YANOMAMI

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.''. 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.

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, worn underneath the stomach. 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 is among the lowest of any demographic group on the planet. ^[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 which nearby villages are invited. The Yanomami 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.

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.

Violence

More than a third of the Yanomamo males, on average, died from warfare.^[3] Men who participated in killings had more wives and children than those who did not.^[4] Some Yanomamo men, however, reflected on the futility of their feuds and made it known that they would have nothing to do with the raiding.⁴ These findings, originally reported by the anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon, have been empirically replicated several times.^[5]
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. ^[6] 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.^[7]. This reputation for violence also extended to the fictionalised depiction of the tribe in Ruggero Deodato's controversial film Cannibal Holocaust.

Haximu Massacre

In a news letter pubished on 7 August 2006 the Indianist Missionary Council reported that: "In a plenary session, the [Brazillian] Supreme Federal Court (STF) reaffirmed that the crime known as the Haximu Massacre [perpetrated on the Yanomami in 1993]Supreme Court upholds genocide ruling, Survival International 4 August 2006 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".^[8] 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 Court's ruling is highly significant and sends an important warning to those who continue to commit crimes against indigenous peoples in Brazil."

Other notes

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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 move around a lot to avoid that areas become overused — a practice known as shifting cultivation.
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 ^[1].
In the mid-70s, golddiggers and garimpeiros started to invade the Yanomami country. They killed members of the Yanomami tribe and stole their land. 1990 had more than 40,000 garimpeiros enter the Yanomami land. In 1992 the president of Brazil, Collor de Melo accepted the opening of a Yanomami Park that was founded by Brazilian anthropologists and Survival International--a project that started in the early 70s. Today, non-Yanomami continue to enter the land. The Brazilian and Venezuelan governments do not have enforcement programs to prevent the entry of outsiders into this land.

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 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.^[10]

References

1. Chagnon, Napoleon, Yanomamo: The Fifth Edition
2. Yanomami Indians in the INTERSALT study (accessed14 January,2007)
3. Keeley: ''War before civilization: The myth of the peaceful savage''
4. (Chagnon 1998; Chagnon 1992)
5. (Ember, 1978; Keeley, 1996; Knauft, 1987)
6. Chagnon, Napoleon. Yanomamo: Fifth Edition. Thompson Learning. 1997. p. 124-5.
7. Steingarten, Jeffery. The Man Who Ate Everything (Paperback). Vintage Books. 1997. p 202.

8. Federal Court is competent to judge the Haximu genocide Indianist Missionary Council
9. Chagnon, Napoleon, Yanomamo: The Fifth Edition
10. http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2005/06/29/anthro

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YANOMAMI

Domestic life, clothing and diet

Language

Violence

Haximu Massacre

Other notes

Situation

See also

References

Further reading

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