Along the River
that Flows Uphill -
from the Orinoco
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Richard Starks
Miriam Murcutt
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Lost in Tibet
Along the River that Flows Uphill - from the Orinoco to the Amazon
by Richard Starks and Miriam Murcutt
The Yanomami Indians
One of the first Westerners to encounter the Yanomami was an American anthropologist named Napoleon Chagnon, who stumbled upon a nomadic tribe in the early 1960s. He described them as “naked, filthy, hideous men” with “strands of dark green slime” hanging from their noses.
“The Yanomami are not an attractive people,” says the book, Along the River that Flows Uphill, “at least not to Western eyes. The men typically go naked except for a single cotton string, which they tie around their waists. This string loops down from their waists and attaches to their drawn-out foreskins and is then pulled up tight so that their penises are held flat against their bellies in a kind of flaccid erection.
“As a rule, the men sport livid scars, since most disputes - even between members of the same village - are settled by the opponents standing toe-to-toe and pounding each other over the head with staves. The scars the combatants inflict can last a lifetime, but since they are worn with considerable pride, they are often exhibited by shaving off the hair that surrounds them or enhanced by highlighting them with a blood-red pigment.
“On festive occasions, the men are known to decorate themselves with headdresses and armbands of parrot or curassow feathers, but when they go on raids, they usually paint themselves black to mimic the colour of night and to represent death. When they wish to relax - or communicate with the spirit world - they traditionally blow a strong, hallucinogenic drug up one another’s nostrils using a three-foot-long tube called a mokohiro.
“Their drug of choice is yopo,
which is
made from the powdered, inner bark of the yakowana tree mixed in human
saliva. By all accounts, yopo gives its users a monumental
high as well as an excruciating headache. It also produces a
dark-green slime that hangs from their noses, which Chagnon couldn’t
help but notice during his first encounter…“For the most part, the Yanomami have enough to eat, but it’s not always to their liking. As a result, they have two distinct words for hunger. One means, ‘I have an empty stomach; while the other means, ‘I have a full stomach - but I crave meat.’”
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�
Richard Starks
and Miriam Murcutt
"The Yanomami have a word, nomohoni, which has no simple English equivalent, but generally means 'to employ trickery in order to set up a massacre'." - From Along the River that Flows Uphill - from the Orinoco to the Amazon