The Yanomamo of the Amazon Basin

Yanomamo Paper Assignment

Napoleon Chagnon has spent about 60 months since 1964 studying the Ð''foot people' of the Amazon Basin known as the Yanomamo. In his ethnography, Yanomamo, he describes all of the events of his stay in the Venezuelan jungle. He describes the "hideous" appearance of the Yanomamo men when first meeting them, and their never-ending demands for Chagnon's foreign goods, including his food. There are many issues that arise when considering Chagnon's Yanomamo study. The withholding of genealogical information by the tribesmen, and how Chagnon was able to obtain his information is an interesting and significant aspect of this study. Why did Chagnon feel that this genealogical information was important? And was Chagnon's choice to study the Yanomamo, despite their hesitancy to cooperate, a wise and ethical one?

Chagnon spent his first five months collecting what he thought was an intricate and elaborate table of genealogical information, marriage relationships, and kinships within the Yanomamo village of Bisaasi-teri. He knew from the beginning that it would be difficult to obtain the actual names of the tribesmen because it is a symbol of honor, respect, dignity, and political admiration. The less your name was spoken in public within the village, the higher you were regarded. And it was considered an extreme taboo to discuss the names of the deceased as well, which made it exceptionally difficult for Chagnon to trace family lineages to the past. Chagnon would interview villagers asking for the names of all members of their community, including the deceased. He recounts many situations in which the interviewee whispered a name into his ear, made him repeat it aloud and then the person whose name he was supposedly calling would cry out in anger while others laughed. It wasn't until five months into his development of a genealogical chart, on a trip to another Yanomamo village, that he discovered the name he had for the village headman translated into "long dong" and that all of his names were in fact ridiculous and, of course, incorrect.

For months and months to follow Chagnon would have to be incredibly strategic and smart in choosing who to interview and what to ask them. He began to only interview in his hut in private, where distractions from other village members could not influence a lie or joke. He would look for inconsistencies in some of the villagers' responses and simply put an end to his connection with them and stick to only those who were being truthful and helpful. He even increased the reward given to villagers who were willing to give genealogical information and therefore created a rapid craze of helping villagers. This way, they were competing to give him information for their eventual rewards, not plotting against him. It took him months to compile his accurate collection of genealogical data, and even after gathering most of it, he still needed his friend, Rerebawa, to double-check most of it for him. He even went so far as to seek out other villages who had bad relations with Bisaasi-teri to break the "name taboo" and give away names.

Chagnon felt that the most important aspect of his research in Bisaasi-teri was to collect genealogical information and organize the marriages and relations between the villagers. This turned out to be his most difficult task, but nonetheless the most useful. He tells in the very beginning of the ethnography that the Yanomamo are considered a very "primitive" societal organization of human beings. The most obvious sign of primitive human life is simply the way the dress. In addition, their fickle nature, lack of industry, methods of hunting and gathering, and political organization, contribute to their primitive nature.

As proved by anthropologists, primitive human life is essentially based on genealogy, marriage practices, kinship, settlement arrangements and political affairs. It was through studying these topics in the Yanomamo village of Bisaasi-teri that Chagnon was to be able to fully understand their way of life. Once he was able to figure out the genealogical data and organize kinships and relationships between kinships in the village, he would be able to understand the social organization of the villagers. In collecting all of the genealogical information from the villagers, he would be able to make connections and conclusions as to why different kinships make certain relations and how certain relations are formed. One of the first aspects of familial relations that he noticed that would present a problem was that children refer to their father and their father's brother using the same term whereas in our culture, we refer to father as "father" and his brother as "uncle".

Even though Chagnon does not come out and state a concrete "hypothesis" about Yanomamo culture and/or human behavior that he was looking to test, the reader is given the impression that Yanomamo culture is one of the very few primitive cultures in the world that have had limited to no contact with the outside world. And even thought some anthropologists have attempted to study cultures similar to the Yanomamo, their hostile and archaic behaviors make it extremely difficult to live within a community of that sort. It was therefore a great challenge to anthropologists