Kenneth Good, David Chanoff
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Subjects -> History -> Americas -> South America -> Venezuela
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Into the Heart and Into My Heart 5 out of 5 stars.
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Good's work is a participant observation study of a primitive group of Indians who live along the Orinoco river in the Amazon. These people live communally and have a different world view than most of us are familiar with. As a result, the Yanomama normative structure is based on their world and culture. As I tell my sociology students, certain patterns may be considered universal, but the content of culture varies. For example, the Yanomama have no concept of privacy. Everything they did according to Good was public, except for sex and defecation. This is similar to the south African !Kung (Bushmen) who have no word for stranger. (Lee, 1969, !Kung Bushmen Subsistence...) They lived in large circular houses called shapono. There were no walls in these structures, and people arranged themselves by kinship and lineage so that the social organization of the families in the village is reflected in the placement of hearths and hammocks. It is within this structure and the central plaza that nearly all domestic activity takes place: child rearing, food distribution and preparation, trading and feasting, curing and cremation, drug taking of the men, singing and dancing of the women. (p. 33)Good referred to the Yanomama as the pain in the neck people instead of the fierce people as Napoleon Chagnon did in his original work of the same title. Good found the Yanomama's lack of concern for privacy somewhat difficult to deal with. In our culture, privacy and independence are the expected norm. We even have terms for behaviors that violate such norms such as invasion of privacy and, of course, trespassing. The Yanomama are not viewed as violent or aggressive but rather as highly emotional and acting without (social) constraints. We might call this behavior impulsive.
Good believed that "... the best way to study the Yanomama was to understand the entire cultural context, rather than concentrate solely on the quantitative measurements...wanted to understand them--and I wanted them to understand me...not simply to record what they were doing, but to comprehend what it meant in the context of their lives." (p. 47)
The Yanomama never use their names in public...they call each other by the appropriate kinship term (father, mother, son, daughter) (p. 52) With a numeric system that stops at two, the Yanomama do not reckon years or ages; instead they categorize people according to general age groups: infants, children, adolescents, adults, elders. (p. 66) Their sense of self (women) included lack of concern for the way they appeared to others. Judgments about another person were not based on how they looked/appeared. Although skills in hunting and shamanism were valued, still every person was on the same level as every other one. There was minimal concern with vanity. (p. 80).
Among the Indians, a visit is never just a visit...and trade is always involved. (p. 97) Normally, the Indians don't like to have their pictures taken since they believe that the image (soul-noreshi) is captured. They were especially irritated when the German scientist Eibel-Eibesfeldt set up a video camera in the middle of the village all day. (p. 137)
I certainly empathize with Kenneth Good's comments about Chagnon's work. Unfortunately, I have never been to the Amazon, or lived with the Yanomamo. I do envy his experiences. In addition, I give complete credibility to his comments and find them most interesting. In the past, I assigned his book as required reading for my Sociology classes. I also list Chagnon's work as supplementary reading as well.
