatial autocorrelation. That is, societies that are more closely related to each other (as measured by their position in the language phylogeny) and closer to each other spatially, have more similar rates of polygyny and mean female contribution to subsistence. Arranged marriages however don’t show a significant phylogenetic signal or evidence of spatial autocorrelation.

The Standard Cross-Cultural Sample was created specifically to try and account for Galton’s problem by pruning the Ethnographic Atlas and sampling only 1 society each from 186 different culture areas, but it is imperfect, particularly in this case where we’ve cut down the sample to only the hunter-gatherers in it.

I performed a phylogenetically controlled regression using Brownian Motion to model trait evolution, which can help account for cultural relatedness (but not spatial autocorrelation directly), and we get very similar results, although the coefficients are a bit smaller, and there is still evidence of residual phylogenetic signal that our model isn’t capturing (K = 1.06, p = 0.018).

One problem with the above is the regression methods I used assume a normal distribution for the response variable (female polygyny) but rates of female polygyny are not normally distributed across societies (W = 0.78, p < 0.001), so I also performed a beta regression as they’re good for modeling proportional data. Since beta regressions require values to be strictly between 0 and 1, I rescaled and adjusted the boundary values of the female polygyny variable (y(n−1) + 0.5/n). Because the values in our polygyny variable are skewed near 0 (as you can see from the plots above) I performed the arcsine square root transformation to handle the skew. We see very similar results here, although female subsistence contribution is no longer significant (p = 0.06), perhaps due in part to our small sample size. Keep in mind the coefficients here are not directly comparable to the other models because of the arcsine transformation:

Another way of testing these relationships is through a generalized additive model (GAM) with a spatial smoothing term s(Latitude + Longitude), which can help account for spatial autocorrelation (but not cultural relatedness directly).) I used the complementary log-log function in R for this beta model to handle the skew of female polygyny:

Another similar result here, although again female subsistence contribution is not significant, which is plausibly due both to our small sample size but also because female contribution covaries with latitude (r = -0.47, p = 0.015), so attempting to account for spatial autocorrelation in this somewhat crude fashion might suppress some of this effect.

Additionally, neither the phylogenetic regression nor the GAM can account for both phylogenetic influence and spatial autocorrelation together.

Finally, I wanted to perform a Bayesian model that could help account for both phylogenetic and spatial patterns. I performed a Bayesian beta regression with phylogenetic and spatial random effects using weakly informative priors. I used a phylogenetic variance-covariance matrix derived from the tree, and a spatial correlation matrix based on geographic distance between societies using exponential decay. I plotted the posterior probability distribution below:

Overall the effect of arranged marriages (β̃ = 0.35, pd = 0.94) and female subsistence contribution (β̃ = 0.38, pd = 0.94) on polygyny does seem pretty robust even when incorporating phylogenetic and spatial controls. There was evidence of both phylogenetic (SD = 0.41, 90% HPDI [0.0003, 1.04]) and spatial (SD = 0.74, 90% HPDI [0.005, 1.41]) effects in the model, although a lot of uncertainty as you can see, due to our small sample size. [Note: “the probability of direction (pd) [is] the proportion of the posterior distribution that is of the median's sign (i.e. greater or less than 0) (Makowski, Ben-Shachar and Lüdecke 2019; McElreath 2020). We interpret associations between predictors and outcomes as strong evidence when 90% of posterior distributions do not include 0 and as moderate when 80% of posterior distributions do not include 0.” (Garfield et al, 2023)]

We can also model the impact arranged marriages and female subsistence contribution have on polygyny as an interaction effect in a Bayesian beta regression, and I found a very strong result (β̃ = 0.62, pd = 0.96). I plotted the model predictions below, which I think does a good job of illustrating the pattern. The model has good predictive accuracy, as the predicted polygyny rates from the model are strongly correlated with the actual rates (r = 0.951, MAE = 0.068).

Notably it seems to be the combination of high female contribution to subsistence and coercive arranged marriages interacting together that most strongly promote high rates of polygyny.

As another check I also calculated the relationship between female subsistence contribution and percent of females married polygynously for each arranged marriage level: for societies with free choice there was essentially no relationship between female subsistence contribution and polygyny (r = 0.007, p = 0.98, n = 13), with some choice there was a small positive but non-significant relationship (r = 0.45, p = 0.27, n = 8), and for societies with no choice there was a significant positive relationship (r = 0.97, p = 0.007, n = 5). Here’s how they look plotted as linear relationships:

Of course these are small sample sizes and the simple correlations don’t control for phylogeny or spatial autocorrelation so the Bayesian model was worth doing, but it’s nice that we’re seeing the same thing across different ways of handling the data.

Conclusion

I think these results make a lot of sense. If arranged marriages are coercive, but males still contribute most of the subsistence, high rates of polygyny generally cannot be maintained because most males can’t support multiple wives. Conversely, if marriages are grounded in free choice, but females contribute most of the subsistence, high rates of polygyny may be difficult to maintain because most women would likely prefer not to have to share a partner. But when females contribute most of the subsistence, arranged marriages are highly coercive, and (I hypothesize) female marriages are arranged at a very young age, it is much easier to sustain higher rates of polygyny.

Overall I think these results are suggestive and a useful replication of Marlowe’s work, but we are still hampered by the small sample size and coarse measures. In Part 2 I will make use of the Binford hunter-gatherer dataset, which is much larger, and in Part 3 I will delve into the ethnographic sources for the individual codes to see how well they hold up.

For two great related papers see Ross et al (2018) - Greater wealth inequality, less polygyny: rethinking the polygyny threshold model and Minocher et al (2019) - Explaining marriage patterns in a globally representative sample through socio-ecology and population history: A Bayesian phylogenetic analysis using a new supertree.

The Ross paper effectively explores some of the important socioecological dynamics related to male wealth and polygyny, although they use a mutual mate choice model, which is very different from the perspective I take here.

The Minocher paper is quite compatible with my results—they found a solid probability of direction for arranged marriages predicting the percent of married men who are polygynous across the entire SCCS (pd = 0.94), which is exactly what I found looking at the impact of arranged marriages on the percent of females married polygynously in my Bayesian model (pd = 0.94). They also found a strong probability of direction for female agriculture on the percent of married men who are polygynous (pd = 0.96) which is close to what I found for the effect of female contribution to subsistence on the percent of married women married polygynously (pd = 0.94). I used a different phylogenetic tree and just looked at the hunter-gatherers in the SCCS so the similar results are encouraging I think.

After reading the paper, I did what I always do after reading a paper like this—I checked the supplement to see if the coding decisions were reported so I could evaluate them for myself. Thankfully they were very clearly and transparently reported (this is admirable, not common enough, and worthy of praise). Here are the codes for the hunter-gatherer societies in the sample:

And here is how the various categories were defined:

Because I have pretty good familiarity with the ethnographic evidence for most of these groups, it seemed clear to me that many of these social institutions are significantly underestimated across these hunter-gatherer societies. Let’s go through a few of these societies and note some of the key omissions.

Based on the coding decisions, the Ache are claimed to have none of these social institutions, and the cited source in the supplement is Hill & Hurtado’s 1996 book Ache Life History. By my read of that source however, the Ache should instead be coded as having at least “between-group links”, “men’s clubs”, “male status”, and “marital services”.

Regarding the first three, evidence comes from the Ache institution of club fights. Hill and Hurtado write,

Organized club fights were often called to exact revenge for an event that could be “blamed” on some individual or individuals. If children were captured or killed by Paraguayans, or killed in any freak accident (such as lightning striking, or a tree falling), a relative, a man who had provided the essence, or a godparent of the child might call for a club fight in order to avenge the child’s death. The death of an important adult very often led to an organized club fight. In addition, older and powerful adult males would sometimes call club fights “just because they wanted/liked to.” Informants admit that in addition to calling club fights in order to avenge the victim of an accident, club fighting was organized by big men so that each man could “display one’s strength … to show how strong we are.” (Hill & Hurtado, pg 71). [emphasis added]

Note that these meetings could involve over a dozen bands with hundreds of people coming together,

In order to bring together the 10–15 bands that might be scattered as far as 100 km apart, runners were sent out with the message that a club fight was to be held at some location. Not all bands attended, and some purposely avoided the event. Nevertheless, usually close to half the Northern Ache group would attend a single “organized” club fight. The camp would sometimes grow to include 300–400 people. (Hill & Hurtado, pg 71). [emphasis added]

Somewhat in keeping with the logic of Dunbar’s paper, it’s clear that these club fights, despite being quite violent, were a mechanism of social control to stamp down on other forms of within-group violence between males. Hill and Hurtado write,

In-group killings among adults account for 10% of all adult female deaths and 11% of the adult male deaths. Club fights were the single most important cause, accounting for about 8% of the deaths to males over fifteen years of age. Only one person (a teenage boy) in the twentieth-century population was shot with an arrow. This is in keeping with a strongly demonstrated aversion to uncontrolled in-group violence. Although the Ache killed all outsiders on sight before peaceful contact, club fights were the only sanctioned form of violence between men within the population itself. Other adult deaths from conspecific members of the Ache population included being buried alive because of old age or sickness, and being left behind to die (because of illness or blindness). (Hill & Hurtado, pg 164). [emphasis added]

Dunbar surprisingly writes in his paper that he, “deliberately avoided institutions that are mechanisms of control (e.g. laws, punishments, policing, or mechanisms for resolving disputes such as duels), since these tend to be associated with much larger scale societies.” However, as I showed in a previous paper, most hunter-gatherer societies actually do have dueling traditions. I don’t understand where Dunbar got the claim that duels “tend to be associated with much larger scale societies”, as nothing appears cited to support it and I don’t think it’s true. See my Works in Progress article ‘Why we duel’ for a summary.

Regarding “marital services”, Hill & Hurtado write that, “Almost all new marriages are characterized by matrilocal residence and behavior that might be called bride-service,” (pg 235) and they also favorably quote at length a description from a missionary in the 1600’s,

The one who is fortunate enough that a daughter is born to him, is very careful in raising her, because through her he will become the head [leader] of others; being the inviolate law of the guayaguis that a son-in-law must follow his father in law, and become part of his family, because among them they have no chiefs, only that the brothers and sons-in-law get together in a group and recognize their father or father-in-law as the leader; but the power that he enjoys over others is very limited, since each lives according to his own whims. (quoted in Hill & Hurtado, pg 46). [emphasis added]

The ostensible lack of marital services across Dunbar’s sample is very difficult to understand since bride service is clearly very common across hunter-gatherer societies, even just for the societies and sources Dunbar covers here.

Dunbar’s source for the Hadza is Marlowe’s 2010 book on them, and in that book Marlowe writes that, “Hadza say it is best to live with the wife’s mother in the beginning, during the birth of the first few children, and then later to live with the husband’s mother. This is a common view among foragers, many of whom expect a new husband to perform bride-service for his wife’s parents (Marlowe 2004c) [emphasis added].” The source Marlowe cites there is his own 2004 paper in Current Anthropology, “Marital Residence among Foragers”. As the table from that paper below shows, most hunter-gatherers have some form of “marital services”, particularly bride service (see the column “Marriage Model/Alternate”).

Dunbar claims no “marital services” among the Dobe !Kung, and his source is Richard Lee’s 1979 book The !Kung San: men, women, and work in a foraging society, yet Lee clearly notes bride service among them, writing that,

Traditionally, the prime characteristics parents of a girl sought in a son-in-law were proved hunting ability and a willingness to live with his in-laws and provide meat for them for a period of years. This period of "bride service" is common among the Dobe !Kung and was even more frequent in occurrence among the Nyae Nyae !Kung during the 1950s. (Lee, pg 240).

The sourcing Dunbar gives for some societies is also inadequate. The only source given for the Tiwi of of Australia is a single 13 page paper, which is odd since multiple excellent books from different authors have been written about them.

Anthropologist Jane Goodale describes bride service among the Tiwi in her 1971 book Tiwi Wives, writing that the son-in-law,

must supply her with all she demands in service or goods, including today clothes, tobacco, money, and the like. If he is lucky to have a mother-in-law who gives him two or more wives, the payments do not increase, for the simple reason that there is initially no limit to what he must do for his ambrinua [mother-in-law] in return for only one daughter. (Goodale, pg 52)

I also have unpublished data on 21 hunter-gatherer societies (reanalyzing Fry & Soderberg’s 2013 sample) and I found that 15 of them practice some form of bride service. The only overlap between that and Dunbar’s sample are 3 societies: the !Kung, the Hadza, and the Tiwi, and by my read all 3 of them very clearly have marital services. Anthropologist James Woodburn writes in his chapter on the Hadza in the 1968 volume Man the Hunter that, “Long strings of bridewealth beads should be, and usually are, given by the bridegroom to his parents-in-law. They are taken and worn by the mother-in-law around her waist. Thereafter, throughout his life of the marriage, the husband should keep his wife and mother-in-law supplied with meat and with trade goods.” (pg 108)

What I found most frustrating is the supposed lack of “men’s clubs” across these societies, with only the Blackfoot coded as having them. I have been covering the topic of men’s cults across small-scale societies for years, so it was clear to me immediately that this is very mistaken. As I found in my previous paper on disguises in hunter-gatherer societies,

Seemingly the most elaborate disguises and strategies of deception in this sample are employed to mimic otherworldly entities in ritual or cult contexts (detailed in Table S2). Four of the 10 societies (Arunta, Bororo, Mbuti, and Ona) have cult practices in which adult males impersonate mythical beings for purposes of deceiving uninitiated women and children, and for three of these societies (Arunta, Bororo, Mbuti) musical instruments are used in secret to mimic the voices of these spirits and add to the credibility of the illusion. In each of these societies the men have secret feasts forbidden to uninitiated women and children (Colbacchini, 1942:286; Gusinde, 1931:1512; Murdock, 1934:35; Spencer & Gillen, 1927:298; Turnbull, 1962:184), often with the claim that the food is consumed by the spirits. [emphasis added]

[And note I was only looking at disguises there, not “men’s clubs” more broadly, which would have been even more common].

To be fair, the societies across our samples are mostly non-overlapping, with the only one in common being the Blackfoot, so hypothetically it could be differences in our samples that led to different results. Except, that’s not the case and again the problem is with the codes. Marlowe discusses the Hadza tradition of Epeme feasts, which is the men’s secret ritual complex, writing that,

Epeme refers to the whole complex of manhood and hunting, but also to the new moon and the relationship between the sexes (Woodburn 1964). Fully adult men are referred to as elati, or epeme men. When a male is in his early 20s and kills a big-game animal, he becomes an epeme or fully adult man. Certain parts of all larger game animals can be eaten by the epeme men only. Not only can females and sub-adult males not eat the meat, they cannot even see the men eat this meat or, it is said, they could die or get ill or suffer any number of misfortunes.

Tiwi boys of Australia spend years, from their mid-teens to early-twenties, out in the bush away from women, going through ritual stages under the guidance of older men (Hart & Pilling 1960, pgs 93-94).

The Murgin of Australia are claimed to have no “between-group links” or “between-group alliances” but the source Dunbar cites, Kinship and Conflict (1965) by Hiatt, notes they have ‘totems’ which can cut across land-owning units and involve monopolization of certain symbols and be a source of support in fighting (Hiatt, pg 14). The men also had secret rituals and could gain status through participation and knowledge. Hiatt writes that, “Secret ceremonies allowed more scope for individual enterprise; some men, not necessarily those advanced in age, achieved recognition for their ability to direct certain rituals and their expert knowledge of the associated mythology.” (Hiatt, pg 146).

The Anbarra of Australia also had secret male rituals. The source Dunbar cites is Betty Meehan’s 1975 dissertation Shell Bed to Shell Midden. Meehan writes that, “The ceremonial ground was situated a short distance to the southwest from the main camp site and there, all the secret ritual was performed and the novices (wori) were kept in seclusion away from all females and uninitiated males.” (pg 52) Meehan notes that women’s foraging mobility was actually restricted somewhat because they were not allowed to go near the men’s ceremonial grounds.

The source for the Agta of the Phillipines is a single 30 page paper, Minter (2017) Mobility and Sedentarization among the Philippine Agta, Senri Ethnological Studies, mostly focused on postcolonial changes. There isn’t sufficient information there to draw conclusions about the presence or absence of any of the coded social institutions.

The sources for the Waorani of South America are two relatively brief papers focused on specific topics, Macfarlan et al. (2018). Bands of brothers and in-laws: Waorani warfare, marriage and alliance formation, Proceedings of the Royal Society, and Rival (1993). The growth of family trees: understanding Huaorani perceptions of the forest, Man. These are clearly not sufficient to give a substantial account of structural traits across this society, however both sources discuss marriage alliances, and the latter notes the presence of drinking ceremonies, feasts, and chiefs, which seems inconsistent with the codes.

Describing the Waorani as ‘hunter-gatherers’ is also debatable (not wrong necessarily, but debatable) since they practice a significant amount of cultivation1, which is the source of their feasting, despite “within-group bonding rituals” being erroneously coded as absent in the Dunbar paper. Same goes for the Ayoreo of South America, who also have feasts with some cultivated products, but are coded as lacking “within-group bonding rituals”.

Overall the logic that human social living requiring various institutions to navigate conflicts of interests rings true, but hunter-gatherer societies are far more complex than they’re given credit for in Dunbar’s paper. I don’t think their social institutions are even necessarily less complex than those of agricultural societies generally, and certainly the evidence provided in the paper does not show that. I have not gone through every single one of the codes, but it should be clear from the above that many of the codes are mistaken and they should not be taken at face value.

This critique isn’t really unique to Dunbar’s paper though, my main conclusion is actually this: you cannot trust other people’s codes. If all you know about hunter-gatherer societies is other people’s generalizations about them, you don’t actually know much about them. You have to read the underlying ethnography for yourself and reach your own conclusions. Obviously that takes a lot more time than reading a secondary source that purports to sum them up and taking their claims at face value, but that’s just how it goes if you want to have an accurate understanding.

Related posts: Why we duel, Ongoing series on male cults, Women’s secrets, The Oldest Trick in the Book (charismatic leaders among hunter-gatherers), Diss Songs (conflict resolution among hunter-gatherers), Some Uses of Musical Instruments in Hunter-Gatherer Societies.

Whenever a seemingly healthy adult or older child died, an inquest involving a spirit medium would be held to determine the culprit. After the spirit medium identified the offender, the suspect would have to undertake a public divination to prove their innocence. This usually required the suspect to cook a large package of either meat or fish, and failure to cook it properly was taken as proof of guilt.

The guilty party would sometimes be killed right there on the spot, or they might be ambushed later somewhere in the bush. The corpse was not uncommonly cooked and eaten. The phrase “Si-nay!” in the Gebusi language was a threat directed towards potential sorcerers which meant “we will cook and eat you!”.

As a consequence of these beliefs and practices, the Gebusi had one of the highest homicide rates ever recorded at the time of contact. Anthropologist Bruce Knauft attributes about 40% of adult deaths in the precolonial period between 1940 and 1962 to homicide.

And yet, in the 28 years from 1989 until 2017 when Knauft’s fieldwork ended, the Gebusi did not have a single recorded homicide. From one of the highest recorded homicide rates to no homicides at all.

If you think of violence as simply being the result of some innate drive, or that cross-cultural differences in homicide reflect biological differences between populations, this rapid change presents a very confusing puzzle. However, when you understand the important ways sociolecological context and culture influence behavior, it becomes much more explicable. Let’s see what factors contributed to the decline of Gebusi homicide.

First, a decline in mortality. As the Gebusi aggregated in larger villages with increased access to healthcare, and better nutrition with the influx of metal tools allowing for more productive gardens, there was a decline in mortality in the post-colonial period. Fewer seemingly inexplicable deaths meant less emphasis on sorcery.

Second, the Gebusi traditionally practiced sister-exchange marriage, with marriages arranged and reciprocated between clans. In cases where a marriage failed to be reciprocated, sorcery accusations were much more common, indicating a subtle strategic element to this practice. In the post-colonial period of greater resource acquisition, particularly more pigs and the introduction of money, there was an increasing emphasis on bride price instead of exchange.

A period of as much as five to ten years was allowed for bride price payment, staving off any potential of immediate retribution for failure to adhere to the agreement. Even partial payment of the bride price seemed to mitigate the animosity associated with unequal exchange which had previously led to sorcery accusations.

Third, some Gebusi attributed the decline of sorcery executions to the influence of Christianity. Knauft writes that, “As the elected Councilor of Gasumi Corners proclaimed, “If there are police but no Church, there will be killing. [But] if there is Church but no police, there won’t be any killing.”” However, some Christian Gebusi have still suspected or accused people of sorcery, so it is important to keep the previously mentioned socioecological factors in mind regarding the decline of executions. Knauft adds that,

In some cases, including that of a Gebusi Evangelical church pastor, the belief in Christianity and in a higher authority of divine judgment itself is taken to justify at least the idea of killing someone, like a sorcerer, who self-evidently does not follow the rules of the church. As such, it appears that religious belief combines with other more pragmatic economic and social organizational factors in accounting for the highly reduced rate of killing among Gebusi. [emphasis added]

Surprisingly, one factor which many people might predict to be important that does not appear to be especially relevant is government or police influence. Knauft writes that, “recent fieldwork has confirmed that no police or other coercive government presence exists in any meaningful way among Gebusi or in neighboring areas.” There is however one documented case in the past where the Gebusi reported a man who murdered his own wife and child to the police, so law enforcement may play some role, albeit a minor one in comparison to the other elements mentioned.

Overall, these patterns of Gebusi homicide, from its high rate in the past to its massive decline, indicate the important role of socioecological context and cultural beliefs in influencing violence.

[Related posts: A Tale of Sorcery and Marriage Among the Gebusi, The Social Dynamics of Sorcery, Why we duel, 'People's Vengeance on a Disagreeable Medicine-Man']

Most Baruya warfare involved skilled archers shooting from a distance, or ambushes from stealth, but an aoulatta would fearlessly approach enemy lines alone and issue his challenge, wielding a magic stone war club. The aoulatta would be followed by a few aides, known as his “dogs”, who would watch as he met an adversary in single combat, only coming up to provide cover against outside attack while the aoulatta finishes off his competitor. The aoulatta would smash his enemy’s skull with his war club, then dip the club in his opponent’s blood, raise it above his own head, and issue a victory cry to signal that his rival had fallen.

When two aoulatta would meet on the battlefield, the victor would treat the corpse of his opponent according to particular customs. If possible, the winner would drag the body of his powerful rival behind his own lines. There he would cut off the fallen aoulatta’s right hand—”the hand that shoots and kills”—and smear his body in the victim’s blood.

Sometimes, after defeating a particularly strong aoulatta, the victorious warrior would cut off the arms and legs of the corpse, and cook and eat them, in order to gain the enemy’s powers and strengths. Because aoulatta had stories of their deeds spread far and wide, among allies and enemies alike, their reputations were well known. The hands of powerful deceased aoulatta were often kept and put on display by the victors as trophies of achievement, right next to the killer’s own war club.

Across many societies, accomplishments in war represent one substantial way a man may achieve some prominence, and individuals and groups use various means of insignia, ceremony, and other displays to mark these exploits. Naturally, from the perspective of out-group members, such fame gained is a kind of infamy.

Waorani warriors of Ecuador would decorate their spears with their own individually distinct designs, “so that survivors of the attack would know who did the killing and fear them.” Among the Ojibwa of Canada, “each of the warriors will leave something of his own behind, as proof that he has been there.” Delaware warriors of the eastern United States would leave war clubs near the corpses of their enemies, precisely to claim credit for the deed to their surviving foes.

Among the Kapauku of Western New Guinea, battles were fought exclusively with bows and arrows, in unorganized pitched battles between rival groups. After a warrior has landed a lethal arrow with his bow, he would perform the ukwaa wakii tai, or the killer’s dance. The killer holds his bow at its lower end in his right hand, and twists it with his wrist, as he runs around in a small circle. He lets out exuberant screams, "wuii-wuiii", in the highest pitched tones he can muster. Even as his enemies’ arrows fly by around him, he puts on this risky, attention grabbing performance to mark his achievement, so that there should be no doubt that he was the one who landed the final blow.

Across many contact-era North American Plains societies, men would design and wear pictographic robes depicting their achievements in war.

Among the Blackfoot, a renowned warrior would “wear a robe on which was pictured his successful encounters with the enemy and symbolic of his leadership in war. War history robes were always painted by men. Either the wearer decorated his own robe or he secured the services of a more skillful painter to do it for him.”

The emergence of modern heraldry in Europe has also been associated with the phenomenon of warriors seeking to be identified and recognized for their accomplishments. Historian Maurice Keen writes that, “The origins of heraldry are clearly connected with the fully mailed warrior’s need for a mark of recognition on the field of battle and at tournaments,” and it was later that they gained the function of hereditary insignia of noble lineages.

Emphasis on the reputations of individual warriors are also commonly expressed in war dances. Explorer George Catlin wrote of the Sioux war dance in the mid-19th century, describing how “Each warrior, in turn, jumps through the fire, and then advances shouting and boasting, and taking his oath, as he ​‘strikes the reddened post.’”

And this emphasis on a warrior’s reputation may continue even after their death. George Catlin described the Dance to the Medicine Bag of the Brave among the Sac and Fox natives in 1835, writing that,

This is a custom well worth recording, for the beautiful moral which is contained in it. In this plate is represented a party of Sac warriors who have returned victorious from battle, with scalps they have taken from their enemies, but having lost one of their party, they appear and dance in front of his wigwam, fifteen days in succession, about an hour on each day, when the widow hangs his medicine-bag on a green bush which she erects before her door, under which she sits and cries, whilst the warriors dance and brandish the scalps they have taken, and at the same time recount the deeds of bravery of their deceased comrade in arms, whilst they are throwing presents to the widow to heal her grief and afford her the means of a living. [emphasis added]

Among the Mundurucú of the Amazon, “When a warrior is killed on a distant battlefield, his head is taken back to the village and put on display with his ornaments, trumpet, and weapons. After a feast in honor of the deceased, the head is suspended from the neck of his mother, widow, or sister, and his fellow warriors pledge to avenge his death.”

Warriors commonly receive more social or material benefits from participating in warfare in societies where war mortality tends to be relatively high. Such incentives likely act as a strong inducement to participation even when there are substantial risks.

But remember that as a warrior’s fame rises with his fellows, his infamy similarly grows among his enemies. In societies where exocannibalism is practiced the most powerful warriors make for the most satisfying meals, for consuming them may be considered a way to absorb their powers, as noted in the aoulatta example described above. As a consequence of the risks involved, warriors also commonly make use of disguises and deception to misdirect responsibility and avoid reprisal for their strikes.

Related Posts: Hostile diffusion, Cannibalism in Human Societies, Notes on the use of Homicide Costumes, 'People's Vengeance on a Disagreeable Medicine-Man', Devotion, Appeasing the Dead, Diss Songs, The Northman, the decline of western civilizations, and the rise of 'Western Civilization'.

At its best, a review or commentary may point out things you missed, and help you gain a better understanding of a film. It can grow your appreciation for specific movies and the medium itself. At its worst however—and it is usually at its worst—it amounts to little more than some guy reifying his own prejudices and preconceptions and cultural assumptions into a pretend measure of quality.

I am not immune to this, naturally. Any list I produce will reflect my own biases and interests and preconceptions and assumptions. It will unavoidably be quite selective and self-serving.

With that said, here are the best films of the year.1

The Top Ten

If you see only one movie in theaters this year, it probably ought to be Avatar: The Way of Water. It is visually striking, the sound design is excellent, the music is excellent, the performances are affecting—it’s not the best movie of the year, but it is the best theatrical experience of the year. James Cameron, like George Lucas, knows good world building is about attention to detail, even at the margins of the story. When the Sullys come to the Metkayina village, we briefly see and hear this Na’vi blowing a shell trumpet to announce to the community the unexpected arrival of visitors.

It’s only a few seconds of images and sound, it has no bearing on the plot, yet these are the sort of details that fill out a fictional culture and make it believable.

When Jake and his family have to leave the Omaticaya clan, we see a ritual where the clan have to symbolically ‘kill’ their former chief with a cut to the chest, which reminded me of the themes of king sacrifice and stranger-kings in works like Frazer’s The Golden Bough and Graeber and Sahlins’ On Kings. This ritual comes back around later in the film, and there are hints that perhaps in the past the Na’vi had cultural norms obligating blood revenge, which may now be more peacefully satisfied with this ritual.

A brief comment in the film similarly notes that the whale creatures used to wage war on each other in the past, but eventually came to peace. These hints that Pandora may have had a fairly bloody history despite its apparent peace and prosperity before the arrival of humans are intriguing, I wonder if future films will develop it further.

Later we see a Metkayina Na’vi healing performance, very much like the performance of ‘sucking doctors’ cross-culturally, and we learn of the symbolic brotherhood the Metkayina have with the whale creatures. Pandora is a world that feels big, and alive, and complex, still with more mysteries to uncover.

Naturally the world building isn’t perfect. The Na’vi are oddly genderless—it’s not clear if they have much of a division of labor, which is a cross-cultural universal on Earth. Male and female Na’vi wear somewhat different ornaments and clothing, but even this is mostly just to fit current WEIRD modesty norms, like keeping Na’vi female breasts covered even when they’re in the water. The Metkayina chief having only one wife is also notable: chiefs are often, though not always, polygynous cross-culturally, but this would perhaps make him less sympathetic and relatable to most WEIRDos. Still, a very entertaining film and I quite liked the world building on the whole.

Related Posts: Some Uses of Musical Instruments in Hunter-Gatherer Societies, The Oldest Trick in the Book, Symbolic reciprocity.

I highly recommend The Northman if you are interested in history and anthropology. Robert Eggers puts you into the mentality of a fundamentally different cultural context, where receiving omens from the Gods and interacting with magical beings are just as much a part of one’s essential activities in the world as spinning fibers and growing crops. My favorite movie of the year, check it out and then read my piece on it.

Related Post: The Northman, the decline of western civilizations, and the rise of 'Western Civilization'.

Tár was the best made film this year. In a post a few years ago I compared ‘cancel culture’ to sorcery—here Todd Field suggests it’s more like being haunted by a spirit. The movie is too subtle and sharp to do justice with a summary, even referencing it in relation to its exploration of ‘cancel culture’ makes it sound parochial and didactic, yet it is neither. Cate Blanchett portrays a very complicated and compelling character, and puts on what I think was by far the best performance of the year. Pay close attention to the references to Shipibo-Conibo music and conceptions of spirits and time. And watch for what lurks in the backgrounds.

Related Posts: The Social Dynamics of Sorcery, Appeasing the Dead.

Women Talking, adapted from the novel of the same name, and based on real events, effectively deals with some very unpleasant themes. As I’ve written a lot about over the years, across many societies historically men have used violence and deception to dominate and control women. This movie shows a group of women organizing in secret to protect themselves against men’s abuses. The music by Hildur Guðnadóttir is excellent, and there are some great performances here, particularly Jessie Buckley as a deeply scarred woman who reacts mostly with misplaced anger towards her fellows.

Related Posts: Ongoing series on male cults, Women’s secrets.

Men was a vicious takedown of a certain kind of man. The film is sharp, beautifully shot, and the ending is wonderfully insane, but I think Alex Garland pulled his punches a bit. The sort of man Garland is highlighting for the first two-thirds of the film is an easy man to dislike. Ugly, entitled, selfish, it’s all microaggressions and resentment. There is no charismatic, sociopathic, duplicitous, womanizing ‘Chad’ here to be shown for what he is. Instead Rory Kinnear and the deceased fiancé act as stand-ins for a kind of ‘beta male’ who resents women in part due to his own failures with them. There’s lots of interesting symbolism involving The Green Man and Sheela na gig. Jessie Buckley also puts on another great performance.

Related Post: Ongoing series on male cults.

Crimes of the Future is another gem from David Cronenberg. A future where people are so reliant on technology for survival their own bodies are somewhat foreign to them. Most people no longer feel pain or experience infection, traditional pleasures are muted, there is little concern for hygiene or conventional sex, the human form has become just another plastic modifiable technology to be maintained. This film is ugly and disgusting and quite beautiful. Typical Cronenberg, really. I’m still thinking about it.

Related Post: Handy man.

Nope is a sharp film with a lot to say about human interaction with, and exploitation of, nonhuman animals. Peele focuses on observation and communication, and how sensory biases are exploited—the recurrent focus on eye contact, the use of the fake horse as a lure, the tube men, the perfect ending which is thoughtfully built on everything shown before. There’s also a great misdirect early on. The performances are all good, particularly Keke Palmer, and Keith David gets an important but very brief scene in the beginning which ties a few things together: “I guess some animals aren’t fit to be tamed.”

Related Posts: Moser et al. Aggressive Mimicry and the Evolution of the Human Cognitive Niche.

Top Gun: Maverick was impeccably crafted. Everything is contrived to get you as quick as possible to the exciting action set pieces and build up the sweet moments of sentimentality, yet it doesn’t insult your intelligence in doing so. A popcorn flick for adults of the kind that big dumb Marvel movies have been gradually displacing. I want more stuff like this and less comic book movies. Which brings me to my next recommendation…

The Batman, much like 2019’s Joker, shows that comic book movies can succeed by copying superior genre films from the 1970’s. There are a lot of good performances in this one, primarily coming from the great chemistry Robert Pattinson’s Batman seems to have with everyone. Batman is at his best in a dyad, either with an ally, enemy, or frenemy, and Battinson’s scenes with James Gordon, The Riddler, and Selina Kyle were all excellent. Zoë Kravitz as Selina/Catwoman was a highlight, and Paul Dano’s Riddler gets a few nice riffs and has a good freak-out scene near the end.

Related Posts: Notes on the use of Homicide Costumes.

And finally, Chup: Revenge of the Artist was a fun surprise. It’s a Hindi-language horror/thriller/black comedy about a serial killer who targets self-righteous film critics. The tone of the film bounces around a lot and it almost collapses into farce, but there are some really fun scenes and digressions on art and passion, and the final scene is pitch-black perfect.

Honorable Mentions

I might edit in more later, but two honorable mentions for now: the Japanese language animated musical Inu-Oh was a ton of fun—great music and a sweet but sad story. And Mia Goth’s performance in Pearl was up there with Cate Blanchett and Jessie Buckley’s work this year, plus the film was surprisingly beautiful to look at, with lots of bright vibrant color.

In the field of behavioral ecology, this tactic is known as ‘masquerade’—“preventing recognition of an animal by resembling an uninteresting or inanimate object in the environment, such as a leaf or stick”.

This and similar camouflage tactics are common both across species and throughout many human societies, as I wrote about in my paper in the journal Human Nature on disguises and the origins of clothing.

Anthropologist Alanson Skinner writes that among the Ojibwa of Canada, “The [war] party was always preceded by scouts…While in service they wore headdresses of grass to conceal them the better when they lay flattened out on the prairie.” Other North American tribes such as the Gros Ventre were also known to have followed this practice.

Once the hunters leave, a Harfoot blows a kind of whistle or flute to signal to their compatriots things are all clear.

As I discussed in a previous post, the use of musical instruments for signalling purposes is common across many forager societies.

Less than a minute into their first appearance on the show and we have already learned a great deal about them, with the focus on some very credible cultural details. The Harfoots are a small people—both physically, and in terms of their ‘social-scale’. In a world with many large dangers they have to be clever. They conceal themselves in plain site with their masquerades and they use musical instruments to communicate in plain hearing.

After the instrument is blown we see Harfoots in their village emerging from hiding places and removing masquerade coverings from their carts.

It is common for nomadic people at risk of attack from enemies to conceal their temporary settlements when possible. In the early 20th century, explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson noted that the campsites of the Akuliakattagmiut of Canada were commonly chosen on hilltops with a good surrounding view of the country to guard against sneak attacks from enemies. They made sure there were many boulders and stone slabs around the site as well, because the caribou skins they used for their tents blended in well with such a backdrop. Stefansson writes that,

A dozen tents are often so artfully pitched that the men and dogs moving about them can be seen at a greater distance than the tents, while an Indian lodge or a white man's tent can usually be seen four times as far as could men standing around them. In August, 1910, our camp was for a few days located a quarter mile across a small lake from an Eskimo camp of some seven tents. Though this camp was on the skyline as seen from ours, we had the greatest difficulty in making it out without the use of glasses, so little did a tent on the skyline differ in shape and color from a boulder on the skyline. Looking from their camp to ours the small details of arrangement could easily be made out. [emphasis added].

One cool visual detail that recurs across multiple episodes of The Rings of Power is the way the kinds of vegetation the Harfoots use to conceal their carts appropriately change depending on the environment they’re in.

Another instrument we see the Harfoots use later is a whistle which mimics an owl hooting…

…and which they use as a lure to draw out their adversaries.

Mimicking the sound of another species as a lure is another cross-culturally common practice, check out our paper led by Cody Moser on aggressive mimicry as a hunting tactic and its importance in human evolutionary history.

Although in this case it didn’t exactly make a lot of sense to me—why would the priestesses respond to a random bird call? If the mimic is to function effectively as a lure it should be a sound the target can be expected to respond to, which is why in nature the mimic tends to imitate the intended prey species, who is liable to move towards a potential mate, or ally, or competitor. Perhaps there is a Tolkien lore explanation here about birds sometimes being spies or something, and maybe the priestesses were worried about that. But really, if the Harfoots’ goal was to draw them out, and the priestesses were looking for them already anyway, simply yelling would probably work better.

Beyond these dramatic efforts towards concealment and signalling with instruments, what else do we learn about the Harfoots throughout the show?

Much of the commentary about the Harfoots I’ve seen online has been quite negative. “The Harfoots are evil,” says a post with over 1,800 ‘upvotes’ in a Lord of the Rings subreddit. “We Need to Talk about the Heartless Harfoots of Rings of Power,” according to a headline at Paste Magazine. “Is it just me, or are the harfoots kind of horrible?” questions another headline, this time at The Daily Dot.

Fundamentally, there are two main complaints: the Harfoots make jokes about members of their community who died, and they are quick to abandon to die those who fall behind.

Before I argue that these complaints, while factually true, are misguided as criticisms of the show and Harfoot culture, let me acknowledge what I think is one useful point critics have made.

Both the critics at Paste and The Daily Dot point out that after the healthy adult man Largo breaks his ankle, this is treated almost as a kind of death sentence, and no one seems willing or able to help pull his cart. Generally, in nearly any society you can expect to have at least some risk buffering systems to deal with temporary shortfalls and setbacks such as this.

This is one reason why hunters tend to share big game widely across forager societies, because hunting is commonly a high-variance activity—I share when times are good for me and bad for you, and you do the same. Particularly when it comes to what should be a temporary illness or injury for an otherwise healthy and productive adult, the Harfoots should probably have some practices to deal with this kind of thing.

With that said, people in nomadic societies by the necessities of their lifestyle may have to deal with some very difficult circumstances. Consider this description from anthropologists Kim Hill and Ana Magdalena Hurtado of the Ache hunter-gatherers of Paraguay,

In the forest, when the Ache were highly mobile, a cruel fate fell upon anyone who could not keep up with the band. Many were simply left behind and never seen again. Others were left on trails near the houses of Paraguayans in the hope that these “enemies” would take pity on and care for the disabled. Still others were buried alive, in order to save them the hideous fate of being devoured by vultures while still conscious. Although such events were relatively rare before contact, they were extremely common during the period of contact when epidemics swept rapidly through the population. Old and sick individuals were simply left behind. Relatives often broke wide, well-marked trails, hoping that their loved ones would catch up later, and sometimes they did, even managing to crawl on their hands and knees from one camp to another until they were able to walk.

Despite this rather harsh treatment of the disabled, occasional examples of great sacrifice are also found. Several blind individuals were led around for years by others who helped them follow the band’s trail (all, however, were ultimately abandoned in times of stress). One boy who had lost his leg below the knee from a snakebite was carried piggyback by his father and other relatives. (He was later left with Paraguayans at first contact.) Older children who couldn’t walk for whatever reason were sometimes carried by their parents for years (again, all were ultimately abandoned, however).

Note both abandonment, particularly in times of severe stress, but also great self-sacrifice and care. In one case, laced with what seems to be a sense of dark humor among the group involved, they write that,

A middle-aged man was left behind because he was too sick to keep up. He was so weak that vultures came right down to the branches just above his head to wait for him to die. He managed to drive away the vultures and recovered from his illness. When he returned to his band they gave him the nickname “Vulture Droppings” because he was covered with feces from the birds who had perched above him. [emphasis added].

Among the Tiwi hunter-gatherers of Australia old women unable to keep up with the band were sometimes buried alive.

While the critical complaints about the theme of abandonment are somewhat understandable, albeit quite parochial, the criticisms of Harfoot sense of humor are just funny. “What the hell is up with the Harfoots? Laughing about a man getting killed by bees because he was an idiot?” asks the Redditor who said the Harfoots are evil.

Standards of humor vary across cultures, individuals, and social contexts. The Harfoots live a challenging nomadic existence in a harsh world occupied by many powerful beings. Slowing down the caravan for one risks dooming them all, and the difficulties their community faces promotes a dark and somewhat melancholic sense of humor. It’s no coincidence that the jokes critics are complaining about mostly occur during what appears to be a kind of funeral rite in episode 3, where they remember and recite the names of those who fell behind. The jokes are part of how the Harfoots mourn.

Naturally, The Rings of Power is a work of fiction and the Harfoots are not real, and as with the world building in pretty much anything you can surely point to numerous ‘unrealistic’ behaviors and other problems with the depiction if you want to go through the tedium. Overall though I was impressed with many of these little details that for me went a long way towards building a credible fictional culture rooted in authentic but underexplored human behaviors.

Related posts: The Northman, the decline of western civilizations, and the rise of 'Western Civilization', Disguises and the Origins of Clothing, Some Uses of Musical Instruments in Hunter-Gatherer Societies, Diss songs.

In his book The Demon-Haunted World (1995), astrophysicist and public intellectual Carl Sagan discussed the impressive tracking abilities of Kalahari hunters at length, and compared the methods they use in evaluating the depressions of footprints to how planetary astronomers analyze crater impacts.

Similarly, over 25 years later, Steven Pinker in his recent book Rationality (2021) offers a very nice extended discussion of Bushmen tracking skills and strategies,

Hunters distinguish dozens of species by the shapes and spacing of their tracks, aided by their grasp of cause and effect. They may infer that a deeply pointed track comes from an agile springbok, which needs a good grip, whereas a flat-footed track comes from a heavy kudu, which has to support its weight. They can sex the animals from the configuration of their tracks and the relative location of their urine to their hind feet and droppings…The San don’t just pigeonhole animals into categories but make finer-grained logical distinctions. They tell individuals apart within a species by reading their hoofprints, looking for telltale nicks and variations. And they distinguish an individual’s permanent traits, like its species and sex, from transient conditions like fatigue, which they infer from signs of hoof-dragging and stopping to rest. Defying the canard that premodern peoples have no concept of time, they estimate the age of an animal from the size and crispness of its hoofprints, and can date its spoor by the freshness of tracks, the wetness of saliva or droppings, the angle of the sun relative to a shady resting place, and the palimpsest of superimposed tracks from other animals.

Two of the most famous public intellectuals in recent American history, both accomplished scientists, decades apart, taking time in their popular science books to emphasize the intelligence and sophistication of African hunter-gatherers.

And yet, despite this extensive popular discussion of what should be a fairly obvious and well-established point—that Kalahari hunter-gatherers are uh pretty good hunters, with effective and intelligent strategies for obtaining their prey—there are some popular hereditarian psychologists who have claimed that African hunter-gatherers are actually too dumb to hunt, and don’t hunt at all or don’t need to hunt to survive.

Bushmen hunters, occupying the lush paradise of the Kalahari Desert, subsist almost entirely on the abundance of plant life that surrounds them, these hereditarians say, while Eurasian ancestors in contrast evolved particularly large brains in part through figuring out how to hunt and survive during ‘cold winters’.

Richard Lynn writes in Race Differences in Intelligence (2006),

The selection pressure for enhanced intelligence acting on the peoples who migrated from tropical and sub-tropical equatorial Africa into North Africa, Asia, Europe, and America was the problem of survival during the winter and spring in temperate and cold climates. This was a new and more cognitively demanding environment because of the need to hunt large animals for food and to keep warm, which required the building of shelters and making fires and clothing.

Similarly, J. Philippe Rushton writes of the supposed novelty of the need to hunt—and fish, and butcher animals, and even use fire apparently!—among Eurasians specifically, writing in Race, Evolution, and Behavior: A Life History Perspective (2000) that,

To survive the long winters, the ancestors of today's Whites and Orientals made complex tools and weapons to fish and hunt animals. They made spearheads that could kill big game from a greater distance and knives for cutting and skinning. Fires, clothes and shelters were made for warmth.

In a footnote in The Bell Curve (1994), Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein compare the “relatively benign environments of Africa to the harsher and more demanding Eurasian latitudes,” that ‘Caucasoids’ and ‘Mongoloids’ had to face. Satoshi Kanazawa (2012) claims that, “In the tropic and subtropic climate of Africa, plant food is abundant, and food procurement is therefore not difficult at all.” Kevin MacDonald and Michael A. Woodley (2016) echo these claims, writing of how it was only after humans left Africa into more northerly climates that, “hunting animals and means of storing food were required.”

These guys are all some of the most popular and well-known English-speaking hereditarians of the last few decades, and there appears to be a consensus among them about the supposed ease of survival in Africa and the lack of a need for hunting there.

First, I will draw on the ethnohistorical evidence to show how badly this hereditarian account misses the mark. Next, I will address some potential objections to the case I make. Finally, I will conclude with some general thoughts on what I consider to be one of the major current failures of hereditarianism.

The Social Importance of the Chase

The hunt is of extreme importance, central to masculine identity, and has substantial reproductive implications among Bushmen groups. Anthropologist Lorna Marshall offers an extended description of how essential hunting is in The !Kung of Nyae Nyae (1976), writing that,

With the rarest exceptions, all !Kung men hunt. Little boys play with tiny bows and arrows from the time they can walk and practice shooting throughout their childhood. At adolescence, they begin to hunt with their fathers. They learn the skills of tracking and stalking and begin to participate in actual hunts. They continue through their manhood till they are gray-haired old men who can no longer endure the exertion of the hunt. A young man may not marry until he has killed a big game animal, proved himself a hunter, and had the Rite of the First Kill performed for him. John Marshall's film, “A Rite of Passage,” depicts the rite as it was performed for young /Ti!kay, son of Khan//a of Kai Kai. The pressure of group opinion upon men to conform to their society's expectation, to hunt and provide meat, is enormously strong. In the Rite of the First Kill, a scarification (one of several) is cut in the skin of the boy's chest and a magic substance rubbed into his body to insure that he will not be lazy, that his heart will say to him, “Why am I sitting here at my fire? Why am I not out hunting?” [emphasis added]

First marriages were customarily arranged among many Bushmen groups, and the parents of daughters placed significant importance on the prospective husband being a good hunter. Marshall writes that,

The parents of a girl want the boy to be responsible, kind to their daughter and, above all, a good provider—which means a good hunter. They want him to make his arrows straight, to shoot swiftly and accurately, to be able to run down an eland, and, most of all, they want a son-in-law whose heart says to him, ‘Why am I sitting lazily here in the werf? Why do I not get up and go hunting?’ and who, in obedience to his heart, and the group’s desire, and the magic which has been rubbed into his scarifications in the Ceremony of the First Killing, gets up and goes…A boy who never killed any large meat animal would not be given a wife, informants said. This was why the strange old deviant, /Gaishay, had remained a bachelor. For reasons no one understood he could not hunt; he gathered veldkos like a woman. Gossip had it that twice he had tried to drag a woman against her will into his scherm but had not succeeded. Informants remarked, ‘Women like meat’. [emphasis added]

Hunting plays an important role in ornamentation and displays of status as well. For the Auin Bushmen, “Among men, decorative scars take the place of a hunt record. For each piece of big game that a man has killed, he wears a horizontal decorative scar, on the right upper arm for male game and on the left upper arm for female game.” And as I noted in a previous piece, hunters at Nyae Nyae would often cut antelope skin from the forehead of their prey and make them into bracelets for their wives. The wife and daughter of the man known as Short Kwi wore dozens of these, demonstrating his hunting prowess.

Territorial boundaries oriented around rights to hunting grounds are also known and respected. Anthropologist George Silberbauer writes of the G/wi of the central Kalahari that,

The exclusiveness of the rights of a band to occupy its territory and to exploit its resources is expressed in interband relationships of the sort described earlier regarding interband migration and the visits of single persons or small groups. These rights are also dramatized in girls' menarchial ceremonies, during which the girls are ritually introduced to the territory and its resources. The rights are also expressed when an infant has been away for some time and is reincorporated into the band by a welcoming ritual….The boundaries are recognized in the statements of informants and in the behavior of people working border zones. Gathering across the border is considered to be an invasion of rights and, to my knowledge, was always avoided. Hunting across a border is also not done, although wounded game is pursued into the neighboring territory. When an animal is brought down only a short distance across the border, it is considered to be killed on home ground. Sometimes an animal that is slow to succumb to arrow poison (see later in this chapter, under “Hunting”) or a wounded animal flees deep into a neighboring band's land. The hunter either gets help from that band if they are camped near the animal's path, and gives most of the meat to the helpers, or later tells the band of the incident and gives the meat to the band as a present to affirm their rights. [emphasis added]

Food Storage and Preservation

In the book The Harmless People (1989), on the Nyae Nyae Bushmen, Elizabeth Marshall Thomas writes that, “Most of the meat is dried to preserve it, causing it to last at least a few weeks,” clearly describing food storage and preservation. This is only one of the most popular and well-known ethnographies ever written, so naturally I do not expect most hereditarians to have read it before making strong claims about the people it describes. Ethnohistorical descriptions from over a century ago also mention the Auin, another Bushmen population, storing gathered foods in sacks of duiker or ibex leather within their huts.

Culture Loss and Complexity

By the time the most detailed ethnographic studies were conducted of Bushmen by Richard Lee and the Marshall family in the 1960’s, most groups had been wiped out by colonial contact.

However older ethnohistorical documents point to various complex cultural behaviors that were relatively common in the past, but rare or not found in the few contemporary groups that survived into recent years. Some examples:

1. Message sticks.

2. Hunting disguises.

   

   Among the Auin, “In isolated cases the skin of an ostrich, with a stick placed in the neck, is used as a mask. The hunter slips into the skin after he has colored his legs with chalky soil. This mask is used for hunting ostriches as well as other types of game.”

3. And war practices and military accoutrements, with local conventions and traditions for navigating conflict.

Technology and Archaeological Evidence

Many important hunting technologies, such as the bow and arrow, seemed to have first emerged in Africa.

Among the Hadza of east Africa, anthropologist James Woodburn writes that, “The possession of a powerful bow is necessary for prestige and a Hadza man uses a bow with a draw-pull in the neighborhood of 120 pounds. The bows in use by other East African tribes are generally much weaker, as are European bows.”

Further, all African hunter-gatherer societies that I have surveyed used complex poisons requiring multi-stage preparation for hunting, again demonstrating the importance of hunting, and a common emphasis on effective hunting tactics among African hunter-gatherer societies.

The Affluent Paradise of the Kalahari

Despite the strange claims hereditarians have made about ease of survival for African hunter-gatherers, as Richard Lee notes in his book on The Dobe Ju/’hoansi (2012),

The northern Kalahari is a semidesert, and water scarcity is a major problem. The Ju rely on a hierarchy of water sources ranked in order of abundance…With these sources the Ju plan their annual round, spending the winter season close to the permanent waters and the summer months ranging widely at the secondary and lesser water sources.

Thus, Bushmen must strategically plan their movements in relation to scarce and sometimes disappearing water sources. And in fact, water is even more scarce in the central Kalahari where the G/wi live, as there are no permanent water sources in many parts of the region, unlike further to the north. There is also a great fluctuation of resources. Silberbauer notes that where the G/wi live,

There is great seasonal variation in the amount and variety of food plants available to provide for the nutritional and fluid requirements of the band. A square kilometer that has esculent plants sufficient to feed 50 people for 20 days in May will only meet the needs of 2 persons for the same period in September. The small-community strategy of the nexus-tied band must take into account the extreme and fairly regular fluctuations of the availability of resources. [emphasis added]

Hereditarians are often vague about what ‘cold winters’ is supposed to mean, but note that it gets below freezing in the Kalahari, and frost regularly blights plant foods during parts of the year, reducing their availability. Careful planning of individual and band movements are important for survival in the Kalahari.

Some Possible Objections

Total Meat Consumption

According to most estimates, the majority of the calories that !Kung Bushmen traditionally consumed came from plants. Reuning (1988) puts most estimates between about 15-40% of food consumed by weight being meat. However, remember we are talking about hunters in the Kalahari Desert—among the G/wi most of this plant food consumption is effectively fluid intake to deal with the shortage of water. Silberbeauer notes that, “Plant foods, which constitute by far the greatest component of the diet, are eaten every day and are also the main source of fluids in all but the six to eight weeks of the year during which rainwater can be found in pools.”

Kaplan et al. (2000) further provide a qualification noting how encroachment by agropastoralist societies may affect hunting success in some regions,

Another study of !Kung food production shows much higher hunting success than Lee reported. Yellen provided data showing that !Kung men acquired twice as much meat per day when they were in bush camps than they did in the permanent dry-season water-hole settlement where Herero raised cattle, which probably had a depressive effect on game densities. Yellen’s sample of person consumption days was larger than Lee’s and covered all months of the year. The daily meat consumption in Yellen’s sample was about 1,600 calories per capita, which would represent 68% of all calories if total food consumption was the same as Lee reported. [emphasis added]

Naturally even if the majority of calories come from plants that doesn’t mean meat is unimportant. As Reuning (1988) writes, “Meat is greatly desired as food and is a vital contributor of protein to the Bushmen's diet. By far the greater quantities of meat (about 80%) are obtained from large (eland, gemsbok, wildebeest) and medium-size (hartebeest, springbok) antelopes.”

IQ Scores

In his 2006 book Richard Lynn puts the IQ of Bushmen at 54, concluding that adult Bushmen have the same average intelligence as eight-year-old European children. He got this number taking the average scores from a maze test and the Leiter International Performance Scale administered by Porteus (1937), and a modified pattern competition test from Reuning (1972). However, Reuning (1972) actually mocks and criticizes the kind of ridiculous conclusion that Lynn (and Porteus before him) comes to,

It makes no sense to set a problem simply because it is of vital interest to you, the investigator, if it does not normally exist in the world of your respondents or is put to them in an incomprehensible form. Take the example of the maze test, which is generally regarded as universally applicable. In the Central Kalahari there is never a situation in which you have to ask yourself: ‘Should I turn left here? Will I get stuck in a blind alley if I turn right?’ A motorist may get stuck in the sand, but the ordinary Kalahari dweller can go straight as far as he wants. There is no barrier or wall of any kind for him. One just cannot expect a Bushman to see the thin lines on a tester's maze as impregnable barriers. Furthermore, how can one who does not speak the subject's language fluently make clear to him such arbitrary rules as ‘Don’t cross the lines with your pencil’, ‘Don’t enter a “blind alley”’, ‘Do not retrace your way’, etc.? If one tries, he must not be too surprised if the results indicate, e.g. that the average mental age of the adult Bushman is, say, 7 1/2 years (Porteus, 1937). This is probably still better than the conclusion a Bushman would draw should he put the average European to the test by, say, leaving him alone in the Kalahari for three days; he would not get a response at all. [emphasis added]

Reuning (1988) further indicates how Lynn’s inferences are unwarranted from his results,

In order to assess the Bushmen’s average intelligence, in comparison with “IQs” of other people, our tests would first have to be standardised with one or more reference groups. A statement about the absolute level of intelligence, the “power of mind” of the Bushmen, is not, therefore, feasible.

Technological Complexity

Because of the demands of a nomadic lifestyle, Bushmen technology has to be portable or quickly reproduced. This simplicity is not due to stupidity but intelligence. As Megan Biesele writes in Women Like Meat (1993),

Habitation and government are based on flexible, opportunistic exploitation of the best resources available at any given time. Because of the need for mobility in following the movements of game, and the water sources usable at different times of year, Bushmen traditionally have very little property. Since they must walk wherever they go and often have to carry babies and small children, they usually have no more possessions than they can comfortably carry. A woman has a few ostrich eggshell water carriers, her digging stick, a wooden pestle and mortar perhaps, and some ornaments and skin bags. A man has his bow and quiver, a spear, sometimes a hunting bag made from the whole skin of a small buck, and a carrying net made of twisted sansevieria fibres and not much else. Most of Bushman technology is carried in the mind as information and technique, in fact, rather than in the hands or on the back. [emphasis added]

One popular hereditarian who was actually very impressed by Bushmen technology is Francis Galton. In Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development (1883) Galton writes that,

Among the races who are thus gifted [as natural artists] are the commonly despised, but, as I confidently maintain from personal knowledge of them, the much underrated Bushmen of South Africa. They are no doubt deficient in the natural instincts necessary to civilisation, for they detest a regular life, they are inveterate thieves, and are incapable of withstanding the temptation of strong drink. On the other hand, they have few superiors among barbarians in the ingenious methods by which they supply the wants of a difficult existence, and in the effectiveness and nattiness of their accoutrements. One of their habits is to draw pictures on the walls of caves of men and animals, and to colour them with ochre. These drawings were once numerous, but they have been sadly destroyed by advancing colonisation, and few of them, and indeed few wild Bushmen, now exist. [emphasis added]

In his travel guide, The Art of Travel (1855), Galton repeatedly draws attention to various Bushmen methods of extracting and storing water and suggests their use. For example,

To filter Muddy Water .—When, at the watering-place, there is little else but a mess of mud and filth, take a good handful of grass or rushes, and tie it roughly together in the form of a cone, 6 or 8 inches long; then dipping the broad end into the puddle, and turning it up, a streamlet of fluid will trickle down through the small end. This excellent plan is used by the Northern Bushmen—at their wells quantities of these bundles are found lying about.

and

Calabashes and other gourds, cocoa-nuts and ostrich eggs, are all of them excellent for flasks. The Bushmen of South Africa make great use of ostrich shells as watervessels. They have stations at many places in the desert, where they bury these shells filled with water, corked with grass, and occasionally waxed over. They thus go without hesitation over wide tracts, for their sense of locality is so strong that they never fear to forget the spot in which they have dug their hiding-place. [emphasis added]

Sounds pretty smart to me! Note again these sophisticated methods of water storage are at odds with the hereditarian claims about lack of storage. Hereditarians ought to be reading more Francis Galton, apparently.

Conclusion

I think giving hunter-gatherers who have never been indoors or held a pencil before a maze test, and concluding that they are dumb because they didn’t follow the instructions you are reciting to them in like their 6th or 7th language, is comically stupid.

In my opinion, if you want to understand and be knowledgeable about cross-cultural differences, you really have to read ethnography. You have to dig into the ethnohistorical evidence. There’s over 1200 societies listed in the Ethnographic Atlas. Documents for over 360 societies are provided for in the eHRAF World Cultures database. The Standard Cross-Cultural Sample consists of 186 societies. The Probability Sample Files on HRAF has 60. The latter two samples were developed in part to deal with Galton’s problem (i.e., non-independence/cultural influence between societies).

Modern nation-states are not independent from each other, but with ethnohistorical data we can better evaluate behaviors in contexts that were genuinely independent. Wicherts (2010) put it perfectly, “National IQs cannot be viewed solely in evolutionary terms but should be considered in light of global differences in socio-economic development, the causes of which are unknown.”

It does not make sense to me to take current population differences in IQ—or pretty much any other measured psychological or behavioral trait—as face value evidence of evolutionary differences between populations as many hereditarians often do, particularly when they haven’t looked at the ethnohistorical evidence, which I generally consider far more relevant to evaluating such claims, because it better addresses issues with Galton’s problem, and the varying pace of economic development and the demographic transition.

Further, comparisons of intelligence differences between populations are naturally highly culturally influenced and contextual.

As Jared Diamond correctly notes in Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997),

Of course, New Guineans tend to perform poorly at tasks that Westerners have been trained to perform since childhood and that New Guineans have not. Hence when unschooled New Guineans from remote villages visit towns, they look stupid to Westerners. Conversely, I am constantly aware of how stupid I look to New Guineans when I’m with them in the jungle, displaying my incompetence at simple tasks (such as following a jungle trail or erecting a shelter) at which New Guineans have been trained since childhood and I have not.

And British geologist H.B. Guppy puts it quite nicely in his work on the natives of the Solomon Islands,

The superior knowledge, which these natives possess of each plant and its uses, has often led me to reflect on the meagre acquaintance with the commonest trees, shrubs, and herbs, which the ordinary white man can claim. Had my native companions asked me to instruct them in a similar manner on the vegetation of an English woodland, if such a rapid change of scene were possible, they would probably have regarded me as a very ignorant and unobservant fellow.

Related Posts: The Sad Story of Short Kwi, Legendary Hunter of the Kalahari, The Oldest Trick in the Book, The Northman, the decline of western civilizations, and the rise of 'Western Civilization', A Survey of Poison Use in Hunter-Gatherer Societies.

Additional Notes: As another example of sophisticated Bushmen hunting strategies, here’s Francis Galton’s account of coming across pitfalls and fencing created by Bushman in Namibia:

We passed a magnificent set of pitfalls, which the Bushmen who live about these hills had made; the whole breadth of the valley was staked and bushed across. At intervals the fence was broken, and where broken deep pitfalls were made. The strength and size of the timber that was used gave me a great idea of Bushmen industry, for every tree had to be burnt down and carried away from the hills, and yet the scale of the undertaking would have excited astonishment in far more civilised nations. When a herd of animals was seen among the hills the Bushmen drove them through this valley up to the fence; this was too high for them to jump, so that they were obliged to make for the gaps, and there tumbled into the pitfalls. We had seen no people about, but at night when we off-packed, the hill-top in front of us blazed with fires. I presume that more trees were being burnt to make a second set of pitfalls. [emphasis added]

Another hereditarian anthropologist, Carleton Coon, quotes this passage in his work The hunting peoples (1971) and remarks on the “considerable organization” required for such a task.

Contradicting further the claims from Lynn and Rushton about the lack of emphasis on hunting and skinning animals and making clothing, Coon also notes that, “The Bushmen of the Kalahari wear skin sandals to protect their feet from the hot, sandy ground when hunting in the summer. This gives them an advantage over the game animals, for the latter usually seek shade in the middle of the day.” and adds that, “The South African Bushmen also cure gemsbok hides, to be worn as robes, with human urine, then they scrape the inner sides thin, and from time to time they rub in bone meal, making the hides as soft as chamois.” [emphasis added]

And a third hereditarian anthropologist, Henry Harpending, who did fieldwork among Kalahari Bushmen and is most famous for co-authoring The 10,000 Year Old Explosion, remarked that, “All of us have the impression that Bushmen are really quick and clever…” Harpending also provides a hilarious anecdote of a hunt with Bushmen that well illustrates their knowledge of tracking and animal behavior:

One morning we set off to where the animal had last been reported. The party was a colleague, several young Bushman males, and myself. We soon picked up its tracks and for several hours followed its wanderings through the low thorny scrub. To me the tracks looked exactly like those of a cow but the Bushmen never hesitated. When it was apparent at one point that there were no tracks at all in view I asked, and the Bushmen told me that there was no point in following the tracks since they knew exactly where it was going. We often saw this hunting with Bushmen­–they used actual tracks as a guide but knew the habits of animals so well that they often proceeded on their own to pick up actual tracks later on.

This went on for hours until, suddenly, a young man grabbed my shoulder and said “there it is.” I looked long and hard until I saw it, well camouflaged behind several yards of thick brush, sideways, staring hard at us with its bright pig eyes. It was about forty yards away.

As I brought the rifle up I was dismayed to realize that it still had a powerful telescopic sight. I should have removed it and use open iron sights in thick bush but I had forgotten. With the magnification of the scope I saw a black mass surrounded by brush. It took a moment to locate the front legs, then the chest. Oriented, I aimed and fired. “Bang-whump”, the bang from the rifle and the whump as the bullet struck the buffalo. He jerked a little, then simply stood there staring at me. “Bang-whump, bang-whump” as I fired two more rounds.

Now he tossed his head and snorted, then started running toward us. Buffalo charge with their nose high, only lowering their head to use their horns on contact. I fired one more round at the charging animal, head on, simply pointing at him because he was so close, then turned and ran. We discovered later that the bullet had struck his shoulder, ricocheted off his scapula, and exited through the skin on his side. It certainly didn’t slow him down at all: I might as well have been shooting at a railroad locomotive.

There were three of us running away now from the charging animal: my colleague, our camp dog, and myself. Perhaps fortunately for us the buffalo went after the dog, which handily outran it. After its charge the buffalo wandered off several dozen yards and collapsed in a thicket.

My colleague and I got together after the charge, brushed each other off, then noticed that none of the Bushmen with us was near. We looked around and called but got no response. Then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw a fellow about fifteen feet up a tree frantically signaling me to be quiet, then pointing at the (apparently) dead buffalo. I laughed and told him to come down, the animal was dead, it was getting dark and we needed to get started butchering it. He shook his head, silent, and frantically waved us back in the direction opposite the carcass. All the Bushmen were up in trees, all waving at us to get away, no one making any noise.

My rifle was empty, slung over my shoulder, as I honed a belt knife for the job ahead. I urged everyone to get out of the trees and get to work but everyone refused. I said “all right, we will just make sure”, then loaded my rifle and sat in a stable shooting position. The buffalo’s carcass was about forty yards away with its back to us. I took careful aim at the center of the neck, exhaled, and fired. “Bang-thump”.

Immediately the “dead” buffalo got to its feet, glared at us, and walked away. I told my Bushman friends that I was sorry that I had mocked them and that I was grateful they had not let me start to skin a live buffalo. They looked at me in disgust and told me that they understood that Europeans were very bright about certain things but that they could see that we could also be capable of heroic stupidity. [emphasis added]

A common theme is that the anthropologists, even hereditarian ones, who are most familiar with Bushmen by way of fieldwork and/or the ethnographic evidence, have a much higher opinion of their intelligence than the hereditarians I quoted at the start who noticeably know nothing about them and are going off of ideologically convenient assumptions about environments and cultural variation, and flawed applications of cognitive tests that are unlikely to be ecologically valid when applied to Kalahari hunters.

Among the Bushmen of Nyae Nyae in Namibia during the 1950’s, the man known as Short Kwi was famous for his hunting prowess. Tales were told of his great achievements in the chase—the time he killed an eland, a wild pig, and a wildebeest in a single day; the time he killed four wildebeest in a large herd—his exploits were legendary.

He was said to be a relentless pursuer who almost never lost an animal. He could pick up a cold trail even over stones. He deduced subtle clues from fallen leaves, such as whether they had been disarrayed by the wind or the movements of his prey. The meat from his pursuits was never wasted, as it was shared liberally and dried to last weeks.

He had encyclopedic knowledge of the animals in his environment—from the smallest mice to the largest antelope, he knew by heart their habits and where they could be found. Elizabeth Marshall Thomas writes that, “He knew every bush and stone in the area of thousands of square miles that he ranged over, and he lived for hunting.”

Short Kwi would sometimes hunt with others, although he mostly hunted alone. His family lived fairly independently in the bush, with just his wife, young daughter, and mother-in-law with him.

He was a small, slender man, even shorter than his wife, and spent much of his time hunting, his passion and occupation. “He would hunt on and on and when word would reach the large band of his wife’s family that he had killed, the band would go out to where the animal was, dry the meat, and eat it.”

While the Bushman practice of ‘shaming the meat’ to prevent an effective hunter from getting a big head is well known, with Short Kwi, “his great ability set him so far apart from ordinary mortals that for once the Bushmen forgot their jealousy and agreed that he was the best hunter the Kalahari had ever known.”

It was a common custom among the Bushmen for the men to cut strips of antelope skin from the forehead of their prey and make them into bracelets for their wives. Short Kwi’s wife and daughter had their arms covered in dozens of these bracelets, demonstrating his hunting skill, although Short Kwi himself wore no ornaments.

Short Kwi was brave, and he was careful.

Once, Short Kwi and two other hunters were tracking a wildebeest that one of the hunters had shot. They found it lying down, still living, surrounded by a pride of about twenty to thirty lions, having apparently decided to obtain this relatively easy prey for themselves. The wildebeest was struggling effectively however, protecting itself from the lions’ attacks with its horns.

The bushmen came across this scene and slowly approached. “We know you are strong, Big Lions, we know you are brave, but this meat is ours and you must give it back to us,” they said. “Great Lions, Old Lions, this meat belongs to us,” they spoke respectfully, but threw little stones and clods of dirt at the lions. The lions began to back away and eventually left the scene.

The wildebeest was still active. As it tried to get to its feet and fight off the men, Short Kwi threw a spear which landed strong into the wildebeest’s neck. The wildebeest continued to struggle with the spear lodged in its neck. Each time one of the men tried to grab the spear, the beast would lunge its horns towards him, forcing him to quickly jump away.

Finally, as one of the men distracted the wildebeest from the front, Short Kwi rushed the wildebeest and extracted the spear while passing over its back. John Marshall, an anthropologist who was there at the time, asked Short Kwi to perform the same maneuver again for a picture. However, Short Kwi declined. “This time he will remember,” Short Kwi said, before killing the bull by throwing the spear again into its throat.

One day, though, Short Kwi’s legendary attentiveness failed him. Without seeing it, he stepped on the tail of a puff adder, which rose up and bit him just below the knee. “His misfortune was regarded as a horrible accident and it was felt that the spirits of the dead were to blame,” Thomas writes.

In the bush there is little opportunity for medical care. Thomas writes that after the bite, “Short Kwi had been sick a year and had not died, but the flesh had gone from the calf of his leg, said Gao, the skin had gone from his foot, his foot was curled and the bones were showing.” Thomas was visiting Short Kwi’s community at this time and, offered to take him to a doctor for treatment.

One night, before they had left for the doctor, part of Short Kwi’s leg fell off,

When the calf had fallen off, Short Kwi was crying and biting his hand and his wife was crying, and Toma and Gao Feet stood beside him for a minute looking, the expression on their faces as dark as night. Then they picked up the leg and carried it away to the veld, where they buried it in a hole, exactly as if it were a person, they were so sad.

Soon after this, Short Kwi was brought by truck to a hospital, where the rest of the gangrenous flesh was removed, and he was fitted with a peg leg. When they returned, Thomas writes that, “We told all this to the Bushmen, but they were not really pleased. The miracle which they had perhaps expected had not taken place, for Short Kwi was still a cripple, and he always would be.”

Elizabeth Marshall Thomas would leave shortly after this, returning around thirty years later in 1987. On this trip she would learn of Short Kwi’s fate.

Short Kwi managed to overcome his disability, walking with his peg leg throughout the bush wherever he wanted. He eventually brought his family to live at the town of Tsumkwe. At Tsumkwe, Short Kwi’s daughter would grow up to marry a highly paid, hard-drinking soldier.

One night, while blackout drunk, the soldier stabbed Short Kwi to death. They had no obvious quarrel, and in the morning the soldier was mystified to learn of what he had done. Thomas thus concludes her account of Short Kwi’s life, writing that,

So all of Short Kwi’s courage, endurance, intelligence, ability, and ingenuity amounted to nothing. He lies in a shallow, trash-strewn grave on the outskirts of Tsumkwe. His widow moved to Gautscha, her traditional home. Later, in remorse, the son-in-law tried to kill himself by the method many people favor nowadays—he stabbed himself in the arm with a poison arrow. People rushed him to the infirmary, where a doctor saved his life by cutting off his arm. Now he, like his father-in-law, is an amputee.

Postface

It is often emphasized that a main driver in the massive increase in life expectancy over time is through improvements in infant and child mortality. Keep in mind, however, that people in contemporary industrialized societies also tend to have less exposure to many natural hazards throughout the lifespan—such as the snake bite Short Kwi experienced—than people across most ‘preindustrial’, and particularly hunter-gatherer, societies. Among the Aché hunter-gatherers of Paraguay for example, snakebite made up 6% of all deaths, and 14% of all adult male deaths in particular.

Note further the devastating social effects the introduction of strong alcohol can have on ‘traditional’ populations. The Epilogue of The Harmless People contains multiple other sad accounts of violence under the influence of excessive alcohol consumption that Elizabeth Marshall Thomas learned of when she returned in 1987.

Minkiol was the most despised and feared shaman known among the Ona hunter-gatherers of Tierra del Fuego. “Incontestably this person was by nature a dangerous fellow,” writes priest and ethnologist Martin Gusinde, going on to discuss how Minkiol’s fellow community members reacted to him, and his own impressions of the man,

Since people were unable to defend themselves against him [due to his magic], they very obviously avoided associating with him; if he appeared unsummoned, he was met by the most unfriendly glances of rejection and discomfort. This mistrust that surrounded him on all sides, which could hardly be greater, did not seem to wound him so much as to encourage him all the more in his malevolent intentions against everyone. On me myself his whole appearance had a very unsatisfactory, not to say frightening, effect at our very first meeting. At that time his previous life was still completely unknown to me. Later, I too avoided him, as one avoids a person whom one regards as capable of bad acts of violence.

Many deaths and acts of misfortune were attributed to Minkiol’s magic, and he, far from denying such accusations, would often brag that he had indeed achieved these malicious feats, threatening anyone who complained with a similar fate.

In the winter of 1914, a young man named Kaukesmo died, and his father accused Minkiol of being responsible. Around the same time, a man named Halemink got sick, and Minkiol was similarly blamed for his condition. As threats towards Minkiol from irate community members became extreme, Minkiol sought help from the local missionary Zenone, “e cosi guella volta [Minkiol] sfuggi alla morte /and thus that time [Minkiol] escaped death/.”

Suspicion and fear of Minkiol had not died down, however. Some years later, the three-year-old daughter of a man named Martin had died, and he blamed Minkiol for her death. Only four months after this, another one of Martin’s children got sick. Martin begged Gusinde for aid, but there was little he could do, and the child soon died.

Almost as soon as his child died, Martin grabbed a cudgel, went into Minkiol’s hut, and began beating him while he had been lying in bed. Martin managed to strike a few blows before Minkiol managed to grab his own weapon and fight back. “Each of the two men had struck violent blows, but when the first drops of blood moistened the ground they suddenly stopped, and Martin left the hut.”1 Gusinde writes that, in the aftermath,

Martin came straight to me and hoped for some help from me. I succeeded in stopping the bleeding, but I did not have the means for further treatment, since the bony part of the nose was shattered and the cartilage considerably crushed in. Whimpering groans broke forth from Minkiol's hut. I would not have dared visit him and offer him my help that day, for the loud vituperation of the people against him continued until far into the night. All, however, seemed very satisfied over the deserved payment that had fallen to him as his share.

Minkiol had at least two fractured ribs from the attack. As soon as he was able to move, he left the camp, as he was not allowed to remain there any longer. “Subsequently these wounds also healed, but the hatred of the people against Minkiol did not die down.”

During the spring of 1920, the 12-year-old son of a man named Talemiot fell ill, and Minkiol offered to cure him. Rather than improving, however, the boy quickly died. A rival medicine-man, Tenenesk, who had previously blamed Minkiol for Halemink’s sickness back in 1914, began to incite the boy’s relatives against Minkiol, implicating him in the boy’s death. The grieving and infuriated family began to plot revenge.

Some three months later, two men [I presume relatives of the boy based on the description, but this is not clear in the text] casually invited Minkiol to go hunting. “All three were on horseback and carried guns. Upon crossing a brook, they inconspicuously gave Minkiol a slight lead: In a moment their bullets pierced him and his horse from behind, and the water swept the two corpses away.” Thus was the end of the reviled and feared Minkiol.

Obviously, I did not know Minkiol, all I know of him is what I have gleaned from the limited description of him provided by Gusinde. But his story was a tragic one. Minkiol seems to have been a man who found himself well-suited for a dangerous and unhappy role, and he played it to perfection. Constantly at the wrong place at the wrong time, he was perceived as a villain, and perhaps he saw himself that way as well.

A person is more than their genes or their instincts: your ‘self’ is an equilibrium that emerges in a social context. Minkiol appears to have been a recurrent victim of circumstance, whose main mistake may have been his willingness to take credit for such repeated misfortunates. His story demonstrates some of the perils of aggressively claiming powers beyond those of ordinary men.

Related post: The Social Dynamics of Sorcery.

Postface

One interesting thing to note is the killing of Minkiol might be considered an example of what some anthropologists, such as Richard Wrangham and the late Christopher Boehm, would consider ‘capital punishment’, and a ‘reverse dominance execution’, and maybe even the killing of an ‘alpha’, in this hunter-gatherer society.

But let’s take note of some key details. Minkiol was attacked by individuals seeking revenge for deceased kin, a much more common motive for lethal violence than any kind of ‘communal execution’ in hunter-gatherer societies. It’s not clear that Minkiol ever actually physically killed anyone—at least, there was no physical evidence, nor apparent motive, linking him to the specific killings he was accused of—the accusations being due entirely to his perceived malicious supernatural powers. And while these powers inspired fear, he was a hated and marginalized figure, not really an ‘alpha’.

And yet, this account is probably more typical of what some would consider ‘capital punishment’ in hunter-gatherer societies than the more popular conception of what 'reverse dominance executions’ entail. Vengeance may be socially approved, but it tends to be enacted in a way that is personal, usually more ‘blood revenge’ than ‘capital punishment’, even when it might be fairly described either way, as in this case.

Anthropologists Douglas Fry and Patrik Söderberg’s 2013 survey of lethal violence across 21 hunter-gatherer societies further found that within-group ‘executions’ were less common than revenge for a previous killing, a husband killing a wife, fights over a woman, interfamilial feuds, and intergroup disputes.

The same belief and procedure were found among the Nenets of Northern Asia, except the object ‘extracted’ was usually a worm. For the Ticuna of Amazonia, the shaman would ‘suck’ out illness-causing thorns. Frogs, worms, and small sticks were all candidates for removal for a shaman among the Klamath of Oregon.

A ǀXam medicine man of South Africa would also remove small sticks from his patients, though he would extract these by ‘snoring’ them out, rather than through ‘sucking’ or sleight of hand. A Comanche doctor of the American Southwest would instead use a small horn to ‘suck’ out little stones supposedly causing the patient’s sickness.

This performance, the ‘extraction trick’, appears to be one of the oldest and most widespread healing practices and magical tricks in the world. It is found across independent hunter-gatherer societies on every part of the planet, and is underpinned by the same universal human psychology everywhere.

I discuss the pervasiveness of the extraction trick across independent hunter-gatherer societies, and the evolved psychology behind it, in my new paper in the open access journal Humans. If you want to learn more be sure to check it out, it’s a short piece.

And if you’d like to watch a related performance, see the 1964 ethnographic film Sucking Doctor. It depicts a Pomo shaman of California engaging in a healing performance and ‘sucking’ out the patient’s sickness, which she then ‘spits’ into a cup of water, where she claims it disappears after a few moments.

Reference: Buckner W. A Deceptive Curing Practice in Hunter–Gatherer Societies. Humans. 2022; 2(3):95-103. https://doi.org/10.3390/humans2030007

The Okipa was a rite closely related to the ceremony of the Sun Dance found across various Plains tribes, which generally involved rituals designed to secure the continued presence of the American bison and prepare young men for success in warriorhood.

The Mandan Medicine Lodge, where key aspects of the Okipa took place, was a secretive and sacred space. Armed sentinels guarded the entrance, with admittance given only by permission of the Conductor of Ceremonies. Women were not supposed to approach or gaze at the Lodge, nor catch even the slightest glimpse of its interior.

There are some key details to notice in the image above. First, all the men are nude, but covered in different colored clay as body painting, “some white, some red, some yellow, and others blue and green”. Normally, Mandan men would dress like this:

So, the body painting we see here is ceremonial, not daily attire. You can also see the men’s bull-hide shields and bows and arrows hanging on the walls.

Second, in the background you can see willow-boughs and aromatic herbs adorning the sides. The willow tree played an important role in the mythology of the Okipa rite, having been carried by a sacred bird during a key moment in their mythic history.

Third, you can see bison and human skulls arranged on the floor. As noted previously an important motive for parts of the Sun Dance and the Okipa rite was to secure the continued presence of the bison.

Finally, in the foreground you can see four sacks lying on the ground. These are made from the skin of bison’s necks into the shape of a tortoise and filled with water. Each sack has a tail of sorts made from raven’s quills, as well as a drumstick lying on top, as the sacks are beaten on as musical instruments during certain ceremonial dances. You can see two rattles nearby as well, also for use in ceremonial dances.

Explorer George Catlin, who recorded the Okipa rite and painted the illustrations in this post, tried multiple times to purchase one of the water-sacks, but was told, “they were medicine (mystery) things, and therefore could not be sold at any price.”

For the first three days of the Okipa rite, much effort was devoted to events occurring outside the Medicine Lodge, with elaborate costumed masquerades enacting the behavior and traditions of local animals, mythical creatures, and spirits.

By the middle of the fourth day, the young men in the Medicine Lodge had not eaten, drank, or slept in that time, and were ready to submit themselves to a rite of profound pain.

Two adult men were to begin inflicting the tortures. One man wields “a large knife with a sharp point and two edges, which were hacked with another knife in order to produce as much pain as possible,” and makes incisions through the flesh, while the other man slides a sharpened splint through the wounds as soon as the knife is withdrawn.

Notably, both men inflicting the tortures have their bodies painted so as to mark their own scars, demonstrating to the young men that they have gone through the same trials. The man wielding the knife also wears a mask, so that, “the young men should never know who gave them their wounds.”

George Catlin writes that,

During this painful operation, most of these young men, as they took their position to be operated upon, observing me taking notes, beckoned me to look them in the face, and sat, without the apparent change of a muscle, smiling at me whilst the knife was passing through their flesh, the ripping sound of which, and the trickling of blood over their clay-covered bodies and limbs, filled my eyes with irresistible tears.

Once the young man’s body had been prepared, with the incisions and splints passed through, “a cord of raw hide was lowered down through the top of the wigwam, and fastened to the splints on the breasts or shoulders, by which the young man was to be raised up and suspended, by men placed on the top of the lodge for the purpose.”

The image below provides some further details:

While the young men are suspended from the ceiling by splints at the breast or back, they are weighed down by bison skulls hung from splints in their arms and legs. In the young man on the left’s right-hand you can see his medicine bag, while both men have their shields hanging from splints in their arms.

What the assistants are doing with the poles is they are rotating the suspended young men, “The turning was slow at first, and gradually increased until fainting ensued, when it ceased.” Catlin writes that,

In each case these young men submitted to the knife, to the insertion of the splints, and even to being hung and lifted up, without a perceptible murmur or a groan; but when the turning commenced, they began crying in the most heartrending tones to the Great Spirit, imploring him to enable them to bear and survive the painful ordeal they were entering on. This piteous prayer, the sounds of which no imagination can ever reach, and of which I could get no translation, seemed to be an established form, ejaculated alike by all, and continued until fainting commenced, when it gradually ceased. [emphasis added]

Once the suspended young man is motionless and silent, the onlookers shout “dead! dead!”, and the men at the top of the lodge begin to lower him to the ground, while a man on the ground would remove the two splints by which the young man had been hung up, “the time of their suspension having been from fifteen to twenty minutes.” Catlin says that,

Each body lowered to the ground appeared like a loathsome and lifeless corpse. No one was allowed to offer them aid whilst they lay in this condition. They were here enjoying their inestimable privilege of voluntarily entrusting their lives to the keeping of the Great Spirit, and chose to remain there until the Great Spirit gave them strength to get up and walk away.

Once the young man had the strength to walk away, the ordeal was generally not over. The young man would go to another masked man wielding a hatchet shown in the foreground on the right of Figure 4. The young man would place his left-hand on the nearby bison skull, and thank the Great Spirit for listening to his prayers and protecting his life during the ordeal. The masked man would then strike off the little finger of the young man’s hand with the hatchet.

Sometimes, immediately after that first offering, a young man also would also offer as a sacrifice the forefinger of the same hand, leaving only the two middle fingers and thumb. Several chiefs and warriors had been known to offer the little finger of their right hand, which is considered an even greater sacrifice.

Some men, through their own volition, had gone through the Okipa tortures multiple times, with the scars on their limbs and breast to prove it.

After being suspended from the ceiling of the Lodge, and the offering of the little finger, the ordeal was still not over, for it was important that honorable scars be produced from these trials, which could not result from simply removing the splints—they must be broken out somehow, leaving a deep scar.

After six or eight young men had gone through the ordeal, they would be led out of the Medicine Lodge, “with the weights still hanging to their flesh and dragging on the ground, to undergo another and (perhaps) still more painful mode of suffering.” This portion of the ceremony is known as ‘the last race’, and takes place in front of the entire tribe.

Each tortured young man would be assigned two athletic men to him, one on either side, each adorned like so:

The painted men would wrap leather straps around the tortured young men’s wrists, and run with them as fast as they could, “the buffalo skulls and other weights still dragging on the ground as they ran, amidst the deafening shouts of the bystanders and the runners in the inner circle, who raised their voices to the highest key, to drown the cries of the poor fellows thus suffering by the violence of their tortures.”

The goal of this event from the tortured young men’s perspective was to see who could run the longest without fainting, and who could recover the fastest after doing so. The majority of them were said to have fainted before even completing half the circle, and thus would be violently dragged through the dirt, “until every weight attached to their flesh was left behind.” After each weight had been disconnected, the two painted men would flee off towards the prairie, “as if to escape the punishment that would follow the commission of a heinous crime.”

No longer burdened by the weight, once the young man gained the strength from the Great Spirit to rise again, his ordeal was over.

Despite the complexity of the rite, there are some individual motives and cultural functions we can point to as playing a role in maintaining this practice. Catlin tells us that the young men were, in some sense, engaged in a kind of competition of stoicism, seeing who can last the longest without fainting, and who can recover the quickest after doing so. Equally, while the ordeals were ongoing, the chiefs and higher status men were observing and evaluating how the young men handle the trials, in order to better decide who to appoint as war leaders or for other important posts in future conflicts.

Thus, on some levels of analysis, individual competition for prestige and group-functions related to warfare can be identified as relevant factors.

But perhaps most important and mysterious of all is the role of devotion. The young submit themselves to some of the worst tortures imaginable with the confidence that they are being encouraged and protected by a power much greater than themselves. Despite the mutilations, deaths were said to be extremely rare, with only one in recent memory according to Catlin (1867),

It was natural for me to inquire, as I did, whether any of these young men ever died in the extreme part of this ceremony, and they could tell me of but one instance within their recollection, in which case the young man was left for three days upon the ground (unapproached by his relatives or by physicians) before they were quite certain that the Great Spirit did not intend to help him away. They all seemed to speak of this, however, as an enviable fate rather than as a misfortune; for “the Great Spirit had so willed it for some special purpose, and no doubt for the young man's benefit.” [emphasis added]

It was the Great Spirit which gives the young men the power to survive these trials, and if a young man should perish in the undertaking, this was at the Great Spirit’s behest, in service of a higher purpose.

Devotion to a being, a belief, a cause—this confers a kind of power onto people, for good and for ill, which can be difficult to comprehend from the outside.

Related posts: Hostile diffusion, Ongoing series on male cults, Symbolic reciprocity.

Note: I might end up doing a follow up post or two on this, focused on the Sun Dance and how this kind of practice spread across the Great Plans. It is intriguing in the Okipa rite how some of the torturers wore masks, the shouting of “dead! dead!”, and the way the two painted men flee at the end. There seems to be a mixture of an initiation practice and a kind of human sacrifice involved in this performance. See my post Hostile diffusion for some oblique hints at how this kind of rite may have spread, I hope to touch on this aspect more concretely in the future.

For the last five years or so I have been doing research on male cult secrecy in small-scale societies. This work did not begin with any particular interest in or knowledge of the topic, but simply reading ethnographies of various societies and coming across certain persistent patterns which I did not understand. It has now grown into a broader interest, and I have covered quite a bit on the topic over the years, which I will give a short overview of here.

My first post on the topic, On secret cults and male dominance, provides some background and focuses on a few functional dimensions of male cults, mostly in terms of male reproductive competition and preparation for warfare. The piece is a bit broad, and probably overly focused on selective functional elements, as I was not aware of just how widespread and diverse male cults were when I wrote it.

The next post, Why headhunting men’s cults develop in lowland riverine rainforest areas, discusses the role socioecological context plays in the development and persistence of certain kinds of warrior cults. Environmental context helps incentivize or constrain particular cultural practices, and this is a too easily and commonly neglected dimension.

I followed that up with Notes on Nggwal, a piece exploring some facets of the tambaran men’s cult of the Ilahita Arapesh of New Guinea. The piece was my first to touch on the topic of homicide costumes, which I also delved into in The Assassin’s Footprint, Leopard Society and the Man-Leopard Murders, and Notes on the use of Homicide Costumes. See also my paper Disguises and the Origins of Clothing published in Human Nature.

I touched on some of the artistic and musical elements involved in Sexual Selection Through Mate Choice Does Not Explain the Evolution of Art and Music, The Bullroarer, and Some Uses of Musical Instruments in Hunter-Gatherer Societies.

I discussed some of the initiation aspects in The Creation of Men and Women in Hunter-Gatherer Societies, the evolutionary dimensions in my Quillette article A Girl’s Place in the World, and deception and male control of desirable occupations and resources in Sacred Metal and Margaret Mead, Reo Fortune, and the 'Loving Deception' of the Mountain Arapesh.

I considered women’s own ritual practices in Women’s secrets, while my most recent post, Shame and cult secrecy, gets into the role of the emotion of shame in both the maintenance and destruction of male secrecy.

This is an ongoing project, and I plan to update this page as I continue to work on it.

Some fifty years prior to Bateson’s writing, the village of Palimbai was celebrating the wagan, an important ceremonial event where secret gongs—conveying the voices of the wagan spirits—are beaten for an extended period in the upper story of the men’s ceremonial house. During this time, public conduct in the village is strictly regulated. There is supposed to be no loud noises—no shouting, fighting, or breaking of firewood—and this is enforced with the explicit threat of killing any man or woman who disturbs the peace. Usually, such extreme measures are not considered necessary.

In this particular case, the ceremony had preceded without incident, up until it was time to prepare for the final public event. The initiatory group that was to produce the performance went to get the croton (Codiaeum) leaves which are used to adorn the giant representations of wagan (Figure 1).

The men followed tradition by sneaking out, so women do not learn the secrets of the production. The leaves were gathered and placed into string bags, and the men were on their way back to the village. Some children were playing near the mouth of the waterway that leads to the village, shooting stalks of elephant grass with toy-spear throwers. One of these projectiles managed to land in the men’s canoe and pierce the bag where the leaves had been placed. The men ran out, speared, and killed the small boy who had thrown the shot.

When they got back to the village, there was a fight, and three or four men of the Wainggwonda clan, who were all considered classificatory “fathers” to the boy, were killed.

At this point, the men of the Tshimail clan, who had been the primary participants in the killing, went to ceremonial house and pulled down all the wagan gongs. They showed the secret gongs to the women of Wainggwonda, and gave them the sacred gong sticks to keep in their houses. Notably, the men also did not add tassels to their lime sticks after these killings, as was normally done as a badge of homicide.

Here we have some themes I have touched on in previous posts on cult secrecy and the sounds of spirits. The men were following the norms of their cultural context in maintaining this tradition of secrecy and using violence to protect and enforce it. After their traditions compelled them to engage in behavior that appears to have offended their sense of honor, the penitent display to the women of the secret gongs and the bestowal of the gong sticks reflected the burden the men understood these objects to have imposed on them.

It is the logic of secrecy—a truth is withheld for a reason, and men may have good cause to fear its revelation. Shame leads men to protect their secrets, and shame leads men to reveal them.

Among the Chambri of New Guinea, a water-drum was used to convey the voice of the crocodile spirit. Margaret Mead says that when she asked Chambri women during a ceremony if they knew what makes the sounds, the women said, “Of course, it is a water-drum, but we don't say we know for fear the men would be ashamed.” And similarly, when she asked the young men if the women knew their secrets, they said, “Yes, they know them, but they are good and pretend not to, for fear we become ashamed. Also—we might become so ashamed that we would beat them.”

I have discussed some of the functional, evolutionary, and self-interested dimensions of male cults, but here we see how they also represent an anxious liability.

Decades of missionary and colonial activity led to the decline of tambaran men’s cult of the Ilahita Arapesh of New Guinea. In 1984 several of the men rose during a church service and revealed the secrets of the cult to the women: “With newfound Christian enlightenment, they realized that the names which they had known this spirit—Nggwal, Holof, Waf, and, in Melanesian Pidgin, tambaran and kastam—referred in fact to only being: Satan,” writes anthropologist Donald Tuzin.

This previous system, the tambaran, required the men to deceive their wives and children, and enact violent dysphoric rites on the young men being initiated, including beatings and penile bleeding: “in discussing these matters with Arapesh informants I was often struck by the negative valuation that they themselves placed on certain of their ritual customs: the act was “cruel,” though the intention frequently was “not,”” Tuzin writes. Although this negative valuation they placed on their customs may to a significant degree reflect the rising influence of colonial and missionary activity at the time.

Yet the decline of the cult and the rise of Christianity led to new problems. While the women took well to Christianity, much of the male bonding and social teaching that occurred within the cult was gone, and without the outlet for camaraderie and ritual meaning many men apparently lost interest in public life. Tuzin reports a rise of alcoholism and wife-beatings with the death of Nggwal, as the social positions of the men became more unstable.

Evolutionary social scientists often love to focus on practical functions and motivations for human behaviors. You’ve got the “culture is smarter than we are,” emphasis of the cultural evolutionists, the fitness maximization logic of the behavioral ecologists, and the functional modularity focus of the evolutionary psychologists.

All of those models are useful, but they have limits. Cultural conventions are not optimal and can be quite suboptimal, people may follow them to the detriment of themselves and others, and the psychological mechanisms most relevant for understanding them are often those emphasizing the paramount importance of social learning and our norm psychology.

Much of our cultural constructions are genuinely mysterious and probably always will be. It is tempting and often valuable to reduce particular behaviors and institutions down to some very basic elements: this is what lets you make predictions and guide future investigation. But recourse to particular narrow functions or motivations will never capture much of what makes human behavior so curious.

Related posts: Symbolic reciprocity, Hostile diffusion, Women’s secrets, Some Uses of Musical Instruments in Hunter-Gatherer Societies, Notes on the use of Homicide Costumes.

Based on findings such as these, I started looking at the use of musical instruments in hunter-gatherer societies with two particular predictions in mind: 1) people should use music to fulfill multiple communicative functions across societies, such as for making an announcement or offering an invitation. If people can rapidly and reliably infer certain conventional meanings from music, then musical instruments ought to also be useful for producing simple messages to quickly convey information across distances and to numerous people at once.

However, 2) if people reliably pick up certain cues from music, then this communicative system should also be vulnerable to exploitation. If I know what information you derive from a certain sequence of notes, I might be able to use this to deceive you, like a bad horror movie using ominous music to create tension despite nothing frightening happening on screen.

I searched eHRAF for four particular musical instruments (trumpets, flutes, whistles, and bullroarers) across societies defined as at least ‘primarily hunter-gatherer’ (>56% of subsistence from wild resources). I looked specifically for a clearly described or conveyed communicative function, but did not include more general contexts (such as dancing, entertainment, or healing). Table 1 covers common functions of these four musical instruments across the 42 hunter-gatherer societies where I found evidence.

As you can see, certain practices appear pretty widespread, such as the use of trumpets or whistles to signal a greeting, invitation, or announcement. The Warao of Venezuela signal their return to the settlement after a successful crab-hunting expedition by blowing a shell trumpet. Among the Bau Fijians the death of a chief was announced by shell trumpet. For certain ceremonies among the Xavante of Brazil, leaders would blow gourd whistles to signal the beginning of the proceedings.

I didn’t include this in Table 1 because it’s not a traditional case—and it didn’t really fit the category—but anthropologist Frederica de Languna offers an interesting post-colonial account among the Tlingit of Alaska, describing how, “The Tcicqedi and Galyix-Kagwantan [clans] sang a Copper River song when coming on the steamer to the Kwackqwan potlatch at Yakutat in 1905. The steamer’s whistle was used as a signal to start and stop the song. [emphasis added]”

Trumpets and whistles are also commonly used to signal an attack, although it’s not always clear whether it’s a way of organizing the attackers, or to inspire fear and panic in the enemy, or both. Among the Maori of New Zealand a shell trumpet was used, “for signalling the approach of enemies, the return of a raiding party, and by a commanding chief for directing or rallying his force during a fight.” The Abipón of Paraguay and Argentina engaged in “surprise attacks accompanied by the loud blowing of trumpets and whistles to disorient their foe.” Among the Creek of Oklahoma whistles were used by leaders in pitched battles as the final signal for engagement.

The use of flutes in courting is quite interesting, although in this sample the practice appears to have been exclusive to societies across the North American Plains or those that had contact with them. These love flutes seem to effectively represent a single tradition that diffused across one region, as opposed to the clearer examples of independent invention across regions we have for the other categories. Anthropologist Mark Awakuni-Swetland writes that among the Omaha of Nebraska,

Love songs played on a flute from afar were one method of indicating an interest in a girl. Marriage was often by elopement so that the girl could escape from the claims of her potential marriage partners. After escaping to the home of one of the boy’s relatives, the young couple would return a few days later to the girl’s parents’ home. The boy’s relative presented gifts to the girl’s relatives. If they were accepted, it signaled recognition of the marriage.

Regarding the use of musical instruments for deceptive purposes, trumpets and whistles are sometimes used in hunting mimicry, although this task is more commonly accomplished vocally across societies rather than with the aid of an instrument.

The use of bullroarers, flutes, trumpets, and whistles to impersonate spirit sounds is notable. These instruments are commonly meant to convey the voices of spirit beings or mythical animals, and they may double as a signal for the uninitiated women and children to hide away in their huts while the men do their rituals or have their feasts. Among the Mbuti of Central Africa the molimo trumpet gives voice to a sacred animal. Anthropologist Colin Turnbull writes that,

Usually the trumpet is heard at about the time the band normally retires for the night. The women in any case have been aware of whatever crisis is the occasion for the meeting and are prepared for it. On hearing the trumpet, they take their children and shut themselves in their huts. None will come out, even to cross the clearing. The men sit close together around one of the fires. As they sing, the molimo trumpet echoes their song, sometimes coming close, sometimes going far away into the forest.

As I discussed previously in my paper on disguises, across various hunter-gatherer societies, “musical instruments are used in secret to mimic the voices of the spirits and add to the credibility of the illusion. [Among the Arunta of Autralia, Bororo of Brazil, and Mbuti of Central Africa] men have secret feasts forbidden to uninitiated women and children, often with the claim that the food is consumed by the spirits.” Before the molimo ceremonies a basket is hung up in a prominent place with offerings for the molimo animal, which the women are expected to keep filled.

As Margaret Mead wrote of the Arapesh horticulturalists of New Guinea, “The secret of the House Tambaran and the sacred flutes…resolves itself into the way the men keep meat away from the women by saying that the monster eats it and then secretly consuming it themselves. The flutes the men blow to scare the women away while they hide the meat.”

Anthropologist Ian Keen described three days of ceremonies among the Yolngu of Australia [not included on eHRAF], writing that,

Each evening a rhythmical banging noise originating on the salt plain behind the camps along the beach resonated through the settlement. The men told the women and children that the spirits were making this noise by stamping on the ground with one foot. While this was going on Yirritja men…walked through the camps collecting flour, tobacco, sugar, etc. 'to feed the wangarr [ancestors] and the spirits'...

How the ‘rhythmical banging noise’ was achieved is not described, as far as I can tell. Keen says earlier in the work that, “it would be a breach of my obligations to [Yolngu men] if I were to publish religious secrets in a work of this kind. I have omitted all but the barest indication of what goes on in the men's secret-ceremony grounds,” so the procedures involved in cases like this among the Yolngu and potentially other societies may not always be mentioned or known to the ethnographer.

See my previous piece on bullroarers, which seems to be an instrument particularly well suited for impersonation of spirits (and weather manipulation).

Overall musical instruments appear to be commonly used across hunter-gatherer societies to convey certain types of simple messages, such as an announcement or attack signal, as well as being used deceptively to impersonate animals and spirits.

What is intriguing about these associations is they are often structured around norms of reciprocity, much like conventional human relationships.

A hunter who kills his prey may naturally thank the beast for submitting to its death, singing a song in its honor, perhaps leaving an offering of berries, or ritually treating and decorating portions of its carcass. “Hunting is not simply a matter of killing animals; you owe them something, and this debt is paid when you bring the animals you have killed back to life by talking about them,” writes Pierre Clastres of the Guayaki-Ache hunter-gatherers of Paraguay.

Among the Xokleng of Brazil, arrows are thought to have a kind of soul, “not only do arrows weep and die if they are deserted or thrown away in the forest, but arrows can see when a man is threatened with death, and they will fall from their places in the house above him at night to warn him of his danger.” Arrows thus respected and treated well return this courtesy, and come to their owner and creator’s aid when he is in peril.

Human emotions and cultural norms, such as feelings of hunger and norms of modesty, can be projected onto diverse representations. When Margaret Mead showed Mountain Arapesh women of New Guinea a life-sized doll, she says, “They would take me aside to ask me how I fed it, and ask if it would never grow any bigger. And if I laid it on the ground with its head lower than its feet, some solicitous woman always rushed to turn it around.”

Animal trials were not uncommon in Europe in the Middle Ages, “In December 1457 the sow of Jehan Bailly of Savigny and her six piglets were caught in the act of killing the five-year-old Jehan Martin. All seven pigs were imprisoned for murder and brought to trial a month later before the seigneurial justice of Savigny.”

Charles Hose and William McDougal write that, “Although Kenyahs [of Borneo] will not kill a hawk, they would not prevent us from shooting one if it stole their chickens; for they say that a hawk who will do that is a low-class fellow, a cad, in fact, for there are social grades among the hawks just as there among themselves. [emphasis added]”. Thus the nonliving and the nonhuman may still be expected to abide to human’s cultural norms of moral culpability and accountability.

As I wrote on previously, in many societies there is a somewhat ambivalent relationship with the deceased, who not uncommonly are thought to feel confused or angry at their loss of life, and must be appeased and shown proper respect by the living.

Among the Manus of New Guinea, “Each Manus' man worships his Father, not in Heaven, but in his house front rafters...The skull of the father of the house owner has an honoured place in a finely carved wooden bowl hung high above...The spiritual presence guards the house and supervises the morals of its people.” This supervision is considered quite literal—Sir Ghost contributes to a man’s fishing success and protects the people of the household from sickness. If, however, Sir Ghost is not properly respected, he will instead inhibit a man’s fishing abilities and bring illness to home. Anthropologist Reo Fortune writes that,

The name of Sir Ghost is hallowed. The house owner often talks to his father's ghost, and honours the name of his father in his manner of speech. When he, in his turn, dies, his son or heir will honour him similarly, but not the ghost of the grandfather. The Manus honour a ghostly father, never a ghostly grandfather, saying that Sir Ghosts deserve to become anonymous and dishonoured when they fail to protect their sons from death. Then their skulls are cast out of the houses into the lagoons, in the house-breaking that follows a house owner's death. [emphasis added]

Because these relationships are often culturally stereotyped, with certain norms and expectations of proper conduct, the nonhuman and the nonliving may nonetheless impose significant demands on people’s time and attention, which they may come to resent. Anthropologist Peter Metcalf writes that,

The Berawan of Long Teru lost their stock of skulls in a disastrous fire that consumed the entire longhouse. It was an incident that was often recalled, and the poor woman, now elderly, whose kitchen fire started the blaze has never been allowed to forget it. But oddly enough, the loss of skulls was not lamented. Though it was claimed that the heads had the potential to bring benefits to the community, the service of them was considered onerous. The heads had to be ‘fed’, so it was said, with small offerings, and kept warm with a fire that never went out. Women had to avoid that part of the longhouse veranda, or pass by in a crouched position. Any contact with heads was dreaded, so that only old men, weary of life, would dare move them, whenever the house needed rebuilding. [emphasis added]

To me, this all points to a few key facets: 1) humans having an evolved psychology with mechanisms particularly attuned to developing and assessing identities: we form our own individual identity, we recognize others, we have a reputation and assess those of others in turn, etc. 2) the universality of cultural norms which structure and guide social interactions, and which, as shown above, are commonly projected onto the nonhuman and nonliving, who themselves have and are given their own identity and reputation, and 3) the role of socioecological context and exchange in incentivizing certain kinds of relationships (e.g., through hunting rituals).

The concept of human ‘ultrasociality’ is naturally focused on how good humans are at cooperating with other humans, but I am particularly fascinated by the effort people go to to try and cooperate with the nonliving and the nonhuman.

Among the Mbuti of Central Africa, the cutting of the umbilical cord is an important rite. While the father is obliged to remain absent for the birth itself, it must be one of his blades, such as a leaf or wooden knife made by him, that is to cut the cord. The father keeps the blade, as well as the cord itself, until his child is old enough to make a bundle of them and bury them in a stream, “where they will get carried away by the next flood waters.”

The umbilical cord connects the fetus to the placenta, which in turn is connected to the uterine wall of the mother, providing the fetus with oxygen and nutrients and allowing it to expel waste. This system has fascinated many people across societies throughout human history. Leonardo da Vinci says in his notebooks, “note how the foetus breathes and how it is nourished through the umbilical cord and why one soul governs two bodies,” going on to add,

the soul of the mother, which first composes, in the womb, the shape of man and in due time awakens the soul which shall be the inhabitant thereof, which first remains asleep and under the tutelage of the soul of the mother which through the umbilical vein nourishes and vivifies it.

Considering the essential role it plays in sustaining the child, it is perhaps not too surprising that special treatment of the umbilical cord after birth is common across hunter-gatherer societies (Table 1).

The cord is commonly cut with a blade of some special material, although it is sometimes unclear whether this reflects a particular cultural meaning or just happens to be considered most effective for the task. Among the Auin of South Africa, “The umbilical cord is severed with the sharp edge of a reed splinter, never with any other object. Practical reasons for this could not be given: “It has always been so.””

Among the Yokuts of California, “The umbilicus was cut with a sharp bone or clamshell; flint was tabu.” The Semang of Malaysia used a splinter of bamboo because metal was considered taboo for this purpose and thought to potentially harm the child.

For the Kaska of British Columbia the blade only became meaningful after use, “An old woman cut the umbilicus with a stone knife which, because of the use that it had been put to, henceforth remained dangerous for any other purpose.” Among the Haida of British Columbia, the particular blade used would be based on the sex of the offspring, “A paternal aunt ushers the child into the world, severs the umbilical cord with a knife—one used by the father for a boy or by the mother for a girl.”

Part or all of the umbilical cord itself is often hidden away, or preserved as an ornament for the child. Among the Aranda of Australia, “The mother severs the umbilical cord with a stone knife…After a few days she makes a necklace for the infant from the remainder of the cord, and paints a black line over its eyebrow to ward off illness.” The Tiwi of Australia instead bury all the afterbirth in a shallow depression, and then cover it with dirt and ashes and some burning logs.

Among The Eyak of Alaska, “The cord was dried and tied around the child's neck as an amulet. Galushia has kept his son's cord in a bag hanging on the wall of the house. The child was supposed to wear the cord until a year before he was old enough to hunt, or in the girl's case, until a year before puberty. Then the cord was buried in the ground. [emphasis added]”

Anthropologist Frances Densmore provides an extended description of the meaning of the keeping of the umbilical cord among the Ojibwa of the Northern Great Plains,

First among the “charms” should be noted the decorated case in which the umbilical cord of the child was preserved. Gagewin stated that the chief reason for this was the securing of wisdom for the child. Another said that if it were not done the child “would become foolish,” and other informants said that if the cord were not kept the child “would always be searching for something.” One said it would poke among the ashes around the fire, and older persons would say, “He is looking for the cord.” It was desired that a child should play with this as it lay in its cradle and should keep it during its whole life, and for that reason the case in old times was sewed with sinew and hung from the hoop by nettle-stalk twine, both of which were very strong. This little case was treasured by a mother in the event of the death of a child. The writer knew a woman who had kept such a case for 25 years after the death of her infant son. A butterfly was sometimes embroidered or worked with beads on such a case, the butterfly being regarded as “the spirit of childish play.” A similar case of plainer design was obtained from a woman who had kept it many years. [emphasis added]

Among the Kutenai of Montana and Idaho, “The umbilical cord is dried and sewed into a fringed buckskin bag which will hang on the cradle board during the child's preambulatory life. At death it will be buried with his grave furniture. The reason given for this is: “This cord is part of you. You should not be cruel and destroy it.”” According to anthropologist Viktor Lebzelter, the reason given for burying the afterbirth among some South African hunter-gatherers was because, “The life of the child would be greatly endangered if an animal found it or if a feared sorcerer could appropriate a piece of it.”

Anthropologist Jules Henry describes the beliefs associated with this practice among the Xokleng of Brazil,

“The hair is thrown into the water because they are afraid to let it rot on earth. The first-born [i.e. the ancients] came out along the water, and therefore they throw the hair into the water.” Like tapir's raw food, water is a general life-symbol to the Kaingáng. In the same way the hair and nails of young children are thrown into the water “so that they will grow. Otherwise the children would dry up and die,” and the umbilical cord is placed in the water for the same reason. [emphasis added]

And, to conclude, the owl ceremony of the Selk’nam of Tierra del Fuego,

The remainder of the umbilical cord is left to dry on the newborn child, until it falls off by itself. The mother rolls it up into a little ring and carefully stores it in a small leather pouch. Only when the child can walk independently does the father catch a small wood owl. While he clasps the bird with both hands, the child takes from its mother's hand its own navel cord and places it around the neck of the animal. Then the father puts the wood owl into the child's hands. All who are standing around watch him until, after a short while, the child lets this little bird with the navel cord around its neck fly away. [emphasis added]

Ritual practices involving the umbilical cord seem to commonly involve both sympathetic magic to protect the child and help them age healthy and well-adjusted, as well as symbolic elements to represent the child’s growth and independence. Representing the last direct physical link of a mother to her child, the severing of the umbilical cord and its retention or disposal offers a dramatic arena ripe for ritual and symbolic representation.

For the father, however, the situation is quite different. He takes to his hammock inside his house, and is visited and consoled as if he were ill. He avoids any strenuous labor for some days, and undertakes an extended fast—“over the space of six full months he does not eat any birds or fish, firmly believing that this would harm the stomach of the child and that it would inherit the natural weaknesses of the animals which the father had eaten.”

That description from a 17th century French missionary, and other accounts like it, interested anthropologist Edward Tylor, who would make understanding the practice of ‘couvade’ a central concern in his work. According to anthropologist Janet Chernela, “The most convincing etymology of the term traces its derivation from the Basque couvade, from the Old French verb couver, meaning “to hatch””. This term was apparently already long in use before Tylor started writing about the practice, although he would certainly popularize it.

Tylor would identify couvade as a global phenomenon, noting its presence across various historical European societies as well,

In Europe, the couvade may be traced up from ancient into modern times in the neighbourhood of the Pyrenees. Above eighteen hundred years ago, Strabo mentions the story that among the Iberians of the North of Spain the women, “after the birth of a child, tend their husbands, putting them to bed instead of going themselves;” and this account is confirmed by the existence of the practice among the modern Basques. “In Biscay,” says Michel, “in vallies whose population recalls in its usages the infancy of society, the women rise immediately after child-birth, and attend to the duties of the household, while the husband goes to bed, taking the baby with him, and thus receives the neighbours' compliments.” It has been found also in Navarre, and on the French side of the Pyrenees. Legrand d'Aussy mentions that in an old French fabliau the King of Torelore is “au lit et en couche” when Aucassin arrives and takes a stick to him, and makes him promise to abolish the custom in his realm. And the same author goes on to say that the practice is said still to exist in some cantons of Beam, where it is called faire la couvade. Lastly, Diodorus Siculus notices the same habit of the wife being neglected, and the husband put to bed and treated as the patient, among the natives of Corsica about the beginning of the Christian era. [emphasis added]

Tylor, working within the framework of 19th century unilineal evolution, considered couvade a survival of a more primitive stage of human culture, where mankind began to transition from the ‘maternal’ to the ‘paternal’ stage—“the turning-point of society when the tie of parentage, till then recognised in maternity, was extended to take in paternity, this being done by the fiction of representing the father as a second mother.”

The cultural stages argument just has nothing to offer in this context, but the functional idea of viewing couvade practices as a kind of symbolic recognition of the father’s contribution to the child has logic to it. James Frazer rejected the cultural stages argument in the early 20th century, and emphasized a different sort of function to the practice, writing that, “The customs called couvade are an application of sympathetic magic, based on a supposed physical bond of sympathy between father and child.”

I’ve been puzzled and curious about this topic for awhile, so I searched ‘couvade’ on eHRAF, as well as a few search combinations such as ‘birth’ AND ‘taboo’, to look for evidence of couvade in the World Cultures database. The World Cultures database currently contains 361 societies, and I found evidence of couvade practices for 63 of them (~17% of societies, Africa=3/71, Asia=10/81, Europe=1/17, Middle East=0/12, Oceania=8/33, North America=13/80, Central America=5/20, South America=23/47) (Table 1).

This number should be considered a very conservative estimate, as this search procedure is not comprehensive. However, tentatively it does appear that couvade practices were quite common in South America, and extant but seemingly not common elsewhere around the world. This is consistent with some of Tylor’s suppositions, who identified South America (and the West Indies) as the region where couvade “developed to the highest degree”.

It is important to note that I am solely looking at practices in which the father participates: birth rituals conducted specifically by the mother are almost certainly more common, but I did not search for them here. It is said among the Mapuche that of Chile and Argentina for example that, “The father of an unborn child is not hampered by either food or conduct taboos or prescriptions; his pregnant wife is.” In some cases covered in my sample, both parents are noted to participate in the same or similar taboos. I’ll look into the ritual practices of mothers in particular in a future post.

I did not include simple restrictions such as the father not being present at the birth itself—only if the father’s activity is described as being restricted in more extensive ways, such as not leaving his hut at all for an extended period, taboos on hunting or other labors, restrictions on eating certain animals, et cetera, were they counted in my search. I also did not differentiate between social and biological fatherhood, so it is possible that in some cases the ritual father was not the biological father.

Here is a description by anthropologist David Maybury-Lewis of practices among the Xavante of Brazil, which I think nicely encompasses the general custom,

For some days immediately after the birth (in two actual instances the number was five) the husband should live quietly in and around his hut. He may work on the making of weapons or of anything else he is currently manufacturing, but he should not go out hunting or fishing and he should not eat meat. The Shavante emphasize that he should moderate his activities during this period. He must eat and drink little. He must not attend the men's councils or be involved in discussion or argument. He must not have sexual intercourse with any woman. He must, in short, live a quiet life.

This description includes each of the categories I coded for: ‘physical restrictions’ in terms of where the father is expected to go, ‘work taboos’ restricting the type of labor he is expected to undertake, and ‘food taboos’ restricting what he is supposed to eat. Sexual taboos also appear to be common, although I did not track these. Similarly, on the Nicobar Islands,

restrictions regarding diet and rest, or avoidance of work, are observed by the father quite as much as by the mother. It is considered selfish of a man to carry on his usual occupations when a birth is imminent and for some time after it has taken place. He is endangering the life of the child if he works hard and gets into a state of perspiration although it is not yet born.

Among the Pomo of California, “The father observed a mild couvade, as among so many Californian tribes. He did not lie in, but for four days remained in the house. After this, he began to go out, but not to any distance, and at first carefully kept from mingling with any crowd. He did not hunt for some two or three months.”

So, again, the common trends as far as I can tell are taboos on certain sorts of food and labor, as well as some restrictions on the father’s physical activity. These taboos seem to operate on the idea that by doing excessive work, eating certain kinds of foods, or going to certain places, the husband is somehow jeopardizing the health of the baby. This seems consistent with Frazer’s emphasis on sympathetic magic. As anthropologist Allan Holmberg puts it among the Siriono of Bolivia,

These rites are designed to protect the life of the infant and to insure its good health. Not only is the infant believed to be extremely delicate during the period immediately following birth, and thus readily subject to disease and death, but it is thought still intimately to be connected with the parents and profoundly to be affected by their activities. [emphasis added]

But note what is not here. Overall I could not find much evidence of birth-mimicry or male symbolism of pregnancy. There are a few rare hints of this, but they tend to be ambiguous. Among the Tupinamba of Brazil, French missionary Yves d'Évreux wrote in the early 17th century that, “When the child is born, [the husband] lays down, to observe the couvade. His wife works as usual and all the village women come to see him and console him about the pain and sufferings he has gone through at making this child. He is treated as if he were sick and tired, and does not leave his bed.”

Anthropologist Rafael Karsten writes among the Mataco of Argentina and Bolivia that, “the father of the child, seemingly instead of the mother, lies in bed, looks weak, fasts, and is attended by the women, in short, behaves just as if he were the person who had given birth to the child and were suffering pains.”

Among the Ainu of Japan and Siberia, an informant told missionary John Batchelor that, “when the birth has taken place, the father is sometimes called upon to stay at home wrapped up by the fire, as you saw, or to leave the house and go to stay with some friends for a time and keep very quiet as though he were ill for six days.”

These descriptions do emphasize the husband lying-in and being treated as if he were sick, but it is generally unclear to me from these descriptions whether the apparent illness is supposed to be a mimic of real or potential child-birth pangs, or whether this is more of a supposition put forward by missionaries and anthropologists, or somewhere in between. James Frazer touched this problem in Volume 4 of Totemism and Exogamy, while still noting there are some well-documented examples of men simulating childbirth,

in some parts of New Ireland, when a woman is in hard labour and a compassionate man desires to aid her delivery, he does not, as we might expect, repair to the bedchamber of the sufferer; he betakes himself to the men’s clubhouse, lies down, feigns to be ill, and writhes in fictitious agony, whenever he hears the shrieks of the woman in childbed. The other men gather round him and make as if they would alleviate his pangs. This kindly meant farce lasts till the child is born.

Frazer also touches on some apparently similar traditional European customs, “Similarly in France, when a woman is in hard labour, it is an old custom to put her husband’s trousers on her “in order that she may bring forth without pain”; and in Germany also they say that it greatly facilitates a woman’s delivery in childbed if she draws on her husband’s trousers.” In Frazer’s telling, such practices are sympathetic magic to alleviate pain in childbirth.

Based on my search, it seems like couvade practices commonly involved an expectant or new father avoiding certain types of labor, locations, and/or foods, likely under the theory that these would bring some sort of harm to his child. These traditions are found all over the world, but seemingly somewhat rarely, except in South America where they were common.

I did not find much clear evidence of men simulating childbirth or its pains, as it is often unclear whether or not the ‘lie-in’ men do is meant to fulfill this function, or tends to be more part of the restrictions on men’s activities to avoid bringing magical harm to the child, or some mixture of the two. This should probably be evaluated on a case-by-case basis and would require a more detailed look at each society than I’ve done here.

One key limitation here is that it is possible, and even probable, that some couvade traditions were kept hidden or declined through missionization and other colonial contact. It is clear that many missionaries and early anthropologists had a negative view of such practices. The 17th century French missionary whose account I began the post with said the couvade practices of the Kalinago were “Among their nonsense which upset me the most,” while Tylor himself wrote of the “farcical proceeding” of couvade, “which for twenty centuries has been the laughing-stock of mankind”. Linguist Margaret Hasluck offers an intriguing case hinting at the decline of couvade in parts of Albania,

I discovered that a case of couvade occurred in Elbasan on January 28th, 1924. A certain Gjon Pal Poplekaj, a Roman Catholic belonging to the tribe of Dushmen in North Albania, had come to work in Elbasan and married an Orthodox girl from that town. On the birth of their first child, Margarita, the Orthodox women went to congratulate the mother and to their horror found the husband in bed beside her on the floor. ‘It made us feel very shy,’ (na erth shum turp) my informants say. His mother-in-law, who had no doubt been scandalized enough herself, explained that he was following the custom of his distant tribe…Unhappily the good folk of Elbasan so laughed at the man that he has not dared to do couvade at subsequent births, and even denies that he did so at Margarita's. His mother-in-law also denies his doing so, though both know how many Orthodox women caught him in the act, and what an outcry it caused. There is thus no hope of extracting an explanation of the custom from him or her. Perhaps some old woman in Dushmen might be more communicative.

I plan to touch more on various other beliefs and practices associated with birth in future posts.