Yanomami

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The Yanomami (spellings include Yanomamö which may be written with an ogonek under the first 'a' as Yąnomamö; also referred to as Ianomami and sometimes Yanomani) are an indigenous people of Brazil and Venezuela. They were studied by Napoleon Chagnon, who called them "the Fierce People" in his first edition of The Yąnomamö, but later changed his title after spending more time with them and coming to a better understanding of their culture. Chagnon also described, among many other things, their use of a hallucinogen ebene, or "yopo".

The name generally refers to a people who live in an area that spans parts of the northwest Amazon Rainforest and southern Orinoco, share the culture, and who speak Yanomaman languages, which include Yanomamö and Sanima. Traditionally, a Yanomami village is a relatively temporary wood and thatch house called a shabono. The shabono is circular in shape and surrounds a central open space. Each family has their own area within the shabono.

Most of the information in this article describes a Yanomami way of life that existed prior to the 1960s. Sustained contact with government officials, the market system, miners, missionaries, journalists, anthropologists and others has led to significant changes to this way of life.

Contents 1 Domestic life, clothing and diet 2 Language 3 Character 4 Other notes 5 Situation 6 See also 7 References 8 Further reading

[edit] Domestic life, clothing and diet

As with many other native Americans of tropical South America, the Yanomami traditionally wore minimal clothing. The sole exception to this was a string-like belt worn by the men, into which the foreskin of the penis was clamped. Traditionally the women wore no clothing at all. The children stay close to their mother; most of the childrearing is done by women. The Yanomami practiced polygyny (though many unions were monogamous). Polygynous 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.

The Yanomami are known as hunters, fishers, and horticulturists, cultivating as their main crops plantains and cassava in "gardens," areas of the forest cleared for cultivation. Another food source of the Yanomami are giant grubs, sometimes the size of baby rodents, cultivated in rotten logs, and cooked directly on a fire after the head is bitten off and innards pulled out ^[1]. Traditionally they did not farm, and the practice of felling palms in order to facilitate the growth of the grubs was the Yanomami's closest approach to cultivation. The traditional Yanomami diet is famously low in salt and their blood pressure among the lowest of all peoples on earth.^[2] The Yanomami have thus been made the subject of studies seeking to link hypertension to sodium consumption.

The Yanomami celebrate a good harvest with a big feast to whom nearby villages are invited. The Yano 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 Yanomami eat a lot and the women dance and sing late into the night.

[edit] Language

In the Yanomamö 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 is written under the first vowel, the whole word is nasalized. All the vowels in "Yanomami" 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 Yanomami 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 "Yanomamö" is not what the Yanomamö call themselves, but is rather a word in their language meaning "man," adopted by Chagnon as a convenient way to refer to the culture and by extension the people.

[edit] Character

There is tremendous debate among anthropologists over why the Yanomamö are so fierce, and over whether the Yanomamö are indeed so fierce at all. Indeed, the word 'fierce' comes from a possibly inaccurate translation of a Yanomami word 'huaiteri', the meaning of which can connote a multiplicity of things such as strength or generousness. Chagnon later changed the title of his ethnography to omit "the fierce people" after coming to the conclusion that this was an inaccurate and unfair label.

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 Yanomami is often domestic, with women commonly beaten by their husbands in disputes. ^[3] Justifiably or not, their violent reputation has also seeped into popular culture. The food critic Jeffrey Steingarten characterized the Yanomami people as "a bunch of bloodthirsty maniacs," whimsically speculating that their purportedly brutal behavior might be attributed to a deficiency of table salt.^[4]

[edit] Other notes

The Yanomami Indians have lived in the borderlands between Brazil and Venezuela for thousands of years.

They live in villages, formed of a circular house which is open in the middle where feasts, etc., are celebrated. Those houses are called yanos, shabonos or malocas, and every member of the tribe lives here.

The Yanomamis are dependent upon the forest; they use "Slash-and-burn" horticulture, grow bananas, fish, gather fruit and hunt animals. Yanomami Indians treat the forest with respect and they move around a lot to avoid that certain areas become overused.

A curious cultural practice of the Yanomami is the manner in which menstruation is treated. In the Yanomami language, the word for menstruation is "kuduru," meaning "to squat." Menstruating women assume a squatting position, allowing menstrual fluid to drip onto the ground rather than using absorbent materials to contain the menstrual flow. Again, this is according to ethnographic studies of decades ago and may not reflect the modern practices of the Yanomami people.^{[citation needed]}

The Yanomami have no real leaders as such and they value sharing and equality. No one can exercise real power over anyone, and even an attempt to do so would be unthinkable. Women are very important in maintaining the agreements in the Yano. It wasn't until the 1950's that the Yanomamis met the Europeans. This 'first contact' was devastating to the Indians.^{[citation needed]} They witnessed when Brazil and Venezuela divided their country, they experienced physical as well as psychological submission and they were considered as primitive by the governments. It was first in the end of the 70's that the Yanomamis became known to the rest of the world. Brazil built a road through the northern country where the Yanomami were situated and thereby helped spread diseases the Yanomami had no resistance to. More than half of the Yanomami population died from introduced diseases.^{[citation needed]}

In the mid-70's when golddiggers and garimpeiros started to invade the Yanomami country. They killed natives, stole their land etc. 1990 had more than 40. 000 garimpeiros invaded the Yanomami country. In 1992 the president of Brazil, Collor de Melo accepted the opening of a Yanomami Park - Brazilian anthropologists and Survival International had worked hard since the early 70's to make the opening of a park possible. However, intrusions on the land are not rare and the government does little to stop the intruders from entering the park.

[edit] Situation

Gold was recently found in Yanomami territory and the inevitable influx of miners brought disease, alcoholism, and violence. Yanomami culture was severely endangered, and has been protected by the Brazilian and Venezuelan national park services with donations from the First World.

Ethical controversy has arisen concerning Yanomami blood taken by scientists such as Napoleon Chagnon and his associate James Neel for study. Yanomami 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 Yanomami 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, voted 846 to 338 to rescind a 2002 report [1] on allegations of misconduct by scholars studying the Yanomami 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 Yanomami people they had studied in the 1960s in Venezuela and Brazil. [2]

[edit] See also

• Darkness in El Dorado
• Visual anthropology
• Tim Asch

[edit] References

[edit] Further reading

• Dennison Berwick, "Savages, The Life And Killing of the Yanomani" [3]
• Napoleon Chagnon, The Yanomamo (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
• Arnold Perey, How Much Feeling? Includes discussion of the life of Fusiwe, a Yanomama head man
  • Part 2
  • Part 3
• 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 / 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**[4]
• Rose, Peter and Conlon, Anne, Yanomamo - a musical entertainment published by Josef Weinberger, London (1983) Looks into the distruction of the Amazon Rainforest as a whole and aims to encourage respect for those who live in harmony with their surroundings

• Indigenous Peoples of Brazil - Yanomami