For a people with a fierce reputation they are also known as doting parents who admonish, but rarely discipline their children and have chided missionaries who spank their own children.
To our perception, they think nothing of lying, cheating, or stealing to get what they desire, and are generally amused by a successful deception. Their concept of the sanctity of life differs westerners profess to hold and guiltlessly murder outsiders if they feel they were cheated. The fetus of awoman's first pregnancy, considered high risk, is usually aborted, as are pregnancies occurring too soon after the birth of the previous child. Most groups practice infanticide, either of unwanted females or deformed infants.
Women seem treated more as property than human, and function to bear children and serve the men in her family. Gender roles are strict. Marriages are arranged, and a proposition of survival and economy rather than love. The Yanomami view what we call love as a weakness, an obsession that gets in way of normal behavior. Husbands live with, and give allegiance to, his wife's family, allegiance to wife's family. He remains indebted to them for his bride and pays them a bride-price for years, usually until her parents death the payment is in exchange for their daughter's labor and the sons she will give him, and begins nominally at the betrothal, sometimes several years before the actual marriage.
A complex system of kinship determines much of Yanomami social behavior, determining exchange obligations and loyalties. The structure is rigid, although not strictly biological, and can be altered in certain instances, usually by high status men. An individual considers all of his biological mother's sisters to be his mother and addresses them with the same term. Likewise his father consists of his biological father and his brothers. Marriage to cross-cousins (father's sister's children to mother's brother's children) is considered an extremely good match, particularly if the parents live in the same village--that way both spouses with remain in that village. In Yanomami marriages the husband stays with the wife's family, at least for the first few years.
Names change often and are descriptive of the person and his experiences. A person may be known by different names in different villages or even within the same village, and is sometimes secretly called by a derogatory names the person himself isn't even aware of. They have a hesitancy to speak the names of the dead, particularly by relatives of the deceased.
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