Tales from the Island of Serendip

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Love Story

"I live in a place where I do not gather wood and no-one hunts. The women do not call me to go kill fish. Sometimes I get tired of being in the house, so I get angry with my husband. I go to the stores and look at clothing.It isn't like in the jungle. People are separate and alone. It must be that they do not like their mothers."

Yarima

Secrets of the Tribe is a documentary film by director José Padilha premiered at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival, where it was nominated for a Grand Jury Prize. This documentary explores the allegations, first brought to light in the book Darkness in El Dorado, written by Patrick Tierney, that anthropologists studying the Yanomami Indians in the 1960s and '70s engaged in bizarre and inappropriate interactions with the tribe, including sexual and medical violations.

Scientists accused in this film are among others James Neel, Napoleon Chagnon and Kenneth Good.

It features interviews with Yanomami, as well as with scientists who have studied them.

One anthropologist featured in the film said the film showed "the social responsibility associated with working with human subjects – especially the unique vulnerabilities of indigenous peoples – and the ease in which such responsibilities can be and have been ignored, discarded, abused."

Tierney presents a convincing case that Chagnon has consistently overestimated Yanomami violence, and that he himself was responsible for fomenting much of it. In his book Yanomami Warfare: A Political History, Ferguson revealed how Chagnon had changed the political balance between different Yanomami groups by favouring some over others, and by selectively providing steel goods and weapons to certain groups. Chagnon was apparently given to bursting into villages decorated in war paint and brandishing a shotgun.

Yanomami men soon realized that their own displays of aggression would be rewarded with machetes and other highly prized tools. According to Ferguson, ‘A war started between groups which had been at peace for some time on the very first day Chagnon got there, and it continued until he left’. Far from being an objective observer of Yanomami violence, Chagnon was an active participant in the wars. Yanomami men were fighting for access not to women but to Chagnon himself.

Alice Dreger, an historian of medicine and science, and an outsider to the debate, concluded in a peer-reviewed publication that most of Tierney's claims (the movie is based on claims originally made by Tierney) were "baseless and sensationalistic charges".

A detailed investigation of these charges by a panel set up by the University of Michigan found the most serious charges to have no foundation and others to have been exaggerated.

Almost all of the lengthy allegations made in Darkness in El Dorado were publicly rejected by the Provost's office of the University of Michigan in November 2000.

Sponsel and Turner, the two scientists who originally touted the book's claims, admitted that their charge against Neel "remains an inference in the present state of our knowledge: there is no 'smoking gun' in the form of a written text or recorded speech by Neel."

The American Anthropological Association has since rescinded its support of the book and acknowledged fraudulent and improper and unethical conduct by Tierney.

The association admitted that "in the course of its investigation, in its publications, in the venues of its national meetings and its web site, [it] condoned a culture of accusation and allowed serious but unevaluated charges to be posted on its website and expressed in its newsletter and annual meetings" and that its "report has damaged the reputations of its targets, distracted public attention from the real sources of the Yanomami tragedy and misleadingly suggested that anthropologists are responsible for Yanomami suffering".

Stephen Broomer points out that, "Tierney wrote a polemical, unscientific book that invoked a scandal. Padilha’s film is more evenhanded than this, no doubt because it includes that scandal as a subject, allowing Chagnon an opportunity to defend himself".

For Tierney, however, as for many of his supporters, anthropology is less a scientific discipline than a political mission. The aim of anthropologists in their view is to defend the dispossessed. Tierney has been an active participant in the political struggles in the Amazon, seeking to defend Yanomami rights against claims made by gold miners and the Brazilian government. In his eyes sociobiology is not so much a scientific method as a political programme. Chagnon’s depiction of the Yanomami, he believes, has paved the way for the use of violence against them by miners and government officials. As a result, Tierney writes, ‘I gradually changed from being an observer to being an advocate’. According to Tierney, ‘Traditional, objective journalism was no longer an option for me.’

Exploitation of the Rain Forest tribes takes many forms and is often disguised behind seeming good intentions.

And sometimes good intentions go awry.

My own experience of living and working intermittently for quarter of a century in a Bengali village tells me this - and I will refer back to it at the end of this chapter, as the story I am about to relate is strongly echoed in my own.

Serendipity is at play yet again....

In 1968, the US anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon published his bestseller Yanomamo: The Fierce People.

He described the tribe as being prone to petty disputes - usually over women - which escalate into wars between villages.

He painted a picture of a world where chronic warfare, gang rape and murder were all facts of life.

It was as a graduate student of Chagnon's that David Good's father, Kenneth Good, first travelled to the Amazon in 1975. Just as the protagonist of Alejo Carpentier's novel "The Lost Steps" had done, and just as his son would do 36 years later, he travelled up the Orinoco past the Guajaribo Rapids. He made his home in a little hut a short distance from the Hasupuweteri.

Good would end up living almost full-time with the Yanomami for more than twelve years, sharing their lives, becoming fluent in their language.

He moved into the village shapono and observed as many of the daily rituals as he could.

He went on treks, hunts and observed funeral rites. The Hasupuweteri called him shori - brother-in-law.

And he began to question the picture of the Yanomami that Chagnon had painted in his book.

"He thought that the Yanomami weren't as fierce as they were represented to be," says his son David. "And I think there's some substance to that, because my father ended up living there 12 years, and I couldn't imagine him living 12 years with a savage, warlike, fierce people. So he became enamoured with the people."

One day in 1978, the headman of the Hasupuweteri presented Good with a proposition.

"'Shori,' he said, 'you come here all the time to visit us and live with us… I've been thinking that you should have a wife. It isn't good for you to live alone,'" wrote Good in his 1991 memoir, Into the Heart: An Amazonian Love Story.

It is common among the Yanomami for an older man to become betrothed to a younger girl. Such betrothals are not consummated for some time — perhaps not ever. The Yanomami understand that sometimes these relationships don’t work out. A girl might thus be betrothed several times before actually being married. The girl brings food from her mother’s fire to feed the man; he brings her his own gifts of food. They talk and joke together. Eventually, the girl feels comfortable being around his hearth and being around him. If things work out, they become friends.

When the girl has her first menses, the man and his betrothed hang their hammocks side by side, and they have sex for the first time. The girl thus has an instant husband and protector. Women beyond the age of puberty are routinely raped if they do not have husbands.

The Yanomami have nothing like a formal ceremony comparable to marriage in Western culture. Divorce is just as informal. The departing spouse simply removes his or her hammock from the space of the other spouse inside the shabono, the large communal house, and then resists or refuses reconciliation and reunification.

At first Good refused, but over time he came around to the idea. "I found myself thinking that maybe being married down here wouldn't be so horrendous after all: certainly it would be in accordance with their customs. In a way the idea even became attractive. After all, what better affirmation could there be of my integration with the Hasupuweteri?"

When he relented, the headman said, "Take Yarima. You like her. She's your wife."

Unlike doctors or psychologists, there is no fixed code of practice barring relationships between anthropologists and the subjects of their research. There is much debate about whether sex is ever permissible in the field, either for enjoyment or study.

In Kenneth Good's case, it was not about research - he and Yarima developed a romantic attachment. She affectionately called him Big Forehead. He called her Bushika - Little One.

“Our relationship changed,” he writes. “Before, Yarima had been the cute little girl with the smile and the hello. Now it was something more than that and, as time passed, a good deal more than that.”

With every trip he made upriver, Good and Yarima became closer, and the theoretical tie between them felt more real.

The community began taking it more seriously too and began to treat them as a married couple.

The marriage created problems in the village where Good lived with Yarima. Yanomami attitudes toward women and sex were very different from his own, and, while he might normally regard these with anthropological detachment, his attitude was different when they were directed at Yarima.

Good frequently had to be away from the village — for permits, visas, research funding. He made a public and very angry announcement that his wife was to be left alone while he was gone. Still, on one occasion when he went downriver on business, the village decided that he was dead, and Yarima was raped by a number of men. One of the men was his own brother-in-law, Yarima’s sister’s husband, with whom it was considered normal for Yarima to have sex. But Good was furious when he returned, and he berated the man publicly. Another time when he was gone, Yarima was beaten and her ear partly ripped off. Yarima’s brother could not understand why Good was so upset by all this. It’s just naka, he told Good, just sex. What do you care?

This precipitated Yarima's first contact with the modern world. Good took her to the town of Puerto Ayacucho, to get her ear attended to.

In 1988, they returned to the jungle for a visit, taking David with them. Yarima was pregnant again, and, while they were there, Yarima gave birth to Vanessa, their second child.

In 1991, Good, along with author David Chanoff, wrote a book about his experiences among the Yanomami entitled Into the Heart: One Man’s Pursuit of Love and Knowledge among the Yanomami.

In his book Kenneth Good describes his wife acclimatising to life around her.

Both Good and Yarima thought it would be a good idea to visit her home village once more, but they could not afford the trip on his salary as an assistant professor. Finally, in 1992, National Geographic agreed to finance the trip if they could make a documentary film out of it, to be called Yanomami Homecoming.

The magazine sent three boats full of people and equipment to the Upper Orinoco, but not — as they had apparently promised — either a doctor or medical supplies for the Yanomami.

The film contains some joyful moments of Yarima showing off her children to her sister and going crab hunting again in the creeks. A five year-old David is seen squabbling with Vanessa over a heavy bunch of plantains, while baby Daniel is carried on Yarima's back in a sling attached to a headband, in the traditional Yanomami style.

But it also captures her despondency.

Two decades after she left, David, now 25, realised he had to find her.

"I remember being with her - we used to have this little routine, where we'd stop by Dunkin' Donuts and get coffee and donuts," he says. He recalls her love of rollercoasters and how they would wrestle together. "I don't remember a sad or distressed mum, not at all," he says.

David travelled hundreds of kilometres by boat through the Amazon to reach his mother's village

"I saw children and men and women on the riverbank just waiting for us to arrive. The women were all topless, the men had shirts and shorts on."

They had come from the village of Hasupuweteri. As David disembarked they began speaking rapidly in the Yanomami language and prodding him.

"I was just completely mobbed - all the women and the children gathered around me. I had so many hands all over me, pulling my ear, touching my nose, touching my hair," he recalls.

At 5'5" (1.6m) David was used to being the smallest in a group, but he found himself nervously standing above the Yanomami, who are one of the world's shortest ethnic groups.

His father was remembered by the older Hasupuweteri, while the younger ones had grown up with stories of how Yarima and Kenneth's children had been raised in the world of the nabuh.

His mother, they told him, was at the village of Irokaiteri, 10 minutes further up the river. But he would not be permitted to complete the journey by boat - he was altogether too interesting.

Instead, he was taken to the village shapono.

"Each family had its own hearth area in the circular dwelling but there were no walls and no privacy of any sort. Adults snored. Babies cried.

"Some people talked... but not in whispers.

"Someone might want to give a speech, one of the pata, the big men... It did not matter that most of them were asleep. He felt like talking, so he was going to talk."

A young man called Mukashe was introduced to David as his half-brother. He ran off into the jungle to fetch their mother.

After 19 years, David would have to wait a few more hours to meet his mother.

After David had been waiting for about three hours, Yarima burst into the Hasupuweteri shapono. She had run all the way there.

She was in her mid-40s, short, vigorous and strong. She had a basket around her head filled with roots she had gathered, which she threw to the ground while she tried to catch her breath. The village became hushed.

It had been two decades, but David recognised his mother.

"I knew it was her right away," he says. "I stood up and approached her. And then it just hit me - what do I do? Everything in me just wanted to hold her, to hug her, but that's not the Yanomami way of greeting people. So it was just this awkward encounter. I put my hand on her shoulder and she started trembling and crying. And I looked into her eyes and I just couldn't help but start crying myself."

"There was a silence," says Hortensia Caballero, who had come upriver with David. "What I remember was a silence. It was a very beautiful, intense moment. Of course all the women in the village, including me, found we had tears on our cheeks."

David started to speak softly in English. He said "I'm here, I'm finally here," and "I made it, I'm back" and "It's been so long".

Then he was flooded with memories of his mother from childhood, which he relayed to Caballero to translate into Spanish, so that Jacinto, the local boatman, could put them into Yanomami.

David did not ask his mother why she had left. Yarima asked if everyone was alive and well, but they did not discuss the past at all.

"I had this realisation," says David, "I don't really care what happened. I don't care about the controversy. I don't care what all these critics think. I don't care why she left. None of that matters to me now - I can leave that for everyone else to speculate. All I'm looking forward to is developing a bright future with my mum and my family and my people."

A video captured another emotional meeting, this time with his uncle (wrongly identified in the video as his grandfather). He had been headman while David's father had been in Hasupuweteri.

"They're really quick to establish your place in the village," he says. "It wasn't like my father's situation where he had to spend years gaining their trust to be accepted."

Soon after his meeting with his uncle, David's mother came up to him with two beautiful young girls.