Describes the customs, housing, and food of the Yanomami; their daily routine; and what is being done to protect the rain forests they live in.

After living fifteen years with the Yanomami, Lizot provides direct accounts of daily experience, shamanism, conflict and alliances.

The 10th anniversary edition A Guardian Best Book about Deforestation A New Scientist Best Book of the Year A Taipei Times Best Book of the Year “A perfectly grounded account of what it is like to live an indigenous life in communion with one’s personal spirits. We are losing worlds upon worlds.” —Louise Erdrich, New York Times Book Review “The Yanomami of the Amazon, like all the indigenous peoples of the Americas and Australia, have experienced the end of what was once their world. Yet they have survived and somehow succeeded in making sense of a wounded existence. They have a lot to teach us.” —Amitav Ghosh, The Guardian “A literary treasure...a must for anyone who wants to understand more of the diverse beauty and wonder of existence.” —New Scientist A now classic account of the life and thought of Davi Kopenawa, shaman and spokesman for the Yanomami, The Falling Sky paints an unforgettable picture of an indigenous culture living in harmony with the Amazon forest and its creatures, and its devastating encounter with the global mining industry. In richly evocative language, Kopenawa recounts his initiation as a shaman and first experience of outsiders: missionaries, cattle ranchers, government officials, and gold prospectors seeking to extract the riches of the Amazon. A coming-of-age story entwined with a rare first-person articulation of shamanic philosophy, this impassioned plea to respect indigenous peoples’ rights is a powerful rebuke to the accelerating depredation of the Amazon and other natural treasures threatened by climate change and development.

The Yanomami people of Brazil first attracted anthropological and popular attention in the 1960s, when they were portrayed as essentially primitive and violent in the widely read book Yanomamo: The Fierce People. To this image of the Yanomami another has recently been added: that of victims of the economic rapacity devouring the Amazon. Sanumá Memories moves beyond these images to provide the first anthropologically sophisticated account of the Yanomami and their social organization, kinship, and marriage, capturing both individual experiences and the broader sociological trends that engulf them. A poignant personal story as well, it draws on Alcida Ramos's extensive fieldwork among the Sanumá (the northernmost Yanomami subgroup) from 1968 to 1992, as she reports on the brutal impact of many invasions--from road construction to the gold rush that brought the Yanomami social chaos, thousands of deaths, devastation of gardens and forest, and a disquietingly uncertain future. At the cutting edge of anthropological description and analysis, Sanumá Memories ponders the importance of "otherness" to the Sanumá; describes Sanumá spaces, from the grandiosity of the rain forest to cozy family compartments; analyzes their notions of time, from the minute reckoning of routine village life to historical and metaphysical macro-time; shows how power and authority are generated and allocated in space and time; and examines the secrecy of personal names and the all-pervading consequences of disclosing them. "Ramos's study is anthropologically sophisticated and ethnographically fascinating. She has been able to construct a particularly refined and compelling account of important problems presented by one of the most interesting indigenous groups in South America, an account that reflects her years of careful and insightful thinking about Sanumá."--Donald Pollock, State University of New York at Buffalo

In Yanomami Warfare, R. Brian Ferguson shows that the Yanomami, far from living in pristine isolation, have been subject to periodic waves of Western encroachment for the last 350 years. Documenting this history of contact in comprehensive detail, the author debunks the popular misconception of the unacculturated Yanomami while creating a framework for understanding their remarkable history of violence.

A ruthless mining company's greed threatens a Yanomami Indian village as a guerrilla leader's daughter vows to carry on his legacy in the adventure novel Yanomami. Berkeley student Natasha Chauny returns to Colombia's San Vicente del Caguan to pay respects to her father, Comandante Paulo, after he's assassinated. She reads his journals, which describe Paulo's disenchantment with the FARC guerrilla movement and his newly discovered dedication to the Amazon Indians. After visiting her father's former comrades, Natasha stops at a nearby Yanomami village bordering Brazil. Her visit coincides with a mining company's plot to displace the Indians and mine a deposit of cassiterite worth millions of dollars without giving them a share. Mercenaries and the Yanomami will clash-with the village's future at stake. How much is Natasha willing to risk to follow in her father's footsteps when the fighting begins? Feel the Yanomami's pleas for help as author Marc Andr� Meyers, a distinguished professor of materials science at the University of California, San Diego, exposes the methods that mining companies use to take over native inhabitants' lands. It's an adventure worth reading and an up-close look at the dangers that the Yanomami face in South America.

Examines the history, life, traditions, and culture of the Yanomami, aborigines of South America whose territory stretches across 30,000 square miles of tropical rain forest in southern Venezuela and northern Brazil.