Why Was This Man an Outcast Among Anthropologists?
Napoleon Chagnon’s new memoir reignites the firestorm over his study of the Yanomamö
- Joshua Hammer
- Smithsonian magazine
In November 1964, a young American anthropologist named Napoleon Chagnon disembarked from a motorized rowboat after traveling for days up the Orinoco River into the territory of the Yanomamö, one of the world’s last isolated Indian tribes. Entering the village where he planned to spend the next 17 months, the 26-year-old Chagnon confronted “burly, naked, sweaty, hideous men staring at us down the shafts of their drawn arrows!” The Indians’ features, he later wrote, were distorted from wads of tobacco wedged between gums and lips. “Strands of dark green snot dripped or hung from their nostrils,” the result of their blowing a green hallucinogenic powder known as ebene up one another’s noses using a yard-long tube. “The Yanomamö blow it with such force,” he noted, “that gobs of it spurt out the opposite nostril of the person inhaling.”
Chagnon’s first encounter with the tribe marked the beginning of a remarkable—and incendiary—career. In his new memoir, Noble Savages: My Life Among Two Dangerous Tribes—The Yanomamö and the Anthropologists, Chagnon recounts his forays, conducted over 35 years, into the rainforest borderlands between Brazil and Venezuela. There he mastered the Indians’ language, mapped genealogy, observed social hierarchies and set forth a thesis that turned anthropology on its head. Challenging Rousseau’s romantic notion that man in his natural state is altruistic and peace-loving, Chagnon described the Yanomamö as a violent tribe whose males derive status—and women—from killing rivals. His groundbreaking 1968 work, Yanomamö: The Fierce People, sold one million copies, became a standard university text—and made him an outcast among anthropologists. ...
http://www.amazon.com/Culture-Critique-Evolutionary-Twentieth-Century-Intellectual/dp/0759672229
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