The "Savage Peoples" Myth: How the Yanomami Were Misread by the West

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The confluence of two cultures is always fraught with misunderstandings, miscommunications, and misinterpretations. But perhaps no case exemplifies this more fully than that of the Yanomami.

In 1968, the Yanomami were catapulted to global fame after the American anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon published his shocking, compelling and highly controversial book, Yanomamö: The Fierce People . The first 13 months of fieldwork had been pure culture shock — his earliest encounter had been with a household of “burly, naked, filthy, hideous men” clutching bows and arrows, with green mucus dripping unchecked from their nostrils — and after some weeks he decided that to cement his place in Yanomami society he must become as “sly, aggressive, and intimidating” as they were. In all, the book argued, they were a “brutal, cruel, treacherous” race who prized aggression over all else.

Yanomamö: The Fierce People was a surprise bestseller, selling more than a million copies in the U.S. alone, and remained a fixture on anthropology undergraduate reading lists for decades. It’s a rollicking ride; Chagnon is a free-wheeling narrator, who openly admits that he was often fooled, misled, or taken advantage of by his reluctant hosts. (They called him Shaki , the name of a “noisome bee.”)

For these reasons, many details of Yanomami culture remained obscure to him, but what was obvious to Chagnon almost immediately was that they seemed to live in a state of perpetual warfare. He had arrived in the immediate aftermath of a violent inter-tribal raid, and from that point on he witnessed and documented a parade of belligerence. He had yearned, he recalled later, to study “really primitive people.” In Yanomami territory he felt he had found them.

Chagnon’s book cemented the Yanomami in the public imagination as a kind of modern-day wild man, a savage running naked through the woods brandishing clubs and poison darts. He illustrated sweeping claims as to the nature of Yanomami culture with hair-raising firsthand accounts of deadly ambushes, hallucinating warriors battling to the death over minor slights, and the rape of captured women.

His lurid interpretations, and the explosion of international interest that followed, met with stiff resistance from his fellow anthropologists, who accused him of, among other things, misrepresentation and sensationalism. The Association of Brazilian Anthropologists released a public statement arguing that Chagnon’s claims were doing very real damage, that by leaning on lazy, tired tropes of warlike, oversexed primitive man, he was unwittingly assisting the Brazilian government’s attempt to sequester the Yanomami on tiny reservations.

It’s true that contemporary readers will detect an unmistakable Conradian frisson from Chagnon’s prose — that sense of slipping back in time, a steamboat chugging ominously towards the source. It was this cinematic quality that so captured the public imagination. And more than that: It reanimated stock characters from centuries-old stories, which have determined so much of how we interact with other cultures.

Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1902) is, of course, merely a modern iteration of a myth that has materialized in cultures around the world for millennia: the demonization of so-called “primitive,” sometimes “savage,” peoples based on cultural differences both real and imagined.

The Norse called all Inuit peoples they encountered in Greenland and Canada skraelings , a derogatory term thought to refer to their animal-skin clothing, smallness of stature or incomprehensible language. The Greeks called all non-Hellenic peoples barbaroi , barbarians. At first, the Romans claimed that same term for themselves, before redirecting it upon their neighbors. But they were far from the only ancient peoples who turned horrified eyes on distant cultures. In Persia, the physician Ctesias wrote of the tribes of India: the Sciapodes, who hopped on a single large foot; the Cynocephali, or dog-headed ones, who barked instead of spoke; and other such monstrous men, again occupying that unnerving space between human and animal.

All this is to say: It is, perhaps, an instinct of man to define himself and his own people by their differences from others. And that he likely assumes his own way of life to be best — most rational, most civilized — and thus casts others as being barbarous or primitive in comparison. Far from being unpeopled, wilderness was historically simply the home of people unlike oneself.

During the Age of Exploration, and in particular the discovery of the “New World,” the idea of the savage or primitive man flared into fresh significance. Intelligence from the Americas, particularly Amazonia, reported bounteous scenes of plenty — of nymph-like natives slipping through tropical forestry. Columbus himself took the mouth of the Orinoco to be the entrance to an earthly paradise, the existence of which he, like many theologians of the time, took to be real: a spatio-temporal glitch that offered direct passage to the very origin of human history. The native “Indians” who paddled out to meet his ship in their canoes, bringing with them gifts of gold and pearls and talking parrots, were representatives, therefore, of some primeval race, long pre-dating Western culture.

For a moment, anything seemed possible: that the prelapsarian Eden might survive still here on Earth. That the golden age of man envisaged by the ancients might yet be extant. This was the place where, as Virgil had imagined, “Fields knew no taming hand of husbandmen … and the earth of her own will / All things more freely, no man bidding, bore.”

But this was a double-edged utopia: wilderness and paradise both. Though these people knew no shame in nakedness, there also came alarming reports of violence and idolatry. It was populated not by close confidants of God, but by shamans, pagans and flesh-eaters. Though those earliest accounts were received with skepticism, a constant flow of breathless reports soon flooded back to the Old World, each claim more horrifying than the last. The word cannibal is derived from “Caribs,” the dog-headed man-eaters claimed by Columbus to inhabit the unexplored islands of the West Indies. There were rumors of women warriors, human sacrifices, grossly unhygienic habits. These were, it seemed clear, savages in both senses of the word. The contemporary definition: fierce, ferocious, cruel. And the older, from the French sauvage : uncultivated, undomesticated.

Thomas Hobbes famously argued in Leviathan (1651) that the “natural condition of mankind” was to be in a state of endless warre , with every man pitched against the other, all living in “continual fear and danger of violent death.” His most influential critic, the French novelist Jean-Jacques Rousseau, viewed the same raw, unmannered world in a different light: Natural man, ruled by passions and not his intellect, could be satisfied without institutions of marriage, property, or the rule of law.

All this is to say: It is, perhaps, an instinct of man to define himself and his own people by their differences from others. And that he likely assumes his own way of life to be best — most rational, most civilized — and thus casts others as being barbarous or primitive in comparison.

The people of the New World met the expectations of both camps: their apparent lack of industry, intensive agriculture and — in the case of forest peoples like the Yanomami — written laws all underlined their qualifications as this primitive proto-man. And despite Rousseau’s romantic appeal, it was Hobbes’ dystopic reading that would have the greatest influence. Every sensational report fed back by explorers and missionaries fuelled a growing narrative that the Americas were ripe for “improvement” — for taming, pacifying — and, conveniently, allowed their conquest and colonization to be recast as a form of, if not exactly charity, a morally neutral form of evangelism.

A formalized cultural hierarchy came to dominate Western thought during the colonial era: one that placed Christian Europe, predictably, at the top of a social ladder whose bottom rung comprised the “primitive” or “savage,” and in between the “barbarian,” who had made some cultural progress but still had work to do.

Amazonian indigenous groups became understood (just as Columbus and his contemporaries had once believed) as a kind of temporal anomaly: prehistoric man in the present-day world. In this way, a visit to a “Stone Age” people — which was, incidentally, how Napoleon Chagnon repeatedly characterized the Yanomami — could be conceptualized as a kind of time travel, a trip to meet a savage Adam and savage Eve, living in the deep past, before the Fall, in a state of nature.

The problem is, the Yanomami are not the vestigial remnants of original man, but contemporary people living in the here and now.

Ultimately, the Yanomami must be categorized neither as noble nor as ignoble savages, for they are as complex and riven by contradictions as the rest of us. Whatever their true nature, it seems obvious to me that any indigenous group, warlike or not, has the right to live by its own rules in its own home territory. The Yanomami have collectively resisted countless attempts to “improve,” “civilize,” or “educate” them. They continue to fight bitterly against the miners, ranchers, and deforesters who seek to degrade and denude a globally significant storehouse of biodiversity and carbon. Whatever it is that powers them, their resistance in such numbers — as no indigenous nation of this size has done — has preserved their homeland from destruction and their culture from dissolution.

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