The Yanomamo People
The Yanomamo People
The Yanomamo people are an indigenous people of northwest Brazil and southern Venezuela in the heart of the Amazon rainforest. The Yanomamo use their environment to there best advantage and exploit almost every part of it. The two main variations in the yanomamo culture are in the placement of their tribes the highland tribes and the lowland tribes. The highland tribes usually number fewer per tribe and are less hostile toward other tribes due to the lower population density and less struggle for food and resources. These people have adapted perfectly to their environment they have a sense of community and will take care of weaker individuals and feed less fortunate families in their tribe they have also set up routes for trade to exploit each tribe’s comparative advantage. They have also made provisions of the heartiest foods around such as the plantain ensuring that they will never go hungry for to long. The majority of Yanomamo technology is very crude and will come from the resources most readily accessible around them such as poles and vines. This form of technology fixed the current problems but was not intended to last indefinitely.
The ideal system for kinship in the Yanomamo culture is that the lineage only travels through the males there fore it would be possible for first cousins to marry as long as the lineage went through one aunt or mother. Confusing this lineage more is the fact that lineage can be changed to fulfill certain agendas such as a brothers daughter can be changed to a sisters daughter to allow an individual to marry. The proceeding sentence shows how the ideal and the real are different in that peoples lineage can be shifted.