SAVE THE YANOMAMI
Customs Of The Yanomami Tribe
The Yanomami have many different customs. Some of the different customs are how they look, what they do when someone dies, what each gender does and the spirit world.
The Yanomami take dressing very seriously and have lots of customs about dressing. Some of these customs are wearing minimal clothing (only red pants), have the same round haircut as each other, paint each other’s body’s, pierce their noses and ears with bamboo sticks, when the men go to war they wear black paint on their bodies to signify the night and the death. The Yanomami wear minimal clothing because where they live in the Amazon is hot and humid. If they wear too much clothing they could get heatstroke, because there are no air conditioners and it would be very hard for them to properly recover.
Some of the customs which happen when someone dies are that the wife will wear black on her cheeks, the men from that community go out for a special hunting trip, that evening the tribe throw a big party and they eat the ash of the dead person for dinner in a soup. When a husband dies the wife paints black of her cheeks to signify her loss and sadness. When a person of the tribe dies the men go on a special hunting trip called a henimoyu, they do this to show all the great things that person did. After the henimoyu the whole community have a big party with the teenagers dancing and singing, the women crying and everybody eating the ash of the dead person in a banana soup.
The Yanomami people have many customs regarding the spirit world. They believe that animals have souls, there are spirits, there is magic (they are superstitious in general) and they love to tell stories. The Yanomami believe everything has a soul including animals because they believe that animals were once humans too, just bad people that needed to be punished. The Yanomami believe in spirits; some of their spirits are Omam, Duku Ka Misi and Amahe-teri. The Yanomami believe in magic and they believe that their people fell from their sky with a god but the god sadly got stopped and had to stay in the clouds. The Yanomami love to tell stories whether it’s about animals or about the rainforest around them. If they don’t know why something happened they make up a story about why is happened.
The Yanomami have lots of customs involving what each gender does, this includes how long they work each day, marriage, language, how they live, what women do and what men do. The Yanomami work very little compared to most tribes. They only work four hours a day! The Yanomami have strict laws about marriage, the father picks who the son/daughter will marry and to show that the couple is married they set up hammocks next to each other. The Yanomami people speak Yanomamo, this is the only language and is used throughout all the communities. They live in big houses called yano’s they look like a big doughnut because they have an area in the middle that is outdoors, for the kids to play and for everyone to tell stories and do what they want to do. The women of the Yanomami tribes find the plants, look after the children, find wood, make fires, cook and fish. The men hunt, cut down the trees for fire wood, make houses, fight and spin the cotton. The men spin the cotton to make cloth because cotton is considered the male spirit so this keeps things in balance. The Yanomami are farmers because they all must grow their own food as there is no such thing as a supermarket.
Men and women have the same haircut because if they have long hair it will make them too hot so they would constantly have go for a swim or indoors to cool off. Yanomami people paint their bodies because it tells other Yanomami tribes what tribe they belong to and it is a sign being fully dressed in their religion.
This Yanomami like dressing up by pierce themselves with bamboo and make bracelets from feathers and flowers. Another custom is that when men go to war they paint black stripes across their faces to signify night and death, this is because they want to show people how brave they are and how they are going to try and protect their tribe even if they get killed doing so.