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- The feasts and alliances that the Yanomamo have can and often do fail to establish stable, amicable relationships between sovereign villages. When this happens, the groups may coexist for a period of time without any overt expressions of hostility. This, however, is an unstable situation, and no two villages that are within comfortable walking distance from each other can maintain such a relationship indefinitely: they must become allies, or hostility is likely to develop between them. Indifference leads to ignorance or suspicion, and this soon gives way to accusations of sorcery. Once the relationship is of this sort, a death in one of the villages will be attributed to the malevolent "hekura" sent by shamans in the other village, and raids will eventually take place between them.
- War is only one form of violence in a graded series of aggressive encounters. Indeed, some of the other forms of fighting, such as the formal chest-pounding duel, may even be considered as the antithesis of war, for they provide an alternative to killing. Duels are formal and are regulated by stringent rules about proper ways to deliver and receive blows. Much of the Yanomamo fighting is kept innocuous by these rules so that the concerned parties do not have to resort to drastic means to resolve their grievances. Thus, Yanomamo culture calls forth aggressive behaviour, but at the same time provides a somewhat regulated system in which the expressions of violence can be controlled.
- The most harmless form of fighting is the chest-pounding duel. These duels usually take place between the members of different villages and are precipitated by such minor affronts as malicious gossip, accusations of cowardice, stinginess with food, or niggardliness in trading.
- Kinship relations play an important part in most fights. If a group is badly outnumbered, they will be joined by remoter kin and friends whose sense of fairness stimulates them to take sides, no matter what the issue is.
- The tops of most men"s heads are covered with deep, ugly scars of which their bearers are very proud. Some men, in fact, keep their heads shaved on top to display their scars, rubbing red pigment on their bare scalps to define them more precisely.
- The raid is the next level in the scale of violence; this is warfare proper. The objective of the raid is to kill one or more of the enemy and flee without being discovered. If, however, the victims of the raid discover their assailants and manage to kill one of them, the campaign is not considered to be a success, no matte how many people the raiders many have killed before sustaining their single loss.
- Although few raids are initiated solely with the intention of capturing women, this is always a desired side benefit. Generally, however, the desire to abduct women does not lead to the initiation of hostilities between groups that have had no history of mutual raiding in the past. New wars usually develop when charges of sorcery are levelled against members of a different group. Once raiding has begun between two villages, however, the raiders all hope to acquire women if the circumstances are such that they can flee without being discovered.
- A captured woman is raped by all the men in the raiding party, and, later by all the men in the village who wish to do so but did not take part in the raid. She is then given to one of them as a wife.
- Warfare, violence and the abduction of women have been extremely important factors in Yanomamo history.
- Approximately 40% of the adult males participated in the killing of another Yanomamo. The majority of them (60%) killed only one person, but some men were repetitively successful warriors and participated in the killing of up to 16 other people.
- Approximately 25% of all deaths among adult males were due to violence.
- Approximately 2/3 of all people aged 40 people or older had lost, through violence, at least one of the following kinds of very close biological relatives: a parent, a sibling, or a child. Most of them (57%) have lost two or more such close relatives. This helps explain why large numbers of individual are motivated by revenge.
- There is a correlation between military success and reproductive success among the Yanomamo. Men who have killed are more successful at obtaining wives, and, as a consequence, have more offspring than men their own age who have not killed. The most plausible explanation for this correlation seems to be that men who have killed are socially rewarded and have greater prestige than other men and, for these reasons, are more often able to obtain extra wives by whom they have larger than average numbers of children.
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