Home Is Where the Hammock Is : INTO THE HEART; One Man’s Pursuit of Love and Knowledge Among the Yanomama <i> By Kenneth Good with David Chanoff (Simon & Schuster: $21.95; 349 pp.)</i>

The Creole Petroleum Corp. map given to me in 1970 as part of a “welcome to the Peace Corps” packet shows a great blank space for that vast region of Venezuela extending down toward the Equator between the borders of Colombia and Brazil. Territoria Amazonas, it says. A black dotted line indicates the Venezuelan boundary; tiny blue squiggles indicate a ganglia of tributary streams eventually feeding into the mighty Orinoco River. Beyond that, the map says nothing--as in “nothing,” empty space, unknown territory, nobody home, don’t even think about it.

In truth, there are a lot of people home in the dense rain forest of the Territorio Amazonas, nearly 10,000 Yanomama to be exact, a cultural assemblage whose paleo-Indian ancestors probably drifted down from North America anywhere from 12,000 to 20,000 years ago.

According to distinguished anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon (whose book, “The Fierce People,” first introduced this strange culture to the world), the Yanomama are a band of murderous primitives, seminomadic, engaged in perpetual internecine warfare, with no written language, no system of numbers, no calendar, no material goods other than what they carry on their backs, no clothes, no knowledge of technology, and no knowledge of the outside world.

For spiritual enlightenment, they poke three-foot-long tubes into their nostrils and blow a powerful narcotic called epene into their brainpans; for sport, they gang-rape women. Though small in stature and equipped only with bows and arrows, they are innate killers, uncorrupted by modern civilization.

Or at least that was the take on the Yanomama until Kenneth Good came along. Good was a student at Pennsylvania State University in 1969 when he read about the tribe in an undergraduate anthropology course. Six years later, as a graduate student beginning field work for his doctoral dissertation (under Chagnon), he found himself heading for the Amazon to begin what he expected to be 15 months of research among the Hasupuweteri Yanomama, a village community miles above the confluence of the Mavaca and Orinoco Rivers. He was to study their diet in an attempt to disprove Chagnon critics who argued that ecological factors, not genetics, were responsible for their horrible temperament.

But . . . arriving finally at this destination and stepping out of his dugout, Good encountered the armed village of naked barbarians with whom he was expected to cohabit and discovered (no doubt to his extreme pleasure) that the Hasupuweteri did not behave as his mentor had advertised. They were, in fact, “all smiling and laughing, shaking their bows and jumping around, obviously in a holiday mood.”

True, they seemed nonplussed by this promethean honky and his pile of gear, but there was no menace or threat in their manner. On the contrary, they seemed excited and curious, their disposition more associated with wide-eyed innocence than malevolence. “The Hasupuweteris’ happiness about having me there was, I realized very quickly, absolutely genuine.”

And indeed it was. Good began a relationship with his village that continued not for the anticipated 15 months but for 11 years. “Into the Heart” is the story of those 11 years--a fascinating account of what amounts to the assimilation of a white, middle-class, Havertown, Pa., boy into a Stone-Age culture.

It is, on the one hand, a descriptive, detailed observation of a strange and alien culture in an exceedingly exotic setting; on the other hand, it is an introspective and moving narrative of personal discovery--a kind of education into humanity that one often finds missing in books written by social scientists. (How much David Chanoff had to do with the form and content of this work is impossible to tell, a seamless collaboration being the best kind. One assumes that credit is due.)

Good begins his personal odyssey as a detached observer living alone in a private hut well away from the subjects of his research. (He is alone in his own head, too, since he cannot speak Yanomama). But as time passes and language skills increase, he becomes more and more involved in the community’s social life. He moves his hut into the village compound, then abandons it altogether except as a place to work, then moves into the communal dwelling unit, the shapono, and hangs his hammock with all the rest.

For months, he is treated as an oddity, a kind of community pet, but by the end of his second year, he is able to say that “the Hasupuweteri had come to accept my presence. I had made the transition from being an alien creature to being a fixture in their daily lives.” And they, we have come to understand, are now an emotional fixture in his daily life. “I was developing a stake in the Hasupuweteri,” he admits, “not merely as subjects for observation and analysis, but as fellow beings whose actions and interactions involved me whether I wanted them to or not.”

Eventually, Good is adopted into the tribal lineage of his village and given a “wife”--a girl named Yarima who is scarcely 11 years old and to whom, in Yanomama tradition, he is considered vaguely betrothed. Since nothing is really involved in all this, Good takes it no more seriously than the Yanomama, going along with it to be a good sport.

But he stays in the jungle for so many years (leaving only long enough to terminate his relationship with Chagnon and find new “sponsors”) that eventually Yarima grows up. And he begins to discover that the relationship with the cute little girl he has treated all along as a quasi daughter has turned some corner. “Yarima had become exceedingly dear to me, almost like a daughter, yet not like a daughter. . . . Nothing in my life had prepared me to understand it. Yet there it was, a feeling as deep as anything I had ever experienced, a feeling, I knew, that was very, very Yanomama.”

The older Yarima gets, the less like a daughter she becomes, and the entire second half of “Into the Heart” is devoted to the love that develops between “Kenny,” as she calls him, and Yarima--and it is by no means a tranquil or unentangled union. If Good himself was not, at the outset, exceedingly skeptical of the wisdom in an emotional attachment between a sophisticated, educated, Westerner and a guileless Hasupuweteri girl, his audience might likely dismiss the whole situation as too farfetched to make compelling reading. But Good’s struggle with himself, and subsequently with both the Yanomama (who keep stealing and abusing Yarima in his absence) and the Venezuelan authorities (who try to deport him) has all the developing drama and intensity of an accomplished novel, and we not only believe, we cheer when this most unlikely couple at last prevail.

Adventure and love story notwithstanding, the greatest achievement of “Into the Heart” (again, perhaps Chanoff deserves some credit) is the way in which it conveys such affection for its subjects. To be sure, Good finds a lot of male Yanomama behavior utterly deplorable, particularly in its treatment of women, but even in his most critical observations one senses the compassion and understanding that he has for these people.

One comes away from this book liking the Yanomama--and liking Kenneth Good.

BOOKMARK: For an excerpt from “Into the Heart,” see the Opinion section, Page 2.