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Gary Shultz
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May 7, 1998
SMU GRADUATE STUDENT LIVED AMONG INDIANS TO LEARN ABOUT LIVES OF ANCIENT HUNTER-GATHERERS
DALLAS (SMU) -- The scene was a tiny village on the Venezuelan savanna where anthropologist Pei-Lin Yu of Southern Methodist University was living among the Pume Indians in order to study their way of life.
It was the rainy season in September 1992 and thanks to a good hunting trip, everyone was dining on venison. Yu's fellow researcher tossed some leftover bones into a fire rather than brave a torrential downpour to throw them in the trash outside of camp. A Pume friend nicknamed P. J. entered their thatched-roof house and saw the bones mixed in with the coals.
"His big smile vanished and his eyes popped out of his head," Yu later recorded in her journal. "Just as (a yell) left his mouth a lightning bolt struck the edge of the camp a few feet from our house. The ground shook and the itchy smell of ozone filled our nostrils. The Pume went wild! Women whooped, children shrieked, men shouted, and P. J. ran out into the storm, frantically singing, blowing blood, and whistling to chase the clouds away. . . .
"After the storm had passed, P. J. sat at our hearth surrounded by excited Pume. He explained that lightning is a living being, very hungry. It especially loves the blood and bones of deer, lizard, anteater, and armadillo, and if you put these bones on the fire the lightning will smell the smoke and strike your house." Yu noted that the coincidence of lightning nearly hitting them would "fuel the Pume belief in lightning magic for the next 100 years. I might believe in it now myself."
A Ph.D. student in SMU's Department of Anthropology, Yu spent nearly two years living among the Pume, a tribe of hunter-gatherers who live on the plains about 300 miles southwest of Caracas, near the Colombian border. Because the Pume live by hunting and gathering rather than by farming, and they are not tied into the industrial economy, their way of life offers researchers a unique window into the study of hunter-gatherers.
"It is important to remember that 10,000 years ago, all of our ancestors lived by hunting and gathering," Yu said. "But the Pume are not fossils. While they help us learn about people of the past, they also are a living part of the modern cultural picture."
Hungry Lightning, published last fall by the University of New Mexico Press, is a collection of excerpts from the daily journal Yu kept while living with the Pume. Proceeds from the book will benefit the Pume, whose way of life may soon change because of the encroachments of ranches and other aspects of the industrialized world on their homeland. The book recently earned SMU's 1997 Godbey Lecture Series Author's Award, which recognizes excellence in research and writing. This year marked the first time in the book award's 18-year history that it had gone to someone other than a faculty member.
The journal is a personal account of Yu's learning the Pume language, the daily skills used to survive, and being adopted into a family against a backdrop of a way of life that does not include the printed word, cash money, guns or automobiles. Or fear of your neighbor.
"I lived for two years without fear of my fellow human beings," Yu said. "I never feared I would be struck or raped or otherwise attacked. In many social ways they are better off than we are."
Not all of her experiences were pleasant, however. She, like the Pume, experienced hunger, the harshness of the elements and the never-ending swarms of biting insects. And while living with the Pume, she contracted malaria and nearly died.
Yu studied how Pume women gathered wild plants, and was surprised to see how much women contributed to the daily diet, compared to men. Pume women, particularly during the long, rainy winters, are frequently the sole providers of food to the camp. Men hunt just as often, but the likelihood of returning with game is much lower.
A 1989 graduate of the University of New Mexico, Yu came to SMU to study archaeology with Dr. Lewis Binford. Yu is especially interested in how the social lives and material technology of living hunter-gatherers like the Pume reflect the lives of people of the past.
Yu was working for the National Park Service when Russell "Rusty" Greaves, a Ph. D. candidate at UNM, invited her to join his field study of the Pume. Greaves felt that he needed the help of a woman researcher since the role of women in hunter-gatherer society has received very little study. The two of them left for Venezuela in the early spring of 1992.
In Hungry Lightning , Yu describes her participation in the process of birth, growth, romance, sickness, healing and death among the Pume. In the future, she plans to return to study and live with the Pume after completing her Ph. D.
"It's not over," Yu said. "I can't wait to get out there again, sit down with a baby and a couple of mangos and catch up on all the gossip!"
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Media Note: Photos of Yu with the Pume are available upon request.
A review copy of Hungry Lightning is available upon request.
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