Customer Reviews

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

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4 star:		(2)
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2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

I liked this book! After reading other anthropological works that mainly concentrate on the male aspect of tribal living, this book shows the other side of the coin.

This is not an entertaining biography in the form of a novel, but a book written for science rather than sales. For people wanting a pleasant read and a nice story, look elsewhere; this is a serious book.

Helena Valero, abducted from her parents by the Yanomamo, experiences all the extremes that a stone-age life could bring. She is shot twice with arrows, has her arm broken by her husband, is forcibly abducted from one village, almost killed in another attempted abduction, and watches her husband being killed by his enemies.

This book not merely supports the work of Napoleon Chagnon concerning the Yanomamo, if anything, this book presents an even more dangerous and difficult environment in which Valero and her sons fight for their lives on numerous occasions.

One of the most valuable documents available reflecting what life would be like fifty thousand years ago. A must for anyone interested in human origins.

I read many of the anthropological books on the "Yanoama" (uncommon spelling used in book) first but I learned more from this book than all the rest put together. She just tells her story, in great detail, and all the emotion and humanity comes out in the story. The people come across as individual people, not a monolithic species to be observed and catalogued in an anthropological zoo.

It takes some time to get through and I never did keep track of which tribe was which and who's trying to kill whom, but you really feel for her and she really brings you into her world. Why this isn't #1 on the Yanamami reading list, or Amazon tribe reading list for that matter, is beyond me. It's maybe the most fascinating biography I've ever read.

In 1937, Brazilian farmer Carlos Valero and his wife and three children were canoeing down a river near the Venezuelan border to his brother-in-law's farm in a forest clearing. Suddenly they were attacked by the Yanomami Indians, and their oldest child Helena, who was 11 or 12 at the time, was wounded. The adults grabbed the younger children and ran, leaving the wounded girl behind, intending to come back for her later. The Indians kidnapped her. Helena Valero grew up among the various bands of Yanomamo, learned their language and adopted their culture, got married (becoming the fifth wife of a chief), had two children; when her first husband was killed, she remarried and had two more children. When her second husband became a wanted man, her family escaped to the white society. The year was 1956. Helena Valero found her parents and brothers, but as she and her husband had no property and no useful occupation, her family sank into poverty; her oldest son helped out shoppers at a market, who gave him tips, off which their family lived. In 1963-1964 she dictated her story to an Italian anthropologist, who published it in 1965. A Web search for her name shows that afterwards she moved back to the jungle.

This book confirms the customary notions of stone age life in the Amazon rainforest. Curare-tipped arrows, shamans who ingest psychoactive substances; the spirit of the sun, of bats, of white men; anacondas, crocodiles, whose short tongues are explained in a Kiplinguesque myth of the origin of fire, jaguars. The Yanomami are (were?) a very violent people; a band could raid another band, kill all the men they could find and seize all the women; this is how Helena Valero passed from one band to another at least twice. There was controversy about anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon, who studied the Yanomami and wrote a book about them called The Yanomamo: Fierce People; an activist journalist accused Chagnon of both instigating violence among the Yanomani and falsifying the reports about it in order to create supporting data for his weird sociobiological theories; however, other anthropologists seem to have refuted the journalist's allegations. I read neither Chagnon's book nor the journalist's, just the Internet reviews, but Helena Valero's book, which describes events long before the Chagnon expeditions, seems to show that the Yanomami were in fact a fierce people.

A cliche of science fiction (in fact, of other genres of fiction as well) is a child of one culture being adopted into another culture, and after reaching adulthood going back to his native people and bringing them the knowledge of his adoptive people - Moses, Mowgli and many others. I read this book because I was wondering if these stories have any relevance to reality as experienced by Helena Valero. They do not; unlike Mowgli and his brothers, Helena Valero was always considered a foreign woman ("Napagnuma" in the Yanomami language) by her captors; having been a big child when captured, she never forgot Spanish and Portuguese and continued saying Roman Catholic prayers. Nor did the white society, except for the Italian anthropologist, care much about her experiences. I am sure that there have been many Indian children captured by whites who eventually came back to their own peoples, such as Jemmy Button, but they never left any accounts of their captivity that I am aware of.

This book is so rich and important, it is hard to say how rich and important it is. Helena Valero, a white captive amongst the Yanoama of the Orinoco, told her story to Ettore Biocca, an Italian anthropologist, and they both did a magnificent job.

Let us consider the value of just one aspect of it: what we learn of Helena Valero's husband, Fusiwe. He was a headman of Yanoama people in Venezuela. (In Brazil the tribe is called Yanomami, a much better known term, and have been studied most notably by Napoleon Chagnon.)

A while ago, I wrote about Fusiwe for an Aesthetic Realism seminar on the issues of men. My title for the paper was "How Much Feeling--and What Kind--Should a Man Have?" I saw that the dilemma of Fusiwe is in men everywhere, today--and we can learn from his victories and travails.

I see the book of Helena Valero as a virtually unrivalled window into the feelings of people living a primeval life, hunting and gathering. Not the least of its virtues is Helena Valero's exquisite memory for many, many details and her fine-grained intimate descriptions of loves and hates, loyalties and falsities--and many more feelings. She presents a picture of the inner lives of present-day tribal people with texture, perception, and truthfulness. What a treasure this book is!

Under stringent and stressful conditions she observed clearly and felt a great deal. I respect her very much.

In the paper I mention above, I tried to show, as an anthropologist with an Aesthetic Realism education, things that Fusiwe had in common with men and women of today in the U.S. and elsewhere. What Fusiwe told Helena Valero about himself reveal a man who was both tender and hard, and couldn't make sense of these opposing forces in himself. And so, in his utterly unique way, he was like other men, including myself.

Here he was, a strong man of a culture seemingly so different from culture in an American or European city, and yet he had the dilemma we have!

So as part of this review, permit me to quote a few paragraphs from my paper:

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Men of the Yanomami, like men of Manhattan or Michigan, want to show they don't have feelings: they're hard, they can't be intimidated, and they can defeat other men. In Yanomami, the word for this hardness and ability to defeat others is "waitiri." In Spanish--and now English has adopted the word--it is "machismo." But, writes Eli Siegel, founder of Aesthetic Realism, in his work Self and World:

"...the self does not want to be strong by the weakness of others....Power is not just the ability to affect or change others; it is likewise the ability to be affected or changed by others."

It is immensely touching to see how a man of the Yanomami was not only hard but desired to be gentle. Here he was, living in an ancient Native American culture where people live by warfare, by hunting with bow and arrow, and by forest agriculture.

And he had the dilemma that Eli Siegel spoke to me about, as to my own life, in an Aesthetic Realism lesson. He put this dilemma in a rhymed couplet:

I have been troubled oft
By the problem of hard and soft.

This problem of hard and soft is dealt with in a notable custom of Yanomami culture. It has been described by a number of male anthropologists, including Napolean Chagnon, with fascination and some horror--because, in my opinion, every man sees his own toughness and vulnerability, desire to defeat and even to be defeated, in this custom.

Helena Valero describes it (pages 144-5) and I summarize:

When men, or a group of men, get in a quarrel and are angry at each other--and yet see themselves as friends--they stand facing one another formally, in the sight of all the people of the community. Each is armed with a heavy wood club called a nabrushi. The first man lowers his head and shows a shaved part and the second man hits him there with the wooden nabrushi. The first man returns the blow. They continue. Each tries to be as indifferent to the staggering blows as possible. There is blood. Valero writes,

"While they struck they said to each other, 'I...call you to see whether you are a real man. If you are a man, let us now see if we become friends again and our anger passes....' The other replied, 'hit me, and we'll be friends again.'" [p. 144]

Fusiwe, the tushaua (or head man) was able to withstand more blows than nearly anyone else, and give heavier ones, and it is clear that his authority depended, in part, on the ability to win these contests.

One sees something resembling this contest in American business, in politics, in war, and even in the academic world. If one can have contempt for, and defeat, one's enemies, if one can have little feeling about hurts or injuries to oneself, one is likely to succeed in "getting ahead."

But a man doesn't just want to be hard and "win." Even as I tried to be tough and eagerly tried to defeat other people intellectually--I also longed to experience tender feelings, which so often I did not have when I wanted them.

That is, even as men think what they most want is power, victory, prestige, hardness, it isn't the only thing we want.

For example, in "The Aesthetic Method in Self-Conflict," a chapter of Self and World, Mr. Siegel writes of "Louis Robinson...of Syracuse, New York." He,

"like all people, talks to, with, and about himself. Sometimes, in these thoroughly intimate conversations, Louis Robinson asserts: "To hell with other people. I'm out of Number One." On other occasions, the somewhat civilized Mr. Robinson says: "This is too bad, thinking of myself all the time; why don't I forget myself and become interested in other things?" (page 100).

Fusiwe was like Robinson--and me. He didn't want only to "win out" over other people. Helena Valero describes numerous times when he did "forget [him]self and become interested in other things." She tells how Fusiwe, when their child was sick, stayed up night after night to watch over him; praying hard and asking help of the forest and mountain spirits to heal the child. He expressed tenderness, and a respect for the forces of reality.

And Helena Valero herself, a white child inducted the hard way into native American culture, describes how the older Fusiwe would tell her stories--and we feel he had love for these, and a tender desire for her to know something beautiful about his people, the way a father might have....

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My account of this book is continued (as I wrote above) on my website. The story of the way Fusiwe wanted to be hard, victorious, triumphant through war, and yet wanted to be tender and did not like himself, is a huge sub-drama within the larger drama of Helena Valero's own captivity, privations, experiences. It is an important drama, a moving drama, and a rare opportunity to know a deep individual whose culture both fitted him and didn't fit him--which can be said of everyone in some fashion.

You can see more of my paper online: <www.perey-anthropology.net>. In it, I try to show the depth of Fusiwe, and how representing all humanity, he illuminates the opposing qualities, the philosophic opposites, that are in all of us. I think he would be glad to know we are learning from him.

For the life of Fusiwe, whom Helena Valero worked very hard to write about justly, shows that even the most warlike of men have a desire to like themselves--and if they cannot make sense of their desires to be tough and gentle, vengeful and kind, they will not successfully like themselves.

In Self and World, Eli Siegel deals with the conflict in every person between the desire to take care of ourselves alone and the desire to be fair to "all that is not ourselves"--the very conflict that Fusiwe had. And we learn how this conflict, and its resolution, is of the utmost importance to the future of humanity.

For the narrative by Helena Valero when studied by means of the Aesthetic Method, as provided by Eli Siegel, presents us with a most important conclusion: War is not inevitable amongst human beings, for there is something better in us than the desire to defeat others.

Read the book and in a moving way you will see how this is true.

This book was so monotonous it screams assigned reading- you wouldn't read this otherwise.

Disappointing as-told-to-account by Portuguese woman kidnapped as a child by Yanomami and raised to adulthood. She tells us what happened but gives us no hint of her own feelings and no perspective that helps us understand the motives of the Indians.