Yanomami football in the high Ocamo (Amazons State, Venezuela): the Mabetiteri case

Abstract

The football taken by teachers, missionaries or the hercians waves to the original peoples of America and practiced at present, constitutes a cultural practice proposed or imposed from the exterior with notable acceptance in the above mentioned peoples, which, in major or minor degree, stamp some personal signs to make it more significant for their own idiosyncrasy. In this work, and on basis of the ethnographic experience, we are going to describe and analyze how it is the football that is practiced in one of the peoples indigenous more emblematic of America because of its degree of isolation to which historically it has been subject. The people Yanomami, circumscribed or exemplified in this case in the shapono or Mabetiteri's community, close to the river Ocamo, will be the subject of our reflection and the motive for understanding how the richness of the human beings is situated in the infinite aptitude to construct senses, and how the uniformity of a global practice in the fund and the forms as it is in the football, can still be interpreted and transformed from the local thing into his deeper sense.