The Fierce People: The wages of anthropological incorrectness - controversy surrounding ethnographer Napoleon A. Chagnon

National Review, Nov 20, 2000 by John J. Miller

It's one of the most celebrated passages in the literature of anthropology: "I looked up and gasped when I saw a dozen burly, naked, filthy, hideous men staring at us down the shafts of their drawn arrows! Immense wads of green tobacco were stuck between their lower teeth and lips making them look even more hideous, and strands of dark- green slime dripped or hung from their noses."

That's how Napoleon A. Chagnon described his first encounter with the Yanomamo, one of the most primitive tribes on the planet. They were practically unknown to the outside world before the 1960s, when Chagnon journeyed to the wild borderlands of Brazil and Venezuela to live among them. His writings on that experience, plus documentary films based on numerous follow-up visits, made the Yanomamo famous. Chagnon described an exotic culture of drug-snorting Amazonians who wore almost no clothing, fought wars over women, and ate the ashes of their dead. Nearly 1 million copies of his groundbreaking book, Yanomamo: The Fierce People, are in print. It's widely considered the best ethnography ever written. There's hardly an Anthro 101 course in the land that doesn't reference this pioneering work. Chagnon is simply the most important cultural anthropologist of his generation.

Now a forthcoming book by Patrick Tierney describes him as a fraud, and worse: a murderer who deliberately spread a measles epidemic among the Yanomamo. W. W. Norton & Co. won't officially publish Darkness in El Dorado until mid November, but its galleys already have won it a National Book Award nomination and an excerpt in The New Yorker. Tierney supposedly documents what is the biggest scandal ever to touch academic anthropology-bigger even than Derek Freeman exposing Margaret Mead's seminal book, Coming of Age in Samoa, as a sham. If conservatives hailed the Mead debunking as a case study in the dangers of cultural relativism, it's the Left that now wants Chagnon's head.

The stakes are enormous. Mead was probably nothing more than a dupe. Chagnon, according to Tierney and his allies, consciously destroyed thousands of lives. The charges are astonishing, and they've been reported virtually everywhere, often without skepticism. There's only one problem with them: They're wholly and indisputably false. Chagnon is the target of one of the greatest smear campaigns ever waged against a scholar.

In October, I met the gray-bearded, 62-year-old Chagnon at his secluded home just south of Traverse City, Mich. He greeted me on his driveway looking like he had just stepped out of the bush: He wore a khaki shirt and vest loaded with zippers and pockets, plus canvas-and-denim hunting pants. He retired from the University of California at Santa Barbara last year, and then moved to this wooded plot. His house can't be seen from the road because of all the trees; it's an ideal retreat for someone who wants privacy. But Chagnon has turned a small study by the front door into a war room. Beneath a portrait of Bonaparte, the anthropologist has battled for weeks to rebut Tierney's allegations, going through old notes and organizing support among former students and sympathetic colleagues. E. O. Wilson calls every other day. Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker have backed him publicly. UC-Santa Barbara and the University of Michigan maintain websites that are in the process of posting point-by-point refutations of Tierney's arguments. "I'm considering legal action," says Chagnon.

Controversy has surrounded Chagnon for years. Much of it is driven by pettiness: Less successful anthropologists envy the influence Chagnon wields. They're offended, too, by the hard-headed, scientific approach he takes into the field, and they harbor ideological resentments for the way Chagnon has described the Yanomamo. Chagnon called his subjects "the fierce people"-partly because that's what they call themselves in their own language, but also because of the chronic violence characterizing their society. In one survey, Chagnon estimated that a quarter of adult Yanomamo men die at the hands of other Yanomamo. He also reported data showing that Yanomamo men who kill produce more offspring than those who don't. In other words, killers have greater reproductive success than non-killers. To a sociobiologist like Chagnon-i.e., someone who believes human behavior and culture are the result of natural selection-that's a very important finding. To many anthropologists, however, sociobiology's genes-to-culture pipeline is a gentrified form of racism, and Chagnon is the enemy.

Chagnon's greatest nemesis may not be Tierney, but Terence Turner, a Cornell University anthropologist who has also studied Amazonians. "Sociobiology is an unviable and logically indefensible reductionism," he says. Furthermore, "Chagnon's pronouncements about the intrinsic violence of the Yanomamo has actively hurt them." Turner complains that politicians and businessmen who want to exploit the Yanomamo homelands for their rich gold deposits use Chagnon's work to demonize the tribe for standing in their way. He's been making this point for more than a decade. In 1994, he labeled Chagnon "a sociopath" for statements that he believed were politically harmful to the Yanomamo, and he denounced Chagnon before a crowded room at the American Anthropological Association's annual convention. Turner, who describes himself as "a Marxist," told me that he first met Tierney "five or six years ago," when he was commuting between Chicago and Ithaca, N.Y. He routinely changed planes in Pittsburgh, where Tierney was living. A mutual friend introduced them, and they began regular meetings at the airport. In the acknowledgments to Darkness in El Dorado, Tierney thanks Turner for his "encouragement." (Tierney was not available for an interview.)