Jacqueline Engel's List: Darkness Debate Jacqueline Engel

A REPORTER AT LARGE about anthropologist Napoleon A. Chagnon, and the damage done by him and others while studying the Yanomami tribes of the upper Orinoco River jungle in Brazil and Venezuela... In "Yanomamo: The Fierce People," which was published in 1968, Chagnon gave both a harrowing account of a prehistoric tribe and a sobering assessment of what life was like for people whom he later referred to as "our contemporary ancestors." "The Fierce People" eventually became one of the most widely read ethnographical books of all time, selling almost a million copies in the United States alone. Buttressed by subsequent films about the Yanomami made by Chagnon and a documentary filmmaker, Timothy Asch, the book became a standard text in anthropology classes worldwide, and it has gone through five revised editions, the last one in 1997.

In the year 2000, a journalist named Patrick Tierney published a book called, "Darkness in El Dorado," and accused anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon and his colleague geneticist James Neel of numerous misdeeds, among them intentionally creating an epidemic of measles among the Yanomami people in order to study the effects of natural selection on primitive societies.  Tierney states that the resulting epidemic caused the death of hundreds of Yanomami.  Incredibly, Tierney charged that the experiments were funded by the US Atomic Energy Commission, who sought to model the societal consequences of mass mortality caused by nuclear war.  In addition to the measles epidemic, Tierney charged that Chagnon mischaracterized the Yanomami as "The Fierce People" when in fact it was Chagnon who was causing the violence by introducing enormous amounts of western goods such as machetes into the Yanomami society, thus stimulating warfare over the introduced goods.  Tierney also accused Chagnon of fraud by staging films, such as "The Axe Fight" that he helped produce.  The journalist charged that the anthropologist prescripted the films and that they were not spontaneous as portrayed. 

Tierney's book caused an uproar in the anthropological community and the American Anthropological Association (AAA) got involved in the debate.  In fact, the AAA convened a special commission to investigate the allegations against Chagnon and Neel.  The report by the AAA issued in May, 2002 exonerated the anthropologist and geneticist from causing a measles epidemic among the Yanomami.  Nonetheless, the AAA criticized some aspects of Chagnon's research, including his portrayal of the Yanomami as "The Fierce People," and his bribing of Venezuelan officials.  However, the AAA debate was not over and three years later in June, 2005 they rescinded the acceptance of the 2002 report.

Despite their previous acquaintance, the Dorita-teri were not enthusiastic about seeing Chagnon and Brewer again. The village headman, Harokoiwa, greeted them with an ax. Swaying from side to side, Harokoiwa upbraided the scientists for driving away game with their helicopter. He also accused them of bringing xawara-evil vapors that, in the Yanomami conception of disease, cause epidemics. Harokoiwa angrily claimed that Chagnon had killed countless Yanomami with his cameras. In reality; many of the Yanomami who starred in The Feast died of mysterious illnesses immediately afterward-new sicknesses the Indians had attributed to the scientists' malefic filmmaking. The Yanomami abandoned the village where The Feast was made and never returned. Later they shot arrows into a palm effigy of the film's anthropologist-Napoleon Chagnon.

    Now, on Chagnon's return, the headman began swinging his ax tantalizingly close to the anthropologist's head. Harokoiwa yelled that he did not want outsiders to poison any more rivers, a reference to Brewer's huge open-pit gold mines on Indian lands.

    Suddenly, one of the chief's sons, wielding another ax, rushed Chagnon. As the weapon arced through the air, it appeared to be on its way to splitting Chagnon's skull when Brewer deftly intercepted the ax with one hand and, with the other, knocked the man to the ground. Adding to the confusion were screams by some of the Dorita-teri women, who begged their men not to kill Chagnon and Brewer, "because they had always brought so many presents."

The most disturbing incident recounted by Tierney involves a measles vaccination program initiated in 1968 by James Neel, a prominent geneticist and mentor of Chagnon. Neel, who died earlier this year, chose a vaccine that some medical authorities had condemned as unsafe because it often triggered virulent reactions. Tierney suggests that Neel's covert intention was not to protect the Yanomami from measles but to test their response to a live-virus vaccine; Neel believed that the Yanomamis' survival-of-the-fittest lifestyle had given them immune systems more robust than those of us in pampered modern societies have. As Neel's team, which included Chagnon, began inoculating Indians, a measles epidemic erupted that eventually killed hundreds of them, according to Tierney. He unearths evidence that Neel and Chagnon suspected the vaccine was causing the epidemic but kept administering it anyway. Neel and Chagnon have claimed that, far from starting the outbreak, they contained it with their vaccination efforts.

The charges against Napoleon Chagnon are of a different nature. These are, essentially, that he has damaged the Yanomami by his activities in the field but most of all by his insistence on portraying them as primitive savages when the evidence does not clearly support his conclusions. These charges are not new. They have in fact been made repeatedly by numbers of anthropologists over the years and in a letter sent by the Brazilian Anthropological Association to the American Anthropological Association in the early 1980s. Chagnon has responded to them by suggesting that he has the scientific evidence to prove his assertions, and that his critics only attack him on ideological grounds.

Tierney argues that many of Chagnon's data are simply false. The Yanomami do not have a particularly high murder rate, nor do men who kill reproduce more than those who don't. Neither are the Yanomami particularly well-nourished--a claim that Chagnon uses to argue that men fight over women and not food.

In the United States, Chagnon and his sociobiologist allies continue to portray the Yanomami as an untainted relic of our past--a handy control group used to prove the biological basis of a range of aggressive human traits. In Latin America, the endurance of the myth of Yanomami aggression has reinforced racism and justified indifference. Both the Venezuelan and Brazilian governments have used unfavorable images of the Yanomami to justify their failure to protect them from migrants, who, starting in the late 1980s, increasingly entered the region, resulting in the death from disease and violence of untold numbers of Yanomami.

That he failed to provide medical care to the Yanomami during the measles epidemic.
2.
That the Yanomami population-genetics studies directed by Neel were performed as controls for comparison with work on mutation detection among the survivors of the atomic bombing in Japan.
3.
That Neel performed unethical experiments on the Yanomami, involving radioactive iodine injections.
4.
That he sought to demonstrate the existence of a “leadership gene” among the Yanomami headmen.
5.
That Neel was somehow involved in administering plutonium injections into patients in the Rochester hospital where he was a medical house officer in the 1940s.
6.
That he discounted the risks of atomic radiation.
7.
That Neel denounced modern American society and advocated improving the human race by principles of coercive eugenics.