A washingtonpost.com article from aojaluot@nettilinja.fi (fwd)

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Tue, 20 Feb 2001 10:55:56 -0500 (EST)
From: register@washingtonpost.com
Subject: A washingtonpost.com article from aojaluot@nettilinja.fi

You have been sent this message from aojaluot@nettilinja.fi as a courtesy of 
the Washington Post (http://www.washingtonpost.com).

I haven't seen this on the WSN yet.

regards Asko Ojaluoto

To view the entire article, go to 
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A46808-2000Dec9.html

Jungle Fever


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.

But by the time Darkness in El Dorado was published, it was alr!
eady in a second, revised edition, one that qualified some of Tierney's more 
sensational claims in the galley proofs of "The Outbreak." Tierney is an 
investigative journalist, and critical aspects of his original indictment of 
Neel took the form of well-documented speculation, leaving plenty of space for 
the heated exchanges by e-mail and Internet that ensued among respectable 
scholars who for the most part hadn't read the book. These hasty incriminations 
and recriminations created their own versions of what Neel had done--and, 
accordingly, criticisms of Tierney that had nothing to do with what he had 
said. Still, it became clear enough that Neel could not have originated or 
spread genuine measles by the vaccine he administered. Tierney then revised the 
conclusion of the relevant chapter in the published version, making the vaccine 
issue more problematic--and to that extent, the chapter self-contradictory. 
Other issues, such as whether Neel was doing some kind of experiment th!
at got out of hand, remain unresolved as of this writing.

The brouhaha in cyberspace seemed to help Chagnon's reputation as much as 
Neel's, for in the fallout from the latter's defense many academics also took 
the opportunity to make tendentious arguments on Chagnon's behalf. Against 
Tierney's brief that Chagnon acted as an anthro-provocateur of certain 
conflicts among the Yanomami, one anthropologist solemnly demonstrated that 
warfare was endemic and prehistoric in the Amazon. Such feckless debate is the 
more remarkable because most of the criticisms of Chagnon rehearsed by Tierney 
have been circulating among anthropologists for years, and the best evidence 
for them can be found in Chagnon's writings going back to the 1960s.

The '60s were the longest decade of the 20th century, and Vietnam was the 
longest war. In the West, the war prolonged itself in arrogant perceptions of 
the weaker peoples as instrumental means of the global projects of the 
stronger. In the human science!
s, the war persists in an obsessive search for power in every nook and cranny 
of our society and history, and an equally strong postmodern urge to 
"deconstruct" it. For his part, Chagnon writes popular textbooks that describe 
his ethnography among the Yanomami in the 1960s in terms of gaining control 
over people.

Demonstrating his own power has been not only a necessary condition of 
Chagnon's fieldwork, but a main technique of investigation. In a scientific 
reprise of a losing military tactic, he also attempted to win the hearts and 
minds of the people by a calculated redistribution of material wealth, and in 
so doing, managed to further destabilize the countryside and escalate the 
violence. Tierney quotes a prominent Yanomami leader: "Chagnon is fierce. 
Chagnon is very dangerous. He has his own personal war." Meanwhile, back in 
California a defender of Chagnon in the e-mail battles has lauded him as 
"perhaps the world's most famous living social anthropologist." The Kurtzian!
 narrative of how Chagnon achieved the political status of a monster in 
Amazonia and a hero in academia is truly the heart of Darkness in El Dorado. 
While some of Tierney's reporting has come under fire, this is nonetheless a 
revealing book, with a cautionary message that extends well beyond the field of 
anthropology. It reads like an allegory of American power and culture since 
Vietnam.

"I soon learned that I had to become very much like the Yanomami to be able to 
get along with them on their terms: sly, aggressive, and intimidating," Chagnon 
writes in his famous study Yanomamo: The Fierce People. This was not the usual 
stance toward fieldwork in the 1960s, when the anthropologist already enjoyed 
the protection of the colonial masters. Chagnon was working in the Amazonian 
Wild West, populated by small, independent and mobile communities in uneasy 
relations of alliance and hostility that could readily escalate to death by 
poisoned arrow. Moreover, when Chagnon began to collab!
orate with biological scientists, his fieldwork became highly peripatetic 
itself, and highly demanding of the Yanomami's compliance. By 1974, he had 
visited 40 to 50 villages in less than as many months, collecting blood, urine 
and genealogies--a tour punctuated by stints of filmmaking with the noted 
cineaste Timothy Asch. Hitting-and-running, Chagnon did fieldwork in the mode 
of a military campaign.

This helps explain why many other anthropologists who have done longer and more 
sedentary work in particular Yanomami villages, including former students and 
colleagues of Chagnon, have disavowed his one-sided depiction of the Yanomami 
as "a fierce people." "The biggest misnomer in the history of anthropology," 
said anthropologist Kenneth Good of Chagnon's use of that phrase in the title 
of his popular textbook. 

Good and other Yanomami specialists make it clear that the supreme accolade of 
Yanomami personhood--the term waiteri that Chagnon translates as "fierce 
people"--involve!
s a subtle combination of valor, humor and generosity. All of these, moreover, 
are reciprocal relations. One should return blow for blow, and Chagnon is 
hardly the only male anthropologist to get into dust-ups with Yanomami 
warriors. But according to his own account, while Chagnon readily joined the 
negative game of holding one's ground, he knowingly brought contempt on himself 
by refusing to be generous with food. Continuous food-sharing is a basic 
criterion of humanity for Yanomami, the material foundation of their sociality.

Needing blood and information quickly, Chagnon would announce his visits to a 
village in the guise of a Yanomami warrior: dressed only in loincloth, body 
painted red, feathered--and carrying a shotgun. His field kits have been known 
to contain chemical mace and an electric stun gun. He tried to cultivate a 
reputation for dangerous magical power by engaging in narcotic shamanistic 
seances. When someone stole from him, he got children to inform on the th!
ief; then he returned the favor by carrying off the latter's hammock until he 
got his stuff back. But when it came to the reciprocity of food sharing, he 
protested that he could not feed the whole village. On the contrary, he 
disgusted curious Yanomami by telling them the canned frankfurters he was 
eating were animal penises, and peanut butter likewise was just what it looked 
like. Unselfconsciously, he acknowledges that his unwillingness to share food 
generously or widely made him "despicable in their eyes."

"The next morning," he writes, "I began the delicate task of identifying 
everyone by name and numbering them with indelible ink to make sure that 
everyone had only one name and identity." Chagnon inscribed these indelible 
identification numbers on people's arms--barely 20 years after World War II.

But he indeed had a delicate problem. He badly needed to know the people's 
names and their genealogies. This information was indispensable to the AEC 
biological studies. He wa!
s also engaged in an absurdist anthropological project, which he took 
seriously, of finding ancestor-based lineage institutions among a people who by 
taboo could not know, could not trace and could not name their ancestors--or 
for that matter, could not bear to hear their own names. To utter people's 
names in their presence is the gravest offense, a horror: "In battle they shout 
out the name because they are enemies." As for the dead, they are completely 
excluded from Yanomami society, ritually as well as verbally, as a necessary 
condition of the continued existence of the living. But for the sake of 
science, Chagnon had to know--and so set in motion an opposition between their 
humanity and his epistemology that developed progressively through his 
professorial career.

Chagnon invented draconian devices for getting around the name taboos. He 
exploited animosities within the village to induce some people to tell on 
others. He "bribed" (his quotation marks) children to disclose !
names when their elders were not around. Most productive of all, he went to 
enemy villages to get people's genealogies, and then confirmed the information 
by seeing if they got angry when he recited the names to their faces. By the 
early 1970s Chagnon had collected some 10,000 Yanomami names, including 7,000 
names of the dead. It must have caused a lot of pain and hate.

Collecting names and blood was destabilizing not only for the insults it 
required, but because Chagnon was buying these with large payments of machetes, 
axes, utensils and other steel trade goods. These were prize objects of 
Yanomami desire, but not simply because of their economic advantages. The 
history of native Americans is too often written as if there had to be a white 
man behind every red man. Incorporating the foreign technology in their own 
cultural order, the Yanomami became the authors of its distinctive historical 
effects. They placed imported steel in the highest category of their own 
hierarchy of!
 values, together with their most precious things, a position to which the 
foreign objects were entitled because of their analogous associations with 
marvelous powers--in this case, European powers. Surely steel was useful, but 
its utility was transcendent, beyond the ways Yanomami knew of making or 
controlling things. And as signs and means of power, the foreign goods were 
engaged in the fundamental transactions of a native Yanomami system of alliance 
and competition. They were materials of feasting, marriage payments, trading, 
making alliances, attracting followers, sorcerizing and much more. More than 
producing food, trade goods produced and reproduced Yanomami culture, hence 
every kind of satisfaction the Yanomami know. Accordingly, the foreign goods 
themselves became objects of native competition--as did their human sources, 
notably Napoleon Chagnon.

Chagnon was not the only outsider whose distribution of steel goods plunged him 
in a maelstrom of Yanomami violence, altho!
ugh it's doubtful that any other anthropologist became so involved in 
participant-instigation. "The distribution of trade goods," as Chagnon observed 
early on, "would always anger people who did not receive something they wanted, 
and it was useless to try and work any longer in the village." Yet moving could 
only generate further contention, now among the villages so favored and 
disfavored by Chagnon's presence. Hostilities thus tracked the always-changing 
geopolitics of Chagnon-wealth, including even pre-emptive attacks to deny 
others access to him. As one Yanomami man recently related to Tierney: "Shaki 
[Chagnon] promised us many things, and that's why other communities were 
jealous and began to fight against us."

Movie-making was an additional mode of provocation, especially when Chagnon and 
Timothy Asch used wealth to broker alliances among previously hostile groups 
for that purpose. The allies were then disposed to cement their newfound amity 
by combining in magical or a!
ctual raids on Yanomami third parties. Deaths from disease were also known to 
follow filming, prompting Tierney to observe that Chagnon and Asch were being 
awarded prizes for "the greatest snuff films of all time."

Over time, the demands on Chagnon's person and goods became more importuning 
and aggressive, to which he would respond with an equal and opposite display of 
machismo. ("He glared at me with naked hatred in his eyes, and I glared back at 
him in the same fashion.") Soon enough he had good reason to fear for his life, 
by magical as well as physical attack--including the time when some erstwhile 
Yanomami friends shot arrows into an effigy of him. Yet Chagnon also knew how 
to mobilize his own camp. Early on, he fostered what was to become a life-long 
sociology of conflicts whose "basic logic," as Tierney put it, saw "Yanomami 
villages opposed to Chagnon attacking those villages that received him."

By 1976, however, Chagnon's ethnography had cost him official anthropolo!
gical support in Caracas, and for nearly a decade he was unable to secure a 
permit to resume fieldwork. In 1985, when he did return, in the company of one 
of his students, the latter reported they were greeted by a crowd of Indians 
shouting the Yanomami version of "Chagnon go home!" In 1989 Chagnon was again 
kept out because the law required that foreign researchers collaborate with 
Venezuelan scientists, and, as he complained to a missionary whose help he 
sought, "the local anthropologists do not like me." Bereft of legitimate 
support, Chagnon returned in 1990 under the dubious aegis of Cecelia Matos, the 
mistress of then-president of Venezuela, and one Charles Brewer Carias, a 
self-proclaimed naturalist, known opponent of Indian land rights and 
entrepreneur with a reputation for illegal gold mining. The trio had concocted 
a scheme to create a Yanomami reserve and scientific biosphere in 6,000 square 
miles of the remote Siapa Highlands, to be directed by Brewer and Chagnon an!
d subsidized by a foundation set up by Matos. According to Tierney, Brewer had 
his eye on rich tin resources in Yanomami territory. In an intensified 
repetition of a now-established pattern, the huge amount of goods that military 
aircraft ferried in for the project helped set off the bloodiest war in 
Yanomami history, with Chagnon's people pitted against a coalition of Yanomami 
opponents, directed by a charismatic leader of their own.

In three years, the scheme collapsed. Matos was eventually indicted for 
corruption, in part for her role in commandeering military support for the 
reserve caper, and she remains a fugitive from Venezuelan justice. In September 
1993, in the wake of huge protests that followed from their appointment as 
administrators of the reserve, Chagnon and Brewer were expelled from Yanomami 
territory by judicial decree. (Among the protesters were the 300 Indians 
representing 19 tribes at the first Amazon Indian Congress, who took to the 
streets against Chagno!
n and Brewer in the town of Porto Ayachuco.) An army colonel escorted Chagnon 
to Caracas and advised him to leave the country, which he did forthwith.

In America anyhow, he suffered no such indignities. On the contrary, the more 
unwanted Chagnon became in the Venezuelan jungle, the more celebrated he was in 
American science. The day before his last expulsion from Yanomami land, the New 
York Academy of Sciences held a special meeting devoted to his work.

In the course of Chagnon's career, the further away he got from any sort of 
anthropological humanism, the more he became a natural scientist. (This could 
be a lesson for us all.) Whatever the accusations of ferocity and inhumanity 
made against his ethnography, he increasingly justified it by claims of 
empirical-scientific value. So he was able to answer his growing chorus of 
critics by the scientific assertion that they were "left-wing anthropologists," 
"anti-Darwinian romantics" and other such practitioners of the "political!
ly correct." One might say that Chagnon made a scientific value of the 
belligerence in which he was entangled, elevating it to the status of the 
sociobiological theory that human social evolution positively selects for 
homicidal violence. Whatever the other consolations of this theory, it brought 
Chagnon the massive support of prominent sociobiologists. The support remained 
constant right through the fiasco that attended his attempt in 1988 to prove 
the reproductive (hence genetic) advantages of killing in the pages of Science.

The truth claims of the argument presented by Chagnon in Science may have had 
the shortest half-life of any study ever published in that august journal. 
Chagnon set out to demonstrate statistically that known killers among the 
Yanomami had more than twice as many wives and three times as many children as 
non-killers. This would prove that humans (i.e., men) do indeed compete for 
reproductive advantages, as sociobiologists claimed, and homicidal violenc!
e is a main means of the competition. Allowing the further (and fatuous) 
assumption that the Yanomami represent a primitive stage of human evolution, 
Chagnon's findings would support the theory that violence has been 
progressively inscribed in our genes.

But Chagnon's statistics were hardly out before Yanomami specialists 
dismembered them by showing, among other things, that designated killers among 
this people have not necessarily killed, nor have designated fathers 
necessarily fathered. Many more Yanomami are known as killers than there are 
people killed because the Yanomami accord the ritual status of man-slayer to 
sorcerers who do death magic and warriors who shoot arrows into already wounded 
or dead enemies. Anyhow, it is a wise father who knows his own child (or vice 
versa) in a society that practices wife-sharing and adultery as much as the 
Yanomami do. Archkillers, besides, are likely to father fewer children inasmuch 
as they are prime targets for vengeance, a possibi!
lity Chagnon conveniently omitted from his statistics by not including dead 
fathers of living children. Nor did his calculations allow for the effects of 
age, shamanistic attainments, headship, hunting ability or trading skill--all 
of which are known on ethnographic grounds to confer marital advantages for 
Yanomami men.

Supporters of Chagnon, and lately Chagnon himself, have defended his 
sociobiology by referring to several other studies showing that men who 
incarnate the values of their society, whatever these values may be, have the 
most sex and children. Even granting this to be true--except for our society, 
where the rich get richer but the poor get children--this claim only 
demonstrates that the genetic impulses of a people are under the control of 
their culture rather than the other way around. For dominant cultural values 
vary from society to society, even as they may change rapidly in any given 
society. There is no universal selective pressure for violence or any othe!
r genetic disposition, nor could genes track the behavioral values varying 
rapidly and independently of them. It follows that what is strongly selected 
for in human beings is the ability to realize innate biological dispositions in 
a variety of meaningful ways, by a great number of cultural means. Violence may 
be inherently satisfying, but we humans can make war on the playing fields of 
Eton, by sorcery, by desecrating the flag or a thousand other ways of "kicking 
butt," including writing book reviews. What evolution has allowed us is the 
symbolic capacity to sublimate our impulses in all the kinds of cultural forms 
that human history has known.

In time, Chagnon became a legend of ferocity in the Amazon. Representations of 
him grew more monstrous in proportion to the scale of the struggles he 
provoked, and even his trade goods were poisoned with the memories of death. 
Tierney reports that shamans now portray his cameras, guns, helicopters and 
blood-collecting equipment as mac!
hinery of black magic, the products of a factory of xawara wakeshi, the deadly 
smoke of disease.

Yet in America, the scientific doctors accord the sociobiological gases 
emanating from this same technology the highest esteem, worthy of hours and 
hours of inhalation in the rooms of the New York Academy of Sciences. On 
college campuses across the country, Chagnon's name is a dormitory word. His 
textbooks have sold in the millions. In the huge undergraduate courses that 
pass for education in major universities, his prize-winning films are able to 
hold late adolescents spellbound by primitivizing, hence, eternalizing, their 
own fascination with drugs, sex and violence. America. 



Marshall Sahlins is the Charles F. Grey Distinguished Service Professor of 
Anthropology emeritus at the University of Chicago. He is the author of the 
just- published essay collection "Culture in Practice."