****** - Verified Buyer
4.5
I haven't read "The Last Days of Eden" (yet), so I don't know the extent to which the two books overlap (a problem raised by another reviewer); this review may need editing once I find out. However, in the meantime I strongly recommend this book. Chagnon is a delightful writer, who manages to provide engaging descriptions of the Yanomamo with whom he spent so much time without using complicated jargon (with the exception of his chapter on social organization and demography, which necessitates technical explanations and is much less accessible to non-anthropologists). His initial chapters, describing his experiences starting out to do fieldwork in a remote region without even knowing the language, are fascinating.One reviewer of "Last Days of Eden" described Chagnon as being rather condescending and looking down on the Yanomamo; I did not find any trace of that attitude here. He seems to have immersed himself completely in this very alien culture, and to understand and accept it very well, without necessarily condoning some of its less attractive features (for example, to our sensibilities, the treatment of women as bargaining chips, to buy security when a village has to seek shelter with a stronger protector). In any case, for us in the west to condemn the ritual violence which permeates Yanomamo life, but which has careful graduations to avoid establishing blood-feuds which may last generations, seems somewhat hypocritical when we ourselves have recently engaged in "vanity wars" and are increasingly using drones to obliterate our perceived enemies (and anyone else in the vicinity).In his final chapter Chagnon is heart-breakingly eloquent on the destruction of the Yanomamo by the inroads of missionaries, followed by tourists and unscrupulous traders, but accepts that this is inevitable, and suggests that we have a moral responsibility to manage this transition so as to minimize the damage. Having spent some time when I was young and naive working with aborigines in the tropical rain forest of Malaya I know a little about the anguish of seeing a functioning, self-sufficient, moral society doomed to vanish before modern capitalism.My copy of the book is the 3rd edition. There are some annoying errors in this, which often occur with rewrites but which should have been caught by a good editor. Some phrases are repeated within a page or two (in one case an entire sentence at the bottom of one page reappears at the top of the next); there are some "spellcheck" errors (a "contingency" is not the same as a "contingent" of men); many of the maps (often taken from other Chagnon publications) are not very clear, and need better legends and scales; and some acronyms are not explained until after they have been used for some time. Also, the italic script used for Yanomamo words makes the letters "h" and "b" virtually indistinguishable, which could easily have been avoided (and a Yanomamo glossary would have been useful). But these are trivial complaints, which don't detract from a most remarkable book.
