Aggression: A Way of Life for the Qolla

Abstract

The meanest people in the world are probably the Qolla, an Andean subculture inhabiting the area around Lake Titicaca between Peru and Bolivia. Anthropological literature described the members of this group as the meanest and most unlikable people on earth -the classic example of an extreme personality type dominated by excessive hostility and aggressiveness. In recent years the Qolla have been called everything from anxious and fearful to dishonest and vindictive. But their rancor is hardly a recent discovery; it is almost legendary. In the 16th century a Mercedarian friar, Padre Martin de Murua, described the Qolla as irrational, cruel, uncivilized, stupid and dull. Is this stereotype realistic or is it overstated? Ethnographer Ralph Bolton of Pomona College in Claremont, Calif., spent five years living among the He does not subscribe to every negative characteristic attributed to them but he concludes that the Qolla, at a minimum, are a hostile and aggressive people. Local authorities in the village of Incawatana, where Bolton stayed, keep records of all significant disputes, carefully noting all details of the complaints brought before them. Bolton selected and recorded the activities that were strictly aggressive-those whose goals were the injury of some person or object. The major complaint category in this conflict file is fights and injuries. Violent encounters are extremely commonplace. The second most common category of aggressive behavior is insults. The Qolla are prone to swaggering, especially when inebriated. At such times they frequently indulge in monologues describing their own ferocity while laughing at the puniness of their enemies. Gesticulating wildly in the air, a Qolla man will shout, I am a man, dammit! You, you are nothing but a dog, an ass, excrement! Stealing (with the intent to injure) ranks just below insulting in frequency, followed by damage to crops, failure to pay debts or fulfill contracts and threats against a person or property. Rape, arson, slander and land ownership disputes are less prominent in Incawatana and are considered more serious. But the most serious and most strongly disapproved behavior is murder. In the 25-year period since 1945, there were 11 murders among 800 residents-a rate of 55 homicides per year per 100,000 population. The same rate for the United States would amount to 115,500 murders a year. Not one country for which data are available, says Bolton, has a rate as high as the Qolla. National homicide rates range from 0.3 to 34 per 100,000 population in Colombia. More than 50 percent of all Incawatana adults have had some form of participation in the events surrounding at least one homicide. Bolton calls this rate surprisingly high for a people who do not have an ethic that extols violence or aggressiveness. The Qolla moral code actually demands of them charity, compassion and cooperation with all men. During interviews with the Qolla, Bolton found that they rarely perceived the discrepancy between their own conduct and the conduct called for by the code. When asked why people kill one another, slaughter each other's animals, burn their crops, fight with them, etc., they insisted: Such behavior is not natural. A rational person could not do things like that. No matter what the Qolla think, Bolton's case file shows that they are an extremely hostile group. Several hypotheses have been proposed in the past to explain their aggressiveness. The domination hypothesis of Weston LaBarre of Duke University suggests that