The cultural script existing in the minds of the polygamous, head-shrinking Jívaro of the Peruvian Rainforest declared: "If you marry someone's legal wife-to-be, beware! The offended bachelor will attempt to kill you. Be prepared!"   And they were prepared/

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The kind of defensive system, as illustrated in the photo above, was not against adversaries like the powerful Incas who lived on the West, nor against the Canelos (Quechua) who lived on the North, nor against the Achuara who lived on the East, nor against the Huambisa and Aguaruna on the South, but against one's own classificatory  "brother" whose rights were violated.

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Every bachelor had a right  to marry his maternal uncle's daughter.  And it was married men, usually those who had more than one wife, who feared being killed by an unmarried parallel cousin whom society had classified as being a "brother." 

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To protect themselves against their offended fictive "brothers," they built fortress-houses like the one above to protect themselves. Now how this particular life-way came into existence begins with the creation of a right tied to the rule: "One shall marry one's cross-cousins and no one else."  

In addition, it was the moral duty of every maternal uncle to provide his nephew a wife. The "no one else" ironclad rule coupled with the polygamous ideal of having two or three wives provided by one's father-in-law produced a culture which lacked marriageable women for bachelors. 

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Their building of fortress-houses has its roots in the merging of status positions.  Mother's sister (aunt) was merged with ego's mother, ego's father's brother (uncle) with father, and ego's parallel cousins with ego's brothers and sisters.  If the Jívaro had not merged status positions, then there would not exist fictive brothers competing with ego for a wife.

 

 

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The above Jívaro divergent design for the family and their misuse of the universal rule of exogamy produced a sinful structure that maimed its members.  But for the materialist, there exist no structurally maimed members of society. 

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Like no other cultural rule, the universal Rule of Exogamy highly determines how everyone thinks and behaves. It is a universal rule missiologists have ignored. Understanding how the Rule of Exogamy has been applied by a given society is the gateway to understanding the emics of the native's worldview.

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While the Divine function of the Rule of Exogamy was to maintain the integrity of the nuclear family, its normative function has been perverted to protect various types of "families" that exist in the world,  each type specifically designed to reduce existential anxieties.

 

Extended Family Types: the Households-of-Five

Both the Chácobo and Jívaro created similar extended family types. Jesus called it  the "household-of-five," prophetically declaring: "For from now on five members in one household will be divided, three against two and two against three. They will be divided, father against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother, mother-in-law against daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law" (Luke 12:52-53).

 

In this passage Jesus was specifically referring to the Jewish household-of-five which kept sons at home and imported daughters.  But there are societies like the Chácobo, Sharanahua, and Jívaro which keep daughters at home and import sons-in-law.  

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But there are also significant internal differences between the Sharanahua household-of-five, the Chácobo household-of-five and Jívaro household -of-five.  For example, the dominant dyad of the Sharanahua household-of-five was that of father-daughter, for the Chácobo it was mother-daughter, and for the Jívaro it was father-in-law and son-in-law.  

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The Jívaro household-of-five plus the polygamous ideal of having more than one wife was maiming them by producing a shortage of marriageable women. The effect of the rule: Thou shall marry the daughter of your maternal uncle and no one else, was that unmarried parallel cousins often ended up marrying someone who was not the daughter of his maternal uncle.  Either way,  one became a wife stealer. 

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But unlike the Sharanahua and Chácobo households-of-five, the Jívaro household-of-five was temporary. This is significant because it enabled husbands to become the heads of their household.  In contrast, Sharanahua and Chácobo sons-in-law were not free to take their wives and move out and set up independent households. The effect of the prohibition was the suppression of husband headship and tribal leaders who had the authority to lead. 

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In contrast, Jívaro sons-in-law were free to leave and setup an independent household with the birth of his first born son.  According to anthropologist Michael Harner, they generally “remained until the birth of the wife’s first son. Thereafter, according to the norm, the son-in-law and his family dwell in a new house nearby.”   "Slightly over half of actual marriages are with cross-cousins." 

 

Unlike the Jívaro, no Chácobo bachelor was compelled to marry the daughter of his maternal uncle.  The preferential marriage rule was not etched in stone.  For the Jívaro, it was.  They had absolutized the relative and in the process created a society which produced cultural forms like, "the common practice of 'reserving' a pre-puberty girl as a future bride by giving gifts of featherwork and trade goods to her parents." 

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This absolutizing of the rule of cross-cousins marriages was observed by anthropologist Michael Harner who wrote:

“the only kinswoman with whom marriage is formally sanctioned is a cross-cousin

(wahe) from either parent’s side of the family.  A man does not have an alternative

of finding a marriage partner outside of his kindred, but this requires him to move

out from his home neighborhood (because of the practice of temporary matrilocality)

and consequently to live among strangers who may be intent on killing him for some

earlier wrong by one of his kinsmen or simply because he took one of their preferred potential mates [a form of stealing].  Slightly over half of actual marriages are with

cross-cousins” (Italics added). 

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Since “a man does not have an alternative of finding a marriage partner outside of kindred,” anyone who did not follow the rule handed down to them by their ancestors automatically becomes an enemy of Jívaro society.  Customary law raised the status of "preferential spouse" to an absolute which stated that one must marry a cross-cousin and no one else.  Those who failed to marry their cross-cousin and found a marriage partner "outside of his kindred" not only broke the "law," they created another serious problem.

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By marrying a daughter who was not the daughter of one's maternal uncle, one was, according to Jívaro customary law, violating the law. One had no right to ignored the property rights of the wife’s cross-cousins.  One would be guilty of stealing someone's wife to be.  And stealing was a punishable offense.

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In contrast, the rule of exogamy for the Chácobo did not demand that a bachelor marry his cross-cousin.  No material uncle was obligated to provide his nephew with a wife. While the Chácobo law-script said cross-cousin marriage was the ideal, the ideal was not “written on stone.”  In fact, I am aware of only one case where a Chácobo bachelor married his cross-cousin.

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This meant a married Chácobo could visit another Chácobo village and be welcomed as a guest. He had no fear of being murdered.  Not so for a Jívaro who had more than one wife or had married the daughter of a non-maternal uncle.  In contrast, the Jívaro would be wondering if the beer he was drinking had been poisoned, or whether or not he would be ambushed on his trip home by someone who considered him to be a wife stealer. 

 

For the Chácobo, drinking beer together was what made life bearable.  It was a sign of friendship and brotherhood. For the Jívaro, drinking beer together was filled with undeclared accusations and intrigue.

 

Yet, one positive effect from moving out with the birth of the first child was the emergence of natural superordinate-subordinate status positions which allow husbands to lead and provide for their families. There was no need for the Jívaro to create a status position the Chácobo call "raisi" whose ascribed function was to provide food for the household-of-five.

 

Jíviro husbands had the natural authority to lead. Whenever threaten by outside forces, some Jívaro husband would take on the role of “war chief” and unite all the neighborhoods together to resist this threat to their existence.  This “ability of Jívaro to ally against outside invaders” was positive.

 

Conviction

1. Moral evil is social and structural as well as personal. 

2. The existence of structural sin and the merging of mutually exclusive status positions is generally ignored by missiologists and missionaries. 

3. Structural sin is committed whenever a society restructures the nuclear family and violates the Structural sin is committed whenever a society restructures the nuclear family and violates the Law of Identity  by merging mutually exclusive status positions as illustrated above.

4. Understanding how the Rule of Exogamy has been applied by a given society is the gateway to understanding the emics of the native's worldview. (emics = How the native perceives and categorizes the world, their rules for behavior, what has meaning for them, and how they imagine and explain things.)