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<H2>THE ORINOCO</H2>
<dd>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.
<p>
<dd>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.
<p>
<dd>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).
<p>
<dd>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.
<p>
<dd>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.
<p>
<dd>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 cÄlebre.  But reports of illegal
incursions of garimpeiros into Venezuelan Yanomami territory still appear.
<p>
<div align=right><b>Nancy Lutkehaus</b></div>
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