In These Times
What Was Done to the Yanomami? by David Graeber
Did James Neel, a geneticist working on a grant from the Atomic Energy Commission, commit an act of mass murder? In 1968, did he, in a fiendish experiment that resulted in hundreds of deaths, intentionally unleash a measles epidemic on a population of Yanomami Indians in Venezuela? It seems extremely unlikely. Was he, instead, guilty of some kind of mass manslaughter, by intentionally using an outdated and extremely powerful vaccine on a notoriously vulnerable and immune-deficient population, then skipping off with all the trained medical personnel in the area as the epidemic spread? We'll probably never know for sure.
Still, the possibility that he might have, along with other claims made in Darkness in El Dorado: How Scientists and Journalists Devastated the Amazon, a book by investigative reporter Patrick Tierney, has sparked an enormous, burgeoning scandal in the world of anthropology--which might seem rather surprising, considering that Neel was not an anthropologist and the book has not even been released.
Here is the story so far.
In mid-September, two anthropologists who had read advance copies of Tierney's book emailed a letter to the President of the American Anthropological Society (AAA), warning her that the organization should begin to brace itself. The mother of all scandals was about to hit the discipline. It concerned anthropology because Tierney's book was largely focused on one man, Napoleon Chagnon, one of the world's most famous anthropologists, who along with filmmaker Timothy Asch is responsible for having made the Yanomami--his notorious "fierce people"--perhaps the single most famous "primitive" society on the face of the earth.
Not only had Chagnon assisted Neel in his inoculation campaign, he was also, according to the book, a bully, fraud and irresponsible adventurer who staged most of his famous movies, created endless wars by his heavy-handed intervention in Yanomami affairs, tried to carve out a jungle empire with corrupt Venezuelan officials and gold miners, systematically doctored his data to represent the Yanomami as incurably warlike and treacherous, and in doing so, played directly into the hands of miners and government officials who used his writings as justification for a campaign meant to seize their lands and destroy their society. Clearly, this was going to be bad news for the discipline. Derek Freeman had made headlines in the '80s just by claiming that Margaret Mead had been incompetent in her research in Samoa; if some of Tierney's Yanomami informants were to be believed, Chagnon was responsible for spreading death and disaster almost everywhere he went.
According to Terry Turner, one of its authors, the original letter-which among other things evoked shades of Joseph Mengele-was never meant for public distribution. But, as so often happens, someone leaked it, and it then began careening through cyberspace so rapidly that within a matter of days, there was probably not an anthropologist on earth who didn't have a copy. Newspapers and magazines soon began to pick up the story. Neel had died seven months before, but Chagnon, very much alive and notoriously combative, began talking about lawyers; Norton Press announced the book's release would be delayed; galleys became unavailable; an excerpt due out in the New Yorker did appear, but so heavily chopped up it was almost incoherent; and the AAA has now declared that it will devote a special section of its annual meeting in November to trying to sort the whole thing out.
Some journalists have already started to treat this as yet another paroxysm in the perennial crisis of anthropology--a discipline which has only begun to gain its feet again after subjecting itself to endless self-criticism in the 1980s. This, however, would be very much mistaken. Napoleon Chagnon is anything but a typical anthropologist, and his behavior (if indeed it does turn out he did any of things he is accused of) is hardly representative of the discipline. For much of his career, Chagnon didn't even hold a chair in anthropology but in genetics.
Chagnon is a devotee of sociobiology, a tiny but extremely aggressive minority within the discipline who believe that human behavior is largely genetically determined. He also genuinely believes that it is actually possible to find pristine, untouched "primitive" societies whose way of life has remained essentially unchanged since the Neolithic. Most serious anthropologists stopped talking this way in the 1930s. Neel believed it and felt that this made the Yanomami the perfect test case for his theories of human prehistory: in particular, his belief that the great engine of human evolution was the fact that stone-age societies were divided into small inbreeding populations in which males competed over headmanship, and the winners got to have multiple wives, thus allowing their superior genetic material to quickly propagate itself within the gene pool.
This, Neel argued, was the great engine of human evolution. The creation of mass society had put an end to this, allowing weaklings to reproduce at almost the same rate as the strong. Chagnon, who is reported to have once remarked that he went to the Amazon to study "warriors, not wimps", believed it too. True, the Yanomami were not hunter/gatherers, which is what all humans were for 99% of their evolutionary history (in fact they cultivated plantains, which aren't even originally native to the Americas) but, unlike any actually existing hunter/gatherers, they had another advantage for his purposes. They appeared to be extraordinarily violent. Yanomami society, as represented in Chagnon's work, was one of constant warfare, chest-pounding contests, axe-fights, wife-beating, gang rape, and every conceivable variety of mayhem. This not only made for excellent cinema but allowed Chagnon to add an even more dramatic kink to Neel's model: in Yanomami society, he argued, it was successful killers who managed to have the most sex and hence, pass on their genetic materials. The motor of human evolution, then, was successful male aggression.
All of this makes Chagnon a bizarre and extremely marginal figure in modern anthropology: someone out of the '20s maybe, a swashbuckling barrel-chested adventurer who believes the people he is studying really are savages; he represents the hard right in a discipline that conceives itself as overwhelmingly left-wing. If his work is taken seriously at all in the anthropological world, it is overwhelmingly for one reason: violence sells. And Chagnon is an excellent salesman. His work is written in an admirably clear and accessible style, his descriptions often vivid, and most of all, it is all accompanied by excellent movies which seemed the perfect combination of science and sensationalism: bloody axe-fights, replete with careful analysis, tense feasts between enemy villages, shamans snorting hallucinogens and vomiting green slime... It is hard to find an undergraduate anthropology major who hasn't seen at least one of them, or who doesn't have a battered old copy of "The Fierce People" tucked away somewhere in the house.
And as for the general public, it often seems like there is only one question which the general public really wants anthropologists to answer: "man in a state of nature-good? or evil?" Now, one could probably compile a list of a hundred different reasons why this is a stupid question (starting with the word "man"); one can explain that actually, hunter/gatherer or horticulturist societies are all different; some are egalitarian, some hierarchical; some peaceful, some warlike; some obsessed with ritual, others relatively free of it; one can explain that this is because no one lives in a 'state of nature' and being human means we actually have some control over how we live; one can point out that it is the special promise of anthropology to be able to show us that the possibilities for human existence are probably far, far, wider than most of us could presently imagine... One can try. But in the face of all this, a good violent movie backed up with an argument that actually, Hobbes and St. Augustine were right-all of us (or all males anyway, but that's all that really matters) are motivated by irrepressible drives for dominance and human life will therefore always be based on competition-is always going to at least get an audience.
So Chagnon has remained among us, despite the fact that within the discipline, almost all his concrete claims are considered long ago debunked. His argument that killers tend to have twice as many children, for example, is based on a survey of men who had undergone a purification ritual which, it turns out, is not only given to those who had killed in warfare (or just claim to have - it's rather hard to know when you're using bows and arrows) but those who, say, had wreaked death on an enemy by magically stealing his footprint.
As for Yanomami violence, Alexander Cockburn may have not been all that far from the truth when he whimsically suggested, some years ago, that some of the Yanomami reputation for being irritable, impatient, and prone to violence might simply be due to the presence of Chagnon himself: people who know him report that just about anyone exposed to the man for any length of time starts to behave like that eventually. In 1995, for instance, Brian Ferguson wrote a book providing extensive documentary evidence that Yanomami warfare, far from being a constant, has tended to flare up precisely wherever Chagnon, or other outsiders, were currently operating.
It's easy to see how this might have happened if one looks at some of the reminiscences Tierney collected from Yanomami who remembered Chagnon's descents on their villages.
"He had his bird feathers adorning his arms. He had red-dye paint all over his body. He wore a loincloth like a Yanomami. He sang with the chant of his shamanism and took yopo"-a powerful hallucinogen used by Yanomami shamans to make contact with spirits. "He took a lot of yopo. I was terrified of him. He always fired off his pistol when he entered the village, to prove he was fiercer than the Yanomami. Everyone was afraid of him...
"He said to my brother Samuel, who was the headman, 'What is your mother's name?' My brother answered, 'We Yanomami do not speak our names.' Shaki"-the Yanomami's name for Chagnon-"said, 'It doesn't matter. If you tell me, I'll pay you.' So, although they didn't want to, the people sold their names. Everyone cried, but they spoke them. It was very sad."
Unsurprising that they did so, considering that Chagnon was offering to "pay" people with steel axes and machetes and that they must have been well aware that he had probably already made a similar offer to their worst enemies, or was about to.
Most anthropologists would look at such behavior with horror. If Chagnon was capable of it, if he was capable of painting himself red, dressing in feathers, and trying to terrify people, it seems, paradoxical though it may seem, because he was convinced he was a scientist. He was there to accumulate data: genealogical lists, blood samples, demographic material, and lots of it, from as many villages as possible. To be a scientist meant to be willing to do whatever it took to get that information.
To be a scientist, for Chagnon, clearly meant to be a hard man. Another telling anecdote in Tierney's account comes from a Venezuelan graduate student who accompanied Chagnon on one of his genealogical surveys. At the first village they came to, everyone ran away. Then,
"When we first arrived at Iwahikoroba-teri, everybody was sick, throwing up and moaning and lying down in their hammocks," Cardoza said. "I remember a little girl, Makiritama. She was vomiting blood. She was defecating blood, too... I went to Chagnon and said, 'You know these people are really sick. Some of them could die. I think we should go and get medical help.'
Chagnon told me that I would never be a scientist."
A scientist, then, is a person willing to paint himself red, cover himself with feathers, and fire off pistols to frighten people, but not one who would go out of his way to get medical attention for the sick. Science, it would seem, is a manly occupation. It is probably all for the best, then, that most anthropologists--who have gradually, over the years, learned to regard the people they study simply as fellow human beings, sharing the same contemporary world if in radically different circumstances--feel rather ambivalent about whether the word even applies to them.
Chagnon and his sociobiologist allies make much of this fact in replying to their critics. For years now, he has been attacking critics of his theories as dishonest, politically motivated, envious liberals, "cultural anthropologists from the Academic Left" mired in some kind of mushy postmodern relativist political correctness. He, on the other hand, has facts. Hard facts. Many of these people don't even believe in facts. Or science, or even reality. "Many cultural anthropologists," he noted in a letter to Time Magazine, "even despise the words 'empirical evidence'."
Not me. Like many anthropologists, I actually do believe in reality. I just think that social realities are so much complicated than the kind studied by chemists or biologists that anyone who applies the same methods to both is bound to...well, shall we say, do violence to reality.
All this rather brings to mind the story about the feminist historian of science who, annoyed by the male bias implicit in the idea of "hard" and "soft" sciences, proposed that we change the terms to "dry" and "wet". In fact, Chagnon ends up being a kind of perfect foil for those who like to critique positivist science. It would be difficult to make up a better target: big, blustery, male, destructive, and dramatically, ridiculously wrong. Although, actually, you could look at it another way too. For all his camp's contempt for 'postmodernism', he could actually be seen as the ultimate Foucauldian: a man who seems to really believe that the only truth is power, indeed, the only reality. His strange inability to tell the difference between the struggle for dominance and the struggle for truth (a truth which of course comes down to the universal nature of the struggle for dominance) casts him into the ultimate postmodern hall of mirrors. How else to explain the bizarre spectacle of Chagnon's village actually going to war with that of a rival anthropologist ("my people can beat up your people!"-though it is only fair to say that, not having been able to get a copy of Tierney's book, I don't know who actually started it), or that strange feathery costume. For most of us cultural anthropologists, just looking at those pictures of Chagnon dressed strutting about in full shamanistic regalia always caused an instinctual shudder of embarrassment (most anthropologists do not actually do this sort of thing)--though most of us, I imagine, could not say precisely why. Now, I guess, we know.
David Graeber is a professor of anthropology at Yale and contributing editor to In These Times.