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Article 1
Doing Fieldwork among the
Yanomamö1
Napoleon A. Chagnon
VIGNETTE
The Yanomamö are thinly scattered over
a vast and verdant tropical forest, living
in small villages that are separated by
many miles of unoccupied land. They
have no writing, but they have a rich and
complex language. Their clothing is
more decorative than protective. Welldressed
men sport nothing more than a
few cotton strings around their wrists,
ankles, and waists. They tie the foreskins
of their penises to the waist string.
Women dress about the same. Much of
their daily life revolves around gardening,
hunting, collecting wild foods, collecting
firewood, fetching water, visiting
with each other, gossiping, and making
the few material possessions they own:
baskets, hammocks, bows, arrows, and
colorful pigments with which they paint
their bodies. Life is relatively easy in the
sense that they can ‘earn a living’ with
about three hours’ work per day. Most of
what they eat they cultivate in their gardens,
and most of that is plantains—a
kind of cooking banana that is usually
eaten green, either roasted on the coals or
boiled in pots. Their meat comes from a
large variety of game animals, hunted
daily by the men. It is usually roasted on
coals or smoked, and is always well
done. Their villages are round and
open—and very public. One can hear,
see, and smell almost everything that
goes on anywhere in the village. Privacy
is rare, but sexual discreetness is possible
in the garden or at night while others
sleep. The villages can be as small as 40
to 50 people or as large as 300 people,
but in all cases there are many more children
and babies than there are adults.
This is true of most primitive populations
and of our own demographic past.
Life expectancy is short.
The Yanomamö fall into the category
of Tropical Forest Indians called ‘foot
people.’ They avoid large rivers and live
in interfluvial plains of the major rivers.
They have neighbors to the north, Caribspeaking
Ye’kwana, who are true ‘river
people’: They make elegant, large dugout
canoes and travel extensively along
the major waterways. FortheYanomamö,
a large stream is an obstacle and can be
crossed only in the dry season. Thus, they
have traditionally avoided larger rivers and,
because of this, contact with outsiders who
usually come by river.
They enjoy taking trips when the jungle
abounds with seasonally ripe wild
fruits and vegetables. Then, the large village—the
shabono—is abandoned for a
few weeks and everyone camps out for
from one to several days away from the
village and garden. On these trips, they
make temporary huts from poles, vines,
and leaves, each family making a separate
hut.
Two major seasons dominate their annual
cycle: the wet season, which inundates
the low-lying jungle, making travel
difficult, and the dry season—the time of
visiting other villages to feast, trade, and
politic with allies. The dry season is also
the time when raiders can travel and
strike silently at their unsuspecting enemies.
The Yanomamö are still conducting
intervillage warfare, a phenomenon
that affects all aspects of their social organization,
settlement pattern, and daily
routines. It is not simply ‘ritualistic’ war:
At least one-fourth of all adult males die
violently in the area I lived in.
Social life is organized around those
same principles utilized by all tribesmen:
kinship relationships, descent from ancestors,
marriage exchanges between
kinship/descent groups, and the transient
charisma of distinguished headmen who
attempt to keep order in the village and
whose responsibility it is to determine
the village’s relationships with those in
other villages. Their positions are largely
the result of kinship and marriage patterns;
they come from the largest kinship
groups within the village. They can, by
their personal wit, wisdom, and charisma,
become autocrats, but most of
them are largely ‘greaters’ among
equals. They, too, must clear gardens,
plant crops, collect wild foods, and hunt.
They are simultaneously peacemakers
and valiant warriors. Peacemaking often
requires the threat or actual use of force,
and most headmen have an acquired reputation
for being waiteri: fierce.
The social dynamics within villages
are involved with giving and receiving
marriageable girls. Marriages are arranged
by older kin, usually men, who
are brothers, uncles, and the father. It is a
political process, for girls are promised
in marriage while they are young, and
the men who do this attempt to create alliances
with other men via marriage exchanges.
There is a shortage of women
due in part to a sex-ratio imbalance in the
younger age categories, but also complicated
by the fact that some men have
multiple wives. Most fighting within the
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village stems from sexual affairs or failure
to deliver a promised woman—or
out-and-out seizure of a married woman
by some other man. This can lead to internal
fighting and conflict of such an intensity
that villages split up and fission,
each group then becoming a new village
and, often, enemies to each other.
But their conflicts are not blind, uncontrolled
violence. They have a series
of graded forms of violence that ranges
from chest-pounding and club-fighting
duels to out-and-out shooting to kill.
This gives them a good deal of flexibility
in settling disputes without immediate
resort to lethal violence. In addition, they
have developed patterns of alliance and
friendship that serve to limit violence—
trading and feasting with others in order
to become friends. These alliances can,
and often do, result in intervillage exchanges
of marriageable women, which
leads to additional amity between villages.
No good thing lasts forever, and
most alliances crumble. Old friends become
hostile and, occasionally, treacherous.
Each village must therefore be
keenly aware that its neighbors are fickle
and must behave accordingly. The thin
line between friendship and animosity
must be traversed by the village leaders,
whose political acumen and strategies
are both admirable and complex.
Each village, then, is a replica of all
others in a broad sense. But each village
is part of a larger political, demographic,
and ecological process, and it is difficult
to attempt to understand the village without
knowing something of the larger
forces that affect it and its particular history
with all its neighbors.
COLLECTING THE DATA
IN THE FIELD
I have now spent over 60 months with
Yanomamö, during which time I gradually
learned their language and, up to a
point, submerged myself in their culture
and way of life.2
As my research progressed,
the thing that impressed me
most was the importance that aggression
played in shaping their culture. I had the
opportunity to witness a good many incidents
that expressed individual vindictiveness
on the one hand and collective
bellicosity on the other hand. These
ranged in seriousness from the ordinary
incidents of wife beating and chest
pounding to dueling and organized raids
by parties that set out with the intention
of ambushing and killing men from enemy
villages. One of the villages was
raided approximately twenty-five times
during my first 15 months of fieldwork—six
times by the group among
whom I was living. And, the history of
every village I investigated, from 1964 to
1991, was intimately bound up in patterns
of warfare with neighbors that
shaped its politics and determined where
it was found at any point in time and how
it dealt with its current neighbors.
The fact that the Yanomamö have
lived in a chronic state of warfare is reflected
in their mythology, ceremonies,
settlement pattern, political behavior,
and marriage practices. Accordingly, I
have organized this case study in such a
way that students can appreciate the effects
of warfare on Yanomamö culture in
general and on their social organization
and political relationships in particular.
I collected the data under somewhat
trying circumstances, some of which I
will describe to give a rough idea of what
is generally meant when anthropologists
speak of ‘culture shock’ and ‘fieldwork.’
It should be borne in mind, however, that
each field situation is in many respects
unique, so that the problems I encountered
do not necessarily exhaust the
range of possible problems other anthropologists
have confronted in other areas.
There are a few problems, however, that
seem to be nearly universal among anthropological
fieldworkers, particularly
those having to do with eating, bathing,
sleeping, lack of privacy, loneliness, or
discovering that the people you are living
with have a lower opinion of you
than you have of them or you yourself
are not as culturally or emotionally ‘flexible’
as you assumed.
The Yanomamö can be difficult
people to live with at times, but I have
spoken to colleagues who have had difficulties
living in the communities they
studied. These things vary from society
to society, and probably from one anthropologist
to the next. I have also done limited
fieldwork among the Yanomamö’s
northern neighbors, the Carib-speaking
Ye’kwana Indians. By contrast to many
experiences I had among the Yanomamö,
the Ye’kwana were very pleasant and
charming, all of them anxious to help me
and honor bound to show any visitor the
numerous courtesies of their system of
etiquette. In short, they approached the
image of ‘primitive man’ that I had conjured
up in my mind before doing fieldwork,
a kind of ‘Rousseauian’ view, and
it was sheer pleasure to work with them.
Other anthropologists have also noted
sharp contrasts in the people they study
from one field situation to another. One
of the most startling examples of this is
in the work of Colin Turnbull, who first
studied the Ituri Pygmies (1965, 1983)
and found them delightful to live with,
but then studied the Ik (1972) of the desolate
outcroppings of the Kenya/
Uganda/Sudan border region, a people
he had difficulty coping with intellectually,
emotionally, and physically. While
it is possible that the anthropologist’s reactions
to a particular people are personal
and idiosyncratic, it nevertheless
remains true that there are enormous differences
between whole peoples, differences
that affect the anthropologist in
often dramatic ways.
Hence, what I say about some of my
experiences is probably equally true of
the experiences of many other fieldworkers.
I describe some of them here
for the benefit of future anthropologists—because
I think I could have profited
by reading about the pitfalls and
field problems of my own teachers. At
the very least I might have been able to
avoid some of my more stupid errors. In
this regard there is a growing body of excellent
descriptive work on field research.
Students who plan to make a
career in anthropology should consult
these works, which cover a wide range of
field situations in the ethnographic
present.3
The Longest Day: The First One
My first day in the field illustrated to me
what my teachers meant when they
spoke of ‘culture shock.’ I had traveled
in a small, aluminum rowboat propelled
by a large outboard motor for two and a
half days. This took me from the territorial
capital, a small town on the Orinoco
River, deep into Yanomamö country. On
the morning of the third day we reached
Article 1. Doing Fieldwork among the Yanomamo
3
a small mission settlement, the field
‘headquarters’ of a group of Americans
who were working in two Yanomamö
villages. The missionaries had come out
of these villages to hold their annual conference
on the progress of their mission
work and were conducting their meetings
when I arrived. We picked up a passenger
at the mission station, James P.
Barker, the first non-Yanomamö to
make a sustained, permanent contact
with the tribe (in 1950). He had just returned
from a year’s furlough in the
United States, where I had earlier visited
him before leaving for Venezuela. He
agreed to accompany me to the village I
had selected for my base of operations to
introduce me to the Indians. This village
was also his own home base, but he had
not been there for over a year and did not
plan to join me for another three months.
Mr. Barker had been living with this particular
group about five years.
We arrived at the village, Bisaasi-teri,
about 2:00 P.M. and docked the boat
along the muddy bank at the terminus of
the path used by Yanomamö to fetch
their drinking water. It was hot and
muggy, and my clothing was soaked
with perspiration. It clung uncomfortably
to my body, as it did thereafter for
the remainder of the work. The small biting
gnats, bareto, were out in astronomical
numbers, for it was the beginning of
the dry season. My face and hands were
swollen from the venom of their numerous
stings. In just a few moments I was
to meet my first Yanomamö, my first
primitive man. What would he be like? I
had visions of entering the village and
seeing 125 social facts running about altruistically
calling each other kinship
terms and sharing food, each waiting and
anxious to have me collect his genealogy.
I would wear them out in turn.
Would they like me? This was important
to me; I wanted them to be so fond of me
that they would adopt me into their kinship
system and way of life. I had heard
that successful anthropologists always
get adopted by their people. I had learned
during my seven years of anthropological
training at the University of Michigan
that kinship was equivalent to
society in primitive tribes and that it was
a moral way of life, ‘moral’ being something
‘good’ and ‘desirable.’ I was determined
to work my way into their moral
system of kinship and become a member
of their society—to be ‘accepted’ by
them.
How Did They Accept You?
My heart began to pound as we approached
the village and heard the buzz
of activity within the circular compound.
Mr. Barker commented that he was anxious
to see if any changes had taken
place while he was away and wondered
how many of them had died during his
absence. I nervously felt my back pocket
to make sure that my notebook was still
there and felt personally more secure
when I touched it.
The entrance to the village was covered
over with brush and dry palm
leaves. We pushed them aside to expose
the low opening to the village. The excitement
of meeting my first Yanomamö
was almost unbearable as I duck-waddled
through the low passage into the village
clearing.
I looked up and gasped when I saw a
dozen burly, naked, sweaty, hideous men
staring at us down the shafts of their
drawn arrows! Immense wads of green
tobacco were stuck between their lower
teeth and lips making them look even
more hideous, and strands of dark-green
slime dripped or hung from their nostrils—strands
so long that they clung to
their pectoral muscles or drizzled down
their chins. We arrived at the village
while the men were blowing a hallucinogenic
drug up their noses. One of the side
effects of the drug is a runny nose. The
mucus is always saturated with the green
powder and they usually let it run freely
from their nostrils. My next discovery
was that there were a dozen or so vicious,
underfed dogs snapping at my legs, circling
me as if I were to be their next
meal. I just stood there holding my notebook,
helpless and pathetic. Then the
stench of the decaying vegetation and
filth hit me and I almost got sick. I was
horrified. What kind of welcome was
this for the person who came here to live
with you and learn your way of life, to
become friends with you? They put their
weapons down when they recognized
Barker and returned to their chanting,
keeping a nervous eye on the village en-
trances.
We had arrived just after a serious
fight. Seven women had been abducted
the day before by a neighboring group,
and the local men and their guests had
just that morning recovered five of
them in a brutal club fight that nearly
ended in a shooting war. The abductors,
angry because they had lost five of their
seven new captives, vowed to raid the
Bisaasi-teri. When we arrived and entered
the village unexpectedly, the Indians
feared that we were the raiders.
On several occasions during the next
two hours the men in the village
jumped to their feet, armed themselves,
nocked their arrows and waited nervously
for the noise outside the village
to be identified. My enthusiasm for collecting
ethnographic facts diminished
in proportion to the number of times
such an alarm was raised. In fact, I was
relieved when Barker suggested that we
sleep across the river for the evening. It
would be safer over there.
As we walked down the path to the
boat, I pondered the wisdom of having
decided to spend a year and a half with
these people before I had even seen what
they were like. I am not ashamed to admit
that had there been a diplomatic way
out, I would have ended my fieldwork
then and there. I did not look forward to
the next day—and months—when I
would be left alone with the Yanomamö;
I did not speak a word of their language,
and they were decidedly different from
what I had imagined them to be. The
whole situation was depressing, and I
wondered why I ever decided to switch
from physics and engineering in the first
place. I had not eaten all day, I was soaking
wet from perspiration, the bareto
were biting me, and I was covered with
red pigment, the result of a dozen or so
complete examinations I had been given
by as many very pushy Yanomamö men.
These examinations capped an otherwise
grim day. The men would blow their
noses into their hands, flick as much of
the mucus off that would separate in a
snap of the wrist, wipe the residue into
their hair, and then carefully examine my
face, arms, legs, hair, and the contents of
my pockets. I asked Barker how to say,
‘Your hands are dirty’; my comments
were met by the Yanomamö in the following
way: They would ‘clean’ their
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hands by spitting a quantity of slimy tobacco
juice into them, rub them together,
grin, and then proceed with the examina-
tion.
Mr. Barker and I crossed the river and
slung our hammocks. When he pulled his
hammock out of a rubber bag, a heavy
disagreeable odor of mildewed cotton
and stale wood smoke came with it.
‘Even the missionaries are filthy,’ I
thought to myself. Within two weeks,
everything I owned smelled the same
way, and I lived with that odor for the remainder
of the fieldwork. My own habits
of personal cleanliness declined to such
levels that I didn’t even mind being examined
by the Yanomamö, as I was not
much cleaner than they were after I had
adjusted to the circumstances. It is difficult
to blow your nose gracefully when
you are stark naked and the invention of
handkerchiefs is millenia away.
Life in the Jungle: Oatmeal, Peanut
Butter, and Bugs
It isn’t easy to plop down in the Amazon
Basin for a year and get immediately into
the anthropological swing of things. You
have been told about horrible diseases,
snakes, jaguars, electric eels, little spiny
fish that will swim up your urine into
your penis, quicksand, and getting lost.
Some of the dangers are real, but your
imagination makes them more real and
threatening than many of them really are.
What my teachers never bothered to advise
me about, however, was the mundane,
nonexciting, and trivial stuff—like
eating, defecating, sleeping, or keeping
clean. These turned out to be the bane of
my existence during the first several
months of field research. I set up my
household in Barker’s abandoned mud
hut, a few yards from the village of
Bisaasi-teri, and immediately set to work
building my own mud/thatch hut with
the help of the Yanomamö. Meanwhile,
I had to eat and try to do my ‘field research.’
I soon discovered that it was
an enormously time-consuming task to
maintain my own body in the manner
to which it had grown accustomed in
the relatively antiseptic environment
of the northern United States. Either I
could be relatively well fed and relatively
comfortable in a fresh change of
clothes and do very little fieldwork, or I
could do considerably more fieldwork
and be less well fed and less comfort-
able.
It is appalling how complicated it can
be to make oatmeal in the jungle. First, I
had to make two trips to the river to haul
the water. Next, I had to prime my kerosene
stove with alcohol to get it burning,
a tricky procedure when you are trying to
mix powdered milk and fill a coffee pot
at the same time. The alcohol prime always
burned out before I could turn the
kerosene on, and I would have to start all
over. Or, I would turn the kerosene on,
optimistically hoping that the Coleman
element was still hot enough to vaporize
the fuel, and start a small fire in my
palm-thatched hut as the liquid kerosene
squirted all over the table and walls and
then ignited. Many amused Yanomamö
onlookers quickly learned the English
phrase ‘Oh, Shit!’ and, once they discovered
that the phrase offended and irritated
the missionaries, they used it as
often as they could in their presence. I
usually had to start over with the alcohol.
Then I had to boil the oatmeal and pick
the bugs out of it. All my supplies, of
course, were carefully stored in ratproof,
moisture-proof, and insect-proof
containers, not one of which ever served
its purpose adequately. Just taking things
out of the multiplicity of containers and
repacking them afterward was a minor
project in itself. By the time I had hauled
the water to cook with, unpacked my
food, prepared the oatmeal, milk, and
coffee, heated water for dishes, washed
and dried the dishes, repacked the food
in the containers, stored the containers in
locked trunks, and cleaned up my mess,
the ceremony of preparing breakfast had
brought me almost up to lunch time!
Eating three meals a day was simply
out of the question. I solved the problem
by eating a single meal that could be prepared
in a single container, or, at most, in
two containers, washed my dishes only
when there were no clean ones left, using
cold river water, and wore each change
of clothing at least a week to cut down on
my laundry problem—a courageous undertaking
in the tropics. I reeked like a
jockstrap that had been left to mildew in
the bottom of some dark gym locker. I
also became less concerned about sharing
my provisions with the rats, insects,
Yanomamö, and the elements, thereby
eliminating the need for my complicated
storage process. I was able to last most of
the day on café con leche, heavily sugared
espresso coffee diluted about five to
one with hot milk. I would prepare this in
the evening and store it in a large thermos.
Frequently, my single meal was no
more complicated than a can of sardines
and a package of soggy crackers. But at
least two or three times a week I would
do something ‘special’ and sophisticated,
like make a batch of oatmeal or
boil rice and add a can of tuna fish or tomato
paste to it. I even saved time by devising
a water system that obviated the
trips to the river. I had a few sheets of tin
roofing brought in and made a rain water
trap; I caught the water on the tin surface,
funneled it into an empty gasoline drum,
and then ran a plastic hose from the drum
to my hut. When the drum was exhausted
in the dry season, I would get a few Yanomamö
boys to fill it with buckets of
water from the river, ‘paying’ them with
crackers, of which they grew all too fond
all too soon.
I ate much less when I traveled with
the Yanomamö to visit other villages.
Most of the time my travel diet consisted
of roasted or boiled green plantains
(cooking bananas) that I obtained from
the Yanomamö, but I always carried a
few cans of sardines with me in case I got
lost or stayed away longer than I had
planned. I found peanut butter and crackers
a very nourishing ‘trail’ meal, and a
simple one to prepare. It was nutritious
and portable, and only one tool was required
to make the meal: a hunting knife
that could be cleaned by wiping the blade
on a convenient leaf. More importantly,
it was one of the few foods the Yanomamö
would let me eat in relative
peace. It looked suspiciously like animal
feces to them, an impression I encouraged.
I referred to the peanut butter as the
feces of babies or ‘cattle.’ They found
this disgusting and repugnant. They did
not know what ‘cattle’ were, but were
increasingly aware that I ate several
canned products of such an animal. Tin
cans were thought of as containers made
of ‘machete skins,’ but how the cows got
inside was always a mystery to them. I
went out of my way to describe my foods
in such a way as to make them sound un-
Article 1. Doing Fieldwork among the Yanomamo
5
palatable to them, for it gave me some
peace of mind while I ate: They wouldn’t
beg for a share of something that was too
horrible to contemplate. Fieldworkers
develop strange defense mechanisms
and strategies, and this was one of my
own forms of adaptation to the fieldwork.
On another occasion I was eating a
can of frankfurters and growing very
weary of the demands from one of the
onlookers for a share in my meal. When
he finally asked what I was eating, I replied:
‘Beef.’ He then asked: ‘Shaki!4
What part of the animal are you eating?’
To which I replied, ‘Guess.’ He muttered
a contemptuous epithet, but stopped asking
for a share. He got back at me later,
as we shall see.
Meals were a problem in a way that
had nothing to do with the inconvenience
of preparing them. Food sharing is important
to the Yanomamö in the context
of displaying friendship. ‘I am hungry!’
is almost a form of greeting with them. I
could not possibly have brought enough
food with me to feed the entire village,
yet they seemed to overlook this logistic
fact as they begged for my food. What
became fixed in their minds was the fact
that I did not share my food with whomsoever
was present—usually a small
crowd—at each and every meal. Nor
could I easily enter their system of reciprocity
with respect to food. Every time
one of them ‘gave’ me something
‘freely,’ he would dog me for months to
‘pay him back,’ not necessarily with
food but with knives, fishhooks, axes,
and so on. Thus, if I accepted a plantain
from someone in a different village
while I was on a visit, he would most
likely visit me in the future and demand
a machete as payment for the time that he
‘fed’ me. I usually reacted to these kinds
of demands by giving a banana, the customary
reciprocity in their culture—food
for food—but this would be a disappointment
for the individual who had
nursed visions of that single plantain
growing into a machete over time. Many
years after beginning my fieldwork, I
was approached by one of the prominent
men who demanded a machete for a
piece of meat he claimed he had given
me five or six years earlier.
Despite the fact that most of them
knew I would not share my food with
them at their request, some of them always
showed up at my hut during mealtime.
I gradually resigned myself to this
and learned to ignore their persistent demands
while I ate. Some of them would
get angry because I failed to give in, but
most of them accepted it as just a peculiarity
of the subhuman foreigner who
had come to live among them. If or when
I did accede to a request for a share of my
food, my hut quickly filled with Yanomamö,
each demanding their share of
the food that I had just given to one of
them. Their begging for food was not
provoked by hunger, but by a desire to
try something new and to attempt to establish
a coercive relationship in which I
would accede to a demand. If one received
something, all others would immediately
have to test the system to see
if they, too, could coerce me.
A few of them went out of their way
to make my meals downright unpleasant—to
spite me for not sharing, especially
if it was a food that they had tried
before and liked, or a food that was part
of their own cuisine. For example, I was
eating a cracker with peanut butter and
honey one day. The Yanomamö will do
almost anything for honey, one of the
most prized delicacies in their own diet.
One of my cynical onlookers—the fellow
who had earlier watched me eating
frankfurters—immediately recognized
the honey and knew that I would not
share the tiny precious bottle. It would be
futile to even ask. Instead, he glared at
me and queried icily, ‘Shaki! What kind
of animal semen are you pouring onto
your food and eating?’ His question had
the desired effect and my meal ended.
Finally, there was the problem of being
lonely and separated from your own
kind, especially your family. I tried to
overcome this by seeking personal
friendships among the Yanomamö. This
usually complicated the matter because
all my ‘friends’ simply used my confidence
to gain privileged access to my hut
and my cache of steel tools and trade
goods—and looted me when I wasn’t
looking. I would be bitterly disappointed
that my erstwhile friend thought no more
of me than to finesse our personal relationship
exclusively with the intention of
getting at my locked up possessions, and
my depression would hit new lows every
time I discovered this. The loss of the
possessions bothered me much less than
the shock that I was, as far as most of
them were concerned, nothing more than
a source of desirable items. No holds
were barred in relieving me of these,
since I was considered something subhuman,
a non-Yanomamö.
The hardest thing to learn to live with
was the incessant, passioned, and often
aggressive demands they would make. It
would become so unbearable at times
that I would have to lock myself in my
hut periodically just to escape from it.
Privacy is one of our culture’s most satisfying
achievements, one you never
think about until you suddenly have
none. It is like not appreciating how
good your left thumb feels until someone
hits it with a hammer. But I did not want
privacy for its own sake; rather, I simply
had to get away from the begging. Day
and night for almost the entire time I
lived with the Yanomamö, I was plagued
by such demands as: ‘Give me a knife, I
am poor!’; ‘If you don’t take me with
you on your next trip to Widokaiyateri,
I’ll chop a hole in your canoe!’; ‘Take us
hunting up the Mavaca River with your
shotgun or we won’t help you!’; ‘Give
me some matches so I can trade with the
Reyaboböwei-teri, and be quick about it
or I’ll hit you!’; ‘Share your food with
me, or I’ll burn your hut!’; ‘Give me a
flashlight so I can hunt at night!’; ‘Give
me all your medicine, I itch all over!’;
‘Give me an ax or I’ll break into your hut
when you are away and steal all of
them!’ And so I was bombarded by such
demands day after day, month after
month, until I could not bear to see a Yanomamö
at times.
It was not as difficult to become calloused
to the incessant begging as it
was to ignore the sense of urgency, the
impassioned tone of voice and whining,
or the intimidation and aggression with
which many of the demands were
made. It was likewise difficult to adjust
to the fact that the Yanomamö refused to
accept ‘No’ for an answer until or unless
it seethed with passion and intimidation—which
it did after a few months. So
persistent and characteristic is the begging
that the early ‘semiofficial’ maps
made by the Venezuelan Malaria Control
Service (Malarialogía) designated
ANNUAL EDITIONS
6
the site of their first permanent field station,
next to the village of Bisaasi-teri, as
Yababuhii: ‘Gimme.’ I had to become
like the Yanomamö to be able to get
along with them on their terms: somewhat
sly, aggressive, intimidating, and
pushy.
It became indelibly clear to me
shortly after I arrived there that had I
failed to adjust in this fashion I would
have lost six months of supplies to them
in a single day or would have spent most
of my time ferrying them around in my
canoe or taking them on long hunting
trips. As it was, I did spend a considerable
amount of time doing these things
and did succumb often to their outrageous
demands for axes and machetes, at
least at first, for things changed as I became
more fluent in their language and
learned how to defend myself socially as
well as verbally. More importantly, had I
failed to demonstrate that I could not be
pushed around beyond a certain point, I
would have been the subject of far more
ridicule, theft, and practical jokes than
was the actual case. In short, I had to acquire
a certain proficiency in their style
of interpersonal politics and to learn how
to imply subtly that certain potentially
undesirable, but unspecified, consequences
might follow if they did such
and such to me. They do this to each
other incessantly in order to establish
precisely the point at which they cannot
goad or intimidate an individual any further
without precipitating some kind of
retaliation. As soon as I realized this and
gradually acquired the self-confidence to
adopt this strategy, it became clear that
much of the intimidation was calculated
to determine my flash point or my ‘last
ditch’ position—and I got along much
better with them. Indeed, I even regained
some lost ground. It was sort of like a political,
interpersonal game that everyone
had to play, but one in which each individual
sooner or later had to give evidence
that his bluffs and implied threats
could be backed up with a sanction. I
suspect that the frequency of wife beating
is a component in this syndrome,
since men can display their waiteri (ferocity)
and ‘show’ others that they are
capable of great violence. Beating a wife
with a club is one way of displaying ferocity,
one that does not expose the man
to much danger—unless the wife has
concerned, aggressive brothers in the village
who will come to her aid. Apparently
an important thing in wife beating
is that the man has displayed his presumed
potential for violence and the intended
message is that other men ought
to treat him with circumspection, caution,
and even deference.
After six months, the level of Yanomamö
demand was tolerable in
Bisaasi-teri, the village I used for my
base of operations. We had adjusted
somewhat to each other and knew what
to expect with regard to demands for
food, trade goods, and favors. Had I
elected to remain in just one Yanomamö
village for the entire duration of my first
15 months of fieldwork, the experience
would have been far more enjoyable than
it actually was. However, as I began to
understand the social and political dynamics
of this village, it became patently
obvious that I would have to travel to
many other villages to determine the demographic
bases and political histories
that lay behind what I could understand
in the village of Bisaasi-teri. I began
making regular trips to some dozen
neighboring Yanomamö villages as my
language fluency improved. I collected
local genealogies there, or rechecked and
cross-checked those I had collected elsewhere.
Hence, the intensity of begging
was relatively constant and relatively
high for the duration of my fieldwork,
for I had to establish my personal position
in each village I visited and revis-
ited.
For the most part, my own ‘fierceness’
took the form of shouting back at
the Yanomamö as loudly and as passionately
as they shouted at me, especially at
first, when I did not know much of the
language. As I became more fluent and
learned more about their political tactics,
I became more sophisticated in the art of
bluffing and brinksmanship. For example,
I paid one young man a machete
(then worth about $2.50) to cut a palm
tree and help me make boards from the
wood. I used these to fashion a flooring
in the bottom of my dugout canoe to
keep my possessions out of the water that
always seeped into the canoe and sloshed
around. That afternoon I was working
with one of my informants in the village.
The long-awaited mission supply boat
arrived and most of the Yanomamö ran
out of the village to see the supplies and
try to beg items from the crew. I continued
to work in the village for another
hour or so and then went down to the
river to visit with the men on the supply
boat. When I reached the river I noticed,
with anger and frustration, that the Yanomamö
had chopped up all my new
floor boards to use as crude paddles to
get their own canoes across the river to
the supply boat.5 I knew that if I ignored
this abuse I would have invited
the Yanomamö to take even greater
liberties with my possessions in the future.
I got into my canoe, crossed the
river, and docked amidst their flimsy,
leaky craft. I shouted loudly to them, attracting
their attention. They were somewhat
sheepish, but all had mischievous
grins on their impish faces. A few of
them came down to the canoe, where I
proceeded with a spirited lecture that revealed
my anger at their audacity and license.
I explained that I had just that
morning paid one of them a machete for
bringing me the palmwood, how hard I
had worked to shape each board and
place it in the canoe, how carefully and
painstakingly I had tied each one in with
vines, how much I had perspired, how
many bareto bites I had suffered, and so
on. Then, with exaggerated drama and finality,
I withdrew my hunting knife as
their grins disappeared and cut each one
of their canoes loose and set it into the
strong current of the Orinoco River
where it was immediately swept up and
carried downstream. I left without looking
back and huffed over to the other side
of the river to resume my work.
They managed to borrow another canoe
and, after some effort, recovered
their dugouts. Later, the headman of the
village told me, with an approving
chuckle, that I had done the correct thing.
Everyone in the village, except, of
course, the culprits, supported and defended
my actions—and my status increased
as a consequence.
Whenever I defended myself in such
ways I got along much better with the
Yanomamö and gradually acquired the
respect of many of them. A good deal of
their demeanor toward me was directed
with the forethought of establishing the
Article 1. Doing Fieldwork among the Yanomamo
7
point at which I would draw the line and
react defensively. Many of them, years
later, reminisced about the early days of
my fieldwork when I was timid and mohode
(“stupid”) and a little afraid of
them, those golden days when it was
easy to bully me into giving my goods
away for almost nothing.
Theft was the most persistent situation
that required some sort of defensive
action. I simply could not keep everything
I owned locked in trunks, and the
Yanomamö came into my hut and left at
will. I eventually developed a very effective
strategy for recovering almost all the
stolen items: I would simply ask a child
who took the item and then I would confiscate
that person’s hammock when he
was not around, giving a spirited lecture
to all who could hear on the antisociality
of thievery as I stalked off in a faked rage
with the thief’s hammock slung over my
shoulder. Nobody ever attempted to stop
me from doing this, and almost all of
them told me that my technique for recovering
my possessions was ingenious.
By nightfall the thief would appear at my
hut with the stolen item or send it over
with someone else to make an exchange
to recover his hammock. He would be
heckled by his covillagers for having got
caught and for being embarrassed into
returning my item for his hammock. The
explanation was usually, ‘I just borrowed
your ax! I wouldn’t think of stealing
it!’
Collecting Ydnomamö Genealogies
and Reproductive Histories
My purpose for living among Yanomamö
was to systematically collect certain kinds
of information on genealogy, reproduction,
marriage practices, kinship, settlement
patterns, migrations, and politics.
Much of the fundamental data was genealogical—who
was the parent of whom,
tracing these connections as far back in
time as Yanomamö knowledge and
memory permitted. Since ‘primitive’ society
is organized largely by kinship relationships,
figuring out the social
organization of the Yanomamö essentially
meant collecting extensive data on
genealogies, marriage, and reproduction.
This turned out to be a staggering and
very frustrating problem. I could not
have deliberately picked a more difficult
people to work with in this regard. They
have very stringent name taboos and eschew
mentioning the names of prominent
living people as well as all deceased
friends and relatives. They attempt to
name people in such a way that when the
person dies and they can no longer use
his or her name, the loss of the word in
their language is not inconvenient.
Hence, they name people for specific and
minute parts of things, such as ‘toenail of
sloth,’ ‘whisker of howler monkey,’ and
so on, thereby being able to retain the
words ‘toenail’ or ‘whisker’ but somewhat
handicapped in referring to these
anatomical parts of sloths and monkeys
respectively. The taboo is maintained
even for the living, for one mark of prestige
is the courtesy others show you by
not using your name publicly. This is
particularly true for men, who are much
more competitive for status than women
in this culture, and it is fascinating to
watch boys grow into young men, demanding
to be called either by a kinship
term in public, or by a teknonymous reference
such as ‘brother of Himotoma.’
The more effective they are at getting
others to avoid using their names, the
more public acknowledgment there is
that they are of high esteem and social
standing. Helena Valero, a Brazilian
woman who was captured as a child by a
Yanomamö raiding party, was married
for many years to a Yanomamö headman
before she discovered what his name was
(Biocca, 1970; Valero, 1984). The sanctions
behind the taboo are more complex
than just this, for they involve a combination
of fear, respect, admiration, political
deference, and honor.
At first I tried to use kinship terms alone
to collect genealogies, but Yanomamö kinship
terms, like the kinship terms in all systems,
are ambiguous at some point because
they include so many possible relatives (as
the term ‘uncle’ does in our own kinship
system). Again, their system of kin classification
merges many relatives that we
‘separate’ by using different terms: They
call both their actual father and their father’s
brother by a single term, whereas
we call one ‘father’ and the other ‘uncle.’
I was forced, therefore, to resort to personal
names to collect unambiguous genealogies
or ‘pedigrees.’ They quickly
grasped what I was up to and that I was
determined to learn everyone’s ‘true
name,’ which amounted to an invasion of
their system of prestige and etiquette, if
not a flagrant violation of it. They reacted
to this in a brilliant but devastating
manner: They invented false names for
everybody in the village and systematically
learned them, freely revealing to
me the ‘true’ identities of everyone. I
smugly thought I had cracked the system
and enthusiastically constructed elaborate
genealogies over a period of some
five months. They enjoyed watching me
learn their names and kinship relationships.
I naively assumed that I would get
the ‘truth’ to each question and the best
information by working in public. This
set the stage for converting my serious
project into an amusing hoax of the
grandest proportions. Each ‘informant’
would try to outdo his peers by inventing
a name even more preposterous or ridiculous
than what I had been given by
someone earlier, the explanations for
discrepancies being ‘Well, he has two
names and this is the other one.’ They
even fabricated devilishly improbable
genealogical relationships, such as
someone being married to his grandmother,
or worse yet, to his mother-inlaw,
a grotesque and horrifying prospect
to the Yanomamö. I would collect the
desired names and relationships by having
my informant whisper the name of
the person softly into my ear, noting that
he or she was the parent of such and such
or the child of such and such, and so on.
Everyone who was observing my work
would then insist that I repeat the name
aloud, roaring in hysterical laughter as I
clumsily pronounced the name, sometimes
laughing until tears streamed down
their faces. The ‘named’ person would
usually react with annoyance and hiss
some untranslatable epithet at me, which
served to reassure me that I had the ‘true’
name. I conscientiously checked and rechecked
the names and relationships
with multiple informants, pleased to see
the inconsistencies disappear as my genealogy
sheets filled with those desirable
little triangles and circles, thousands of
them.
My anthropological bubble was burst
when I visited a village about 10 hours’
walk to the southwest of Bisaasi-teri
some five months after I had begun col-
ANNUAL EDITIONS
8
lecting genealogies on the Bisaasi-teri. I
was chatting with the local headman of
this village and happened to casually
drop the name of the wife of the Bisaasiteri
headman. A stunned silence followed,
and then a villagewide roar of uncontrollable
laughter, choking, gasping,
and howling followed. It seems that I
thought the Bisaasi-teri headman was
married to a woman named “hairy cunt.”
It also seems that the Bisaasi-teri headman
was called ‘long dong’ and his
brother ‘eagle shit.’ The Bisaasi-teri
headman had a son called “asshole” and
a daughter called ‘fart breath.’ And so
on. Blood welled up my temples as I realized
that I had nothing but nonsense to
show for my five months’ of dedicated
genealogical effort, and I had to throw
away almost all the information I had
collected on this the most basic set of
data I had come there to get. I understood
at that point why the Bisaasi-teri laughed
so hard when they made me repeat the
names of their covillagers, and why the
‘named’ person would react with anger
and annoyance as I pronounced his
‘name’ aloud.
I was forced to change research strategy—to
make an understatement to describe
this serious situation. The first
thing I did was to begin working in private
with my informants to eliminate the
horseplay and distraction that attended
public sessions. Once I did this, my informants,
who did not know what others
were telling me, began to agree with
each other and I managed to begin learning
the ‘real’ names, starting first with
children and gradually moving to adult
women and then, cautiously, adult men,
a sequence that reflected the relative degree
of intransigence at revealing names
of people. As I built up a core of accurate
genealogies and relationships—a core
that all independent informants had verified
repetitiously—I could ‘test’ any
new informant by soliciting his or her
opinion and knowledge about these
‘core’ people whose names and relationships
I was confident were accurate. I
was, in this fashion, able to immediately
weed out the mischievous informants
who persisted in trying to deceive me.
Still, I had great difficulty getting the
names of dead kinsmen, the only accurate
way to extend genealogies back in
time. Even my best informants continued
to falsify names of the deceased, especially
closely related deceased. The falsifications
at this point were not serious
and turned out to be readily corrected as
my interviewing methods improved (see
below). Most of the deceptions were of
the sort where the informant would give
me the name of a living man as the father
of some child whose actual father was
dead, a response that enabled the informant
to avoid using the name of a deceased
kinsman or friend.
The quality of a genealogy depends in
part on the number of generations it embraces,
and the name taboo prevented me
from making any substantial progress in
learning about the deceased ancestors of the
present population. Without this information,
I could not, for example, document
marriage patterns and interfamilial alliances
through time. I had to rely on older informants
for this information, but these were
the most reluctant informants of all for this
data.As Ibecamemoreproficientinthelanguage
and more skilled at detecting fabrications,
any informants became better at
deception. One old man was particularly
cunning and persuasive, following a sort of
Mark Twain policy that the most effective
lie is a sincere lie. He specialized in making
a ceremony out of false names for dead ancestors.
He would look around nervously to
make sure nobody was listening outside my
hut, enjoin me never to mention the name
again, become very anxious and spooky,
and grab me by the head to whisper a secret
name into my ear. I was always elated after
a session with him, because I managed to
add several generations of ancestors for particularmembers
ofthevillage.Others steadfastly
refused to give me such information.
To show my gratitude, I paid him quadruple
the rate that I had been paying the others.
When word got around that I had increased
the pay for genealogical and demographic
information, volunteers began pouring into
my hut to ‘work’ for me, assuring me of
theirchangedwaysandkeendesireto divest
themselves of the ‘truth.’
Enter Rerebawä: Inmarried Tough
Guy
I discovered that the old man was lying
quite by accident. A club fight broke out
in the village one day, the result of a dispute
over the possession of a woman.
She had been promised to a young man
in the village, a man named Rerebawä,
who was particularly aggressive. He had
married into Bisaasi-teri and was doing
his ‘bride service’—a period of several
years during which he had to provide
game for his wife’s father and mother,
provide them with wild foods he might
collect, and help them in certain gardening
and other tasks. Rerebawä had already
been given one of the daughters in
marriage and was promised her younger
sister as his second wife. He was enraged
when the younger sister, then about 16
years old, began having an affair with
another young man in the village, Bäkotawä,
making no attempt to conceal it.
Rerebawä challenged Bäkotawä to a
club fight. He swaggered boisterously
out to the duel with his 10-foot-long
club, a roof-pole he had cut from the
house on the spur of the moment, as is
the usual procedure. He hurled insult after
insult at both Bäkotawä and his father,
trying to goad them into a fight. His
insults were bitter and nasty. They tolerated
them for a few moments, but Rerebawä’s
biting insults provoked them to
rage. Finally, they stormed angrily out of
their hammocks and ripped out roofpoles,
now returning the insults verbally,
and rushed to the village clearing. Rerebawä
continued to insult them, goading
them into striking him on the head
with their equally long clubs. Had either
of them struck his head—which he held
out conspicuously for them to swing at—
he would then have the right to take his
turn on their heads with his club. His opponents
were intimidated by his fury,
and simply backed down, refusing to
strike him, and the argument ended. He
had intimidated them into submission.
All three retired pompously to their respective
hammocks, exchanging nasty
insults as they departed. But Rerebawä
had won the showdown and thereafter
swaggered around the village, insulting
the two men behind their backs at
every opportunity. He was genuinely
angry with them, to the point of calling
the older man by the name of his longdeceased
father. I quickly seized on
this incident as an opportunity to collect
an accurate genealogy and confidentially
asked Rerebawä about his
adversary’s ancestors. Rerebawä had
Article 1. Doing Fieldwork among the Yanomamo
9
been particularly ‘pushy’ with me up to
this point, but we soon became warm
friends and staunch allies: We were both
‘outsiders’ in Bisaasi-teri and, although
he was a Yanomamö, he nevertheless
had to put up with some considerable
amount of pointed teasing and scorn
from the locals, as all inmarried ‘sons-inlaw’
must. He gave me the information I
requested of his adversary’s deceased
ancestors, almost with devilish glee. I
asked about dead ancestors of other people
in the village and got prompt, unequivocal
answers: He was angry with
everyone in the village. When I compared
his answers to those of the old
man, it was obvious that one of them was
lying. I then challenged his answers. He
explained, in a sort of ‘you damned fool,
don’t you know better?’ tone of voice
that everyone in the village knew the old
man was lying to me and gloating over it
when I was out of earshot. The names the
old man had given to me were names of
dead ancestors of the members of a village
so far away that he thought I would
never have occasion to check them out
authoritatively. As it turned out, Rerebawä
knew most of the people in that
distant village and recognized the names
given by the old man.
I then went over all my Bisaasi-teri
genealogies with Rerebawä, genealogies
I had presumed to be close to their final
form. I had to revise them all because of
the numerous lies and falsifications they
contained, much of it provided by the sly
old man. Once again, after months of
work, I had to recheck everything with
Rerebawä’s aid. Only the living members
of the nuclear families turned out to
be accurate; the deceased ancestors were
mostly fabrications.
Discouraging as it was to have to recheck
everything all over again, it was a
major turning point in my fieldwork.
Thereafter, I began taking advantage of
local arguments and animosities in selecting
my informants, and used more
extensively informants who had married
into the village in the recent past. I also
began traveling more regularly to other
villages at this time to check on genealogies,
seeking out villages whose members
were on strained terms with the
people about whom I wanted information.
I would then return to my base in
the village of Bisaasi-teri and check with
local informants the accuracy of the new
information. I had to be careful in this
work and scrupulously select my local
informants in such a way that I would not
be inquiring about their closely related
kin. Thus, for each of my local informants,
I had to make lists of names of
certain deceased people that I dared not
mention in their presence. But despite
this precaution, I would occasionally hit
a new name that would put some informants
into a rage, or into a surly mood,
such as that of a dead ‘brother’ or ‘sister’6
whose existence had not been indicated
to me by other informants. This
usually terminated my day’s work with
that informant, for he or she would be too
touchy or upset to continue any further,
and I would be reluctant to take a chance
on accidentally discovering another dead
close kinsman soon after discovering the
first.
These were unpleasant experiences,
and occasionally dangerous as well, depending
on the temperament of my informant.
On one occasion I was planning
to visit a village that had been raided
recently by one of their enemies. A
woman, whose name I had on my census
list for that village, had been killed
by the raiders. Killing women is considered
to be bad form in Yanomamö warfare,
but this woman was deliberately
killed for revenge. The raiders were unable
to bushwhack some man who
stepped out of the village at dawn to urinate,
so they shot a volley of arrows over
the roof into the village and beat a hasty
retreat. Unfortunately, one of the arrows
struck and killed a woman, an accident.
For that reason, her village’s raiders deliberately
sought out and killed a woman
in retaliation—whose name was on my
list. My reason for going to the village
was to update my census data on a nameby-name
basis and estimate the ages of
all the residents. I knew I had the name
of the dead woman in my list, but nobody
would dare to utter her name so I could
remove it. I knew that I would be in very
serious trouble if I got to the village and
said her name aloud, and I desperately
wanted to remove it from my list. I called
on one of my regular and usually cooperative
informants and asked him to tell me
the woman’s name. He refused adamantly,
explaining that she was a close
relative—and was angry that I even
raised the topic with him. I then asked
him if he would let me whisper the
names of all the women of that village in
his ear, and he would simply have to nod
when I hit the right name. We had been
‘friends’ for some time, and I thought I
was able to predict his reaction, and
thought that our friendship was good
enough to use this procedure. He agreed
to the procedure, and I began whispering
the names of the women, one by one. We
were alone in my hut so that nobody
would know what we were doing and nobody
could hear us. I read the names
softly, continuing to the next when his
response was a negative. When I ultimately
hit the dead woman’s name, he
flew out of his chair, enraged and trembling
violently, his arm raised to strike
me: ‘You son-of-a-bitch!’ he screamed.
‘If you say her name in my presence
again, I’ll kill you in an instant!’ I sat
there, bewildered, shocked, and confused.
And frightened, as much because
of his reaction, but also because I could
imagine what might happen to me should
I unknowingly visit a village to check genealogy
accuracy without knowing that
someone had just died there or had been
shot by raiders since my last visit. I reflected
on the several articles I had read
as a graduate student that explained the
‘genealogical method,’ but could not recall
anything about its being a potentially
lethal undertaking. My furious informant
left my hut, never again to be invited
back to be an informant. I had other similar
experiences in different villages, but
I was always fortunate in that the dead
person had been dead for some time, or
was not very closely related to the individual
into whose ear I whispered the
forbidden name. I was usually cautioned
by one of the men to desist from saying
any more names lest I get people ‘an-
gry.’7
Kaobawä: The Bisaasi-teri
Headman Volunteers to Help Me
I had been working on the genealogies
for nearly a year when another individual
came to my aid. It was Kaobawä, the
headman of Upper Bisaasi-teri. The village
of Bisaasi-teri was split into two
components, each with its own garden
ANNUAL EDITIONS
10
and own circular house. Both were in
sight of each other. However, the intensity
and frequency of internal bickering
and argumentation was so high that they
decided to split into two separate groups
but remain close to each other for protection
in case they were raided. One group
was downstream from the other; I refer
to that group as the ‘Lower’ Bisaasi-teri
and call Kaobawä’s group ‘Upper’ (upstream)
Bisaasi-teri, a convenience they
themselves adopted after separating
from each other. I spent most of my time
with the members of Kaobawä’s group,
some 200 people when I first arrived
there. I did not have much contact with
Kaobawä during the early months of my
work. He was a somewhat retiring, quiet
man, and among the Yanomamö, the
outsider has little time to notice the rare
quiet ones when most everyone else is in
the front row, pushing and demanding attention.
He showed up at my hut one day
after all the others had left. He had come
to volunteer to help me with the genealogies.
He was ‘poor,’ he explained, and
needed a machete. He would work only
on the condition that I did not ask him
about his own parents and other very
close kinsmen who had died. He also
added that he would not lie to me as the
others had done in the past.
This was perhaps the single most important
event in my first 15 months of
field research, for out of this fortuitous
circumstance evolved a very warm
friendship, and among the many things
following from it was a wealth of accurate
information on the political history
of Kaobawä’s village and related villages,
highly detailed genealogical information,
sincere and useful advice to me,
and hundreds of valuable insights into
the Yanomamö way of life. Kaobawä’s
familiarity with his group’s history and
his candidness were remarkable. His
knowledge of details was almost encyclopedic,
his memory almost photographic.
More than that, he was
enthusiastic about making sure I learned
the truth, and he encouraged me, indeed,
demanded that I learn all details I might
otherwise have ignored. If there were
subtle details he could not recite on the
spot, he would advise me to wait until he
could check things out with someone
else in the village. He would often do this
clandestinely, giving me a report the next
day, telling me who revealed the new information
and whether or not he thought
they were in a position to know it. With
the information provided by Kaobawä
and Rerebawä, I made enormous gains in
understanding village interrelationships
based on common ancestors and political
histories and became lifelong friends
with both. And both men knew that I had
to learn about his recently deceased kin
from the other one. It was one of those
quiet understandings we all had but none
of us could mention.
Once again I went over the genealogies
with Kaobawä to recheck them,
a considerable task by this time. They
included about two thousand names,
representing several generations of individuals
from four different villages.
Rerebawä’s information was very accurate,
and Kaobawä’s contribution
enabled me to trace the genealogies
further back in time. Thus, after nearly
a year of intensive effort on genealogies,
Yanomamö demographic patterns and
social organization began to make a
good deal of sense to me. Only at this
point did the patterns through time begin
to emerge in the data, and I could begin
to understand how kinship groups took
form, exchanged women in marriage
over several generations, and only then
did the fissioning of larger villages into
smaller ones emerge as a chronic and important
feature of Yanomamö social, political,
demographic, economic, and
ecological adaptation. At this point I was
able to begin formulating more sophisticated
questions, for there was now a pattern
to work from and one to flesh out.
Without the help of Rerebawä and
Kaobawä it would have taken much
longer to make sense of the plethora of
details I had collected from not only
them, but dozens of other informants as
well.
I spent a good deal of time with these
two men and their families, and got to
know them much better than I knew most
Yanomamö. They frequently gave their
information in a way which related
themselves to the topic under discussion.
We became warm friends as time passed,
and the formal ‘informant/anthropologist’
relationship faded into the background.
Eventually, we simply stopped
‘keeping track’ of work and pay. They
would both spend hours talking with me,
leaving without asking for anything.
When they wanted something, they
would ask for it no matter what the relative
balance of reciprocity between us
might have been at that point.…
For many of the customary things
that anthropologists try to communicate
about another culture, these two
men and their families might be considered
to be ‘exemplary’ or ‘typical.’ For
other things, they are exceptional in
many regards, but the reader will, even
knowing some of the exceptions, understand
Yanomamö culture more intimately
by being familiar with a few
examples.
Kaobawä was about 40 years old
when I first came to his village in 1964. I
say “about 40” because the Yanomamö
numeration system has only three numbers:
one, two, and more-than-two. It is
hard to give accurate ages or dates for
events when the informants have no
means in their language to reveal such
detail. Kaobawä is the headman of his
village, meaning that he has somewhat
more responsibility in political dealings
with other Yanomamö groups, and very
little control over those who live in his
group except when the village is being
raided by enemies. We will learn more
about political leadership and warfare in
a later chapter, but most of the time men
like Kaobawä are like the North American
Indian ‘chief’ whose authority was
characterized in the following fashion:
“One word from the chief, and each man
does as he pleases.” There are different
‘styles’ of political leadership among the
Yanomamö. Some leaders are mild,
quiet, inconspicuous most of the time,
but intensely competent. They act parsimoniously,
but when they do, people listen
and conform. Other men are more
tyrannical, despotic, pushy, flamboyant,
and unpleasant to all around them. They
shout orders frequently, are prone to beat
their wives, or pick on weaker men.
Some are very violent. I have met headmen
who run the entire spectrum between
these polar types, for I have
visited some 60 Yanomamö villages.
Kaobawä stands at the mild, quietly
competent end of the spectrum. He has
had six wives thus far—and temporary
Article 1. Doing Fieldwork among the Yanomamo
11
affairs with as many more, at least one of
which resulted in a child that is publicly
acknowledged as his child. When I first
met him he had just two wives: Bahimi
and Koamashima. Bahimi had two living
children when I first met her; many others
had died. She was the older and enduring
wife, as much a friend to him as a
mate. Their relationship was as close to
what we think of as ‘love’ in our culture
as I have seen among the Yanomamö.
His second wife was a girl of about 20
years, Koamashima. She had a new baby
boy when I first met her, her first child.
There was speculation that Kaobawä
was planning to give Koamashima to one
of his younger brothers who had no wife;
he occasionally allows his younger
brother to have sex with Koamashima,
but only if he asks in advance. Kaobawä
gave another wife to one of his other
brothers because she was beshi
(“horny”). In fact, this earlier wife had
been married to two other men, both of
whom discarded her because of her infidelity.
Kaobawä had one daughter by
her. However, the girl is being raised by
Kaobawä’s brother, though acknowledged
to be Kaobawä’s child.
Bahimi, his oldest wife, is about five
years younger than he. She is his crosscousin—his
mother’s brother’s daughter.
Ideally, all Yanomamö men should
marry a cross-cousin.… Bahimi was
pregnant when I began my field work,
but she destroyed the infant when it was
born—a boy in this case—explaining
tearfully that she had no choice. The new
baby would have competed for milk with
Ariwari, her youngest child, who was
still nursing. Rather than expose Ariwari
to the dangers and uncertainty of an early
weaning, she chose to terminate the newborn
instead. By Yanomamö standards,
this has been a very warm, enduring marriage.
Kaobawä claims he beats Bahimi
only ‘once in a while, and only lightly’
and she, for her part, never has affairs
with other men.
Kaobawä is a quiet, intense, wise, and
unobtrusive man. It came as something
of a surprise to me when I learned that he
was the headman of his village, for he
stayed at the sidelines while others
would surround me and press their demands
on me. He leads more by example
than by coercion. He can afford to be this
way at his age, for he established his reputation
for being forthright and as fierce
as the situation required when he was
younger, and the other men respect him.
He also has five mature brothers or halfbrothers
in his village, men he can count
on for support. He also has several other
mature ‘brothers’ (parallel cousins,
whom he must refer to as ‘brothers’ in
his kinship system) in the village who
frequently come to his aid, but not as often
as his ‘real’ brothers do. Kaobawä
has also given a number of his sisters to
other men in the village and has promised
his young (8-year-old) daughter in
marriage to a young man who, for that
reason, is obliged to help him. In short,
his ‘natural’ or ‘kinship’ following is
large, and partially because of this support,
he does not have to display his aggressiveness
to remind his peers of his
position.
Rerebawä is a very different kind of
person. He is much younger—perhaps in
his early twenties. He has just one wife, but
they have already had three children. He is
from a village called Karohi-teri, located
about five hours’ walk up the Orinoco,
slightly inland off to the east of the river itself.
Kaobawä’s village enjoys amicable
relationships with Rerebawä’s, and it is for
this reason that marriage alliances of the
kind represented by Rerebawä’s marriage
into Kaobawä’s village occur between the
two groups. Rerebawä told me that he
came to Bisaasi-teri because there were no
eligible women from him to marry in his
own village, a fact that I later was able to
document when I did a census of his village
and a preliminary analysis of its social
organization. Rerebawä is perhaps more
typical than Kaobawä in the sense that he is
chronically concerned about his personal
reputation for aggressiveness and goes out
of his way to be noticed, even if he has to
act tough. He gave me a hard time during
my early months of fieldwork, intimidating,
teasing, and insulting me frequently.
He is, however, much braver than the other
men his age and is quite prepared to back
uphis threats with immediate action—as in
the club fight incident just described
above. Moreover, he is fascinated with political
relationships and knows the details
of intervillage relationships over a large
area of the tribe. In this respect he shows all
the attributes of being a headman, although
he has too many competent brothers in his
own village to expect to move easily into
the leadership position there.
He does not intend to stay in
Kaobawä’s group and refuses to make
his own garden—a commitment that
would reveal something of an intended
long-term residence. He feels that he has
adequately discharged his obligations to
his wife’s parents by providing them
with fresh game, which he has done for
several years. They should let him take
his wife and return to his own village
with her, but they refuse and try to entice
him to remain permanently in Bisaasiteri
to continue to provide them with
game when they are old. It is for this reason
that they promised to give him their
second daughter, their only other child,
in marriage. Unfortunately, the girl was
opposed to the marriage and ultimately
married another man, a rare instance
where the woman in the marriage had
this much influence on the choice of her
husband.
Although Rerebawä has displayed his
ferocity in many ways, one incident in
particular illustrates what his character
can be like. Before he left his own village
to take his new wife in Bisaasi-teri, he
had an affair with the wife of an older
brother. When it was discovered, his
brother attacked him with a club. Rerebawä
responded furiously: He grabbed
an ax and drove his brother out of the village
after soundly beating him with the
blunt side of the single-bit ax. His
brother was so intimidated by the thrashing
and promise of more to come that he
did not return to the village for several
days. I visited this village with Kabawä
shortly after this event had taken place;
Rerebawä was with me as my guide. He
made it a point to introduce me to this
man. He approached his hammock,
grabbed him by the wrist, and dragged
him out on the ground: ‘This is the
brother whose wife I screwed when he
wasn’t around!’ A deadly insult, one that
would usually provoke a bloody club
fight among more valiant Yanomamö.
The man did nothing. He slunk sheepishly
back into his hammock, shamed,
but relieved to have Rerebawä release
his grip.
Even though Rerebawä is fierce and
capable of considerable nastiness, he has
ANNUAL EDITIONS
12
a charming, witty side as well. He has a
biting sense of humor and can entertain
the group for hours with jokes and clever
manipulations of language. And, he is
one of few Yanomamö that I feel I can
trust. I recall indelibly my return to
Bisaasi-teri after being away a year—the
occasion of my second field trip to the
Yanomamö. When I reached Bisaasiteri,
Rerebawä was in his own village
visiting his kinsmen. Word reached him
that I had returned, and he paddled
downstream immediately to see me. He
greeted me with an immense bear hug
and exclaimed, with tears welling up in
his eyes, ‘Shaki! Why did you stay away
so long? Did you not know that my will
was so cold while you were gone that I
could not at times eat for want of seeing
you again?’ I, too, felt the same way
about him—then, and now.
Of all the Yanomamö I know, he is
the most genuine and the most devoted to
his culture’s ways and values. I admire
him for that, although I cannot say that I
subscribe to or endorse some of these
values. By contrast, Kaobawä is older
and wiser, a polished diplomat. He sees
his own culture in a slightly different
light and seems even to question aspects
of it. Thus, while many of his peers enthusiastically
accept the ‘explanations’
of things given in myths, he occasionally
reflects on them—even laughing at some
of the most preposterous of them.…
Probably more of the Yanomamö are
like Rerebawä than like Kaobawä , or at
least try to be. .…
NOTES
1. The word Yanomamö is nasalized
through its entire length, indicated by
the diacritical mark ‘,’. When this
mark appears on any Yanomamö word,
the whole word is nasalized. The
vowel ‘ö’ represents a sound that does
not occur in the English language. It is
similar to the umlaut ‘ö’ in the German
language or the ‘oe’ equivalent, as in
the poet Goethe’s name. Unfortunately,
many presses and typesetters
simply eliminate diacritical marks, and
this has led to multiple spellings of the
word Yanomamö—and multiple mispronunciations.
Some anthropologists
have chosen to introduce a slightly different
spelling of the word Yanomamö
since I began writing about them, such as
Yanomami, leading to additional misspellings
as their diacriticals are characteristically
eliminated by presses, and to
the incorrect pronunciation ‘Yanomameee.’
Vowels indicated as ‘ä’ are pronounced
as the ‘uh’ sound in the word
‘duck’. Thus, the name Kaobawä would
be pronounced ‘cow-ba-wuh,’ but entirely
nasalized.
2. I spent a total of 60 months among the
Yanomamö between 1964 and 1991.
The first edition of this case study was
based on the first 15 months I spent
among them in Venezuela. I have, at the
time of this writing, made 20 field trips
to the Yanomamö and this edition reflects
the new information and understandings
I have acquired over the years.
I plan to return regularly to continue
what has now turned into a lifelong
study.
3. See Spindler (1970) for a general discussion
of field research by anthropologists
who have worked in other cultures.
Nancy Howell has recently written a
very useful book (1990) on some of the
medical, personal, and environmental
hazards of doing field research, which
includes a selected bibliography on
other fieldwork programs.
4. They could not pronounce “Chagnon.”
It sounded to them like their name for a
pesky bee, shaki, and that is what they
called me: pesky, noisome bee.
5. The Yanomamö in this region acquired
canoes very recently. The missionaries
would purchase them from the Ye’kwana
Indians to the north for money, and then
trade them to the Yanomamö in exchange
for labor, produce, or ‘informant’
work in translating. It should be emphasized
that those Yanomamö who lived on
navigable portions of the Upper Orinoco
River moved there recently from the deep
forest in order to have contact with the
missionaries and acquire the trade goods
the missionaries (and their supply system)
brought.
6. Rarely were there actual brothers or sisters.
In Yanomamö kinship classifications,
certain kinds of cousins are
classified as siblings. See Chapter 4.
7. Over time, as I became more and more
‘accepted’ by the Yanomamö, they became
less and less concerned about my
genealogical inquiries and now, provide
me with this information quite willingly
because I have been very discrete with
it. Now, when I revisit familiar villages
I am called aside by someone who whispers
to me things like, “Don’t ask about
so-and-so’s father.”
Excerpted from “Doing Fieldwork among the Yanomamö” from Yanomamö: The Fierce People by Napolean A. Chagnon, 1992, Fourth Edition, pp.
5–31. © 1992 by Holt, Rinehart, and Winston. Reprinted by permission.