“Unfortunately, most explorers have been unable to appreciate the humanness of the Yanoama [term used by Smole]. Instead, adventurers helped give them a reputation for being more `wild' (bravo or salvaje in Spanish), violent, and potentially dangerous than most other Indians of South America. Over the years they have become legendary” (pp. 14-15).

William J. Smole, 1976, The Yanoama Indians: A Cultural Geography, Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.

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“Contemporary anthropology continues to invent other peoples to serve as vehicles to conceptualize important social and intellectual problems of the Western human self today. We have invented the Yanomamo of South America as a symbol to conceptualize human aggression and sexuality” (p. 48).

“In other words, the social and cultural reality constructed by the anthropologist is actually a portrait of his own psychological reality, as dictated by the ideas that are considered meaningful to him and his audience” (p. 90).

Jacob Pandian, 1985, Anthropology and the Western Tradition: Toward an Authentic Anthropology, Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, Inc.

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“To my great surprise I had found among them a way of life that, while dangerous and harsh, was also filled with camaraderie, compassion, a thousand daily lessons in communal harmony” (p. 13).

“... The more I thought about Chagnon's emphasis on Yanomama violence, the more I realized how contrived and distorted it was. Raiding, killing, and wife beating all happened; I was seeing it, and no doubt I'd see a lot more of it. But by misrepresenting violence as the central theme of Yanomama life, his Fierce People book had blown the subject out of any sane proportion” (p. 73).

*Kenneth Good, 1991, Into the Heart: One Man's Pursuit of Love and Knowledge Among the Yanomami, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.

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"I have a hard time looking at the Yanomami people as "natives", "Indians", "aborigines", or whatever you may wish to call them. I see them as human beings, people who have the same emotions and feelings as you and I. After all, the word Yanomami simply means "human being." Must we look at them as some kind of exotic beings that exist only to satisfy our curiosity?"

Greg Sanford in Who Speaks For The Yanomami? Williamsburg, VA: Studies in Third World Societies No. 57, Frank Salamone, ed., 1996, p.76.

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