Noble Savages (eBook)

My Life Among Two Dangerous Tribes -- the Yanomamo and the Anthropologists

Napoleon A. Chagnon (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2013 | 1. Auflage
544 Seiten
Simon & Schuster (Verlag)
978-1-4516-1147-2 (ISBN)

Infos

ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT SCIENTIFIC MEMOIRS OF OUR TIME
When Napoleon Chagnon arrived in Venezuela's Amazon region in 1964 to study the Yanomam Indians, one of the last large tribal groups still living in isolation, he expected to find Rousseau's 'noble savages,' so-called primitive people living contentedly in a pristine state of nature. Instead Chagnon discovered a remarkably violent society. Men who killed others had the most wives and offspring, their violence possibly giving them an evolutionary advantage. The prime reasons for violence, Chagnon found, were to avenge deaths and, if possible, abduct women.
When Chagnon began publishing his observations, some cultural anthropologists who could not accept an evolutionary basis for human behavior refused to believe them. Chagnon became perhaps the most famous American anthropologist since Margaret Mead--and the most controversial. He was attacked in a scathing popular book, whose central allegation that he helped start a measles epidemic among the Yanomam was quickly disproven, and the American Anthropological Association condemned him, only to rescind its condemnation after a vote by the membership. Throughout his career Chagnon insisted on an evidence-based scientific approach to anthropology, even as his professional association dithered over whether it really is a scientific organization. In Noble Savages, Chagnon describes his seminal fieldwork--during which he lived among the Yanomam, was threatened by tyrannical headmen, and experienced an uncomfortably close encounter with a jaguar--taking readers inside Yanomam villages to glimpse the kind of life our distant ancestors may have lived thousands of years ago. And he forcefully indicts his discipline of cultural anthropology, accusing it of having traded its scientific mission for political activism.
This book, like Chagnon's research, raises fundamental questions about human nature itself.

Textauszug

1 Excerpt from: NOBLE SAVAGES: My Life Among Two Dangerous Tribes--The Yanomam and the Anthropologists By Napoleon A. Chagnon 1 Culture Shock My First Year in the Field The First Day My first day in the field--November 28, 1964--was an experience I'll never forget. I had never seen so much green snot before then. Not many anthropologists spend their first day this way. If they did, there would be very few applicants to graduate programs in anthropology. I had traveled in a small aluminum rowboat propelled by a large outboard motor for two and a half days, cramped in with several extra fifty-five-gallon gasoline barrels and two Venezuelan functionaries who worked for the Malarialoga, the Venezuelan malaria control service. They were headed to their tiny outpost in Yanomam territory--two or three thatched huts. This boat trip took me from the territorial capital, Puerto Ayacucho, a small town on the Orinoco River, into Yanomam country on the High Orinoco some 350 miles upstream. I was making a quick trip to have a look-see before I brought my main supplies and equipment for a seventeen-month study of the Yanomam Indians, a Venezuelan tribe that was very poorly known in 1964. Most of their villages had no contact with the outside world and were considered to be 'wild' Indians. I also wanted to see how things at the field site would be for my wife, Carlene, and two young children, Darius (three years old) and Lisa (eighteen months old). On the morning of the third day we reached a small mission settlement called Tama Tama, the field 'headquarters' of a group of mostly American evangelical missionaries, the New Tribes Mission, who were working in two Yanomam villages farther upstream and in several villages of the Carib-speaking Ye'kwana, a different tribe located northwest of the Yanomam. The missionaries had come out of these remote Indian villages to hold a conference on the progress of their mission work and were conducting their meetings at Tama Tama when I arrived. Tama Tama was about a half day by motorized dugout canoe downstream from where the Yanomam territory began. We picked up a passenger at Tama Tama, James P. Barker, the first outsider to make a sustained, permanent contact with the Venezuelan Yanomam in 1950. He had just returned from a year's furlough in the United States, where I had briefly visited him in Chicago before we both left for Venezuela. As luck would have it, we both arrived in Venezuela at about the same time, and in Yanomam territory the same week. He was a bit surprised to see me and happily agreed to accompany me to the village I had selected (with his advice) for my base of operations, Bisaasi-teri, and to introduce me to the Indians. I later learned that bisaasi was the name of the palm whose leaves were used in the large roofs of many Yanomam villages: -teri is the Yanomam word that means 'village.' Bisaasi-teri was also his own home base, but he had not been there for over a year and did not plan to come back permanently for another three months. He therefore welcomed this unexpected opportunity to make a quick overnight visit before he returned permanently. Barker had been living with this particular Yanomam group about four years at that time. Bisaasi-teri had divided into two villages when the village moved to the mouth of the Mavaca River, where it flows into the Orinoco from the south. One group was downstream and was called Lower Bisaasi-teri (koro-teri) and the other was upstream and called Upper Bisaasi-teri...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 19.2.2013
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Biografien / Erfahrungsberichte
• Themenwelt: Sachbuch/Ratgeber ► Natur / Technik
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Ethnologie
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Politik / Verwaltung
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie
• ISBN-10: 1-4516-1147-1 / 1451611471
• ISBN-13: 978-1-4516-1147-2 / 9781451611472