Yanamomo culture and the unokaimou ceremony

1) Unlike most cultures, the Yanomomo do not have formal laws or written language, so their culture’s response to murder will be very different. Murders often happen because of sexual issues or disagreements and in response, raids often happened as a way of avenging dead relatives or tribe members. If someone is on a raid or murdered another person, they need to go through the unokaimou ceremony to cleanse their spirit and ensure they will not receive any punishment in their afterlife. While the Yanomamo people do not encourage their tribe members to go around killing other members constantly, those who have unokaid are not imprisoned or shunned from society. The average person who has unokaid has more children than someone who has not unokaid, so it can be understood that being a murderer is not a bad trait in this society and it is often sexually desirable.
2) Revenge killings are very common among the Yanomamo. While they seem risky to do as other tribes often are many days of walking apart and multiple tribe members can lose their lives, they are used as a deterrent for future attacks and show that there are consequences for attacks on their tribe. The night before a raid begins, there is a ritual and everyone plans who will be attacked. The next morning, they will attack the village from afar using bows and arrows and most of the raiders will shoot the target. As soon as they return, the raiders will do the unokaimou ceremony.
3) Those who obtain the status of unokais are well-respected among their tribe and tend to have more romantic success than those who are not unokais. While it is a possibility that non-unokais people are less likely to die from attacks and will live longer and have more children, the data does not seem to support this claim, as most deaths from raids are non-unokais. The Yanamomo people highly value being unokaid, so there are not many benefits of not being unokaid.
4a) The political leaders or patas are typically unokais. They are seen as people who have honored their deceased tribe members, hence why they are given positions of power.
4b) The more times someone has unokaid, the higher up their social status is. Yanamomo culture values the unokaimou ceremony and what it provides for the tribe, so it is seen among many men in a tribe.
4c) Yanamomo tribes are very closely bonded. Due to how many wives and children men have in this culture, nuclear families are very large, which makes family trees and the amount of cousins children have even greater. This means that if someone in your tribe was killed, it was likely a close relative, either a sibling or a cousin, which makes revenge more enticing, hence why so many raids occur.
4d) Those who have unokaid tend to have far more children than those who haven’t unokaid. The more times someone has unokaid also makes them a more attractive partner, so men who have unokaid 5+ times typically have more wives and offspring than men who have unokaid less than 5 times, or perhaps not unokaid at all.
5) Even if a behavior is anti-social or something that nobody should want to do doesn’t mean that nobody will do it. Humans are all very diverse creatures and no one person thinks exactly like another person, so laws prohibiting murder and social isolation exist as a punishment and deterrent to prevent people in the future from killing others. In most cases, murder is counter-productive against the growth of a population, strikes fear across a group, and divides people, so laws against murder and a justice system exist to enforce these laws and keep a society “healthy”. Every culture has different values, so while American culture may prohibit murder because it is against our values and ideals, the same cannot be said for all other cultures. All cultures have different sets of values and priorities, in the same way that every human has their own set of beliefs, which is why laws exist to prevent those with beliefs different than the majority from acting on them.