Noble Savages - My Life Among Two Dangerous Tribes -- the Yanomamo and the Anthropologists

Napoleon Chagnon

Simon & Schuster

2012

546 páginas

18h 12m

ISBN-19: 9781451611472_ebook

When Napoleon Chagnon arrived in Venezuela’s Amazon region in 1964 to study the Yanomamö Indians, one of the last large tribal groups still living in isolation, he expected to find Rousseau’s “noble savages,” so-called primitive people living contentedly in a pristine state of nature. Instead Chagnon discovered a remarkably violent society. Men who killed others had the most wives and offspring, their violence possibly giving them an evolutionary advantage. The prime reasons for violence, Chagnon found, were to avenge deaths and, if possible, abduct women.