    34

    34

    34

    the business of the day.  Said Luyat, all he could think of as he filmed was the army

    of the Greeks on the dusty plain outside the walls of Troy.  The Homeric heroes,

    Luyat was certain, must have made war very much like this.  Then, his mind still on

    primitive war, the film-maker said, "There is a book you must read.  I will send it to

    you tomorrow."  The next day, there arrived a volume, in French, called Yanoama.

    It was the first-person account of a European girl--Helena Valero-- living with her

    parents on the Rio Negro who had been kidnapped by the Yanomamo when she

    was still small.  The Yanomamo had attacked Valero's parents, riddled her father

    with arrows, then taken the little girl  back into the forests and adopted her.  After

    all, soon she would be valuable as a wife.  The writer spent her teens and some of

    her adult years among the Yanomamo, experiencing far more of their brutal ways

    than Chagnon in his landmark fieldwork was ever able to see.  It is from her

    account that I take my description of Yanomamo assaults.  (Helena Valero's story is

    available in English as Yanoama: The Narrative of a White Girl Kidnapped by

    Amazonian Indians, as told to Italian anthropologist Ettore Biocca, Dennis Rhodes,

    trans., E.P. Dutton, New York, 1970.  The tale of a Yanomamo raid and the brutal

    massacre of children appears on pages 34-37.  See also: Allen W. Johnson &

    Timothy Earle, The Evolution of Human Societies: From Foraging Group to

    Agrarian State, pp. 124-126.)

    36. According to anthropologist Judith Shapiro of the University of Chicago, quoted

    in Marvin Harris, Cows, Pigs, Wars and Witches: The Riddles of Culture, p. 77.

    37. Here's how Eusebius put it: "writers of history record the victories of war and

    trophies won from enemies, the skill of generals, and the manly bravery of soldiers,

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