Napoleon Chagnon and the Struggle for Scientific Anthropology
Kevin MacDonald, 3/7/2013
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Evolutionary anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon’s new book, Noble Savages: My Life Among Two Dangerous Tribes—The Yanomamö and the Anthropologists, is creating a considerable stir because it (gasp!) reiterates his findings that the behavior of the Yanomamö tribe of the Amazon basin was a good fit with an evolutionary model. In his review, Nick Romeo summarizes the central findings:
To a Darwinian anthropologist, it comes as no surprise that genetically related kin would form coalitions to wield power. And indeed, nearly all Yanomamö headmen have a greater number of male kin in their village than potential rivals do. But earlier anthropological models often downplayed natural selection and rejected the idea that hierarchies might be innate features of human society. Where these models assumed that individuals of the same age and gender would have roughly equal status in a village, Chagnon documented extensive kin-based hierarchies. He explained their presence in Darwinian terms: individuals who promote the survival of genetic kin are promoting the survival of their own genes. He also observed that power in Yanomamö villages was primarily defined by access to reproductive resources, not material ones. Powerful males had more wives and more offspring than less powerful males, and they were able to use their influence to provide close male relatives with wives. Power was both cause and effect of producing many genetically related kin in a village. A more disturbing finding was the correlation he noticed between violence and reproductive success: Yanomamö men who had killed other men were statistically more likely to have more offspring than those who had not.
Or, more colorfully, as Chagnon (who is nothing if not colorful) phrased in hisSkeptic interview with Frank Miele,
I was threatening the general attitude within anthropology that all native peoples are pacific and live an angelic kind of life, gliding through the jungle with lithe, scented bodies, being altruistic, sharing their food, and willing to cooperate with the stranger that comes in and wants to learn about them and their culture, and anxious to share their knowledge and life histories with that stranger.
Chagnon’s work quickly became a standard ethnological account among evolutionary anthropologists, but he was “effectively blacklisted” by the wider field. ...
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