Noble Savages: My Life Among Two Dangerous Tribes -- the Yanomamo and the Anthropologists
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Last annotated on March 7, 2017
IntroductionRead more at location 48
Note: Y è tutto ciò che un antropologo sogna: una comunità intatta e da sempre isolata dal resto dell'umanità... Quanto era dura la vita dell'antropologo a quei tempi: mesi senza un contatto... La guerra infinita dei Y. La vita presso i Y è ansiosa carica di terrore di imprevisti violenti. Domina il pericolo e spesso il portatore è il ns vicino. Hobbes è stato buon profeta ed è incredibile come persino alcuni antropologi possano preferorgli Rousseau.... La cooperazione tra uomini nn è naturale: va spiegata. La biologia ci ha provato con divrse teorie ma gli antrpologi o erano distratti o facevano finta di nn ascoltare... Hamilton: l'uomo collabora privilegiando i familiari: ciò è compatibile con la massimizzazione della sua prole. "Un figlio vale otto cugini"… Lo studio di Y è una conferma della kin selection di Hamilton. Quando il gruppo è famiglia allargata ok. Quando si estende sorgono conflitti e scissioni. Tuttavia se le vicinanze sono occupate la scissione nn si realizza e i conflitti sorgono sia dentro che fuori... Come nasce la politica e lo stato? Quando la scissione è impissibile bisogna vivere in conflitto cosicchè lo stato viene visto come il male minore. Oltre al fatto che un villaggio grande è più potente di un piccolo villaggio... Quando il villaggio supera le 200 unità il capo - che vanta una parentela diluita - adotta metodi tirannici... La massimizzazione della sicurezza. Ecco la teoria che megio descrive il mondo primitivo. Meglio di Darwin (max prole) e meglio di Smith (max profitto)... Il gruppo sembrava nel bel mezzo di una transizione (dalla caccia all'agricoltura).. Le denunce ricevute. NC accusato di aver corrotto i primitivi. La svolta p.c. dell'antropologia. L'ubiquità del terrore mal si conciliava con l'immagine del buon selvaggio INTRO@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ Edit
newly arrived mission groups who came to convert them to Christianity.Read more at location 68
I made a small mud-and-thatch hut next to one of the recently contacted villages and started to learn the Yanomamö language.Read more at location 71
I have spent some thirty-five years of my academic life studying the YanomamöRead more at location 73
To do this I had to travel six hours in my canoeRead more at location 86
The Yanomamö were fascinating, wild, and very difficult to live with, especially when you were the only one of your kindRead more at location 88
they quickly learned to modify their habits and could be very cooperative and even charming in small numbersRead more at location 90
ruined by creeping civilization and increased contact with the “outside world.”Read more at location 96
The Yanomamö were one of the last remaining large tribes that were still locked in intervillage warfare, struggling to maintain their independence, security, and safety from the ever-possible unexpected attacks by their Yanomamö neighbors.Read more at location 99
I would be one of the last eyewitnesses to the political, social, and military struggles that repeatedly occurred among the YanomamöRead more at location 103
These people were involved in a barely perceptible transition from “primitive” to “complex.”Read more at location 108
terminated with the development of the political state and “civilization.”Read more at location 111
Latecomers denounce me because the Yanomamö they visit at Salesian or other missions today are not the same kinds of Yanomamö I firstRead more at location 114
denounce earlier anthropologists in the name of political advocacy of native rightsRead more at location 116
because this older image of the Yanomamö does not conform to what the activists want to see.Read more at location 117
people were Noble Savages as Jean-Jacques Rousseau and his followers imaginedRead more at location 124
Rousseau never used the phrase “noble savage” (or “the good savage,” as it is sometimes translated) in his best known work, The Social Contract (1762), but the concept he described—that humans in the state of nature were blissful, nonviolent, altruistic, and noncompetitive and that people were generally “nice” to each other—was soon given that name.Read more at location 124
One point I emphasize in this book is that our assumptions about the alleged social tranquility of the past may be idealistic and incorrect.Read more at location 128
Life in the societies of ancient past—the “Stone Age”—appears to have been decidedly uncertain and fraught with danger, mostly from neighboring peoples who seemed to be ever willing to fall upon you when you least expected it—and this possibility was never very long out of your mind.Read more at location 129
In political philosophy it might be maximizing the greatest goodRead more at location 136
I discovered that maximizing political and personal security was the overwhelming drivingRead more at location 137
He likened war to foul weather—not just a shower or two, but a persistent condition for extended periods of time, something chronic.Read more at location 140
But most anthropologists have never lived among people who are really primitive.Read more at location 148
For many anthropologists who cling to Rousseau’s view of mankind rather than Hobbes’s, I am a heretic, a misanthrope, and the object of condemnation by politically correct colleagues, especially those who identify themselves as “activists” on behalf of native peoples because I describe the Yanomamö as I found them.Read more at location 153
reluctance of anthropological theoreticians and field researchers to take ideas from biology seriouslyRead more at location 163
frequently noted amity and favoritism characteristically found in kinshipRead more at location 168
In a very real sense, these “kinship behaviors” were in fact reproductive behaviors.Read more at location 169
For example, individuals share on average half (50 percent) of their genes with their siblings, they share one-fourth (25 percent) with their half-siblings, an eighth (12.5 percent) with their full cousins, etc.Read more at location 172
That’s because eight cousins would carry, on average, 100 percent of the genes that the person who laid down his life carried.Read more at location 177
It is easy to get along with your neighbors when there are only a few dozen of them in your band or village and most of them are close kin—brothers and sisters, or dependent juveniles like your children, nephews, and nieces.Read more at location 182
But it is not so easy to get along when your village growsRead more at location 183
because the only rules of cooperation and social amity are kinship rules,Read more at location 186
Large, politically complex societies emerged only after—or as a consequence of—the replacement of kinship institutions and nepotism by other institutions, by what Hobbes called the power that keeps men in awe, namely, the political state and law.Read more at location 187
most of the peoples in the newly discovered worlds of central Africa, Polynesia, Melanesia, Australia, and the Americas lacked what we have come to know as the political state and the law.Read more at location 190
the presence of potentially hostile neighbors inhibits village fissioning, keeping people at home where disputes and arguments increase, but also helping the village to survive as a group in a political situationRead more at location 193
as the group increases in size from, say 40 to 80 people, the role that political leaders (headmen) must play in keeping order increases.Read more at location 197
tasks become more difficult as village sizes get larger—150 peopleRead more at location 199
threats and physical coercion to maintain orderRead more at location 200
When villages get even larger, say 200 people, headmen can become oppressive and tyrannical.Read more at location 201
Some of the Yanomamö villages I lived in contained close to 300 peopleRead more at location 202
Yanomamö Indians represents just a single exampleRead more at location 206
The Yanomamö I studied seem to have made a few halting steps toward greater social complexityRead more at location 222
