Scheca02's List: Darkness

• In his 2000 accounts of the 1968 epidemic (including his New Yorker article and book manuscript), Tierney had portrayed the anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon and the late geneticist-physician James V. Neel, Sr., as virtually amoral eugenicists bent on conducting inhumane and deadly field experiments on a phenomenally vulnerable population. Tierney suggested that Neel—with Chagnon’s collaboration—had introduced a potentially fatal contraindicated measles vaccine to the Yanomamö, probably inducing the 1968 epidemic, allowing him to test his eugenic theories
• The truth was quite the opposite. From prior field research, before the 1968 epidemic, Neel had determined that the Yanomamö were alarmingly vulnerable to measles, and so he had personally arranged to bring vaccines on the 1968 expedition. Neel had not taken the matter lightly; he had consulted experts regarding the best vaccine to use, obtained instruction about safe administration, and personally arranged the financing to make the vaccination campaign possible
• American Anthropological Association (AAA)—played a supporting role to Tierney’s work. This was a supporting role that ultimately threatened the AAA’s integrity and indeed the integrity of American anthropology itself. Thus, while this paper provides some previously uncollected and critically informative background material on Tierney’s work, it chiefly seeks to highlight the problematic aiding and abetting of Tierney by scholars who had the power to know better and to do better.
• The Turner-Sponsel memo—a truly extraordinary piece of work—began by stating that, “In its scale, ramifications, and sheer criminality and corruption, [the scandal] is unparalleled in the history of Anthropology.” In florid prose, Turner and Sponsel then uncritically related Tierney’s most sensational claims, including that the geneticist James Neel had “in all probability deliberately caused” an outbreak of measles by using a contra-indicated vaccine among the Yanomamö to test an “extreme,” “fascistic” eugenic theory.
• After the contentious meeting, the AAA’s President Louise Lamphere took the matter still further. The AAA formed the Peacock Commission, whose confidential report called for the formation of what became known as the El Dorado Task Force. Chaired by the past AAA President Jane Hill, the AAA’s Task Force was charged with inquiring into issues raised by Tierney’s book. The Task Force included Janet Chernela, Fernando Coronil, Trudy Turner, and Joe Watkins. Under pressure from Chagnon’s colleagues, a collaborator of Chagnon was added late to the Task Force (AAA
• In his work, Tierney does come across as a man trying to walk in the footsteps of Jesus, carrying sick children out of the woods, rescuing them from criminals (Tierney 1994), and then rescuing them from a mythically evil Chagnon who bears a striking resemblance in Tierney’s representations to the gone-native Kurtz in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.
• The damage might have been better contained if not for the AAA, whose leaders chose not to make a forceful statement about Tierney’s egregious falsehoods. The AAA opted to do nothing like what my own home organization, the American Society for Bioethics + Humanities, did in 2009 to defend bioethicists Ezekiel Emanuel and Robert Pearlman against false representations of their work by journalists (Lindemann et al. 2009). While the Peacock and the Task Force Reports contain some critiques of Tierney, both explicitly took Tierney’s book as the roadmap to follow for further inquiries. Both even essentially thanked Tierney on behalf of anthropologists. The Peacock Commission concluded this: “Patrick Tierney’s provocative book, Darkness in El Dorado, has contributed a valuable service to our discipline” (Peacock et al. 2001). The Task Force later concluded this: “Darkness in El Dorado has served anthropology well” (AAA 2002a:9). No other scholarly organization treated Tierney’s house of cards as constituting a valuable service to their discipline.
• Did the Peacock Commission really need to act like a grand jury, hastily issuing a sealed indictment, never pausing to really examine whether the evidence warranted an indictment, in spite of multiple authoritative and well-publicized denunciations of Tierney’s fakeries? I think not. Indeed, the Peacock Report should come as a shock to any scholar worth her salt. (A copy of it has recently been made available at the Hume online archive [Peacock et al. 2001].) Not only is it a mess in places in terms of reasoning and lacking basic formatting consideration, the report itself states that it was prepared so hastily that not all members of the Peacock Commission were able to approve the final version.

• According to Hill, Neel was cleared of all charges (Hill 2009). So what did Chagnon do wrong? According to the Task Force, after all these trials and tribulations, conclusively just two things:

  First, . . . his representations of Yanomami ways of life were damaging to them and . . . he made insufficient effort to undo this damage, and second . . . his association in the early 1990s with FUNDAFACI, a Venezuelan foundation that sponsored his research, represented an unethical prioritizing of his own research concerns over the well-being of the Yanomami

• Chagnon was getting desperate, by the late 1980s, to find ways to get back into Yanomamö-land to continue his work. Denied, via intense politicking, the ability to do this through the typical channels, he decided to team up with a group of wealthy Venezuelans associated as FUNDIFACI whose members included Charles Brewer-Carias, a man with gold mining interests. Chagnon thus made alliances with people whose interests appeared unsavory.

  I am not qualified to assess this incredibly complicated web of Venezuelan politics. I will simply say that the material about this, in the Task Force Report, does not approach standards required of a fair ethics investigation and smacks mostly of guilt by association.
• When I read Chagnon’s work on the Yanomamö, I see a deeply humanizing portrayal. But maybe that’s because, like Chagnon, I don’t see humans as angels. Yes, Chagnon sees in the Yanomamö evidence of treachery, greed, and violence. And he clearly sees that as evidence that they are like the rest of us.

  • I feel like this is extremely important to note just in general. 

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• The thunderous descent of the military helicopter at the village of Dorita-teri drove Yanomami Indian women and children screaming into the surrounding plantain gardens. Out in the jungle, panic also reigned, as macaws and parrots, deer and tapirs scrambled to escape the machine. When the dust cleared, twenty Yanomami warriors were standing in a semicircle, yelling at seven white men and one white woman who had descended from the helicopter with television cameras and sound equipment. Most of the warriors held enormous bows and arrows. The headman wived all ax.

  • Unlikely......
• In spite of the "first contact" craze, almost all of these extraordinarily remote communities had been visited before and were being reharvested after a suitable interval.
• 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.

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• “I looked up and gasped when I saw a dozen burly, naked, filthy, hideous men staring at us down the shafts of their drawn arrows!” — but it also embroiled him in controversy.
• These are impressive adversaries — “Indiana Jones had nothing on me,” is how Chagnon puts it — but by far his most tenacious foes have been members of his own profession.

  • Ok maybe this guy is a little cocky...
• But even today, after thousands of pages of discussion, including a lengthy investigation by the American Anthropological Association (A.A.A.), there is no consensus about what, if anything, Chagnon did wrong.

  • It's doing the thing again where it won't let me highlight because someone has already been to this website and shared it with the group. 

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• The point is this: Our way of being is certainly tied to our biological heritage, but the differences we see across cultures are the products of lived experience, with cultural norms shaped by our environment and how we are brought up. It also seems true that within academia, there are subfields into which we are enculturated, and which inform and shape our thinking.
• Chagnon spent decades with the Yanomamö of Venezuela and wrote a monograph called Yanomamö: The Fierce People. The first through third editions kept the subtitle, but it was dropped for the fourth edition. The Venezuelan government had used Chagnon’s work to label the Yanomamö as dangerous and unsociable, as part of its effort to displace indigenous tribes occupying land otherwise exploitable for lumber or for other purposes.

  • Is this where a lot of the uproar comes from?
• Some sociocultural anthropologists and human rights activists have held Chagnon responsible for the use of his ethnography against an indigenous group. This seems rather unfair. If the Yanomamö are fierce, that is not Chagnon’s fault; the use of an honest ethnography for nefarious political or economic goals is not the ethnographer’s responsibility.
• A good portion of the history of anthropology involves extracting accurate descriptions from local informants without upsetting people. Chagnon seems to have had a harder time than average getting past the taboos, but his story is different from that of many other ethnographers in only one important respect: Most ethnographers produced findings that matched the expectations of sociocultural anthropologists. Chagnon, however, had become an unabashed sociobiologist. It is not the case that Chagnon was doing it wrong relative to his contemporaries. Rather, it is problematic for some that his paradigm for research rests in biology rather than culture.
• The accusations in Darkness in El Dorado were an unfair way to judge Chagnon’s research. But there is a fair way to judge it, which is to ask whether he was right. Are the Yanomamö fierce or not? The Yanomamö are what can be called a “middle range society.” The term refers to the population size (not small like most forager groups such as the Ju/’hoansi, and not large like peasant or industrial societies). It can refer to people who are horticulturalists (raising much of their food in small gardens), pastoralists (keeping animals such as cattle), or seafaring fishing people. A number of cultural traits have been associated with middle range societies, with only a subset of these traits found in any one culture.

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• Through the work of Chagnon and others, the Yanomami have become one of the best-known, if not the best-known, Amazonian Indian group in the world. People in diverse locales on diverse continents know of them. They have become a symbol in the West of what life is like beyond the pale of “civilization.”
• James Neel has been called by many the father of modern human genetics. He served on the University of Michigan’s faculty for more than forty years, becoming one of its most distinguished members. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences as well as to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and was awarded the National Medal of Science and the Smithsonian Institution Medal.
• Napoleon Chagnon, a retired professor of anthropology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, is one of the best-known members of the discipline. His writings, particularly his introductory ethnography Yanomamö: The Fierce People and the films associated with it have made his name familiar to millions upon millions of college students since the 1960s. It is not too far-fetched to suggest that Chagnon helped make the Yanomami famous as a tribe around the world and the Yanomami, in turn, have been the basis for Chagnon’s own fame.
• Patrick Tierney is a freelance investigative journalist based in Pittsburgh. He obtained an undergraduate degree in Latin American studies from the University of California at Los Angeles. Those who interact with him on a personal level describe him as gentle and soft-spoken.
• 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. Because the first of these accusations in effect charged a distinguished scientist with facilitating the deaths of Yanomami, it received the most media attention. This accusation has been dismissed by most people; the second is very much with us.
• 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.

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• Second, and critical for the themes of this book, the way the controversyplayed out offers an important lens through which to examine the entire disci-pline of anthropology. We see not only how anthropologists idealize themselvesin describing their work to others. We also see the actual practice of anthropol-ogy — up close and clear. We are led to explore questions central to the discipline
• Tierney spent eleven years researching and writing Darkness in El Dorado. Hestarted out investigating the disruptive impact gold mining and gold minerswere having on the Amazonian region, including on the Yanomami. At somepoint in this research he turned his attention to the scientists and journalists whohave worked among the Yanomami.
• Tierney makes a considerable effort to give Darkness in El Doradothe trap-pings of academic scholarship. The book contains more than 1,590 footnotes; thebibliography contains more than 250 books. The question, however, is whetherTierney’s years of research and voluminous citations add up to a credible work
• Jacques Lizotis a prominent French anthropologist who lived among theYanomami for more than twenty years. He is highly critical of Chagnon’s writ-ings. Two points tend to be repeatedly asserted about Lizot’s time in the field:that he was a strong public defender of Yanomami rights and that he had homo-sexual relations with a number of Yanomami boys.
• First, critics suggested that he had never got-ten informed consent for his medical research among the Yanomami. (Informedconsent, touched on above, involves getting formal permission from subjects toconduct research on them and is required today in all medical research.) Evenif standards of informed consent during the 1960s differed from those existingtoday, several critics asked if Neel couldn’t have done more to inform theYanomami about the details of his research.
• econd, with the publication of Tierney’sbook many Yanomami came to realize that the blood collected during Neel’sresearch was still being preserved in American laboratories. They felt they hadnever been informed that this would occur.
• Second, some anthropologists brought up Chagnon’searlier criticism of Davi Kopenawa, a prominent Yanomami activist who playeda key role in the effort to establish a Yanomami reserve in Brazil. They asked ifit was right that an anthropologist should undermine the work of an indigenousactivist seeking to protect his people.
• To date, the answer is essentially no. Despite all thepublicity and all the good intentions expressed by anthropological organizationsand anthropologists, the Yanomami essentially still live under the same tenuoushealth conditions as before. This is a scandal in itself. It suggests that theYanomami seem, for many anthropologists, to be primarily tools for intellectualargument and academic advancement.
• The first is the inequality of power between anthropologists and those whomthey study. Since anthropologists tend to come from countries that are more eco-nomically developed and militarily powerful than those they study, it is reason-able to ask, what ethical standards should govern how the more powerful use theintellectual and biological resources of the less powerful?
• The second is the anthropological injunction (embodied in the AmericanAnthropological Association’s code of ethics) to do no harmto those whomanthropologists study. What this means in practice — what specific actions thisdirective commits an anthropologist to — remains unclear. Remember thatChagnon, who essentially admitted in his own writings to violating this ethic,was lionized by many within the discipline.
• hird issue, offering just compensationto those who assisted in one’sresearch. Anthropologists tend to present generous gifts to informants. But aresuch gifts sufficient compensation, given that anthropologists take the inform-ants’ information back to their universities and use it to build financially satis-fying careers that often far exceed what their informants can expect in their ownlives?

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