[Marxism] Chagnon among the Yanomamo

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

When I first got word of the Jared Diamond/New Yorker magazine scandal, 
I could not help but think of Napoleon Chagnon and the Yanomami. Just 
around the time that the Marxism list was launched, a big fight broke 
out among anthropologists over Chagnon’s fieldwork with the Amazon 
rainforest Indians provoked by the publication of Patrick Tierney’s 
“Darkness in El Dorado: How Scientists and Journalists Devastated the 
Amazon”. Sides were drawn in the profession between those pro and con 
Chagnon, who at least unlike Jared Diamond had professional 
qualifications in the field. In doing some preliminary research on the 
Chagnon-Tierney dispute, I have learned that some experts in the field 
without any apparent axe to grind have faulted his research.

I plan to revisit the controversy in light of what I have learned about 
evolutionary psychology, particularly through my reading of Jared 
Diamond’s “The Third Chimpanzee” but want to start off by posting some 
excerpts from the fifth edition of Chagnon’s “Yanomamo”, a book that was 
titled “Yanomamo: the fierce people” in its initial publication in 1977. 
Given all the controversy his research has generated, it is 
understandable why he would have dropped the fierce people, especially 
since the global perception that they are facing extinction. It would be 
like writing a book in 1940 titled “The Aggressive Jew”.

The excerpts below are not intended to be an introduction to Chagnon’s 
work, but only passages that struck my eye for obvious reasons except 
for the last, which I will explain beforehand. For a useful presentation 
of Chagnon’s approach, I have made available an article from the 1988 
Science magazine titled “Life Histories, Blood Revenge, and Warfare in a 
Tribal Population” at http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/chagnon.pdf.

full: 
http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2009/06/27/chagnon-among-the-yanomamo/

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