Question 1: The readings for “Topic 3: Fieldwork” all touched on, to varying degrees, ethical concerns related to the idea of doing ethnography. Did the readings and video raise any ethical issues tha

Women dress about the same. Much of their daily life revolves around garden- ing, hunting, collecting wild foods, col- lecting 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. Life is relatively easy in the sense that they can ‘earn a living’ with about three hours’ work per day. Most of what they eat they cultivate in their gar- dens, and most of that is plantains—a kind of cooking banana that is usually eaten green, either roasted on the coals or boiled in pots. Their meat comes from a large variety of game animals, hunted daily by the men. It is usually roasted on coals or smoked, and is always well done. 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, but in all cases there are many more chil-dren and babies than there are adults.

This is true of most primitive popula- tions and of our own demographic past.

Life expectancy is short.

The Yanomamö 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 have neighbors to the north, Carib- speaking Ye’kwana, who are true ‘river people’: They make elegant, large dug- out canoes and travel extensively along the major waterways. For the Yanomamö, a large stream is an obstacle and can be crossed only in the dry season. Thus, they have traditionally avoided larger rivers and, because of this, contact with outsiders who usually come by river.

They enjoy taking trips when the jun- gle abounds with seasonally ripe wild fruits and vegetables. Then, the large vil- lage—the shabono—is abandoned for a few weeks and everyone camps out for from one to several days away from the village and garden. On these trips, they make temporary huts from poles, vines, and leaves, each family making a sepa- rate hut.

Two major seasons dominate their an- nual cycle: the wet season, which inun- dates the low-lying jungle, making travel difficult, and the dry season—the time of visiting other villages to feast, trade, and politic with allies. The dry season is also the time when raiders can travel and strike silently at their unsuspecting ene- mies. The Yanomamö are still conduct- ing intervillage warfare, a phenomenon that affects all aspects of their social or- ganization, settlement pattern, and dailyroutines. It is not simply ‘ritualistic’ war:

At least one-fourth of all adult males die violently in the area I lived in.

Social life is organized around those same principles utilized by all tribesmen:

kinship relationships, descent from an- cestors, 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 pat- terns; they come from the largest kinship groups within the village. They can, by their personal wit, wisdom, and cha- risma, become autocrats, but most of them are largely ‘greaters’ among equals. They, too, must clear gardens, plant crops, collect wild foods, and hunt.

They are simultaneously peacemakers and valiant warriors. Peacemaking often requires the threat or actual use of force, and most headmen have an acquired rep- utation for being waiteri: fierce.

The social dynamics within villages are involved with giving and receiving marriageable girls. Marriages are ar- ranged 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 al- liances with other men via marriage ex- changes. There is a shortage of women due in part to a sex-ratio imbalance in the younger age categories, but also compli- cated by the fact that some men have multiple wives. Most fighting within the ANNUAL EDITIONS 2 village stems from sexual affairs or fail- ure to deliver a promised woman—or out-and-out seizure of a married woman by some other man. This can lead to in- ternal fighting and conflict of such an in- tensity that villages split up and fission, each group then becoming a new village and, often, enemies to each other.

But their conflicts are not blind, un- controlled violence. They have a series of graded forms of violence that ranges from chest-pounding and club-fighting duels to out-and-out shooting to kill.

This gives them a good deal of flexibility in settling disputes without immediate resort to lethal violence. In addition, 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 ex- changes of marriageable women, which leads to additional amity between vil- lages. No good thing lasts forever, and most alliances crumble. Old friends be- come hostile and, occasionally, treacher- ous. Each village must therefore be keenly aware that its neighbors are fickle and must behave accordingly. The thin line between friendship and animosity must be traversed by the village leaders, whose political acumen and strategies are both admirable and complex.

Each village, then, 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 difficult to attempt to understand the village with- out knowing something of the larger forces that affect it and its particular his- tory with all its neighbors.

COLLECTING THE DATA IN THE FIELD I have now spent over 60 months with Yanomamö, during which time I gradu- ally learned their language and, up to a point, submerged myself in their culture and way of life. 2 As my research pro- gressed, the thing that impressed me most was the importance that aggression played in shaping their culture. I had the opportunity to witness a good many inci- dents that expressed individual vindic- tiveness on the one hand and collective bellicosity on the other hand. Theseranged in seriousness from the ordinary incidents of wife beating and chest pounding to dueling and organized raids by parties that set out with the intention of ambushing and killing men from en- emy villages. One of the villages was raided approximately twenty-five times during my first 15 months of field- work—six times by the group among whom I was living. And, the history of every village I investigated, from 1964 to 1991, was intimately bound up in pat- terns of warfare with neighbors that shaped its politics and determined where it was found at any point in time and how it dealt with its current neighbors.

The fact that the Yanomamö have lived in a chronic state of warfare is re- flected in their mythology, ceremonies, settlement pattern, political behavior, and marriage practices. Accordingly, I have organized this case study in such a way that students can appreciate the ef- fects of warfare on Yanomamö culture in general and on their social organization and political relationships in particular.

I collected the data under somewhat trying circumstances, some of which I will describe to give a rough idea of what is generally meant when anthropologists speak of ‘culture shock’ and ‘fieldwork.’ It should be borne in mind, however, that each field situation is in many respects unique, so that the problems I encoun- tered do not necessarily exhaust the range of possible problems other anthro- pologists have confronted in other areas.

There are a few problems, however, that seem to be nearly universal among an- thropological fieldworkers, particularly those having to do with eating, bathing, sleeping, lack of privacy, loneliness, or discovering that the people you are liv- ing with have a lower opinion of you than you have of them or you yourself are not as culturally or emotionally ‘flex- ible’ as you assumed.

The Yanomamö can be difficult people to live with at times, but I have spoken to colleagues who have had dif- ficulties living in the communities they studied. These things vary from society to society, and probably from one anthro- pologist to the next. I have also done lim- ited fieldwork among the Yanomamö’s northern neighbors, the Carib-speaking Ye’kwana Indians. By contrast to manyexperiences I had among the Yanomamö, the Ye’kwana were very pleasant and charming, all of them anxious to help me and honor bound to show any visitor the numerous courtesies of their system of etiquette. In short, they approached the image of ‘primitive man’ that I had con- jured up in my mind before doing field- work, a kind of ‘Rousseauian’ view, and it was sheer pleasure to work with them.

Other anthropologists have also noted sharp contrasts in the people they study from one field situation to another. One of the most startling examples of this is in the work of Colin Turnbull, who first studied the Ituri Pygmies (1965, 1983) and found them delightful to live with, but then studied the Ik (1972) of the des- olate outcroppings of the Kenya/ Uganda/Sudan border region, a people he had difficulty coping with intellectu- ally, emotionally, and physically. While it is possible that the anthropologist’s re- actions to a particular people are per- sonal and idiosyncratic, it nevertheless remains true that there are enormous dif- ferences between whole peoples, differ- ences that affect the anthropologist in often dramatic ways.

Hence, what I say about some of my experiences is probably equally true of the experiences of many other field- workers. I describe some of them here for the benefit of future anthropolo- gists—because I think I could have prof- ited by reading about the pitfalls and field problems of my own teachers. At the very least I might have been able to avoid some of my more stupid errors. In this regard there is a growing body of ex- cellent descriptive work on field re- search. Students who plan to make a career in anthropology should consult these works, which cover a wide range of field situations in the ethnographic present. 3 The Longest Day: The First One My first day in the field illustrated to me what my teachers meant when they spoke of ‘culture shock.’ I had traveled in a small, aluminum rowboat propelled by a large outboard motor for two and a half days. This took me from the territo- rial capital, a small town on the Orinoco River, deep into Yanomamö country. On the morning of the third day we reached Article 1. Doing Fieldwork among the Yanomamo 3 a small mission settlement, the field ‘headquarters’ of a group of Americans who were working in two Yanomamö villages. The missionaries had come out of these villages to hold their annual con- ference on the progress of their mission work and were conducting their meet- ings when I arrived. We picked up a pas- senger at the mission station, James P.

Barker, the first non-Yanomamö to make a sustained, permanent contact with the tribe (in 1950). He had just re- turned from a year’s furlough in the United States, where I had earlier visited him before leaving for Venezuela. He agreed to accompany me to the village I had selected for my base of operations to introduce me to the Indians. This village was also his own home base, but he had not been there for over a year and did not plan to join me for another three months.

Mr. Barker had been living with this par- ticular group about five years.

We arrived at the village, Bisaasi-teri, about 2:00 P.M. and docked the boat along the muddy bank at the terminus of the path used by Yanomamö to fetch their drinking water. It was hot and muggy, and my clothing was soaked with perspiration. It clung uncomfort- ably to my body, as it did thereafter for the remainder of the work. The small bit- ing gnats, bareto, were out in astronomi- cal numbers, for it was the beginning of the dry season. My face and hands were swollen from the venom of their numer- ous stings. In just a few moments I was to meet my first Yanomamö, my first primitive man. What would he be like? I had visions of entering the village and seeing 125 social facts running about al- truistically calling each other kinship terms and sharing food, each waiting and anxious to have me collect his geneal- ogy. I would wear them out in turn.

Would they like me? This was important to me; I wanted them to be so fond of me that they would adopt me into their kin- ship system and way of life. I had heard that successful anthropologists always get adopted by their people. I had learned during my seven years of anthropologi- cal training at the University of Michi- gan that kinship was equivalent to society in primitive tribes and that it was a moral way of life, ‘moral’ being some- thing ‘good’ and ‘desirable.’ I was deter-mined to work my way into their moral system of kinship and become a member of their society—to be ‘accepted’ by them. How Did They Accept You?

My heart began to pound as we ap- proached the village and heard the buzz of activity within the circular compound.

Mr. Barker commented that he was anx- ious to see if any changes had taken place while he was away and wondered how many of them had died during his absence. I nervously felt my back pocket to make sure that my notebook was still there and felt personally more secure when I touched it.

The entrance to the village was cov- ered over with brush and dry palm leaves. We pushed them aside to expose the low opening to the village. The ex- citement of meeting my first Yanomamö was almost unbearable as I duck-wad- dled through the low passage into the vil- lage clearing.

I looked up and gasped when I saw a dozen burly, naked, sweaty, hideous men staring at us down the shafts of their drawn arrows! Immense wads of green tobacco were stuck between their lower teeth and lips making them look even more hideous, and strands of dark-green slime dripped or hung from their nos- trils—strands so long that they clung to their pectoral muscles or drizzled down their chins. We arrived at the village while the men were blowing a hallucino- genic drug up their noses. One of the side effects of the drug is a runny nose. The mucus is always saturated with the green powder and they usually let it run freely from their nostrils. My next discovery was that there were a dozen or so vicious, underfed dogs snapping at my legs, cir- cling me as if I were to be their next meal. I just stood there holding my note- book, helpless and pathetic. Then the stench of the decaying vegetation and filth hit me and I almost got sick. I was horrified. What kind of welcome was this for the person who came here to live with you and learn your way of life, to become friends with you? They put their weapons down when they recognized Barker and returned to their chanting, keeping a nervous eye on the village en- trances.We had arrived just after a serious fight. Seven women had been abducted the day before by a neighboring group, and the local men and their guests had just that morning recovered five of them in a brutal club fight that nearly ended in a shooting war. The abductors, angry because they had lost five of their seven new captives, vowed to raid the Bisaasi-teri. When we arrived and en- tered the village unexpectedly, the In- dians feared that we were the raiders.

On several occasions during the next two hours the men in the village jumped to their feet, armed themselves, nocked their arrows and waited ner- vously for the noise outside the village to be identified. My enthusiasm for col- lecting ethnographic facts diminished in proportion to the number of times such an alarm was raised. In fact, I was relieved when Barker suggested that we sleep across the river for the evening. It would be safer over there.

As we walked down the path to the boat, I pondered the wisdom of having decided to spend a year and a half with these people before I had even seen what they were like. I am not ashamed to ad- mit that had there been a diplomatic way out, I would have ended my fieldwork then and there. I did not look forward to the next day—and months—when I would be left alone with the Yanomamö; I did not speak a word of their language, and they were decidedly different from what I had imagined them to be. The whole situation was depressing, and I wondered why I ever decided to switch from physics and engineering in the first place. I had not eaten all day, I was soak- ing wet from perspiration, the bareto were biting me, and I was covered with red pigment, the result of a dozen or so complete examinations I had been given by as many very pushy Yanomamö men.

These examinations capped an otherwise grim day. The men would blow their noses into their hands, flick as much of the mucus off that would separate in a snap of the wrist, wipe the residue into their hair, and then carefully examine my face, arms, legs, hair, and the contents of my pockets. I asked Barker how to say, ‘Your hands are dirty’; my comments were met by the Yanomamö in the fol- lowing way: They would ‘clean’ their ANNUAL EDITIONS 4 hands by spitting a quantity of slimy to- bacco juice into them, rub them together, grin, and then proceed with the examina- tion.

Mr. Barker and I crossed the river and slung our hammocks. When he pulled his hammock out of a rubber bag, a heavy disagreeable odor of mildewed cotton and stale wood smoke came with it.

‘Even the missionaries are filthy,’ I thought to myself. Within two weeks, everything I owned smelled the same way, and I lived with that odor for the re- mainder of the fieldwork. My own habits of personal cleanliness declined to such levels that I didn’t even mind being ex- amined by the Yanomamö, as I was not much cleaner than they were after I had adjusted to the circumstances. It is diffi- cult to blow your nose gracefully when you are stark naked and the invention of handkerchiefs is millenia away.

Life in the Jungle: Oatmeal, Peanut Butter, and Bugs It isn’t easy to plop down in the Amazon Basin for a year and get immediately into the anthropological swing of things. You have been told about horrible diseases, snakes, jaguars, electric eels, little spiny fish that will swim up your urine into your penis, quicksand, and getting lost.

Some of the dangers are real, but your imagination makes them more real and threatening than many of them really are.

What my teachers never bothered to ad- vise me about, however, was the mun- dane, nonexciting, and trivial stuff—like eating, defecating, sleeping, or keeping clean. These turned out to be the bane of my existence during the first several months of field research. I set up my household in Barker’s abandoned mud hut, a few yards from the village of Bisaasi-teri, and immediately set to work building my own mud/thatch hut with the help of the Yanomamö. Meanwhile, I had to eat and try to do my ‘field re- search.’ I soon discovered that it was an enormously time-consuming task to maintain my own body in the manner to which it had grown accustomed in the relatively antiseptic environment of the northern United States. Either I could be relatively well fed and rela- tively comfortable in a fresh change of clothes and do very little fieldwork, or Icould do considerably more fieldwork and be less well fed and less comfort- able.

It is appalling how complicated it can be to make oatmeal in the jungle. First, I had to make two trips to the river to haul the water. Next, I had to prime my kero- sene stove with alcohol to get it burning, a tricky procedure when you are trying to mix powdered milk and fill a coffee pot at the same time. The alcohol prime al- ways burned out before I could turn the kerosene on, and I would have to start all over. Or, I would turn the kerosene on, optimistically hoping that the Coleman element was still hot enough to vaporize the fuel, and start a small fire in my palm-thatched hut as the liquid kerosene squirted all over the table and walls and then ignited. Many amused Yanomamö onlookers quickly learned the English phrase ‘Oh, Shit!’ and, once they discov- ered that the phrase offended and irri- tated the missionaries, they used it as often as they could in their presence. I usually had to start over with the alcohol.

Then I had to boil the oatmeal and pick the bugs out of it. All my supplies, of course, were carefully stored in rat- proof, moisture-proof, and insect-proof containers, not one of which ever served its purpose adequately. Just taking things out of the multiplicity of containers and repacking them afterward was a minor project in itself. By the time I had hauled the water to cook with, unpacked my food, prepared the oatmeal, milk, and coffee, heated water for dishes, washed and dried the dishes, repacked the food in the containers, stored the containers in locked trunks, and cleaned up my mess, the ceremony of preparing breakfast had brought me almost up to lunch time!

Eating three meals a day was simply out of the question. I solved the problem by eating a single meal that could be pre- pared in a single container, or, at most, in two containers, washed my dishes only when there were no clean ones left, using cold river water, and wore each change of clothing at least a week to cut down on my laundry problem—a courageous un- dertaking in the tropics. I reeked like a jockstrap that had been left to mildew in the bottom of some dark gym locker. I also became less concerned about shar- ing my provisions with the rats, insects,Yanomamö, and the elements, thereby eliminating the need for my complicated storage process. I was able to last most of the day on café con leche, heavily sug- ared espresso coffee diluted about five to one with hot milk. I would prepare this in the evening and store it in a large ther- mos. Frequently, my single meal was no more complicated than a can of sardines and a package of soggy crackers. But at least two or three times a week I would do something ‘special’ and sophisti- cated, like make a batch of oatmeal or boil rice and add a can of tuna fish or to- mato paste to it. I even saved time by de- vising a water system that obviated the trips to the river. I had a few sheets of tin roofing brought in and made a rain water trap; I caught the water on the tin surface, funneled it into an empty gasoline drum, and then ran a plastic hose from the drum to my hut. When the drum was exhausted in the dry season, I would get a few Ya- nomamö boys to fill it with buckets of water from the river, ‘paying’ them with crackers, of which they grew all too fond all too soon.

I ate much less when I traveled with the Yanomamö to visit other villages.

Most of the time my travel diet consisted of roasted or boiled green plantains (cooking bananas) that I obtained from the Yanomamö, but I always carried a few cans of sardines with me in case I got lost or stayed away longer than I had planned. I found peanut butter and crack- ers a very nourishing ‘trail’ meal, and a simple one to prepare. It was nutritious and portable, and only one tool was re- quired to make the meal: a hunting knife that could be cleaned by wiping the blade on a convenient leaf. More importantly, it was one of the few foods the Ya- nomamö would let me eat in relative peace. It looked suspiciously like animal feces to them, an impression I encour- aged. I referred to the peanut butter as the feces of babies or ‘cattle.’ They found this disgusting and repugnant. They did not know what ‘cattle’ were, but were increasingly aware that I ate several canned products of such an animal. Tin cans were thought of as containers made of ‘machete skins,’ but how the cows got inside was always a mystery to them. I went out of my way to describe my foods in such a way as to make them sound un- Article 1. Doing Fieldwork among the Yanomamo 5 palatable to them, for it gave me some peace of mind while I ate: They wouldn’t beg for a share of something that was too horrible to contemplate. Fieldworkers develop strange defense mechanisms and strategies, and this was one of my own forms of adaptation to the field- work. On another occasion I was eating a can of frankfurters and growing very weary of the demands from one of the onlookers for a share in my meal. When he finally asked what I was eating, I re- plied: ‘Beef.’ He then asked: ‘Shaki! 4 What part of the animal are you eating?’ To which I replied, ‘Guess.’ He muttered a contemptuous epithet, but stopped ask- ing for a share. He got back at me later, as we shall see.

Meals were a problem in a way that had nothing to do with the inconvenience of preparing them. Food sharing is im- portant to the Yanomamö in the context of displaying friendship. ‘I am hungry!’ is almost a form of greeting with them. I could not possibly have brought enough food with me to feed the entire village, yet they seemed to overlook this logistic fact as they begged for my food. What became fixed in their minds was the fact that I did not share my food with whom- soever was present—usually a small crowd—at each and every meal. Nor could I easily enter their system of reci- procity with respect to food. Every time one of them ‘gave’ me something ‘freely,’ he would dog me for months to ‘pay him back,’ not necessarily with food but with knives, fishhooks, axes, and so on. Thus, if I accepted a plantain from someone in a different village while I was on a visit, he would most likely visit me in the future and demand a machete as payment for the time that he ‘fed’ me. I usually reacted to these kinds of demands by giving a banana, the cus- tomary reciprocity in their culture—food for food—but this would be a disap- pointment for the individual who had nursed visions of that single plantain growing into a machete over time. Many years after beginning my fieldwork, I was approached by one of the prominent men who demanded a machete for a piece of meat he claimed he had given me five or six years earlier.

Despite the fact that most of them knew I would not share my food withthem at their request, some of them al- ways showed up at my hut during meal- time. I gradually resigned myself to this and learned to ignore their persistent de- mands while I ate. Some of them would get angry because I failed to give in, but most of them accepted it as just a pecu- liarity of the subhuman foreigner who had come to live among them. If or when I did accede to a request for a share of my food, my hut quickly filled with Ya- nomamö, each demanding their share of the food that I had just given to one of them. Their begging for food was not provoked by hunger, but by a desire to try something new and to attempt to es- tablish a coercive relationship in which I would accede to a demand. If one re- ceived something, all others would im- mediately have to test the system to see if they, too, could coerce me.

A few of them went out of their way to make my meals downright unpleas- ant—to spite me for not sharing, espe- cially if it was a food that they had tried before and liked, or a food that was part of their own cuisine. For example, I was eating a cracker with peanut butter and honey one day. The Yanomamö will do almost anything for honey, one of the most prized delicacies in their own diet.

One of my cynical onlookers—the fel- low who had earlier watched me eating frankfurters—immediately recognized the honey and knew that I would not share the tiny precious bottle. It would be futile to even ask. Instead, he glared at me and queried icily, ‘Shaki! What kind of animal semen are you pouring onto your food and eating?’ His question had the desired effect and my meal ended.

Finally, there was the problem of be- ing lonely and separated from your own kind, especially your family. I tried to overcome this by seeking personal friendships among the Yanomamö. This usually complicated the matter because all my ‘friends’ simply used my confi- dence to gain privileged access to my hut and my cache of steel tools and trade goods—and looted me when I wasn’t looking. I would be bitterly disappointed that my erstwhile friend thought no more of me than to finesse our personal rela- tionship exclusively with the intention of getting at my locked up possessions, and my depression would hit new lows everytime I discovered this. The loss of the possessions bothered me much less than the shock that I was, as far as most of them were concerned, nothing more than a source of desirable items. No holds were barred in relieving me of these, since I was considered something sub- human, a non-Yanomamö.

The hardest thing to learn to live with was the incessant, passioned, and often aggressive demands they would make. It would become so unbearable at times that I would have to lock myself in my hut periodically just to escape from it.

Privacy is one of our culture’s most sat- isfying achievements, one you never think about until you suddenly have none. It is like not appreciating how good your left thumb feels until someone hits it with a hammer. But I did not want privacy for its own sake; rather, I simply had to get away from the begging. Day and night for almost the entire time I lived with the Yanomamö, I was plagued by such demands as: ‘Give me a knife, I am poor!’; ‘If you don’t take me with you on your next trip to Widokaiyateri, I’ll chop a hole in your canoe!’; ‘Take us hunting up the Mavaca River with your shotgun or we won’t help you!’; ‘Give me some matches so I can trade with the Reyaboböwei-teri, and be quick about it or I’ll hit you!’; ‘Share your food with me, or I’ll burn your hut!’; ‘Give me a flashlight so I can hunt at night!’; ‘Give me all your medicine, I itch all over!’; ‘Give me an ax or I’ll break into your hut when you are away and steal all of them!’ And so I was bombarded by such demands day after day, month after month, until I could not bear to see a Ya- nomamö at times.

It was not as difficult to become cal- loused to the incessant begging as it was to ignore the sense of urgency, the impassioned tone of voice and whining, or the intimidation and aggression with which many of the demands were made. It was likewise difficult to adjust to the fact that the Yanomamö refused to accept ‘No’ for an answer until or unless it seethed with passion and intimida- tion—which it did after a few months. So persistent and characteristic is the beg- ging that the early ‘semiofficial’ maps made by the Venezuelan Malaria Con- trol Service (Malarialogía) designated ANNUAL EDITIONS 6 the site of their first permanent field sta- tion, next to the village of Bisaasi-teri, as Yababuhii: ‘Gimme.’ I had to become like the Yanomamö to be able to get along with them on their terms: some- what sly, aggressive, intimidating, and pushy.

It became indelibly clear to me shortly after I arrived there that had I failed to adjust in this fashion I would have lost six months of supplies to them in a single day or would have spent most of my time ferrying them around in my canoe or taking them on long hunting trips. As it was, I did spend a consider- able amount of time doing these things and did succumb often to their outra- geous demands for axes and machetes, at least at first, for things changed as I be- came more fluent in their language and learned how to defend myself socially as well as verbally. More importantly, had I failed to demonstrate that I could not be pushed around beyond a certain point, I would have been the subject of far more ridicule, theft, and practical jokes than was the actual case. In short, I had to ac- quire a certain proficiency in their style of interpersonal politics and to learn how to imply subtly that certain potentially undesirable, but unspecified, conse- quences might follow if they did such and such to me. They do this to each other incessantly in order to establish precisely the point at which they cannot goad or intimidate an individual any fur- ther without precipitating some kind of retaliation. As soon as I realized this and gradually acquired the self-confidence to adopt this strategy, it became clear that much of the intimidation was calculated to determine my flash point or my ‘last ditch’ position—and I got along much better with them. Indeed, I even regained some lost ground. It was sort of like a po- litical, interpersonal game that everyone had to play, but one in which each indi- vidual sooner or later had to give evi- dence that his bluffs and implied threats could be backed up with a sanction. I suspect that the frequency of wife beat- ing is a component in this syndrome, since men can display their waiteri (fe- rocity) and ‘show’ others that they are capable of great violence. Beating a wife with a club is one way of displaying fe- rocity, one that does not expose the manto much danger—unless the wife has concerned, aggressive brothers in the vil- lage who will come to her aid. Appar- ently an important thing in wife beating is that the man has displayed his pre- sumed potential for violence and the in- tended message is that other men ought to treat him with circumspection, cau- tion, and even deference.

After six months, the level of Ya- nomamö demand was tolerable in Bisaasi-teri, the village I used for my base of operations. We had adjusted somewhat to each other and knew what to expect with regard to demands for food, trade goods, and favors. Had I elected to remain in just one Yanomamö village for the entire duration of my first 15 months of fieldwork, the experience would have been far more enjoyable than it actually was. However, as I began to understand the social and political dy- namics of this village, it became patently obvious that I would have to travel to many other villages to determine the de- mographic bases and political histories that lay behind what I could understand in the village of Bisaasi-teri. I began making regular trips to some dozen neighboring Yanomamö villages as my language fluency improved. I collected local genealogies there, or rechecked and cross-checked those I had collected else- where. Hence, the intensity of begging was relatively constant and relatively high for the duration of my fieldwork, for I had to establish my personal posi- tion in each village I visited and revis- ited.

For the most part, my own ‘fierce- ness’ took the form of shouting back at the Yanomamö as loudly and as passion- ately as they shouted at me, especially at first, when I did not know much of the language. As I became more fluent and learned more about their political tactics, I became more sophisticated in the art of bluffing and brinksmanship. For exam- ple, I paid one young man a machete (then worth about $2.50) to cut a palm tree and help me make boards from the wood. I used these to fashion a flooring in the bottom of my dugout canoe to keep my possessions out of the water that always seeped into the canoe and sloshed around. That afternoon I was working with one of my informants in the village.The long-awaited mission supply boat arrived and most of the Yanomamö ran out of the village to see the supplies and try to beg items from the crew. I contin- ued to work in the village for another hour or so and then went down to the river to visit with the men on the supply boat. When I reached the river I noticed, with anger and frustration, that the Ya- nomamö had chopped up all my new floor boards to use as crude paddles to get their own canoes across the river to the supply boat. 5 I knew that if I ig- nored this abuse I would have invited the Yanomamö to take even greater liberties with my possessions in the fu- ture. I got into my canoe, crossed the river, and docked amidst their flimsy, leaky craft. I shouted loudly to them, at- tracting their attention. They were some- what sheepish, but all had mischievous grins on their impish faces. A few of them came down to the canoe, where I proceeded with a spirited lecture that re- vealed my anger at their audacity and li- cense. I explained that I had just that morning paid one of them a machete for bringing me the palmwood, how hard I had worked to shape each board and place it in the canoe, how carefully and painstakingly I had tied each one in with vines, how much I had perspired, how many bareto bites I had suffered, and so on. Then, with exaggerated drama and fi- nality, I withdrew my hunting knife as their grins disappeared and cut each one of their canoes loose and set it into the strong current of the Orinoco River where it was immediately swept up and carried downstream. I left without look- ing back and huffed over to the other side of the river to resume my work.

They managed to borrow another ca- noe and, after some effort, recovered their dugouts. Later, the headman of the village told me, with an approving chuckle, that I had done the correct thing.

Everyone in the village, except, of course, the culprits, supported and de- fended my actions—and my status in- creased as a consequence.

Whenever I defended myself in such ways I got along much better with the Yanomamö and gradually acquired the respect of many of them. A good deal of their demeanor toward me was directed with the forethought of establishing the Article 1. Doing Fieldwork among the Yanomamo 7 point at which I would draw the line and react defensively. Many of them, years later, reminisced about the early days of my fieldwork when I was timid and mo- hode (“stupid”) and a little afraid of them, those golden days when it was easy to bully me into giving my goods away for almost nothing.

Theft was the most persistent situa- tion that required some sort of defensive action. I simply could not keep every- thing I owned locked in trunks, and the Yanomamö came into my hut and left at will. I eventually developed a very effec- tive strategy for recovering almost all the stolen items: I would simply ask a child who took the item and then I would con- fiscate that person’s hammock when he was not around, giving a spirited lecture to all who could hear on the antisociality of thievery as I stalked off in a faked rage with the thief’s hammock slung over my shoulder. Nobody ever attempted to stop me from doing this, and almost all of them told me that my technique for re- covering my possessions was ingenious.

By nightfall the thief would appear at my hut with the stolen item or send it over with someone else to make an exchange to recover his hammock. He would be heckled by his covillagers for having got caught and for being embarrassed into returning my item for his hammock. The explanation was usually, ‘I just bor- rowed your ax! I wouldn’t think of steal- ing it!’ Collecting Y dnomamö Genealogies and Reproductive Histories My purpose for living among Yanomamö was to systematically collect certain kinds of information on genealogy, reproduc- tion, marriage practices, kinship, settle- ment patterns, migrations, and politics.

Much of the fundamental data was gene- alogical—who was the parent of whom, tracing these connections as far back in time as Yanomamö knowledge and memory permitted. Since ‘primitive’ so- ciety is organized largely by kinship re- lationships, figuring out the social organization of the Yanomamö essen- tially meant collecting extensive data on genealogies, marriage, and reproduction.

This turned out to be a staggering and very frustrating problem. I could not have deliberately picked a more difficultpeople to work with in this regard. They have very stringent name taboos and es- chew mentioning the names of promi- nent living people as well as all deceased friends and relatives. They attempt to name people in such a way that when the person dies and they can no longer use his or her name, the loss of the word in their language is not inconvenient.

Hence, they name people for specific and minute parts of things, such as ‘toenail of sloth,’ ‘whisker of howler monkey,’ and so on, thereby being able to retain the words ‘toenail’ or ‘whisker’ but some- what handicapped in referring to these anatomical parts of sloths and monkeys respectively. The taboo is maintained even for the living, for one mark of pres- tige is the courtesy others show you by not using your name publicly. This is particularly true for men, who are much more competitive for status than women in this culture, and it is fascinating to watch boys grow into young men, de- manding to be called either by a kinship term in public, or by a teknonymous ref- erence such as ‘brother of Himotoma.’ The more effective they are at getting others to avoid using their names, the more public acknowledgment there is that they are of high esteem and social standing. Helena Valero, a Brazilian woman who was captured as a child by a Yanomamö raiding party, was married for many years to a Yanomamö headman before she discovered what his name was (Biocca, 1970; Valero, 1984). The sanc- tions behind the taboo are more complex than just this, for they involve a combi- nation of fear, respect, admiration, polit- ical deference, and honor.

At first I tried to use kinship terms alone to collect genealogies, but Yanomamö kin- ship terms, like the kinship terms in all sys- tems, are ambiguous at some point because they include so many possible relatives (as the term ‘uncle’ does in our own kinship system). Again, their system of kin clas- sification merges many relatives that we ‘separate’ by using different terms: They call both their actual father and their fa- ther’s brother by a single term, whereas we call one ‘father’ and the other ‘uncle.’ I was forced, therefore, to resort to per- sonal names to collect unambiguous ge- nealogies or ‘pedigrees.’ They quickly grasped what I was up to and that I wasdetermined to learn everyone’s ‘true name,’ which amounted to an invasion of their system of prestige and etiquette, if not a flagrant violation of it. They re- acted to this in a brilliant but devastating manner: They invented false names for everybody in the village and systemati- cally learned them, freely revealing to me the ‘true’ identities of everyone. I smugly thought I had cracked the system and enthusiastically constructed elabo- rate genealogies over a period of some five months. They enjoyed watching me learn their names and kinship relation- ships. I naively assumed that I would get the ‘truth’ to each question and the best information by working in public. This set the stage for converting my serious project into an amusing hoax of the grandest proportions. Each ‘informant’ would try to outdo his peers by inventing a name even more preposterous or ridic- ulous than what I had been given by someone earlier, the explanations for discrepancies being ‘Well, he has two names and this is the other one.’ They even fabricated devilishly improbable genealogical relationships, such as someone being married to his grand- mother, or worse yet, to his mother-in- law, a grotesque and horrifying prospect to the Yanomamö. I would collect the desired names and relationships by hav- ing my informant whisper the name of the person softly into my ear, noting that he or she was the parent of such and such or the child of such and such, and so on.

Everyone who was observing my work would then insist that I repeat the name aloud, roaring in hysterical laughter as I clumsily pronounced the name, some- times laughing until tears streamed down their faces. The ‘named’ person would usually react with annoyance and hiss some untranslatable epithet at me, which served to reassure me that I had the ‘true’ name. I conscientiously checked and re- checked the names and relationships with multiple informants, pleased to see the inconsistencies disappear as my ge- nealogy sheets filled with those desirable little triangles and circles, thousands of them.

My anthropological bubble was burst when I visited a village about 10 hours’ walk to the southwest of Bisaasi-teri some five months after I had begun col- ANNUAL EDITIONS 8 lecting genealogies on the Bisaasi-teri. I was chatting with the local headman of this village and happened to casually drop the name of the wife of the Bisaasi- teri headman. A stunned silence fol- lowed, and then a villagewide roar of un- controllable laughter, choking, gasping, and howling followed. It seems that I thought the Bisaasi-teri headman was married to a woman named “hairy cunt.” It also seems that the Bisaasi-teri head- man was called ‘long dong’ and his brother ‘eagle shit.’ The Bisaasi-teri headman had a son called “asshole” and a daughter called ‘fart breath.’ And so on. Blood welled up my temples as I re- alized that I had nothing but nonsense to show for my five months’ of dedicated genealogical effort, and I had to throw away almost all the information I had collected on this the most basic set of data I had come there to get. I understood at that point why the Bisaasi-teri laughed so hard when they made me repeat the names of their covillagers, and why the ‘named’ person would react with anger and annoyance as I pronounced his ‘name’ aloud.

I was forced to change research strat- egy—to make an understatement to de- scribe this serious situation. The first thing I did was to begin working in pri- vate with my informants to eliminate the horseplay and distraction that attended public sessions. Once I did this, my in- formants, who did not know what others were telling me, began to agree with each other and I managed to begin learn- ing the ‘real’ names, starting first with children and gradually moving to adult women and then, cautiously, adult men, a sequence that reflected the relative de- gree of intransigence at revealing names of people. As I built up a core of accurate genealogies and relationships—a core that all independent informants had veri- fied repetitiously—I could ‘test’ any new informant by soliciting his or her opinion and knowledge about these ‘core’ people whose names and relation- ships I was confident were accurate. I was, in this fashion, able to immediately weed out the mischievous informants who persisted in trying to deceive me.

Still, I had great difficulty getting the names of dead kinsmen, the only accu- rate way to extend genealogies back intime. Even my best informants continued to falsify names of the deceased, espe- cially closely related deceased. The falsi- fications at this point were not serious and turned out to be readily corrected as my interviewing methods improved (see below). Most of the deceptions were of the sort where the informant would give me the name of a living man as the father of some child whose actual father was dead, a response that enabled the infor- mant to avoid using the name of a de- ceased kinsman or friend.

The quality of a genealogy depends in part on the number of generations it em- braces, and the name taboo prevented me from making any substantial progress in learning about the deceased ancestors of the present population. Without this informa- tion, I could not, for example, document marriage patterns and interfamilial alliances through time. I had to rely on older infor- mants for this information, but these were the most reluctant informants of all for this data. As I became more proficient in the lan- guage and more skilled at detecting fabrica- tions, any informants became better at deception. One old man was particularly cunning and persuasive, following a sort of Mark Twain policy that the most effective lie is a sincere lie. He specialized in making a ceremony out of false names for dead an- cestors. He would look around nervously to make sure nobody was listening outside my hut, enjoin me never to mention the name again, become very anxious and spooky, and grab me by the head to whisper a secret name into my ear. I was always elated after a session with him, because I managed to add several generations of ancestors for par- ticular members of the village. Others stead- fastly refused to give me such information.

To show my gratitude, I paid him quadruple the rate that I had been paying the others.

When word got around that I had increased the pay for genealogical and demographic information, volunteers began pouring into my hut to ‘work’ for me, assuring me of their changed ways and keen desire to divest themselves of the ‘truth.’ Enter Rerebawä: Inmarried Tough Guy I discovered that the old man was lying quite by accident. A club fight broke out in the village one day, the result of a dis- pute over the possession of a woman.She had been promised to a young man in the village, a man named Rerebawä, who was particularly aggressive. He had married into Bisaasi-teri and was doing his ‘bride service’—a period of several years during which he had to provide game for his wife’s father and mother, provide them with wild foods he might collect, and help them in certain garden- ing and other tasks. Rerebawä had al- ready been given one of the daughters in marriage and was promised her younger sister as his second wife. He was enraged when the younger sister, then about 16 years old, began having an affair with another young man in the village, Bäko- tawä, making no attempt to conceal it.

Rerebawä challenged Bäkotawä to a club fight. He swaggered boisterously out to the duel with his 10-foot-long club, a roof-pole he had cut from the house on the spur of the moment, as is the usual procedure. He hurled insult af- ter insult at both Bäkotawä and his fa- ther, trying to goad them into a fight. His insults were bitter and nasty. They toler- ated them for a few moments, but Re- rebawä’s biting insults provoked them to rage. Finally, they stormed angrily out of their hammocks and ripped out roof- poles, now returning the insults verbally, and rushed to the village clearing. Re- rebawä continued to insult them, goad- ing them into striking him on the head with their equally long clubs. Had either of them struck his head—which he held out conspicuously for them to swing at— he would then have the right to take his turn on their heads with his club. His op- ponents were intimidated by his fury, and simply backed down, refusing to strike him, and the argument ended. He had intimidated them into submission.

All three retired pompously to their re- spective hammocks, exchanging nasty insults as they departed. But Rerebawä had won the showdown and thereafter swaggered around the village, insult- ing the two men behind their backs at every opportunity. He was genuinely angry with them, to the point of calling the older man by the name of his long- deceased father. I quickly seized on this incident as an opportunity to col- lect an accurate genealogy and confi- dentially asked Rerebawä about his adversary’s ancestors. Rerebawä had Article 1. Doing Fieldwork among the Yanomamo 9 been particularly ‘pushy’ with me up to this point, but we soon became warm friends and staunch allies: We were both ‘outsiders’ in Bisaasi-teri and, although he was a Yanomamö, he nevertheless had to put up with some considerable amount of pointed teasing and scorn from the locals, as all inmarried ‘sons-in- law’ must. He gave me the information I requested of his adversary’s deceased ancestors, almost with devilish glee. I asked about dead ancestors of other peo- ple in the village and got prompt, un- equivocal answers: He was angry with everyone in the village. When I com- pared his answers to those of the old man, it was obvious that one of them was lying. I then challenged his answers. He explained, in a sort of ‘you damned fool, don’t you know better?’ tone of voice that everyone in the village knew the old man was lying to me and gloating over it when I was out of earshot. The names the old man had given to me were names of dead ancestors of the members of a vil- lage so far away that he thought I would never have occasion to check them out authoritatively. As it turned out, Re- rebawä knew most of the people in that distant village and recognized the names given by the old man.

I then went over all my Bisaasi-teri genealogies with Rerebawä, genealogies I had presumed to be close to their final form. I had to revise them all because of the numerous lies and falsifications they contained, much of it provided by the sly old man. Once again, after months of work, I had to recheck everything with Rerebawä’s aid. Only the living mem- bers of the nuclear families turned out to be accurate; the deceased ancestors were mostly fabrications.

Discouraging as it was to have to re- check everything all over again, it was a major turning point in my fieldwork.

Thereafter, I began taking advantage of local arguments and animosities in se- lecting my informants, and used more extensively informants who had married into the village in the recent past. I also began traveling more regularly to other villages at this time to check on genealo- gies, seeking out villages whose mem- bers were on strained terms with the people about whom I wanted informa- tion. I would then return to my base inthe village of Bisaasi-teri and check with local informants the accuracy of the new information. I had to be careful in this work and scrupulously select my local informants in such a way that I would not be inquiring about their closely related kin. Thus, for each of my local infor- mants, I had to make lists of names of certain deceased people that I dared not mention in their presence. But despite this precaution, I would occasionally hit a new name that would put some infor- mants into a rage, or into a surly mood, such as that of a dead ‘brother’ or ‘sis- ter’ 6 whose existence had not been indi- cated to me by other informants. This usually terminated my day’s work with that informant, for he or she would be too touchy or upset to continue any further, and I would be reluctant to take a chance on accidentally discovering another dead close kinsman soon after discovering the first.

These were unpleasant experiences, and occasionally dangerous as well, de- pending on the temperament of my infor- mant. On one occasion I was planning to visit a village that had been raided recently by one of their enemies. A woman, whose name I had on my cen- sus list for that village, had been killed by the raiders. Killing women is consid- ered to be bad form in Yanomamö war- fare, but this woman was deliberately killed for revenge. The raiders were un- able to bushwhack some man who stepped out of the village at dawn to uri- nate, so they shot a volley of arrows over the roof into the village and beat a hasty retreat. Unfortunately, one of the arrows struck and killed a woman, an accident.

For that reason, her village’s raiders de- liberately sought out and killed a woman in retaliation—whose name was on my list. My reason for going to the village was to update my census data on a name- by-name basis and estimate the ages of all the residents. I knew I had the name of the dead woman in my list, but nobody would dare to utter her name so I could remove it. I knew that I would be in very serious trouble if I got to the village and said her name aloud, and I desperately wanted to remove it from my list. I called on one of my regular and usually cooper- ative informants and asked him to tell me the woman’s name. He refused ada-mantly, explaining that she was a close relative—and was angry that I even raised the topic with him. I then asked him if he would let me whisper the names of all the women of that village in his ear, and he would simply have to nod when I hit the right name. We had been ‘friends’ for some time, and I thought I was able to predict his reaction, and thought that our friendship was good enough to use this procedure. He agreed to the procedure, and I began whispering the names of the women, one by one. We were alone in my hut so that nobody would know what we were doing and no- body could hear us. I read the names softly, continuing to the next when his response was a negative. When I ulti- mately hit the dead woman’s name, he flew out of his chair, enraged and trem- bling violently, his arm raised to strike me: ‘You son-of-a-bitch!’ he screamed.

‘If you say her name in my presence again, I’ll kill you in an instant!’ I sat there, bewildered, shocked, and con- fused. And frightened, as much because of his reaction, but also because I could imagine what might happen to me should I unknowingly visit a village to check ge- nealogy accuracy without knowing that someone had just died there or had been shot by raiders since my last visit. I re- flected on the several articles I had read as a graduate student that explained the ‘genealogical method,’ but could not re- call anything about its being a potentially lethal undertaking. My furious informant left my hut, never again to be invited back to be an informant. I had other sim- ilar experiences in different villages, but I was always fortunate in that the dead person had been dead for some time, or was not very closely related to the indi- vidual into whose ear I whispered the forbidden name. I was usually cautioned by one of the men to desist from saying any more names lest I get people ‘an- gry.’ 7 Kaobawä: The Bisaasi-teri Headman Volunteers to Help Me I had been working on the genealogies for nearly a year when another individual came to my aid. It was Kaobawä, the headman of Upper Bisaasi-teri. The vil- lage of Bisaasi-teri was split into two components, each with its own garden ANNUAL EDITIONS 10 and own circular house. Both were in sight of each other. However, the inten- sity and frequency of internal bickering and argumentation was so high that they decided to split into two separate groups but remain close to each other for protec- tion in case they were raided. One group was downstream from the other; I refer to that group as the ‘Lower’ Bisaasi-teri and call Kaobawä’s group ‘Upper’ (up- stream) Bisaasi-teri, a convenience they themselves adopted after separating from each other. I spent most of my time with the members of Kaobawä’s group, some 200 people when I first arrived there. I did not have much contact with Kaobawä during the early months of my work. He was a somewhat retiring, quiet man, and among the Yanomamö, the outsider has little time to notice the rare quiet ones when most everyone else is in the front row, pushing and demanding at- tention. He showed up at my hut one day after all the others had left. He had come to volunteer to help me with the geneal- ogies. He was ‘poor,’ he explained, and needed a machete. He would work only on the condition that I did not ask him about his own parents and other very close kinsmen who had died. He also added that he would not lie to me as the others had done in the past.

This was perhaps the single most im- portant event in my first 15 months of field research, for out of this fortuitous circumstance evolved a very warm friendship, and among the many things following from it was a wealth of accu- rate information on the political history of Kaobawä’s village and related vil- lages, highly detailed genealogical infor- mation, sincere and useful advice to me, and hundreds of valuable insights into the Yanomamö way of life. Kaobawä’s familiarity with his group’s history and his candidness were remarkable. His knowledge of details was almost ency- clopedic, his memory almost photo- graphic. More than that, he was enthusiastic about making sure I learned the truth, and he encouraged me, indeed, demanded that I learn all details I might otherwise have ignored. If there were subtle details he could not recite on the spot, he would advise me to wait until he could check things out with someone else in the village. He would often do thisclandestinely, giving me a report the next day, telling me who revealed the new in- formation and whether or not he thought they were in a position to know it. With the information provided by Kaobawä and Rerebawä, I made enormous gains in understanding village interrelationships based on common ancestors and political histories and became lifelong friends with both. And both men knew that I had to learn about his recently deceased kin from the other one. It was one of those quiet understandings we all had but none of us could mention.

Once again I went over the geneal- ogies with Kaobawä to recheck them, a considerable task by this time. They included about two thousand names, representing several generations of in- dividuals from four different villages.

Rerebawä’s information was very ac- curate, and Kaobawä’s contribution enabled me to trace the genealogies further back in time. Thus, after nearly a year of intensive effort on genealogies, Yanomamö demographic patterns and social organization began to make a good deal of sense to me. Only at this point did the patterns through time begin to emerge in the data, and I could begin to understand how kinship groups took form, exchanged women in marriage over several generations, and only then did the fissioning of larger villages into smaller ones emerge as a chronic and im- portant feature of Yanomamö social, po- litical, demographic, economic, and ecological adaptation. At this point I was able to begin formulating more sophisti- cated questions, for there was now a pat- tern to work from and one to flesh out.

Without the help of Rerebawä and Kaobawä it would have taken much longer to make sense of the plethora of details I had collected from not only them, but dozens of other informants as well.

I spent a good deal of time with these two men and their families, and got to know them much better than I knew most Yanomamö. They frequently gave their information in a way which related themselves to the topic under discussion.

We became warm friends as time passed, and the formal ‘informant/anthropolo- gist’ relationship faded into the back- ground. Eventually, we simply stopped‘keeping track’ of work and pay. They would both spend hours talking with me, leaving without asking for anything.

When they wanted something, they would ask for it no matter what the rela- tive balance of reciprocity between us might have been at that point.… For many of the customary things that anthropologists try to communi- cate about another culture, these two men and their families might be consid- ered to be ‘exemplary’ or ‘typical.’ For other things, they are exceptional in many regards, but the reader will, even knowing some of the exceptions, un- derstand Yanomamö culture more inti- mately by being familiar with a few examples.

Kaobawä was about 40 years old when I first came to his village in 1964. I say “about 40” because the Yanomamö numeration system has only three num- bers: one, two, and more-than-two. It is hard to give accurate ages or dates for events when the informants have no means in their language to reveal such detail. Kaobawä is the headman of his village, meaning that he has somewhat more responsibility in political dealings with other Yanomamö groups, and very little control over those who live in his group except when the village is being raided by enemies. We will learn more about political leadership and warfare in a later chapter, but most of the time men like Kaobawä are like the North Ameri- can Indian ‘chief’ whose authority was characterized in the following fashion:

“One word from the chief, and each man does as he pleases.” There are different ‘styles’ of political leadership among the Yanomamö. Some leaders are mild, quiet, inconspicuous most of the time, but intensely competent. They act parsi- moniously, but when they do, people lis- ten and conform. Other men are more tyrannical, despotic, pushy, flamboyant, and unpleasant to all around them. They shout orders frequently, are prone to beat their wives, or pick on weaker men.

Some are very violent. I have met head- men who run the entire spectrum be- tween these polar types, for I have visited some 60 Yanomamö villages.

Kaobawä stands at the mild, quietly competent end of the spectrum. He has had six wives thus far—and temporary Article 1. Doing Fieldwork among the Yanomamo 11 affairs with as many more, at least one of which resulted in a child that is publicly acknowledged as his child. When I first met him he had just two wives: Bahimi and Koamashima. Bahimi had two living children when I first met her; many oth- ers had died. She was the older and en- during wife, as much a friend to him as a mate. Their relationship was as close to what we think of as ‘love’ in our culture as I have seen among the Yanomamö.

His second wife was a girl of about 20 years, Koamashima. She had a new baby boy when I first met her, her first child.

There was speculation that Kaobawä was planning to give Koamashima to one of his younger brothers who had no wife; he occasionally allows his younger brother to have sex with Koamashima, but only if he asks in advance. Kaobawä gave another wife to one of his other brothers because she was beshi (“horny”). In fact, this earlier wife had been married to two other men, both of whom discarded her because of her infi- delity. Kaobawä had one daughter by her. However, the girl is being raised by Kaobawä’s brother, though acknowl- edged to be Kaobawä’s child.

Bahimi, his oldest wife, is about five years younger than he. She is his cross- cousin—his mother’s brother’s daugh- ter. Ideally, all Yanomamö men should marry a cross-cousin.… Bahimi was pregnant when I began my field work, but she destroyed the infant when it was born—a boy in this case—explaining tearfully that she had no choice. The new baby would have competed for milk with Ariwari, her youngest child, who was still nursing. Rather than expose Ariwari to the dangers and uncertainty of an early weaning, she chose to terminate the new- born instead. By Yanomamö standards, this has been a very warm, enduring mar- riage. Kaobawä claims he beats Bahimi only ‘once in a while, and only lightly’ and she, for her part, never has affairs with other men.

Kaobawä is a quiet, intense, wise, and unobtrusive man. It came as something of a surprise to me when I learned that he was the headman of his village, for he stayed at the sidelines while others would surround me and press their de- mands on me. He leads more by example than by coercion. He can afford to be thisway at his age, for he established his rep- utation for being forthright and as fierce as the situation required when he was younger, and the other men respect him.

He also has five mature brothers or half- brothers in his village, men he can count on for support. He also has several other mature ‘brothers’ (parallel cousins, whom he must refer to as ‘brothers’ in his kinship system) in the village who frequently come to his aid, but not as of- ten as his ‘real’ brothers do. Kaobawä has also given a number of his sisters to other men in the village and has prom- ised his young (8-year-old) daughter in marriage to a young man who, for that reason, is obliged to help him. In short, his ‘natural’ or ‘kinship’ following is large, and partially because of this sup- port, he does not have to display his ag- gressiveness to remind his peers of his position.

Rerebawä is a very different kind of person. He is much younger—perhaps in his early twenties. He has just one wife, but they have already had three children. He is from a village called Karohi-teri, located about five hours’ walk up the Orinoco, slightly inland off to the east of the river it- self. Kaobawä’s village enjoys amicable relationships with Rerebawä’s, and it is for this reason that marriage alliances of the kind represented by Rerebawä’s marriage into Kaobawä’s village occur between the two groups. Rerebawä told me that he came to Bisaasi-teri because there were no eligible women from him to marry in his own village, a fact that I later was able to document when I did a census of his vil- lage and a preliminary analysis of its social organization. Rerebawä is perhaps more typical than Kaobawä in the sense that he is chronically concerned about his personal reputation for aggressiveness and goes out of his way to be noticed, even if he has to act tough. He gave me a hard time during my early months of fieldwork, intimidat- ing, teasing, and insulting me frequently.

He is, however, much braver than the other men his age and is quite prepared to back up his threats with immediate action—as in the club fight incident just described above. Moreover, he is fascinated with po- litical relationships and knows the details of intervillage relationships over a large area of the tribe. In this respect he shows all the attributes of being a headman, althoughhe has too many competent brothers in his own village to expect to move easily into the leadership position there.

He does not intend to stay in Kaobawä’s group and refuses to make his own garden—a commitment that would reveal something of an intended long-term residence. He feels that he has adequately discharged his obligations to his wife’s parents by providing them with fresh game, which he has done for several years. They should let him take his wife and return to his own village with her, but they refuse and try to entice him to remain permanently in Bisaasi- teri to continue to provide them with game when they are old. It is for this rea- son that they promised to give him their second daughter, their only other child, in marriage. Unfortunately, the girl was opposed to the marriage and ultimately married another man, a rare instance where the woman in the marriage had this much influence on the choice of her husband.

Although Rerebawä has displayed his ferocity in many ways, one incident in particular illustrates what his character can be like. Before he left his own village to take his new wife in Bisaasi-teri, he had an affair with the wife of an older brother. When it was discovered, his brother attacked him with a club. Re- rebawä responded furiously: He grabbed an ax and drove his brother out of the vil- lage after soundly beating him with the blunt side of the single-bit ax. His brother was so intimidated by the thrash- ing and promise of more to come that he did not return to the village for several days. I visited this village with Kabawä shortly after this event had taken place; Rerebawä was with me as my guide. He made it a point to introduce me to this man. He approached his hammock, grabbed him by the wrist, and dragged him out on the ground: ‘This is the brother whose wife I screwed when he wasn’t around!’ A deadly insult, one that would usually provoke a bloody club fight among more valiant Yanomamö.

The man did nothing. He slunk sheep- ishly back into his hammock, shamed, but relieved to have Rerebawä release his grip.

Even though Rerebawä is fierce and capable of considerable nastiness, he has ANNUAL EDITIONS 12 a charming, witty side as well. He has a biting sense of humor and can entertain the group for hours with jokes and clever manipulations of language. And, he is one of few Yanomamö that I feel I can trust. I recall indelibly my return to Bisaasi-teri after being away a year—the occasion of my second field trip to the Yanomamö. When I reached Bisaasi- teri, Rerebawä was in his own village visiting his kinsmen. Word reached him that I had returned, and he paddled downstream immediately to see me. He greeted me with an immense bear hug and exclaimed, with tears welling up in his eyes, ‘Shaki! Why did you stay away so long? Did you not know that my will was so cold while you were gone that I could not at times eat for want of seeing you again?’ I, too, felt the same way about him—then, and now.

Of all the Yanomamö I know, he is the most genuine and the most devoted to his culture’s ways and values. I admire him for that, although I cannot say that I subscribe to or endorse some of these values. By contrast, Kaobawä is older and wiser, a polished diplomat. He sees his own culture in a slightly different light and seems even to question aspects of it. Thus, while many of his peers en- thusiastically accept the ‘explanations’ of things given in myths, he occasionally reflects on them—even laughing at some of the most preposterous of them.… Probably more of the Yanomamö arelike Rerebawä than like Kaobawä , or at least try to be. .… NOTES 1. The word Yanomamö is nasalized through its entire length, indicated by the diacritical mark ‘,’. When this mark appears on any Yanomamö word, the whole word is nasalized. The vowel ‘ö’ represents a sound that does not occur in the English language. It is similar to the umlaut ‘ö’ in the German language or the ‘oe’ equivalent, as in the poet Goethe’s name. Unfortu- nately, many presses and typesetters simply eliminate diacritical marks, and this has led to multiple spellings of the word Yanomamö—and multiple mis- pronunciations. Some anthropologists have chosen to introduce a slightly dif- ferent spelling of the word Yanomamö since I began writing about them, such as Yanomami, leading to additional mis- spellings as their diacriticals are charac- teristically eliminated by presses, and to the incorrect pronunciation ‘Yanoma- meee.’ Vowels indicated as ‘ä’ are pro- nounced as the ‘uh’ sound in the word ‘duck’. Thus, the name Kaobawä would be pronounced ‘cow-ba-wuh,’ but en- tirely nasalized.

2. I spent a total of 60 months among the Yanomamö between 1964 and 1991.

The first edition of this case study was based on the first 15 months I spent among them in Venezuela. I have, at the time of this writing, made 20 field trips to the Yanomamö and this edition re- flects the new information and under- standings I have acquired over the years.

I plan to return regularly to continuewhat has now turned into a lifelong study.

3. See Spindler (1970) for a general dis- cussion of field research by anthropolo- gists who have worked in other cultures.

Nancy Howell has recently written a very useful book (1990) on some of the medical, personal, and environmental hazards of doing field research, which includes a selected bibliography on other fieldwork programs.

4. They could not pronounce “Chagnon.” It sounded to them like their name for a pesky bee, shaki, and that is what they called me: pesky, noisome bee.

5. The Yanomamö in this region acquired canoes very recently. The missionaries would purchase them from the Ye’kwana Indians to the north for money, and then trade them to the Yanomamö in ex- change for labor, produce, or ‘informant’ work in translating. It should be empha- sized that those Yanomamö who lived on navigable portions of the Upper Orinoco River moved there recently from the deep forest in order to have contact with the missionaries and acquire the trade goods the missionaries (and their supply sys- tem) brought.

6. Rarely were there actual brothers or sis- ters. In Yanomamö kinship classifica- tions, certain kinds of cousins are classified as siblings. See Chapter 4.

7. Over time, as I became more and more ‘accepted’ by the Yanomamö, they be- came less and less concerned about my genealogical inquiries and now, provide me with this information quite willingly because I have been very discrete with it. Now, when I revisit familiar villages I am called aside by someone who whis- pers to me things like, “Don’t ask about so-and-so’s father.” Excerpted from “Doing Fieldwork among the Yanomamö” from Yanomamö: The Fierce People by Napolean A. Chagnon, 1992, Fourth Edition, pp.

5–31. © 1992 by Holt, Rinehart, and Winston. Reprinted by permission.