Hungry Lightning: Notes of a Woman Anthropologist in Venezuela, Yu Pei-Lin, Pei-Lin Yu, Yu

A young student of anthropology receives an offer she cant refuse: the chance to live among the Pum , a South American hunting-and-gathering people who call the tropical Venezuelan savannah home. During their time in the village of Doro An , 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 Pum family, Yus 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 authors own illustrations, Yus journal entries seek to present through a young Americans eyes a sketch of her Pum family, their heroic struggle to survive in a changing world, and the power and mystery of the Pum way of life.

In Hungry Lightning we glimpse haunting fragments of life among the Pum 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

ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS

Pei-Lin Yu is an archaeologist at the U.S. Bureau of Reclamations Pacific Northwest Regional Office in Boise, Idaho. She won the 1998 Goodbey Authors Award from Southern Methodist University, Dallas, for Hungry Lightning.