The Yanomami are one of the most celebrated groups ever studied by cultural anthropologists. This is partially attributable to the anthropologist most closely associated with them, Napolean Chagnon. His 1968 book Yanomamö: The Fierce People described a quite violent group where the most aggressive men won the most wives and had the most children. In 2000, his methods were challenged by another anthropologist, Patrick Tierney who, among other claims, suggested that Chagnon altered the society by distributing machetes to his research subjects.
Below are excepts from Tierney’s article, The Fierce Anthropologist, that was published in the New Yorker magazine in October, 2000. Also included are excerpts from anthropologist John Tooby’s rebuttal to Tierney’s claims. While reading the pieces, consider the questions below. You may also want to find other information on the Internet.
What is the basis of Tierney’s claim? In other words, what did Chagnon do wrong? Do you agree or disagree?
Did Chagnon act in an unethical manner? Why or why not? What about Tierney? Was he acting ethically by publishing his findings?
What would you do if you were in Chagnon’s shoes? Remember that he had to do something to pay back his informants. What items would you distribute to them? Could these items cause problems?
What does this controversy tell you about the nature of anthropological research?
Excerpts from Tierney’s Article
In November, 1964, Napoleon A. Chagnon, a twenty-six-year-old American anthropology graduate student, arrived in a small jungle village in Venezuela, to study one of the most remote tribes on earth–the Yanomami Indians. The reality that Chagnon encountered was, in many ways, stranger than anything previously imagined. In his book, 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. What was most striking about them was, he wrote, “the importance of aggression in their culture.” The Yanomami, he concluded, lived in a “state of chronic warfare”.
At the time of Chagnon’s first expedition, most of the Yanomami were mountain dwellers. They did not have much in the way of metal tools or personal possessions. Chagnon arrived in Yanomami territory in an aluminum rowboat with an outboard motor. He was carrying axes and machetes to give to the villagers as payment for their cooperation. Chagnon wrote that the first recipients of his gifts, all of whom were male, immediately left the village for remote settlements, where the axes and machetes could be used for trade. The Yanomami’s need to wage war, he observed, encouraged the breeding of males-and this, in turn, led to more war. Among anthropologists, this conclusion contradicted the conventional wisdom that primitive warfare was the result of competition for hunting territories, cropland, or trade routes. In 1988, he published an article in Science in which he reported that the Yanomami men who murdered had twice as many wives and three times as many offspring as non-murderers had. He concluded that, among the Yanomami, the act of killing bestowed status.
Anthropologist Kenneth Good calls Chagnon “a hit-and-run anthropologist who comes into villages with armloads of machetes to purchase cooperation for his research. Unfortunately, he creates conflict and division wherever he goes.” Anthropologist Brian Ferguson noted that by Chagnon’s own account, he shuttled between enemy villages and cultivated “informants who might be considered ‘aberrant’ or ‘abnormal’ outcasts in their own society,” and who would give him tribal secrets in exchange for beads, cloth, fishhooks, and, above all, steel goods. To get the data he wanted, Chagnon, by his own account, began “‘bribing’ children when their elders were not around, or capitalizing on animosities between individuals.” Ferguson writes that Chagnon stirred up village rivalries by behaving like a regional big man and an “un-Yanomami…wild card on the political scene.”
Excerpts from John Tooby’s Response
Through 10 years of dogged sleuthing, it would seem, Tierney dragged a conspiracy of anthropological wrongdoing into the light. Last week, when finalists for this year’s National Book Awards were announced, Darkness in El Dorado was listed in the nonfiction category. There is only one problem: The book should have been in the fiction category. When examined against its own cited sources, the book is demonstrably, sometimes hilariously, false on scores of points that are central to its most sensational allegations. After looking into those sources, I found myself seriously wondering whether Tierney had perpetrated a hoax on the publishing world.
Chagnon was said to have been the main cause of the violence he saw among the Yanomamö and more generally to have twisted his scholarly portrayal of them to bolster his Hobbesian theories of human nature. Tierney claims that Chagnon, to support this view, exaggerates Yanomamö violence. He doesn’t mention the fact that the rates of violence Chagnon documents are not high compared with the rates found by anthropologists in other pre-state societies. Nor does he mention Chagnon’s view that, if anything, the Yanomamö’s rate of lethal violence is “much lower than that reported for other tribal groups.” Not only does Tierney generally ignore inconvenient data, citing only anthropologists who disagree with Chagnon. He also, time and again, has a way of magically turning anthropologists whose data support Chagnon into anthropologists who contradict him.
Tierney says that competition over the pots and machetes and other steel tools that Chagnon gave the Yanomamö sometimes led to war. This is logically possible. The Yanomamö certainly valued Chagnon’s gifts, since cutting the jungle back for their crops was much easier with machetes. But Tierney fails to mention that Chagnon’s contributions (made so that he would be allowed to collect data) were dwarfed by all the other sources of such items, such as the military, who hired Yanomamö laborers, and especially the vast mission system, which imports boatloads of machetes and other goods, and even has its own airline. While Tierney considers Chagnon’s distribution of steel tools an outrageous threat to peace, he amazingly gives a free pass to the introduction by others including some missionaries of hundreds of shotguns. These weapons are known to have been used by the Yanomamö in raiding from mission areas to the less well-armed villages where Chagnon worked.
Content of Messages
Does it matter what you say in your messages? The simple answer is “not really”. The goal of discussions is to get you to engage the course material with others. As long as you are contributing to the topic, I will not mark you down for posting something that is incorrect. One other practice that will lead to reduced scores is consistently using poor grammar. Remember that you are in college and should be communicating accordingly. For the discussions, you should feel free to discuss things in a fairly relaxed manner, but do make attempts to capitalize correctly, use punctuation, and to check spelling. A final note is that posts should be at least three sentences in length to be counted as followups.
