Derek Stavarski's List: Darkness

While Dreger details the impressive volume of resources that she consulted including interviews with some 40 individuals, she fails to reveal that several of these individuals agreed to the interview because of misinformed consent. We were led to believe that she was going to be a detached scholar; but this article, like the paper on which it is based and that I heard at the 2009 convention of the American Anthropological Association (AAA), is anything but the work of an objective scholar. She is highly selective in her treatment of the Darkness in El Dorado controversy, obviously in defense of her admitted friend Napoleon Chagnon. Nevertheless, I still have faith in scholarship and hope that eventually a genuinely detached and objective scholar will document and analyze the controversy.

“Chagnon made numerous flights into the Yanomami area without any quarrantine proceedures [sic] or other protections for the indigenous peoples. The Task Force maintains that this was unacceptable on both ethical and professional grounds and was a breach of the AAA's Code of Ethics. AAA ethical standards require that anthropologists must put the best interests of the people being studied ahead of their research. Chagnon compromised this principle.”

The AAA has also worked to protect indigenous peoples by raising public awareness of the problems they face. The AAA has been acutely aware of the harm suffered by the Yanomami at the hands of gold miners and timber interests, who have brought disease and pollution. Since the 1970s, AAA has issued public statements on the imperiled situation of the Yanomami and indigenous peoples of Latin America. In 1979 and 1991, the AAA called for the creation of a Yanomami Reserve in Northern Brazil. The Brazilian Government created the Yanomami Reserve in 1992.

Patrick Tierney, an investigative journalist, has accused both Neel and Chagnon of committing serious abuses against the Yanomami. He charges Neel with instigation of, or at the very least doing little or nothing to deal with, the serious measles epidemic among the Yanomami that resulted in thousands of deaths. To explain why Neel would have done such a thing Tierney refers to Neel's years of work with the Atomic Energy Commission. The AEC was investigating the toxic effects of atomic radiation on human beings and therefore acquired the use of a facility at the Strong Memorial Hospital, which was under the same roof as the University of Rochester Medical School.

His accusations against Chagnon also implicate him in the epidemic, arguing that he administered a counter-indicated vaccine on Neel's instructions; but Tierney's major charges are different and various. He claims that Chagnon interfered massively with the lives of the Yanomami in all sorts of ways. He claims that the films he made about them were particularly intrusive and many of the scenes in them were staged to show off the Yanomami as both fierce and primitive. The warfare which he highlighted as characteristic of Yanomami culture resulted more often than not from their battles over the trade goods that Chagnon distributed. His behavior in the field was insensitive and often deliberately so, as when he bribed or pressured children or other susceptible Yanomami to give him information on taboo topics.