today, in which he described this ritual which takes place North of
here, high in the Andes in the springtime.
As he described it, these two villages on either side of a pass in the
mountains meet in the pass and have a battle-literally-with traditional
weapons like slings.
He said that, as the tradition goes, the side that wins will have better
harvests that year.
He also described how this tradition seems to have been handed down from
the pre-incan Moche culture (if I remember correctly). The battle can
quite literally be deadly. He said that the year he went, he saw at
least one person killed and several others seriously injured, including
badly broken limbs.
This tradition is quite bizarre when viewed from the Gringo
perspective--I mean... come on! Getting killed for some anachronistic
religious belief?
And the really strange thing is that this thing is permitted by the
Peruvian government and even regulated. Apparently, the police look on,
and even regulate things, making sure nobody's smuggling in rifles or
dynamite--only traditional weapons are permitted.
But I got to thinking about how rational this may be, given the belief
system of the people in that part of the countryside. If they win, they
believe they will have a better harvest, and that might be a matter of
life and death for many people in the community. To corrupt Dr. Hans
Zarkov of Flash Gordon fame--"A rational transaction. One life for
many." There is a small probability that you get killed or hurt, but the
result may be, if you believe the myth, that your kids and folks and
uncles and aunts and cousins and friends all get fed and survive this
year, they all get to stay in town, nobody has to go to Lima and work in
a dirty, dangerous factory, and maybe you even make enough to buy some
Chicha during Semana Santa or a new radio or a healthy horse.
Maybe not such a bad deal, right?
The key is the belief system. If you buy in, it makes sense. If you
don't believe, it's ridiculous.
There are two points that occurred to me about this. The first one is a
philosophy of social science idea:
One could argue (I think successfully) that any form of rationality,
including economic rationality, is utterly subjective. Don't worry--I
won't be going all Postmodern/Kuhnian any time soon.
The primary difference between Exchequer Paulson and Karl Marx and those
campesinos up in the mountains is facial hair and goofy hats (for
examples, see my most recent photo posting, in the sidebar). But after
that, the primary difference is the fact that Paulson's theory about the
way the world works has a lot more systematically constructed evidence
than either of the other two theoretical approaches to explaining local
economic trends. Let's face it: neither "winning rock-throwing contest
= good harvest" or "communist revolution = workers' paradise" has a lot
of systematically constructed evidence going for it, while
"recapitalizing banks = much less recession" has some pretty strong
evidence.
Perhaps more importantly to the scientific endeavor, however, is my
second point.
Most people aren't rational economic actors. We know that. When you
pull the lever to drop the 100 $1 bills and offer your partner one of
them, he (or she) says no. We get a lot more utility out of sticking it
to some jerk than we do from $1. What can you buy with $1, anyways? If
we were economically rational, we would never celebrate Halloween, right?
Broadly, we're neither very good at incorporating alternative types of
rationality into our models of human political behavior nor do we make
any attempt to address alternative types of rationality. We have a
pretty good idea what people will do when they're primarily motivated by
money and they have a broadly market-compatible set of beliefs about the
way the world works, but what if there is another type of utility that
moves people--maybe religious faith determines what utility people get
from particular types of action--or maybe people's understanding of how
the world works is totally different from that of the economists.
If you believe (like the Quechua speakers of some Andean villages) that
winning rock fights will make the harvest better, or that blood
fertilizes the earth, or (like the ancient Mayans) that giving your
crops to the priestly class will make the rains come next year, you're
going to do a lot of things that don't make sense to economists. And
fundamentally, that's a flaw.
In order to have a truly comprehensive theory of human behavior, we need
to have generalizable theories (take that, Kuhn!) which are capable of
incorporating alternative rationalities and alternative forms of utility.
2 comments:
Point taken, but aren't most wars a product of some "anachronistic religious belief"?
Found your blog! Have you heard of Tinku in Potosi? Same idea. Nobody is supposed to die these days, but of course what goes on during the festival is not as closely watched as the law would like to think. -Denise Z.
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