From the issue dated October 26, 1994
Bitter Warfare in Anthropology
Charges of academic distortion and grandstanding mark a dispute over the Amazon's Yanomamo Indians
By Peter Monaghan
When Napoleon A. Chagnon entered Venezuela 30 years ago to study the Yanomamo Indians, he had the study of them all to himself.
The Yanomami were particularly interesting because they lived in remote lands at the head of the Orinoco River and appeared to have been isolated from European contact. In a series of books and articles, Mr. Chagnon promoted the Yanomami as a model of pristine society, only partially evolved from hunter-gatherers to farmers. He thought the Yanomami, because of their primitiveness, could show how humans had behaved throughout much of their existence. He became especially interested in the relationship between biological factors and behavior.
Mr. Chagnon's notions of how the Yanomami could serve as a biological laboratory have been controversial among anthropologists. But with the Yanomami now facing extinction, many worry about the effects of Mr. Chagnon's portrayal of them as violent primitives. The dissenters say his criticism of various groups attempting to help the Yanomami has only harmed the tribe.
In recent years, between 2,000 and 3,000 Yanomami have died from introduced disease. Others have perished in clashes with miners. Since 1987, 50,000 miners have flooded Yanomamoland to search illegally for gold.
Charges of academic distortion, grandstanding, and censorship are being traded in a dispute so heated that some participants are calling it "the ugliest in all of anthropological history."
The debate about the Yanomami, once confined to scholarly quarters, now involves Roman Catholic missions, the Venezuelan and Brazilian governments, and relief organizations working on the tribe's behalf. In the latest twist, someone anonymously sent newspaper articles to anthropology departments across the country in what Mr. Chagnon calls a "smear campaign" against him. He says: "You can ruin an anthropologist easily. But it turns out my prominence is high enough that I have a certain amount of immunity."
Mr. Chagnon, a professor of anthropology at the University of California at Santa Barbara, has been praised even by his strongest critics for bringing the Yanomami to world attention. Says R. Brian Ferguson, associate professor of anthropology at Rutgers University at Newark: "The Yanomami cannot be steamrollered, the way many other groups have been, and it's in large part because of him."
The Yanomami are the largest native group in the Amazon Basin. They number about 22,500 in Venezuela and Brazil and live in about 225 villages dispersed through highland jungles north of the Amazon River. Their lands are protected, and all those who enter the area, including researchers, must obtain permits first.
In 1968, Mr. Chagnon published a pioneering study, Yanomamo: The Fierce People (Harcourt Brace). Now in its fourth edition, it has been assigned to millions of anthropology students. "My work on the Yanomami made them instantly famous, perhaps the most famous tribe in the world," he says. "That made them very attractive to a lot of anthropologists."
Mr. Chagnon's book described many aspects of Yanomami life, including their semi-nomadic lifestyle, their faith in shamanism, and their pervasive use of hallucinogens. He also detailed Yanomamo warfare, in which many deaths result from skirmishing between villages. To settle actual and perceived wrongs, from the abductions of women to deaths believed to be caused by witchcraft, tribesmen conduct revenge raids, limited to one or two killings. Lesser slights are traditionally settled in chest-punching or club duels.
When other researchers ventured into the rugged Yanomamo jungle, they began to doubt Mr. Chagnon's findings. Many claimed that he overemphasized Yanomamo violence -- the "fierceness" of his book's title.
Among Mr. Chagnon's strongest critics is Bruce Albert, a researcher at the Research Institute for Cooperation and Development in Paris who has worked among the Yanomami since 1975. He argues that Mr. Chagnon has "taken a small part of a society and built an identity card for that people."
Much of the contention has stemmed from differences between schools of anthropological thought over what Yanomamo violence implies about human behavior. Those differences were most apparent after Mr. Chagnon published an article in Science in 1988 laying out his argument for a correlation between killing and "reproductive success." He reported that Yanomamo men who had killed others in warfare won more wives and thus had more children. He proposed that this enhanced reproductive success was a biologically determined reward for killing.
The article provoked a storm of criticism. Some scholars argued that Mr. Chagnon was making a neo-Darwinian claim: that in Yanomami society, and human communities in general, violence is inherent in "survival of the fittest." The scholars proposed that rather than being a way of propagating the tribe, violence among the Yanomami resulted from shortages of food and other resources or from tensions caused by social change.
The Yanomamo debates reflect larger disagreements about the merits of sociobiology that have polarized anthropology since the 1970's. Critics of sociobiology object that it insists on simplistic biological explanations for complex human behaviors. They add that when anthropologists claim to have found those biological factors, they have merely recast their own ideologies as scientific fact.
Mr. Chagnon has several defenders, most of them former students or research partners who share his sociobiological orientation. They believe that opposition to him stems largely from ideological differences and jealousy.
Among experts on the Yanomami, however, he has few supporters. Mr. Albert maintains that Mr. Chagnon's Science article makes several unsupportable statistical claims.
For a start, he argues, Mr. Chagnon overestimates the number of Yanomami who kill (Mr. Chagnon put it at 44 per cent), in part by misinterpreting the meaning of a key Yanomamo concept, unokai. The term refers generally to those who kill others. It can also refer to those who are thought to have caused deaths by witchcraft. So actual killers, Mr. Albert says, are hard to distinguish from metaphorical ones.
Mr. Albert has similar objections to Mr. Chagnon's contention that unokais enhance their reproductive fortunes by abducting more women than others. Mr. Albert accused Mr. Chagnon of cultural bias, saying he had imposed a Hobbesian view of the state of nature on the Yanomami.
Another debate focuses on whether the Yanomami are truly a pristine society. In a forthcoming book, Mr. Ferguson of Rutgers says that the historical record shows that Europeans have been eroding the tribe's isolation for 300 years, and that the Yanomami have a long history of interactions with other tribal cultures.
Mr. Chagnon has his own explanation for the criticism of him. Referring to anthropology's battle between quantitative and qualitative approaches, he calls his critics "anti-scientific" and "anti-biological."
"I'm dealing with people who have a fixed investment in the argument that human beings are no more or no less than a product of culture," he says. On the other hand, he says, he himself is "a real hard-nosed empirical scientist."
Ironically, Mr. Chagnon's critics say he has often misused statistics himself to shore up sociobiological arguments. He claims, for example, to have proved by empirical measurement that the Yanomami suffer from no shortage of food, and that, therefore, competition for food cannot explain their warfare. Other researchers object that his data were gathered at an atypical settlement, where Yanomami lived among more technologically advanced Ye'kwana Indians.
The most heated controversy over statistics involves Mr. Chagnon and the Salesians, a Catholic missionary group. Both sides accuse the other of manipulating the Yanomami for their own ends. Mr. Chagnon contends that he has proof that mortality rates within a few miles of Catholic Salesian missions in Venezuelan Yanomamoland far outstrip those in remote villages and at the missions. In pieces in The New York Times and the Times Literary Supplement, he has accused the Salesians of drawing Yanomami to their missions but then neglecting to provide adequate health care.
The Salesians, the most prominent missionary group in the Amazon, say they are not there to convert the Yanomami but to help them in their transition to the modern era. Many anthropologists, including at times Mr. Chagnon, credit the group with helping them work with the Yanomami. The Salesians and their many anthropologist supporters argue that Yanomami gravitate to missions to trade goods or because they know they can find medical care there.
Mr. Chagnon's opposition to the Salesians peaked after miners massacred 16 Yanomami in 1993. The acting President of Venezuela appointed Mr. Chagnon to an investigative commission. Named to head it was Mr. Chagnon's research colleague, Charles Brewer-Carias, a Venezuelan explorer, naturalist, and former government minister whose own mine in the nearby Bolivar state has been said by his critics to be illegal.
Their appointments provoked such an uproar among anthropologists and human-rights groups in Venezuela that, within a week, the government named a second commission. It included the Salesian bishop of the state of Amazonas. When the commission arrived at the massacre site, it ordered Mr. Chagnon's group to leave.
Mr. Chagnon charges that the Salesians, in an attempt to retain power in the region, are trying to keep the plight of the Yanomami hidden and have pressured the Venezuelan government to mount an inadequate search for the killers.
To those and other charges that Mr. Chagnon makes, the Rev. Edward J. Cappelletti, the Salesians' U.S. director of missions, says: "He's lying; there's no other word for it."
Anthropologists who support the work of the Salesians agree. Jacques Lizot, a former student of Claude Levi-Strauss who has spent 25 years among the Yanomami, says of Mr. Chagnon's charges: "Tout ca, ce sont des calomnies!" ("That's all slander!")
Mr. Chagnon also accuses the Salesians and other anthropologists of persuading government officials to exclude him from Venezuelan Yanomamoland. From 1976 to 1985, he couldn't enter the region at all. An inconsistently enforced ban on research visits by non-Venezuelans barred him from entering the area.
This year and last, documents attacking Mr. Chagnon's scholarship have been sent, some anonymously, to many anthropology departments in the United States, as well as to the National Science Foundation. The documents included newspaper articles critical of him and Mr. Brewer-Carias. Some of the anonymous mailings were postmarked in New Rochelle, N.Y., where the Salesians have their U.S. headquarters. Mr. Chagnon says the Salesians are orchestrating a smear campaign against him.
Father Cappelletti acknowledges sending some of the materials, but not anonymously. One item Father Cappelletti did send was an English translation of a posting to a computer bulletin board in which Mr. Lizot derides Mr. Chagnon personally and professionally. "Everyone is sick and tired of the maniac," Mr. Lizot wrote. (Mr. Lizot and Mr. Chagnon once worked side by side in neighboring mission sites. Now they are at loggerheads, and no trace of friendship remains.)
If the anonymous mailings were intended to suppress Mr. Chagnon, they have had the opposite effect. Supporters at other campuses have circulated a petition, contending that Mr. Chagnon is a victim of academic jealousy and censorship.
They plan to send the petition to the American Anthropological Association, pointing out that Mr. Chagnon has been blocked at times from entering Yanomamoland to do research. The group wants the association to reaffirm the principle that scholars should have free access to research sites.
Terence Turner, an anthropology professor at the University of Chicago who was chairman of an anthropological commission on the Brazilian Yanomami, offers a different interpretation of recent events. He contends openly what many other Amazon researchers say privately: that Mr. Chagnon is "using aspects of the Yanomamo tragedy to dramatize himself on the basis of patently false claims." He says that Mr. Chagnon "so actively, so blithely discredits and undermines organizations that have done a lot of good."
"Anthropologists who work with people who really have their backs to the wall, who are threatened with extinction, ought to be fighting for them, and not dramatizing their own careers."
As the controversy continues, many scholars say, one important question has been pushed aside: In helping to preserve the decreasing numbers of the tribe, who should speak for the Yanomami? With this question, as with every other aspect of the Yanomami debate, no easy answer is apparent.
One possibility is Davi Kopenawa, a Spanish-speaking Yanomamo who has emerged as a tribal spokesman. Yet Mr. Chagnon and his supporters dismiss him as a parrot of human-rights groups and say he does not speak for the tribe.
That charge has outraged Mr. Albert and others. "It's very bad for the Yanomami that a well-known American anthropologist like Chagnon should say this," says Mr. Albert, who is helping Davi Kopenawa write his autobiography.
Mr. Albert, like all the Yanomami's defenders, says that to survive the tribe needs land sovereignty and security from violence and rampant diseases. On that, all parties seem to agree. "People are losing track of the most important thing," Mr. Chagnon says: "The Yanomami are dying of genocide."
All parties also agree that whatever is done will require the help of carefully trained anthropologists. Mr. Chagnon says it's obvious what kind of researchers will be required: "People like myself."
Copyright © 1994 by The Chronicle of Higher Education
