Murder in good company - Gebusi people of New Guinea have high homicide rate

Science News,  Feb 6, 1988  by Bruce Bowere

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MURDER IN GOOD COMPANY

Cooperation, camaraderie and a dizzying homicide rate distinguish a

small New Guinea society

The Gebusi, a society of around 450 persons living in a New Guinea rain forest, are a strikingly gentle lot. They revel in kog-wa-yay, roughly translated as "good company." Togetherness, casual talk and exuberant humor are daily staples. There is no central political structure and no jockeying for power among the stronger men; matters of concern to Gebusi, who live in communal "longhouse" settlements, are decided by consensus. Food, including bananas grown in small gardens and the occasionally hunted wild pig, is routinely shared among all the residents of a settlement. Anger, violence and warfare are frowned upon.

But behind this aura of serenity and conviviality lurks a brutal paradox: The Gebusi murder one another at a rate among the highest ever reported, about 40 times greater than the 1980 homicide rate in the United States. According to anthropologist Bruce M. Knauft of Emory University in Atlanta, who documented the Gebusi homicide rate during nearly two years of field work, their murderous ways cannot be explained by current theories of violence applied to societies such as ours that have complex political and economic systems.

"The character of homicide appears to change in simple societies that have no pecking order or dominance hierarchy among adult men," says Knauft. "Especially in these societies, there may be a pattern of social life that is generally peaceful and tranquil but is punctuated by aggression which, when it does occur, is unrestrained and frequently homicidal."

This pattern, he adds, may be a critical aspect of the evolution of human violence, since simple, decentralized societies have predominated for most of the history of Homo sapiens.

Anthropologists who encounter such societies often come away with a vision of "Eden in the outback," says Emory anthropologist Melvin Konner, "only to have the discovery foiled by better data." Margaret Mead's observations of life in Samoa are perhaps the most famous instance of this tendency. In 1928, she wrote of a near-utopian Samoa unencumbered by aggression, competition, sexual repression and conflict-ridden adolescence. Since the 1950s, several accounts, including a controversial book by Australian anthropologist Derek Freeman, have described a more complex Samoa in which violent crime, including rape, is not uncommon and is often committed by adolescent boys.

In small societies of noncompetitive foragers or hunter-gatherers, violence is especially easy to overlook, says Knauft. First, the people often fear and downplay occasional aggressive outbursts, and second, even a few murders committed from year to year can translate into a high overall homicide rate.

A case in point are the !Kung Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert, dubbed "the harmless people" by an investigator several decades ago. They are indeed generally peaceful and gregarious, but a systematic survey in 1979 found that the !Kung's homicide rate is nearly three times that of the United States, which is already one of the highest among Western nations. Within a population of 1,500 !Kung, an estimated 22 killings occurred over five decades, "about five more than the same number of New Yorkers would have been expected to commit over the same period," according to Konner.

A similar pattern of pervasive good will and self-effacement combined with occasional violent flare-ups and even murders has been noted among Central Eskimo groups, the Semai aborigines of Malaysia and the nomadic Hadza of Tanzania, says Knauft.

But the Gebusi study is perhaps the most intensive homicide inquiry to date. Knauft began by establishing complete genealogies for 15 of 25 Gebusi clans and partial genealogies for three others. Clan members are distantly or directly related to one another. The total number of adult deaths in the genealogical sample between 1940 and 1982 totaled 394. The cause of each death was cross-checked in extensive discussions with Gebusi informants, including relatives, friends and acquaintances of the deceased person.

There were 129 cases of homicide, nearly one-third of all deaths, reports Knauft in the Aug.-Oct. CURRENT ANTHROPOLOGY. The annual homicide rate from 1940 to 1982 is at least 568 murders per 100,000 persons, he says, a conservative calculation based on the partial population survey. By contrast, the 1980 homicide rate in the United States, according to Federal Bureau of Investigation statistics, was 10.7 murders per 100,000 persons; the estimate for Detroit in 1985 was 58.2 murders per 100,000 persons.

"Only the more extreme instances of modern mass slaughter would equal or surpass the Gebusi homicide rate over a period of several decades," says Knauft.

Four out of five Gebusi murders uncovered in the study involved the killing of someone branded as a sorcerer for having allegedly caused the death of another Gebusi. Death from disease, often caused by infections and parasites, is ever-present among the Gebusi and sets the stage for sorcery accusations. More than one-quarter of the sickness deaths in the genealogical sample precipitated a sorcery killing.