User:Abhishekbh/Yanomamo

"Fierce People" redirects here. For the film, see Fierce People (film).

Yąnomamö

Regions with significant populations
Venezuela, Brazil
Languages
Yanomaman languages
Religion
shamanism

The Yąnomamö are a large native tribe of South America. They reside in the Amazon rainforest, among the hills that line the border between Brazil and Venezuela. Due to the remoteness of their residence, they had remained largely uncontacted by the outside world until the beginning of the last century. This has allowed them to retain several aspects of their culture that factors such as population explosion and growth in material wealth have eradicated from the rest of the world. As a result, the Yanomamö have come to be one the most well studied groups by modern Science.

The word Yąnomamö means 'human being' in their language. The word is supposed to be pronounced with thorough nasalization. The phonetic sound 'ö' does not occur in the English alphabet and as a result has led to different accounts of how Yąnomamö is spelled and pronounced. Some anthropologists had published the spelling Yanomamɨ, but because many presses and typesetters eliminate the diacritical marks, an incorrect pronunciation of 'Yanomamee' has emerged.

Most of the information in this article describes a Yąnomamö way of life that existed prior to the 1960s. Sustained contact with missionaries, government officials, miners, journalists, tourists, anthropologists and others has led to significant changes to this way of life. It should also be noted that large variations might exist from village to village. There are always individuals and communities who break the rules and hence deviations from what is presented below may be observed.

Domestic Life

Village

The Yąnomamö live in villages usually consisting of their kin or otherwise marriageable lineages (those they may marry). Village sizes vary though as a guideline they can contain between 30 to 400 people. In what is largely a communal system, the entire village lives under a common roof called the Shabono. Shabonos have a characteristic oval shape with open grounds in the center measuring an average of a 100 yards. The Shabono itself is the perimeter of the village, if it has not been fortified with palisade walls. Under the roof, divisions exist marked only by support posts, partitioning individual houses and spaces. Shabonos are built from raw materials from the surrounding jungles, such as leaves, vines and tree trunks. This leaves them very susceptible to heavy damage from rains, winds, and insect infestation. As a result, new shabonos have to be built every 1 to 2 years. Choosing the location for a new Shabono is a matter of much importance and is principally decided by warfare patterns, and the suitability of the surrounding forest for their food gardens.

Daily Life

An average day for a Yąnomamö begins early at dawn. As the village slowly comes to life, individuals casually chat with each other, or discuss any pressing matters. If any sexual liaisons have to take place, they occur at this time as it easy to leave the shabono under the pretence of going to the toilet. Most raiders also attack at this time, often after spying on the village overnight. After breakfast, those men who plan to hunt leave while it's still dark. Others go about tending to their gardens, usually planting new crops or burning off dead debris. The women might accompany their men in the gardens. As the day gets warmer and more humid, by about 10:30 am, most people are back in their hammocks after taking a quick bath. After spending the hot afternoon mostly lazing around, the men return to any remaining work. For the men, this is almost always followed by drug inhaling and chanting of the Hekurä spirits. Then a large dinner is cooked using any meat that might be available which is usually accompanied with some vegetables. By now it's usually dark, and after further socializing, most people retire to their hammocks. It is not uncommon however to find a few individuals chant or discuss political matters late into the night. In times of war or threat of war, the average day might be very different.

Food

The Yąnomamö are [Swidden Horticulturalists|Horticulturalists] as well as Hunter-Gatherers. This form of gardening is their main sustenance and provides 80% - 90% of their food. The bulk of their gardening efforts produce plantains, but there is good reason to believe that before contact with the New World (who introduced these crops to South America), manioc, maize and other such crops were mainly cultivated. The garden locations are selected carefully. An ideal location would be like a börösö (savanna). It would contain only a light tree cover so that it is easy to clear and would be near a fresh water source. After the brush has been removed, trees are usually cut down. After they have been given some time to dry-off, they are burned and hence cleared. Larger trees which may not burn so easily are simply left where they have fallen, and now they may serve as boundaries between personal lots. A garden is then given several months to evolve into something usable and is harvested as long at is maintainable. Constant clearing of new growth has to take place, but when it does get to be too much a nuisance (usually a year or two), a new garden is made. It is not uncommon to find tribes maintaining multiple gardens. Chagnon notes that their system of slash-and-burn is not as systematic as the term implies. As a form of gathering, several wild fruits and vegetables are eaten from the surrounding forests. Most Yąnomamö recognize the trees and plants which produce edible parts, and gather the food whenever fancied. In what can be called a more organized form of gathering, the locations of favourite non-domesticated foods are noted and then harvested in a controlled and often creative manner. Powder and juices produced from some plants are also used for producing poisons and other potions believed to have supernatural powers. Other than fruits and vegetables, the honey of bees is a prized food and sought after with great fervor. Other important crops include Tobacco and Cotton. Tobacco is chewed by almost every member of the tribe including children over 10 years of age. It is consumed in a chewing fashion after being mixed with a type of salt: burnt ashes of some trees. It is also used as a common trading item; when a village is left without tobacco for any reason, the word they apply to themselves is the same as their word for poor. Cotton is grown for many practical uses. It is used in the production of comfortable sleeping hammocks, their clothes, and is also used to decorate oneself. Most meals are accompanied with some form of meat, which comes from fresh hunts of the day or previous leftovers. Commonly hunted animals include various species of large birds, wild pigs, some monkeys, tapirs, armadillos, anteaters, alligators, deer, rodents, and almost anything else that is available. They also consume insect grubs as delicacies. Larger animals such as pigs are usually hunted with hooked arrows whereas smaller animals such as monkeys may be hunted with poisonous arrows. A technique for catching those animals that live in burrows or caves involves forcing the creatures out or asphyxiating them by blowing smoke into their holes. This technique has also been used on opposing tribes by not just the Yąnomamö but several South American tribes. Other forms of hunting include fishing which is usually a combined effort of men and women. While women beat the water and hence the fish of a river to a shallow stream, the men use either nets made out of cotton or lianas or wooden baskets to capture the fish en masse. Fish are also caught solo with spears and a well-trained reflex. Excess meat is hung over a fire for storage. This method not only keeps insects away, but also dries out the meat making it last longer that it would otherwise. The traditional Yąnomamö diet is famously low in salt, and their blood pressure is among the lowest of any demographic group on the planet. The Yąnomamö have thus been made the subject of studies seeking to link hypertension to sodium consumption.

Clothes

Much like all other humans, the Yąnomamö also possess a modesty when it comes to certain body parts. The men usually wear nothing more than a cotton string around their waists which they to the stretched-out foreskins of their penises. Women also wear a kind of cotton string around their waists which covers the crotch area only by the hanging part of the cotton string. The reaction that a male receives when his penis string becomes undone is the same that a male would receive in other societies if he was left exposed: a mixture of laughter and embarrassment. Correspondingly, it is proper for women to cross their legs while sitting in an upright position if much would be left exposed. Other than this, the clothes they fashion might be occasional strings tied around various other parts of the body. Skins and tails of animals might be used as hats or other ornaments.

Material Possessions

The material possessions of the Yąnomamö are few in variety. These include various types of clay pots (or cuiäs), canoes (only be some tribes), their weapons, and some other basic tools. The clay pots they use vary in size are made out by hardening shaped clay over a fire. These seldom become specialties of certain tribes and are then traded regularly. Other tools commonly used include crude knives made by sharpening stones or bark, wooden baskets, improvised "packets" for carrying food made out of leaves & lianas. Chagnon notes that much like their feasts, this specialization and trading of certain items could be artificially created as an implicit excuse to maintain relations. Tribes that live around different geographical features may develop different items to suit their needs. Those that live near rivers sometimes made kinds of canoes which can be used to traverse short distances. The canoes are made out of different kinds of woods, the largest type being made out of a tree trunk that is hollowed out to a thin u-shape and then further stretched over a fire. Weapons are amongst the most valuable possession for the males. Their bows are made out of palm wood 5 or 6 feet long and strung with fibres of bark. The bowstaves are further shaped by some kind of a sharp object (animal teeth, knives etc) into powerful ovals. The arrow bodies are about 6-feel long, made out of a cultivated cane, with interchangeable arrow-heads. Three main types of arrow-heads are used: curare-poised palm headed, bamboo headed, or animal bone headed. The curare poison is produced from plants of genus Strychnos and what is locally called Mamöcöri. The splinters which attach these heads to the arrow-bodies are weakened by cutting tiny slits in the wood, so that when the victim tries to pull out the arrow, the head breaks off and the poison remains effective. Bamboo-heads are made sharp and quite effective when used at short distances. Other heads are made out of animal bone (usually monkey bone) which because of it's shape, acts as a hook and embeds itself pretty well into the target's body. It is considerably difficult and painful to pull these type of arrows. These arrows are then decorated however the owner see fit, using bird feather, or pigment-paint. Arrows are usually collected back after they are used, and those that have killed many or great humans become valuable trade goods. Other than bows and arrows, wooden clubs (nabrushi) are used in smaller conflicts.

The children stay close to their mother; most of the childrearing is done by women. The Yąnomamö practiced polygamy (though many unions were monogamous). Polygamous families consisted of a large patrifocal family unit based on one man, and smaller matrifocal sub-families: each woman's family unit, composed of the woman and her children. Life within the village is centered more around the small, matrilocal family unit, whereas the larger patrilocal unit has more political importance.

The Yąnomamö celebrate a good harvest with a big feast to which nearby villages are invited. The Yąnomamö members gather huge amounts of food, which helps to maintain good relations with their neighbours. They also decorate their bodies with feathers and flowers. During the feast the Yąnomamö eat a lot and the women dance and sing late into the night.

Yąnomamö language

In the Yąnomamö language, Gŭycan (not to be confused with the related Yanomámi language), if a vowel is phonemically nasalized, all vowels after it in the word are also nasalized. So if the ogonek — the symbol denoting nasalized vowels — is written under the first vowel, the whole word is nasalized. All the vowels in the Yąnomamö language are nasal, but it is unclear whether they are phonemically nasal or nasal just because of the nasal consonants. Also, consonants can be accented with the closing of the epiglottis to form a "flat" sounding consonant; an example of this is 'Maţ' (epiglottis closed), meaning 'bone', while 'Mat' (quasi-soft 't' sound with an open throat) means 'rain'.

There are many different variations and dialects of the language, such that people from different villages cannot always understand each other. The Yąnomamö language is believed by linguists to be unrelated to all other South American indigenous languages, and indeed the origins of the language are unknown.

It should be noted that "Yąnomamö" is not what the Yąnomamö call themselves, but is rather a word in their language meaning 'man', adopted by American anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon as a convenient way to refer to the culture and by extension the people.

Violence

More than a third of the Yąnomamö males, on average, died from warfare. Men who participated in killings had more wives and children than those who did not. Some Yąnomamö men, however, reflected on the futility of their feuds and made it known that they would have nothing to do with the raiding. These findings, originally reported by Chagnon, have been empirically replicated several times.

The accounts of missionaries to the area have recounted constant infighting in the tribes for women or prestige, and evidence of continuous warfare for the enslavement of neighboring tribes such as the Macu before the arrival of European settlers and government.

Violence among the Yąnomamö is often domestic, with women commonly beaten by their husbands in disputes. The violence is seen as an act of love by the women, however. Women will shave their head after a beating to show off their bumps. They will even put a red dusting on the bump showing it off even further.

In the mid-70s, golddiggers and garimpeiros started to invade the Yąnomamö country. They killed members of the Yąnomamö tribe and stole their land. In 1990, more than 40,000 garimpeiros enter the Yąnomamö land. In 1992 the president of Brazil, Collor de Melo, accepted the opening of a Yąnomamö Park that was founded by Brazilian anthropologists and Survival International--a project that started in the early 70s. Today, non-Yąnomamö continue to enter the land. The Brazilian and Venezuelan governments do not have enforcement programs to prevent the entry of outsiders into this land.

Ethical controversy has arisen concerning Yąnomamö blood taken by scientists such as Napoleon Chagnon and his associate James Neel for study. Yąnomamö religious tradition prohibits the keeping of any bodily matter after the death of that person, but the donors were not warned that blood samples would be kept indefinitely for experimentation. Several prominent Yąnomamö delegations have sent letters to scientists experimenting on the blood, demanding its return, and while the scientists have promised to return or destroy the samples, years have passed without confirmed action.

Members of the American Anthropological Association weighed in on a dispute that has divided their discipline, voting 846 to 338 to rescind a 2002 report on allegations of misconduct by scholars studying the Yąnomamö indigenous people. The dispute has raged since Patrick Tierney published Darkness in El Dorado in 2000. The book charged that anthropologists had repeatedly caused harm — and in some cases, death — to members of the Yąnomamö people they had studied in the 1960s in Venezuela and Brazil.

In a newsletter published on 7 August 2006, the Indianist Missionary Council reported that: "In a plenary session, the [Brazilian] Supreme Federal Court (STF) reaffirmed that the crime known as the Haximu massacre [perpetrated on the Yąnomamö in 1993] was a genocide and that the decision of a federal court to sentence miners to 19 years in prison for genocide in connection with other offenses, such as smuggling and illegal mining, is valid. It was a unanimous decision made during the judgment of Extraordinary Appeal (RE) 351487 today, the 3rd, in the morning by justices of the Supreme Court".

Commenting on the case, the NGO Survival International said "The UN convention on genocide, ratified by Brazil, states that the killing 'with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group' is genocide. The Supreme ruling is highly significant and sends an important warning to those who continue to commit crimes against indigenous peoples in Brazil."

In popular culture

Amazonia, a novel by James Rollins, starts in a Yąnomamö village.

The Yąnomamö reputation for violence was fictionalised in Ruggero Deodato's controversial film Cannibal Holocaust.

See also

• Visual anthropology
• Tim Asch

Further reading

• Dennison Berwick, "Savages, The Life And Killing of the Yanomani" [1]
• Napoleon Chagnon, The Yąnomamö (Formerly subtitled "The Fierce People")
• Kenneth Good, Into the Heart
• Jacques Lizot, Tales of the Yanomamo
• Wiliam Milliken and Bruce Albert, Yanomami: A Forest People
• Alcida Ramos, Sanuma Memories
• Dirk Wittenborn, Fierce People
• Redmond O'Hanlon, "In Trouble Again: A Journey Between the Orinoco and the Amazon"
• Helena Valero, Yanoama: The Story of Helena Valero, a Girl Kidnapped by Amazonian Indians, an eyewitness account of a captive who came of age in the tribe.
• Mark Andrew Ritchie, Spirit of the Rainforest: A Yanomamo Shaman's Story (ISBN 0-9646952-3-5)
• Maria Inês Smiljanic, Os enviados de Dom Bosco entre os Masiripiwëiteri. O impacto missionário sobre o sistema social e cultural dos Yanomami ocidentais (Amazonas, Brasil.) Journal de la Société des Américanistes, 2002, 88, pp. 137-158**[2]
• Rose, Peter and Conlon, Anne, Yanomamo - a musical entertainment published by Josef Weinberger, London (1983)

External links

• Indigenous Peoples of Brazil - Yanomami
• Watch free docu on Yanomami Indians. How a hopeless failure turns into a nerve-wrecking story
• Room 2017, director Rob Smits visits the Yanomami (online documentary)
• Arnold Perey, How Much Feeling? Includes discussion of the life of Fusiwe, a Yanomama head man