What Napoleon Chagnon believed
Although it is brief article (7 ½ pages, including 42 footnotes),
Napoleon Chagnon’s “Life Histories, Blood Revenge, and Warfare in a
Tribal Population” has the merit of encapsulating all the themes that
would make him famous in anthropological circles. Since it appeared in
the February 26, 1988 issue of Science Magazine, a publication that is
behind a subscriber’s firewall, I have made it available at
http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/chagnon.pdf as well.
Because I plan to summarize some of the best-known opposition to
Chagnon’s theories in subsequent posts, it only makes sense to establish
first what he stood for. He begins by making a distinction between his
own approach and more traditional views that centered on the struggle to
control scarce food resources:
Violence is a potent force in human society and may be the principal
driving force behind the evolution of culture (1). For two reasons,
anthropologists find it difficult to explain many aspects of human
violence. First, although ethnographic reports are numerous, data on how
much violence occurs and the variables that relate to it are available
from only a few primitive societies. Second, many anthropologists tend
to treat warfare as a phenomenon that occurs independently of other
forms of violence in the same group. However, duels may lead to deaths
which, in turn, may lead to community fissioning and then to retaliatory
killings by members of the two now-independent communities. As a result
many restrict the search for the causes of the war to issues over which
whole groups might contest-such as access to rich land, productive
hunting regions, and scarce resources-and, hence, view primitive warfare
as being reducible solely to contests over scarce or dwindling material
resources (2). Such views fail to take into account the developmental
sequences of conflicts and the multiplicity of causes, especially sexual
jealousy, accusations of sorcery, and revenge killings, in each step of
conflict escalation.
read full article:
http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2009/07/30/yanomami-science-wars-part-four/
_______________________________________________
pen-l mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
