title: Noble Savages: My Life Among Two Dangerous Tribes -- the Yanomamo and the Anthropologists
author:  Napoleon A. Chagnon 
description: Chagnon, author of a best-selling college textbook on the isolated Yanomamo tribe of the Amazon basin, was branded a heretic for violating the received wisdom of anthropologythat societies untouched by modern civilization are generally peaceful, and when theyre not, the reasons stem from fighting over scarce resources. After living among them for five years, Chagnon found the Yanomamo fierce fighters over women. He would ultimately spend 35 years studying the tribe, drawing on the disciplines of anthropology, archaeology, and biology to offer a complex portrait of the isolated tribe. His study came at a time of turmoil within his profession as political correctness and growing activism on behalf of native populations conflicted with more scientific and Darwinian notions of natural selection. Chagnon is as critical of his own early navet in living among the Yanomamo as he is of cultural anthropology itself, which he describes as more religious than scientific. This is a fascinating look at a severely isolated tribe as it evolved into a more complex society as well as a scathing look at the tensions within an academic discipline in transition. --Vanessa Bush
zlib_text:  
  The Nellore Yanadis v. 13.11, www.philaletheians.co.uk, 21 March 2019 
  Page 1 of 4 
  The Nellore Yanadis 
  
  LIVING THE LIFE SERIES 
  UNTUTORED MASTERS OF THE OCCULT POWERS OF NATURE 
  The Nellore Yanadis v. 13.11, www.philaletheians.co.uk, 21 March 2019 
  Page 2 of 4 
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
  Untutored masters of the healing and protective 
  powers of nature that keep them healthy and secure. 
  First published in The Theosophist, Vol. IV, No. 4, January 1883, pp. 82-83. 
  Republished in Blavatsky Collected Writings, (A MYSTERIOUS RACE) IV pp. 287-90. 
  HILE TRAVELLING FROM THE LANDING PLACE — on the Madras “Buck-
  ingham Canal” — to Nellore, we were made to experience the novel sensa-
  tion of a transit of fifteen miles in comfortable modern carriages each 
  briskly dragged by a dozen of strong, merry men, whom we took for ordinary Hindus 
  of some of the lower or Pariah caste. The contrast offered us by the sight of these 
  noisy, apparently well-contented men, to our palanquin-bearers, who had just car