Who Are the Yanomami and Why Are They Important in Anthropology?
continued . . . The Yanomami are also one of the foundational societies of the anthropological corpus. They are referred to in most introductory textbooks. Anthropology has become increasingly fragmented over the past several decades, with anthropologists studying a wide array of societies. The Yanomami—along with the Trobriand Islanders, the Navajo, and the Nuer—constitute shared points of reference for the discipline in these fragmented times. The Yanomami are one of the groups almost every anthropology student learns about during his or her course of study. The Yanomami tend to be called by three names in the literature: Yanomami, Yanomamö, and Yanomama. The names all refer to the same group of people. Different subgroups are labeled (and label themselves) with different terms; there is no broadly accepted indigenous term for the whole group. There is a politics of presentation regarding which of these three terms one uses. Yanomamö is the term Chagnon gave the collective group, and
