Biography.

What "Guns, Germs, and Steel" did for colonial history, this book will do for modern anthropology, telling the explosive story of how ruthless journalists, self-serving anthropologists, and obsessed scientists placed the Yanomami, one of the Amazon basin's oldest tribes, on the cusp of extinction. A "New York Times" Notable Book. of photos.

Yanomami raises questions central to the field of anthropology - questions concerning the practice of fieldwork, the production of knowledge, and anthropology's intellectual and ethical vision of itself. Using the Yanomami controversy - one of anthropology's most famous and explosive imbroglios - as its starting point, this books considers how fieldwork is done, how professional credibility and integrity are maintained, and how the discipline might change to address central theoretical and methodological problems. Both the most up-to-date and thorough public discussion of the Yanomami controve.

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.

"Napoleon Chagnon's well-known case study, Ya̦nomamö: the Fierce People, begins with a first chapter on doing fieldwork among them. It is one of the features of this case study that makes it one of the most widely used in this series. Ever since The Fierce People appeared in 1968 readers have expressed their strong interest in a more complete account of Chagnon's experiences and methods of research with the Ya̦nomamö. The present study is a response to this wish, and as the reader will discover, a very satisfying one. Studying the Ya̦nomamö is satisfying because in it Chagnon explains not only how he went about the collection of data, why he considered it important, and how he organized it analytically, but also because his personal experience is described in vivid detail. Much of what he describes is pure adventure of the kind that most field anthropologists encounter in some degree, but rarely in quite this dramatic a context, for there are few people remaining in this world like the Ya̦nomamö."--Page vi.