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The Yanomamo are one of the best-known forest tribes in South America. Their home is in the Amazon rainforest, among the hills that line the border between Brazil and Venezuela.

The Yanomami or yanomamos are Native Americans of South America. Most of the information in this article describes a Yanomami way of life that existed prior to the 1960s. Sustained contact with government officials, the market system, miners, missionaries, journalists, anthropologists and others has led to significant changes to this way of life.

Contents 1 Domestic life, clothing and diet 2 Yanomami 3 Violence 3.1 Haximu Massacre 4 Other notes 5 Situation 6 See also 7 References 8 Further reading

As with many other native Americans of tropical South America, the Yanomami traditionally wore minimal clothing. The sole exception to this was a string-like belt worn by the men, worn underneath the stomach. Traditionally the women wore no clothing at all

The children stay close to their mother; most of the childrearing is done by women. The Yanomami practiced polygamy (though many unions were monogamous). Polygamous families consisted of a large patrifocal family unit based on one man, and smaller matrifocal sub-families: each woman's family unit, composed of the woman and her children. Life within the village is centered more around the small, matrilocal family unit.

The Yanomami are known as hunters, fishers, and horticulturists, cultivating as their main crops plantains and cassava in "gardens", areas of the forest cleared for cultivation. Another food source of the Yanomami are giant grubs, sometimes the size of baby rodents, cultivated in rotten logs and cooked directly on a fire after the head is bitten off and innards pulled out. ^[1] Traditionally they did not farm, and the practice of felling palms in order to facilitate the growth of the grubs was the Yanomami's closest approach to cultivation. The traditional Yanomami diet is famously low in salt and their blood pressure is among the lowest of any demographic group on the planet. ^[2] The Yanomami have thus been made the subject of studies seeking to link hypertension to sodium consumption.

The Yanomami celebrate a good harvest with a big feast to which nearby villages are invited. The Yanomami members gather huge amounts of food, which helps to maintain good relations with their neighbours. They also decorate their bodies with feathers and flowers. During the feast the Yanomami eat a lot and the women dance and sing late into the night.

In the Yanomamö language, Gŭycan, (not to be confused with the related Yanomámi language), if a vowel is phonemically nasalized, all vowels after it in the word are also nasalized. So if the ogonek is written under the first vowel, the whole word is nasalized. All the vowels in "Yanomami" are nasal, but it is unclear whether they are phonemically nasal or nasal just because of the nasal consonants. Also, consonants can be accented with the closing of the epiglottis to form a 'flat' sounding consonant; an example of this is 'Maţ' (epiglottis closed) meaning 'bone', while 'Mat' (quasi-soft 't' sound with an open throat) means 'rain'. There are many different variations and dialects of the language, such that people from different villages cannot always understand each other. The Yanomami language is believed by linguists to be unrelated to all other South American indigenous languages, and indeed the origins of the language are unknown.

It should be noted that "Yanomamö" is not what the Yanomamö call themselves, but is rather a word in their language meaning "man," adopted by American anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon as a convenient way to refer to the culture and by extension the people.

More than a third of the Yanomamo males, on average, died from warfare.^[3] Men who participated in killings had more wives and children than those who did not.^[4] Some Yanomamo men, however, reflected on the futility of their feuds and made it known that they would have nothing to do with the raiding.^[4] These findings, originally reported by Chagnon, have been empirically replicated several times.^[5]

The accounts of missionaries to the area have recounted constant infighting in the tribes for women or prestige, and evidence of continuous warfare for the enslavement of neighboring tribes such as the Macu before the arrival of European settlers and government.

Violence among the Yanomami is often domestic, with women commonly beaten by their husbands in disputes. ^[6] Justifiably or not, their violent reputation has also seeped into popular culture. The food critic Jeffrey Steingarten characterized the Yanomami people as "a bunch of bloodthirsty maniacs," whimsically speculating that their purportedly brutal behavior might be attributed to a deficiency of table salt ^[7]. This reputation for violence also extended to the fictionalised depiction of the tribe in Ruggero Deodato's controversial film Cannibal Holocaust.

In a news letter published on 7 August 2006 the Indianist Missionary Council reported that: "In a plenary session, the [Brazilian] Supreme Federal Court (STF) reaffirmed that the crime known as the Haximu massacre [perpetrated on the Yanomami in 1993]^[8] was a genocide and that the decision of a federal court to sentence miners to 19 years in prison for genocide in connection with other offenses, such as smuggling and illegal mining, is valid. It was a unanimous decision made during the judgment of Extraordinary Appeal (RE) 351487 today, the 3rd, in the morning by justices of the Supreme Court".^[9] Commenting on the case the NGO Survival International said "The UN convention on genocide, ratified by Brazil, states that the killing 'with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group' is genocide. The Supreme ruling is highly significant and sends an important warning to those who continue to commit crimes against indigenous peoples in Brazil."^[8]

The Yanomami Indians have lived in the borderlands between Brazil and Venezuela for millennia.

They live in villages, formed of a circular house which is open in the middle where feasts, etc., are celebrated. Those houses are called yanos, shabonos or malocas, and every member of the tribe lives here.

The Yanomamis are dependent upon the forest; they use "Slash-and-burn" horticulture, grow bananas, fish, gather fruit and hunt animals. Yanomami Indians move around a lot to avoid that areas become overused — a practice known as shifting cultivation.

A curious cultural practice of the Yanomami is the manner in which menstruation is treated. In the Yanomami language, the word for menstruation is "kuduru," meaning "to squat." Menstruating women assume a squatting position, allowing menstrual fluid to drip onto the ground rather than using absorbent materials to contain the menstrual flow ^[10].^{[citation needed]}

In the mid-70s, golddiggers and garimpeiros started to invade the Yanomami country. They killed members of the Yanomami tribe and stole their land. 1990 had more than 40,000 garimpeiros enter the Yanomami land^{[citation needed]}. In 1992 the president of Brazil, Collor de Melo accepted the opening of a Yanomami Park that was founded by Brazilian anthropologists and Survival International--a project that started in the early 70s. Today, non-Yanomami continue to enter the land. The Brazilian and Venezuelan governments do not have enforcement programs to prevent the entry of outsiders into this land^{[citation needed]}.

A Yanomami village is featured in the first episode of 'Last One Standing (TV program)', where the chief permits six Westerners to learn traditional Yanomami wrestling (a brutal sport with some similarity to Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu) and use their newly developed skills in a competition with warriors from other villages. In this same episode, rare glimpses of Yanomami shamanism are seen when the tribe's medicine man (correctly) predicts the winning Westerner, and uses healing techniques on the same man when he suffers from a sore throat.

A fictional tribe featured in the movie Cannibal Holocaust (1981) was named after the Yanomami.

In Amazonia, by James Rollins, a Yanomami village is where the book starts.

Heinz Kindlimann had the opportunity to visit the Yanomamis in the 1960's, he lived with them a long time. 40 years later he went back again and he was astonished how much had changed.

Gold was recently found in Yanomami territory and the inevitable influx of miners brought disease, alcoholism, and violence. Yanomami culture was severely endangered, and has been protected by the Brazilian and Venezuelan national park services with donations from the First World.

Ethical controversy has arisen concerning Yanomami blood taken by scientists such as Napoleon Chagnon and his associate James Neel for study. Yanomami religious tradition prohibits the keeping of any bodily matter after the death of that person, but the donors were not warned that blood samples would be kept indefinitely for experimentation. Several prominent Yanomami delegations have sent letters to scientists experimenting on the blood, demanding its return, and while the scientists have promised to return or destroy the samples, years have passed without confirmed action.

Members of the American Anthropological Association, weighed in on a dispute that has divided their discipline, voted 846 to 338 to rescind a 2002 report on allegations of misconduct by scholars studying the Yanomami indigenous people. The dispute has raged since Patrick Tierney published Darkness in El Dorado in 2000. The book charged that anthropologists had repeatedly caused harm — and in some cases, death — to members of the Yanomami people they had studied in the 1960s in Venezuela and Brazil.^[11]

• Darkness in El Dorado
• Visual anthropology
• Tim Asch
• Yanoama: The Story of Helena Valero, a Girl Kidnapped by Amazonian Indians
• Documentary, director Rob Smits visits the Yanoama Indians

1. ^ Chagnon, Napoleon, Yanomamo: The Fifth Edition
2. ^ Yanomami Indians in the INTERSALT study (accessed14 January 2007)
3. ^ Keeley: War before civilization: The myth of the peaceful savage
4. ^ ^{a b} (Chagnon 1998; Chagnon 1992)
5. ^ (Ember, 1978; Keeley, 1996; Knauft, 1987)
6. ^ Chagnon, Napoleon. Yanomamo: Fifth Edition. Thompson Learning. 1997. p. 124-5.
7. ^ Steingarten, Jeffery. This view is a wild guess and should not be taken very seriously. The Man Who Ate Everything (Paperback). Vintage Books. 1997. p 202.
8. ^ ^{a b} Supreme Court upholds genocide ruling, Survival International 4 August 2006
9. ^ Federal Court is competent to judge the Haximu genocide Indianist Missionary Council
10. ^ Chagnon, Napoleon, Yanomamo: The Fifth Edition
11. ^ http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2005/06/29/anthro

• Yanomami Myths and Legends
• Dennison Berwick, "Savages, The Life And Killing of the Yanomani" [1]
• Napoleon Chagnon, The Yanomamo (Formerly subtitled "The Fierce People")
• Kenneth Good, Into the Heart
• Jacques Lizot, Tales of the Yanomamo
• Wiliam Milliken and Bruce Albert, Yanomami: A Forest People
• Arnold Perey, How Much Feeling? Includes discussion of the life of Fusiwe, a Yanomama head man
  • Part 2
  • Part 3
• Alcida Ramos, Sanuma Memories
• Dirk Wittenborn, Fierce People
• Redmond O'Hanlon, "In Trouble Again: A journey Between the Orinoco and the Amazon"
• Helena Valero, Yanoama / Eyewitness account of a captive who came of age in the tribe.
• Mark Andrew Ritchie, Spirit of the Rainforest: A Yanomamo Shaman's Story (ISBN 0-9646952-3-5)
• Maria Inês Smiljanic, Os enviados de Dom Bosco entre os Masiripiwëiteri. O impacto missionário sobre o sistema social e cultural dos Yanomami ocidentais (Amazonas, Brasil.)Journal de la Société des Américanistes, 2002, 88, pp. 137-158**[2]
• Rose, Peter and Conlon, Anne, Yanomamo - a musical entertainment published by Josef Weinberger, London (1983) Looks into the destruct of the Amazon Rainforest as a whole and aims to encourage respect for those who live in harmony with their surroundings
• Indigenous Peoples of Brazil - Yanomami
• Indigenous Peoples of Brazil - Yanomami

• Watch free docu on Yanomami Indians. How a hopeless failure turns into a nerve-wrecking story