The Napoleonic Invasion (The Yanomami Controversy)
nonAs the summer of love was winding down and Jane Goodall’s first reports of chimpanzee warfare were exploding into public consciousness, Napoleon Chagnon suddenly became the world’s most famous living anthropologist with the publication of Yanomamö: The Fierce People. The year 1968 was a good one to come out with a dashing anthropological adventure yarn claiming to prove that warfare is ancient and integral to human nature.
The year began with the “velvet revolution” in Prague and the TET offensive in Vietnam. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s worst dream came true in Memphis, Robert Kennedy was felled on a Los Angeles stage, and blood and chaos ran in the streets of Chicago. Richard Nixon slinked into the White House, Charles Manson and his lost followers plotted mayhem in the dry hills above Malibu, and the Beatles put the final touches on The White Album. The year ended with three American astronauts, for the first time ever, gazing back upon this fragile blue planet floating in eternal silence, praying for peace.27
Given all that, perhaps it’s not surprising that Chagnon’s account of the “chronic warfare” of the “innately violent” Yanomami struck a public nerve. Desperate to understand human murderousness, the public lapped up his depictions of the day-to-day brutality of people he described as our “contemporary ancestors.” Now in its fifth edition, Yanomamö: The Fierce People is still the all-time bestseller in anthropology, with millions of copies sold to university students alone. Chagnon’s books and films have figured prominently in the education of several generations of anthropologists, most of whom accepted his claims to have demonstrated the inherent ferocity of our species.
But Chagnon’s research should be approached with caution, as he employs a host of dubious techniques. Ferguson found, for example, that Chagnon conflates common murder with war in his statistics, as does Pinker in his discussion of the Gebusi. But more importantly, Chagnon fails to account for the effects of his own disruptive, rather Hemingway-esque presence among the people he studied. According to Patrick Tierney, author of Darkness in El Dorado, “The wars that made Chagnon and the Yanomami famous—the ones he wrote about with such relish in The Fierce People—began on November 14, 1964, the same day the anthropologist arrived with his shotguns, outboard motor, and a canoe full of steel goods to give away.”28 Tierney cites Chagnon’s own doctoral thesis, showing that in the thirteen years prior to his arrival, no Namowei (a large branch of the Yanomami) had been killed in warfare. But during his thirteen-month residence among them, ten Yanomami died in a conflict between the Namowei and the Patanowateri (another branch).
Kenneth Good, an anthropologist who first went to live with the Yanomami as one of Chagnon’s graduate students and stayed on for twelve years, described Chagnon as “a hit-and-run anthropologist who comes into villages with armloads of machetes to purchase cooperation for his research. Unfortunately,” wrote Good, “he creates conflict and division wherever he goes.”29
Part of Chagnon’s disruptiveness no doubt resulted from his blustery, macho self-conception, but his research goals may have been an even bigger source of problems. He wanted to collect genealogical information from the Yanomami. This is a tricky proposition, to say the least, given that the Yanomami consider it disrespectful to speak names out loud. Naming the dead requires breaking one of the strongest taboos in their culture. Juan Finkers, who lived among them for twenty-five years, says, “To name the dead, among the Yanomami, is a grave insult, a motive of division, fights, and wars.”30
Anthropologist Marshall Sahlins described Chagnon’s research as “an absurdist anthropological project,” trying to work out ancestor-based lineages “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.”31
Chagnon dealt with his hosts’ taboo by playing one village off against another. In his own account, he: began taking advantage of local arguments and animosities in selecting my informants…. traveling to other villages to check the genealogies, picking villages that were on strained terms with the people about whom I wanted information. I would then return to my base camp and check with local informants the accuracy of the new information. If the informants became angry when I mentioned the new names I acquired from the unfriendly group, I was almost certain that the information was accurate…. I occasionally hit a name that put the informant into a rage, such as that of a dead brother or sister that other informants had not reported.32
To recap:
The word anthro has entered the vocabulary of the Yanomami. It signifies “a powerful nonhuman with deeply disturbed tendencies and wild eccentricities.”33 Since 1995, Chagnon has been legally barred from returning to the lands of the Yanomami.
When anthropologist Leslie Sponsel lived among the Yanomami in the mid-1970s, he saw no warfare, just one physical fight, and heard a few loud marital disputes. “To my surprise,” writes Sponsel, “people in [my] village and three neighboring villages were simply nothing like ‘the fierce people’ described by Chagnon.” Sponsel had brought along a copy of Chagnon’s book, with its photos of fighting Yanomami warriors, as a way to explain the sort of work he was doing. “Although some of the men were absorbed by the
pictures,” he writes, “I was asked not to show them to children as they provided examples of undesirable behavior. These Yanomami,” Sponsel concluded, “did not value fierceness in any positive way.”34
For his part, in over a decade living among them, Good witnessed a single outbreak of war. He cut his association with Chagnon eventually, having concluded the emphasis on Yanomami violence was “contrived and distorted.” Good later wrote that Chagnon’s book had “blown the subject out of any sane proportion,” arguing that “what he had done was tantamount to saying that New Yorkers are muggers and murderers.”