History Of The Yanomamo: The Riddles Of Culture

In the Yanomamo culture, warfare is practiced as a way to demonstrate the strength of a village, or individual. Overall, warfare is practiced in the Yanomamo culture because of a combination of factors. One of the proximate, or indirect, causes of the violence include seeking revenge for villagers who have been killed. Another proximate cause of violence that it is used to steal women from other villages in order to increase the number of available wives. Also, villages must appear intimidating and tough so that other villages do not raid them. These are a few of the proximate causes of violence. Competition over scarce resources is one ultimate, or root, cause of violence. Men who are violent may gain greater social status, which encourages violence overall. Another ultimate cause of the violence is the lack of strong political leadership within the villages. These villages do not have leaders to stop violence or structure violence in productive ways. Without such leaders, villagers are more likely to rely on violence in impulsive ways. Hostility between villages often results in violence, as there are no leaders to resolve the hostility. In addition, another ultimate cause of violence is the geographical environment of the Yanomamo. Since the Yanomamo territory is restricted, and often invaded by outsiders, available land becomes more scarce. This causes competition for land to increase, which increases violence. Since people of the Yanomamo cannot move into areas

Throughout the article, Doing Fieldwork among the Yanomamo, by Napoleon A. Chagnon the reader is able to read along as if they were a real anthropologist’s on a journey throughout the villages of tropical forests in unoccupied lands. Changnon begins his writing explaining the culture and life style of the Yanamamö people. How their daily lives focus on gardening, hunting, visiting and completing tasks to get through the day. He describes their short life expectancy and the risks of violence between surrounding villages. The amount of men is exceedingly larger than the women, and often time’s men have multiple wives. Changon describes how each village is apart of broader political demographic. However he expresses how difficult it is to understand all of this simply from his descriptions.

Hollywood’s early depictions of Natives consisted of tribesmen and noble savages who are in tune with Nature. Films such as The Silent Enemy portray these stereotypes on screen with actors like Chief Buffalo Child Long Lance being shown as tribesmen who are very noble Natives. Although these stereotypes are positive, they are still stereotypes nonetheless. These stereotypes have caused

The crown depicted the Indians as intractable, only to find that settlers resorted to violence against the Indians precisely because of their supposed intractability. Indigenous peoples, for their part, fought among themselves and against advancing settlers. All groups sought to “territorialize” their societies to secure themselves against competitors. In the final chapters, Langfur extends and qualifies this complicated story. In the later eighteenth century, settler pressures grew, stressing crown policies and threatening indigenous social orders, until all-out war broke out after 1808. For Langfur this was no Manichean battle between European invaders and indigenous victims. To a dominant narrative of violence he juxtaposes a “parallel history of cooperation” among Europeans, Africans, and Indians, and he concludes that war itself must be understood in terms of “the relationship of cooperative enemies.”

2. The Ibo people are in no way savages because they have an organized structure to their society with rules and laws. A society that employs morals, ethics, and accountability for peoples’ actions cannot be considered savage. The Ibo are highly religious; the base of most of their daily life revolves around religion, whether it is how they raise their families or how they grow their crops. “The Feast of the New Yam was held every year before the harvest began, to honor the earth goddess” (36). Yams control the Ibo economy, and if a person farmed well, success tended to follow. The Ibo village created a very stable economy due to this. The society itself is organized mostly by a person’s title, which states their place in a sort of government. The Egwugwu act much like “judges” and the people themselves try to settle things peacefully between each other.

The frequent depiction of the “Noble Savage” trope has many functions, with its main function being to portray Native Americans as sinless uneducated humans and to make their abusers and torturers seem evil and superior, which in most cases the torturers are indeed evil. Bartolomé de Las Casas and Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca use the “Native Savage” trope for different reasons, which makes their portrayal different, and not because they are writing about different tribes and groups of Native Americans. The “Noble Savage” is a very common adaptation of Native Americans, but the definition isn’t as pretty as the name of the trope may seem to be.

There were a ton of gender differences going on in both Sonqo and Yanomamo. In Sonqo, the major gender differences, to me, were shown numerously in traditional rituals performed. Every tradition was performed by a man and the men always played the most important part. An example of this was when they would share the bundles of coca for chewing. During the exchange of these, men always received it

This transfer of the substance serves as a flow of energy from one being to another. The shaman is said to gain the power needed to call on the spirits through this process.

     Napoleon Chagnon has spent about 60 months since 1964 studying the ‘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

1 One of the Age/Gender divisions between the United Sates and the Yanomamo culture are the fact that as women grow older they gain more respect. In the text, Chagnon states “A woman gains increasing respect as she ages, especially when she is old enough to have adult children who care for her and treat her kindly” (128). This proves that woman in the Yanomamo culture tend to get treated better as they grow older. This is similar to the United States because as a woman grows older in the United States she tends to have less of a chance to experience street harassment and other types of behaviors only younger women would experience. This could be because our society understands the challenges that women face in our society, and treat them nicer

Cabeza de Vaca’s account reveals that the native populations of the Americas (the Indians) were cruel to the Europeans; and as a result, they deserve punishment for their aggression.

During the Spanish conquest of the Incan Empire the role of the Kuraka was crucial in gaining control over the Andean society. The role of the Kuraka could be thought of as “provincial nobility”[1] whose main job was to control the labor and tribute made and delivered from the natives to the state. In order to do this job the Kurakas had to maintain respect from the natives while maintaining good relations with the colonial state. This could be difficult considering that too much affiliation with the state could lead to a loss of status to the natives, and a loss of respect from the natives would make one useless to the state. “The Indian who broke entirely with his own culture

Throughout history, Native Americans in early America have been viewed as primitive and violent people. Artwork often depicts them engaging in barbaric behavior such as eating other humans and engaging in violent wars. However, this view of early Native Americans has been created by the works of people belonging to the “civilized world” of early America. Lucy Terry’s poem “Bars Fight” retells the story of when a group of Indians attacked two families that she knew. Terry’s work can be compared to those of Christopher Columbus and Thomas Jefferson in their portrayal and perception of Indians.

This research paper will delve into the topic of cannibalism in native tribes of Brazil during the Portuguese colonization of the South American country. My research only the topic yielded very interesting results. Some scholars suggest that cannibalism (in the instances involving the Tupinamba tribe and their ritualistic practices) didn't even occur. This isn't to say, however, that cannibalism was completely nonexistent in Brazil, but arguing that it did not occur in the “savage” ways often described. I could easily sum up the accounts of various witnesses of cannibalism, but I will focus on the material that will mostly discuss the effect that cannibalism had on colonization in Brazil.

In studying Bali it is easy for an anthropologist to overlook cockfighting and "aside from a few passing remarks, the cockfight has barely been noticed" (276). However through Geertz's observation he believes that the cockfighting has much more depth to it and it is not the cocks that are fighting, "actually, it is men" (276). In Bali animals are not portrayed as beautiful creatures but detested as representing demons. Much of Balinese life is adjusted to prevent any association with animals so they will "file the child's teeth" at a young age and eat "hurriedly and privately" because they believe it is beast-like (278). The Balinese are "aversive to animals," so why are they so involved with cockfights? Geertz believes the male Balinese identify with cocks as what they "most fear, hate, and are fascinated by – The Powers of Darkness" (278). Rather than treating the cocks cruelly like any other animal, they treat them with a tremendous amount of care and respect, even beyond that of fellow humans. Geertz as an anthropologist is capable of recognizing this relationship between the Balinese men and their fascination with cocks and how it has an affect on their culture.