Love Among the ‘Fierce People’ in the Amazon Jungle

Longbeard, the Hasupuweteri headman, came over to my hammock and struck up a conversation. The large tobacco roll bulging inside his lower lip seemed to heighten his already serious demeanor. He started slowly, as if this were something he had given a lot of consideration to. “I’ve been thinking,” he said, stroking the wispy hairs that grew out of his chin, “I’ve been thinking that you should have a wife. It isn’t good for you to live alone.”

I couldn’t think what in the world had brought this on. I had lived with the Hasupuweteri for two straight years, and no one had ever mentioned the subject. “No, brother-in-law,” I said, “I’m doing fine. I don’t need a wife. I’m not looking for one.”

But that didn’t satisfy him.

Longbeard’s persistence began to wear on me, and I found myself thinking that maybe being married wouldn’t be so horrendous after all: Certainly, it would be in accordance with their customs. In a way, the idea even became attractive. After all, what better affirmation could there be of my integration with the Hasupuweteri?

But I vacillated. No “marriage” here was going to endure. I wasn’t going to stay with the Yanomama forever, and aside from my personal plans, the practical requirements involved simply in mounting an expedition here (not to speak of living here) were immense--none of which meant anything at all to Longbeard. But if he felt so strongly about it, why not? You want me to have a wife, brother-in-law? Sure, OK, I’ll have a wife.

“Good,” he said, smiling broadly. “Take Yarima. You like her. She’s your wife.”

Not only a wife, but Yarima no less, who couldn’t be more than 12 years old.

Yarima herself quite obviously knew nothing at all about this. I looked around the enclosure and didn’t see her. She was probably out in the garden with her mother. I was sure she had been “married” before--that is, betrothed. All Yanomama girls her age got betrothed. Of course Yarima had been betrothed before. And she would be betrothed again, maybe four or five times more before she began to menstruate. After that, she would become someone’s wife for real.

Young Yanomama girls have a relationship arranged for them by their parents or older relatives, but nothing changes in their lives. They still live with their parents and carry on exactly as before, except that they are generally acknowledged to be betrothed. During a betrothal, the girl will be sent over to her “husband’s” hammock area to give him some food that her mother has prepared. He in turn--the prospective husband is always a productive man, never a child--might send back his own gifts of food.

Eventually, the girl feels comfortable being around his hearth and being around him. If things work out well, they become friends, in the same way that an uncle is friendly toward a favorite niece--the difference being, of course, that if they are still betrothed when she undergoes her first menses ritual, she will then hang her hammock next to his and they will truly become husband and wife.

From an anthropological point of view, the Yanomama custom of child betrothal made a lot of sense. It created strengthened ties between families in the community and between different lineages--marriages within a lineage are prohibited as incest. Since girls are already spoken for when they reach adolescence, there is no competition for them. Much potentially destructive rivalry is precluded this way, as are the problems of out-of-wedlock pregnancies. In Yanomama land, every woman is considered sexually available once she has begun to menstruate. And since there are no moral inhibitions against premarital or extramarital sex, having unattached adolescent girls around would create all sorts of difficult and disruptive conflicts.

From a personal point of view, this was not particularly serious. These were an inventive people in some respects, and one of the things they were inventive at was in devising ways to keep a nabuh (outsider) around, with his immense and distributable wealth.

The origin of Longbeard’s approach may well have been simply to provide me with an additional attachment to the Hasupuweteri. He was the headman, and it was his responsibility to think of the group’s well-being. Or it might have been a gesture of friendship, a surge of brotherly feeling. As for me, in my wildest dreams it had never occurred to me to marry an Indian woman in the Amazon jungle. I was from suburban Philadelphia. I had no intention of going native.

But I did say OK, and in this somewhat casual, offhand manner Yarima became betrothed to me.

Nobody took it seriously at first, just as no one among the Yanomama takes any new betrothal all that seriously. It has to grow. The man has to demonstrate that he is truly interested. The girl has to learn to feel comfortable with him. Beyond that, I was a nabuh , and nabuh don’t stay. They take their pictures, make their observations, then they leave and are never seen again. So I was a heorope , a husband, but then again I was also a “brother” and a “brother-in-law”--all invented relationships. But gradually, I noticed, perceptions changed--people began to take the betrothal more seriously. Instead of smiling at it, the women started calling me Yarima heorope .

Slowly, I found myself involved. I started feeling almost like another parent to her. In our terms, she might have been a cute little neighbor’s kid whom you like a lot and who comes over to your house for milk and cookies. But here I was living in a culture where a young girl like that is considered a wife, or at least a potential wife--a wife in the making.

After a while I started going out into the forest with Yarima and her brother, who was about 18. I would never think of going into the forest on my own, and I knew that she would feel more comfortable with her brother along. So the three of us would go. Often we would go fishing at the clear stream that was about an hour from the house. Her brother would go out into the water first, she would go in next, and I’d follow. He would bring the fish line, hooks and sinkers that I’d given him. I had my shotgun in case we came across any birds, and I’d bring along a pot and matches and some rice. When we stopped Yarima would cook the rice and whatever fish we had caught.

Our relationship changed. Before, Yarima had been the cute little girl with the smile and the hello. Now it was something more than that and, as time passed, a good deal more than that. I had done plenty of hunting before, but always with the men. She had been out in the forest all her life, but as a little girl with her mother and the other women and children. Now we were out together, with her brother along, but together, in the way that a prospective husband and a betrothed girl would be. I knew that this, at least in Yanomama terms, was becoming a marriage. Here in the Amazon it was so simple and straightforward--no formalization, no ceremony, no exchange of gifts or vows. Marriage just happens.

A month later, I motored downriver to Platanal, then flew out to Caracas. From there I cabled that I was going back to Hasupuweteri for a few more months. As far as my own work for the Max Planck Institute in Munich went--the transcriptions and translations and text analyses--I could do that in Hasupuweteri as well as I could in Germany. And Yarima was not in Germany.