Yanomamö tribal

Yanomamö territory straddles the mountainous headwaters of the Orinoco and Amazon river drainage basins along the border between Brazil and Venezuela. They depend on hunting, gardening and wild food for survival. The population has been estimated at about 8,500 individuals in Brazil and 12,500 in Venezuela living in some 250 different, small, independent villages.

The most populated area is situated in the Parima Mountains, between the headwaters of the Rio Orinoco (on the Venezuelan side), and the Rio Parima, Rio Mucajaí, and Rio Catrimani (on the Brazilian slope). They are made up of four adjacent subgroups, divided according to linguistic subdivisions: Yanomae, Yanomami, Sanima e Ninam.

Traditionally, as an interior tropical rain forest society, the Yanomamö followed a mixed subsistence economy primarily of foraging (hunting, gathering, and fishing) and secondarily of farming (swidden, shifting, or slash-and-burn horticulture).

Although hunting accounts for only 10% of Yanomamö food, amongst men it is considered the most prestigious of skills and meat is greatly valued by everyone. No hunter ever eats the meat that he has killed. Instead he shares it out among friends and family. In return, he will be given meat by another hunter.

The first historical mention of Yanomamö, by their earlier name Guaharibo, comes from a Yecuana ally of the Spanish around 1759, who knew all the rivers and passes up to the Orinoco headwaters, where they went to raid.

Until the 1940s and 1950s the Yanomamö were largely unknown to the outside world because they were so isolated, difficult to reach, and lived in an unexplored pocket of the Amazon Basin. The Yanomamö are one of the largest indigenous nations remaining in the Amazon, and supposedly until the 1980s they were one of the least acculturated (changed) by contact with Western society.
Yanomamö tribal