Madison Hill's List: darkness

• Even more serious than Chagnon's ''checkbook anthropology,'' which rewarded cooperative Yanomami with everything from fishhooks to outboard motors, was his method for tracing the group's lineage: Tierney says he paid people to tell him the names of their dead ancestors, a revelation that is taboo in Yanomami culture. If that failed, he approached rival communities to get the information, aggravating tension. Far from being a quiet observer, Chagnon was a dominant presence: Villagers say he would descend into communities, God-like and armed with a shotgun, via helicopters that sometimes blew the roofs off buildings.

• However, the Academy did not rebut another of Tierney's claims: that Neel and Chagnon acted unethically by collecting thousands of blood, urine, and stool samples from the Yanomami from 1965 to 1972, presumably without their full consent. Neel was working for the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission, and these samples allowed him to compare the gene mutation rates of an isolated population group with those of atom bomb survivors in Japan. 

   
• Although some of Darkness in El Dorado's claims may well be disproved, the volume is a valuable contribution to the debate over anthropological ethics. Certainly, those who read it will never again watch a film on obscure indigenous groups without wondering how much of the action has been staged.

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• • The anthropologist began to lose his fear -- he became fearless.  
    When he first arrived he was afraid.  Then he developed courage.  He wanted to show that he was brave.  If the 
    Yanomami could beat him, he could beat them
• • He ordered 
    the Yanomami to fight among themselves.  He paid with pans, machetes,  knives, fishooks.
• • I don't like this, no.  I don't like these anthropologists who use the name of the Yanomami on paper, in books.  
    One doesn't like it.  Another says its wrong.  For us Yanomami, this isn't good.  They are using our name as if we 
    were children.  The name Yanomami has to be respected.  It's not like a ball to throw around, to play with, hitting 
    from one side to another.  The name Yanomami refers to the indigenous peoples of Brazil and Venezuela.  It must 
    be respected.  This name is authority.  It is an old name.  It is an ancient name.  These anthropologists are treating us 
    like animals -- as they would fish or birds.

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• “Tierney presents convincing evidence,” write the aghast anthropologists Turner and Sponsel that on his 1968 trip to the Yanomami, a tribe in the Venezuelan Amazon, Neel greatly exacerbated, and probably started, the epidemic of measles that killed ‘hundreds, perhaps thousands’ (Tierney’s language-the exact figure will never be known) of Yanomami.” It seems that the epidemic was “caused, or at least worsened and more widely spread, by a campaign of vaccination carried out by the research team, which used a virulent vaccine (Edmonson BI) that had been counter-indicated by medical experts for use on isolated populations with no prior exposure to measles (exactly the Yanomami situation).”
• Neel also allegedly colluded with Venezuelan politicians attempting to gain control of Yanomami lands for illegal gold mining concessions. He provided “cover” for the illegal mine developer as a “naturalist” collaborating with the anthropological researchers, in exchange for the politician’s guarantee of continued access to the Indians for the anthropologists.

• Chagnon has been promoting a version of Yanomami society in which aggressive alpha males appropriate all desirable women and slaughter the weak, to the great delight of sociobiologists who have revelled in Chagon’s fictions as proof of their own gloomy views of the human condition. The simplest explanation of why the Yanomami were “fierce” is because they quite rightly couldn’t stand Chagnon. 

   

    Tierney devotes much of the book to a critique of Napoleon Chagnon’s work, charging that Chagnon has cooked his research, not least by repeatedly fomenting the internecine wars which he invokes as evidence of the ultimately healthful genetic purging by which the Yanomami survive.

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• • Most importantly these scholars had
    repeatedly shown that, in his work, Tierney had painted what amounted to a
    fictitious picture of a measles epidemic among the South American Yanomamö
    people in 1968.
• • I had to wonder when I came upon this story years after all this, given the reality
    as evidenced by so very many documentary sources, how did Tierney’s falsehoods
    get as far as they did? To answer that, one must really understand how and why
    certain individuals—but especially leaders within the American Anthropological
    Association (AAA)—played a supporting role to Tierney’s work.

• Turner says he became a vocal critic when he began investigating the slaughter in 1993 of more than a dozen Yanomamo by Brazilian gold miners. As he saw it, the Indians had been jeopardized by Chagnon's depiction of them as fierce warriors, which led the miners to attack violently and made the larger public unsympathetic. "His politics are bad," Turner says. "His ideas are used by miners and politicians, especially in Brazil, to argue for a breakup of Yanomamo land." Worse, Turner says, is Chagnon's assertion "that the males who are dominant get more women, and therefore their genes get passed on more. This is very close to the Nazi idea that there's a leadership gene that the dominant people pass on and this is the natural order."
• In every isolated area of the world, anthropologists and missionaries have a complicated relationship. In many cases, the Amazon included, missionaries arrived first and the scientists relied on them for guidance, support and introductions. But while missionaries traditionally have sought to convert and "civilize" local people, anthropology is supposed to be a hands-off enterprise restricted to the observation of native culture. The two purposes have clashed often.

• This honor bestowed by the NAS will, hopefully forever, relegate this shameful event into history and restore Chagnon’s reputation as one of the great anthropologists of the 20th century.
• Congratulations to Napoleon Chagnon, who has long borne the standard for evolutionary anthropology for which he is now recognized. In our travails as anthropologists, we believe that it would be wise to emulate Chagnon’s courage, persistence and honesty.