Analysis Of Yanomamo: The Fierce People

Kenneth Good is a cultural anthropologist that graduated from the University of Pennsylvania and was a graduate student of Napoleon Chagnon, who wrote the book Yanomamo: The Fierce People. As a student of Chagnon, Good traveled to South America in 1957 to live among the Hasupuweteri Yanomamo people for 15 months with the purpose of studying their diet and attempting to prove that Chagnon’s theory that ecological factors were the reason for this indigenous people’s horrible temperament. During the first months of Good’s stay in the Amazon forest, he found himself with a couple problems. One of them were the language. He could speak Spanish but none of the Yanomamo could understand it, so he saw himself with no way to actually speak with the …show more content…
He would only be able to go there twice a day and that wasn’t enough to collect enough data for his research. Good was suppose to stay in the Amazon forest for 15 months. He stayed for 12 years. During this time, he witnessed several violent moments that made him believe that Chagnon was telling the truth when he called the Yanomamo a fierce people. Rape, for example, was something that usually happened and was seen as a normal thing. Young girls needed to find a husband as soon as possible so they could be protected against rapist. They needed to have a husband or someone who they would be promised to so they wouldn’t be vulnerable to …show more content…
I’m from Brazil as well so my point of view is a little bit different, mostly because I’m more used to hear about different cases or understand their way of life. Of course practices like rape, war between tribes that can be about power, food, or territory, for example, are not good things at all. It always causes harm to one or more people, sometimes to the entire tribe. If they win a war against some people, most likely they would kill the men remaining and rape the women. From our society it is a definitely a savage way of life and I agree with that but we can not be ethnocentric. This life that for us is dangerous and illegal, for them is seem as something normal, as their culture. They never had a different life than that, they had never seen anything different either. They gather and hunt for their survival and the probability that this would lead to war when encountering other people who’s doing the same is bigger. All societies have some type of war; they might not be physical, but they