The horrific customs of the Yanomama primitive tribe

Yanomami, a primitive Indian tribe living in northern Brazil and southern Venezuela, has a strange custom of burning the dead after their death and distributing the ashes to their families for consumption. Let's go and learn about the mysterious tribe of Yanomama with Xiaobian.

Currently, approximately 15000 Yanomamas live in Brazil, and another 12000 live in Venezuela. Although they are belligerent, they still have no good way to face a modern army. A strange custom among the Yanomama people is to burn the body of the deceased after the death of their clansmen, and then distribute the ashes to their families for eating. The Yanomamas believed that people would die when cursed by witches or other tribes, so they often had armed conflicts with people from other tribes.

A Yanomama woman holds edible bananas picked from the forest. She tied her girl with a tree bark sling hanging obliquely over her shoulders. After giving birth, Yanomama women will not have sexual contact for four years. During that time, she always took her children with her. It was impossible for her to raise two children to survive in the jungle. The Yanomama people are very similar to southerners in China, but with darker skin and shorter stature, about 145 to 150 centimeters.

Because the tropical rainforest is hot and humid all year round, clothes seem superfluous. The Yanomama people used branches and leaves provided by the rainforest as materials to build simple circular thatched houses. Twenty families with blood relatives lived together in the ring houses, with each family having a section. The Yanomama people make a living by collecting, planting and hunting. They, mainly women, collect hundreds of species of animals and plants from the rainforest as daily necessities and food, such as rattan, fruits, medicinal materials, insects, honey, etc. They never plunder excessively, so these things are inexhaustible and inexhaustible.

Each Yano has a collectively-developed orchard, and each household gets a small piece to grow tobacco leaves, cassava, bananas and other plants for daily use and consumption. The population size and sex ratio of the Yanomama are largely controlled by women. In order to raise healthy children with adequate nutrition, they will dispose of newborn babies who are sick, born too close, or destroy the normal ratio of male to female. This also limits the uncontrolled expansion of population beyond the capacity of the rainforest.

The Yanomama people have no religious beliefs in the strict sense and no gods to worship. They are in the stage of understanding that all things are spiritually alive. They believe that all things in nature have mysterious powers, good or bad, and these invisible powers can be mobilized by witchcraft to attack enemies, and witchcraft is also necessary to crack these powers. By experiencing the feeling of smoking hallucinogens under the guidance of the old shaman, learning to sing incantations and some technical movements, you can practice witchcraft as a shaman.

For example, if a wizard gives a patient herbs and practices it to convince him that the divine power of an animal has been called to draw out the bad power in his body, the patient will really feel better. From a psychological perspective, this is equivalent to a psychological suggestion that stimulates the disease resistance mechanism in the patient and has a certain auxiliary therapeutic effect. But the Yanomama people do not respect wizards because of this. They believe that asking a wizard to chase away imaginary enemies and use witchcraft to banish sickness is on the same level and as asking neighbors to help carry wood.

When the dry season comes, the rainforest roads are smooth and easy to access, and the rainforest brings a rich harvest, large-scale social activities for the Yanomama people begin, usually involving connected settlements inviting each other to have a meal. Before the meal, both the guest and guest should dress themselves as much as possible, such as using natural pigments to paint various patterns on their bodies, inserting feathers, etc. There was only one food for the treat, which was a large wooden trough of sweet porridge cooked with various tubers, fruits, and leaves.

Men used long bows and arrows to hunt in the surrounding rainforests. The prey does not belong to him, but is distributed equally to the entire settlement. Three to five years later, when the ring house gradually deteriorated, the fruit garden was exhausted, and there were not many prey around it, people collectively moved to another place to rebuild houses and open orchards. The abandoned place was soon covered with various plants and gradually restored to part of the rainforest.

Vipers did not kill them, nor did wild beasts. Generations of Yanomama people lived a peaceful life on the Amazon River. But entering the 21st century, their peaceful life is facing threats from the outside world. Needless to say, the threat comes from civilized people in so-called civilized societies. Because only civilized people can make all natural and primitive things disappear. Brazil has a vast land and few people, and many places are in an undefended state, which has troubled the Brazilian government. Recently, they launched a new plan to build a base and station troops in the jungles of the northern Amazon River. The result of this is naturally to squeeze the living space of some primitive tribes.