Society-YANOAMA The name Yanoama (Yanomamo) is an ethnolinguistic designation for a number of small Indian groups of southern Venezuela and northern Brazil. These groups include the Sanema (Guaharibo), Nabudub, Pubmatari, Taclaudub, Waica, Casapare (Shiriana), Karime, Samatari, Surara, and Pakidai. They occupy contiguous territories, speak more or less closely related languages, and display essentially similar economic, social, and religious forms. The Yanoama are located between lat. 0 degrees-5 degrees N and long. 62 degrees-65 degrees 30 minutes W, an area which spans the headwaters of several important rivers--the Paragua, Ventuari, Padamo, Ocamo, Mavaca, and Orinoco rivers in Venezuela, and the Uraricuera, Catrimani, Dimini, and Araca rivers in Brazil. Cariban peoples enclose the Yanoama in a semicircle to the northeast, and Arawakans to the southwest. The Yanoama function as a buffer between these two groups and have successfully resisted intrusion into their territory by either one. The Yanoama language has been tentatively classified in the Macro-Chibcha phylum (Greenberg 1960; Wilbert 1963; Voegelin and Voegelin 1965). The Yanoama are one of the largest unacculturated aboriginal groups left in South America, with a total population of around 12,000, distributed throughout more than 200 villages. Subsistence is based on slash-and-burn agriculture, with plantains and bananas the predominant crops. Also grown are bitter and sweet manioc, taro, yams, and sweet potatoes. The fruit of the peach palm is of primary importance to the diet during certain times of the year. Hunting and collecting are supplemental subsistence activities. Fishing is of minor importance to the economy. A Yanoama permanent settlement consists of a circle of huts around a central plaza. The huts stand so close to one another that adjacent roofs overlap, giving the impression of a circular roof, interrupted only by the diametrically opposed entrances to the settlement. These permanent villages are often surrounded by palisade fences. The village is the basic sociopolitical unit and is occupied by several extended families, composed of nuclear family households. The founding nucleus of such a village consists of two intermarried pairs of brothers, their sisters (or wives), and their descendants. The two resulting lineages exchange their women, thus creating a number of affinal alliances. As additional lineage groups join the village community and intermarry with members of the original lineage, political pressures and internal factionalism frequently lead to the splitting apart of the village and the establishment of a completely new community. Each village has its own headman (pata), and one pata is usually more influential than the others. Migliazza (1972: 415) claims that the position of chief or headman is not really inherited, but is dependent on the chief having many living agnatic relatives and the ability to assert himself among them. There is some indication, however, that the office was once inherited patrilineally from father to son or from elder brother to younger brother. During times of war, a man with experience in combat was often chosen to act as war chief, an office which was not hereditary and which became inactive when hostilities ceased. Marriage among the Yanoama serves to bind non-agnatically related groups of males to one another in a system of exchanges involving goods, services, and the promise of a reciprocal exchange of women at a later date. Ties between husband and wife are weak, but those between a man and his sister's husband are contrastingly strong. Brother-sister exchanges and cross-cousin marriages are the preferred pattern, and, at least ideally, the Yanoama have a prescriptive bilateral cross-cousin marriage rule. Postnuptial residence is temporarily matrilocal, with the groom joining the household of the bride's parents, where he renders them bride service for some time. Later, residence can be with the husband's family or wherever the husband chooses. Should the husband die, the woman is remarried to his brother. If he has no brothers, then after a year she can remarry any of her eligible tribesmen. Polygyny is a common practice among the Yanoama, and is frequently sororal. All Yanoama groups, as well as their Carib neighbors, have bifurcate merging kinship terminology for the first ascending generation, accompanied by Iroquoian cousin terminology. Patrilineal descent and agnatic relationships are considered more important than matrilineal relatives. Clans and moieties have apparently never existed among the Yanoama, but lineages have been mentioned by Chagnon (1971). In his analysis of the kinship system, Chagnon affords a central place to the local descent group--basically a lineage segment, consisting of agnatically related co-resident kinsmen, usually restricted to two generations in depth. The Yanoama have a rich and complex set of theological concepts, myths, and legends. They conceive of the external world as having an origin, boundaries, supernatural beings, and a specific nature. They believe that people have several souls. One is the buhii ("will" or "spirit"), which at death turns into the no borebo and travels to the hedu layer of the Cosmos, wherein dwell the souls of the dead. In addition, each person has a noreshi, a sort of spirit or portion of the soul, and an animal in the jungle to which this spirit corresponds. These noreshi animals are inherited patrilineally for men and matrilineally for women. Sickness is caused when the noreshi soul leaves the body. In addition, the Yanoama believe that every species of animal and plant has its own hekira, a spiritual "proto" of the species. Most internal illnesses are believed to have been caused by the intrusion of hekira or by foreign objects injected by this spirit. Shamanism is well developed. The shaman establishes contact with spirits through the use of hallucinogenic drugs. Friendly hekira are used in curing ceremonies to fight against the "evil ones" who cause illness (Migliazza 1972: 424). Curing is the chief function of the shaman, but sorcery against enemies is also practiced. Small children are the particular targets of the magical projectiles of an enemy sorcerer. Any man can become a shaman if he wishes, with only some simple but formal training under the tutelage of an older shaman, but only a few men in each village actually choose this occupation. At death, the body is burned and the remaining bones crushed into a powder, which is consumed in a beverage at a later date by the mourners in memory of the dead. This practice is common to all Yanoama groups. From 1954 on, the Yanoama have been the subject of a large number of field investigations. Also, dozens of excellent ethnographic films were produced by Napoleon Chagnon and Timothy Asch during the 1960s and 1970s. Chagnon's works (1966, 1968) provide a general ethnography on the Yanoama as a whole, with special emphasis on warfare, social organization, marriage alliances, interpersonal relations, and intercommunity relationships. Culture summary by John M. Beierle Chagnon, Napoleon Alphonseau. Yanomano warfare, social organization and marriage alliances. Ann Arbor, University Microfilms, 1967 [1971 copy]. 3, 9, 221 l. illus., maps, tables. University Microfilms Publications, no. 67-8226) Dissertation (Anthropology) -- University of Michigan, 1966. Chagnon, Napoleon Alphonseau. Yanomano, the fierce people. New York, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1968. 19, 142 p. illus., maps. Greenberg, Joseph. The general classification of Central and South American languages. Selected papers of the Fifth International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences, 1956. Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1960. Migliazza, Ernest C. Yanomama grammar and intelligibility. Doctoral dissertation, Bloomington, Indiana University, 1972. Voegelin, Carl F. Languages of the world: Native American fascicle two. By Carl F. Voegelin and Florence M. Voegelin. Anthropological Linguistics, Vol. 7, No. 7, 1965. Wilbert, Johannes. Indios de la region Orinoco-Ventuari [Indians of the Orinoco-Ventuari region]. Fundacion La Salle de Ciencias Naturales, Monografias 8. Caracas, 1963. 7884