Preview

Yanomami Tribe and Their Culture Aspects Essay Example

Good Essays
Open Document
Open Document
659 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
Yanomami Tribe and Their Culture Aspects Essay Example
Yanomami Culture

Remedios Cochran

ANT 101

Amy VanSurksum

March 15, 2011

The Yanomami is an Indian tribe that live in the thick rainforest in Venezuela. They are known to be called the Stone Age Tribe. This tribe was discovered in the eighteenth century, by a western explorer. The daily social roles of the Yanomami tribes are very different, and yet similar to the roles of Americans today. Yanomami men and women perform very different and specific roles within their society. The women, leave everyday to travel miles to collect some food, water, firewood, for the village, they are still care for the children and husbands The men are the hunters and gardeners The Yanomami are horticulturalists. Most of their diet is cultivate from gardens, and a small portion is from hunted animals. The combined roles of the men and woman benefit the entire Yanomami village. The Yanomami tribe are also known to be cannibals. After the death of occurs to a tribe member dies, the body is set afire in a remote area and the bones are pulverized into a fine powder which is mixed into a beverage. The beverage is consumed by the deceased person’s relatives. This is a religion belief that the deceased’s soul will enter the body of the living relatives. (White and Johansen, 2005, chapter 3, Bibliography.) This tribe relies on a system based upon kinship. This kinship system distinguishes between parental siblings and opposite sexes. I found this system to be quite confusing, but the Yanomami Tribe was very familiar with it. In the kinship system, parental siblings of the same sex are considered to be blood relatives, these siblings are also called parents. Parental siblings of

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Satisfactory Essays

    B. Kinship is organized by tents. A husband and wife live in shared tents with usually one to five kids. The tents of the Basseri tribe show social organization in a tribe.…

    • 463 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Good Essays

    In the latter part of the 1930s, PhD. Ruth Underhill headed a college-financed anthropological study of the Southwestern-based Papago society (Lavender). The result from the venture was a self-proclaimed “autobiography” of a Papago woman’s recount of her experiences as a member of the tribe. Though Underhill’s Autobiography ultimately fails to provide a comprehensive historical study of the Papago, it nonetheless provides a rich, fascinating introduction to the world of Native American customs and traditions.…

    • 627 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Nacirema Tribe Analysis

    • 760 Words
    • 4 Pages

    I continued to read, and the more I read, the more confusing it became. The author speaks of things that this tribe do in their day to day lives in a prehistoric kind of way, but the similarities are just way to coincidental to our way of life. I asked myself, is this what we used to develop ourselves with? I mean is this the basis we have come to utilize our way of life? As I continued to read, I wonder how it is that no one I know has never spoke of such a tribe.…

    • 760 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Essay On Nacirema Tribe

    • 504 Words
    • 3 Pages

    After realizing “Nacirema” is American spelled backwards, it becomes evident that Miner is criticizing American culture. He describes the “tribes” behavior with a focus on changing personal appearance and magic-based rituals. Everybody goes to the “Latipso” to see “medicine-men” when they are sick and often are given potions or end up dead. This is like a looking glass into American culture. In our culture, there is a huge focus on physical features, but we don’t pray to fix it. Instead we take vitamins, apply make up, shave and wear nice clothes. Oftentimes when we are sick, hospital visits result in doctors writing prescriptions or performing surgery. We usually don’t know what the pills do for us, but are told it will correct the ailment and invest a lot of trust into the doctors no matter what.…

    • 504 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    Rainy Mountain

    • 1136 Words
    • 5 Pages

    N. Scott Momaday, in the memoir “The Way to Rainy Mountain”, traced the ancestral roots of his tribe back to the start of the Kiowa tribe. Momaday had always known about his ancestry but the death of his grandmother, Aho, prompted him to seek an in-depth personal exploration of his family history and background. Therefore, Momaday went back to his grandmother's residence and he observed that the spirit of the Kiowa tribe was faint but still very stirring. When he travelled to Aho’s house after her death, he’s looking to build a connection with his ancestors. Momaday felt that he could learn a lot of things and gain some insight from his visit to the motherland. From this article, it is evident that the Kiowa people were very spiritual and had an unbending love for nature because they strived to preserve the environment and performed spiritual dances and rituals in veneration to the sun. This memoir is an embodiment of the Kiowa culture, and N. Scott Momaday gives the reader a succession of oral narratives from the Kiowa community.…

    • 1136 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    In February, when there is no agricultural work, many men help out the women with spinning. And vice versa; certain agricultural tasks are performed by women like placing seeds in the furrows and turning over the clods during plowing, which both require use of their hands. The Yanomamo on the other hand, are pretty similar when it comes to physical work. It is common to see women leaving the village at 3:00 or 4:00 p.m. and returning at dusk with loads of wood on their backs. Women usually prepare the food which emphasizes her proprietorship as the man’s obligation to her. The books states how Men rarely fail to thank their wives for the cooked meal. Though men may dominate agriculturally, women dominate the household. This is mainly true because men are always coming and going between house and field work. But in general, I believe that socially, they do not see each other as equal. At public gatherings, men and women sit separately. As the men sit at the head table, women dish out the food. I have found that women tend to be subservient to the men especially in the public setting. One thing that I found disturbing was how men would sometimes improperly treat women. Specifically for the Yanomao, it was common for the women to be in fear…

    • 2197 Words
    • 9 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Better Essays

    Iroquois Kinship System

    • 982 Words
    • 4 Pages

    The Iroquois is the group I have decided to do my research of kinship systems on. This will come from what I have found in the text of chapters three and four of the text. The Iroquois is a unilineal descent group. This means that descent is traced back through one sex or side of the family. They traced their bloodline through the female side of the family, meaning they were a matrilineal descent group. These groups are not as common as patrilineal descent groups, which trace their bloodlines through the male side of the family. Horticultural societies used the matrilineal descent group because of women having a key part of the food producing role. They also owned land. The likelihood of a society being or remaining a matrilineal society depends upon how much food is obtained from hunting and herding. The more meat and food gathered by men as a result of this will drive down the role of women as major food producers. The fact that descent groups extend beyond any one individual because it goes beyond any one person’s lifetime allows things to remain in a group for a long time. This includes property, land, hunting and fishing territories, animals, and even knowledge. Iroquois matrilineage gave women the right to fields and tools, since they were a horticultural society, this made sense. Women did most of the cultivating of the crops and they should have the rights to both the land and tools to reap what is sown. They also lived in longhouses. These were long structures in which nuclear families lived in different compartments inside the house. After marriage, the Iroquois were matrilocal, meaning the husband lived in the wife’s community or longhouse. The eldest woman of a matrilineage was the most influential in decision making, including the allocation of resources and property. (Nowak & Laird, 2010, Chapter 4)…

    • 982 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    Kinship, the relationship between individuals, is a cultural universal that is shared by all. These relationships are defined through marriage, descent, or other cultural arrangements. Kinship helps to establish how “people classify each other, the rules that affect people 's behavior and people 's actual behavior” (Nowak & Laird, 2010, sec 4.5). Kinship systems differ between cultures and help to define the unique social organizations within different societies. Anthropologists have studied various cultures in an effort to understand how individuals within a culture behave toward one another and the effects that kinship has on their lifestyle. For instance, the kinship system of the Inuit has a significant impact on how the culture behaves, lives, and survives in the harsh climates of the Arctic Circle.…

    • 640 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Death Not Be Strange

    • 444 Words
    • 2 Pages

    This article compares our Western burial traditions to the Berawan’s. The Berawan think that our ritual is evil and because we embalm our dead so they can be shown in coffins, they said that we trap our dead in a suspended condition between life and death. The Berawan see America as a land with the potential for millions of zombies. Metcalf’s comparison is so thoroughly describes the Berawan’s practices in but in my ethnocentric world, it is easy to see why their beliefs are rejected as illogical. Berawan funerary customs are more natural than the American treatment of the dead, but are still way for exotic. The most exotic to me is that after storing the dead for several months some people would consume liquid decomposition mixed with rice.…

    • 444 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    Santillanes, Gary. “Releasing the Spirit: A Lesson in Native American Funeral Rituals.” October, 1997. The University of Minnesota. December 14, 1998. http://www.umn.edu…

    • 1187 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Good Essays

    Small ceremonies, or rituals, are still practiced in some remote parts of Australia, such as in Arnhem Land and Central Australia. These take the custom of chanting, singing, dancing or ritual action to summon the Ancestral Beings to guarantee a good amount of food. The death of a person in this culture is a time when people often paint themselves white, cut their own bodies to display their sorrow for the loss of their loved one, and conduct a series of rituals, songs and dances to ensure the person’s spirit leaves the area and returns to its birth place, from where it can later be reborn. There are two full types of burials that are to be conducted. The primary burial is when the body is laid out on an raised wooden platform, sheltered in leaves and branches, and left several months for the skin to rot away from the bones. The secondary burial is when the bones are collected from the platform, painted with red ochre, and then distributed in different ways. Sometimes a family member will bring a portion of the bones with them for a year or more. Sometimes they are wrapped in paperbark and put in a cave shelter, where they are left to disintegrate with time. In parts of Arnhem Land the bones are placed into a big dead log and left at a designated area of bushland. The dead log is a dead tree trunk which has been naturally hollowed out by the action of…

    • 921 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    Navajo Culture

    • 2375 Words
    • 10 Pages

    The Navajo society is a culture rich in tradition. They value the close knit relationship with their family and have a great appreciation for the land. They fought to preserve their way of life, resulting in high values in; kinship, lifestyle, religious beliefs, and their rites of passage.…

    • 2375 Words
    • 10 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Good Essays

    The discovery that Native Americans' culture is not static, is a relatively new one. With the aid of modern archeology, we now know that the Natives were very complex and were ever changing. The evidence we have now is still basic, but we can still learn a lot from it. Because of the lack of evidence, a lot of controversy is attributed to Native Americans. Some people believe that Natives were perfect beings, living in harmony with nature and others believe that they were savages due to human sacrifices, wars, etc. Natives are also often compared to Europeans who like them, engaged in warfare as well. One large difference is that Europeans had more capability to cause destruction compared to the Natives, due to their technology and organization…

    • 929 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    2. Fox, Robin. 1979. Kinship Categories. Evolutionary Biology and Social Behavior: Anthropological Perspective. William Irons, Pp. 132-144. North Scituate, MA: Duxbury Press.…

    • 920 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    East Indian Culture Essay

    • 1596 Words
    • 7 Pages

    Food plays a very important role in East Indian culture. Dietary habits within this culture are complex, enormously varied from region to region, and strongly influenced by religion (Purnell & Paulanka, 2008). Each religion has its own cooking style, which is influenced by the terrain, climate and crops.…

    • 1596 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Good Essays