Yanomamo
gregladen | November 23, 2016What is Thanksgiving?
Thanksgiving is a feast. But what is a feast? Anthropology is all about examining ourselves through the lens of other cultures. Or, at least, that's what we used to do back in the good old days. Let's have a look at this great American holiday from this perspective and see what we see.
A traditional feast in Venezuela
The enemy has arrived, in force, outside your village. The men are armed and wearing the symbols of war, which is appropriate because your group and the group milling about outside your walled settlement are at war. One of the men, wearing war garb but…
gregladen | May 2, 2013Two young boys are having an argument while their fathers, resting in hammocks, look on. The argument is over something silly but escalates until the dads decide to intervene. They equip each boy with a small pole and position them face to face, explaining the rules of the game. Each child has the opportunity to whack the other with the stick, in turn. The boys can continue to carry out this ritualized but stingingly painful combat until one of them gives up, handing victory to his opponent. Eventually, these boys will grow into men, and this sort of combat, using either long poles borrowed…
gregladen | April 5, 2013Napoleon Chagnon spent years living among the Yanomamo of Venezuela and wrote, among other things, a classic ethnography still used widely in anthropology classes. It came to pass that Chagnon and his ethnography came under scrutiny, actually a few waves of scrutiny, from practitioners of cultural anthropology in part because his monograph depicted the Yanomamo as “fierce people” and this characterization of them was used, misused really, against them by outside forces including the government to justify their “pacification.” The Yanomamo were indeed being abused by these outside forces, and…
gregladen | November 22, 2012Today is Thanksgiving in the US. Happy Thanksgiving. Let us being with a word of advice:
TAKE THE TURKEY OUT OF THE FREEZER NAO!!!
And now ... a feast.
The enemy has arrived, in force, outside your village. The men are armed and wearing the symbols of war, which is appropriate because your group and the group milling about outside your walled settlement are at war. One of the men, wearing war garb but adorned also with white flagging to indicate a peaceful intent attempts to enter your village but is stopped by guards. They converse briefly and the guards allow the man to crawl into…