THE ORINOCO
The Orinoco River flows through Venezuela and Brazil. Like its larger cousin, the mighty Amazon, the Orinoco winds through hot tropical lowland forest regions of South America. Because of the forbidding climate and dense jungle terrain, these areas have been sparsely populated. Avoided, until recently, by the colonial populations of South America, the Amazon Basin and the Orinoco region have traditionally been inhabited by numerous small aboriginal Indian groups.
One such group, the Yanomami, have captured the attention of anthropologists, missionaries, and travellers alike. Today, as a result of the ethnographic books and films that describe them, they are among the most-widely represented South American Indians (The Yanomami were the proto-type for the Amazonian Indians depicted in John Boorman's adventure drama The Emerald Forest, set in the Brazilian rainforest), yet they still remain one of the most remote and unassimilated groups in the region.
Noted anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon (author of The Yanomamo) first visited the Yanomami in 1964, and has continued to visit them up to the present. In the early 1970s he worked with ethnographic filmmaker Timothy Asch on a series of films about Yanomami culture and society. The films they produced include The Ax Fight, Tapir Distribution, Magical Death, and Children's Magical Death (Documentary Educational Resources). Other films document the advent of missionaries among the Indians (Ocamo is my Town; New Tribes Mission).
Chagnon initially characterized the Yanomami as "The Fierce People," because of their propensity to fight among one another-usually resulting in the break up and dispersal of a larger into a smaller group, or a fragment of a community leaving one group to join another. But other anthropologists who have spent time among the Yanomami point out the aspects of cooperation, friendship, and intimacy that exists among different Yanomami communities and between husband and wife and parents and children. They suggest that the Yanomami are no fiercer or more violent than many other people or groups.
Among the Yanomami, certain men have the ability to manipulate the spirit world on the behalf of other human beings. They serve as the Yamomami's shaman or magical healers, interceding between humans and spirits in the context of sickness as they attempt to induce the spirits (called hekura by the Yanomami) to cure individuals who are ill. In order to establish contact with the hekura spirits, Yanomami shaman inhale a hallucinogenic drug called ebene. The effect of the drug on the shaman is the production of visions of particular spirits, usually the spirits who are believed to be causing an individual to be sick. The shaman then attempts to persuade the spirit to stop afflicting the person and to help him regain health.
Given the lengthy history of European contact in South America, it is astonishing how long the Yanomami have been able to remain as isolated and culturally intact as they have. In addition to the presence of Catholic and Protestant missionaries, the event that may be most threatening to Yanomami automony, and ultimately to their very existence, is the discovery of gold in the region inhabited by Yanomami groups along the Brazilian border. The death of four Yanomami at the hands of Brazilian garimpeiros (miners) became an international cause célebre. But reports of illegal incursions of garimpeiros into Venezuelan Yanomami territory still appear.
Nancy Lutkehaus
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