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Note to the WSN list from Alan Spector:
The following very long message was posted on PSN (Progressive
Sociologists Network) earlier today with the request that it be circulated
widely. The original is available on the PSN/CSF archives, in case I
altered anything by reformatting it.
Assuming that most of the charges are true (and I have to say that
I CANNOT vouch for the truthfulness yet), it should be of interest to many on
WSN who are interested in the ways that imperialism oppresses people and how
many academics are worse than mediocre liars -- they are active particpants in
murder. Again, because I just heard about this today, there is always the
possibility that it is some kind of hoax. So this message from me is a call
for further investigation, rather than an assertion as to the absolute truth of
all the charges. But if they are true, it should motivate us all
to intensify a critical scrutiny not just of imperialism, but
of the social sciences as well. The issue goes beyond outrage over
murder. It raises important questions as to how "respectable" theories of
sociobiology, etc. can be turned into eugenic theory and then into selective
murder.
==Here is the text of what appeared on
PSN==
From: Donna J. Haraway <haraway@snowcrest.net Sent: Thursday,
September
14, 2000 4:13 PM Subject: Fwd: Imminent anthropological scandal Colleagues, I am forwarding this message in case you have not seen it. This is something we should all know about. Very, very ugly. It makesme payattention again to the hard and on-going problem of how to be responsible in the many worlds of genetics--in biology, anthropology, medicine, journalism,science studies, art, women's studies, popular culture, dog worlds—in short, in all those places in which we all work. Donna To: Louise Lamphere, President, American
Anthropological Association --Don
Brenneis, President -elect, American Anthropological Association (brenneis@cats.ucsc.edu) From: Terry Turner, Professor of Anthropology, Cornell University. Head of the Special Commission of the American Anthropological Association to Investigate the Situation of the Brazilian Yanomami, 1990-91 (tst3@cornell.edu Leslie Sponsel, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Hawaii, Manoa. Chair of the AAA Committee for Human Rights 1992-1996 In re: Scandal about to be caused by
publication of book by Patrick
Tierney (Darkness in El Dorado. New York. Norton. Publication date: October 1, 2000). Madam President, Mr.
President-elect:
We write to inform you of an impending scandal
that will affect the American
Anthropological profession as a whole in the eyes of the public, and arouse intense indignation and calls for action among members of the Association. In its scale, ramifications, and sheer criminality and corruption it is unparalleled in the history of Anthropology. The AAA will be called upon by the general media and its own membership to take collective stands on the issues it raises, as well as appropriate redressive actions. All of this will obviously involve you as Presidents of the Association-so the sooner you know about the story that is about to break, the better prepared you can be to deal with it. Both of us have seen galley copies of a book by Patrick Tierney, an investigative journalist, about the actions of anthropologists and associated scientific researchers (notably geneticists and medical experimenters) among the Yanomami of Venezuela over the past thirty-five years. Because of the sensational nature of its revelations, the notoriety of the people it exposes, and the prestige of the organs of the academic establishment it implicates, the book is bound to be widely read both outside and inside the profession. As both an indication and a vector of its public impact, we have learned that The New Yorker magazine is planning to publish an extensive excerpt, timed to coincide with the publication of the book (on or about October 1st). The focus of the scandal is the long-term project for study of the Yanomami of Venezuela organized by James Neel, the human geneticist, in which Napoleon Chagnon, Timothy Asch, and numerous other anthropologists took part. The French anthropologist Jacques Lizot, who also works with the Yanomami but is not part of Neel-Chagnon project, also figures in a different scandalous capacity. One of Tierney's more startling revelations is that the whole Yanomami project was an outgrowth and continuation of the Atomic Energy Comissions secret program of experiments on human subjects James Neel, the originator and director of the project, was part of the medical and genetic research team attached to the Atomic Energy Commission since the days of the Manhattan Project. He was a member of the small group of researchers responsible for studying the effects of radiation on human subjects. He personally headed the team that investigated the effects of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs on survivors,. He was put in charge of the study of the effects of atomic bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and later was involved in the studies of the effects of the radioactivity from the experimental A and H bomb blasts in the Marshall Islands on the natives (our colleague May Jo Marshall has a lot to say about these studies in the Marshalls and Neel's role in them). The same group also secretly carried out experiments on human subjects in the USA. These included injecting people with radioactive plutonium without their knowledge or permission,in some cases leading to their death or disfigurement ( Neel himself appears not to have given any of these experimental injections). Another member of the same AEC group of human geneticists and medical experimenters, a Venezuelan, Marcel Roche, was a close colleague of Neel's and spent some time at his AEC-funded center for Human Genetics at Ann Arbor. He returned to Venezuela after the war and did a study of the Yanomami that involved administering doses of a radioactive isotope of iodine and analyzing samples of blood for genetic data. Roche and his project were apparently the connection that led Neel to choose the Yanomami for his big study of the genetics of "leadership" and differential rates of reproduction among dominant and sub-dominant males in a genetically "isolated" human population. There is thus a genealogical connection between the the human experiments carried out by the AEC, and Neel's and Chagnon's Yanomami project, which was from the outset funded by the AEC. Tierney presents convincing evidence that Neel and Chagnon, on their trip to the Yanomami in 1968, greatly exacerbated, and probably started, the epidemic of measles that killed "hundreds, perhaps thousands" (Tierney's language-the exact figure will never be known) of Yanomami. The epidemic appears to have been caused, or at least worsened and more widely spread, by a campaign of vaccination carried out by the research team, which used a virulent vaccine (Edmonson B) that had been counter-indicated by medical experts for use on isolated populations with no prior exposure to measles (exactly the Yanomami situation). Even among populations with prior contact and consequent partial genetic immunity to measles, the vaccine was supposed to be used only with supportive injections of gamma globulin. It was known to produce effects virtually indistinguishable from the disease of measles itself. Medical experts, when informed that Neel and his group used the vaccine in question on the Yanomami, typically refuse to believe it at first, then say that it is incredible that they could have done it, and are at a loss to explain why they would have chosen such an inappropriate and dangerous vaccine. There is no record that Neel sought any medical advice before applying the vaccine. He never informed the appropriate organs of the Venezuelan government that his group was planning to carry out a vaccination campaign, as he was legally required to do. Neither he nor any other member of the expedition, including Chagnon and the other anthropologists, has ever explained why that vaccine was used, despite the evidence that it actually caused or at a minimum greatly exacerbated the fatal epidemic. Once the measles epidemic took off, closely following the vaccinations with Edmonson B, the members of the research team refused to provide any medical assistance to the sick and dying Yanomami, on explicit orders from Neel. He insisted to his colleagues that they were only there to observe and record the epidemic, and that they must stick strictly to their roles as scientists, not provide medical help. All this is bad enough, but the probable truth that emerges, by implication, from Tierney's documentation is more chilling. There was, it turns out, a compelling theoretical motive for Neel to want to observe an epidemic of measles, or comparable "contact" disease, or at least an outbreak virtually indistinguishable from the real thing-precisely the effect that the vaccine he chose was known to cause-and to produce one for this purpose if necessary. This motive emerges from Teirney's documentation of Neel's extreme eugenic theories and his documented statements about what he was hoping to find among the Yanomami, interpreted against the background of his long association with the Atomic Energy Commission's secret experiments on human subjects. Neel believed that "natural" human society (as it existed everywhere before the advent of large-scale a gricultural societies and contemporary states with their vast populations) consisted of small, genetically isolated groups, in which, according to his eugenically slanted genetic theories, dominant genes (specifically, a gene he believed existed for "leadership" or "innate ability") would have a selective advantage, because male carriers of this gene could gain access to a disproportionate share of the available females, thus reproducing their own superior genes more frequently than less "innately able" males. The
result, supposedly, would be the continual upgrading of
the human genetic
stock. Modern mass societies, by contrast, consist of
vast genetically
entropic "herds" in which, he theorized, recessive genes could not
be eliminated by
selective competition and superior leadership genes would be swamped by mass genetic
mediocrity. The political implication of this fascistic eugenics is clearly that society
should be reorganized into small breeding isolates in which genetically
superior males could emerge into dominance, eliminating or subordinating the
male losers in the competition for leadership and women, and amassing harems of
brood females.
A big
problem for this program, however, was the tendency, generally recognized by virtually all qualified
population geneticists and epidemiologists, for small breeding isolates to
lack genetic resistance to diseases incubated in other groups, and their consequent
vulnerability to contact epidemics. For Neel, this meant that the
emergence of genetically superior males in small breeding isolates would tend to be
undercut and neutralized by epidemic
diseases to which they would be genetically vulnerable, while
the supposedly
genetically entropic mass societies of modern democratic states,
the
antitheses
of Neel's ideal alpha-male-dominated groups, would be better
adapted for developing
genetic immunity to such "contact" diseases. It is known that Neel, virtually alone among contemporary
geneticists, rejected the genetic (and historical) evidence for the
vulnerability of genetically isolated groups to diseases introduced through
contact from other populations. It is possible that he thought that genetically
superior members of such groups might prove to have differential levels of immunity
and thus higher rates of survival to imported diseases. In such a case, such
exogenous epidemics, despite the enormous losses of general population they
inflict, might actually be shown to increase the relative proportion of genetically
superior individuals to the total
population, and thus be consistent with Neel's eugenic program.
However this may have been, Tierney's
well-documented account, in its entirety, strongly supports the conclusion that the
epidemic was in all probabilty deliberately caused as an experiment
designed to produce scientific support for Neel's eugenic theory. This remains
only an inference in the present state of our knowledge: there is no "smoking
gun" in the form of a written text or recorded speech by Neel. It is nevertheless
the only explanation that makes sense of a number of otherwise inexplicable
facts, including Neel's known interest in observing an epidemic in a small
isolated group for which detailed records of genetic and genealogical relations
were available, his otherwise inexplicable selection of a virulent vaccine
known to produce effects virtually identical with the disease itself, his
behavior once the epidemic had started (insisting on allowing it to run its course
unhindered by medical assistance while meticulously documenting its
progress and the genealogical relations of those who perished and those who
survived) and his own obdurate silence, until his death in February, as to why he
carried out the vaccination program in the first place, and above all with
the lethally dangerous vaccine.
The
same conclusion is reinforced by considering the objectives of the anthropological research carried
out by Chagnon under Neel's initial direction and continued support. Chagnon's
work has been consistently directed toward portraying Yanomami society as
exactly the kind of originary human society envisioned by Neel, with dominant
males (the most frequent killers) having the most wives or sexual partners and
offspring. If this pristine, eugenically optimal society could be shown to
survive a contact epidemic with its
structure
of dominant male polygynists essentially intact, regardless
of quantitatively
serious population losses, Neel might plausibly be able to argue
that his eugenic social
vision was vindicated. If the epidemic was indeed produced as an experiment, either wholly or in
part, the genetic studies on the
correlation of
blood group samples and genealogies carried out by Chagnon
and some of his
students thus formed integral parts of this massive, and massively
fatal, human experiment. As another reader of Tierney's ms
commented, Mr. Tierney's analysis is a case study of the dangers in science of
the uncontrolled ego, of lack of respect for life, and of greed and
self-indulgence. It is a further extraordinary revelation of malicious and
perverted work conducted under the aegis of the Atomic Energy
Commission. Tierney's revelations begin, but
do not end, with the 1968 epidemic. There are many more episodes and sub-plots,
almost equally awful, to his narrative of the antics of anthropologists among
the Yanomami. Enough has been said
by this time,
however, for you to see that the Association is going to have
to make some
collective response to this book, both to the facts it documents
and the probable
conclusions it implies.There will be a storm in the media, and another in the general scholarly
community, and no doubt several within anthropology itself. We must be ready. Tierney
devotes much of the book to a critique of Napoleon Chagnon's work (and
actions). He makes clear Chagnon has faithfully striven, in his ethnographic and
theoretical accounts of the Yanomami, to represent them as conforming to
Neel's ideas about the Hobbesian savagery of "natural" human societies , and
how this constitutes the natural selective context for the rise to social
dominance and reproductive advantage of males with the gene for
"leadership" or "innate ability" (thus Chagnon's emphasis on Yanomami "fierceness" and
propensity for chronic warfare, and the supposed statistical tendency for men who
kill more enemies to have more female sexual/reproductive partners).
He
documents how all these aspects of Chagnon's account of the Yanomami are based
on false, non-existent or misinterpreted data. In other words, Chagnon's
main claims about Yanomami society, the ones that have been so much heralded by
sociobiologists and other partisans of his work, namely that men who
kill more reproduce more and have more female partners, and that such men become
the dominant leaders of their communities, are simply not true. Thirdly and
most troublingly, he reports that Chagnon has not stopped with cooking and
re-cooking his data on conflict but has actually attempted to manufacture the
phenomenon itself, actually fomenting conflicts between Yanomami communities, not
once but repeatedly.
In his
film work with Asch, for example, Chagnon induced Yanomami
to enact fights
and aggressive behavior for Asch's camera, sometimes
building whole
artificial villages as "sets" for the purpose, which were presented
as spontaneous slices
of Yanomami life unaffected by the presence of the anthropologists.
Some of these unavowedly
artificial scenarios, however,
actually turned into real conflicts, partly as a result of
Chagnon's policy
of giving vast amounts
of presents to the villages that agreed to put on the docu-drama, which distorted their
relations with their neighbors in ways that encouraged outbreaks of raiding.
In sum, most of the Yanomami conflicts that Chagnon documents, that are the
basis of his interpretation of Yanomami society as a neo-Hobbesian system of
endemic warfare, were caused directly or indirectly by himself: a fact he
invariably neglects to report. This is not just a matter of bad ethnography
or unreflexive theorizing: Yanomami were maimed and killed in these
conflicts, and whole communities were disrupted to the point of fission and
flight.(Brian Ferguson has also documented some of this story, but Tierney adds much
new evidence). As a general point, it is clear that Chagnon's whole
Yanomami oeuvre is more radically continuous with Neel's eugenic theories, and his
unethical approach to experimentation on human subjects, than appears simply from
a reading of Chagnon's works by themselves. Chagnon is not the only
anthropologist mentioned in Tierney's narrative. Some of his students, like Hames and
Good, are also dealt with (not so
unfavorably).
The
French anthropologist, Jaques Lizot, also gets a chapter. He
has had nothing to
do with Neel or Chagnon (in fact has been a trenchant and cogent critic of their work), but he has
an Achilles heel of his own in the form of a harem of Yanomami boys that he
keeps, and showers with presents in exchange for sexual favors (he has also been
known to resort to young girls when boys were unavailable). On the sexual front,
there are also passing references to
Chagnon
himself demanding that villagers bring him girls for
sex. There is still more, in the form
of collusion by Neel and Chagnon with sinister Venezuelan politicians
attempting to gain control of Yanomami lands for illegal gold mining
concessions, with the anthropologists providing "cover" for the illegal mine
developer as a "naturalist" collaborating with the anthropological researchers, in
exchange for the politician's guaranteeing continuing access to the
Indians for the anthropologists. This nightmarish story
-a real anthropological heart of darkness beyond the
imagining of even a Josef Conrad (though not, perhaps, a Josef Mengele)--will be seen (rightly in
our view) by the public, as well as most anthropologists, as putting the
whole discipline on trial. As another reader of the galleys put it, This book
should shake anthropology to its very foundations. It should cause the
field to understand how the corrupt and depraved protagonists could have
spread their poison for so
long while they were accorded great respect
throughout the Western World and generations of undergraduates received their
lies as the introductory substance of anthropology. This should never be
allowed to happen again.
We venture to predict that this reaction is fairly representative of the response that will follow the publication of Tierney's book and the New Yorker excerpt. Coming as they will less than two months before the San Francisco meetings, these publication events virtually guarantee that the Yanomami scandal will be at its height at the Meetings. This should give an optimal opportunity for the Association to mobilize the membership and the institutional structure to deal with it. The writers, both emeritus members of the Committee for Human Rights, have arranged with Barbara Johnston, the present chair of the CfHR, that the open Forum put on by the Committee this year be devoted to the Yanomami case. This seemed the best way to provide a venue for a public airing of the scandal, given that the program is of course already closed. With Johnston's consent, we have invited Patrick Tierney to come to the Meetings and be present at the Forum. He has accepted. He has also agreed to have a copy of the book ms sent to Johnston, for the use of the CfHR. We have also tentatively agreed with Barbara that the CfHR should draft a press release, which the President (either or both of you) could (if you and the Executive Board approve) circulate to the media. There are obviously human rights aspects of this case that make the CfHR appropriate, but the Ethics Committee, the Society for Latin American Anthropology, and the Association for Latina and Latino Anthropology should also be notified and involved, separately or jointly. These obviously do not exhaust the possibilities--- a lot of thought and planning remains to be done. Our point is simply that the time to start is now. ------- End of Forwarded Message ______________________________ Donna J. Haraway History of Consciousness Dept. University of California at Santa Cruz Santa Cruz, CA 95064 fax: 831-459- ++++++++++++++++=End of message that was posted on PSN================ |