"As I read “Noble Savages,” Napoleon A. Chagnon’s memoir of his years among the Yanomamö, an isolated Amazonian tribe, I started hearing Linda Ronstadt’s cover of “Poor, Poor Pitiful Me,” first as a low background hum that grew louder and more insistent across the book’s 500-plus pages.
For the uninitiated, Chagnon is an American anthropologist whose 1968 book “Yanomamö: The Fierce People,” which argued that “primitive” people didn’t live in the peaceable societies Rousseau had imagined but instead fought bitterly, put him at the center of several long-running controversies. In “Darkness in El Dorado” (2000), the writer Patrick Tierney claimed that Chagnon and his research partner, the geneticist James V. Neel, exacerbated the 1968 measles epidemic among the Yanomamö; and that Chagnon aggravated the violence he claimed was endemic by distributing machetes and guns as payment to his informants.
The American Anthropological Association convened a special task force to look into the accusations. Its two-volume report concluded that while Chagnon may have misrepresented the Yanomamö, no evidence backed up the measles allegations. The committee was split over whether Neel’s fervor for observing the “differential fitness of headmen and other members of the Yanomami population” through vaccine reactions constituted the use of the Yanomamö as a Tuskegee-like experimental population."
Get the Story:Tribal Warfare (The New York Times 2/17) Also Today:
'Noble Savages' (Inside Higher Education 2/18)
'Noble Savages': A Journey To Break The Mold Of Anthropology (NPR 2/13)
Related Stories
NYT Magazine: Polarizing scholar pens 'Noble
Savages' book (2/13)
Join the Conversation
