A race against time.

• Author: Good, Kenneth R.
• Position: The plight of Venezuela's Yanomani people - Includes related article about the author - Cover Story

With dislocation and modern contact, the survival of the peaceful Yanomami of the Orinoco is threatened by fatal epidemics

On an April afternoon in 1975 I walked into the Yanomami village of Hasupuwe-teri, a community of eighty-seven people in Venezuela's upper Orinoco region. I had arrived there as a graduate student in anthropology, with a goal to stay fifteen months. In the end, I would remain twelve years.

I had selected Hasupuwe-teri because of its remoteness. Virtually untouched by the outside world, it was an anthropologist's dream. To get, there I flew by light plane to the last mission station and then traveled upriver by dugout canoe, crossing the Guajaribo rapids. I remember the Catholic Salesian missionary offering me my last good meal and wishing me luck as I set off, loaded with supplies for the year.

Semi-nomadic foragers and gardeners of the Amazon forests of Venezuela and Brazil, the Yanomami very probably share many common aspects with their ancestors who settled in tiffs region hundreds if not thousands of years ago. Most likely the Yanomami were hunters and gatherers before they grew their staple food of bananas and plantains--Old World crops uknown in the Americas in pre-Columbian times. But even with these crops, today's Yanomami spend about haft theft time foraging away from theft houses and gardens.

About five people were stretched out in their hammocks strung under the thatched roof of the shapono, the conmmunal structure. One old woman was weaving a basket. Another was roasting a few plantains on the embers of the family hearth for a mid-afternoon snack. At the far end of the dwelling a young mother nursed her child as she swung softly in her split-vine hammock. The rest of the villagers were out fishing, hunting, or gathering wild foods. There was a quiet, lazy, peaceful air; all seemed engrossed in theft own activity or thoughts.

As I walked from hearth to hearth, a man who looked to be middle-aged smiled and offered me a rokomi banana, one of about fifteen varieties known to the community. It would have been difficult to be more precise in his age. Yanomami faces hardly wrinkle, even into old age. Graying is rare and balding unknown. He could not have helped since his language allows him to count only to two. (The Yanomami have had no need for greater numerical precision than one, two, or many; hence, they have not developed a numbering system.) But since he was fastening feathers on a new arrow I assumed he was young enough still to go hunting. I managed to ask him in my broken Yanomami why he had not joined the other men in the day's hunt. He, in turn, with effort convinced me that he simply didn't feel like hunting that day.

I later would learn that individuals engage in subsistence activities when they feel like it and at an average of only three hours a day. There is no real distinction between work and leisure so no one feels obligated to do anything on any given day. But in the end they all do their share.

Later that afternoon most of the...