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This article analyzes a complex of grief, rage and homicide among the Ecuadorian Waorani, tracing the relationships among worldview, values and concepts of self, and envy, rage and homicide, especially witch-killing. We contrast the results with the position taken by Rosaldo in his widely cited paper “Grief and the Headhunters Rage” (1989). We hold that Waorani individuals' experience of rage during bereavement is not, as argued by Rosaldo for the Ilongot, a thing sui generis, immune to further explanation. Rather, it is explained as a product of people defining their experience on the basis of cultural constructions of self and reality and acting in accord with those definitions. We also argue that this explanation, coupled with the similarities in the Waorani and Ilongot complexes, suggests the operation of similar sociocultural and psychological processes in the two societies and supports, contra the assertions of postmodernists and others, the continued value and validity of cross-cultural comparative research.

Implicit in all social relations, including those involving material transactions, are conceptions of reality that include fundamental assumptions about the nature of human beings, the relationships among them, and the world around them. This article examines economic exchange and reciprocity in two societies that are very similar in their ecological contexts, modes of subsistence, technologies, and social organizations but at opposite extremes in their attitudes toward violence. They are the Semai of Malaysia, one of the most peaceful societies known, and the Waorani of Amazonian Ecuador, the most violent society yet described. Comparison of the norms of exchange in these two societies reveals two very different views of the world: The Semai see themselves as helpless in a hostile world that is beyond their control and the Waorani see themselves as self-reliant and capable in a world that they feel fully competent to control. Understanding these culturally constructed realities as they are embodied in Semai and Waorani exchange (and in other areas of life as well, of course) contributes to an understanding of the character of sociality generally in these two societies, including their diametrically opposed dispositions toward violence in human relations.

Trinkets and Beads. 1996.52 minutes, color. video by Christopher Walker. For more information contact First Run/Icarus Films, 153 Waverly Place, New York, NY 10014.

The Senoi Semai of Malaysia have frequently been cited as examples in the debates over the wellsprings of human violence. Numerous writers have employed selected Semai ethnographic material to support assertions that, their apparent peacefulness notwithstanding, Semai are in reality bloodthirsty killers. This assertion has in turn been used as evidence in support of a variety of approaches whose common thread is a view of aggressiveness and violence as somehow innate in human beings. The authors of this article, whose publications form the basis of most anthropological knowledge of Semai life and culture, draw on their own published and unpublished work as well as on documentation from other sources to refute these interpretations. We hold that Semai life is, as first-hand observers have described it, notably free of interpersonal violence, and we argue that misrepresentations rooted in particular theoretical or philosophical a priori assumptions are scientifically untenable and culturally slanderous.

The concept of culture is coming increasingly under attack by proponents of a variety of approaches sharing largely deductive methodologies, a thoroughgoing materialism, and the dualistic assumption that culture is reducible to phenomena on some more "fundamental" level. This paper analyzes one such approach, embodied in an analysis by Derek Freeman of an aboriginal Malaysian belief and behavior complex. It examines the logical structure of the argument and its use of the empirical data, making explicit the assumptions underlying these sorts of arguments and assessing their implications for a science of anthropology.

The frustration-aggression hypothesis is examined in the light of a corpus of ethnographic data and is shown to be inadequate to account for the observed behaviors. An alternative model is tentatively proposed that incorporates the frustration-aggression hypothesis, other extant approaches to the study of aggression, and early and current theories in the field of emotion within a systems-oriented framework. This model is then tested against additional ethnographic data.

substantive issues of disputes and the restoration of the integrity of the social fabric. The means used to realize these objectives, however, vary widely cross-culturally and are intimately related to other aspects of personality, society, and culture. In this paper, I analyze one such process of conflict resolution as it occurs among the Semai Senoi of West Malaysia and trace some of contextual relationships. The Semai Senoi are an aboriginal population numbering some 15,000 individuals. They live for the most part in small, relatively isolated hamlets of fewer than 100 people, the settlements scattered along the deep valleys that dissect the mountainous spine of the central Malay Peninsula. Although the degree of acculturation to and integration into the national socioeconomic system varies from area to area within the Semai region, the traditional Semai pattern is one of politically autonomous settlements. Each village exploits a defined territory and subsists by swidden cultivation of manioc and hill rice supplemented by hunting, fishing, trapping, and gathering. This pattern persists in the less accessible highland and deep forest areas and characterizes the settlement a tiny hamlet of four houses and sixty-five men, women, and children-where the bulk of the research for this paper was conducted. The Semai are best known in the anthropological literature for

Numerous researchers have noted the existence of culture-specific patterns of emotionality, or “ethoses,” that are characteristic of particular societies. This paper examines the development and maintenance of one such emotional specialization by analyzing the social, cultural, psychological, and physiological processes whose interactions give rise in each generation to an ethos of fearfulness among the Semai Senoi of West Malaysia.

The most influential current explanations of preindustrial violence and warfare see it as determined by factors and forces entirely external to human beings and their motives and purposes. This article critically examines the most prominent of these approaches—behavioristic, sociobiological, and ecological-functional—and some of the assumptions underlying them. Then, drawing on ethnographic data from a society known for its peacefulness—the Semai Senoi—the article offers an alternative conception of action, one that views human behavior, including warfare and nonviolence, as purposive, and that sees human beings as active decision makers picking their ways through fields of options and constraints in pursuit of individually and culturally defined goals in a culturally constituted reality which they themselves are actively constructing.

Much of the controversy over the sources ofhuman violence is traceable to conflicting conceptions of human action as "determined" or as "motivated." This paper examines the pervasive nonviolence of the Semai Senoi ofMalaysia, showing it to be rooted in understandings of the world and meanings imparted to it, i.e., in appraisals and interpretations of experience based in culturally-given conceptions, definitions and assumptions. Focusing on human motives and on the psychological and cosmological spaces within which they are generated