Received: by alpheratz.cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk id OAA21370 (8.6.9/5.3[ref pg@gmsl.co.uk] for cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk from fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk); Tue, 23 Jan 2001 14:44:00 GMT Subject: Fwd: Looking into the heart of darkness Date: Tue, 23 Jan 2001 09:40:47 -0500 x-sender: wsmith1@camail2.harvard.edu x-mailer: Claris Emailer 2.0v3, Claritas Est Veritas From: "Wade T.Smith" <wade_smith@harvard.edu> To: <skeptic@listproc.hcf.jhu.edu>, "memetics list" <memetics@mmu.ac.uk> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-transfer-encoding: quoted-printable Message-ID: <20010123143928.AAA26110@camailp.harvard.edu@[128.103.125.215]> Sender: fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk Precedence: bulk Reply-To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
Looking into the heart of darkness
Anthropologists face a moment of truth after charges of bringing cultural
ruin to the Amazon
By David L. Chandler, Globe Staff, 1/23/2001
http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/023/science/Looking_into_the_heart_of_dar
kness+.shtml
They were supposedly some of the most primitive people on Earth, totally
unaffected by the outside world. They supposedly lived under idyllic
circumstances, unusually well-fed and healthy. And they were thought to
be among the most warlike people on Earth, so much so that a popular book
about them was subtitled ''The Fierce People.''
Wrong, wrong, and scandalously wrong, says a new book that may have
exposed a dark underside of the way Western intellectuals study so-called
''primitive'' societies.
''Darkness in El Dorado'' alleges, among other things, that the peaceful,
malnourished Yanomamo people of the remotest regions of Venezuela and
Brazil were decimated, corrupted, infected, manipulated and culturally
transformed by wave after wave of conquistadors, missionaries,
adventurers, and exploiters, starting well before anthropologists even
arrived.
Unfortunately, some researchers made the Yanomamo's problems worse,
author Patrick Tierney charges, provoking them to violence and then
publishing books and documentaries that ruined their reputation. In
addition, Tierney charges that the researchers corrupted Yanomamo culture
and recklessly introduced diseases the Yanomamo were unable to fight off.
While some of Tierney's allegations appear to be unsupported or plain
wrong, the book has rocked the profession as never before, and is likely
to bring about profound changes in the whole field of anthropology.
Already, a 50-member group of anthropologists who specialize in the
Amazon region voted unanimously this month to recommend a full-scale
investigation of Tierney's charges.
The book's most sensational charge is that flamboyant, best-selling
author Napoleon Chagnon, and his associate and mentor, medical researcher
James Neel, either deliberately or through reckless behavior brought
about or worsened a serious measles epidemic that killed hundreds of
Yanomamo in 1968. That claim has now been convincingly refuted, since the
epidemic was well underway before the team entered the Yanomamo lands,
and the team's vaccination efforts most likely helped to limit it.
Serious questions remain, however, about whether they provided
appropriate medical attention as the epidemic raged throughout the time
of their fieldwork that year.
The book's other charges are less inflammatory but perhaps more central
to the whole business of anthropology. They include claims, familiar for
years among anthropologists, that Chagnon's actions among the Yanomamo
were, in fact, directly responsible for much of the violence that he
documented among them, and that his repeated characterization of them as
fierce and warlike - disputed by other anthropologists who have spent far
longer working among them - has been used by gold miners and others to
justify the decimation of Yanomamo lands.
People familiar with the work of a task force set up by the American
Anthropological Association to look into Tierney's claims say members
have concluded that at least some of the charges warrant serious
investigation. The committee's chairman, past anthropological association
president James Peacock, however, said no final decision had been made
but that the group's conclusions will be announced after the
association's board meeting on Feb. 3.
''The book has served as a wakeup call for the profession,'' said
anthropologist Leslie Sponsel of the University of Hawaii, and it will
''increase awareness and concern with regard to professional ethics and
human rights in general, as well as for the Yanomamo in particular.''
While at least 60 books have been written about the Yanomamo, Sponsel
said - and many of these have included at least some of the allegations
of misconduct contained in Tierney's book - none has ever caught the
attention of the profession as this one has. At the same time, few books
have ever been so vocally denounced by such noted scholars. A group of
academic luminaries, including E.O. Wilson of Harvard and Steven Pinker
of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, wrote a letter to the New
York Times Book Review denouncing a favorable review of the book and
questioning its charges against Chagnon and Neel, who died last year.
''The charges have been examined in detail and shown to be false,'' the
letter said.
But most of the responses rebut only a small subset of the charges in
Tierney's book. Terence Turner, an anthropologist at Cornell University
and longtime critic of Chagnon, said in an interview that the charges
centering on a measles epidemic at the time of Chagnon's first visit to
the Yanomamo ''have been the focus of 90 percent of the discussion. The
rest of the [charges], which is 90 percent of the book, has been, if not
ignored, then certainly little discussed.''
Controversy is nothing new for the blunt-spoken Chagnon. While he is
undoubtedly the best-known researcher on the Yanomamo, and his books and
films about them are staples of university anthropology courses, he has
been accused by many other anthropologists over the years of mistreating
his research subjects, intentionally or not. He has also been accused of
drawing false conclusions about the Yanomamo in his published work, and
then disregarding their fate when his words were used to justify a
decimation of their people and their lands.
In fact, he has been repeatedly barred by the Brazilian and Venezuelan
governments from even entering the Yanomamo lands, and has been
vociferously denounced by Yanomamo leaders.
Now, both governments have actually banned, for the time being, any
further research by anyone in the remote Yanomamo lands. New ethical
guidelines are being drafted by both governments and by anthropologists,
which may change the way such studies on isolated people are conducted.
Tierney said he was as surprised as anyone by the furor that erupted
months before his book even came out last November. ''I thought it would
be a kind of modest nonevent, the way most books are,'' Tierney said in
an interview.
Not by a long shot.
As soon as pre-publication galley proofs of the book were sent out for
review, anthropologists Sponsel and Turner - both of whom have been
critical of Chagnon's research in the past - sent a long memo to leaders
of the American Anthropological Association alerting them to the
explosive claims that were about to come out. Their letter - intended as
a private communication - was quickly circulated widely among
anthropologists, and soon on the Internet, where angry online debates
quickly erupted.
Three key points about the research by Chagnon and others among the
Yanomami remain central to the debate:
That tradegoods distributed by Chagnon to get Yanomami to cooperate in
his research, including machetes and knives, became both the motive and
the means for savage attacks between Yanomamo villages upset at the
uneven distribution of the goods.
That Chagnon's methods caused great friction between individuals and
between villages, and may, in turn, have brought about serious violence.
In order to construct genealogies of the Yanomomami, Chagnon was battling
a strong taboo against speaking the names of dead relatives. So he got
the names of the dead from the deceased's enemies - thus increasing the
tensions that existed between the groups.
That on numerous occasions he traveled to remote Yanomamo villages on
large military helicopters, landing in the middle of villages so that the
helicopter backwash blew the roof right off the tribe's communal house.
Chagnon denies that he broke taboos to get the names of the dead, but his
explanation in response to Tierney's book seems to differ from earlier
accounts.
''They knew that I knew the names of every one of the people'' in books
of Polaroid pictures of the Yanomamo that Chagnon had compiled, Chagnon
recently explained, ''and were not disturbed, let alone angered, by
this.''
Yet, in his own book describing the expedition, Chagnon wrote that he
stumbled upon the idea of seeking information about the dead from
Yanomamo rivals and children. As he watched two Yanomamo fight with
clubs, one began speaking the name of the other's dead father as a way of
insulting him. Chagnon immediately went to the one who had been shouting
the name and asked about the other man's ancestors: ''He gave me the
information I requested of his adversary's deceased ancestors, almost
with devilish glee.''
Chagnon's defense against the charge that he damaged villages with his
helicopter landings is also revealing. He writes that he first landed a
mile away from a village and down a steep hill: ''They had to carry my
equipment up that steep hill and knew that when I left they would have to
carry it back down.'' As a result, he assumes that he is doing the
Yanomamo a favor by landing closer - even if it destroys the collective
house in which all the villagers live.
Yet, perhaps the most serious charge concern Chagnon's portraying the
Yanomamo as warlike to the outside world, a claim that played into the
hands of mining interests that wanted access to their land in Brazil.
Cultural Survival, a Cambridge-based organization fighting for the rights
of indigenous peoples around the world, has strongly denounced Chagnon's
work:
''It is not a trivial matter to insist on the fierceness of a people or
to maintain that they represent an especially primitive stage in human
evolution. Chagnon ... has done so deliberately, systematically and over
a long period of time... We at Cultural Survival consider this to be not
only bad science but also a bad example of harmful writing about an
indigenous people.''
Cultural Survival director Ian McIntosh hopes the outcry over Tierney's
book helps counter Chagnon's writing, noting that just one percent of the
world's population still lives as traditional hunter-gatherers. And
almost all of them, like the Yanomamo, are under threat of losing their
land.
This story ran on page C1 of the Boston Globe on 1/23/2001. © Copyright
2001 Globe Newspaper Company.
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