1. The Yanomamo
The central theme of Napoleon Chagnon's ethnography "Yanomamo: The Fierce People" is embedded in the title of the book. The basic point that the author was trying to get across is violence or fierceness of this South American tribe. He claims that this is the way Yanomamo people see themselves and this is how they want to be percepted by others. Chagnon has a lot of evidence backed up with statistics to support his topic. However, I believe he had not kept in mind the consequences of this claims and descriptions. .
The life of Yanomamo people is indeed filled with violence. Some thirty percent of men die violently and nearly half of the men who have reached the age of twenty-five have participated in a killing. They regularly beat their wives. It often happens; even they don't have any particular reason, simply to show her that they care for her. Newborn children are often cruelly murdered in gruesome ways such as choking a child with a stick, strangling it with a piece of vine or throwing it against a tree. The Yanomamo people habitually use hallucinogenic drugs and are all addicted to tobacco. All of this builds a picture of an evil, immoral, and hateful tribe.
When describing a population in such manner there are certain consequences to consider. Politically, this gives a justification for foreigners to come in and distort the ways of life of the Yanomamo people for their pleasure or profit. Yanomamo people are simply "not worth consideration". Napoleon Chagnon spent a lot of time and paper criticizing the missionaries who come in and try to change the tribe's religious beliefs and often interfere with them militarily in ways such as selling them shotguns and powder. According to the missionaries the Yanomamo are supposed to use it for hunting, but in reality a great deal of time they are used in warfare, club fights, etc. The author also mentions tourists who disturb the Yanomamo people and pollute their environment.
This is a look into the lives of the Yanomamo Indians of Brazil and Venezuela. ... There is also mentioning of how the government treated the Yanomamo decades ago some of the history of the Yanomamo Indians. ... Chagnon has also formed a group called the Yanomamo Survival Fund. ... During Chagnon's 50 months of fieldwork on the Yanomamo Indians, all of it was done with the Yanomamo in Venezuela except of one brief period in 1967. ... Yanomamo village population size and land area vary. ...
The Yanomamos bulk of food comes from the garden (manioc, maize, and bananas). ... Among the Yanomamo, men have difficulty finding women because they are in short supply. ... The Yanomamo live in only a ranked society, which is decidedly masculine because "men are more valuable than women". ... Political organization among the Yanomamo is carried out in feasts. ... Some Yanomamo even play with their rich language and work at being what we might call literary or learned....
The Yanomamo live in the tropical rainforests of Brazil and Venezuela. ... (Smoles 1976:7) The Yanomamo as a culture has found a way to adapt to their environment. ... Like the Yanomamo, the Masaai also have a sort of adapting ritual (Masaai.com). ... This proves that the Yanomamo have more than one way in which marriage is practiced. ... In comparison to the Yanomamo, they do...
The Yanomamo has a unique family organization. ... However, when the Yanomamo becomes ten years old, one thirds of them live in a family with their parents, and one tenth of them are in such family when they comes to be twenty years old. This means that most marriageable aged Yanomamo men don't have a living father, who must die from attacks of raiders or accidents. In Yanomamo society, marriages are arranged by a father, but, in the case of absence of a father, they are arranged by elder men of their kinship or elder male friends. The Yanomamo usually marry more than one wife as ...
Yanomamo women are treated as materialistic objects and promised by their father or brother to a Yanomamo man in return for reciprocity. ... The trades are often practiced in the Yanomamo culture. Polygamy is also a part of the Yanomamo culture. Yanomamo women are kept in the male's possession. ... Adultery is inexcusable to the Yanomamo. ...
The material that promotes the film in an academic and independent film catalog, BuyIndies.com, describes the process of the ritual by saying: "The shaman plays a vital role in Yanomamo society, for it is he who calls, commands, and often is possessed by spirits, or hekura. ...
The essential difference in these two theories is what drives a society towards its advancements. Marx believed that the inequality between the haves and have-nots would lead to a revolt from the proletariat. (The proletariat are easily described as the workers who are employed by the capitalists.) ...
The material that promotes the film in an academic and independent film catalog, BuyIndies.com, describes the process of the ritual by saying: "The shaman plays a vital role in Yanomamo society, for it is he who calls, commands, and often is possessed by spirits, or hekura. ...