an amusing hoax of the grandest proportions

i love me a good prank. and when the pranksters are a remote tribe of amerindians  and the one being pranked is a dunderhead anthropologist—even better. the following account is taken from napoleon chagnon’s book yanomamö: the fierce people (1968). here, chagnon tries to record each tribe member’s “true name” the only problem is that this was an invasion of their system of prestige and etiquette, if not a flagrant violation of it.

They reacted to this in a brilliant but devastating manner: They invented false names for everybody in the village and systematically learned them, freely revealing to me the ‘true’ identities of everyone. I smugly thought I had cracked the system and enthusiastically constructed elaborate genealogies over a period of some five months. They enjoyed watching me learn their names…

Everyone would then insist that I repeat the name aloud, roaring in hysterical laughter as I clumsily pronounced the name, sometimes laughing until tears streamed down their faces. The ‘named’ person would usually react with annoyance and hiss some untranslatable epithet at me, which served to reassure me that I had the ‘true’ name…

My anthropological bubble was burst when I visited a village about 10 hours’ walk to the southwest some five months after I had begun collecting genealogies on the Bisaasi-teri. I was chatting with the local headman of this village and happened to casually drop the name of the wife of the Bisaasi-teri headman. A stunned silence followed, and then a villagewide roar of uncontrollable laughter, choking, gasping, and howling followed. It seems that I thought the Bisaasi-teri headman was married to a woman named “hairy cunt.” It also seems that the Bisaasi-teri headman was called ‘long dong’ and his brother ‘eagle shit.’ The Bisaasi-teri headman had a son called “asshole” and a daughter called “fart breath.”

if only i had thought of this prank when an anthropologist from the university of delaware studied my family in 1992-1994.