The Yanomamo

The Yanomamo people are generally closely related to others in their tribe. If they lose someone in their tribe, it effects them deeply. They are then expected to take revenge on the tribe they believe caused the death of their kinsmen. If they don't take revenge, then the whole tribe is seen as weak and is often raided more often by other tribes who take their resources. In Western cultures, we typically don't or aren't expected to take blood revenge. Instead, Western cultures tend to rely on the legal system, like police officers who arrest the individual(s) who killed someone, the lawyers who prosecute them, and the prison system that houses convicted murderers.

For the Yaanomamo people, revenge killings often happen shortly after the loss of one of their kinsmen. A group of men will get together and go to the village of the offending tribe, often a 4-5 day walk from their own village. Despite the fact that the individual tribesmen will build effigies of the person from the offending tribe that they want to kill, they often kill the first man they come across from the offending tribe, then retreat as quickly as they can back to their own village before the victim is discovered by his own tribe.

Those who become unokais tend to be more powerful in the Yanomamo tribes. They tend to be seen as strong individuals who tend to get more wives and more power. The unokais who have killed the most tend to become tribal leaders with big families. And unokais tend to have more wives than non-unokais, thus producing more offspring and having larger families. And the bigger your immediate family, the more resources you are able to obtain. Even young male children are encouraged to be more aggressive.

The Yanomamo people can become leaders of a tribe if they take part in many revenge killings. Socially, this is seen as a sign of strength, thus making the man who takes revenge more often than others is respected by his tribesmen. And since most people in a tribe are closely related, in general, any lose of one particular person can be felt by the tribe as a whole. Thus the leaders tend to determine if a raid will happen. And the stronger you are perceived to be, the more successful you are generally going to be, attracting more wives to yourself than someone who never goes on raids or takes part in blood revenge.

If laws are not created to protect citizens against being killed, then it seems killing becomes an acceptable means of revenge, despite the fact that killing is wrong (and perhaps, in some cases, despite the fact that there's no proof). In the Yanomamo culture, it doesn't even seem like revenge is exacted on the perpetrator of the crime, but rather on the tribe who harbors the perpetrator of the crime. It seems that killing is more random and revenge is taken out on whoever the revenging party comes across first. This is not protecting the innocent from the dangers associated with murder as a crime.