Hungry Lightning: Notes of a Woman Anthropologist in Venezuela

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A young student of anthropology receives an offer she can’t refuse: the chance to live among the Pume, a South American hunting-and-gathering people who call the tropical Venezuelan savannah home. During their time in the village of Doro Ana, the author and the principal researcher study a vanishing way of life in which cash money, the written word, automobiles, and airplanes are rare and frightening intrusions.

Adopted into a Pume family, Yu’s informal and personal accounts of events during her two year stay sparkle with descriptive flourishes and turns of phrase as she describes the daily cycles of birth, growth, romance, sickness, healing, and death among the villagers. Enlivened with the author’s own illustrations, Yu’s journal entries seek to present through a young American’s eyes a sketch of her Pume family, their heroic struggle to survive in a changing world, and the power and mystery of the Pume way of life.

In Hungry Lightning we glimpse haunting fragments of life among the Pume Indians. We find an intimate, deeply feminine–but ever-so-slightly jaded and strangely melancholic–voice savoring the tastes and smells of life lived in the Venezuelan savanna. A complexly sensual portrait.–Barbara Tedlock