When I first learned about the Jared Diamond/New Yorker scandal a year
or so before it went public, the first thing that sprang to mind was
another anthropology scandal that broke out in 2000 with the publication
of Patrick Tierney’s “Darkness in El Dorado: How Scientists and
Journalists Devastated the Amazon”.
Tierney’s book was an attack primarily on Napoleon Chagnon who was a
leading expert on the Yanomami Indians in the Amazon rain forest, based
primarily in Venezuela. Chagnon’s book on the Yanomami, until the most
recent editions, was subtitled “The Fierce People”. He had developed the
thesis that warfare between various Yanomami villages was endemic and
that it was caused by rivalry over access to females. In a kind of
survival of the fittest, the most aggressive Yanomami warriors had the
greatest possibility of propagating their genes.
For those who have watched documentaries on the chimpanzees on National
Geographic documentaries, you will make the connection immediately. For
Chagnon, there is little difference between men and animals when it
comes to the all-important question of survival. In 1979 Chagnon and
William Irons co-edited a book titled “Evolutionary Biology and Human
Social Behavior” that coincided with the emergence of sociobiology as
the latest trend in the sciences harking back to social Darwinism.
Grasping his affinity with Napoleon Chagnon, E.O. Wilson, the father of
sociobiology, wrote a fawning introduction to Chagnon’s “Yanomami: The
Last Days of Eden”, a popular adaptation of his original study, a book
that has become the best-selling anthropology text of all time after
Margaret Mead’s “Coming of Age in Samoa”. Ironically, both Mead and
Chagnon’s have been viewed as one-sided portrayals of their subjects
flowing from their respective ideological biases. Mead sought evidence,
even falsified, to support her thesis that Samoan adolescents were
sexually liberated while Chagnon was only interested in data to help his
argument that the Yanomami were bellicose, even to the point of staging
ax fights for a movie that the participants were paid for in advance,
like Hollywood extras.
Diamond and Chagnon cooked the books to demonstrate that the Papua New
Guinea highland tribesmen and Yanomami Indians were warlike in exactly
the same way that George W. Bush got us into war in Iraq. The weapons of
mass destruction were non-existent, just as the mass killings were in
PNG and the Amazon rain forests.
read full article:
http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2009/07/16/yanomami-science-wars-part-1/
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