Into the Heart: One Man's Pursuit of Love and Knowledge Among the Yanomama

Into the Heart is a book written by Kenneth Good, an anthropologist. Good went to the rainforests in Brazil to live among the Yanomama. He went there to study their way of life. He discovered how different these people are from the people in the United States. Their diet consisted of what they hunted and things they planted. They worked very hard and lived off the land. These people never complained no matter how bad a situation was. Unlike our society, the only transportation they had was by foot, they slept either outdoors or in houses with large open rooms with many people, and they did not have medicine or doctors. During his stay, Good learned the lifestyle of the Yanomama. He learned their ways and accepted the things they did. While there, he met a very young Yanomama girl. He gradually fell in love with her. Even though they had major cultural differences, the two of them left the rainforest and came to the United States where they were married. This is an excellent book to read. There was suspense not knowing what was going to happen next. It was extremely interesting to see how other people in the world live as compared to our own traditions. Plus it had some romance mixed in by the marriage of this couple from totally different cultures. I would recommend that everyone read this very interesting book.

LIke many, I picked this book up from an interest in anthropology. Like most of those same people, when I finished it, it felt as if i'd ended a great novel. To be completely honest, there are a severely limited number of times I (a twenty-six year old male graduate student in politics) have read a book only to have tears roll down my cheeks. Seriously, this is a glorious story as well as a fascinating anthropological commentary.Here's the context: Ken Good was a graduate student under Napoleon Chagnon who was one of the first to do work with the Yanomamo indians. Chagnon wanted Good to do some research (field work) that might help supplement Chagnon's thesis that that Yanomamo are violent more by nature than culture. No matter the reasons, Good ends up not only abandoning Chagnon and his research, but finds the Yanomamo significantly less violent (by nature or culture) than Chagnon did. This may, in part, have been due to the fact that where Chagnon always remained the detached observer (his book is full of graphs, charts, and statistics), Good's got very personal (no stats here, for better or worse). ...Which brings us to the next layer of the story. Beyond being an anthropological perspective on the Yanomama, it is a fantastic - FANTASTIC! - love story. After a few years of living in the Yanomama community, good was offered a wife according to tradition. It took him a while to warm to it (and her even longer, given that he had strange habits like writing in notebooks and wearing 'foot coverings' Who would do such things?!). Their love blossomed, though, and the second half of the book is much about a host of difficulties: his struggle to 'hold on to her' when obligation took him out of the village for months at a time, the struggle to get a legal marriage to a woman who has no birth records, and later, how to get her out of the village with him. The only problem i had with the book has less to do with the book and more with its circumstances. Good comments that Chagnon, in painting the Yanomama to be 'fierce people' overexaggerated (rather than fabricated) their ferocity. My guess, after reading both books, is that Good did the same thing by possibly underexaggerating. Good, for instance, will speak of some of the heinous things that Yanomama do, speak of it as a ancillary side-note, and wrap it up in two sentences, only returning to the topic chapters down the road. Truth be told, I think the truth lies betwixt Chagnon's and Good's accounts and I can't fault either book, but when one reads the two together, one gets the impression that BOTH authors completely missed (or ignored) things that the other got. How else could such different accounts come to pass? For all that I strongly recommend this read both for education in anthropology and as one of the best love stories around.

I am a sociologist, and have used Good and Chanoff's book, Into the Heart, as required reading in one of my courses for four years in a row. It's a large second-year course on comparative sociology, and it aims to help students develop an ability to understand and analyze societies of very different types. To this end, the course blends sociology, anthropology and history. The book Into the Heart was originally brought to my attention by a college representative of its publishing company; she said it was one of the most fascinating books she'd ever read, and she thought it might work well in my course. I dutifully began to read it, and wound up making the decision to adopt it even before I'd finished reading it -- I found it that good. Four years later, now, I can say this: out of all the books I've used as required reading in all the courses I've taught, none has ever caught the attention of my students as well as Into the Heart. I've had students come up to me spontaneously to say things like it was the most interesting book they'd ever read, that having started it they'd stayed up all night reading it, that they'd bought a copy for a friend as a Christmas present, etc. The book is unique in my experience in that way. The issues it revolves around divide opinion among students, but it seems to never fail to fascinate them, and the disagreements make for excellent discussions class discussions. My teaching assistants tell me the same about their experiences with it in the tutorials they run. They also tell me that the students engage themselves with this book like no other. I'd encourage anyone to read it, and would specifically encourage faculty looking for captivating reading for their students, in relevant courses, to check it out.

With Into the Heart, Good and Chanoff have created that all-too-rare phenomenon-- a book that can be equally enjoyed by the general reader and the academic specialist. A riveting account of Good's years with the Yanomami people of Venezuela and Brazil, it can be read as a rich ethnography, an "insider's view" of the scientific research process, an edge-of-your-seat travel yarn, or a rainforest version of "Romeo and Juliet." I first encountered it quite by chance in the trade-book section of a chain bookstore, where the word "Yanomami" on the cover caught my eye. In my graduate training as a cultural anthropologist, I had read descriptions of the Yanomami characterizing them as "the fierce people." jungle warriors whose obsession with violence and warfare alledgedly proved that human nature was innately nasty and brutish. So I was both astonished and pleased to read Good's nuanced descriptions of life in a Yanomami village, to find that this much-maligned group was composed of unique, complex individuals, some aggressive, some gentle, all impressively resourceful in adapting to their rainforest environment. I now use it as an auxiliary text in my introductory classes, and student response has been overwhelmingly positive. Good's discussion of his research brings to life the interplay of scientific theory and data in a dramatic and accessible way. At the same time, his sketches of daily life among the Yanomami transport the reader so effectively that one can almost smell the meat roasting on the campfires, hear the low murmur of voices punctuating the night, feel the rhythm of lives enjoyed in attunement with nature and kin. The Yanomami no longer seem like strangers in a strange land, but like neighbors-- people we feel we know. And then there's the love story that propels the narrative and provides suspense, the memoir of gradually flowering trust, tenderness, and commitment between Ken and Yarima, the Yanomamo woman who would become his wife and the mother of their three children. The emotional richness of their struggle to preserve love in the face of immense cultural barriers is especially appealing to college-age readers, and probably explains why more than one undergraduate has confessed that "Ken Good's book was the only one I read cover-to-cover this semester-- I just had to find out what happened!" A rare human document that can be enjoyed on many levels, this unique story will find its way "into the heart" of any reader who enters its rainforest world-- and will not be soon forgotten.

This is a truly remarkable book, much different from most anthropological literature. Although Good sets out to do a very mainstream anthropological study, he gets drawn in to the community, and what ensues is a fascinating tale, a touching love story, and hopefully, a major change in people's beliefs about so-called "primitive tribes". As Good becomes more and more frustrated with the competitive and stuffy world of academia and more connected to his Yanomama tribe, he truly begins to change his life. Remarkable!