What happens when western anthropologists descend on the Amazon and make one of the last unacculturated tribes in existence, the Yanomami, the most exhaustively filmed and studied tribe on the planet? Despite their "do no harm" creed and scientific aims, the small army of anthropologists that has studied the Yanomami since the 1960s has wreaked havoc among the tribe - and sparked a war within the anthropology community itself.
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The Ax Fight (1975) is an ethnographic film by anthropologist and filmmaker Tim Asch and anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon about a conflict in a Yanomami village called Mishimishimabowei-teri, in southern Venezuela. It is best known as an iconic and idiosyncratic ethnographic film about the Yanomamo and is frequently shown in classroom settings.
Director
This is one of the few ethnographic films in which the anthropologist appears as one of the subjects, and as such it is a lively introduction to the nature of fieldwork. Napoleon Chagnon, who lived among the Yanomamo for 36 months over a period of eight years, is shown in various roles as "fieldworker": entering a village armed with arrows and adorned with feathers; sharing coffee with the shaman Dedeheiwa who recounts the myth of fire; dispensing eyedrops to a baby and accepting in turn a shaman's cure for his own illness; collecting voluminous genealogies; making tapes, maps, Polaroid photos; and attempting to analyze such patterns as village fission, migration, and aggression.
Director
An examination of shamanism in the Yanomamo society. Dedehiewa, a shaman of the Mishimishi-mabowei-teri village, summons spirits called hekura to "cure or kill".
Director
Yanomamo feasts are ceremonial, social, economic, and political events. They are occasions for men to adorn their bodies with paint and feathers, to display their strength in dance and ritualized aggression; for trading partnerships to be established or affirmed; and for the creation or testing of alliances. In the feast filmed in 1968, the Patanowa-teri had invited the Mahekodo-teri to their village. The two groups had been allies until a few years before this event, when they had fought over the abduction of a woman. They now hoped to renew their broken alliance, which they did successfully. Soon after the filmed feast, the two villages together raided a common enemy. A detailed discussion of this feast, and of the significance of feasting among the Yanomamo, is found in chapter 4 of Chagnon's Yanomamo: The Fierce People. The film's graphic representation of reciprocity and exchange may enrich (and be enriched by) a reading of Marcel Mauss' The Gift.
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This film illustrates the field techniques used by a multidisciplinary team of researchers from the University of Michigan in collaboration with their Venezuelan colleagues. The film also includes a brief sketch of Yanomamo culture and society.
