Thoughtful Warriors with Brenda Bowser
2025-07-29 12:00:00.000 +00:00

Uh I'm David Pinsov. I am David Petrozowski. Although I go by Dave on the podcast because it's Dave. I'm David. Yeah. Uh and uh this is Evolutionary Psychology, the podcast. In parentheses, yes. In parentheses. And this is actual evolutionary psychology by actual evolutionary psychologists. Forgot the tagline. I'm sorry, Dave. That's okay. I mean, who listens to this podcast anyway? Yeah, it's true. So I hope you are I hope you listener are one of those people. Thank you for being one of those people. Um and you know, in defense of David, you know, he has already heard the episode by the time it comes out. So um, but David, you should be listening. Uh David, good to see you. Good to see you too, Dave.

Um today we have a very special and kind of different episode. And this is uh Brenda Bowser. Brenda Bowser is uh at Cal State Fullerton. Um she's professor of um anthropology. And this episode is was sort of born out of, you know, we were celebrating the life of John Patton, who uh very unfortunately passed away. And um, and we I attended there was a um uh a symposium last October to sort of talk about uh all of the things that John did uh John Patton did in his career. And today we're very lucky to have his wife and lifelong collaborator Brenda Bowser um really just talking about their field site, Canalbo, and um and sort of just I don't know about you, David, but if there's one episode we've ever

recorded that what has been said has sort of stuck in my memory, this is that one. Yeah, this one was pretty haunting. I uh we should give a disclaimer for listeners. Um we get into uh intergroup violence, uh abduction of women, uh really uh heavy stuff. Yeah. Um so maybe maybe not bedtime listening. No, but deeply sincere experiences from Brenda and from the field about uh about their time in Kanambo. And um yeah, I don't know. I think like David said, I think this is the I think there was a different uh feel to this episode. And uh we really appreciated Brenda coming on and talking about her time with John. And I think um, you know, I the we'll link to the John um John Patton Memorial Symposium content.

There were so many amazing um scientists who worked with him. And uh yeah, I think this is just part of sort of celebrating and thinking about his contribution to science. And if there were any justice in the world, John Patton, John Q. Patton would be very widely known in terms of the anthropology and evolutionary psychology of intergroup conflict. And every time I ever saw him at, for example, the HBES meeting, it was always sort of like, I just felt so lucky to spend time with him and he would tell me stories from the field in a place where there was actually group conflict. And as a uh experimental lab psychologist, it sort of kept me honest. Yeah, this was a really special episode and um I I think you'll enjoy it.

Okay. Uh without further ado, here is Brenda Bowser. Welcome everybody. We have um another wonderful um guest today. Today we have uh Brenda Bowser. Brenda, obviously, you know, we miss John a lot. And I know you and John really spent a tremendous amount of your life in doing this field site in Kanambo. And I almost feel sort of silly asking you a question about it to start off with. And I know you've been thinking about sort of reflecting on this lifetime of sort of doing this thing. For those of the people listening who don't know what you've been doing, what what would you like to start out by saying about? Yeah. Why I I did a timeline and I won't go through the whole thing and I barely got through the

beginning of it. But Sean and I met as um PhD students at UCSP. And we met in 1983. And by 1985, we had gotten together, so to speak, and decided that we would do this fieldwork together. And we were married in 87. We planned literally our first child around our field work. Luckily we had a friend who was a PhD student in anthropology and decided to go to medical school. And so she counseled us on how to plan to have a child in the field and all the weights and ages and immunizations and how to figure all that out. So we did that and um John went to this is a shortened version, of course, but went to New Guinea when Neil was 11 months old, I mentioned, so that was 89, and then came back and um

applied for had been applying for funding, but the New Guinea folks who were reviewing NSF proposals at the time were not particularly enamored by Darwinian approaches. So Shagnon approached John and said, You should come to Yanamamal territory with me, which we planned to do. And then there was a military coup. And John got a note, a handwritten note from Shagnon in his box saying, can't go. There's been a military coup. The president's mistress is responsible for the permit. She's fled the country. We don't have military permits. By then, John and I had given up our place to live. I had taken a leave of absence from my job, and we had to rethink where we were going to go. And this was really foremost for john's dissertation work at the time um and from

there really it starts um the search for uh konambo and yeah and and and just to like fill in some of the details for folks so john is interested in human conflict is this the overarching theme and why he goes to new guinea john was interested in I'm trying to think of how to put it succinctly. I mean, certainly human warfare and the evolved psychology of coalitional violence, but particularly as that relates to men's status and the question of why men kill, why men engage in warfare, how from a Darwinian perspective one can explain that conundrum of altruism. And that was sort of the root of John's question, but always seated in evolutionary thinking. And he studied biology first at USC. So he really came to you to anthropology and to UCSB with

An evolutionary perspective and particularly grounded in ecology and behavioral ecology. So yeah. So yeah, his and his dissertation, you know, was titled Thoughtful Warriors. And I think one of the things that was implicit in sort of what I was looking for, and one of the things that I just love talking to John so much when I would talk to him about at like the Human Behavior and Evolution Society conference, or reading his dissertation, was the thoughtful warriors was it was that um this thing of conflict or killing or being a warrior which I think sometimes gets romanticized or demonized either way. John was looking at it from this perspective of we have to just um respect that it it might be complicated and there's there's a logic

to it. Um and it was neither gratuitously um anti or pro. It was just sort of dispassionately like this is going to be a complicated psychology. But what what what a um you know you mentioned he went to New Guinea 11 months. I can't imagine that and and is is is am I correct in understanding that where he went and even Kanamo itself, which we'll get into in a second, it's not the um, not only is it not, you know, a a four-star hotel, I mean, on some level, you know, you're going to a place because of human conflict being uh in in the in the air. So these are not necessarily the safest places. Is that right? And sort of how how can you can you elaborate a bit on that? And was that part of, you know, yeah, because I I can imagine people listening and saying,

well, you know, what what do you do? You know, um yeah, it it's a really um uh yeah I'll I'll I'll shut up and let you say oh I I I I guess I want to kind of free list here a little bit of the thinking and the thinkers who influenced John's um the development of his research question, and which then led to the choice of field sites. And um so certainly uh Robert Wright and the Moral Animal, um, Alexander Hamilton on kin selection, Shagnon's work, Trivers on reciprocal altruism, Franz DeWall on chimpanzee politics, and especially triadic awareness as the foundation of coalitional thinking, building from there, right? From those compared, those, those dyadic comparisons, then a triadic comparison,

and to build really a construction of cognitive categories that are coalitions and understanding status within that context, so not disembedded in any way. So there were specific criteria for selecting a field site. The first one, which I think is generally the advice that most of us give all of our students, right, is your choice of field site should be driven by your research question. So for John, the first thing was a history of recent or ongoing tribal um conflict. So coalitional violence, which is the the definition of um warfare that John was working with. So um so the research question really was the first criterion for selecting a place to go and and New Guinea was a great place to go and do that um because of the ongoing and

longstanding um history of um tribal warfare. So that was why he went to New Guinea and wanted to do that. So um I think that answers that. Yeah. What was that like? I mean, did you guys have a discussion? I mean, you know, we you know if you don't want to answer, but what you know, he has an 11 month old and then he's going to the business. What was that discussion like? I mean you know he he went for one month and the idea was he would go and check it out and then come back and we could um you know work on continue to work on getting funding and um and know uh what it would be like and plan better. So uh but for for me, you know, I I was trained as an anthropologist. So I was trained and I was in the archaeology program, but I wanted

to look at really the material correlates of status and alliance, and particularly with a focus on women. And John and I always joked that before we started to do this work, we divided the world into the living and the dead, and he did the living and I did the dead. and then once we started this work, we divided the world along gender lines. And he worked, you know, mainly with the men, and I worked mainly with the women. So I we were, and we often said that, you know, it it may have seemed brave for us to do that, but if anything bad had happened, and things bad do happen in the field, especially with children, sometimes people lose their children in the field. Sometimes there are books written on children in the field.

There are a lot of challenges. So we would have just seemed really stupid if anything bad had happened. But we were really cautious and we took our time. And that was a piece of it. what the and we worked with our pediatrician in fact for Neil to know what the um what what health challenges we should plan for how many pounds Neil would need to be before he could take the medications and the immunizations and the same for us um we we recognized an additional responsibility for keeping ourselves alive, you know, so that we didn't leave a child. Um, and we had to make plans for what would happen if something happened to us in the field, and that of course involved the support of the community and decisions about who

would take responsibility for Neil if something happened to us. So I think we um we we both felt fairly confident in our ability to work in the field. You know, I'd done lots and lots and lots of archaeological work in the tropics and elsewhere, and for years doing, you know, tough logistics. And John also was a really skilled outdoorsman. So we felt we felt prepared, we felt confident. We had role models who were awesome, you know. I mean, Shagnon, Brown, and the plan Shagnon and uh yeah, Donald Brown. Yeah, Donald Brown. Right. Yeah. Right. And, you know, everyone in our world, including graduate students like Barry Hewlett was a graduate student when we were at UCSB, all went off to do these

awesome periods of field work. And the expectation, the requirement at UCSB at the time was a minimum of 12 months. So we knew that this is what we were to do. And um I'm I'm we just had a lot of support and a lot of good models and a lot of training and good advice, and we felt prepared. Yeah. Does that answer your question? It it absolutely. I mean, I think um uh it's I think it's still brave. I think so too. Looking back, we were not afraid, but not um careless. Right. It wasn't reckless, yeah. No. David. I'm a kvecher. I could not handle uh being in that kind of situation. Um, if it were me and I was choosing a research question, it would be the cultural semiotics of the Ritz-Carlton. I'm more comfortable there than I am in Kanambo.

Um uh and we'll get to Kanambo. Yeah, so Kanambo, and I mean one way to maybe introduce Kanambo, and maybe this is a cartoonish version, but for me it was in reading John's dissertation, which is incredible. And we should we'll post a link to John's dissertation probably for this episode. um, is I think this was like an earlier colonial explorer who sort of met with the the kind of Ashwar community, but it was about um this was a community that resisted not only um, you know, was it Mayan and also Spanish? I mean, can you give the and there's also an anecdote with uh with molten gold. Is this the um that was the Spanish? Yeah, the so the yeah, the the ethnohistory of the region is that the Schwar

and Achwar territories in the sort of flanks of the the the eastern flanks of the Andes and down into the upper Amazonian watershed that is the Ecuadorian Amazon, that those folks um successfully resisted um the Inca incursion, which and and there were others um in Ecuador especially because that was late in the empire expansion of the Inca um but they were repelled by um by the Achuar and the Shuar and um and the Achar and the Shuar also repelled initial um Spanish incursions and the story is that um there there's gold in the Schwar territory which is up in the hills a little bit from where we are. But um but the story is that they poured molten gold down the throat of a Spanish, you know, um yikes in the church.

Yeah. John John John would sort of always during the CP, John Tuby would often um sort of recount John John Patton's uh story of it or just sort of, you know, that they the the men just sort of surrounded this this guy's hut or his building and sort of was saying, you know, you wanted this gold, here it is, sort of. It was uh it was sort of revenge, almost like Hollywood style revenge, but a a true story. And Michael Hunter wrote about that in his ethnography on the Schwar. And I haven't actually tracked down those historical sources. So I don't know how well founded they are. Okay. Yeah. So there's a lip yeah, but I mean in in and I think John in the dissertation um notes where he got that quote from.

But yeah, it's quite striking. You don't always come across an academic dissertation with the introduction to the field site including how the they fended off the the Incas in the Spanish, and there's this story of the the you know, them going and and pouring molten gold down the throat of the person who was trying to sort of um basically exploit the the land and the community. So and and the Achuars still see themselves as fierce people. And so I can tell you things that were said. Um there was a one John actually I was staying in a community with Neil. And John was headed downriver in a small canoe where they said, Signora, it's too small for you, it's too dangerous. And I'm like, okay, so they went without me and I was sad.

But the first place that they stayed, the traditional greeting from a person, a Nachoir person in their house is you call up, hoot up to the houses, which are usually built high on river terraces and defensible locations traditionally. And the response, if you're welcome, is don't worry, I will not kill you while you sleep. So John got that response, his first um visit going down the river. I can't imagine that was very reassuring. Oh okay. Thanks. We need to know that's the good answer. That's the good answer. You need to do your homework to know that's the good answer. Or or I there was a a story that you know, I think parts of Dave, but there was a big fight um among a bunch of senior men.

It was not dignified. And um, and it's a longer story, of course, about what they were fighting about and such, but um, but one of the men who um identifies as Qichwa said, you know, basically threatened to kill one of the Achwar men. And this is Isak Pijora, and he stood up and he said, You cannot count kill me. I am Achwar. I will kill you when you go outside to pee at night on the trail. And that's the standard way that raids are mounted especially against individuals um when killing is targeted. So and that's those those threats are real. In this case, um I think they were it was understood that this was gonna be resolved, but um without violence, but this is still anyway, so the threat of violence was there and you know there were

real situations and and um deaths while we were there and um certainly we heard firsthand accounts and um and were there for resolutions of some of those things and watched people's I mean, conflict management strategies, which might just be that you hop out of the canoe and spend the night sleeping in the forest, you know, while we went downriver with other people. And but um, this one man couldn't go because it was his father who had killed the father of someone who was in that village. And there's still the obligation for retaliation. But people have strategies for dealing with that. And in this case, it was not to be confrontational, not to go into the community, just to get out of the. I mean, the canoe stopped and Simone Kuhee has um got out.

And I was like, what's going on? And it took a while for people to explain because you're not sitting so close to people in a canoe always. But um anyway, that was one of those um things. So there were times when we were worried about our own safety. There were times when I was worried about my own safety if there were death threats against the person whose house I was staying at, for example. And people would tell me, don't worry, Brenda, it would cause problems if someone killed you, no one will kill you. And I just wow, so reassuring. The consequences after, yeah. Well, you know, I just I really it was still kind of nerve-wracking, but I I learned a lot every time. And and I learned to trust people.

So um, and I trusted that people really watched out for me and watched out for John and watched out for our kids, because we eventually had three of them, and they each came to the field at different times. So I think that's, and if we're talking about field sites and how to choose field sites and how to maintain field sites, which is one of the questions that you raised earlier, Dave, trusting, being able to trust, learning to trust, learning what you don't know, and being able to um follow instructions, you know, that and respect the people who live there, that they have greater knowledge than you do. And it's, it, you know, it's it's a good, it's not only a good way to live, period, you know, but to live safely, but to live well within

the community and to learn as much as you can possibly learn. So that was so so listening to people is really important. Amazing. Um, we just got to Kanambo. So we were in New Guinea. Um, Kanambo, I mean, there's sort of two questions. One is sort of what was the personal decision to go there? And then the second thing is that I think most people listening are thinking, well, you know, this sounds like a very scary, violent place. Um is is that something that the people there think of themselves as it being a scary and violent place? Or is that um something we're sort of painting on here and you know, uh do you know what I'm sort of getting at? So yeah. I do. Um so there is the latent potential for violence, and that's always managed

and always there. So there's a lot of time spent on consensus building, addressing problems when they arise, identifying problems early, and that's really the day to day work of adults in the community is to um manage politics um because of the potential for violence. But we went in, you know, when I said it, and I'll tell you a little bit more about how we got in to Conambo because it really does take a year. So anybody who thinks that you just pop in, you know, it's not, it's a big time commitment. So um, but but Conambo and those territories had a history of endemic rating and into boy, I figured this out from at one point because I've written it, but certainly past the 1960s, you know, into the 1970s.

And we so the older people in the communities at the time had experienced this. Had experienced a raiding. Had experienced raiding, and I mean, literally, you know, captive women, you know, sisters who were still living in the communities where they had been taken when they were stolen during raids. Um, I mean, those were discussions that evoked a lot of emotion. Um, people who had killed, who would come to our house, you know, at night. I can think of one guy, Visually, who came to our house to tell us about the people he had killed. I think they were five. He knew, of course, exactly. And um, and his children didn't know those stories. Wow. And when we went into communities, people would tell the stories that they knew.

You know, so it might be their mother who was a child who hid under the bodies of her cousins in a canoe. Um so that and she wasn't killed, but you know, her cousins were. And um So I think men, I was John and I were thirty-four, I think, when we went into Conambo. And the so the men and women who had experienced these big raids, um, and active rating. We're married to women my age. So a little bit older. So we we and and people referred to this. There was one senior person in the community of Konambo, not sorry, in Copatalsa, actually on a different river, but where we went first. But he referred to it as the time when we were dying. And it was a time when community, I want to say community leaders, but they

weren't community leaders yet. They were people who formed communities and then became community leaders because they invited others in, others joined them, but they they really intentionally worked on conflict management and reconstructing um society. And this was true in many parts of Yamozania, not just in the area where we were, but it took us a long time, I think, to realize how historically embedded those processes were throughout that enormous subcontinent. Well, I I suspect the question that is going through a lot of our listeners' mind, uh in addition to my mind, is why? So whenever there is any kind of violence that takes place, um we want to know why it happened, what were the causes.

If we watch a true crime documentary, we want to know what's going on inside the killer's head. Why did he do it? What was the motive? And so the question that has been eating away at me as you've been describing these um really terrifying uh scenarios with this ambient possibility of violence being a fact of life is why? Why what what do you think are the causes of of these killings? Um are there multiple causes? How do you partition them? What is your your understanding here of of what is behind this? So from a very reduced perspective, I would say, you know, at the core of almost every story of violence is um is a conflict over women, and that certainly would have been John's first response.

Um but to understand that um it's Conflict conflict over women. Could you unpack that for us? Because that that is a pretty striking claim. Um and I know uh certainly conflicts over women we know what we have some idea of what that's like. I mean there's there's you know talk of incels these days, you know, men who are involuntarily celibate and they're you know sometimes they engage in violence. Um w what do you what does it mean for uh violence to be driven by conflict over women? Well, you know, to take kind of one level um captive women are you know the women are stolen throughout the world even today, right? And um but I think to contextualize it more, again, thinking about small scale societies, places where there are no

institutionalized positions or institutions that manage politics, it's the responsibility of every man and woman to make decisions, and there are still cultural institutions for who's responsible for responding to particular incidents. So partly the answer to your question is that there are long histories, there are long genealogies, there are responsibilities on the parts of sons, especially to avenge the deaths of their fathers. So that's part of the context. But if we're talking about conflict over women, um in these con I'm going to speak now to Konambo and Achar and Qicha and Sabara, which are the three indigenous um ethnolinguistic groups represented in that territory, but it's a more general phenomenon.

So women are taken in raids. Women are taken individually. And this is more historic than, but not only historic. To be taken, and I asked Napoleon Chagnan about this too if it was true among the Yanumama when he says it is so to be taken for a woman to be taken can be um considered true even if she leaves of her own volition but without the permission of her father. So there are many circumstances in which women run off with men, but there are also many historic circumstances where a young girl might be bathing by the river and a man from another river basin may observe her over time and then snatch her and run with her. There may be a retaliatory array, like the Hatfield and McCoy kind of thing, where women

are taken. And those require vengeance. If a woman is married to a man, her father has the right to reclaim her, even when she's a grandmother. That right he exists for his entire life, that threat to reclaim one's daughter can often serve to settle disputes at the time, you know, put down the gun or I will take my daughter back. But if he were to do that, that would cause problems. And the family of the daughter, the husband in this case um could rightfully and would have to make a decision about how they were going to respond and they could respond by going in a raid to take her back um and that circumstance is um is true and documented certainly in the oral histories that I've recorded in the territory where we work.

So, and those are not forgotten. Those things are not forgotten. And a raid might include, you know, physical assault of other people in the household. It might include killing of men in houses on the way upriver, downriver, along the trail. It just depends on the level of escalation. So strategies to de escalate violence are part of this landscape as well. And people know how to do that, and they have to make decisions about how they're going to respond to circumstances that give them the right and the responsibility to respond, but they have other responsibilities as well, like maintaining peace. So these are all decisions that are made among people in coalitions, how they're going to respond, whether they're going to support violence

as a retaliation, as a response, or whether they aren't. And so those are if that's so there are many ways a woman can be stolen. um and and that it can be she can be taken back by her family she can be stolen by a complete stranger um she can be um and and that is more historic but to be today to be taken without permission of the father is the one of the more common affronts and so if so if I'm hearing you correctly, um if a woman voluntarily uh falls in love with someone in a different community and runs off with that person, the father will will view this as literally equivalent to her being abducted forcefully by a neighboring community. Yeah. And I asked Napoleon Shagnon, who is of course recorded uh extensive

histories and genealogies of this. And I asked him specifically whether the same linguistic term is used, and he said yes. So there's no distinction. Wow. I mean, I mean, to to a Western mind, that that is pretty uh mind-boggling. It seems like a a a huge chasm of a distinction there, and yet they're not make so w what do you think is behind that? Why why do they view them as equivalent? So marriage, you know, marriages throughout much of the world are still arranged, whether we think that or not, we're a peculiar society where we believe in marriage for love, which fails fairly often. But I think here it's important to realize the age of marriage and also some of the conventions of marriage.

So there's sororal polygyny, so that a man who marries a woman may reasonably expect to also marry her sister. The sister may reasonably expect to run off with or marry her sister's husband and may want to, but the age of marriage. The age of marriage, five would be unusual, but is not unheard of. And that's not considered right. That's a whole nother s kind of adjudication. Um, but for a young girl to be married at the age of eight, if her father is really old or really dead, um, then that may girls tend to be married earlier. Um, but the age of eight, the age of 11, and I've recorded the ages of marriage for a long time and going back in time. 13, you know, any older than 13, you're kind of getting over the hill.

Um, so for um for a young woman to choose to run off, especially at that age, is not so uncommon. Um you know, they're they're not always thinking well in those early adolescent years, no matter where we are. So um there was there was one circumstance where an older, a really senior guy who really had been a fierce warrior, which delighted John, of course, had five or six wives, but he was really old, and his older wives weren't kind to the younger wives, and he took on an additional wife, and she was really young, and she and I don't even remember now, but she ran off with his son. And that was we'd only been in the community. This was a different community, but we'd only been there, you know, maybe a couple of

weeks. But we saw that drama unfold. And um, and he he, you know, threatened to go after them. He was gonna kill both of them and with his gun. And so but what happens is that there's this sort of, you know, on the trail, the world, the word is past, you know, he's gonna come after you, you'd better keep going, you know, and they run further and further. Um, and and maybe after a time that will be resolved, or maybe it won't. But um, but she didn't want to be in that marriage. It was not a good marriage. And and that's true for a number of women, but leaving a marriage is something that can cause so much conflict and retaliation and violence that people don't support it. So the the women and men who run off have

to run far. And that's true whether the woman is abducted just cold, you know, by the river, the guy tends to go. Warren DeBora did a study of the ethnography and found this to be a pattern. They tend to go one or two rivers over, you know, so that they they go far. Um, to and you could think of it as the conflict management strategy, you know, where they leave town basically. Um, but it it's that's some of the context for um I mean there are many contexts in which women are regarded as stolen, but those raids when they were endemic, you know, almost always involved taking women and and really incorporating them violently into the um the community and the household. Wow. I mean, there are so many questions I have here, uh, but before I get into them, I just

want to make sure that I'm getting the picture of what's going on here correctly. So it seems to me, based on what you're describing, that the centripetal force of these societies is violent competition between men. Um and what they are competing over is a limited resource, uh, namely women. Um and that has a kind of cold, tragic Darwinian logic, which is that the men who succeed in capturing women will tend to have a reproductive advantage and and the genes promoting such behavior will therefore have a selective advantage relative to alternative genes. So this has a really uh awful Darwinian logic to it. Um and and because these coalitions of men are competing with one another over this limited

reproductive resource, um, the primary motive behind violence in these communities is either uh capturing women or avenging the capture of women or the killing of other men. So it's it's it's primarily capturing women or or revenge? Would would though is that a fair characterization or am I oversimplifying? No, I think that you are fair in your theoretical assessment of the situation. It fits the facts on the ground, it fits the historical facts, it hits it fits the genealogical facts, the ethnographic facts. Um, but I wouldn't say that that's the focus of life today for sure. Okay. Um I think it's the focus of our theory um of the moment. But um I think and I and I've thought about this quite a bit

because I mean that was the focus of the both John and I, you know. studied collected data on alliance formation and how those relationships worked and how they were supported, you know, what greased the wheels, how decisions were made, all of those things. But it's still I think, And even in other parts of Amazonia, as I've been privileged to work with scholars elsewhere, I've spent a fair amount of time in Brazil now with anthropologists there and some in the little bit in the communities, but um I think we need to turn this narrative on its head, which is that when things got heated in Konambo, it would not be unusual for especially one woman in particular who was my one of my main instructors,

um, to come up to me and very quietly put her hand on my um and say, you know, calm down, Brenda, because I would be upset. Calm down. We want to live well. And if people needed to leave, which is a common conflict resolution strategy, you know, and there's a community decision making process. If there's conflict between parties and the community, there's some consensus built about who should leave. But the goal is to live well. And when people are mad, when there's discussion, when there's possibility of a fissioning event or something, people will say, I'm going to find a place to live well. And it turns out that the in in Brazil, the anthropologists and the linguists have done a lot of work with this concept.

And it's deeply rooted in the Tubi Wadani language family, which covers most of the continent. And there is a specific term that has a common root in all these different languages. And it is basically translated to to find a place to live well. So people are cautious about violence, they're attentive to the potential for violence. They have strategies for avoiding violence, for considering the multiple responsibilities that are inherent in conflict, and one's own responsibility for addressing that as a responsible adult and member of a community. So I think the piece that we tend to lose sight of in these discussions is that larger context. And that, you know, John's dissertation was called the thoughtful warrior.

And I think that's really, you know, totally embedded in that concept. I can give you one of my favorite examples, and this was like really early. So in Copitasa, which was again the first community we went into, and it was on a different river. And we took Don Brown's advice and went for a short period of time, which was almost five months, to learn how to live well in a community and learn what we needed to do for logistics and you know try out some of the data methodologies and then come back home and sort of refine all of that and regroup. But so we went into Copatassa and one of the first things that happened and again it was always so so many things were just a big surprise to us, I think, when they were happening.

But there was all this commotion and the man who had loaned us a house who was the senior man who had said we were looking for a place um because um it was a time when we were dying. You know, there were very few people left in the territory. And but somehow someone had called a plane to go into multiple communities to collect five elders, five elder men, and and they were going off to a little tiny place um and and it was slowly revealed that there was a man who had been found dead in his house with blood everywhere, splattered all around the house. And these five elders were brought, you know, by plane, coordinated among themselves to go in and evaluate the situation, determine what had happened, and determine what the appropriate response would

be. Now if this were a murder, which it, you know, to the Western eye appeared to be, then it would obligate a response, um, a retaliatory violent response by one thread of obligation, which was pretty dominant, you know. So if if it was a murder, so uh the the norm is the the murder must be avenged. Are there any exceptions to that rule, or is that always the rule if they determine it's a murder, then it must be avenged? Is that how it works? There there are ways around it. Um so this is one of the things that I learned in this situation. But you know, if you think of it again, in a place where institutionalized authorities don't exist, there are no police to call in, there are no judges, adults are the ones

responsible for deciding how to address and adjudicate these kinds of violent actions. All societies have to make these decisions, and they have institutionalized decision-making processes for doing that, and people who are responsible for implementing them. the five elders, um, one of whom was from the community where we were at Copatassa, um decided this is we found out when they came back, decided that it was a phantasm it was who had killed this man and that no retaliatory action was obligated. I I really want to dig into this. Um that is fascinating. So who are these people who and what were their connections to to the person who was killed? These people who do who were deciding uh that this was a phantasm.

So I don't I don't know and I don't even know if I would have that in my notes because I was we were so new to the territory and the community at the time. I don't know if I know the relationship. Um do they usually have no relationship? Are they are they specifically people are related to each other? So the people who are determining what to do next are people who are usually socially uh or genetically connected to the victim. No. No, not necessarily I mean, everybody in the territory, you have almost no business being there if you're not related by blood or marriage. So that's just the tr the case. Okay. Um an anthropologist understand us. We are always thrilled when we get our fictive kinship terms because that gives us a place

in the community. So I'm grandmother. Um, on the other hand, was some monkey fictive kinship for those. Yeah. A bearded monkey. That's really funny. That's really funny. Yeah. So um, but um my sense of it was this was a man who was not closely related to a lot of other people. And he may, my memory is that it was that he lived, they and he must have had a family of some kind, but um maybe just a wife and a mother in law or something like that. But I don't know for sure. But that he lived maybe even in an isolated house on the river rather than in a larger household cluster or a community, a larger community. But this is where status matters. This is the definition of what makes an important person.

And an important person is someone that others listen to. right. So the men who went in were senior men from throughout the territory who were people that others listened to. So they could confer among themselves they were considered, you know, knowledgeable and um right-minded. And they reached that decision. And it was so clear to us, you know, to John and I, that this was a decision to de-escalate. And one of the strategies that people had in their toolkit that we had never read about or heard about or imagined, right? Just to declare that the death was due to supernatural means and a phantasm. So a being that wasn't even sent by a shaman, which is a more common way to die. Um so that's really fascinating.

Uh so am I correct in saying that it's not so much your social closeness or distance to the victim that determines whether you get to make this decision, but your status within the community and your and your political power. That it's the high status men who are primarily making the decision about whether to avenge someone's death or not. Is that correct? I would say yes, that's correct. It's respected people, usually respected elders. It's not always men. And there too, I think there's so much that still remains to be written about the role that women play. So, you know, the one who has the weapon in their hand, you know, is not always the man, but probably more often the man than a woman. But women, for example, do a lot of divination and often determine who is responsible for

a death that then leads to an avenge um incident. So um anyway so so I really want to get into this this phantasm thing because I find this really fascinating. Um so they attribute the cause of death to a ghost. Presumably the reason they're doing this is because it's a socially acceptable way to say we don't want to avenge this person's death. We don't want to take on the risk of going into the neighboring community and finding who did it and risking our lives. I wouldn't say that. I wouldn't say that. Okay. No, because these men had the right to respond and um and the responsibility to respond, someone would have had that right and responsibility to respond. And what it does is lead to more retaliatory violence, right?

So it's more, it's less about risk avoidance than it is about conflict um management. Got it. So they're trying to avoid escalating the conflict and and w walking headfirst into a cycle of violence. Right. Or creating a new job. Got it. And so and so if so if that's that's their motive. We don't want to get into a cycle of of violence where we're constantly avenging, you know, an eye for an eye makes everyone blind. We don't that's our motive here. Um Why not just come out and say that? Why do we have to make up the story about the ghost? So I just gave a talk at our national conference, and I've done versions of this talk for a while. But um and it uh thinking about Indigenous ontologies and epistemologies and what constitutes valid evidence and what

logics pertain are very culturally specific. So and the understanding of the world as it is, as a place where death is caused by certain things. People that the explanation of the phantasm fits into that that native ontology, that understanding of the world and how that comes about. So so so uh let me reframe the question. Do you see this uh phantasm story as a way of covering up the uh the real motive, which is to avoid a cycle of violence, or do you view this belief that it as sincere, that they truly believe that the person was killed by a ghost? I think that they carefully considered the evidence at hand and decided that the a reasonable explanation was the phantasm. And whether they Also

considered the fact that this would quell violence, I would say, of course, you know, and and those men that was of their generation and and knowing one of them, um actually, and knowing of actually another one knowing him. Um that was that was their responsibility. So they they reached that decision, I would say, on balance after considering multiple um possibilities. And um, I wasn't there. I don't know what kinds of evidence they considered, but certainly, you know, just the blood all over the place was apparently consistent with the killing by a phantasm and the fact that there were no there seemed to be no obvious um individuals who would be likely responsible for that death. Um there was no blame of others that I heard.

Now there may have been those discussions in other communities, but people would have discussed a lot of different possibilities. Um, but the one who pronounces the decision is generally the higher status person, usually as an outcome of hearing other perspectives and listening to other perspectives. So they gathered multiple people together to discuss it. That that thing you said about being listened to, I mean, one of the things and you know, that I remember John saying was that um when you go to these meetings, the um there's all this posturing, especially often young men, strong men, um, and lots of things are said. Um, but then at some point somebody starts talking, it's a loud room, and then the room

quiet down. And that's when you know that the person who is with high status is speaking. And it's not often somebody who's sort of superficially impressive for an outsider. If somebody just came off the plane or the canoe, they might not pick them out of the group as being the person who looks quote unquote like the leader. Um And that really stuck struck me and still does. And I think, you know, that thing you said about being listened to. And I think one of the things that people listening also might think in hearing this. And obviously, we're focusing on the violence because that's so different from what we, I mean, most of us were privileged to not be in that kind of context. And so that's the thing we're focusing on.

And I'm sure most of the day people it's you know people are laughing and playing and eating and cooking and you know doing things we're focusing on that I mean I think appropriately enough but also as you said you know we don't want to essentialize what the culture is like or life is like but I think the other thing people might hear um especially is this thing of especially with women being taken is sort of women don't have agency. Um and I know Brenda you you know, you mentioned early on that you guys divided up living and dead, but also by gender or by sex. And I think, you know, some of the things John told me, he sort of relayed about that, you know, he learned it from you. And you have such a long history in the community that, you know, I think

historically there's been a long, long overlooking of sort of women and women's roles and women's agency and how that gets how that plays out in this context. And I know I know you've thought a lot about that. Can you say something about that? I mean, I think you're you're you have, I can't over um uh I I sell as the wrong word, but sort of over overemphasize how much you have such a long, deep knowledge of this field site and and such trust um and obviously don't you don't have to betray any trusts of in terms of you know like this will be a public thing but yeah please can you just sort of for those people listening who are sort of thinking you know women's agency doesn't exist um and this is all about the men and the violence

like can you sort of how how do you how do you how do you think about that yeah well I was interested in women's status when we first went in and women's relationships and how and now remembering this is 1992 and the anthropology of women was still a relatively new field. So um most of women's most of studies, most studies in the anthropology of women's status had addressed women's status relative to men. And a lot of it was done from a Marxist perspective. Um, so within, you know, sort of the patriarchy. And um and I and this was a good opportunity to do that, right? To look at women's status relative to men. But the first thing that we found when starting those tasks, the triadic comparison tasks on status and

alliance, was that men refused to comment on women's relationships. And they said it would cause trouble. And but this was the way it was explained to me, is that, and when we were talking about, so we began to, you know, investigate separately those concepts of women's status and alliance and did the tasks separately. But it was said that women lead among women and men lead among men. And that's true in a lot of societies where men and women have really distinctive domains of responsibility. And it's not all, you know, home versus politics. So, but women are very active, and I've written about this some, but uh fair amount. Um So men and women are very active in political decision making and

consensus building, but women do um converse among women, men converse among men. The difference is that women have access to men's spaces. I was interested in sort of domestic space. And um, so women have access to men's spaces during these big open discussions. Men do not have access to women's spaces. So women actually have more knowledge of what's going on. Um, and this is where um women can be and are effective in um mediating disputes. They have more sometimes cross-coalitional alliances than men. And so they can cross those boundaries and help develop consensus about what appropriate mediation would be. I think you may know the story. They I mean sometimes a woman will just march across know the boundary between the two

factions and Konamo and walk into a house and basically tell the men that they're behaving badly. And um and here's what needs to happen. You know, and that that does happen in this this was one of my favorite stories because it was a it was a dispute where this is the time when they s uh someone when he sac said uh you can't kill me I'm a choir I will kill you and um but these guys they they were, it was a dis it was a dispute over who was the father of a child. So there was some reproductive um issue at stake and who was responsible among the young men. And um and it was it just turned into the and and they'd been drinking because it was a big event. And um and the the senior men, as I said, very undignified,

um got into a fist fight, but the floor of the house fell. And I'm this is Konambo behind me, so you can see that the floors of the houses are raised. So they broke it broke through, and all the men came crashing through. And that was the end of the fight. And everybody went home. And the next day, um, the dispute was resolved by um by one of the women. And it was it was so funny. I I just laughed so much. And then the story was told to me on the phone because, you know, since when we first went, that would have been impossible. But this the woman actually um lived in town, was from Konamo, but so and so I would get phone calls. Now I get like Facebook messages almost every day, you know, or you know.

So anyway, but I'm not sure I may have wandered off a little bit in that. But so women and and this is women are concerned about anything that has the potential for violence because it affects their lives too. And to think that that domain would be left exclusively to men in these small communities where everybody visits every day and the daily work really is the management of politics, um, would would just be lacking imagination, you know, an understanding of how the world works. I I don't so women to s uh agency is such a funny concept, right? Because we often tend to forget that agency specifically has to do with how one navigates one's life within a particular structure and in of um community or society or institution or whatever.

But um but I have this uh phrase politics afoot. You can see politics afoot. You can see when people are walking to somebody else's house and that it wouldn't be part of their daily routine, you know something's up. So it's just and and you know, outside we chose Konambo, who which has and did had has had continuously, about 200 people, just slightly under 200, because it was the largest community in the territory, and because it was divided into these two ethnolinguistic factions, and it was famous. I mean, we heard about it long before we were ever invited to go there. Um, so it was a really good place to study coalitional dynamics. um and and where we could get a 100% sample while many psychologists criticize the sample size tell me anyone who you know me really would

be unhappy with a 100% sample. Um so that was anyway so I hope that helps. Yeah yeah it was it was the story that um I think John told me about getting the guys drunk was that also something that actually came from from you that the is that the apocryphal, or did I get that right? That there were two men and they were sort of in conflict, and the wives sort of told the other, each of them independently, that the other had been sort of considering apologizing. Um, but they had in fact just talked amongst each other, decided it was a good idea to have a resolution, and they just sort of put them in a in a hut together with some uh chicha, which is the alcoholic drink, and sort of they men the men quote unquote decided to um

uh back off. Yeah. That happened more than once. Yeah. It's not uncommon. And I think for that particular story, I think John and I were both there. You know, we we did these daily rounds of houses, and but we would sometimes be involved in different conversations because there is kind of a men's side of the house and a woman's side of the house. Yeah and um But I like that. I like the kind of cryptic, or at least from a male centric perspective, which has been the long default for anthropology and science, right? It's just, it's, it looks cryptic, but I think it's the um it's it's a good example of. I mean, I think maybe this is too strong, but I think an argument against that is almost like the men are the drones and the women are controlling them, right?

It's sort of like you don't get your hands dirty. Um, uh you don't risk yourself, but you're you're really, you know, um, you know, that's a different way to look at the power dynamic and the cost and benefit logic. Um, and you know, I think it's it's only because what John relayed to me when he when he expressed that, that was in the context of saying that you have such this long history of of trust in the community. Um, you know, he he he he mentioned another anecdote where somebody threatened him at some point, and John I think said, I've known you since you were, you know, and he pointed to his knee or something, you know. Um, and that actually led to this person sort of backing off um a bit.

Like I remember carrying you, basically, was what John said to this this guy. And I may not have been there for that one. I don't I don't know. Yeah, no, I remember him telling me that. Yeah, he probably didn't. So yeah. But um, but I think that's the point. I think like that idea of sort of that um quote unquote cryptic leadership, you know, but but from this, but that's only because it's it hasn't been viewed from this more quote unquote more objective perspective, which I think would be the argument that, you know, the women are um doing a lot, and it's by design that some of it looks cryptic from the perspective of the men. Certainly if we're talking about the existing literature and anthropology,

I I was remembering um women if you look at the old ethnographies deserve their special category in the index because they're mentioned so infrequently. Wow. And there might be three pages where women are mentioned specifically. So I really I really have deep concerns about the current use of that literature. Yeah. Um to call information about women given and and that literature has been so heavily critiqued, you know. I mean, uh could could it be that this underestimation of women's influence in these societies is itself a product of the uh subtlety and intelligence with which they influence people covertly, that that is in fact a design feature that they are trying to influence without creating common knowledge that the

influence has taken place. I think that's a really important question. And I think that the anthropologists who went to the field, if they gave any credit to women, assumed that. But because they did not have access to or even questions about women's participation in political decision making. There's so little written that we don't know. I I really think it's a an area that's open for more study. One of the themes, uh um I think my job in this podcast is to say the themes every time of the every episode at least once. But one of the themes of in our discussions has often been humility and sort of appreciating and just sort of listening to people who aren't usually listened to. And I think this is a really good example of that.

The understanding ourselves and the science, this is a really clear case of um if people going sort of arrogantly or not respecting the people or evolved psychology, um, and that there's going to be you know what kids are doing, what women are doing, um, you know, even if you're a male from a you know um you know 1950s, 60s anthropologist, that um that uh if you're not if you're letting your culture's sort of bargaining power blind you to the scientific questions you're asking, you're not looking at what children are doing, what women are doing, it's bad for the science, right? And you know, because John and I did our field work initially during a time period when 12 months in the field was a minimum, and because we aspired to be deeply immersed in

that ethnographic context, I think we learned a lot more. Um, and so I you know, there's there's discussion now about slow science and fast science, but um but but also it I think it that we understand that we're sometimes blinded by our questions, Right? We go in with a particular question that's formulated, we collect our data to address that particular question, and we may never learn about these other phenomena if we're not there to ask questions about it. So the beauty of ethnography and the beauty of anthropology, especially long-term, committed, community-based anthropology is that you learn um what you may never have asked about and if you listen yeah and and that's the to me the great privilege of of being able to

do this work is to is to is that you know to learn things that you might never have have thought about um yeah Yeah. Yeah. As a psychologist being interested in coalitional psychology, I always think to myself, talking to John always kept me honest. And it was exactly for this reason, right? That um, and I think psychology and the evolutionary behavioral sciences, I mean, David and I have talked about this. We've had many uh people who are right in the interst in in in between anthropology and psychology. Um, and uh I think it's so important as psychologists, and I say this as a laboratory psychologist, to keep anthropology in the evolutionary behavioral sciences because it keeps us honest and we really lose our reality tethering if we don't

keep talking to and and ultimately it's being grounded in in the the local knowledge and what's actually happening. Yeah. Yeah, and um I understand that next year HBES and the is it the Cultural Evolutionary Society are gonna hold joint meetings, and I think a really positive um thing. Yeah. Speaking of uh interfactional conflict, I'm glad that the factions are being united in evolutionary social science. Um I I I wanna speaking of factions, I wanna um return to something you mentioned about w women having more social ties between uh the rival factions than uh men had, uh and that because of that women were sort of trusted more as impartial mediators and adjudicators of uh intra or intergroup conflict.

Um and I I find that to be a really interesting uh gender divide. Um and I'm I'm kind of curious about uh how that divide came to be, uh uh why you think it exists, um, and and how women are uh navigating that role. And I'm not sure that it's so much that they're like trusted more, but rather that they have greater access, right? Because they formed these relationships that cause they just have more knowledge about about the the the situation itself in these conflicts. Often that's true. And I talked to Lita about this when during the symposium for John in October, but you know, John and I collected data over many years, and our goal for this time of our lives was to um look longitudinally at men's and women's

coalitional structures. And that scenario that I just described really relates to two time periods. And contrary to my expectations, though, women with the greater cross-coalitional ties Were those with fewer kin within their own coalition and across the coalition. And so my argument was they needed to establish those cross-coalitional ties because that gave them really a place to go in the event that they lost their place in their own coalition, which again, you know, know, co um conflict resolution often involves someone leaving and they being less securely um related by kinship to people in their own coalition would be the most likely to have to leave if there were some kind of conflict. And that did happen um with a couple of women um and their families.

But so what I wanted to see, so basically the structures looked like men had these really cleanly bounded coalitions. Um, and you know, they needed to be really clear on where their um alliances um were. And I'm And Brenda, to just interrupt, is that the the linguistic, is that the the like, you know, color, you know, where there's that one hut that's over? What can you just explain? so just so people have a sense of what is the scale of the coalition for the men? Yeah. Right. So um and this really was, you know, John's methodology um to collect um quantitative information using cognitive anthropological approaches to reconstruct really the political landscape, the categories of alliances. So, and so men and the whole community really talked about Konambal being

divided upriver and downriver into Achwa and Qichua factions. And that was true, even though each of those factions, in fact, was ethnically mixed. Okay. So by marriage and political affiliation. And the one, the one um house that you so so we have this kind of iconic figure of, you know, sort of this line, this wavy line that represents the river and then houses distributed along the river. And you can see that upriver, you know, I think they're coded, I can't remember if it's red or blue. Yeah, you have the thing I'm looking around. Yeah. Somewhere in my office here. But you can see how clean the divide is. And the divide that in that image is based on two things. It's based on how people discuss, right?

How people refer to themselves and how they refer to others. And it was a you know, the theory of ethnicity and identity is that it's situational, right? So you may refer to yourself differently in different situations. So one way that it was explained to me wh by a woman is I am with the Achwar, but I am Qichua. So if that helps clarify That actually just raises more questions. So that so there's a distinction between um being uh one of a member of the group and being with the group. So what is the difference there? Because they sound the same to my Western ear. So could you unpack that distinction? I can tell you how that is viewed. Yeah. When people talk about um it's usually based on identity.

If we're talking about, let's say, ethnolinguistic identity, um, then people identify usually based on the language that they spoke in the home. Okay, their first language. Now, if their parents spoke different languages and multiple languages, then there's a little bit of um complication there in how clean those that pattern is. But generally, when people talk about the first language that they learned, the um the foods they eat, um kind of how fierce they are, um, those kinds of characteristics that are ascribed to ethnolinguistic groups and that are learned during early socialization. Um, I mean that is more of what can be called an ethno-linguistic dimension of identity, right? Um, and then but the political factional affiliation on the

ground, even though people refer to the upriver people as Achwar and the downriver people as Qichua, though now they refer to them as Sapata, which is a whole nother dimension of things, but um it's it's a gloss. Um and it generally refers to who the founders of those places were. So the Upriver faction that the founders of that household cluster were Achwa people, and then others joined them. um and the same downriver the founders identified at the time as quichua and um and then others joined them so they're known as the atwar above and the quichua down below and this is just really classic identity it could conform with classic identity theory right that theory of that that identity is multidimensional and that it's

situational yes um so it's it i i the lovely thing about field work, especially in the long term, is that you see theory come to life, you know, and that's that really does in Konombo. So but it's hard for people to understand that. Um sometimes. Yes. I mean oh sorry. Yeah. Yeah. I mean I I just uh I'm I'm very excited to hear you talk in these terms. Um, because you know, I do work in political psychology. Um, and I think a problematic tendency is to um overexplain uh political beliefs and and political activity in terms of identity as opposed to allegiance. So these are two different things, and I and I applaud you for highlighting the important distinction between these things. I think that uh political psychologists too often get caught up in identity and miss out on

alliances. So for example, um, I could be, I don't have to be a police officer to feel political allegiance to police officers if I'm a Republican. I don't have to be a black person to feel as though I'm an ally of black people politically. Um and if we focus solely on identity, which group you strictly belong to, rather than allegiances and loyalties, we're missing out on the crucial dimension of what politics is and how it works. So I'm gonna go out on a limb and wager that the I am with this group uh is going to matter more politically than the I am a member of this group. Is that correct? Yeah. And and I I looking at material culture, looked at pottery and pottery design and have looked in considerable depth.

But um from the perspective of um Design as ethnic marker. And one of the things, and really I have to give credit to John for this because the women make this beautiful elaborate pottery. And I was collecting pottery and I was going to analyze it to see whether their political affiliation or political identity was reflected more strongly in their designs than their ethnolinguistic identity, really to test this idea that well you know pottery is supposed to reflect ethnicity and it's supposed to be you know unchanging virtually and um which didn't work out so um because it really fits better so John said well then why don't you just ask women if they can identify the ethnicity of the woman who made the pot based on just showing them the pots so I did that test too and

um and and women, it fits all the characteristics of ethnic markers that we would expect with stereotyping. And women certainly were more accurate at identifying what was not made by a woman of their group than at identifying what was because they made finer gradations of otherness. And but um but but to your question, um both the design similarities and the women's identification of the pottery um was predicted significantly more by their political affiliation than by their ethno-linguistic identity. So my is that they're you know signifying in group and outgroup identity very actively in the pottery designs that they're making, which explains really the cultural transmission of Wow. So the pottery is not uh necessarily signaling which group I

belong to, but which group I am politically loyal to. Right. If by which group I belong to, you mean the ethnolinguistic identity. Right. Right. So it's not something that is, you know, static and passive and you know learned in early socialization and perpetuated throughout the lifetime of an individual, but that these markers are being used actively to signify and and to be understood as markers of um group out group identity in a political sense. Yeah. That's so yeah, it's so fascinating. I mean I I I I'm sorry I just have to delve deeper into this because I find this so fascinating. So um the pottery is being used um as as a signal of which faction you are loyal to. That that if you're trying to predict pottery, um uh loyalty is the right variable to look

at. So I I'm very curious about what it is about pottery that makes it a good way of signaling or signifying uh political differences and w why other methods aren't used. Why can't they just be out in the open? I'm loyal to this side, I'm loyal to this side, why do they have to communicate this information through pottery? There are many markers of affiliation and they're all the time. Yeah. You know, so it may be who you invite to your house for um a work party, you know, to whom you give meat, they're they're that's why um i it's hard to and whether it's all understood as signification, I think probably so. Whether it's all done for purposes of signification, I think probably not. I think so.

So if if not if not signification, then then what would the alternative motive be? Well, um so we studied relationships in a lot of different ways. We studied meat sharing. We studied the um sharing of propagules, garden propagules, and how that relates to garden richness and women's reproductive success. The meat sharing it is certainly if you look at the pattern signifies alliances, but you also get the pattern where higher status men are giving more meat than they're receiving and they um um again it all relates to reproductive success and strategies of alliance building. I mean strategies of alliance building and status building as a um yeah so it's not merely a signifying alliance but also a status marker as well.

Uh in what terms uh uh and so you're you're talking about um meat sharing in particular uh is both a a way of signifying status but also a way of forging uh alliances. Uh is that right? And and is is something similar going on with pottery or are this that's this is where I think we're too focused, not in this conversation, but in general in the field, maybe more focused on status as a goal rather than kind of almost a byproduct. But um so I think building coalitions is more important than building status. But people who are best at building coalitions accrue status because of the skills that they have in coalition building and they become known for making wise decisions, speaking well, and um

the things that give people status. Um so meat sharing, I I think it would be really hard to say people share meat and give more meat for to build status, even though a crew partly it's not highly visible now. So it's more of a dyadic relationship. Um sending, I mean, you know, for me to go, John and I to go back to our house and find a leg of deer slapped onto the table with someone riding in charcoal from the fire, you know, from Cilio, Mukushiwa or something, um, is not uncommon. But um I so I don't see all those things as markers, if that's what you know, is as signification of status um or status striving, but rather as coalition building. And I think that's more important, And it's more important to the well-being of people's

families, which translates into reproductive success. And right. So I mean the question then in my mind is um what in fact is the difference between status and coalitional support? Is there a di- Do you see a distinction there? Are they the same thing or are they different? Um, What is the relationship between them? So for for me, uh in this conversation, um there's sort of blurry the difference between these two things. In my mind, the way I think about status is uh is basically in terms of coalitional support. So uh my way of thinking about status, you you can feel free to disagree with this way, is um common knowledge of a person's relative value as a social partner, um, and its downstream consequences on coalitions and alliances.

So it is a good strategy to favor the high value partners as allies and coalition members. And because it is a good strategy to do that, people who are recognized as valuable partners, therefore, as a byproduct acquire all this political power because they have all these people who are willing to support them and be their allies. So I view status as basically what happens when a community gains common knowledge that say I'm uh the best and that causes everyone to want to be my ally. And uh as as we say, the enemy of my enemy is my friend. So if I uh hate someone, um people are going to uh show support to me by hating that person. If I love someone, they're going to show support to me by loving that person.

Um if I take a side, they're gonna try to be on my side, they're gonna try to imitate me, uh, to to show uh loyalty to me. I view uh all of that as as a kind of status. So uh um do what do you think of that way of thinking? Do you have a different way of thinking? Um and I think um uh I'm gonna go back to the pottery and tell you that there's this category I that I created of women data that I could see over and over again that I call women in between. And they're the women who politically mediate. Um they also paint pottery that women can't identify as either Achwa or Qichua. They have ambiguous pottery, but they recognize the styles of both above and below. And I argue that that's an intentional strategy of political ambiguity.

But I think of status as influence, and I think of status as influence that is wielded in the process of political decision making within, and it and it has to be embedded within a coalition. It's not something that exists independently, you know, as a personal characteristic that one carries around with them wherever they go. So um I I I don't think that's inconsistent with what you're talking about, but I don't think that it is the consensus that's built isn't necessarily a single kind of consensus. It's really that individual people all tend to consider this person in that way. But status is, and again, this is the methodology that we used, right? So we, you know, spent a fair amount of time doing kind of what our

are called free listing exercises where you just ask people, what is it that makes an important person? You know, and they free list those attributes and you find some consensus, and then those become attributes of study. But and you elicit in this context the indigenous terminology for people of of status, of importance, what because status is a meaningless term, you know, in most contexts. But so um and in so I can tell you what those terms are, but in Kichu it's an amo, which really translates best into organizer rather than leader. Someone who can organize a new community. Someone who starts a new community, invites others to join. Someone who can organize a fish poisoning event. Someone who, when they invite people, they come.

Someone who when they speak, they're listened to. Someone who, when they loan something, they get it back. I mean, there are really interesting attributes ascribed to a person of status. And so in Qichua it's Amu, which best translates into organizer. And um and then in Achwar, I love it, it's it's Hun, which means big and hunri are the big people and it's not just men. It's women and men. If you ask people who the Hunri are, they'll list men and women. Men more often leave out the women. But um not everyone and certainly not the women. So um there are people of influence and respect and I think in measured in many ways that I think are universally true. And then but they are, you know, Hunri or Amu

within that context. And they actively work as responsible people to give meat to people who might not otherwise have it, which is part of how they extend those um coalitional ties. But it's it's women who don't have a husband, um, a new family who doesn't have a lot of other relationships. Um the the visiting anthropologists, you know, who do you give meat to? And usually you can give more meat because you're a better hunter. I mean, there are lots of implications all bound up in that. Um people who people respect people who work hard, you know? Um, women have big gardens. Um, there's a relationship between garden richness and women's um political centrality and um and their reproductive success.

Um so even though you tend to think sometimes there's not a lot of variation in women's reproductive success, there is, and it's very meaningful. Um, so I'm not sure. I just it's I I think you just can't see status as disembedded from coalition. And I don't think that everybody's out there status driving. I think status is something that's built by this sense of responsibility for others and sense of responsibility for conflict resolution, especially in this context. There's the theory, you know, there's political factionalism, the theories of the work done in political factionalism a while ago, um, really is helpful, I think, in that respect, because it really gives you an idea of the importance of the swing voters, which is certainly important in

politics today, and how people curry the um the alliance of those swing voters. And that certainly happens in in this context as well. And I think that that's probably universally true in politics that you have people that you know may defect or maybe um maybe you can get to defect and um and those people tend to get sometimes a little more attention than than perhaps they deserve but you need them. Interesting. So you don't view uh status as separable from from coalitional support or political power that they're they're basically the same thing. I don't think they're the same thing. I think they're two different dimensions of relationships. Um, so you can have someone with a really strong coalitional base who doesn't have a

lot of status, but people will, you know, that's odd. That that that's sound that's interesting. So uh how how would that work? A person who is um say has a lot of influence, coalitional support, political power, whatever you want to call it, and yet they're low status. How does that work? Well, especially in these kinds of communities, status you know is partly a factor of age. So you may have a young man who's very hardworking, whose status may be a little higher than expected for his age, but it's still low in the community overall. Um, but if he's well respected and perhaps um, you know, hard working and shares a lot of his resources with others, demonstrates his commitment to being a good member of the community and the coalition, um, you

know, supports for young men, his father-in-law, um, when expected to do so, if then, then if there is a conflict, then he's more likely to be supported in that conflict by others um who do not whole have those same attributes. So in this study, you know, the question was for status, you know, what makes an important person? And those are the attributes that I described. And then the question about alliance was who would support who in the event there were a conflict involving these three people. And so that was the triadic task for alliance. And were these related? So were the important people also the people who would be supported in conflicts? Or were they often different people? Yeah, they're related.

Um so I wish I had a graph. So there's a we have some really nice diagrams of sort of coalitional relationships, the political landscape with the excuse me, icons for each individual scale by size according to status. So you can see that the higher status people are most well situated within their alliances. And even for men, the highest status people are tend to be more um toward the center of the division between the two coalitions. For women, it's really clear there are almost three groups. So you have like the Achwar Alliance, the Qichua Alliance, and then this group, loose group, but still statistically significant, where women who have higher status than expected for their age are more centrally located between the two

coalitions. So it's really a nice visual representation of their position as mediators within the coalitions. Okay. So it's almost like uh status is the filler for sort of how we have to get by and make a living in whatever context we are. Um, and in particular in Kanambo, that is, you know, having coalitional um uh influence or influence in the community. Like um it's um uh yeah. I I think you can't disentangle them. And you know, if we want to read contemporary social theory, you know, Bordure would tell us that in a heartbeat, but that you know that um status comes from one's position within those uh in this case what we call alliances or coalitions. Right. It's a relational attribute. It's not a a noun.

It's not a thing. It's sort of a um it's like being good at, you know, like if I just said somebody's good at something, it doesn't tell you what they're good at, right? Like it it doesn't, it doesn't fill in the content. It's just sort of a uh an adjectival word, right? It's sort of like status is sort of like what that is. It's status has that same stat. Status has the same status, which is interesting. That's a really good way to think about it. And and I think this with the shamanism too, where people are looking for the shaman, but shamanic power um or ability is is often um relational right and it's um it's not a role it's it's something that you cultivate and you have more or less of and

than than others so um yeah Yeah, it's it's so interesting. I mean, this is and this is again what I can think we're this is real time keeping us honest here. Like we're we're learning about status. Yeah. Yes. We're both both interested in this topic, and and as uh we've been uh seeing, it's just an incredibly rich and complicated topic with with lots of really subtle distinctions to be made. Um I remember we got into status a lot with um Chris von Ruden who we had on the on the podcast. Um and um he he told a story that that stuck with me of a hunter who was uh exiled from the community for being too good of a hunter for being a show off um and and that often being too overt or braggadocious in one's uh seeking of status or or

influence could actually lower your status and influence. Um and I'm curious if there are similar dynamics at play uh in the in the in the communities that you've worked with. You know, and anthropologists have a term for that called leveling mechanisms that are commonly found in small-scale societies. But let me think. Um I can't I don't I can't think of any circumstances that would fit that that scenario. Men, especially young men, tend to be fairly humble. They need to be. So I I can I guess I can see how that happens. But so this territory and this region, Indigenous of Indigenous communities, is predominantly matrilocal, meaning that you know young men to be married need to go and live in the house of their father-in-law and

mother-in-law. And there is a period of bride service where they're really obligated to work, um, to do whatever it is that especially their father-in-law wants them to do. So to tell someone to take a two-day hike, to um go buy a cigarette at a military base for a party that's coming up might be a task that you would assign to a son-in-law. In the old days, it could be a several month trip downriver to get salt. And those are tasks for young married and sons-in-law. So I I imagine that if a young man were a little too cocky in the house of his father in law, he would be set on an even longer trip. But um I don't, I don't really young men certainly express that they need to behave in a certain way while they're married in, um,

especially at first. So I can't. There are people who are sort of men who may be kind of a bully, an older, you know, a higher status senior man. And what I see is that he's had a hard time finding husbands for his daughters because they don't want to go live with him. And people don't want them to go, their sons to go live there. But I I don't so but I can't think of anything that is really overtly kind of a leveling mechanism that I've observed, and mostly because I don't see I've I can't think of a single example of behavior I've seen that would be categorized as braggadocious. You know, I I think there's teasing and interesting. Is it is it because if it were to happen, it would be penalized and therefore it doesn't

happen? Or is it is the idea of braggadociousness being bad not even uh a thing? People make fun of people sometimes, you know, which but it's a but it's not as an outcome of that, I think. I I don't know. I can't I can't answer the question. I don't I can't really think of anything that um it Well I mean certain certainly the father who's having a hard time finding husbands for his daughters because he's perceived to be a bully, that is a real uh Darwinian reproductive consequence for uh being seen as a bully. Um and you would expect that that to matter a lot um if if your if your reputation is uh that poor. Um so that certainly to me suggests at least at least some you know real costs being

faced uh for for being seen as as too much of a bully um but yeah no it's it's it's interesting um because i have uh a way of thinking about this that um basically tries to explain the variation in status symbols as deriving from the fact that uh revealing them as status symbols often negates their status enhancing effects. Um and so uh that creates a kind of volatility uh in in our in status seeking, um, such that if we if it if if it all comes out in the open that we're just a bunch of braggadocious status seekers, then we all have to do something different to show that we're more humble or that we don't care about status. And that creates uh an incentive to send a different signal. And you sort of and this creates um uh a a dynamic that

that would cause cultural variation in the in the types of status signals being sent over time. Um Does that sound plausible to you? Yeah, I think that the that to consider that more, I would think about um what might be contexts for status driving that are novel contexts, um, and who moves into those positions and that um and then and and of course that's happening now because the men who were you know the ones at my knee when uh we first went in are now president of the indigenous political organization and that sort of thing. Um and I think in those contexts would probably see some status leveling. And I haven't thought about that a lot. And I haven't um I don't but so and again anthropologically, we know that when kind of new opportunities, new context for status open

up, it's often the young men who move who strive to move into them because it gets them out from under the thumb of the elders who otherwise sort of keep their status under control. So I think probably, you know, in Konamo now and in a lot of other traditional societies there's greater articulation with outside institutions, you know, with NGOs and the coolness of indigeneity and such that we might see more of that at play. Yeah. Brend Brenda, when you we've asked anthropologists sort of what it's like on a personal level being in these communities. And I mean, we've talked a lot about the violence, but there's also this principle of life that there's no free lunch, or for every con, there's a benefit, you know, for every pro

there's a con, and vice versa. Is there anything about like when you experience sort of switching cultures, and you know, you've been so immersed, um, and maybe the blinds are blurred, maybe, you know, but um, but uh that you that's sort of unique um, or that's a pro because there's all of this conflict, there's actually some something else, you know. There's almost like a a piece because everybody is sort of um sh pretty coordinated about social relationships, or everybody's really close. You know, people talk about closeness when they've been in conflict or combat together. Do you find that there are things that for those of us who don't aren't in a culture where there is this sort of interpersonal violence that they're sort of part of our evolved

psychology or part of our experience of social ties that that that you have or Kanambo has that you've seen people have or that you have yourself that what you see that you know we wouldn't, David and I just would not have that experience. Is there anything like that? I think I yeah, I I tend to see politics afoot everywhere. I see coalitions forming everywhere. I see people who are better or worse at it, certainly within faculty, you know, within the academic senate, um, even within the administration. You know, there are ways to um Observe coalitions that are forming that may require a little concern or ways to understand coalitions and how they are formed on the ground to be effective at getting things done.

I think understanding that I think politics and coalitional formation and um respect and status formation are always part of the human condition and recognizing that that's true in whatever context we're embedded. I I think I see that. But and I think and I I hope this doesn't sound arrogant, but I feel like when I step into an indigenous context, I understand better. And that's true in there are in people who write in native studies and really identify common characteristics of um really we are talking about epistemology and ontology and and um just an understanding of how the world works and the relationships and how important they are um i i feel like i get that better than if i wouldn't have had this experience.

Is that do you think that's because I mean, maybe these are not mutually exclusive, but you know, there's the one version where sort of like uh everyone in a modern, I don't know what the right adjective is, but you know, in a in a weird society, um we're all just sort of like really poorly developed politically and coalitionally because we don't have these like evolutionarily valid training life experiences. So is it that that everybody, it's sort of like the hunting, you know, like you know, Chris talked about how, you know, people are just really good, or everyone we've had on, you know, you're good at identifying plants, you're a good hunter, you just have this, you're you're healthy, you have this great knowledge base, and you know, and we we are all, you

know, David and I especially, you know, we're just like bumbling idiots. You know, so there's that, so one version is you get it when you show up because you have been trained in a crucible of sort of really, you know, you've gotten good training in like actually ecologically or evolutionarily valid alliance and politics? Or is it that it's just that the cues for our evolved psychologies, it's just fitting the cue structure better, where it's just you're hearing the conversations, you're seeing the people, and and maybe the same appetite that people have for sort of you know, TV shows or dramas or fiction is this appetite for, you know, um, that's politics for our evolved psychology, not current politics of, you know, abstract things.

So do you think, you know, so this experience that you understand it, and may again, maybe these are not separable. I mean, it's a hard question, but do you do you get a sense that it's because your evolved psychology is responding to that this is just the right Q structure for all of us? Or is it that the people you're working with are also just like really good at it because they have this um face-to-face, like they're just they're just really good at it and we're just really bad at it. Or maybe, and again, yeah. I don't I don't think we are really bad at it. I think we're really good at it. I think that evolved psychology is is part of the way we all perceive the world. I think that I perceive it more acutely because of,

and I imagine that you do both of you also, because you've thought about the the theory of it, you know, the principles and the paradigm and and um and you'll r recognize the patterns and the behaviors more rapidly and more consciously than than others. But you know, we all know movers and shakers and it's context dependent, I think, you know. So it may be, again, the academic senate, it may be the people who can move the conversation in a faculty meeting effectively, it may be making sure or you know, organizing the joint conference of HBS and the Cultural Evolutionary Society, you know, those folks are, you know, embedded in structure of alliances and and um and that maybe there's a little more status driving going on in in our you know modern world than

in the um than there is in a small community but I don't think anyone would deny that there isn't status driving going on you know everywhere and and coalitions being formed everywhere and I think the same the same principles apply. Yeah. Just hunting and giving me. It's just different behaviors. One of the things that really struck me in the uh October um symposium was so many people came up and just talked about how you and John had opened sort of your house and your home and your family up to them. And uh I'm wondering, is that sort of the flip side of you going to Kanambo in the sense of, I mean, the dividing line between work and home or home life or family life, um, you know, how do you I don't even know what my question is, but I think, you know, like it's just the

observation that I was really struck with how many students felt like you adopted them and really took care of them. Um is that something you that you did consciously? Well, kind of, but um it wasn't unusual to find that one of us independently had invited somebody to come, you know, and stay. But I think honestly, I think it's who we both John and I are or were, you know, um, in our homes when we grew up, we often had uh lots of other people, you know, coming in and living with us for periods of time. And, you know, it might be in my case, somebody who got thrown out of the house by their mother. And my mother would say, Well, you know, they can stay here. And it would talk to the parents and say, you know, they'll be okay and we'll make sure.

And a year later they're still there. You know, so I mean, that was part of my growing up. And then John comes from a really big extended, you know, Mexican family. And so to have cousins and aunts and his mother's sister lived with them almost his entire life. And so I think, uh, and I don't know, maybe I've not had this conversation with the therapist, but maybe they would say we don't have good boundaries. But um, you know, I don't, I I think it's maybe that pre-adapted us to field work, you know, because there, there, there are boundaries, you have to learn them, but they're really different. And um and you know, even proxymics are different. And um what is your business versus somebody else's business, you know, especially us,

because you know, there had to be a whole new category of person established for us. So um boundaries were um we learned about them because we kind of needed to. But yeah yeah I mean I think that's the anthropology um is is is exactly sitting is is the science of those boundaries right and sort of maybe just sitting right on them or pushing through them right yeah yeah and and and that was my you know for finding a place to do research and maintaining that research site, you know, um, living well within the community and contributing a benefit to the community. Um and and understanding that you're there. Um I'm not even sure I would say as a guest, but you're there by virtue, you're hosted, you know, you're there, especially in an indigenous territory where it's we're

totally dependent on people's permission to be here. So um it's by their grace, sort of in a way, yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. So I think one of the one of the things we ask people is um if there's anything we should ask you, um, because we we often don't even know enough to ask the right questions. Is there anything um that yeah on at whatever level that we should have asked? Don't think so. Um I think, you know, for students and others who are thinking about establishing a field site, I think recognizing how much time it can take to do that and how important getting permissions and building relationships is before you can even go into a community. So we were over, we were about 11 months in before we actually started our field work in

Conambo. So um the IRB is a really great process because it requires you now to think about what your potential impacts on a community may be. And we do have impacts on a community when we go in, it just changes a lot for people. We become, you know, kind of, we we need to think about that and we need to think about what kind of benefit we can return and how we can return a benefit in a way that allows people the choice to participate or not participate in the research so we did um we did we were basically served as health promoters and um the first aid station and facilitated um that um access to medical care that people when asked you know that's what they wanted and we could do that um a lot of ucsp folks have done that that was a model that we

followed um you know john could give injections and do little sutures because he'd worked in a medical research lab and you know and those were and he had worked in a venom lab. So and he could fix things like radios. So when there was a snake bite and the radio was down, he could gauge. And we had brought in anti-venom and um so in communic we so he fixed the radio and and you know, and and then so we could call the pilots in for the emergency evacuation and could gauge, you know, the point at which it might be necessary to administer anti-ven and which you don't want to do if you don't have to because of the necrosis that can result. Anyway, there's there's so many, so many things, right? So many things.

Ask people what they need. That's I think the advice. Make sure you ask permission before you go anywhere. Don't take a lot of photographs, don't be rude. Um, you know good good good life lessons for any context actually. Right. Right. And and we basically didn't go anywhere unless we were invited. We waited for invitations and I find that to be good um method. Yeah. So how how long? So how long has it been? So from the moment you step foot in Kanambo till this day, how many years is that, if you don't mind me asking? I'm just curious. No, we first went in 1992 and maybe around April, somewhere around there. We went in first. Um be and then that was part of our checking out different places and then

going back to the States and regrouping and coming back. So we landed in Konambo Christmas Eve, 1992, with a two year old. And um, so that's been a few years, right? 32, 35, yeah, 32, 33, something like that. And and and the uh the if you were gonna graph sort of how much knowledge people feel giving you, or sort of how much you know about the community, is it that even in the last 10 years you've learned so much more or is it trailing off? Or, you know, what's the curve of um I haven't been back since John and I did our last field trip there in 2018 and then came COVID and almost every every anthropologist we've talked to is had the COVID line. Yeah. So it's it's time to go back. And it's not that I haven't been in touch with people.

Like I said, I get phone calls and I get lots of Facebook messages. But um so in that sense, uh I mean the world of people in Conambo has changed so much. The younger generation speaks Spanish, they're literate. We just saw the first um kid born in Konambo get her college degree. Oh cool. And so just there's a lot of changes. But I think honestly, I mean John and I started doing what we call tag team field work and tag team parenting, and we did a lot of separate trips because somebody had the kids back as all that stuff. But um, and I learned a lot. Um I think of them as pajama parties, just traveling with women and um, you know, getting a big hotel room or staying on the river and you know a shelter that is built, you know, for the

night. Um but just um I I think I learn stuff all the time. Every time I go, I learn something new and um so the individual stories, but there's tons of data to be analyzed. So there's still work to be done and I gotta go back this summer and even touch base and make sure I'm getting, you know, when are you coming? Are you coming back? You know, all the time. So it's time I have responsibilities and people that I care about. So yeah. Yeah. It's such an incredible, I mean, you know, I think we're all I think we're all lucky in the evolutionary behavioral sciences to be doing it. I feel that way. Um and I especially think that, you know, the the anthropology part of that is the it's just an incredible, you know, these these societies are changing so

much and to be the generation that sort of is seeing it, um, um, you know, it's it's it's vanishing, right? These the the the these different places that are not all h homogeneous. Um It's such a um just an incredible opportunity to sort of document this this way of living and these people. Yeah. Yeah. And I, you know, on the one hand, I feel like I have some responsibility to say we don't want to contribute to the, you know, the myth of the vanishing. No, exactly. Yeah. And I I was even in my humming and hawing, that's I was sort of thinking about saying that. Yeah, exactly. And and that the these, you know, sort of principles of indigenity are found in urban Indian communities. And you know, my students on campus who are native.

You know, there's there's just a a way of thinking about the world that is shared and um and and I'm done I don't have to declare that as my own insight. You know, we can look at lots of writing by native scholars and find it there. So I don't I'm I'm worried though about going back. You know, so many people, including John, have died. Yeah. There will be observations of all those deaths and um there um I don't I don't know what this next generation is gonna be. That generation though, there are boisterous ones, you know. I mean, I think always, but it's when they we talked, we used to talk about sorry, UCSB this way when we were graduate students, and there was sort of the golden handshake given to a bunch of or offered to a bunch of faculty who retired, and then

suddenly the ones who had been the junior roosters became the senior roosters, and there was a lot of cockfight. And um, so I think that that's probably going on right now in Conambo to a certain extent. Um, I and that would be interesting to see actually those leveling mechanisms and what the elders are doing, but they're probably just letting them do it, you know, because that's more typical. So yeah, I don't know. Yeah. Things are changing for sure. Yeah. Well, thank you, Brenda, for uh giving your uh insightful theoretical perspective. Um, but more importantly the rich empirical reality uh that our theories will inevitably collide with as we embark on this mission to try to understand uh who we are.

Uh it was a real pleasure talking with you, and I really appreciate you coming on the podcast. Yeah, thank you. Yeah, and uh and I I will butcher this, but you and John both are Hundri and Amu, uh yes. So both both big and organizers. So thank you for for doing that and and thank you for coming on. Thank you for inviting me and giving me the opportunity to reflect on all of this and engage with those ideas. I I think all these theories are compatible. So I think we're on the right track for sure. So thank you. Yeah. Thank you. Okay. So David, we've completed another episode. We sure did. Um so what can people do if they're uh enjoying what they're hearing and they want to support us and uh give us some encouragement?

Um they can share our episodes on social media. They can give us a rating um on whatever format they listen to. They can also leave a positive review. Yeah. All those would be great. And we also have a Patreon page if you're so inclined to support us. Yeah. So uh yeah, I guess we'll see you next week then.