Romance and thrills in the Amazonian jungle
INTO THE HEART is an apt title for the autobiography of anthropologist Kenneth Good and the ethnography of the Yanomama Indians rolled into one, and for a romantic book that journeys into the heart of the unexplored Venezuelan jungle.
When Good set off to study the Hasupuweteri Yanomama, he had every reason to be apprehensive. The Hasupuweteri were known in American anthropology circles as the "fierce people" and myths about them were many. They were reputed to be killers, hallucinogenic drug-addicts and wife abductors -- the last of the Stone Age warrier tribes who dragged women through the jungle and raped them. They blew powdered narcotics up each other's noses with metre-long tubes, fought with curare-tipped arrows and drank the ashes of dead relatives. Eternally at war, these tribes lived in the "zone of intense warfare."
It is amazing how, even in the mid-1970s, when Good set out to the head of the Orinoco river in search of the Hasupuweteri, some Americans could believe almost anything. Taking some of the traits of the Hasupuweteri out of their cultural context, they held that violence was in their genes. Good's doctoral thesis supervisor endorsed this view.
But not everyone agreed with the theory that the Indians were innate killers. Among the Indians, war had subtler and more complex causes. There were "environnmental reasons for it, ecological causes that could be found in the need to defend hunting territories and satisfy the dietary demand for protein".
Good's research was supposed to demolish, once and for all, the ecological theories that stressed the relationship between environment and culture. At odds with his supervisor even before starting, Good did not take long to steer around to the very views he had set out to vanquish.
His adventure is related with gusto, although one does not see it to its proper end. Somewhere along the way, the academic controversy, its narration, success and failure get dissipated as Good almost becomes a Hasupuweteri. Instead of the headhunters he went to find, he discovers a proud, humorous and tolerant people who show great compassion and camaraderie in their daily lives. Good's only irritation is the utter lack of privacy, a concept unknown to the Hasupuweteri, who live communally and do absolutely everything, except sex and defecation, in public.
Plunging into the depths of the lives of the Hasupuweteri, Good delays his academic pursuits and when he falls in love with Yarima, a beautiful Yanomama girl, his remarkable bond with the Hasupuweteri is sealed forever.
Subtle style
In a lyrical style that almost reads like poetry, Good weaves anthropological insights very subtly into the more subjective, day-to-day description of his experiences, which is a credit to both his and Chanoff's penmanship.
But I could not help feeling sad at the end. In the battle between the cultures and the sexes, will the "great US white male" always win? Yarima was brought to the US by Good, as an act of love, to lead the life of a middle-class American housewife. Could he not live in the Amazon, instead of taking Yarima to Philadelphia's concrete jungles? A picture of Yarima, decked traditionally in flowers and with sticks pierced through her nose, lips and ears, adorns the cover. If Good had married a white American, would he still have splashed nude pictures of his wife, or had her in curlers?