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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.
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