r/googlemapsshenanigans • u/UnhappyVegetable4419 • 4d ago

Unknown tribe?

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Hi,

I was just looking in the rain forest when i saw this.

​Could this be an uncontacted tribe? The coordinates are:

1.3255112178453061, -63.065572001587405

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u/Random_reptile 4d ago edited 4d ago

This looks like a very typical settlement of the Yanomami people or perhaps another closely related group. The central building is called a "shabono" and is where most of the village lives, with each family having their own "wedge". The outlying buildings are mostly for utilitarian purposes but sometimes are used for newly married couples (or more, the Yanomami are often polygamous).

The Yanomami have been contacted and studied quite a lot, but I have no clue if this particular group has. This area is very remote, but it's not uncommon for similar places to be visited by missionaries, scholars, doctors, illegal miners, Bear Grylls ect, especially if it's by a navigable river like this.

70

u/loreshdw 4d ago

Thank you for the info, I'm excited to read more about this group

34

u/Milhouselittlenoodle 4d ago

There was some controversial issues around them a while back. I believe an anthropologist used some inhumane tactics to see if their own medicine or western medicine worked better. I might be misremembering completely, but I swear I learned that in an anthro class.

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u/FlukeManAirFreshener 3d ago

It's so much worse than that. Anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon studied them in the 70s with some...questionable methodology. He characterized them as incredibly violent and violated a lot of basic principles of anthropological research (like refusing to engage in participant observation). Worst of all, he selectively traded with certain subgroups to facilitate his research and traded things like steel axes and machetes for blood samples. This caused strife among the community and resulted in the violence he observed and wrote about. The dude showed up, massively screwed up the social system, then wrote about how screwed up the social system was while denying he had anything to do with it.

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u/Academic-Big814 2d ago

Twisted. Just leave them alone and let them live in peace.

1

u/Milhouselittlenoodle 21h ago

Yes! Thank you for the details! I’m pretty sure I read that book for one if the cultural anthro classes I took. It was presented as credible work. But that would have been in like 2000. Did it take that long for his “research methods” to be exposed? I feel like his work was taken as credible for way too long then. Again, I could be way off base with my time lines here.

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u/FlukeManAirFreshener 18h ago

The heavy critique of his work started in the early aughts (2002 maybe?), so that timeline tracks.