The central theme of Napoleon Chagnon’s ethnography “Yanomamo: The Fierce People” is embedded in the title of the book. The basic point that the author was trying to get across is violence or fierceness of this South American tribe. He claims that this is the way Yanomamo people see themselves and this is how they want to be percepted by others. Chagnon has a lot of evidence backed up with statistics to support his topic. However, I believe he had not kept in mind the consequences of this claims and descriptions.
The life of Yanomamo people is indeed filled with violence. Some thirty percent of men die violently and nearly half of the men who have reached the age of twenty-five have participated in a killing. They regularly beat their wives. It often happens; even they don’t have any particular reason, simply to show her that they care for her. Newborn children are often cruelly murdered in gruesome ways such as choking a child with a stick, strangling it with a piece of vine or throwing it against a tree. The Yanomamo people habitually use hallucinogenic drugs and are all addicted to tobacco. All of this builds a picture of an evil, immoral, and hateful tribe.
When describing a population in such manner there are certain c

I do not know if I could say that Chagnon had a case of inverted ethnocentrism, or going native, but there definitely is some evidence of the things that he would never have done in his original culture. Back to the story with the missionary, when he decided to take the drug with the other natives to get in touch with their hekura, he was definitely “one of them” at this moment. I do not know if radical actions such as this are completely necessary to do for an anthropologist, but I have to admit that I think that it helped him (and us, readers) understand better this tradition and, consequently, the Yanomamo culture.

In general I enjoyed reading the book. It was quite interesting and the writing style was simple. The statistics, genealogy charts, and such were a bit tedious, but I really enjoyed reading about Yanomamo religious practices and how they view themselves and the world. The book was quite well-organized, although the author was a little jumpy from the neutral tone to some very emotional and critical statements.

I must admit that sometimes it seems that the author was a bit too emotional in writing his book. Even if the tone of the description of a tradition or an incident is neutral, every once in a while he puts exclamation marks here and there, that reveal his attitude towards the issue. For example: “One of them (women) commented that the other’s husband must really care for her since he has beaten her on the head so frequently!” Also, his book is full of phrases such as “I was astonished”, “I gasped”, “I was horrified”, etc. In a scientific work, I expected a little less sentimentalism, but I must admit that his comments on personal perspective of those things (which in many ways reflect mine because we come from cultures so similar compared to that of Yanomamo) made the book much more interesting to read. After all we were not dealing with chemical elements or mathematical formulas here. We were studying living people.

So where is the fine line in this work between picturing these people as less than worthy, brutal and hateful and justifying their violent behavior? I believe this is one of the most difficult and important dilemmas in anthropology. The author cannot rationalize or excuse the ethical issues occurring in his subject of study, but he cannot judge them either. Presenting the truth neutrally without putting the Yanomamo tribe down in the eyes of the outside world and at the same time exposing the horrible facts of their daily life is a very difficult task. I cannot say that Chagnon completely succeeded in it, but it is obvious that he tried. Many times, if he cannot justify a certain behavioral feature, he at least tries to explain it in the most acceptable ways. At the same time he obviously does not hi