[lbo-talk] sick perversions

Charles Brown cbrown at michiganlegal.org
Tue Sep 28 08:03:21 PDT 2004


* Subject: Sahlins on Chagnon * From: "Charles Brown" <CharlesB at xxxxxx * Date: Fri, 16 Feb 2001

________________________________

http://archives.econ.utah.edu/archives/marxism/2001w07/msg00209.htm

" The White man is the Devil "

--Elijah Muhammed

Or

"Mistah Kurtz, he dead " again

Marshall Sahlins clarifies what exactly was the genocidal conduct of Chagnon , even if Neel didn't do exactly what Tierney said at first.

Charles Brown

((((((((

<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A46808-2000Dec9.html>

Jungle Fever

By Marshall Sahlins

Sunday, December 10, 2000; Page X01

DARKNESS IN EL DORADO

How Scientists and Journalists

Devastated the Amazon

By Patrick Tierney

Norton. 417 pp. $27.95

Guilty not as charged.

Well before it reached the bookstores, Patrick Tierney's Darkness in

El Dorado set off a flurry of publicity and electronic debate over its

allegations that, at about the same time American soldiers were

carrying out search-and-destroy missions in the jungles of Vietnam,

American scientists were doing something like research-and-destroy by

knowingly spreading disease in the jungles of Amazonia. On closer

examination, the alleged scientific horror turned out to be something

less than that, even as it was always the lesser part of Tierney's book.

By far the greater part is the story, sufficiently notorious in its own

right, of the well-known anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon: of his work

among the Yanomami people of Venezuela and his fame among the science

tribe of America.

The pre-publication sound and fury, however, concerned the decorated

geneticist and physician the late James Neel--for whose researches in

the upper Orinoco during the late 1960s and early 1970s Chagnon had

served as a jungle advance man and blood collector. Sponsored by the

U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), Neel's investigations were

designed to establish mutation rates in a population uncontaminated by

nuclear radiation for comparison with the survivors of Hiroshima and

Nagasaki. But according to Tierney, Neel also had another agenda: He

wanted to test an original theory of immunity-formation in a "virgin

soil" population, exposed for the first time to a devastating foreign

disease. Hence the sensational chapter on "The Outbreak," where

Tierney alleges that Neel abetted, if not created, a deadly measles

epidemic by inoculating Yanomami Indians with an outmoded type of

vaccine known to cause severe reactions. Or so it says in the original

review galleys of the book.

-clip-



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