How Napoleon Chagnon Became Our Most Controversial Anthropologist

Brian Finke for The New York Times

Napoleon Chagnon, one of America's best-known and most maligned anthropologists.

Among the hazards Napoleon Chagnon encountered in the Venezuelan jungle were a jaguar that would have mauled him had it not become confused by his mosquito net and a 15-foot anaconda that lunged from a stream over which he bent to drink. There were also hairy black spiders, rats that clambered up and down his hammock ropes and a trio of Yanomami tribesmen who tried to smash his skull with an ax while he slept. (The men abandoned their plan when they realized that Chagnon, a light sleeper, kept a loaded shotgun within arm's reach.) These are impressive adversaries — "Indiana Jones had nothing on me," is how Chagnon puts it — but by far his most tenacious foes have been members of his own profession.

Photograph from Napoleon Chagnon

Chagnon being decorated by his early guide, Rerebawa, circa 1971.

At 74, Chagnon may be this country's best-known living anthropologist; he is certainly its most maligned. His monograph, "Yanomamö: The Fierce People," which has sold nearly a million copies since it was first published in 1968, established him as a serious scientist in the swashbuckling mode — "I looked up and gasped when I saw a dozen burly, naked, filthy, hideous men staring at us down the shafts of their drawn arrows!" — but it also embroiled him in controversy.

In turning the Yanomami into the world's most famous "unacculturated" tribe, Chagnon also turned the romantic image of the "noble savage" on its head. Far from living in harmony with one another, the tribe engaged in frequent chest-pounding duels and deadly inter-village raids; violence or threat of violence dominated social life. The Yanomami, he declared, "live in a state of chronic warfare."

The phrase may be the most contested in the history of anthropology. Colleagues accused him of exaggerating the violence, even of imagining it — a projection of his aggressive personality. As Chagnon's fame grew — his book became a standard text in college courses — so did the complaints. No detail was too small to be debated, including the transliteration of the tribe's name. As one commentator wrote: "Those who refer to the group as Yanomamö generally tend to be supporters of Chagnon's work. Those who prefer Yanomami or Yanomama tend to take a more neutral or anti-Chagnon stance."

In 2000, the simmering criticisms erupted in public with the release of "Darkness in El Dorado," by the journalist Patrick Tierney. A true-life jungle horror story redolent with allusions to Conrad, the book charged Chagnon with grave misdeeds: not just fomenting violence but also fabricating data, staging documentary films and, most sensational, participating in a biomedical expedition that may have caused or worsened a measles epidemic that resulted in hundreds of Yanomami deaths. Advance word of the book was enough to plunge anthropology into a global public-relations crisis — a typical headline: "Scientist 'Killed Amazon Indians to Test Race Theory.' " But even today, after thousands of pages of discussion, including a lengthy investigation by the American Anthropological Association (A.A.A.), there is no consensus about what, if anything, Chagnon did wrong.

Shut out of the jungle because he was so polarizing, he took early retirement from the University of California at Santa Barbara in 1999. "The whole point of my existence as a human being and as an anthropologist was to do more and more research before this primitive world disappeared," he told me bitterly. He spent much of the past decade working on a memoir instead, "Noble Savages: My Life Among Two Dangerous Tribes — the Yanomamö and the Anthropologists," which comes out this month. It is less likely to settle the score than to reignite debate. "The subtitle is typical Chagnon," says Leslie Sponsel, an anthropologist at the University of Hawaii and a longtime critic of Chagnon. "Some will interpret it as an insult to the Yanomami and to anthropology in general." Sponsel despaired that what is known as "the fierce controversy" would ever be satisfactorily resolved. "It's quicksand, a Pandora's box," he said. "It's also to some degree a microcosm of anthropology."

When Chagnon first went into the jungle, in 1964, the public image of anthropology was at its peak. Claude Lévi-Strauss's "Tristes Tropiques," his magisterial memoir of his years studying tribes in Brazil, had recently been translated into English, prompting Susan Sontag to declare anthropology "one of the rare intellectual vocations that do not demand a sacrifice of one's manhood. Courage, love of adventure and physical hardiness — as well as brains — are used by it." "Dead Birds" (1963), Robert Gardner's depiction of ritual warfare among the Dani people of New Guinea, was greeted as a landmark of ethnographic filmmaking. In the "Stone Age" culture of the Dani, anthropologists believed they had a snapshot of human development at a crucial early stage, and rumors of other "uncontacted" tribes fueled fantasies of genuine discovery. Membership in the A.A.A. doubled between 1960, when Margaret Mead, the field's pre-eminent authority, served a term as president, and 1968.

Chagnon was well cast for life in the field. A 26-year-old graduate student at the University of Michigan, he grew up poor in rural Port Austin, Mich., the second of 12 children. He was self-sufficient and handy with a shotgun — minimum requirements for surviving on jungle terrain where the nearest airstrip was several hours downstream by motorized canoe. "It's the harshest environment in the world, physically speaking," Kenneth Good, an anthropologist at New Jersey City University, who accompanied Chagnon to Venezuela in 1975 and eventually married a teenage Yanomami woman, told me. "I nearly died of malaria several times."

Anda sedang membaca artikel tentang

How Napoleon Chagnon Became Our Most Controversial Anthropologist

Dengan url

http://koraninternetonline.blogspot.com/2013/02/how-napoleon-chagnon-became-our-most.html

Anda boleh menyebar luaskannya atau mengcopy paste-nya

How Napoleon Chagnon Became Our Most Controversial Anthropologist

namun jangan lupa untuk meletakkan link

How Napoleon Chagnon Became Our Most Controversial Anthropologist

sebagai sumbernya