Week 5 - Venezuela 2 (Yanomami)

PARTS 1 and 2. The Yanomami Indians: Fierce People or Fierce Anthropology?

Associated Readings

1. Peter Winn, selections from Chapter 7 of Americas (“Children of the Sun”), pp. 250-254 (2006)
2. Robert Borofsky, Front matter and Chapters 1-3 of Yanomami: The Fierce Controversy and What We Can Learn from It, pp. 1-52 (2005)
3. Robert Borofsky, Chapters 4-7 of Yanomami: The Fierce Controversy and What We Can Learn from It, pp. 53-106 (2005)
4. Gustavo Lins Ribeiro and Paul Little, “Neoliberal Recipes, Environmental Cooks: The Transformation of Amazonian Agency,” from The Third Wave of Modernization in Latin America, pp. 175-192 (1998)

Introduction
If you’re an anthropology major, there’s a good chance you’ve already heard of the Yanomami (also called the Yanomamo; either name is aok).  With a population of more than 20,000, they are one of the largest indigenous societies in Latin America.  Since contact with the outside world was relatively recent (roughly, the 1960s), they have been of immense interest to anthropologists as an example of "pristine" tribal society.  (This notion of "pristine" is problematic, and we'll interrogate it later on.)  For this and other reasons we'll discuss later on, various aspects of Yanomami life in the Amazon rainforest have been heavily studied by anthropologists.  My discussion of the Yanomami is divided into three parts.  First, we’ll get to know them as an anthropological case study, focusing on their “traditional” cultural practices, including subsistence mode, residence pattern, political organization, and kinship structures.  Then, we’ll consider the implications of  various forms of contact the Yanomami have faced from the outside world roughly since the 1960s.  Finally, we’ll focus on a major controversy involving the Yanomami, a world-renowned geneticist, and one of the most well-known cultural anthropologists of the late 20th century.

I. The Yanomami:  Introduction to a Tribal Amazonian Culture

Where Do They Live?
The Yanomami live in some 300 villages spread out over the tropical Amazonian rainforest of southern Venezuela and northern Brazil.  You can see where they are concentrated on the following image:



Residence Patterns

The Yanomami live in villages usually consisting of their children and extended families. Village sizes vary, but usually contain between 50 and 400 people. In this largely communal system, the entire village lives under a common roof called the “shabono.”  Shabonos are oval shaped, with open grounds in the center about 100 yards long.  Here's what a shabono looks like:




Under the roof, individual houses and spaces are partitioned by vertical support posts. Shabonos are built from raw materials from the surrounding jungles, such as leaves, vines and tree trunks. They are susceptible to heavy damage from rains, winds, and insect infestation. As a result, villagers build new shabonos every couple of years.

Subsistence Pattern
For those of you new to anthropology, allow me to introduce the term "subsistence pattern."  In essence, this term refers to the way a given society makes use of resources in its environment to survive and otherwise "get by."  In anthropology, five broadly defined subsistence patterns are recognized.  These are:

1. Hunting and gathering (also known as foraging) - when no crops or animals are grown, but instead a society depends entirely on what is naturally available "in the wild" (e.g., fruits, nuts, roots, and vegetable which can be gathered and meat and game which can be hunted); can support relatively small groups of people.
2. Horticulture - small-scale gardening, no use of irrigation or fertilizer, so production is neither continuous nor intensive. Typically involves "slash and burn" techniques, that is, clearing a parcel of rainforest by burning its contents, using the parcel until the soil loses its nutritive capacity, and then abandoning it.  (Although this sounds "not green-friendly," it is actually a very sustainable form of subsistence as long as there is enough land for abandoned plots to have sufficient time (typically ten years) to regenerate.  Horticulture can support larger populations than foraging, but not as large as cities.
3. Pastoralism.  Relying primarily on animal protein from herded animals (typically cattle, sheep or goats) for survival.
4. Agriculture.  The defining characteristic of agriculture is its use of fertilizer and irrigation which allows it to be both intensive and continuous (year-round).  Most agricultural societies focus on one primary crop (for example, rice, wheat, or soy beans).  This is called "monocrop production."  Very labor-intensive but can support quite large populations, including state-level societies and cities.
5. Industrialism.  Includes industrial agriculture and factory production.

While the Yanomami do some foraging, most of their nutritional input comes from horticulture, as defined above.  Their primary horticultural crops are plantains (similar to bananas) and cassava, although they gather naturally available fruits and berries from the rainforest and hunt animals and fish as well.  Typically, each village has its own garden.  The Yanomami frequently move to avoid areas that become overused, a practice known as shifting cultivation when the soil becomes exhausted.  The Yanomami celebrate a good harvest with a massive feast to which nearby villages are invited. In this way, food helps to maintain good relations with their neighbors.

Social Organization
Children stay close to their mothers when young; most of the childrearing is done by women. The Yanomami traditionally practice polygyny (men can have more than one wife), though many unions are monogamous. Polygamous families consisted of a large patrifocal family unit based on one man, and smaller matrifocal subfamilies: each woman's family unit, composed of the woman and her children. Life in the village is centered around the small, matrilocal family unit, whereas the larger patrilocal unit has more political importance beyond the village.

Political Organization
Each Yanomami village has a "village headman."  This isn't a hereditary position -- one isn't born into it.  Rather, a man who achieves prestige through his skills as a warrior, as an effective speaker, and as generous in his offerings to community feasts may become accepted as the headman.  More about the position of village head:

1. It comes with very limited authority:  He cannot force or coerce people to do things.  Rather, he can only persuade, harangue, and try to influence people to do things.
2. The village head acts as a mediator in disputes, but he has no authority to back his decision or impose punishments.
3. The village head must lead in generosity: He must be more generous, which means he must cultivate more land.  He also hosts feasts for other villages.

One of the reasons the Yanomami have been of interest to anthropologists is their extremely high level of inter-village warfare and their high rate of homicide.  Indeed, based on estimates from anthropological accounts, fully 25% of adults die from warfare.  (Typically, the causes of warfare are a sexual affair or one village's failure to deliver a woman for marriage to a man from another village.)  These statistics led anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon to call the Yanomami "the fierce people"--and this label has stuck.


Now, you might ask yourself, why should we care about warfare among the Yanomami?  What's the big deal?  To come at an answer to this question, consider your own view of "human nature."  Do you believe people are "naturally" peaceful and it is only society that drives people to violence?  Or, do you think humans are innately selfish, aggressive, and inclined to violence, and it is only society that teaches us to be "civilized"?  As a rare instance of a society with minimal contact with western civilization until recently, the Yanomami--for better or worse--have been seen as providing a "purer" view of human nature.  In the West, they have been taken as a symbol of what life is like beyond the pale of “civilization.”  Their high level of violence and warfare has been used (including by Chagnon) as evidence of an inherently violent and aggressive human disposition.  Since Chagnon's earliest publications in the 1970s, this argument has been extremely controversial.  Meanwhile, Chagnon's ethnographic monographs have become bestsellers.

II. The Consequences of Contact:  Challenges to Yanomami Livelihood




Until the 1980s, contact with the Yanomami was rare.  The discovery of gold on Yanomami land midway through that decade changed everything.  Within just a couple of years, miners flocked to southern Venezuela and northern Brazil, setting up mining operations through the illegal occupation of indigenous land.  These operations require laborers, and so have attracted droves of poor people from other regions to come to Yanomami lands to work in the mines.


I have prepared a short (half-hour) film, "Contact: The Yanomamo Indians of Brazil,” which provides a good (if troubling) introduction to the changes the Yanomami have faced since the 1980s due to the incursion of miners.  (The film is viewable under the "Videos" tab on Bb.)  To catch the key moments from the film, I have also prepared a short set of "viewing questions" below.  Read them over and scribble (or type) notes and possible answers as you are watching the film.  These notes are crucial to grasping what's important in this story.

Viewing Questions
1) It is useful to map out the various social actors represented in this film.  Look for each of the following:
 
a. The Yanomami, including their shaman, women and children.
b. The Miners (garimpeiros)
c. The Nurse (who speaks in English)
d. Politicians, including the country executive
e. The representative of the National Indian Foundation (FUNAI)
f. The market vendors
g. Activists at the Alta Mira summit




2) What have the Yanomami adopted from outsiders and incorporated into their ways of obtaining food? What Western tools do the Yanomami now use to hunt, fish, and gather crops?

3) What have the effects of mining been on the Yanomami’s subsistence economy?

4) What are the effects on the environment in general? Are there new ways of obtaining food that have come about as a result of the miners' invasion? Have miners influence ways in which food transactions are conducted (bartering vs. begging, exchange)? Have the miners introduced new foods?

5) How do the miners see the Indians? How do they perceive themselves in relation to the Indians? Do they think they are influencing the Indians in positive or negative ways, or a combination of both? Explain.

6) How do the Yanomami perceive the miners? Does more than one viewpoint exist, as shown in the film? What are Yanomami views about taking things from outsiders? Are they unanimously in favor? If not, what kinds of individuals are opposed? Why?

7) How has mining affected Yanomami health? What new diseases have they brought? Why are these so devastating? To what do the Yanomami traditionally attribute disease? In what ways are their views of disease similar or different from Western understandings? How have outsiders and their diseases changed the ways that Yanomami understand disease? cure disease? How, according to Yanomami thinking, are illnesses cured and what role do Western medicines have?




Activism
Toward the end of the film, we see an impressive example of organized political struggle in the form of the five-day Altamira conference held in 1989.  Here we see a different side of indigenous experience.  Rather than passive victims of the greed of the miners, Indians are shown to be creative, media-savvy, and united in their resistance to outside incursions.  The conference was organized and led by the Kayapó Indians, a group with much more experience with outsiders than the Yanomami, and well-known for their unusually effective negotiations and resistance strategies.  (The Kayapó, for example, have negotiated a deal with The Body Shop to sell Brazil nut oil from their lands.)


Environmentalism
So far, our discussion of Yanomami experiences with outsiders has focused on miners.  More recently, tensions have arose around a different set of interests, which we can broadly refer to as "environmental."  (The key text here is the assigned reading by Peter Little and Gustavo Lins-Ribeiro.)  The aim of this short article is to disabuse us of a naive vision of environmentalism.  Environmentalism, they argue, is not a simple "concern for the environment" which can (and should) be applied anywhere in the world where there is a threat.  Instead, environmentalism is a discourse -- a way of expressing ideas -- that serves the interests of different segments of society.  The segments that make use of environmentalism discourses are:

•    the state
•    multilateral and bilateral financing agencies
•    national and int’l NGOs
•    local populations
•    market-oriented actors



Since each segment is looking after their own interests, their use of environmentalism discourses is inherently political and inevitably gives rise to tension and disagreement.


According to the authors, the ways each sector expresses its concern over "the environment" vary.  As it turns out, there are three variations on how such concerns are expressed -- three "discourses of environmentalism," if you will.  These are:

1)    Amazonia is the world’s largest rainforest, and must be saved
2)    Amazonia is home to traditional peoples, whose livelihood is threatened
3)    Amazonia has the highest biodiversity levels in the world; these must be preserved


These three discourses might sound reasonable to you.  But consider a situation in which Yanomami Indians are asked by international "green" organizations to cease their traditional practice of slash-and-burn horticulture on the grounds that it contributes to deforestation (discourse #1).  In your discussion board postings for this week, you'll have the opportunity to consider this set of issues in more depth.

III.  The Fierce Controversy 

Robert Borofsky's book, Yanomami: The Fierce Controversy and What We Can Learn From It and José Padilha's 2010 film "Secrets of the Tribe" tell the disturbing, complicated, and at times entertaining story of anthropology's engagement with the Yanomami since the 1960s.  The anthropologist who receives the lion's share of Borofsky's attention is Napoleon Chagnon, mentioned in Section I above.  Borofsky also gives due attention to genetics researcher James Neel, whose grants to study measles among Amazonian populations helped fund Chagnon's early investigations as well.  "Secrets of the Tribe" focuses almost exclusively on anthropologists and provides provocative and at times chilling accounts of other anthropologists' engagements with the Yanomami, including Jacques Lizot and Kenneth Good.  While Chagnon's research and conclusions had been questioned for some time, it wasn't until the 2000 publication of journalist Patrick Tierney's Darkness in El Dorado: How Scientists and Journalists Devastated the Amazon that the so-called "fierce controversy" came to occupy center stage in U.S. anthropology.  If you haven't already, read the Borofsky text and watch "Secrets of the Tribe" now.