Tierney became interested in Latin American culture in 1968, when anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon published Yanomamo: The Fierce People. Giving graphic details of the Indians' hallucinogenic drug use, warfare, and women-stealing raids on other villages, Chagnon argued that violent Yanomami men had more female partners and more offspring, and thus became dominant in their communities. His book became a classic in anthropological literature, selling over 1 million copies, more than Margaret Mead's legendary Coming of Age in Samoa. Chagnon became a larger-than-life figure to a generation of anthropologists. But after spending 11 years researching his story on the Yanomami in the field, Tierney, initially an admirer, came to loathe Chagnon's practices. Tierney's not the first critic: Over the years, a number of anthropologists have cast doubt on Chagnon's thesis that the Yanomami are particularly fierce. (Indeed, Chagnon removed his subtitle The Fierce People from later editions.) But Tierney offers painstaking research--including hundreds of interviews with missionaries, anthropologists, and the Yanomami themselves--presenting difficult-to-refute evidence that Chagnon and others misrepresented the nature of the indigenous group to suit their own agenda. Tierney's calculations indicate Chagnon may have vastly overstated the ``violence quotient'' of some villages by failing to count all of the men. Chagnon, now retired from the University of California Santa Barbara, says Tierney's accusations are ``preposterous.'' His supporters have posted point-by-point rebuttals of Tierney's conclusions on the Internet (www.anth.ucsb.edu/chagnon.html ), noting that he is not a trained anthropologist and thus is ill-equipped to challenge Chagnon's established thesis on Yanomami violence. But few have stepped forward to defend Chagnon's research methods. Even more serious than Chagnon's ``checkbook anthropology,'' which rewarded cooperative Yanomami with everything from fishhooks to outboard motors, was his method for tracing the group's lineage: Tierney says he paid people to tell him the names of their dead ancestors, a revelation that is taboo in Yanomami culture. If that failed, he approached rival communities to get the information, aggravating tension. Far from being a quiet observer, Chagnon was a dominant presence: Villagers say he would descend into communities, God-like and armed with a shotgun, via helicopters that sometimes blew the roofs off buildings. (From: a review of Atrocities in the Amazon? DARKNESS IN EL DORADO: How Scientists and Journalists Devastated the Amazon By Patrick Tierney http://forests.org/archive/brazil/atamhows.htm) ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- -- There are, I believe, examples and arguments to be made for a wide variety of practices, social structures and relationships within human history and prehistory, and the animal kingdom. Giving primacy to any one is true religious mysticism. Or ideology.