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"Fierce People" redirects here. For the film, see Fierce People (film).
The Ya̧nomamö are a large population of native people in 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 20th century. This 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 Ya̧nomamö have come to be one of the most widely studied groups by modern science.[citation needed] The word Ya̧nomamö means 'human being' in their language. The word is supposed to be pronounced with thorough nasalisation. The phonetic sound 'ö' does not occur in English, and this has led to different accounts of how Ya̧nomamö 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. This article largely describes a Ya̧nomamö 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.
[edit] Domestic life, clothing and diet The Ya̧nomamö live in villages usually consisting of their kin and marriageable lineages (see below). Village sizes vary, but are usually between 50 and 400 people. In this 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 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. The Ya̧nomamö depend on the forest; they use "slash-and-burn" horticulture, grow bananas, gather fruit, hunt animals and fish. Ya̧nomamö Indians frequently move to avoid areas that become overused — a practice known as shifting cultivation. Children stay close to their mother; most of the child rearing is done by women. The Ya̧nomamö practiced polygyny (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 in the village is centered more around the small, matrilocal family unit, whereas the larger patrilocal unit has more political importance. The Ya̧nomamö 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 for the Ya̧nomamö is grubs.[1] Traditionally they did not farm, and the practice of felling palms in order to facilitate the growth of the grubs was the Ya̧nomamö's closest approach to cultivation. The traditional Ya̧nomamö diet is famously low in salt, and their blood pressure is among the lowest of any demographic group.[2] For this reason, the Ya̧nomamö have been the subject of studies seeking to link hypertension to sodium consumption. The Ya̧nomamö celebrate a good harvest with a big feast to which nearby villages are invited. The Ya̧nomamö members gather huge amounts of food, which helps to maintain good relations with their neighbors. They also decorate their bodies with feathers and flowers. During the feast the Ya̧nomamö eat a lot and the women dance and sing late into the night. [edit] Language In the Ya̧nomamö language, Gŭycan, if a vowel is phonetically nasalized, then 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 Ya̧nomamö language can be made 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 variations and dialects of the language, such that people from different villages cannot always understand each other. The Ya̧nomamö 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 "Ya̧nomamö" is not what the Yanomamo 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. [edit] ViolenceHistorically, more than a third of the Ya̧nomamö males, on average, died from warfare.[3] Chagnon claimed that men who participated in killings had more wives and children than those who did not.[1] However, many criticized Chagnon's data as it is impossible to confirm. Some Ya̧nomamö men, however, reflected on the futility of their feuds and made it known that they would have nothing to do with the raiding.[1] These findings, originally reported by Chagnon, have been empirically replicated several times.[4] 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. [edit] ControversyIn the mid-1970s, gold-diggers and garimpeiros started to enter the Ya̧nomamö country. They killed members of the Ya̧nomamö tribe and settled on their land. In 1990, more than 40,000 garimpeiros entered the Ya̧nomamö land.[citation needed] In 1992, the president of Brazil, Collor de Mello, accepted the opening of a Ya̧nomamö Park that was founded by Brazilian anthropologists and Survival International—a project that started in the early 70s. Today, non-Ya̧nomamö continue to enter the land. The Brazilian and Venezuelan governments do not have enforcement programs to prevent the entry of outsiders into this land.[citation needed]. Ethical controversy has arisen about Ya̧nomamö blood taken by scientists such as Napoleon Chagnon and his associate James Neel for study. Ya̧nomamö 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 Ya̧nomamö 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.[citation needed] 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 Ya̧nomamö 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 Ya̧nomamö people they had studied in the 1960s in Venezuela and Brazil.[5] [edit] Haximu MassacreMain article: Haximu massacre In a newsletter published on August 7 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 Ya̧nomamö in 1993]"[6] was a genocide [...] It was a unanimous decision made during the judgment of Extraordinary Appeal (RE) 351487 [7] 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."[6] [edit] YanomamoThe WWF (World Wildlife Fund) has created a play to convey a message to the world about what is happening to the people, the trees, etc. in the Amazon rainforest by comparison to a Yanomamo tribesman/tribeswoman living in the Amazon. It has been published and been performed by many drama groups around the world. [edit] In popular cultureAmazonia, a novel by James Rollins, starts in a Ya̧nomamö village. The Ya̧nomamö reputation for violence was fictionalised in Ruggero Deodato's controversial film Cannibal Holocaust where they apparently practiced endocannibalism.[8] This is only part true.[9] They are mentioned in episode 11, Eye Spy, of NCIS (TV series). The chief medical examiner, "Ducky", states that "Only 9% of the world's population is left-handed. Interestingly, that percentage has remained the same since prehistoric times. ... Curiously enough, the Yanomami tribe in the Amazon are 33% left-handed." The television show Metalocalypse has an episode dedicated to the Ya̧nomamö where the band is taken in and joins in the tribes rituals. [edit] See also[edit] References
[edit] Further reading
[edit] External links
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