The more I study the adventures of anthropologists in Yanomami-land, the more surreally cinematic they seem. From the pistol-packing Napoleon Chagnon in a loincloth to Jacques Lizot’s homosexual harem, the need for a Francis Ford Coppola or a Werner Herzog cries out.
I began reading Kenneth Good’s memoir “Into the Heart: One Man’s Pursuit of Love and Knowledge Among the Yanomamo” mostly in search of information that ran counter to Chagnon’s “fierce people” thesis. (There are at least three acceptable ways of spelling their tribal name: Yanomami, the most common, as well as Yanomamo and Yanomama.) But the more I read, the more convinced I became that Kenneth Good is one of the most remarkable denizens of this world imaginable. Indeed, so compelling was his story that Hollywood took out an option to turn his memoir into a movie but it was never made. Now that would have been something I would have paid top dollar to see.
Kenneth Good first came to Yanomami territory in 1974 as a 27-year-old graduate student. Despite traveling there under the auspices of Napoleon Chagnon, he was much closer to Marvin Harris philosophically. As I discussed in a previous post, Harris challenged Chagnon’s “fierceness” theory on the basis of cultural materialism, making the point that it was a struggle for food rather than females that explained clashes among the Stone Age peoples.
As Good grew closer to the people he was studying, he was offered one of their daughters as a bride. As it turned out she was 9 years old at the time. More about this subsequently.
full: http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2009/09/08/yanomami-science-wars-part-seven/
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