J Scott Hill's List: darkness

• The book, Darkness in El Dorado, by Patrick Tierney is filled with a series of accusations ranging from misconduct, unprofessional conduct, to downright illegal and immoral acts. The book is also impressively documented with 58 pages of footnotes, another 10 pages of references cited, and 90 personal interviews. The average reader is put in the position of having to accept such massive documentation as being as accurate and unbiased as such lengthy referencing would imply. However, when specific sources relied upon by Tierney are compared with the way Tierney uses them, a very different pattern emerges: one of highly selective use of sources in ways that support Tierney's main arguments and the omission of much more substantive materials which contradict him. I give only two examples from first person accounts that he relies upon heavily for particular points but ignores when they speak to others.

  • the question is whether sticky notes show up automatically
• These raids center on the capture of women who are repeatedly gang raped before being divvied up among their captors. These gang rapes continue even during the time period when men who have killed on the raid are going through a process of purification before reentering normal Yanomamo society. The raids lead to many deaths, especially of male defenders, and infants and male children who are murdered by the victors before their mothers are taken off. These murders include grizzly descriptions of house poles covered with babies' brains and of a toddler rectally impaled on the end of a sharp bow. It seems hard to believe that Tierney, who used this source so extensively to indict Lizot, could not have read the rest of the book about stealing women. Further stories tell about the murder or mutilation of women who try to flee abusive husbands or return to their original villages. In the 45 years of raiding described by Jungleman, the raids are motivated to gaining access to women or retrieving women who have been stolen or have run away, or for revenge for previous raids.

• We write to inform you of an impending scandal that will affect the American Anthropological profession as a whole in the eyes of the public, and arouse intense indignation and calls for action among members of the Association. In its scale, ramifications, and sheer criminality and corruption it is unparalleled in the history of Anthropology... (Turner & Sponsel letter) 

   

   

    This website is dedicated to providing a place to find information about Patrick Tierney's Darkness in El Dorado: How Scientists and Journalists Devastated the Amazon.

• • Violence as a natural behavior in primitive societies is a major theme.  Tierney argues that much of the violence was caused by the presence of trade goods brought in by the researchers.

•  

    Mr. Tierney spent 10 years on the book, which criticizes scholars and journalists for abetting the demise of the Yanomami, a remote tribe in the Amazon river basin. The Yanomami have attracted the intense interest of scholars since the 1960's, in part because they seemed relatively untouched by the influences of modern industrial society. In books such as Napoleon A. Chagnon's The Yanomamo, now in its fifth edition, scholars have documented the violent nature of that people and suggested that such behavior is natural in premodern societies.
• • measles
• One of his most explosive charges is that in 1968, James V. Neel, a human geneticist at the University of Michigan and a pioneering researcher of the Yanomami who died last February, deliberately injected tribespeople with a controversial vaccine for measles. Among those who, like the Yanomami, lacked any natural immunity to measles, the vaccine was known to cause measles-like symptoms and proved deadly to hundreds, perhaps thousands. Even after the epidemic began, according to the book, Mr. Neel prevented the afflicted from receiving medical treatment.
• in order to test his eugenic theories about the evolutionary utility of male domination. In Mr. Neel's view, write the e-mail's authors, "'natural' human society ... consisted of small, genetically isolated groups, in which ... dominant genes (specifically, a gene he believed existed for 'leadership' or 'innate ability') would have a selective advantage, because male carriers of this gene could gain access to a disproportionate share of the available females."

3 more annotations...

• Napoleon A. Chagnon I have spent many delightful hours with Dedeheiwä , one of the most knowledgeable men I have known, and a true leader. He has told me about the details of village history, of ancient and current wars with other villagers, and secrets of kinship and genealogy that bind the members of his village together.

• For instance, who can deny that it is extremely reckless and obviously unethical to bring groups of journalists and other visitors in helicopters to remote Yanomami villages without proper quarantine procedures for the visitors to safeguard against spreading communicable diseases to a vulnerable population. It is well-known that a common cold or influenza can lead to deadly consequences among Indigenous groups like the Yanomami. Dreger accuses Tierney of entering villages without quarantine, but does not condemn this in Chagnon’s case that involved not just one individual but many on several occasions.
• No single defender of Chagnon, including Dreger, has ever admitted that he ever did anything unethical, this in spite of some of the conclusions of the AAA Task Force on Darkness in El Dorado and various other inquiries (Borofsky 2005). For instance, who can deny that it is extremely reckless and obviously unethical to bring groups of journalists and other visitors in helicopters to remote Yanomami villages without proper quarantine procedures for the visitors to safeguard against spreading communicable diseases to a vulnerable population. It is well-known that a common cold or influenza can lead to deadly consequences among Indigenous groups like the Yanomami. Dreger accuses Tierney of entering villages without quarantine, but does not condemn this in Chagnon’s case that involved not just one individual but many on several occasions. However, the Task Force on Darkness in El Dorado of the AAA (2002b) did condemn this conduct as unethical: “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.”
• Dreger mentions Ferguson’s thesis that Chagnon may have inadvertently intensified conflicts, tensions, and violence in Yanomami villages through the distribution of large amounts of trade goods in relatively short period of times, but she never comes to grips with the very serious implications of that thesis.
• Chagnon’s work, including what many have recognized as his persistent and dangerous misrepresentation of the Yanomami as “the fierce people”
• Indeed, the AAA Task Force on Darkness in El Dorado decided not to interview Yanomami specialists because so many of them have been critical of Chagnon’s work and conduct. (For the most recent critical analysis of his canonical ethnography see Sponsel 2010a). Thus, if Tierney is wrong on every last point, then so are every one of the numerous and diverse anthropologists whose criticisms he summarizes. That is highly improbable. Yet it appears that Chagnon thinks that only he is right among all of the experts on the Yanomami, and everyone else is wrong (Padilha 2009). However, the AAA Task Force on Darkness in El Dorado (AAA 2002b) concluded that: “Chagnon's representation of Yanomami as "fierce people" conveyed a false image that was damaging, according to the Report.

3 more annotations...

• Diffusionism as an anthropological school of thought, was an attempt to understand the nature of culture in terms of the origin of culture traits and their spread from one society to another. Versions of diffusionist thought included the conviction that all cultures originated from one culture center (heliocentric diffusion); the more reasonable view that cultures originated from a limited number of culture centers (culture circles); and finally the notion that each society is influenced by others but that the process of diffusion is both contingent and arbitrary (Winthrop 1991:83-84).
• Malinowski suggested that individuals have physiological needs (reproduction, food, shelter) and that social institutions exist to meet these needs. There are also culturally derived needs and four basic "instrumental needs" (economics, social control, education, and political organization), that require institutional devices.
• Among the major questions about this issue was whether human culture had evolved in a manner similar to biological evolution or whether culture spread from innovation centers by diffusion (Hugill 1996:343).
• Radcliffe-Brown focused on social structure rather than biological needs. He suggested that a society is a system of relationships maintaining itself through cybernetic feedback, while institutions are orderly sets of relationships whose function is to maintain the society as a system. Radcliffe-Brown, inspired by Augustus Comte, stated that the social constituted a separate "level" of reality distinct from those of biological forms and inorganic matter. Radcliffe-Brown argued that explanations of social phenomena had to be constructed within the social level. Thus, individuals were replaceable, transient occupants of social roles. Unlike Malinowski's emphasis on individuals, Radcliffe-Brown considered individuals irrelevant (Goldschmidt 1996:510).
• There was a shift in focus from the speculatively historical or diachronic study of customs and cultural traits as "survivals" to the ahistorical, synchronic study of social "institutions" within bounded, functioning societies (Young 1991:445).
• The American, Lewis Henry Morgan, infuriated his British contemporaries, when his research demonstrated that social change involved both independent invention and diffusion. He agreed with British sociocultural anthropologists that human progress was due to independent innovation, but his work on kinship terminology showed that diffusion occurred among geographically dispersed people (Kuklick 1996:161).
• Acculturation, then, is the process of systematic cultural change of a particular society carried out by an alien, dominant society (Winthrop 1991:82-83)
• Despite its theoretical limitations, functionalism has made important methodological contributions. With its emphasis on intensive fieldwork, functionalism has provided in-depth studies of societies. Additionally, the investigation of functional interrelationships of customs and institutions provides a ready-made framework for the collection of information
• Culture Areas: In 1895 Otis T. Mason wrote an article entitled "Influence of Environment upon Human Industries or Arts," which was published in the Annual Report of the Smithsonian Institution. This article identified eighteen American Indian "culture areas." It was a simple concept, in that tribal entities were grouped on an ethnographic map and related to a geographical aspect of the environment.
• Acculturation: Kroeber (1948) described acculturation as changes produced in a culture because of the influence of another culture, with the two cultures becoming similar as the end result. These changes may be reciprocal, which results in the two cultures becoming similar, or one-way and may result in the extinction of one culture, when it is absorbed by the other (Kroeber 1948:425).
• Interactionist theorists criticized functionalism for failing to conceptualize adequately the complex nature of actors and the process of interaction. Marxist theory argued against functionalism's conservativism and the static nature of analysis that emphasized the contribution of social phenomena to the maintenance of the status-quo. Advocates of theory construction questioned the utility of excessively classificatory or typological theories that pigeonholed phenomena in terms of their functions (Turner and Maryanski 1991). Functional theory also has been criticized for its disregard of the historical process and for its presupposition that societies are in a state of equilibrium (Goldschmidt 1996:511).
• Assimilation: Milton Gordon (1964) formulated a series of stages through which an individual must pass in order to be completely assimilated (Thompson 1996:113). Although he listed acculturation as the first stage in the series, not all individuals go past this stage. It is not always possible to adopt the dominant culture's way of life completely, in order to assimilate (Titiev 1958:200).

10 more annotations...

• The UCSB preliminary report - on Patrick Tierney's allegations in Darkness in El Dorado (334K, PDF format).
• • Patrick Tierney's "Attack-Dog" Story: A Report on One of Tierney's Many Allegations against Chagnon. Bill Irons (March 3, 2002) 
   
  •   Ethnographic and Personal Aspects of Filming and Producing The Ax Fight, Napoleon A. Chagnon

• This is a report on an investigation I conducted to check the accuracy of one of Patrick Tierney's many allegations against Napoleon Chagnon in his book Darkness in El Dorado . This is the charge that Chagnon had his students dress up in padded suits to be attacked by Chagnon's "attack dogs," and that he took his dogs into bars in State College, Pennsylvania, where he would have them "corner big, 200-pound-plus weightlifter types." (P. 130, Darkness in El Dorado .) Tierney claims that this behavior on Chagnon's part reflects a fascination with violence (p. 182). Tierney cites an interview with Kenneth Good as the source of this information: "Kenneth Good, phone interview, January10, 1995" (p. 351, note 29).
• Although they are lesser allegations than the charges of genocide and fomenting warfare also made by Tierney, they are nevertheless serious accusations. Also, unlike much of the information Tierney presents from interviews, this story can be checked easily. These are not allegations about events in a remote Yanomamo village that are difficult or impossible to check. These are allegations about events, in the town of State College, Pennsylvania, that were witnessed by a number of people who can be reached by telephone or by e-mail.
• Not all of those contacted have responded yet. The investigation is not complete, but I am ready to report what I have found: that these particular accusations are inaccurate. This result needs to be seen in context of the numerous other inaccuracies reported by various investigators.
• I have seen demonstrations of Parma's and Gus's guard dog skills including with the padded suit, but I found the demonstrations interesting and informative. Frankly, I do not remember if a student was suited up. He never asked me to although I would have liked to learn more from him about dog training and would have been willing. Gus and Parma were extremely well trained and behaved and I never had the slightest anxiety around them. They were good dogs. It is dogs that are not trained that are dangerous.
• he rest of the Tierney story about threatening people with the dogs in bars or elsewhere is complete garbage and out of character. Chagnon rightly prided himself on his extremely professional attitude and behavior with his dogs.
• In the late spring of 1974, Napoleon Chagnon and his wife, Carlene, had a barbecue in their back yard in State College. Robert Martin asked Chagnon if he could bring one of his attack-trained dogs and give a demonstration to the guests who were mostly Penn State students and faculty members. He wanted to show how gentle an attack dog could be when not given the signal to attack, and how obedient the dog would be when given both the signal to attack and the signal to desist from attack. (Chagnon's dogs were not trained as attack dogs and could not have given such a demonstration.) Martin came to the party with one of his own attack-trained dogs. He also brought a padded suit and other protective gear designed to allow demonstration of the behavior of highly trained attack dogs without risk of injury to the person attacked. Martin let the dog circulate among the guests so they could see that he was not a threatening dog. He then called for a volunteer to put on the padded suit and allow the dog to attack him when signaled to do so by his trainer. The student who put on the suit and took part in the demonstration did so voluntarily and was at no risk of injury. Chagnon specifically remembers that the student who put on the suit was John Perlis, who was at the time painting Chagnon's house to earn extra money. There never was any other demonstration involving Napoleon Chagnon and an attack dog.
• Chagnon supported Good's field research with funds from an NIMH grant Chagnon got in 1975. Good had no grant of his own. All his research funds came from Chagnon. Chagnon had an agreement with Good to the effect that (1) Good would collect data for Chagnon in addition to the data he needed for his dissertation, (2) Chagnon and Good would collaborate on publications growing out of Good's field research, (3) Good would send Chagnon progress reports from the field, (4) Good would provide Chagnon an accounting of the funds he received from Chagnon's grant. Chagnon needed the latter for his own accounting to NIMH. This was not an unusual type of agreement between a professor and a graduate student. Chagnon had the same agreement with Raymond Hames and Eric Fredlund, and Hames and Fredlund stuck to their agreements. Good however failed to stick to the agreement. For over a year, he failed to send any progress reports to Chagnon, and, in response to the lack of reports, Chagnon sent him a message saying he would cut off his funding if he did not send a progress report in the next three months. The progress report never appeared and Chagnon cut off Good's funding. Shortly after this, in June of 1977, Good returned to State College and complained that he had been mistreated by Chagnon.

• Tierney's book has distorted the truth about this and spread the false story that Chagnon's involvement with dogs was a socially destructive thing. This parallels what Tierney did when he distorted the role of Neel and his associates in the 1968 measles epidemic (see the Santa Barbara web site). His false story turns something constructive into something destructive. How should we evaluate a book that does this sort of thing over and over again? 

6 more annotations...

• The year Timothy Asch and I filmed The Ax Fight ---1971---was a particularly difficult year in my professional life, and an especially difficult field season for me. It was the year I decided to leave the University of Michigan, a decision that made me very sad because I had grown to love that University and hoped I could remain there forever.
• In preparing this essay I read all my notes for 1971, my letters to my wife, the transcriptions of my tape recordings in the field, and other things I wrote that year. The events of 1971 all came back vividly and it was like re-living a bad nightmare.
• Numerous complex and unpleasant things took place that year, many of them in the field during my ongoing collaboration with medical colleagues, or things related to that collaboration that were developing just before my 1971 field trip or happened immediately after that trip
• He got into the canoe, I took him to the village, he shot film, I explained then and later why it was important to shoot that particular piece of film, the Indians didn't harm him, I got him safely back with all his film, and spent a lot of time making anthropological sense of it in the production phase. His obliviousness to the 'nitty-gritties' sometimes annoyed me. I found his 1979 discussion of how our boat sank humorous, but self-serving.
• I am an ethnographer who sometimes uses film as a way to describe events and things, just as I might use a still photograph, a diagram, a tape recording or a written field note. Motion picture film to me is just a useful recording device, but one that can record some kinds of things much better than other devices can, and the resulting product can be treated in ways that products of other documenting devices can not.
• Neel and his colleagues, including their counterparts from Venezuelan research institutions, spent several weeks with me among the Yanomamö in early 1966 and managed to collect an enormous amount of information with my assistance.
• It would allow me to return to the field on a regular basis to extend my own anthropological and demographic studies, and afforded me a great deal of time to analyze and publish the results of my field studies without time-consuming teaching duties.
• Our collaboration had several well-defined aspects. One of these obliged me to go to the Yanomamö area a week or so ahead of Neel's researchers and gain the cooperation of numbers of Yanomamö groups and do basic censuses and genealogical studies, and identify villages by their origins and determine their historical relationships to other groups. This was basically an extension of what my original field studies focused on and was a central feature of my own research goals: my objectives were very consistent with what Neel and members of his team wanted to know in order to place their biomedical data into anthropological context.
• A second obligation was to orchestrate the field research and the logistics of getting Neel and his researchers to the villages and persuading the Yanomamö to be at their villages when we arrived. The initial temporal design of our collaboration would require that I spend about two to three weeks in the field collaborating with the biomedical researchers, after which they would return to their laboratories and I would then be free to pursue my own field objectives for the next two to three months.
• Late in 1966, and again in 1967, I attempted to shoot 16mm motion picture film of the Yanomamö with a hand-held Bolex camera that I borrowed from a friend. A Salesian Priest and friend of mine, Padre Cocco, was aware that I was trying to shoot film and offered to give me a brand new Bolex that someone had given him earlier that year. He didn't know how to use it, had no interest in shooting films, the film was expensive, etc
• One of the difficulties I immediately perceived in my attempts to shoot film was that the Yanomamö were very conscious of me filming them and unless I was filming some dramatic event that dominated their attention, much of the footage I shot was of people staring into the lens of my camera and asking me what I was doing. I was the only non-Yanomamö in their villages and, of course, the center of attention when I did something unusual, like try to shoot film or take pictures.
• The Feast (1970) was based on my then somewhat unusual ethnological argument that the Yanomamö feast was not a 'first-fruits' or 'harvest' ceremony as had been claimed by several anthropologists, but was primarily a political event and it could be used to illustrate sophisticated anthropological theories drawn from Durkheim, Mauss, Levi-Strauss, Leach, Dumont and others. There was probably no ethnographic film in existence that even attempted to illustrate basic and important anthropological concepts and theories. The Yanomamö feast was about complex marriage and political alliances and could theoretically be filmed in a way that would illustrate this.
• My boat fell apart. I had fallen into several rivers traveling at high speeds after dark to meet medical schedules and frequently hit submerged logs I couldn't see, which twice knocked me out of the boat. On one occasion the heavy motor bounced back into the canoe and smashed my leg, causing me to limp for the entire three-month field trip. When Neel's final group left, he unexpectedly arranged in Caracas for yet a third wave of medical colleagues to come into the field and promised them the use of my only outboard motor, which would have grounded me and would have made my planned film collaboration with Asch impossible. I ignored Neel's radio instructions to give my only motor to the third team and wanted to get as far away from the mission radios as fast as I could.

• The 1971 Filming Collaboration 

  Just as the second of the two teams of medical doctors departed---but before the third group came to claim my motor---Tim Asch and Craig Johnson landed at Esmeralda with what looked to me like several tons of filming equipment. I shuddered at the enormous effort and work it would take to get this mound of heavy material into Mishimishimaböwei-teri, and how compromised we would be because the Yanomamö would be keenly aware that we couldn't move without their help in carrying all this material into and out of their village.
• Tim tended to do dumb things like this. He once threw a rock at a dog that had been snapping at him as he filmed in the village of Patanowä-teri in 1968. It never dawned on him when he threw it that in a round village the rock would eventually end up in someone's house and might hit someone, which it did. The Yanomamö used about every word in their vocabulary to angrily describe his stupidity for not knowing this as I tried to apologize for him.
• Once in the village I discovered that several families from Ironasi-teri were visiting there. They had been invited by Wadoshewä and his brothers, one of the more important political factions in the village. The Ironasi-teri had all been part of the Mishimishimaböwei-teri village a few years earlier, but as the village grew larger and larger, more and more fights broke out. The village must have been extremely large when it fissioned, since Mishimishimaböwei-teri alone had over 250 people in it and Ironasi-teri had well over 150 people. While the several Ironasi-teri families were technically "visitors", they were not strangers. They had been born in and grew up in Mishimishimaböwei-teri and were therefore their close kinsmen. Indeed, Wadoshewä and his brothers wanted this particular group of Ironasi-teri to rejoin the village because of the large number of intermarriages between their respective families. Wadoshewä had even expended the extraordinary effort of clearing jungle and planting crops for them to entice them into rejoining the group.
• The ax fight broke out on the afternoon of our second day in the village. Because I had visited and worked in Mishimishimaböwei-teri for the previous three years, I knew almost all the people by sight and name, and was able to identify most of the main actors in that event. The narration in the film seems to imply that none of us had ever been in that village until a day before the ax fight event occurred. It would have been impossible to make that film without the previous three years of field studies in that village, or the repeated return trips I made to that village after 1971. Anthropological documentary films like The Ax Fight are not possible if the filmmaking collaborators go to an unknown Yanomamö village and spend just four weeks in it, nor are Interactive CD ROMs like this.
• During the four weeks we stayed in Mishimishimaböwei-teri in 1971 Asch shot approximately 60,000 feet of film with synchronous sound taken by Craig Johnson. I also shot several rolls of 16mm film with my Bolex, cutaway scenes for a film I was independently making by myself, Magical Death . I had filmed the main portion of this shamanistic event the year before in this same village.
• I made the Magical Death film with relatively primitive equipment to convince Asch that the most important ingredient in a successful anthropological film is not so much the footage itself or the sophistication of the equipment, but the ethnographic and ethnological content that makes the footage meaningful. If the filmmakers among you do not believe this, then look at the footage of the ax fight without the soundtrack and imagine what it would 'mean' with no ethnographic content. Indeed, when we returned from the field in 1971 we showed the raw footage with the synchronous sound (but no narration) to sophisticated anthropological groups and asked people to write a brief essay about what they thought the film meant.
• One picture may be worth a thousand words, but the right thousand words makes all the difference in an ethnographic film. Without them, ethnographic film is just meaningless pictures to an ethnographer, whatever they might be to non-ethnographers. There is not a democracy of ideas and interpretations in a real world. Not every idea or interpretation is as good as any other insofar as explanation and generating understanding are concerned.
• First, a small but influential number of Venezuelan anthropologists critical of me and my work had managed to prevent me from returning to the Yanomamö for 10 years (1975 - 1984). One reason was their hostility to my filmmaking. They repeatedly claimed that I was 'making millions of dollars' on the films I had produced on the Yanomamö and was exploiting them for personal financial gain. This was absolutely false. I never earned a penny on any film I made on the Yanomamö. All our films were distributed by non-profit organizations, no royalties were paid to anyone, and in fact it cost me money out of my own pocket to shoot and produce some of these films. Asch never made a penny either. It was hard for these Venezuelan anthropologists to believe that I didn't earn a 'profit' on the Yanomamö films, but they persisted in falsely claiming that I did.
• Second, some of the films I made with Asch had been deliberately 'modified' by my opponents in Venezuela, perhaps with help from non-Venezuelans, to enrage the Yanomamö and provoke them into hostility toward me. In 1985, after returning to the Yanomamö for the first time in nearly 10 years, I was astonished that some Yanomamö, particularly those near the Salesian Mission of Boca Mavaca, were openly hostile to me. They had been my friends when I left. When I asked why they were so angry, they said they were angry because I made "shami" films of them ("filthy" films).
• By their descriptions they were taken to a projection room and shown the titles to one of my films, freeze-framed so it was clear to them that my name was on the film, and their host took phonetically took them through my name, syllable-by-syllable, as he pointed to the title---to make sure they knew it was my name. They were then shown a film. The film was probably Magical Death , but a 'doctored' version of it. One of the scenes in Magical Death shows the shamans magically scooping up the symbolic 'body fat' of their victim from the ground, and licking and sucking this 'body fat' off their fingers.
• Someone had apparently spliced into the film close-up pornographic footage of non-Yanomamö men repeatedly sticking their fingers into vaginas, and then switching back to my footage showing the Yanomamö shamans licking and sucking their fingers. The Yanomamö men were portrayed as licking vaginal fluids off their fingers. The third reason was that Asch indicated that he was interested in filming Helena Valero, a Brazilian who was captured by the Yanomamö when she was a teenager and who spent most of her life as a captive among them. Almost every westerner who has initiated any contact with this poor woman has exploited her, and I adamantly refused to be party to anything that might be construed as exploiting her. Helena Valero had returned to live with the Yanomamö with her eldest son, Jose. They lived at Boca Ocamo at Padre Cocco's Salesian Mission.
• A fourth reason I did not want to enter into another film collaboration was the fact that I was planning to travel extensively and with minimal equipment, and go to many villages, many of them being inland considerable distances. I intended to travel as unencumbered as I could and not have excessive amounts of equipment that would hamper my freedom of movement and make me extremely dependent on carriers from the inland villages I would visit. I intended to bring only what I needed to do my work in each remote village, and my own carriers to get me there and get me back.
• Cardozo returned to Venezuela in 1986 without finishing his Ph.D. and tried to established himself among his Venezuelan colleagues as their local Yanomamö expert on the basis of a few weeks of field research. He shortly thereafter denounced me and joined ranks with my opponents in Venezuela---which also alingned him with my critics in Brazil and the US. Asch joined with them, apparently believing that this would be the most certain way to get into the Yanomamö area to continue his filming interests. He began giving talks and publishing comments that were critical of me and my field research. In 1991 Cardozo organized and hosted an international conference on the Venezuelan Yanomamö, held in Caracas. Tim Asch helped him organize this conference.

24 more annotations...

• I am grateful that Professor Bruce Alberts, the President of the National Academy of Sciences, has taken the time to scrutinize Darkness in El Dorado , including the 1469 endnotes. He has found several minor errors, none of which deal with the central issue of the book--the treatment of the Yanomami in the Amazon. I did not write the book lightly and I do not take any mistakes lightly. I will correct them in the next printing of the book.
• fact, the book is a work with a broad and encompassing theme, which suggests that cultural deracination has been brought about by outsiders, including scientists and journalists who have projected their own views and ideologies on the Yanomami.
• One of my theses, for those who haven't read the book yet, is that scientific expeditions to the Yanomami to collect 12,000 blood samples and genealogies, financed by the Atomic Energy Commission as part of radiation studies in human genetics between 1965 and 1972, ¹ took unethical and unfair advantage of the Yanomami. These expeditions also spread disease, warfare, and cultural chaos among one of the most vulnerable groups in the world.
• nstead, I cite a standard medical text, Immunization: Principles and Practice , on the Edmonston strain vaccines: "The Original Edmonston A and B vaccine strains caused quite severe reactions akin to natural measles. These could only be overcome by simultaneous use of immunoglobulin, which was clearly not a practical procedure for routine vaccination." ²
• The Edmonston B strain of measles virus vaccine and the concomitant administration of measles immune globulin has been rendered relatively obsolete by newer, further attenuated strains." ³ I also cited the geneticist Francis Black's decision to inoculate the Tiriyo Indians in 1966, two years before the Neel expedition, with the safer Schwarz vaccine, a fortunate choice since he found that the Tiriyo's febrile response to the Schwarz was nearly three times higher than other populations. ⁴
• I also discuss the real possibility of an unknown, concomitant exposure--including evidence from the expedition tapes, mission records and a government nurse that one of the expedition's guides may have spread the disease. Whatever the origin of the measles epidemic, the Yanomami also have a unique cultural response to disease, particularly unknown disease. They interpret it to be the work of witchcraft. The afflicted people will isolate themselves out in the jungle and often will themselves to die.
• Neel himself acknowledged in the American Journal of Epidemiology in 1970 that "the reaction to measles vaccine without gamma globulin had been, in some cases, as severe as the disease itself among Caucasian children." ⁸ Among the Yanomami at Ocamo, Neel himself recorded the most severe reaction known to have occurred on the planet--with temperatures skyrocketing up to 104 degrees (when the most conservative adjustment is made for the method of taking temperatures) and the outbreak of rash.
• I have also documented, in painful detail, how Neel's team, despite being in the middle of a major outbreak of measles in a virgin population, continued to collect blood, stage films and distribute massive amounts of steel presents that attracted sick Yanomami who trailed the expedition into the tribe's heartland. I wish that Professor Alberts had discussed this issue, which is central to the measles chapter. Thus, the scientists seem to have been a primary vector of infection.
• They vaccinated at Mavaca on February 13, 1968. ⁹ By Feb 18, 1968, there was an epidemic at Mavaca. In the tape, Rousseau, a radio technician, told Chagnon that he was going to radio for antibiotics "because of the effects of the vaccine." He adds, "Now if because of the effects of the vaccine, we get outbreaks of the measles." At this point, Chagnon turns to Neel for clarification, saying that Rousseau is ". . . trying to interpret all of them [cases of measles] to mean that it's a reaction to the vaccination, which I don't think is a wise thing to do." ¹⁰ Chagnon also says, "But it's certain now that we have measles at Mavaca and Ocamo and I don't know where else it is--and I don't know when it arrived." ¹¹ After Neel explains that individuals with runny noses and runny eyes are the most infectious transmitters, Chagnon asks, "Does . . . does the vaccine give runny eyes?"
   
    Chagnon appeared confused about the origin of the outbreak and frustrated by the strong reactions to the vaccine.
• At some point in human history, the fighting began to be relegated to the physically and intellectually more fit. The military deferments for physical/mental reasons which obtain when armies are conscripted, as in the recent World Wars, render war an agent of negative selection. ¹²
• This perspective on warfare--as an agent for removing the mentally and physically weak and rewarding the strong and capable--is at the heart of understanding Neel's interpretation of tribal conflict, which is so crucial for Yanomami studies. From this perspective arises his obviously eugenic belief in "the Index of Innate Ability"--superior genes that are supposed to accumulate in the offspring of dominant chiefs. ¹³ In his paper, "On Being Headman," Neel writes, "The possible genetic implications of headmanship are obvious . . . the breeding structure of primitive populations had strong eugenic implications. . . ." Most striking of all, is Neel's conclusion:
• Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission
• The ABCC and Human Radiation Experiments
   
    President Alberts says I have made "a particularly egregious error" in implying that the ABCC conducted human radiation experiments. But it is President Alberts who draws that implication from a graph of human relationships, which illustrates that James Neel was associated with individuals who conducted (or participated in planning) experiments on human beings--from his superior Joseph Howland (who admitted to injecting a man with plutonium) ¹⁸ to Shields Warren (under whose aegis tracer experiments were undertaken around the world). ¹⁹
• central and primary thesis of my book, which is that the scientists who worked with the Yanomami were often reckless and violated the norms of informed consent and humane treatment of scientific subjects. These standards and norms were widely recognized at the time, and taking advantage of the most vulnerable and isolated tribal groups on earth has left a legacy of shame, and an abject lesson for future researchers to contemplate.

12 more annotations...

• The author, Patrick Tierney, presented evidence that suggested that the epidemic was deliberately caused as an experiment, although the purpose of the experiment was left unclear.

• Archaeologists have done little research in the Yanoama area. Ethnographers believe that the homeland of the Yanoama lies in the Parima highlands of the Venezuelan-Brazilian border and that they have recently expanded from there as a result of the decimation of Carib speakers who occupied the upper Orinoco and its major tributaries. Initial contact with Westerners may have begun as early as the 1750s. It was not until the 1950s that missionaries and anthropologists made sustained contact with these people. Some Yanoama have had sustained contact with the Ye'kwana Indians for at least 100 years, leading to warfare, intermarriage, and establishment of partially integrated co-settlements. The contact situation differs sharply among Yanoama in Brazil and Venezuela. In Venezuela, Yanoama interaction with foreigners is largely limited to Ye'kwana Indians, missionaries, anthropologists, and government workers. In Brazil significant portions of Yanoama lands have been taken over by Brazilian miners. The resulting contacts between the two populations have led not only to the introduction of a variety of diseases that have taken a huge toll in Yanoama lives, but also has resulted in some places, in open warfare between Yanoama and Brazilians.
• Historical reconstruction (174)Topography and geology (133)History (175)External relations (648)Acculturation and culture contact (177)Inter-ethnic relations (629)Morbidity (164)Instigation of war (721)   
• In high elevations the house may be reduced in diameter to form a pitched roof to adapt to cooler temperatures. Yanoama located villages near small, non-navigable streams. However, in the last 20 years many Yanoama have chosen to occupy large river sites to maintain easy contact with missionaries.
• TRADE    Internal trade among the Yanoama is well developed. Some trade is the result of differential distribution of primary resources (e.g., hallucinogenic plants) or a temporary surplus of prime domesticates (e.g., cotton or good hunting dogs), but in other instances trade is the exchange of material tokens to symbolize alliances between individuals. Over the last twenty years most Yanoama have become totally dependent on outside sources of axes, machetes, aluminum pots, and fish hooks and line. Most of these items have come from the missionaries as gifts and wages. Through mission organized cooperatives, the Yanoama began to market baskets and arrows and some agricultural products. Trade has a much longer history where the Yanoama are in close contact with Ye'kwana.
• KIN GROUPS AND DESCENT    The Yanoama practice patrilocal residence and trace descent patrilineally. Patrilineal descent does not lead to the development of named kinship groups. Members of the same patrilineage refer to themselves as mashi which means people who are related patrilineally. Kin groups tend to be localized in villages and their genealogical depth is rather shallow. Kinship is critical in the arrangement of marriage and very strong bonds develop between kin groups who exchange women.
• Yanoama marriage rules are prescriptive in that marriage partners must be cross-cousins. Ideally, mates are double cross-cousins, a result of the practice of sister exchange. Women are typically married soon after their first menses to men in their early twenties. Although marriage is patrilocal, a husband must live with his parents-in-law for several years performing bride service. This rule may be relaxed for high status males. Polygyny is permitted and 10-20% of all males at any time are polygynists. Ideally, polygyny is sororal and the levirate and sororate are practiced. Men and women average 2.8 marital partners during their lifetimes with about 75% of those marriages ending as a result of divorce with the balance as a result of the death of one of the partners.
• SOCIALIZATION    Mothers dominate the care of infants who spend most of their time suspended in a simple sling that runs diagonally from the caretaker's right shoulder to just above the left hip. During this time the mother carries her infant to forest and garden as she works. While the child is being weaned it is more frequently cared for by older sisters and female relatives. Weaning from the breast and the sling may occur abruptly, especially if the mother is pregnant; and is occasioned by howls of protest by the child. Although fathers will affectionately play with infants they spend very little time (less than five minutes a day) in care giving activities. In contrast to boys, girls begin making important economic contributions by the age of six as they accompany mothers in gardening and gathering excursions and assist in food preparation. Boys spend most of their time playing rough and tumble games, shooting toy bows, and roaming in the nearby forest in the same sex groups. Parents encourage sons and daughters to be assertive and to respond to insults with physical or verbal aggression. Physical punishment (slapping, punching, or striking with objects) is not uncommon. A girl's puberty ceremony (YOBOMOU) begins immediately during her first menses. During this time a girl is secluded for a few weeks in a small shelter near her parent's hearth, is restricted to a special diet, and her head is shaved upon departure.
• Although the Yanoama are an egalitarian people, age, sex, and personal accomplishments are important in status differentiation. High status is acquired through valor in combat, accomplished oratory, and expertise in shamanism. However, high status cannot be inherited, it must be earned. Mature men dominate positions of political authority and religious practice. Local descent groups play important roles in regulating marriages and settling disputes within villages.
• The village headman is the dominant political leader and comes from the largest local patrilineage. When a village is large or when two local descent groups are approximately equal in size, a village may have several headmen. To lead, the headman must rely on demonstrated skills in settling disputes,
• representing the interests of his lineage, and successfully dealing with allies and enemies. Styles of leadership vary; some headmen lead through practiced verbal skills while others resort to bullying tactics. Concerted action requires the consensus of adult males. However, an individual is free not to participate in collective action if it suits him.
• CONFLICT    Conflicts typically arise from accusations of adultery, failure to deliver a betrothed woman, personal affronts, stinginess, or thefts of coveted garden crops such as tobacco and peach palm. For men, if such conflicts move past a boisterous shouting match a variety of graded, formal duels may occur. If a fight becomes serious, respected men may intervene to cool tempers and prevent others from participating. Frequently, duels end in a draw with each contestant preserving his dignity. For women, dueling is rare. Instead, a direct attack is made by the aggrieved using hands and feet or makeshift weapons.
• Warfare or feuding is endemic among the Yanoama, according to Chagnon. While the initial cause of a conflict frequently may be traced to a sexual or marital issue, feuds are self-perpetuating. This is because the Yanoama lack formal mechanisms to prevent aggrieved parties from exacting the amount of vengeance or counter-vengeance they deem sufficient once a conflict has started.
• FILE EVALUATION    The Yanoama collection consists of eleven documents all in English.
• The chapter from Wilbert's book is on the Sanema primarily, with information on other Venezuelan Indians included as well. The two monographs by Chagnon are general ethnographies of communities especially in Venezuela with comparative data from communities in Brazil. A recent addition to the collection is that by Early and Peters on population dynamics of Mucajai Yanoama in Brazil from the late 1950s to 1987. Finally, the manuscript by Human Relations Area Files is a bibliography compiled in 1993 containing approximately 100 items. The ethnography of the Yanoama is controversial. People interested in more information on the Yanoama should see the HRAF bibliography.

12 more annotations...

• In The New Yorker excerpt, Tierney insinuates rather than states his case in a rhetorical style that combines events but does not connect them. The article notes that "it cannot be determined with any accuracy how many died after receiving the vaccination", and registers the medical consensus that the vaccine "was not, in itself, contagious". This hedging has not quite made it into the news reports of the book. The BBC, for one, broadcast a report in English, Spanish and Portuguese that "a US geneticist who died earlier this year has been accused of deliberately infecting thousands of Yanomami Indians with measles, killing hundreds of them", a line echoed by other media outlets.
• It is claimed that Chagnon indulged in yopo, a local hallucinogen, and bribed children for tribal secrets. For one film The Feast, he is described as more or less using an abandoned village as a stage set. In the early 1990s, it is said, Chagnon took journalists and scientists on helicopter tours of the region to build support for a Yanomami reserve. Structures in three villages, it is claimed, were badly damaged by downdraft from the choppers.

• Chagnon takes angry issue with one "distortion". He used ebena - the Yanomami word for yopo - only once or twice, he said. Once was in a run-in with a Protestant missionary, he said. "The Indians asked me to," he said. "They were afraid that this particular missionary was able to throw them into the chasm of hell. He was intimidating them. I said we are going to take care of that right away." 

   

    Accordingly he took the drug and "pranced and danced to speak to the spirits", he said. "It was purely to make a particular point that the missionary didn't have the authority to put these people in hell." Chagnon says he wrote the incident into one edition of his book but later withdrew it. 

   

    As to the machetes, he says, "I have probab
• Anthropology, says Chagnon, has "gone beserk. It's gone postmodern. Postmodern scholars don't like science."
• homas Headland, of the Summer Institute for Linguistics in Texas, has done linguistic research with tribal communities around the world. "I wouldn't mind seeing Chagnon knocked off his pedestal because he is no friend of mine," he says.

3 more annotations...

• Ms. SUSAN LIN (University of Pennsylvania): Every aspect of that account, every bit of that story is just wrong. 

   

    KESTENBAUM: Susan Lin is a science historian at the University of Pennsylvania who has studied James Neel's work. When she heard the measles story, she contacted a library where Neel's papers are kept. An archivist there found a folder labeled Yanomami, 1968, insurance. It contained photocopies of Neel's field notes. Apparently, Neel knew what was Tierney was after and left these behind as a defense from beyond the grave. Lin says the scribbled field notes clearly show that Neel and Chagnon were trying to control an epidemic. People were dying, but not from the vaccine, from a measles outbreak already in full swing. If anything, she says, Neel was frustrated at having to care for so many sick.
• hese arguments have not satisfied Neel and Chagnon's critics. Napoleon Chagnon himself says his detractors will never be convinced. They're suspicious of his work, period. The anthropology community has long been divided into two camps, he says: those who agree with him, that evolution has given humans a darker side, and those who don't.
• People don't like to have it widely known man is, by nature, a competitive animal, and they would like to prefer to believe that man is, by nature, a very nice critter. So I'm bringing bad news to the anthropological dream that in the Stone Age things were nice.

1 more annotation...

• Largely under the influence of Alexander (1974), a school of sociobiological thought emerged which took as its central precept the maximization of reproductive success. Its main assumption is that such maximization is a basic motive and can explain a whole range of human mating and kin-related behaviours. Thus organisms would strive to maximize reproductive success through inclusive fitness, and attempt to ensure (largely in the case of males) that the genes they ‘invested’ in were their own; i.e. ensure the certainty of paternity. Thus the problem of the avunculate (the special relationship between mother’s brother and sister’s son) and hence the origins of "matrilineal descent were attributed to ‘low paternity certainty’ in promiscuous societies where males would prefer to invest in sisters’ sons with a low but definite degree of genetic relationship, rather than their own sons whose degree of relationship could be zero (for a critique see Fox 1993). The logic of this general position has been applied to hyper-gamy, despotic "polygyny, child abuse, legal decisions, kin support in illness, family structure, cross-cousin marriage, mate competition, kin-term manipulation, polyandry, bridewealth, morality, parental care, among many others. (See e.g. Chagnon and Irons 1979; Betzig et al. 1988.)
• Another tradition, however, rejects the primacy of reproductive fitness maximizing. It argues that while differential reproductive success in the past, and particularly in the species’ environment of evolutionary adaptation (EEA), certainly led to specific adaptations, no such generalized motive can explain ongoing behaviour. Such a motive, it is argued, does not give specific enough instructions to the organism, which is more likely to act on proximate motives like desire for sex, avoidance of cheaters, accrual of resources, achievement of status, etc. These may well lead to reproductive success, but they are not based on any general desire for its maximization.
• Sociobiology, both broadly and narrowly speaking, shows then a continuing vigorous development with influences in all the social sciences as well as philosophy and literature. The future holds promise for the development of a normal science paradigm within which constructive disputes will be possible and cumulative progress made. The big question for social anthropology is the degree of its willingness to end its flirtation with anti-scientific trends in the social sciences and to enter into a constructive debate with the sociobiologists.

1 more annotation...

• Also, Good [1991] views Chagnon's emphasis on violence as misleading [pp13, 55,56,73,174,175]. Good perceptively points out that because the Yanomami live in a communal house without inner walls, any violence is so public and obvious that the observer can easily become obsessed with it, whereas other prosocial or nonviolent aspects of behavior can be readily missed by contrast [pp 33,73]. However, Good is much more impressed with the relative harmony in such an intimate society [pp 13,33,69,80,82]. For example, he writes:
  To my great surprise I had found among them a way of life that, while dangerous and harsh, was also filled with camaraderie, compassion, and a thousand daily lessons in communal harmony [p131]. The more I thought about Chagnon's emphasis on Yanomama violence, the more I realized how contrived and distorted it was. Raiding, killing, and wife beating all happened; I was seeing it, and no doubt I'd see a lot more of it. But by misrepresenting violence as the central theme of Yanomama life, his Fierce People book had blown the subject out of any same proportion [p 73]. Good also asserts that Yanomami men are not macho [p 80], that they limit rather than maximize violence [p 74], and that they lack open warfare [pp 44,46].