Cultural Traditions of the Yanomamo Tribe - Essay Example

"I looked up and gasped when I saw a dozen burly, naked, filthy, 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 noses." That's how Napoleon A. Chagnon described his first encounter with the Yanomamo, one of the most primitive tribes on the planet. They were practically unknown to the outside world before the 1960s, when Chagnon journeyed to the wild borderlands of Brazil and Venezuela to live among them. The Yanomamo people of Central Brazil are one of the oldest examples of the classic pre-Columbian forest footmen. The Yanomami comprise a society of hunter-agriculturists of the tropical rainforest of Northern Amazonia, whose contact with non-indigenous society over the most part of their territory has been relatively recent. Their territory covers an area of approximately 192,000 km2, located on both sides of the border between Brazil and Venezuela, in the Orinoco-Amazon interfluvial region. They communicate in various dialects but have No written language. The total population of the Yanomami in Brazil and Venezuela is today estimated to be around 26,000 people. The Yanomamo exist in small bands or tribes and reside in round communal huts. The Yanomami local groups are generally made up of a multifamily house in the shape of a cone or truncated cone called yano or xapono, which are actually made up of individual living quarters or by villages composed of rectangular-type houses .Each collective house or village considers itself an autonomous economic and political entity (kami theri yamaki, 'we co-residents') . The village is the basic sociopolitical unit and is occupied by several extended families, composed of nuclear family households. The founding nucleus of such a village consists of two intermarried pairs of brothers, their sisters or wives and their descendants. The two resulting lineages exchange their women, thus creating a number of affinal alliances. As additional lineage groups join the village community and intermarry with members of the original lineage, political pressures and internal factionalism frequently lead to the splitting apart of the village and the establishment of a completely new community. These small tribes hold their men in high ranks. Chiefs are always men who are held responsible for the general knowledge and safety of the group's women. The males are permitted to beat their wives if they feel the need to and can marry more than one woman at a time. This loose form of polygamy is a way of increasing the population of the tribe.Each village has its own headman (pata), and one pata is usually more influential than the others. Migliazza (1972: 415) claims that the position of chief or headman is not really inherited, but is dependent on the chief having many living agnatic relatives and the ability to assert himself among them. There is some indication, however, that the office was once inherited patrilineally from father to son or from elder brother to younger brother. During times of war, a man with experience in combat was often chosen to act as war chief, an office which was not hereditary and which became inactive when hostilities ceased. Marriage among the Yanoama serves to bind non-agnatically related groups of males to one another in a system of exchanges involving goods, services, and the promise of a reciprocal exchange of women at a later date. All Yanoama groups, as well as their Carib neighbors, have bifurcate Merging kinship terminology for the first ascending generation, accompanied by Iroquoian cousin terminology. Patrilineal descent and agnatic relationships are considered more important than matrilineal relatives. Clans and moieties have apparently never existed among the Yanoama, but lineages have been mentioned by Chagnon (1971). In his analysis of the kinship system, Chagnon affords a central place to the local descent group-basically a lineage segment, consisting of agnatically related co-resident kinsmen, usually restricted to two generations in depth. The Yanomamo are organized into named localized lineage groupings on the basis of patrilineal descent. Lineage groups are quite shallow and small. They seldom extend beyond three adult generations (the descendants of a single great-grandfather) or include as many as 100 members. Generational depth and group size are limited by the frequent segmentation. Division usually occurs because of disputes between cousins over rights to women who are due to marry into the group in the system of exchange marriage. Ensuing fights lead to internal violence, separation of segments (usually groups of brothers), and relocation to new settlement and farming locations. The newly formed daughter lineages retain no ties with each other and are normally opposed as enemies. Genealogical connections are fogotten with the passing of the generations because of a stipulation forbidding the mention of the names of the dead and, thereby, of any connecting ancestral links (Chagnon 1983). Lineages function as territorial units, inhabiting a common settlement and normally foster mutual cooperation and support among their members, often focusing on organizing alliances and battles in a cycle of endemic warfare. Their central dynamics are set in motion by their role in the marriage exchange system. They are exogamous and their members consult jointly in the selection of marriage partners for their sons and daughters within the web of marriage exhanges with allied lineage groups. The marriage system normally acts to construct regular relationship between pairs of lineages who regularly intermarry through a system of bilateral cross cousin marriage. Intermarrying units tend to pair off and exclusively occupy the same village, thereby generating a moiety system. Members from other lineages may also reside in the village and marry within it, but two intermarrying moieties will usually dominate the settlement both numerically and socially. When lineages segment they usually include their closest affines when migrating to a new settlement, thereby reproducing the moiety structure. Yanomamo lineages may be said to exert a limited range of corporate functions through collective rights to marry off their women and claim wives in exchange within the marriage system. Beyond this, the group does not manage joint assets, such as land, that frequently assume importance in other unilineal societies. Ties between husband and wife are weak, but those between a man and his sister's husband are contrastingly strong. Brother-sister exchanges and cross-cousin marriages are the preferred pattern, and, at least ideally, the Yanoama have a prescriptive bilateral cross-cousin marriage rule. its members ideally prefer to marry inside this community of kin with a 'cross' cousin, that is the son or daughter of a maternal uncle or paternal aunt. This type of marriage is reproduced as far as possible between the families in a generation and from generation to generation, making the collective Yanomami house or village a dense and comfortable mesh of consanguine and affinal bonds. However, despite this ideal autarchy, all local groups maintain a network of relations of matrimonial, ceremonial and economic exchange with various nearby groups, considered allies in opposition to other multicommunity groupings of the same nature. These groupings partially overlap to form a complex sociopolitical nexus, which links the totality of Yanomami collective houses and villages from one end of the indigenous territory to the other. Postnuptial residence is temporarily matrilocal, with the groom joining the household of the bride's parents, where he rendersthem bride service for some time. Later, residence can be with the husband's family or wherever the husband chooses. Should the husband die, the woman is remarried to his brother. If he has no brothers,then after a year she can remarry any of her eligible tribesmen. Polygyny is a common practice among the Yanoama, and is frequently sororal. Yanomamo people rely heavily on a system of political alliances based upon kinship. As part of that system, they have incorporated an intricate feasting and trading system into their culture. The Yanomamo live in a constant state of warfare with other tribes and even within their own groups. Marriages are often arranged according to performances of one's relatives in battles. Ideal marriages are thought to consist of cross cousin marriages and are performed by the males of the family and the religious leaders of the tribe. In addition to their strong kinship ties, political alliances and thirst for revenge, the Yanomamo have a detailed religion, based on the use of hallucinogenic drugs and the telling of mythical tales. "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". The space of the forest used by each Yanomami house-village can be described schematically as a series of concentric circles. These circles delimit areas with distinct modes and intensity of usage. The first circle, within a five kilometer radius, circumscribes the area of immediate use by the community; small-scale female gathering, individual fishing or, in the summer, collective fishing with timb poison, occasional brief hunting trips (at dawn or dusk) and agricultural activities. The second circle, within a five to ten kilometer radius, is the area of individual hunting (rama huu) and day-to-day family food gathering. The third circle, within a ten to twenty kilometer radius, is the area used for the collective hunt expeditions (henimou) lasting one to two weeks that precede the funerary rituals (cremation of bones, burial or ingestion of ashes during the intercommunity reahu ceremonies), as well as the long multifamily hunting and gathering expeditions (three to six weeks) during the period when the new swiddens are ripening (waima huu). Also found in this 'third circle' are new and old swiddens: here, people make occasional encampments nearby in order to cultivate the former and harvest the latter, as well as hunt the abundant game in the vicinity Read More