Changnon’s Doing Fieldwork Among the Yanomamo
Alberto Pesodas Jr
Napoleon Chagnon has been labeled as the "most controversial anthropologist"
in the United States in a New York Times Magazine profile preceding the publication of
his book, Noble Savages: My Life Among Two Dangerous Tribes—the Yanomamö and
the Anthropologists, a scientific memoir. He is best known for his long-term ethnographic
field work among the Yanomamö, his contributions to evolutionary theory in cultural
anthropology and to the study of warfare. The Yanomamö are a society of indigenous
tribal Amazonians that live in the border area between Venezuela and Brazil. (MU, 2018)
The article of Changnon on “Doing Fieldwork among the Yanomamo” talks
about his experience in his fieldwork among the Yanomamo Indians who live in
Southern Venezuela. Changnon spent 19 months among Yanomamo with a purpose of
systematically collecting certain kinds of information on genealogy, reproduction,
marriage practices, kinship, settlement patterns, migrations, and politics and feelings
towards agression. With some visions about fieldwork as a graduate student about
ethnography or attempt to adopt their way of life, he met intense culture shock. Culture
shock is a “sense of confusion and uncertainty sometimes with feelings of anxiety that
may affect people exposed to an alien culture or environment without adequate
preparation” (Merriam-Webster 2019)
Some of the instances where Changnon experienced culture shock include:
being met with gnats the bit him and made him swell up; an astonishing lack of
hygiene; laundry conundrums; villagers constantly high on hallucinogens; and difficulty
getting enough food. Other than that is the intense loneliness because he was away
from his family. He attempted to make friends, but those friends robbed him, cunningly
got him to give them his tools, begged for goods from Napoleon, the rich subhuman,
and mocked him. In an attempt to get along with them, he would give in to their
demands for tools or food, but soon found this to only make the problem worse, as they
would come back demanding bigger and better goods. Through this he found he
needed to be just as cunning to be accepted into their culture.
The whole process of gathering data about their genealogies was tougher and
people from the group would call him names and make fun of him. “Primitive social
organization is kinship organization, and to understand the Yanomamo way of life I had
to collect extensive genealogies. He said “I could not have deliberately picked a more
difficult group to work with in this regard” (Changnon 1992, 7). Overall, the article talked
about Yanomamo, the fierce people and his stories, problems and challenges upon
entering the society and doing his fieldwork.
The Yanomamo
Yanomamo, based on the typologies of political organization belongs to the
tribes. Yanomamo,according to Changnon (1992), fall into the category of Tropical
Forest Indians called ‘foot people.’ They avoid large rivers and live in interfluvial plains of
the major rivers. They are thinly scattered over a vast and verdant tropical forest. They
have no writing system but possess rich and complex language. Their clothing was more
decorative than protective. The daily life of the Yanomamo people revolves around
gardening, hunting, collecting wild foods, collecting firewood, fetching water, visiting
with each other, gossiping, and making the few material possessions they own: baskets,
hammocks, bows, arrows, and colorful pigments with which they paint their bodies.
Their villages are round and open—and very public. One can hear, see, and smell
almost everything that goes on anywhere in the village. Privacy is rare, but sexual
discreetness is possible in the garden or at night while others sleep. The villages can be
as small as 40 to 50 people or as large as 300 people.
Based on Changnon (1992) article, they enjoy taking trips when the jungle
abounds with seasonally ripe wild fruits and vegetables. There are two major seasons
dominate their annual cycle: the wet season, which inundates the low-lying jungle,
making travel difficult, and the dry season—the time of visiting other villages to feast,
trade, and politic with allies. Yanomamo are still conducting intervillage warfare, a
phenomenon that affects all aspects of their social organization, settlement pattern,
and daily routines. Social life is organized around those same principles utilized by all
tribesmen: kinship relationships, descent from ancestors, marriage exchanges between
kinship/descent groups, and the transient charisma of distinguished headmen who
attempt to keep order in the village and whose responsibility it is to determine the
village’s relationships with those in other villages. Their positions are largely the result of
kinship and marriage patterns; they come from the largest kinship groups within the
village.
According
to
Changnon
(1992),
The
Yanomamo
are
simultaneously
peacemakers and valiant warriors. Peacemaking often requires the threat or actual use
of force, and most headmen have an acquired reputation for being waiter or fierce.
The social dynamics within villages are involved with giving and receiving marriageable
girls. Marriages are arranged by older kin, usually men, who are brothers, uncles, and
the father. It is a political process, for girls are promised in marriage while they are
young, and the men who do this attempt to create alliances with other men via
marriage exchanges. There is a shortage of women due in part to a sex-ratio
imbalance in the younger age categories, but also complicated by the fact that some
men have multiple wives. But their conflicts are not blind, uncontrolled violence. They
have a series of graded forms of violence that ranges from chest-pounding and clubfighting duels to out-and-out shooting to kill. This gives the Yanomamo a good deal of
flexibility in settling disputes without immediate resort to lethal violence.
Changnon (1992) also added that they have developed patterns of alliance
and friendship that serve to limit violence— trading and feasting with others in order to
become friends. These alliances can, and often do, result in intervillage exchange of
marriageable women, which leads to additional amity between villages. The fact that
the Yanomamö have lived in a chronic state of warfare is reflected in their mythology,
ceremonies, settlement pattern, political behavior, Each village is a replica of all others
in a broad sense. But each village is part of a larger political, demographic, and
ecological process, and it is therefore difficult according to Changnon to attempt to
understand the village without knowing something of the larger forces that affect it and
its particular history with all its neighbors.
Reference
Changnon, Napoleon. 1992. “Doing Fieldwork among the Yanomamö” from
Yanomamö: The Fierce People. Fourth Edition p5-31. Holt, Rinehart, and Winston.
Missouri University. 2019. “Napoleon Changnon”. Department of Anthropology at the
University of Missouri. https://anthropology.missouri.edu/people/chagnon
Merriam-Webster Dictionary. 2019. “Culture Shock”. Merriam-Webster Incorporated
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/culture%20shock