Received: by alpheratz.cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk id QAA21896 (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 16:02:00 GMT Message-ID: <2D1C159B783DD211808A006008062D3101745BFD@inchna.stir.ac.uk> From: Vincent Campbell <v.p.campbell@stir.ac.uk> To: "'memetics@mmu.ac.uk'" <memetics@mmu.ac.uk> Subject: RE: Looking into the heart of darkness Date: Tue, 23 Jan 2001 16:00:44 -0000 X-Mailer: Internet Mail Service (5.5.2650.21) Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Sender: fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk Precedence: bulk Reply-To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
Ah, so the book's finally out then! I've heard about this.
Vincent
> ----------
> From: Wade T.Smith
> Reply To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
> Sent: Tuesday, January 23, 2001 2:40 pm
> To: skeptic@listproc.hcf.jhu.edu; memetics list
> Subject: Fwd: Looking into the heart of darkness
>
> 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_da
> r
> 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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