Katherine Coppe's List: Yanomami Darkness

• journalists accompanied Chagnon on helicopter flights to Yanomami villages that blew the roofs off structures and left behind injured, frightened residents
• a documentary crew filmed the progressive weakening and death from fever of a Yanomami woman and her infant without making any attempt to provide medical care to them.

• Chagnon said he'd found a society in which homicide and warfare were common and  the most violent men wound up with the most wives and children. In his view, the  Yanomamo--and by extension, all humans--fought not because fighting was essential  to survival but because they were programmed for violence in a lawless society.  Survival of the fittest, at least in Yanomamo terms, means survival of the meanest.
• Instead, he believes,  war may drive the creation of modern societies. "Of course, a lot of airy-fairy  types in universities who have never seen an Indian in the flesh don't want to  consider this. That's why they think I'm dangerous, that I have dangerous ideas.  And that's why they and the Catholic Church are keeping me out."
• 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."

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• The Yanomami (who are also called Yanamamo, Yanomam, and Sanuma) are a remote group of some twenty to thirty thousand Indians who live in over a hundred villages scattered on both sides of the border between Venezuela and Brazil.
• but continues to defend the thesis that the

  Yanomami are fierce, warring with each other to capture women, so that their best warriors can maximize their reproductive success
• There, in the immediate postwar years, vulnerable patients such as the poor in charity wards, the terminally ill, women, and children were injected with radioactive substances or given them to ingest in other ways without their knowledge or consent.
• He argues that Neel was a man who believed that such experiments were defensible in the name of science and was therefore the kind of man who might very well treat a devastating epidemic among the Yanomami as a unique opportunity to observe how such an event would affect a remote, tribal people.
• The charges that James Neel induced a measles epidemic among the Yanomami or at least treated them like guinea pigs to be studies while the epidemic ran its course have been disputed by medical experts and others who know about Neel’s research. If these charges are without merit, as now seems probable, then the only accusations remaining against Neel depend on innuendo and guilt by association.
• Chagnon poses as the scientist "telling it like it is," but since the way he tells it is challenged by large numbers of reputable anthropologists, including some who have also studied the Yanomami, Chagnon’s interpretation should not be accepted without question.

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• Tierney makes two basic accusations against Neel: (1) that Neel helped make the measles epidemic worse, rather than better, through the actions he took to fight the epidemic and (2) that Neel could have done more than he did to help the Yanomami at this time.

• Tierney makes seven basic accusations against Chagnon: (1) He indicates that Chagnon misrepresented key dynamics of Yanomami society, particularly their level of violence. The Yanomami were not “the fierce people” depicted by Chagnon. They were significantly less bellicose, in fact, than many Amazonian groups. (2) What warfare Chagnon noticed during his research, Tierney asserts, Chagnon himself helped cause through his enormous distribution of goods, which stimulated warfare among the Yanomami as perhaps never before. (3) Tierney accuses Chagnon of staging the films he helped produce, films that won many cinematic awards and helped make Yanomamö: The Fierce People a best seller. The films were not what they appeared to be—live behavior skillfully caught by the camera—but rather staged productions in which Yanomami followed preestablished scripts. More

   
• The first is the inequality of power between anthropologists and those whom they study

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• I asked Barker how to say, ‘Your hands are dirty’; my comments were met by the Yanomamo in the following way: They would ‘clean’ their hands by spitting a quantity of slimy tobacco juice into them, rub them together, grin, and then proceed with the examination.
• inability lof villages to be held together by kinship, marriage, descent from common ancestors, and the ephemeral authority of headmen such as Kaobawa

• How did that measles epidemic get started?

  Chagnon: It was introduced to the Yanomamö in Brazil. The young daughter of a missionary brought it back from a trip to Manaus.

• geneticist James Neel and anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon were involved in experiments for the American Atomic Energy Commission which greatly exacerbated, and 'probably started', a severe measles epidemic that killed hundreds of Yanomami in the late 1960s.
• experiments were designed to provide support for Neel's belief in eugenic theories.
• Fiona Watson of Survival International, who has worked with the Yanomami for over 10 years, says 'they are no more or less violent than any other society.' Survival published criticism of Chagnon's theories in 1990.

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• According to his field notes, Neel spent the next two hours developing a plan to control the spread of the sickness.
• Chagnon is further charged with having "cooked and re-cooked" his data to paint a picture of the Yanomami as "The Fierce People"--aggressive and competitive--an image which haunts them and threatens their welfare to this day.
• he had brought with him 2,000 doses of the Edmonston B vaccine and gamma globulin (which lessens post-vaccination fever) and ample supplies of penicillin and terramycin. He distributed all liberally.
• They label Neel "the originator and director of the project."
• Tierney alleges that Neel vaccinated 40 Yanomami without gamma globulin, giving them fevers that "could not be distinguished from the fevers of natural measles."
• According to Ferguson, as paraphrased by Tierney, "Chagnon stirred up village rivalries by behaving like a regional big man and an 'un-Yanomami...wild card on the political scene.'"
• Chagnon convinced the Patanowa-teri tribe to move to a village near the Orinoco River more accessible to his project.
• If Chagnon is guilty of anything, it is of refusing to kowtow to anthropology's intellectual hegemony and the anti-scholastic demands of the native rights movement.
• characterizing him previously as "a sociopath who slanders those who help the Yanomami without regard to the Yanomami themselves" and "a liar whose lies damage the Yanomami."
• Neel, mercifully, died before these accusations arose. The future, immediate and otherwise, is unclear for Chagnon, who retired last year from duties at the University of California-Santa Barbara.

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