-Caveat Lector-
http://salon.com/books/feature/2000/09/28/yanomamo/print.html
Did scientists start a deadly epidemic to prove that humanity is
innately violent -- or are they victims of politics?
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By Juno Gregory
Sep. 28, 2000 | In an extraordinary "open letter" to the American
Anthropological Association last week, Terence Turner of Cornell
University and Leslie Sponsel of the University of Hawaii alerted the
association -- and hundreds of participants on several e-mail lists
who received the forwarded message -- to the upcoming publication of
"Darkness in El Dorado: How Scientists and Journalists Devastated the
Amazon," a book by investigative journalist Patrick Tierney. Turner
and Sponsel grimly informed the AAA that the book was an "impending
scandal" that would "arouse intense indignation" in the public mind.
There was certainly indignation to spare in the letter itself: "In
its scale, ramifications, and sheer criminality and corruption [the
scandal] is unparalleled in the history of Anthropology."
Tierney's book, which is to be extensively excerpted in the New
Yorker in early October, contains an extensive catalog of astonishing
-- and, many say, incredible -- allegations against several highly
regarded anthropologists who conducted detailed ethnographic studies
in the jungle highlands of Venezuela and Brazil over the past 35
years. Most explosively, Tierney alleges that:
* American geneticist James Neel performed a monstrous
biological experiment on the Yanomamo Indian tribe by deliberately
introducing a dangerous measles virus, thereby causing hundreds of
deaths.
* Napoleon Chagnon, perhaps America's most famous
anthropologist, participated in Neel's epidemiological experiment,
staged tribal ceremonies and violence for documentary cameras, fudged
scientific data and tried to carve out a personal kingdom within the
Yanomamo reserve.
If true, these allegations would not only call these men's personal
integrity into question but undermine the validity of their research,
which has been influential in framing some popular assumptions about
human evolution and behavior. Chagnon's work, in particular, has been
widely cited as supporting the view that men are the engines of
evolutionary improvement because they are inherently violent
competitors for sexual access. In this view, the most aggressive
"winners" in prehistory had the most sex with the most women, and
passed on their superior fighting genes to the largest number of
children. As a corollary, this theory says that our evolution was
driven by hierarchical processes, so that the most "natural" human
social system is one of dominance rather than cooperation.
The political implications of such views are obvious, and Neel and
Chagnon have long come under fire because of the uses that could be
-- and, in Chagnon's case, have been -- made of their work. Politics,
Chagnon and his defenders say, is what is really behind Tierney's
book and Turner and Sponsel's letter to the AAA. "The Turner letter
is transparently an attempt to destroy a man's career and plow salt
into the ruins," says journalist Andrew Brown, author of "The Darwin
Wars." Chagnon himself called Turner and Sponsel's letter "extremely
offensive" and said that Tierney, Turner and Sponsel have already
accused him of many of these crimes, in print and verbally at
academic meetings, repeatedly over the past decade. "This is just a
more elaborate extension of their long vendetta against me," he said.
Chagnon, for his part, has not been shy about returning the salvos
lobbed at him over the years. He portrays his professional enemies as
"leftists" and "Marxists," politically correct bleeding hearts who
are out to suppress the truth simply because they find it
unpalatable. While Chagnon's critics can boast overwhelmingly higher
numbers (including most Indian organizations, human rights groups,
missionaries, environmentalists, researchers and government officials
in Venezuela), Chagnon has a coterie of impressive, high-profile
defenders and allies in the scientific community. Most of them
declined to talk on the record, but their contempt for Chagnon's
accusers was visceral. Turner, one Chagnon partisan told me, is a
"swirling sophist."
Chagnon also has many sympathizers in the major media, perhaps
because of the growing popularity of the cultural views that his
research supports. In short, Chagnon seems to have considerably more
famous firepower on his side, and that adds up to a significant
public relations advantage in the United States and Britain. I soon
discovered, when I began asking questions, that many of Chagnon's
friends are certain, even before they have read Tierney's book, that
the charges against Chagnon, Neel and other anthropologists will
prove to be merely "ugly politics." They confidently frame the
conflict as Chagnon's manly "hard evidence" against his softheaded
critics' "emotional assertions."
So, are Tierney's red-hot allegations about Neel and Chagnon legitimate?
Tierney's most shocking suggestion -- played for all it was worth by
Turner and Sponsel -- is that in 1968, Atomic Energy Commission
geneticist Neel, his protege Chagnon and a respected Venezuelan
physician named Marcel Roche deliberately inoculated a sample
population of Yanomami Indians with Edmonston B, a dangerous and
totally inappropriate live-virus measles vaccine. Coincidentally with
the vaccinations, and following the researchers' path, a full-blown
measles epidemic broke out among the Yanomami. Tierney quotes several
people who hint darkly that an epidemic might have been exactly what
Neel was seeking.
Neel, who died in February, considered himself, as he titled his 1994
autobiography, a "Physician to the Gene Pool." He thought that modern
culture, with its supportive interventions on behalf of the weak, was
"dysgenic." It had strayed too far from humankind's original
"population structures": small, relatively isolated tribal groups
where men competed with one another -- violently -- for access to
women. In these societies, Neel assumed, the best fighters would have
the most wives and children, and pass on more of their genetic "index
of innate ability" to the next generation, leading to a continual
upgrading of the quality of the gene pool. But among modern humans,
Neel wrote, the "loss of headmanship as a feature of our culture, as
well as the weakening of other vehicles of natural selection, is
clearly a minus."
Tierney never establishes what definitive data he thinks Neel's tiny
research team could have hoped to obtain in the midst of a
widespread, out-of-control epidemic. But there were things Neel would
have been anxious to discover about Yanomami resistance to disease.
Historically, small and isolated populations tend to become more and
more susceptible to "contact diseases" from outsiders, and all those
generations of genetic improvement might go for naught if a village
could be wiped out in a matter of days by an intruding microbe. On
the other hand, if the "best" males of Neel's ideal tribal societies
also had better resistance to disease, an epidemic would be likely to
further concentrate their superior genes.
Susan Lindee, of the Department of the History and Sociology of
Science at the University of Pennsylvania, reviewed Neel's 1968 field
notes on the epidemic immediately after hearing about Turner and
Sponsel's letter to the AAA. "Neel was a Cold Warrior deluxe, and an
elitist," she wrote in an e-mail summarizing her findings. He was
"confident about his hierarchical rankings of races, sexes,
civilizations, fields of knowledge production, and forms of social
organization." She suggested that his confidence may even have
extended to seeing the Yanomami as "primitives" who could be
legitimately used for research into the conditions of human evolution.
But her review of Neel's notes indicates that the outbreak of measles
caught Neel and Chagnon very much by surprise. Tierney himself found
audiotapes in the National Archives, recorded by filmmaker Timothy
Asch during the first days of the epidemic, that show that Neel and
Chagnon were increasingly distressed and puzzled at the astonishing
coincidence of their vaccinations and a virulent outbreak of measles.
Putting Neel's field notes and Tierney's narrative together, it seems
highly unlikely that Neel and Chagnon actually intended to start an
epidemic. But that doesn't mean they didn't start it unintentionally.
By 1968 Edmonston B was considered by most immunization professionals
to be out-of-date. Other, more modern vaccines were available,
vaccines that used much weaker viruses and were cheaper and easier to
administer. Even with an accompanying dose of gamma globulin to
control the antibody response, the Edmonston B vaccine tended to
cause extreme reactions. Without gamma globulin, as Neel himself
wrote in a 1970 article on the epidemic in the American Journal of
Epidemiology, the vaccine reaction was, "in some cases, as severe as
the disease itself among Caucasian children."
But Neel wouldn't have been worried that the Yanomami would come to
any permanent harm if he used the vaccine on them. Lindee stated that
Neel's notes show that he visited the Centers for Disease Control to
discuss the vaccination protocol some months before he went to
Venezuela. Samuel Katz, a Duke University pediatrician and an
acknowledged expert on immunization research and development, posted
several facts about Edmonston B to the e-mail lists and Web sites
discussing the Turner letter, facts that Neel would undoubtedly have
been told when he consulted the CDC. Although some populations'
reactions had been significantly greater with Edmonston B than with
newer, more attenuated vaccines, there had never been any deaths
associated with Edmonston B trials. And, Katz said -- perhaps most
important for Neel -- even among sick and malnourished children in
Nigeria and other underdeveloped countries, "there was never any
transmission of vaccine virus to susceptible contacts."
In spite of Katz's assurances, it seems to me that the simplest
explanation that fits all the documented facts in Tierney's book is
that the live Edmonston B vaccine, contrary to all expectations,
produced at least one transmissible case of measles in the Yanomami.
Evidence pointing in that direction includes Neel's attempt after the
fact to blame the outbreak on a dubious "subclinical" case at Ocama
mission village, and his apparent concern about how the whole matter
might be viewed by history. (The copies of his field notes Lindee
reviewed were in a file marked "Yanomamo-1968-Insurance.") The lone
transmissible case probably occurred among the first group of 40
people Chagnon immunized -- without suppressive gamma globulin
therapy -- at Ocama on Jan. 22, 1968.
Hundreds of Yanomami died of measles in the 1968 epidemic. In his
book, Tierney heavily overstates the possibility of genocidal
conspiracy, and there is certainly no "smoking gun," but I'm not
surprised that Neel felt the need for an "insurance" policy. The
outbreak of a transmissible virus from the live vaccine was not
something he could have anticipated, but using Edmonston B on a
remote Amerindian population in the first place was unwise, and some
of my e-mail correspondents -- who prefer not to be quoted by name --
consider it "ethnocidal" negligence.
Tierney's account of anthropological crimes goes on from there. In
the same year as the measles epidemic, 1968, Chagnon, Neel's young
protege, was about to become famous for a popular and influential
book he published about his earlier experiences among the Amazonian
Indians of Venezuela. "Yanomamo: The Fierce People" sold millions of
copies and has been used extensively in anthropology education ever
since. Chagnon and filmmaker Asch also collaborated on a series of
riveting and award-winning documentaries depicting Yanomami village
life, bizarre hallucinogenic ceremonies and gut-wrenching Stone Age
battles. The Yanomami soon became the best-known tribal people in the
world, and the main thing people knew about them was that they were
extraordinarily violent. Few undergraduates who saw "The Ax Fight"
forgot the ugly thud at the peak of the struggle, apparently the
sound of someone's head being struck with an ax.
Tierney makes a kind of running parable out of the vast amount of
ethnographic filmmaking that went on in the late '60s and early '70s.
The films contributed greatly to Chagnon's growing reputation, and at
the same time portrayed a distorted image of the Yanomami to the
outside world. Tierney reports on an article Asch wrote later that
claimed Chagnon would become "bitter" if Asch tried to film anything
other than aggressive behavior. Asch said that when he urged Chagnon
to film women's activities, Chagnon "whipped around" and asked, "What
makes you think there are any women's activities?"
But Chagnon didn't just edit out peacefulness from his exciting
documentaries on the Yanomami. Many incidents and set pieces were
actively staged, including Chagnon's own dramatic entrance into a
native village. But even when the action was not being overtly
choreographed, the presence of filmmakers and anthropologists
probably altered the Yanomami's behavior. Tierney quotes Asch and
several Yanomami participants in the films who said that it quickly
became clear to the Yanomami that Chagnon would reward them with
intensely desirable steel machetes and cooking pots for displays of
violent behavior and fierce posturing.
Filming also exacerbated tribal tensions, altered the wealth
structure of the society and, perhaps most important of all,
introduced disease. "The protagonists of Chagnon and Asch's most
famous films all met with disaster," Tierney asserts. "Chagnon's
computer printouts, blood samples, I.D. photos, maps and films were
all scientific supports for an American saga in which anthropologists
triumphed over intransigent Indians and the Indians politely died off
camera. Critics who garlanded these pictures really underestimated
the artistry involved. They gave blue ribbons to the greatest snuff
films of all time."
Tierney's tolling of anthropological sin continues in a lengthy
chapter examining Chagnon's most famous and influential scientific
paper, published in 1988. Chagnon burnished his already glowing
reputation in this article in Science, outlining almost perfect
scientific evidence that directly supported his mentor Neel's
theories about human evolution. Based on the vast amounts of
genealogy data and blood samples that he had laboriously collected
from dozens of Yanomami communities, Chagnon announced that he had
discovered an intriguing and statistically significant trend:
Yanomami men who had killed other men tended to have more wives --
and more children -- than those who weren't killers.
This was an extraordinarily important finding. The idea that
murderous violence enhanced Yanomami men's reproductive success
definitively debunked what Chagnon had once called "all the crap
about the Noble Savage." Perhaps, Chagnon's study implied, we really
are an inherently violent and aggressive animal species, constrained
toward peacefulness in our modern lives only by an "unnatural" veneer
of dysgenic civilization. At least that's how many people interpreted
it.
Tierney's book raises convincing and serious questions -- and makes
some flat-footed assertions -- about Chagnon's necessarily intrusive
and divisive research methods, his "checkbook anthropology" and the
effects of his film shoots. He charges that Chagnon's own presence
disrupted traditional cultural values, trade patterns and political
balances of power, so that far more violence followed in his wake
than was present before he arrived. But the questions he raises about
this landmark study are perhaps the most crucial of all. If, in spite
of all the allegations about Chagnon's behavior, he nevertheless
provided valuable, honest and important information about the nature
of human beings, shouldn't he be forgiven for breaking a few eggs on
the way to his historic omelet? So how valid, ultimately, is
Chagnon's most famous contribution to anthropological science?
One major problem Tierney reports, culled from the furious exchanges
in the journal articles that followed Chagnon's article, was that
Chagnon had no objective evidence of the homicides his "killers" had
committed, but based his figures on the number of men who had
undergone "unokaimou," a difficult ritual purification for murder.
But "unokai," as men who had undergone the ritual called themselves,
didn't undertake it solely for causing death in battle. Many
unokaimou were performed for deaths men thought they had caused by
spells, animal surrogates like jaguars or snakes or magical
procedures such as "stealing footprints."
Even when it came to war, often a man did not know for sure if he had
killed anyone, having perhaps only fired an arrow into a melee during
a skirmish. But he would undergo the penance anyway, just to be sure.
Figures on war deaths also showed that many more men claimed to have
killed on their raids than had actually died in battle. In short, the
relationship between actual physical homicide and unokai status in
Chagnon's study was, at best, uncertain. If the men he counted
weren't really murderers, were his conclusions valid?
Perhaps the most critical problem in a study that purported to show
the differential reproductive success of killers -- or at least men
who claimed to be killers -- was that Chagnon deliberately left out
the living children of the men who were dead.
R. Brian Ferguson, an anthropologist at Rutgers University and author
of "Yanomami Warfare: A Political History," thinks this was an
important omission. His examination of the personal histories of a
number of Yanomami war leaders indicated that there is ample reason
to believe that the most warlike men were likely to be killed
themselves, cutting short their reproductive years. Chagnon himself
points out that retaliation and revenge are crucial factors in
Yanomami violence. "Adding in deceased men and their offspring could
lower the unokais' measured reproductive advantage," Ferguson notes
in his book. "It is certainly within the realm of possibility that
unokai men would be found to have fewer offspring than non-unokai
men." Ferguson told me that it has been 11 years since Chagnon
publicly promised that he would publish some new data that would
answer Ferguson's question, but the data has not yet appeared.
Tierney himself examines some of Chagnon's data as it appears on the
interactive CD of "The Ax Fight," and takes it apart in a convincing
manner. "His charts on fertile killers looked good on paper," Tierney
writes, "but there was no way to confirm or refute them. Not only
were the 'killers' anonymous, so were the twelve villages they came
from." Tierney says that he was finally able to "penetrate" Chagnon's
data by combining his own visits to villages in the field with global
positioning system locations and mortality statistics. From there he
goes on to show that significant parts of Chagnon's data are
misleading. I expect that this chapter will cause the most volcanic
reaction among Chagnon's friends and supporters, because here
Tierney, a mere investigative journalist with minimal "official"
credentials, has fired on Chagnon's scientific Fort Sumter. Tierney
has committed the ultimate act of academic war in accusing Chagnon of
cooking his books.
Ultimately, for a variety of reasons that Tierney documents in
eye-glazing detail, Chagnon was expelled from Yanomamo territory in
1993 by the government of Venezuela. One major cause of this ejection
was that Chagnon apparently attempted -- with the help of Cecilia
Matos, the mistress of Venezuela's later-impeached President Andres
Perez -- to get himself and his longtime friend, swashbuckling
illegal gold miner Charlie Brewer Carias, named as the sole
administrators of a special "scientific reserve" segment of the
Yanomami homelands.
"Getting involved with Charles Brewer Carias is probably the worst
mistake of Chagnon's anthropological career," says anthropologist Kim
Hill of the University of New Mexico, a Chagnon defender who is also
quoted in Tierney's book. Like others, Hill surmises that Chagnon
hooked up with the disreputable adventurer out of desperation, when
political storms and a relentless campaign of what Hill describes as
"academic repression" induced the government of Venezuela to revoke
Chagnon's permits to visit his beloved Yanomami. "Chagnon flipped out
when they cut off access," says Hill.
Chagnon's ill-advised attempt to create what Tierney calls a "private
jungle kingdom" outraged many Yanomami and their "bleeding heart"
advocates. Tierney quotes Nelly Arvelo Jimenez, an American-educated
Venezuelan anthropologist, who wondered how Chagnon could have
"dared" to associate himself with "environmental predators and
economic gangsters" like Brewer.
Over the years the Yanomami reputation for savagery, which Chagnon
had elevated and celebrated, has clearly and directly encouraged
violence against them -- including a horrific massacre by a gang of
Brazilian gold miners in July 1993 -- as well as unjust treatment at
the hands of their governments, which have made direct use of
Chagnon's research as justification for isolating and partitioning
Yanomami homelands.
If Chagnon's material, films and data paint honest pictures of the
Yanomami, it would be totally unfair to blame him for the ugly uses
that have been made of his work. Nevertheless, it seems the Yanomami
themselves do blame him, and when Chagnon turned to corrupt
wheeler-dealer Brewer for political help in maintaining access to his
research subjects, he infuriated them and accelerated their
determination to keep him out of their country.
Chagnon's supposed crimes will be formally investigated by the
American Anthropological Association, starting at the group's annual
meeting in November, and the organization's president assured the
anthropological community, in another widely circulated open letter,
that it would consider Chagnon's case fairly. But the AAA, one of
Chagnon's friends told me, is "a joke." Another wrote to me in
e-mail, "It is worth pointing out that the last time the American
Anthropological Association was asked to engage in special pleading
on behalf of a totemic matter was when there was a resolution
actually passed against the work of Derek Freeman, who exposed
Margaret Mead's work for the shabby confabulation it actually is."
The conjuring up of Mead is interesting under the circumstances. Some
feel that the cultural potency of her classic -- and now discredited
-- "Coming of Age in Samoa" was only surpassed by Chagnon's "The
Fierce People." Mead made her major ethnographic blunders under the
influence of the educational theories of her mentor Fritz Boas and
her own wish to see an idyllic native culture free of sexual taboo.
She saw what she wanted to see, and the natives cooperated, telling
her what she wanted to hear. Mead's error was in pressing her
ethnography into the service of her politics and her preconceptions,
a danger that most honest anthropologists acknowledge is ever present
in all fieldwork, and that Tierney hints is the major reason
Chagnon's science so conveniently coincided with his mentor's
theories and his own romantic vision of manhood.
Tierney bought into that vision himself, originally. In the
beginning, he says, he very much admired the audacious, Indiana
Jones-style anthropologist. "He seemed preternaturally resourceful to
me, a veritable hero -- as he was to many other undergraduate males
in the late sixties and early seventies." But like so many other of
Chagnon's friends and collaborators over the years, Tierney became
disillusioned.
The most intriguing defection was that of filmmaker Timothy Asch, who
first became upset with Chagnon over "Magical Death," a documentary
Chagnon made on his own in 1971, which showed Yanomami men in a
bizarre ceremony of visiting symbolic death on the children of their
enemies and a ritualistic "eating of babies' souls." Asch considered
that film especially prejudicial to the Yanomami, but he also had his
doubts about his own films, feeling that they were biased and
incomplete.
Tierney quotes from an interview Asch gave to a film magazine:
"'Chagnon was so stuck in simple theories that, right away ["The Ax
Fight"] became a real joke,' Asch said. 'It is funny with its
simplistic, straight-jacketed, one-sided explanation ... I was
feeling, you know, halfway into making the film, this great suspicion
of the whole field beginning to fall apart before my eyes.'" In 1992
Asch also admitted that while editing "The Ax Fight" in a
Massachusetts studio, it was he who created the awful thunking sound
that became so emblematic of Yanomami violence -- by striking a
watermelon.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
About the writer
Juno Gregory is an independent journalist who specializes in
military, economic and scientific subjects. She is a graduate of the
University of California's School of International Relations.
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