Why yanomamo are refered as " foraging Horticulturalists?

Question

Why yanomamo are refered as " foraging Horticulturalists?

Answer 1

The phrase refers to the two main components of their  subsistance strategy.  

/Foraging/ suggests the use of available food resources such as they can gather, dig up, pick, pluck, hunt, and bring in from what's available and "findable" in the natural environment.  It also can just a highly mobile lifestyle, but this is less true from the Yanomamo.

/Horticulturalists/ refer to what some consider informal cultivation and what has been compared to gardening.  Neither of these is entirely accurate, but they start to get the idea across.  Horticulturals do not practice an organized, plot-base form of plant-growing on any scale.  Instead, they may help scatter seeds, may do a little weeding, may help create conditions favorable to the growth of a particular crop.  Sometimes they have fiarly large "gardens," though they're not normally in plots and may not be recognized by folks used to looking at plants in rows in plowed dirt.

So the basic idea put in really crude, simple terms, is that the Yanomamo practice a way of life in which they get their food from hunting, gathering, and gardening.

Answer 2

Because they don't "farm" per se, but they do try to help foster the rainforest plants they forage some of their food. I think that's right. It's been a while. They were also known by social anthropologist Napoleon A. Chagnon as "The Fierce People, who wrote a book by the same title.