Yanomamo

As one of the most famous of all cultures in anthropology and beyond, the Yanomami are ethnographic celebrities. They are a large population of indigenous people living in a vast area of some 192,000 square kilometers in the Amazon rain forest. The heart of their homeland is the Sierra Parima, part of the Guyana Highlands, the mountainous divide between the watersheds of the two most famous rivers of the Amazon region, the Orinoco and the Amazon itself. Their territory overlaps the border between northwestern Brazil and southeastern Venezuela. Some21,000 Yanomami reside in 363 scattered communities that range in size from 30 to 90 individuals with a few reaching more than 200 in size. Although very little archaeological research has been conducted in the area, two other independent lines of evidence, linguistics and blood group genetics, indicate that the Yanomami have been a separate population for 2,000 years. Their language remains classified as independent, unrelated to any others on the continent of South America.

Surely among the reasons for their survival for millennia is one of the most outstanding attributes that distinguishes this unique culture, reciprocity. It is a pivotal social principle applied in almost every aspect of their daily life, and most commonly through kindness, sharing, cooperation, and camaraderie. However, this principle is also applied in resolving disputes, occasionally even through violence between individuals, groups, or villages. In various ways reciprocity extends beyond ordinary life to their relationships with the spiritual component of their world as well. For example, every Yanomami hunter has a counterpart in the form of an animal spirit in the forest that he cannot kill without seriously endangering himself. The unity, interconnectedness, and interdependence of all life is a fundamental tenet of the religion and philosophy of the Yanomami, another expression of reciprocity.

The Yanomami world is intensely intimate, socially and ecologically. Traditionally people dwell together in a big, palm leaf thatched, communal, round house with a large open central plaza. Their egalitarian society is structured primarily along lines of kinship. In this communal shelter, the hammocks of each nuclear or extended family are arranged around a hearth along the back perimeter. Each village is [Page 2348]relatively autonomous politically with a charismatic headman who can lead only by persuasion in developing a consensus. There is no chief or other authority uniting more than one community, let alone Yanomami society as a whole, although alliances with several other villages are common for economic, social, and political purposes. In Yanomami society the units of residence, kinship, and politics are not isomorphic, but overlap in diverse, complex, and fluid ways. This dynamic is mirrored by the subsistence economy that entails almost daily forays into the surrounding forest for gardening, hunting, fishing, and gathering. Accordingly, individuals accumulate an extensive detailed knowledge of the ecology of their habitat from such regular intimate experience.

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Yanomami society successfully adapted to the diverse terra firme (interfluvial) forest ecosystems within its territory for two millennia. They developed an ecologically sustainable society in terms of their low population density; limited interest in material culture; high mobility; rotational subsistence economy; environmental knowledge; and worldview, values, and attitudes. They practice a rotational system of land and resource use not only in their shifting or swidden farming, but also in their hunting, fishing, and gathering. The last three activities emphasize extensive trekking several times a year when they may camp in the forest for a week to a month or so at a time. Their environmental knowledge includes well over a hundred species of wild plants that they use for food, medicinal, and other purposes. Furthermore, their worldview, values, and attitudes usually help promote respect for nature. For instance, they have a system of extensive prohibitions on consuming certain animal species, some of which apply to everyone in the community whereas others are specific to individual circumstances. These food taboos reduce pressure on prey species. Thus, after millennia of use the forest and its wildlife remain intact. The sustainability of traditional Yanomami society is no romantic illusion.

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