Yanoama: The Narrative of a Young Woman Kidnapped by Amazonian Indians (Kodansha Globe) [Paperback]

Ettore Biocca (Author), Helena Valero (Author), Philip Turner (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 1997 | Series: Kodansha Globe

A dramatic and uniquely intimate portrait of twenty years in an Amazonian Indian Village.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"[Valero] narrates her experience with...remarkable powers of observation."

Language Notes

Text: English (translation)
Original Language: Italian

Product Details

• Paperback: 354 pages
• Publisher: Kodansha America (February 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1568361084
• ISBN-13: 978-1568361086
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.5 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,328,016 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #89 in Books > History > Americas > South America > Venezuela

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A must read, November 19, 2003

By 

J. head (littlteton, nh USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Yanoama: The Narrative of a Young Woman Kidnapped by Amazonian Indians (Kodansha Globe) (Paperback)

An incredible first hand story of a world probably gone forever. In the 1930's a White Amazon river trader's daughter is kidnapped by the Yanoama, a tribe of Amazonian Indians. This pre-teen is adopted by the tribe and assimilates into the Stone Age culture over the succeeding twenty years. The lifestyle, experiences, and culture are fascinating and bizarre. Helena Valero never forgot her roots. She eventually escaped along with one of her children to a Salesion mission. Her original white family rejected her. She lived her life doing menial work at the mission, making sure her child received an education at the mission school. She had had a hard life in the forest, beaten, and bartered, but effected her own rescue only to be rejected by her original family and told to get a job and start supporting herself and child. At the mission she was looked upon as just another native inhabitant trying to acquire western ways. I am a little suspicious of this story because there seems to be a total lack of notoriety. If a Helena Valero were to walk out of the Amazonian forest today she would be deluged with book and movie deals. I believe the truth of the story comes out in the details. The facts of her story and her intimate knowledge of tribal life seem to bear out the truth.

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars "Yanoama" speaks to cultural difference, March 8, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Yanoama: The Narrative of a Young Woman Kidnapped by Amazonian Indians (Kodansha Globe) (Paperback)

This lengthy narrative, rich in detail and allegory, will benefit anyone with an interest in cross cultural thought. If we can trust Biocca's telling of Helena Valero's "displaced" life among the Yanomami, then we have with "Yanoama" something truly unparalleled. But it's virtues may pass unnoticed among the "professionally trained" in cross-cultural studies. Many anthropological texts, these days, navel-gaze through interpersonal thickets of this or that "other" modernity, extending a Western "cosmopolitanism" upon peoples who often do not share our sensibilities. Biocca's book by contrast offers a refreshingly descriptive account of the intercultural life of a young girl, age 11, who was captured by Yanomami indians, only to live with them and learn their customs, differences, and political tensions before returning to "the West" some twenty years later. Although her story is by now quite old (she was kidnapped in the 1930's), and the Yanomami now live an entirely different way of life, the reader will find Valero's "ethnographic" upbringing an essential supplement to any anthropological or philosophical understanding of Yanomami life. If you doubt the descriptive quality of this book, look no further than N. Chagnon's contemporaneous (1968) but still-celebrated "Yanomamo" to see a real straw-man depiction of these particular Brazilan and Venezualan peoples.

9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A World Apart From Civilization as We Know It, March 28, 2002

By 

Vickey Sue Ollis (Rainsville, Alabama) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Yanoama: The Narrative of a Young Woman Kidnapped by Amazonian Indians (Kodansha Globe) (Paperback)

Yanoama tells the story of a young girls coming of age in a world apart from civilization as we know it. Helena Valero was taken from her parents by the native Yanoama Indians of Venezuela while a preteen girl. She struggled to learn their language and strongly gave her own opinions to those who whished to keep her as their property. Helena lived on her own in the tropical rainforest, was bitten and chased by large snakes, survived poisoned arrows, beatings, and starvation. Her will to survive above all else kept her alive. The Yanoama are what we would call primitive peoples who practice indocanibalism, take more than one wife, wear no clothes and practice rituals that seem unreal to people of the "civilized world". This is the true story of Helenas capture and eventual escape. Life in the rainforest was not east for Helena along the Rio Negro, but as she grew older and had children her resolve strengthened to survive and escape with those whom she loved into a better life where the Yanoaman tribes would not constantly be threatening to kill them. While this is an excellent source for anthropology it is more important as the documentation of the human will to survive.