Lecture 7 Notes
Yanomamö: The Ax Fight and The Feast
Thanks greatly to the writings
of Napoleon Chagnon and the films that Timothy Asch made in
collaboration with Chagnon, the Yanomamö (also called Yanomami
or Yanoami) are one of the best-known tribal peoples of the
world. Chagnon has spent some sixty months in twenty different
field trips to the Yanomamö since 1964.
In 1964, the Yanomamö were living independent lives, and the outside world took little interest in them. By the 1990s, they were overwhelmed by missionaries, gold miners, and epidemic diseases.
1964: The Ethnographic Present.
The single most salient aspect of Yanomamö culture is their warfare. Raids between villages are frequent, and friendly villages can easily become enemies. Even within-village fights, usually over women, frequently break out and escalate through carefully calibrated levels of seriousness to fatal encounters. The twin motives of successfully prosecuting warfare and avoiding it shape Yanomamö social, political, and economic lives. The Yanomamö are horticulturalists,. using low-technology end of farming, in which fields and gardens are worked without plows but with simple tools like wooden digging sticks. Horticulturalists are usually subsistence farmers, which is to say they grow food for their own households, not for sale. Horticulturalists may be swidden farmers, using slash-and-burn techniques to clear ground in the forest that will be used for only a few rounds of cropsbefore it is abandoned and the people move on to another swidden field. or they may be like the Dani, who have larger, more permanent fields. The Yanomamö raise food, tobacco, and cotton in small gardens carved out of the jungle. Plantains (which are similar to bananas) are their main source of food, although the men actually spend as much time hunting as they do gardening and prefer to hunt. Chagnon estimates that although the Yanomamö spend only about three hours a day getting food, they are exceptionally well nourished.
The Yanomamö live in villages of 30 to 300 people that are hours or days from the next village by foot. For protection against enemy raids, it is desirable to have a large village. But with greater size, there are more fights. Large villages eventually break up, and splinter groups move away to establish new villages in less populated areas deeper in the forest. Much of Chagnon's research has been the documentation of the political process of alliance and fission by which the Yanomamö have been spreading through the rain forest.
The villages themselves are architecturally simple but elegant. Each household unit has its own high lean-to, and these lean-tos are arranged end to end in a great circle or oval around a central plaza, giving the appearance of a single continuous structure.
The Yanomamö men value aggressiveness highly. This aggressiveness is supported by the constant use of various hallucinogens, which they grind to powder and blow up each other's nostrils through long tubes. it is fair to say that a good part of the male population is in an altered state of consciousness much of the time. The Yanomamö have little graphic art but are extraordinarily creative in telling and retelling their myths. There is not an exact proper form of a myth. Rather, each teller embellishes it as he will.
The Yanomamö Today
It was the Yanomamö's great misfortune that their way of life was not such as to gain the immediate respect of outsiders. The Yanomamö seemed to most people to be the ultimate savages with no claim to humanitarian consideration. The result has been that national governments do not feel especially obligated to protect the Yanomamö and, in fact, may even feel justified in allowing them to be wiped out. The most disastrous turning point was a great gold rush in 1987. Thousands of uncontrolled miners poured into Yanomamö lands from the Brazil side. Disease and shotguns spread throughout the villages. Those who are most interested in helping the Yanomamö, Chagnon and other anthropologists and missionaries-have been drawn into bitter mutual recriminations. Meanwhile, the Yanomamö survive, but it is hard for anyone to be optimistic about their future.
Be careful when you watch the films not to let yourself fall into the ethnocentric pitfall of considering the Yanomamö to be "savages."
1970, color, Running
Time: 29 Minutes.
Filmmaker: Timothy Asch, Anthropologist: Napoleon Chagnon
The film follows events of a feast between two Yanomamö villages that had been friendly, then warred against each other, and now are tentatively, nervously, trying to reestablish friendly ties. The film shows many sorts of exchanges, none of which make much economic sense but all of which are part of gift giving. Asch was thinking very explicitly about Marcel Mauss and once said, not entirely in jest, that with this film he had illustrated The Gift.
Among the Yanomamö, the feast is a total social institution. Perhaps one could say that its main function is to create an alliance between two villages, but it does this by creating many ties between individuals. Food is given, of course, and fine cotton hammocks, bows, arrows, and dogs change hands. In most cases, the exchange is incomplete and must be continued at another feast on another day. The men parade their might in front of their guests, showing what powerful allies (or dangerous enemies) they will be. Although no one says so explicitly, one assumes that each side measures the other for possible brothers-in-law or sons in-law. Chagnon has pointed out that the goods that are exchanged are usually the special products of one village. What is interesting here is that even though each village has access to the same raw materials, each specializes in producing only some items such as hammocks, pottery, or bows. This specialization, then, encourages the intervillage trading that leads to alliances and to some degree counters the divisive factors (especially competition between men for women) that tend to split Yanomamö groups. We get a hint of how the Yanomamö themselves talk about these exchanges from the English subtitles of the film. People demand gifts, insist on generosity, and deplore stinginess. Like Americans, the Yanomamö choose to ignore at times the obligatorily reciprocal nature of gifts.
1975, color, Running
Time: 30 Minutes.
Filmmaker: Timothy Asch; Anthropologist: Napoleon Chagnon
The film represents an important innovation in how it describes the conflict that arises between visitors and hosts in a Yanomamö village. The visitors are related to the hosts, and they once lived together, but after earlier conflict, the group split apart. Now they are tentatively getting together again to see whether the advantages of alliance can offset old resentments. However, a local woman accuses a visiting man of doing something wrong (the story that is told to Asch and Chagnon changes). Her menfolk then begin the confrontation, which gets larger and more serious, despite the attempts of one leader to mediate. In the first sequence, we see the unedited footage that Asch shot as the fight was unfolding. The second sequence, heavily narrated, adds information about what Asch and Chagnon learned about the true story of the fighting. Then a series of kinship diagrams give us a picture of how all the principals are related to each other. Finally, we see the entire sequence again, without narration but with English subtitles translating the Yanomamö speeches.
At first glance, the fight looks merely chaotic. But as we come to understand it, we see how carefully calibrated the escalating violence really is. There are no institutions to resolve the conflict peacefully beyond mediation, which fails.
Sources:
Heider, Karl, 1997, Seeing Anthropology: Cutural Anthropology Through Film. Boston: Allyn and Bacon.
Chagnon, Napoleon, 1992, The Yanomamö. Ft. Worth: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich College Publishers.
Yanomamö Interactive: Understanding the Ax Fight Web Site & CD-ROM (The image above is from it.)
See also, Out of Sync: The Cinema of Timothy Asch.
Does American culture have practices similar to those shown in The Feast? Do we have anything that resembles the Ax Fight with its "regulated" conflict?
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ljz, 3/1/98