the tribe of Yanomamo

       Yanomamo reaction paper

Yanomamo tribe is found in Venezuela and Brazil. The Yanomamo fall into the category of Tropical Forest Indians called “foot people”. They don’t have any writing but their language is very vast and complex. The Yanomamo tribe has a village which is very open and therefore public, one can hear, smell and see almost everything happening in the village. Very less privacy is available amongst the tribe. The clothes that they wear is also very different, it covers minimal skin and they also use cloth that they tie around their ankles and wrist. Aggression also plays a large part in the shaping of their culture. Much of their lives revolve around hunting, gathering, collecting and gardening. Each village however is the replica of another in this tribe.

 The Yanomamo people have settled near interfluvial plains of major rivers and avoid large rivers. This is caused because the Yanomamo tribes believe that large rivers can only be crossed in dry seasons. They traditionally avoid large rivers, thus also avoiding contact with other people who come from the river. This shows that the Yanomamo tribes try to avoid outside contact and rather stay with their own people. However, the tribe does abandon their large village (the shabono), for a few weeks. In this time the tribe camps in other places and make temporary huts and shacks with the help of branches and leaves. Each family makes and lives in a separate hut during this time.

Two major seasons dominate the annual cycle of the Yanomamo tribe, the dry season and the wet season.   The dry season is also the time when raiders can travel and strike silently at their unsuspecting enemies. The Yanonamo are still conducing inter village warfare. In their perspective, this is not ritualistic and a lot of men died due to this. This seems very alien to us, yet this is practised without any hesitation by the Yanomamo tribe. The war is usually due to marriage or girl child amongst the tribes. However the fights are not blind and uncontrolled, they have series of graded forms of violence.

The marriages and kinship largely decides the social status in the tribe, however there are lesser women compared to men, due to both, lesser birth of girl child and the fact that many men have more than one wife. The marriage is arranged by older kins, usually brothers, fathers and uncles of the girl. Fights also occur within the village usually due to the lack of delivering the girl child promised for marriage.

In the perspective of the author, he describes how he thought that the Yanomamo tribe was just extremely alien and that they were somehow shocking but after discussing this with his other colleagues he found how similar all their situation was and how they all had accepted these cultures even if they were a world apart. What I realised in this book was how cultural relativism, etic and emic all have played a huge part on the experience of the author. He learned the language and the lifestyle of the tribe and by the end of it he realized how charming and nice his experience actually was. Not only did he face problems in the beginning, they tribe must have also felt awkward how a very different man was styding them but even in the midst of the lifestyle like the Yanomamo tribe they managed to be cultural relativistic.