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Among the Yanomama
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19826 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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5 / 1991 |
2,996 Words |
| Author
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Clay Robarchek
Clay Robarchek is assistant professor of anthropology at
Wichita State University in Wichita, Kansas. He and his wife,
Carole, also an anthropologist, are interested in peaceful and
violent orientations as aspects of complex cultural systems.
They have recently returned from the upper Amazon, where they
lived with and studied the Waorani (better known as Auca), a
society where, until very recently, more than 60 percent of
adult deaths were the result of homicide, making them perhaps
the most violent people known to anthropology. |
INTO THE HEART
Kenneth Good with David Chanoff
New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991
349 pp., $21.95
In 1991, the Amazon rain forest is very much on the mind of the "civilized" world, mainly because we fear that its destruction, abetted by World Bank development loans and our insatiable hunger for cheap beef, will deprive the world of much of its rainfall and perhaps even its breathable air. We have also heard that there are still some people back in those jungles.
In 1975, when Kenneth Good first set out for the Amazon, the rain forest was as relevant to the concerns of most people as the far side of the moon. Except for a few anthropologists and missionaries, the only interest in the indigenous inhabitants was exhibited by government bureaucrats, who saw the thinly scattered bands as obstacles to the exploitation of the region's resources or as pawns to be used in domestic political power struggles, and by miners and ranchers, who wanted to, and frequently did, exterminate them.
Good came to Venezuelan rain forest as a member of an anthropological research team. He planned to stay for fifteen months collecting data for his Ph.D. dissertation, data that the project's organizer hoped would silence critics of his explanation for the violent way of life of the Yanomama Indians. What Good found was another world, a society whose assumptions and expectations were radically at odds with his own. He would spend the next eleven years trying to achieve the transition from his reality into theirs, striving to see and understand the world through their eyes. As he began to succeed, he found a different conception of how to be human. He also found something else, something quintessentially human: love.
The story, told by Good and David Chanoff, makes an altogether unique and remarkable book. It is a tale of adventure and romance, of courage and commitment, of triumph over bureaucratic malevolence and the dangers of the primeval forest.
The book also provides a revealing look at the pettiness and egocentricity that often drives scientific research and debate. In this case it seems to have reached rather extraordinary levels, even by the standards of a traditionally fractious discipline. In Good's account, his life was literally placed at risk when he was denied vital medicines and equipment. The book is also
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