• DOI:10.1086/201170
• Corpus ID: 144661874

Yanomamo Hallucinogens: Anthropological, Botanical, and Chemical Findings

@article{Chagnon1971YanomamoHA,
  title={Yanomamo Hallucinogens: Anthropological, Botanical, and Chemical Findings},
  author={Napoleon A. Chagnon and P W Le Quesne and James M. Cook},
  journal={Current Anthropology},
  year={1971},
  volume={12},
  pages={72 - 74}
}

• N. Chagnon, P. L. Le Quesne, J. Cook
• Published 1 February 1971
• Environmental Science
• Current Anthropology

The Yanomamo Indians of southern Venezuela and northern Brazil employ hallucinogenic snuffs made from a wide variety of feral and domestic plants. Schultes (1967: 303) has recently suggested that this general geographical region represents the "center of complexity" of snuff-taking in South America. More recently, he and Holmstedt (Schultes and Holmstedt 1968: 123) have suggested that the Yanomamo area itself may even represent the very region where one of the most common varieties of snuff-that made of myristicaceous substances-originated. It is not surprising, therefore, that there is a large and continually growing body of literature which describes various aspects of the area's ethnobotany and ethnopharmacology (see Wurdak 1958, Wassen and Holmstedt 1963, Seitz 1965, 1967, Holmstedt and Lindgren 1967, Schultes 1967, 1969, Schultes and Holmstedt 1968, Agurell et al. 1969, and Corothie and Nakano 1969). There are, however, a number of misconceptions and inconsistencies in the literature, particularly on subjects dealing with plant-collecting, ethnobotany, and ethnology. Our recent ethnobotanical, chemical, and ethnological findings will serve to clarify some of the issues and perhaps assist those fieldworkers who intend to collect additional ethnobotanical data from this region. (The chromatography techniques and microanalytical results will be published later [Chagnon, Le Quesne, and Cook n.d.].) ETHNOBOTANICAL FINDINGS