Revenge and Conflict: Social and Cognitive Aspects - Conflict and Multimodal Communication: Social Research and Machine Intelligence - page 80

Far from expressing the fundamentally collective character of life in honor societies,
vengeance was a tool for preventing conflicts from becoming needlessly and dangerously
collective. Knowing that they were subject to punishment if they extended help, kin of
would-be aggressors had good reason to discourage violent acts, and kin of offenders had
good reason to distance themselves from acts already committed. (Gould 2003 , p. 134)

Is revenge functional to the maintenance of societies or should societies get
rid of revenge? It is unlikely to find an unequivocal answer, and Posner ( 1980 )is
probably right in suggesting that revenge may be partially determined by historical
and economic circumstances. When the juridical system is weak and individuals
need to protect their families and possessions, a pure vengeance system may appear,
and its maintenance depends on the structure of society but also on the presence of
additional means for conflict resolution.

4.4.1 The Yanomamo

Payback was a fitness-enhancing behavior in traditional, strongly egalitarian,
acephalous, kinship-based, or tribal societies, scattered on relatively large regions,
like the Yanomamo described by Chagnon ( 1988 , 2013 ). In his seminal work on
warfare and blood revenge among the Yanomamo of Amazonas, Chagnon developed
a theory of violence and conflict in which blood revenge serves two main functions.
At the group level, groups with a reputation for “swift retaliation” are less threatened
and also attacked less frequently. Revenge is equally important at the individual
level, and in the Yanomamo society, being successful in exacting revenge could be
even translated into higher marital and reproductive success (Chagnon 1988 ).
Chagnon describes warfare and blood revenge as inevitably linked to conflicts
of interest that arise because as humans we need to seize resources from the
environment, including our peers, to survive. In such a context, not reacting to
appropriation has high material and symbolic costs. In addition to the obvious costs
of losing resources, like food, in these societies, not reacting had high symbolic
costs, like being downgraded in reputation and thus becoming victims of social
avoidance and ostracism. Losing status was equivalent to being condemned to
exploitation, starvation, falling within predators' reach, and death, and a similar
fate was presumably shared by one's own kinship group.
In such an environment, revenge was presumably a rather effective, if not
efficient, way of avoiding such lethal circumstances, more spontaneous than other
institutions of social control, like third-party enforcement, and more precocious
than sophisticated institutions like legal systems. In those contexts, being able to
payback a damage or an offense and to signal that “nobody walks over me” were
essential traits to avoid exploitation, marginalization, and death. In those contexts,
not taking revenge is equivalent to being dishonored, with all the consequences in
terms of losing status, power, and the possibility of being chosen as a partner. In
other words, losing honor could have been equivalent to being sentenced to social
exclusion and then, in extreme cases, to death. On the other hand, if we look at the