Jacques Lizot’s critique
There is a cinematic quality between the clash of Napoleon Chagnon and
Jacques Lizot. Chagnon, the blustering American who like to fire pistols
to intimidate the Yanomami, could have been played by the young John
Wayne. Lizot, the gay French disciple of structuralist Claude
Levi-Strauss who seduced young Yanomami with gifts of cigarettes and
pasta, could have been played by Alain Renais.
It is too bad that Patrick Tierney chose to emphasize Lizot’s sexual
predations in his “Darkness in El Dorado”. While there certainly could
be a case made that any adult taking sexual advantage of a young woman
or man for that matter deserves opprobrium, one cannot escape feeling
that Tierney was exhibiting old-fashioned homophobia in the name of
defending Indian rights.
Although Chagnon and Lizot started out as collaborators, they eventually
parted ways—no doubt a function of deep differences over how to regard
the Indians. For Chagnon, they were like Jane Goodall’s chimpanzees
waging primate war on their enemies. For Lizot, they were more like the
Bonobo chimps that used sexual play—including homosexual—to relieve the
tensions that lead to violence.
To be fair to Lizot, he did not literally think that the Yanomami were
like chimps. In fact his main objection to Chagnon was over his
sociobiology, a bogus science that reduces everything to genes.
read full article:
http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2009/08/06/yanomami-science-wars-part-six/
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