Word: yanomamo
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...business back in London. That was a failure, like everything else he tried, but he caught the Amazon bug, and 10 years later he pulled off the one spectacular success of his life. In defiance of malaria, anacondas, electric eels, freshwater stingrays, Confederate colonists, customs inspectors and Yanomamo tribesmen, he smuggled 70,000 priceless rubber-tree seeds out of Brazil and back to England...
...reluctant to talk about their emotions, and when they do, they're not particularly good at it. So when Giordano and her colleagues decided to undertake a large-scale study of the secret love life of teenagers, they approached their subjects the way you would treat warriors of the Yanomamo: with scientific objectivity and extreme caution...
Lipsky approaches the cadets like an anthropologist stalking the elusive Yanomamo tribe, and with good reason: he's in a weird, weird place. "Cadets entering West Point step into an irony-free zone," Lipsky writes, "a place where sarcasm has been fought to a standstill." When people say "Huah!" at West Point, they're not doing an Al Pacino impression. "Huah!" is the universal adjective for all things gung-ho and military: a huah cadet would never be caught missing a shave or parking sloppily. A huah cadet would never flunk the regular fitness tests, which include 42 push...
Tierney also takes on the swashbuckling ethnographer Napoleon Chagnon, whose 1968 volume Yanomamo: The Fierce People first made the tribe famous and whose books continue to be staples of college anthropology courses. Chagnon has been challenged before, notably by Rutgers University Newark anthropologist Brian Ferguson, whose 1995 book on Yanomami warfare suggested that the presence of foreigners, Chagnon in particular, sparked much of the conflict among the Yanomami. Tierney's charges go further. He claims that Chagnon manipulated his data to support his sociobiological thesis that natural selection favored Yanomami who were genetically prone to violence. Moreover, he asserts that...
That was 1987, and Plotkin was deep in a Venezuelan rain forest. Then director of plant conservation for the World Wildlife Fund, he had heard of a hallucinogen used by Yanomamo medicine men. Made from the leaves, sap and seeds of various plants, the potent snuff might have medicinal benefits, he thought. After all, aspirin came from white willow bark, which North American Indians relied on to relieve pain. In fact, plants were vital in the development of 25% of all prescription drugs...