Selections From Noble Savages

Noble Savages: My Life Among Two Dangerous Tribes
- The Yanomamö and The Anthropologists
Napoleon Chagnon

           This is a book about the Yanomamö Indians and my lifelong study of them, particularly their culture, ecology, demography, and their social and political behavior. They were the last major tribe living free from interference of any government when I lived among them. Some of their 250 villages have yet to be visited by outsiders even today, but the number of such villages is dwindling… Until the 1940s and 1950s the Yanomamö were largely unknown to the outside world because they were so isolated, difficult to reach, and lived in an unexplored pocket of the Amazon Basin. There were over twenty thousand of them living in… small, independent villages…
            When I first arrived I made a small mud-and-thatch hut next to one of the recently contacted villages and started to learn the Yanomamö language. After a few months I began visiting the more remote villages, reaching them either by walking directly from my hut or by taking my small dugout canoe upstream via the smaller rivers and then walking inland from there… Since that time I have spent some thirty-five years of my academic life studying the Yanomamö…. I returned to the Yanomamö some twenty-five or so times… and I ultimately spent a total of approximately five years living with them… My fieldwork entailed many adventures and risks not commonly encountered in typical anthropological field situations… I was completely isolated for months at a time with no contact with the outside world….
            The Yanomamö were fascinating, wild, and very difficult to live with, especially when you were the only one of your kind in one of their isolated villages… But… I realized that these were very special people and that I would have to spend a long time among them learning and documenting their social behavior, their population expansions and migrations, their oral history… , and the many wars they had fought with their neighbors. The Yanomamö were one of the last remaining large tribes that were still locked in intervillage warfare, struggling to maintain their independence, security, and safety from the ever-possible unexpected attacks... They sometimes made a stand and fought, but other times they fled and settled in adjacent, unpopulated new areas that were safer, gradually moving outward from the center of their homeland….
          I discovered that over time their culture was getting more complex and their villages were growing larger and more cohesive. This process undoubtedly occurred many times in human history as tribal peoples… made the transition from a hunting-and-gathering way of life to one based on agriculture… but in the Yanomamö area I could actually detect and try to document it. This was the last chance for an anthropologist to observe this fascinating social and political transition that terminated with the development of the political state and ‘civilization.’
          …That is why I decided very early in my fieldwork that I would have to go back repeatedly to continue documenting this rare event… My initial fieldwork among the Yanomamö began in the mid-1960s… Today things are very different. A great deal of change has taken place. Latecomers denounce me because the Yanomamö they visit… are not the same kinds of Yanomamö I first met. And anthropology itself has changed politically. It is now acceptable to denounce earlier anthropologists in the name of political advocacy… because this older image of the Yanomamö does not conform to what the activists want to see..(1-7).

What I Discovered
 
The Ubiquity of Terror. We now live in a world where anxiety about terrorists and terrorism are facts of life in many countries… We might think that this is something new in human history, an evil inflicted on us because civilization has broken down. Some might even lament the loss of pristine innocence and wish we could recapture some of the virtues that were lost when cultures became more complex and evolved into nations, empires, and industrialized states. We might even lament how good it would be if we could return to the innocent condition when people were Noble Savages as Jean-Jacques Rousseau and his followers imagined them… humans in the state of nature [who] were blissful, nonviolent, altruistic, and noncompetitive and… [when] people were generally ‘nice’ to each other…
          [O]ur assumptions about the alleged social tranquility of the past may be idealistic and incorrect. Worse yet, these assumptions appear to be increasingly unsustainable the further back in time we go. Life in… the ‘Stone Age’ …appears to have been decidedly uncertain and fraught with danger, mostly from neighboring peoples who seemed to be ever willing to fall upon you when you least expected it—and this possibility was never very long out of your mind. The distant past of humanity may have been more like what Thomas Hobbes had in mind, a life that was short, nasty, and brutish…
            Security… I discovered that maximizing political and personal security was the overwhelming driving force in human social and cultural evolution. My observation is based not only on what we have thus far learned from political science and anthropological field reports, but also on a lifetime of experience living with native Amazonian tribesmen who chronically live in… a condition of war… a persistent condition for extended periods of time, something chronic. The Yanomamö among whom I lived were constantly worried about attacks from their neighbors and constantly lived in fear of this possibility.
            Neither Hobbes nor Rousseau ever saw …tribesmen living in a ‘state of nature.’ Their philosophical positions… were derived entirely from speculation. It is therefore astonishing that some cultural anthropologists cling to the Noble Savage view of human nature when ours is the profession that collected almost all of the empirical data on tribesmen and what social life was like under ‘pristine’ or ‘Stone Age’ conditions. Thus anthropologists should be the most likely people to arrive at a highly informed, empirically defensible view of human nature using the evidence from generations of anthropological research. But most anthropologists have never lived among people who are really primitive. Many learn about such people… by reading about them in the ethnographic reports written by the anthropologists who have actually lived among these people.
During most of my fieldwork the Yanomamö lived as close to the ‘state of nature’ as one could in the twentieth century… [They] had a certain kind of nobility that most anthropologists rarely see in acculturated and depopulated tribes that have been defeated by and incorporated into the political states in whose jurisdiction they reside.
          For many anthropologists who cling to Rousseau’s view of mankind rather than Hobbes’s, I am a heretic, a misanthrope, and the object of condemnation by politically correct colleagues, especially those who identify themselves as ‘activists’…

Sociality and the demographic facts of life.

          The ability to live cooperatively in social groups is not “natural” and therefore not something to be taken for granted or merely assumed. Rather, it is something that must be explained. Not all organisms live permanently in socially organized groups. Why some do is a fascinating question, one that cannot be explained by the social sciences. It is a biological and evolutionary matter, so it falls outside the scope of… cultural anthropology. This does not mean, however, that anthropologists can ignore this question.
          Several major theoretical breakthroughs in evolutionary theory occurred just prior to or during the time I began studying anthropology… One of these breakthroughs should have had a major impact on anthropological theory but, puzzlingly, it did not. The longtime reluctance of anthropological theoreticians and field researchers to take ideas from biology seriously was the most likely reason… [A]t least some scientific anthropologists who were prominent in the profession should have recognized [the] …importance [of the biological concept “inclusive fitness” or “kin selection”] … for understanding the frequently noted amity and favoritism characteristically found in kinship interactions among tribesmen in a kinship-dominated society. In a very real sense, these ‘kinship behaviors’ were in fact reproductive behaviors… 
          [The] general argument was that since related individuals share genes with each other, an individual could get copies of his or her genes into the next generation by favoring close kinsmen and not reproducing sexually at all. For example, individuals share on average half (50 percent) of their genes with their siblings, they share one-fourth (25 percent) with their half-siblings, an eighth (12.5 percent) with their full cousins, etc. Thus if they engage in certain kinds of ‘favors’ that enhance a full cousin’s reproductive success, then, to the extent that those favors enabled that kinsman to find a mate and produce offspring, their favoring of that kinsman helped them to get some of their own genes into the next generation…
          It is easy to get along with your neighbors when there are only a few dozen of them in your band or village and most of them are close kin—brothers and sisters, or dependent juveniles like your children, nephews, and nieces. But it is not so easy to get along when your village grows to be several hundred people and includes people whose kinship ties are increasingly remote—second and third cousins, or strangers who join the village. Arguments and fights then become chronic. Some people have to leave and form their own new, tiny communities because the only rules of cooperation and social amity are kinship rules, and kinship rules cannot maintain social order in larger groups.
          Large, politically complex societies emerged only after—or as a consequence of—the replacement of kinship institutions and nepotism by other institutions, by what Hobbes called the power that keeps men in awe, namely, the political state and law… [Early anthropologists were] astonished by the obvious fact that most of the peoples in the newly discovered worlds of central Africa, Polynesia, Melanesia, Australia, and the Americas lacked what we have come to know as the political state and the law… [T]he presence of potentially hostile neighbors inhibits village fissioning… but …larger villages are more secure than smaller ones…

Leadership and social cohesion. 

          The internal cohesion of a small group of co-resident kinsmen derives mainly from rules obligations and expectations about kinship. But as the group increases in size from, say 40 to 80 people, the role that political leaders (headmen) must play in keeping order increases. Since the headmen come from the largest kinship group, most of their “subjects” are blood relatives and their tasks are relatively easy. The tasks become more difficult as village size gets larger—150 people or so—and headmen must then become more insistent in their injunctions and begin to use threats and physical coercion to maintain order and peace within the group. When villages get even larger, say 200 people, headmen can become oppressive and tyrannical. Some of the Yanomamö villages I lived in contained close to 300 people and one group contained nearly 400 people immediately before I first visited them. The political leaders in these villages were extremely harsh men…

Political evolution. 

          It is unusual—and perhaps even unwise—for an anthropologist to attempt to relate his own ethnographic fieldwork to broader issues like the evolution of political society. Part of the reason is that a study of a specific culture… represents just a single example in a much larger set of existing ethnographic examples that, collectively, compose the larger picture. However… there are two general exceptions to this rule. The first is that selected data from specific ethnographic studies… are often (and legitimately) used in traditional anthropology to inform general theoretical issues and guide further research in many other cultures. The second exception is that some tribal societies are larger, include multiple communities, and therefore this larger sample of villages of the same tribe can indicate probable cultural evolutionary trends. Variations found in these villages strongly suggest how socially adaptive features within the larger sample of communities might logically lead toward increased social and political complexity… [They] can plausibly be interpreted as ‘micro-evolutionary’ changes toward greater social and political complexity in a relatively unacculturated, multi-village, large tribal society…
          The Yanomamö I studied seem to have made a few halting steps toward greater social complexity… Understanding how and why larger, more complexly organized Yanomamö villages came into existence from smaller, less complexly organized villages will shed some light on how some of the first steps toward the political state may have been taken by many other tribesmen and, I hope, this will improve our understanding of the evolution of cultural and social complexity in general… (7-12).
 
Culture Shock - My First Year in the Field
 
          …My first day in the field—November 28, 1964—was an experience I’ll never forget. I had never seen so much green snot before then. Not many anthropologists spend their first day this way. If they did, there would be very few applicants to graduate programs in anthropology… My ears were ringing from three dawn-to-dusk days of the constant drone of the outboard motor. It was hot and muggy, and my clothing was soaked with perspiration, as it would be for the next seventeen months.
          Small biting gnats, bareto in the Yanomamö language, were out in astronomical numbers, for November was the beginning of the dry season and the dry season means lots of bareto. Clouds of them were so dense in some places that you had to be careful when you breathed lest you inhale some of them. My face and hands were swollen from their numerous stings.
          In just a few moments I was to meet my first Yanomamö, my first ‘primitive’ man. What would he be like? I had visions of proudly entering the village and seeing 125 ‘social facts’ running about, altruistically calling each other kinship terms and sharing food, each courteously waiting to have me interview them and, perhaps, collect his genealogy.
          Would they like me? This was extremely important to me. I wanted them to be so fond of me that they would adopt me into their kinship system and way of life. During my anthropological training… I learned that successful anthropologists always get adopted by their people. It was something very special. I had also learned during my seven years of anthropological training that the “kinship system” was equivalent to “the whole society” in primitive tribes and that it was a moral way of life. I was determined to earn my way into their moral system of kinship and become a member of their society—to be accepted by them and adopted as one of them…
          My head began to pound as we approached the village and heard the buzz of activity within the circular compound… I nervously felt my back pocket to make sure that my nearly blank field notebook was still there, and I felt more secure when I touched it… The excitement of meeting my first Yanomamö was almost unbearable as I crouched and duck-waddled through the low passage into the open, wide village plaza. I looked up and gasped in shock when I saw a dozen burly, naked, sweaty, hideous men nervously staring at us down the shafts of their drawn arrows! Immense wads of green tobacco were stuck between their lower teeth and lips, making them look even more hideous. Strands of dark green snot dripped or hung from their nostrils—strands so long that they drizzled from their chins down to their pectoral muscles and oozed lazily across their bellies, blending into their red paint and sweat.
          We had arrived at the village while the men were blowing a greenish powder, a hallucinogenic drug called ebene, up each other’s noses through yard-long hollow tubes. The Yanomamö blow it with such force that gobs of it spurt out of the opposite nostril of the person inhaling. One of the side effects of the hallucinogen is a profusely runny nose, hacking and choking, and sometimes vomiting. The nasal mucus is always saturated with the green powder, and the men usually let it run freely from their nostrils.
          My next discovery was that there were a dozen or so vicious, underfed growling dogs snapping at my legs, circling me as if I were to be their next meal. I stood there holding my notebook, helpless and pathetic. Then the stench of the decaying vegetation, dog feces, and garbage hit me and I almost got sick. I was shocked and horrified. What kind of welcome was this for the person who came here to live with you and learn your way of life, to become friends with you, to be adopted by you? The Yanomamö put their weapons down… and returned to their chanting, keeping a nervous eye on the village entrance.
          We had arrived just after a serious fight. Seven of the women… had been abducted the day before by a neighboring group, and the local men and their guests had just that morning recovered five of them in a brutal club fight that nearly ended in a shooting war with arrows. The neighboring abductors, now angry because they had just lost five of their seven new female captives, had threatened to raid… and kill them with arrows. When [we] arrived and entered the village unexpectedly, they suspected or assumed that we were the raiders.
On several occasions during the next two hours the men jumped to their feet, armed themselves, nocked their arrows, ran to the several entrances, and waited nervously for the noise outside the village to be identified. My enthusiasm for collecting ethnographic facts and esoteric kinship data diminished in proportion to the number of times such an alarm was raised… I disconsolately mumbled to myself, “Christ! What have I gotten myself into here?”
          …I pondered the wisdom of having decided to spend a year and a half with these people before I had even seen what they were like. I am not ashamed to admit that had there been a diplomatic way out, I would have ended my fieldwork then and there. I did not look forward to the next day—and months—when I would be alone with these people. I did not speak a word of their language, and they spoke only their own language…
         The Yanomamö were decidedly different from what I had imagined them to be in my Rousseauian daydreams. The whole situation was depressing, and I wondered why, after entering college, I had ever decided to switch my major to anthropology… I had not eaten all day, I was soaking wet from perspiration, the bareto biting me, and I was covered with snot-laden red pigment, the result of a dozen or so complete examinations I had been given by as many very pushy, sweaty Yanomamö men.
          These examinations capped an otherwise grim and discouraging day. The naked men would blow their noses into their hands, flick as much of the green mucus off as they could in a snap of the wrist, wipe the residue into their hair, and then carefully examine my face, beard, arms, legs, hair, and the contents of my pockets… They would ‘wash’ their hands by spitting a quantity of slimy tobacco juice into them, rub them together, wipe them into their hair, grin, and then proceed with the examination with ‘clean’ hands… After I had adjusted to the circumstances, my own habits of personal cleanliness declined to such levels that I didn’t protest anymore while being examined… as I was not much cleaner than they were. I also realized that it is exceptionally difficult to blow your nose gracefully when you are stark naked and the invention of tissues and handkerchiefs is still millennia away (16-22).
 
My Life in the Jungle
 
          It isn’t easy to plop down in the Amazon Basin for seventeen months and get immediately into the anthropological swing of things. You have been told or read about quicksand, horrible diseases, snakes, jaguars, vampire bats, electric eels, little spiny fish that will swim into your penis, and getting lost. Most of the dangers… are indeed real, but your imagination makes them more ominous and threatening than many of them really are.
          Most normal people have no idea how many of the simple things in life just do not exist in the field—something as simple as a flat surface to write on or put your coffee cup on. What my anthropology professors never bothered to tell me about was the mundane, unexciting, and trivial stuff—like eating, defecating, sleeping, or keeping clean. This, I began to suspect, was because very few of my professors had done fieldwork in uncomfortable circumstances remotely similar to what I now faced. These circumstances turned out to be the bane of my existence during the first several months of field research. After that they became merely the unavoidable, inconvenient, but routine conditions of the life of a fieldworking anthropologist who unwittingly and somewhat naively decided to study the most remote, primitive tribe he could find…
          I soon discovered that it was an enormously time-consuming task to maintain my hygiene in the manner to which I had grown accustomed... Either I could be relatively well fed and relatively comfortable in a fresh change of clothes—and do very little fieldwork—or I could do considerably more fieldwork and be less well fed and less comfortable…
          I quickly learned how complicated it can be to make a simple bowl of oatmeal in the jungle. First, I had to make two trips to the river to haul my water for the day. Next, I had to prime my kerosene stove with alcohol to get it burning, a tricky procedure when you are trying to mix powdered milk and fill a coffeepot with water at the same time. My alcohol prime always burned out before I could turn on the kerosene, and I would have to start all over. Or I would turn on the kerosene, optimistically hoping that the stove element was still hot enough to vaporize the fuel and start a small fire in my palm-thatched hut as the liquid kerosene squirted all over my makeshift table and mud walls and then ignited.
          Many amused Yanomamö onlookers quickly learned the English expletive Oh shit! They actually got very good at predicting when I would say this: if something went wrong and I had a clumsy accident, they would shout in unison: “Say ‘Oh shit!’” …Later, and once they discovered that the phrase irritated the New Tribes missionaries, the Yanomamö used it as often as they could in the missionaries’ presence, or worse yet, mischievously instructed the missionaries to say ‘Oh shit!’ whenever they also had a mishap… (22-23).
          As to recurrent personal needs let me just say that the Yanomamö have not yet worked out a suitable sewage system… people just go off a ways into the jungle to do number two… The environs immediately surrounding a Yanomamö village of two hundred people are a hazardous place to take an idle stroll. We’ve all been on camping trips, but imagine the hygienic consequences of camping for about three years in the same small place with two hundred companions without sewers, running water, or garbage collection, and you get a sense of what daily life is like among the Yanomamö. And what it was like for much of human history, for that matter… (25).
 
Beginning to Doubt Some Anthropological Truths
 
          There were two things I learned that first day that would dominate much of my field research life for the next thirty-five years… The first discovery was that ‘native warfare’ was not simply some neutral item on an anthropological trait list… Among the Yanomamö native warfare was not just occasional or sporadic but was a chronic threat, lurking and threatening to disrupt communities at any moment. The larger the community of people, the more one could sense its foreboding presence.
          Warfare and the threat of warfare permeated almost all aspects of Yanomamö social life: politics, visits between villages, tensions among people, feasts, trading, daily routines, village size, and even where new villages were established when larger communities subdivided, a process I called village fissioning. This martial condition is not often discussed in the anthropological literature because there were few places in the world where populations of tribesmen were still growing by reproducing offspring faster than people were dying and were fighting with each other in complete independence of nation states that surrounded them…
          The second discovery I made that first day was that most Yanomamö arguments and fights started over women. This straightforward ethnographic observation would cause me a great deal of academic grief because in the 1960s “fighting over women” was considered a controversial explanation in “scientific” anthropology. The most scientific anthropological theory of primitive war of the 1960s held that tribesmen, just like members of industrialized nations, fought only over scare material resources—food, oil, land, water supplies, seaports, wealth, etc. For an anthropologist to suggest that fighting had something to do with women, that is, with sex and reproductive competition, was tantamount to blasphemy, or at best ludicrous. Biologists, on the other hand, found this observation not only unsurprising, but normal for a sexually reproducing species.  
          What they did find surprising was that anthropologists regarded fighting over reproductive competition as ludicrous when applied to humans. Competition among males vying for females was, after all, widespread in the animal world.
I was stunned by the reaction to this finding by some of the most famous anthropologists of the day. There was immediate and serious professional opposition to my rather innocent description of the facts when I published them in 1966 in my doctoral thesis. I was still wet behind my ears in an academic sense, and found myself, at the ripe age of twenty-eight, already controversial for saying that the Yanomamö, a large, multi-village Amazonian tribe, fought a great deal over women and marital infidelity.
          That’s when I started to become skeptical about what senior members of my profession said about the primitive world. I began suspecting that senior anthropologists believed that it was their solemn responsibility to “interpret” for the rest of the world what they regarded as the recondite meanings of the customs of other cultures… 
          [W]hat I didn’t know then was that if some serious, well-trained anthropologist who spent more than a year living in the midst of a warring tribe reported that much of the fighting he witnessed was “over women,” that is, was rooted in reproductive competition, then such an informed conclusion opened the possibility that human warfare had as much to do with the evolved nature of man as it did with what one learned and acquired from one’s culture. Most anthropologists, by contrast, believed that warfare and fighting was entirely determined by culture. My fieldwork raised the anthropologically disagreeable possibility that human nature was also driven by an evolved human biology. This idea was extremely controversial in the 1960s and angered [and would “constitute an allegedly dangerous challenge to the received wisdom of”] many cultural anthropologists (26-28).
 
The Intellectual and Political Climate of the 1960s
 
          It is a truly curious and remarkable characteristic of cultural anthropology, as distinct from other subfields of anthropology, that any time native people are said to do something risky for reasons other than “maximizing access to material resources,” leading figures in the profession grow uneasy and suspicious. One well-known cultural anthropologist—an Englishman named Ashley Montagu—wrote angry book-length rebuttals whenever someone made such a claim. He seemed convinced that people might get the wrong impression that biological factors help explain what humans do, or, worse yet, that humans might have something called “human nature” … or, more precisely, that their behavioral characteristics might have evolved by some natural process, such as what Darwin called “natural selection.”
          My career began with the uneasy feeling that cultural anthropology was one of the last bastions of opposition to Darwin’s theory of evolution… The standard, almost solemn, epistemological position in cultural anthropology when I was in graduate school was that humans have only a cultural nature. Thus our physical or biological characteristics as an evolved primate are irrelevant to whatever we do as members of society. The biological properties of humans, as my professors taught me, have to be factored out of any anthropological explanation of what we do… Anthropology by definition is the science of man. Isn’t it strange that this science factors out its central subject’s biology in pursuit of understanding its subject?
          This rather odd but axiomatic view has deep—and widespread—roots in several of the social sciences, sociology and anthropology in particular. Briefly put, the distinguished nineteenth-century French sociologist Emile Durkheim struggled to establish a “science of society” (what today we call sociology) at a time when it was intricately bound up and intertwined with psychology and social psychology. He felt that there were irreducible facts that were purely and exclusively social in nature and could be studied in their own right, divorced from any psychological and/or biological attributes of the human organisms whose activities were the subject of study. The study of these facts, he argued, deserved to have its own science…
          A similar rebellion occurred in cultural anthropology… [with scholars who], like Durkheim before them, …insisted that the biological aspects of human beings were not relevant to ‘the culture processes.’ My observation that Yanomamö men fought mostly over women, and, equally important, that these conflicts and their outcomes had important consequences for understanding Yanomamö culture and society, disturbed some of my fellow cultural anthropologists… I was saying not just one, but two things that deeply concerned these anthropologists… The first was that warfare was common among the Yanomamö and that it was apparently not caused by capitalist exploitation, nor was it a reaction to oppression by Western colonial powers. This raised the possibility that warfare was, in a sense, a “natural” or “predictable” condition among tribesmen who had not been exposed to or corrupted by capitalistic, industrialized, and/or colonial cultures… The second possibility my research raised was that lethal conflicts between groups might not be explicable by citing “shortages of scarce strategic material resources,” considered by anthropologists and other social scientists to be the only legitimate “scientific” reason for human conflict and warfare… 
          [After he gave a lecture on the Yanomamö to a professor’s class, the professor warned Chagnon, “You shouldn’t say things like that. People will get the wrong impression… We shouldn’t say that native people have warfare and kill each other. People will get the wrong impression.”]… [Such objections reflected] a Marxist ‘cultural materialist deterministic’ anthropological view, while I was among a small minority of anthropologists struggling to develop a more Darwinian, more evolutionary view of human behavior. I saw no difficulty in incorporating both views into a comprehensive theory of human behavior… [but] many other anthropologists… adamantly insisted that a scientific theory of human behavior had no room for ideas from biology, reproductive competition, and evolutionary theory. Many of these anthropologists argued that cultures and societies were not merely analogous to living, sexually reproducing organisms, but were homologous with them and therefore interchangeable in Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection. Biologists found this argument implausible and unpersuasive…”
          During the… years I spent among the Yanomamö I began to explore and document their lives in statistical and demographic ways—and my doubts about much of what I had learned about anthropology from my professors only grew… I eventually learned… that cultural anthropology did not fit a traditional scientific definition where facts are established by observations that are verified by others to establish patterns and, if empirical observations by others do not verify the original observations, then efforts must be made to account for the differences in the observations. Instead, anthropology is more like a religion. Indeed, the organizational and intellectual structure of a large fraction of cultural anthropology is best understood if viewed as an academic fraternity that intimidates and suppresses dissent, usually by declaring that the dissenter is guilty of conduct that is unethical, immoral—or Darwinian.
          Many cultural anthropologists today are afraid to make even timid challenges to this authority and are very careful to describe their findings in cautiously chosen words that are frequently vague so as not to give people ‘the wrong impression’ or, more important, not to invite the suspicion or condemnation of the ayatollahs of anthropology, the Thought Police who guard the received wisdoms… (28-32).
 
Discovering the Significance of the Names
 
            I knew immediately on that first day among the Yanomamö that they were different from what my academic training had prepared me to find. The Yanomamö were unusual, and I knew I couldn’t describe their society adequately by doing the minimally acceptable fieldwork… They were too pure, too pristine, and too special. They had not been decimated by introduced diseases nor by colonists on the fringe of an expanding frontier… It was an almost unique anthropological situation at the time—an extraordinary opportunity to study possibly the last large, warring, isolated tribe left on the planet.
          They were special in many other regards. For example, they struck me as being more self-confident—even somewhat arrogant—and startlingly indifferent to the “outside world” shortly after seeing it—or parts of it—for the first time. I would have expected that they would be more shocked and the shock would last longer on seeing… some of our technology, such as outboard motors, machetes, or flashlights. To be sure, they found them curious and remarkable at first, but they quickly became very matter-of-fact about them.
          They also had a very noticeable quality that is hard to explain, a “subjective” quality that my professors and the anthropology books I read never mentioned—nor seemed to even be aware of. For example, I knew immediately when I saw my first Yanomamö what “wild” Indian meant compared to an “acculturated” one. The wild ones had a kind of glint in their eyes and a haughty look about them that the acculturated ones had seemingly lost… 
          [A missionary gave me a list of common Yanomamö phrases, which] might have been adequate if I were sitting in a room alone with some sympathetic, cooperative Yanomamö who was interested in teaching me his language, but this kind of situation almost never occurred. Rather, I would usually be surrounded by groups of Yanomamö—dozens—each clamoring to be heard and, when I didn’t respond to them in a normal Yanomamö fashion, they assumed that I was hard of hearing and would speak louder, more emphatically, or simply shout impatiently at me… 
          One of my major ethnographic ‘triumphs’ during the first several months of my work was to teach a young man… who eventually became one of my best informants, what a word was and have him help me break the long strings of Yanomamö sounds I would write down into discrete words. This might seem like a trivial accomplishment, but it is huge when you are trying to learn an unwritten language from people for whom notions of verb, adjective, noun, tense, and so forth don’t exist…
          [He had recently married a woman from this village and was living here temporarily to complete “bride service” before returning to his home village]. Young men from distant villages who marry into another village must work for the wife’s parents for around six months to a year before they can take their new wife back home… He was not enthusiastic about bride service, so he often hung around me all day and gradually began helping me… He eventually became my nearly constant companion, guide, and friend during my initial seventeen months of fieldwork… [He] was one of the few informants who realized what I was trying to do and caught on quickly. He was an exceptionally bright young man…
Despite the fact that Yanomamö is not a written language, I had to adopt some alphabet—linguists call it an orthography—that represented the basic sounds of the language.
          My course work in anthropological linguistics was helpful to… develop a writing system… and after discovering its underlying grammar and structure… [to] write it on paper. This was an essential requirement before I could even begin the anthropology part of my field research… Thus, I not only had to learn the Yanomamö language, I also had to develop a way to write it so I could, for example, make a dictionary and take notes in their language, or at least write down their names for things so I could refer to a dictionary when I forgot some word in their language…
          There is also an unusual problem with the Yanomamö language: it is not apparently demonstrably related to any of the indigenous languages found in the Americas… The fact that no other native group speaks a related language seems to suggest that the Yanomamö have lived in isolation for a very long time (38-43).
 
The Physical Appearance of the Yanomamö
 
…I saw a young man standing on one of the giant rocks that jutted into the Orinoco [river]. I knew as soon as I saw him that I was looking at my first Yanomamö. He had not lost the “wild” look in his eyes…. He was rather stocky but had slender legs and arms. He wore badly faded and tattered pants and a shirt and both were much too large for his frame. He was… perhaps five feet, four inches tall. He looked like he weighed about 120 pounds. His jet-black hair was cut pudding-bowl-style. What I could see of his skin was surprisingly light compared to that of the people we saw along the river who spent much of the time fishing in canoes, their skin exposed to the equatorial sun many hours per day… [Similarly, the] other Yanomamö I met during my first year of fieldwork were… very handsome people… 
          My anthropology training and common sense made me aware of the fact that certain kinds of anthropological data like myths could not be collected immediately and would have to wait until I learned more of the Yanomamö  language. However, there were things I could see with my own eyes and describe without knowing much of the language. Things like how the Yanomamö  cleared gardens, collected roofing materials, when they ate, how they made material items like bows, arrows, or bamboo quivers to carry extra arrow points, what they did to various kinds of game animals to prepare them for eating, etc. …did not require a sophisticated ability to communicate with the Yanomamö, who would often hold up objects as they worked so I could see them as they would tell me what they were. I happily jotted these names down—or recorded them on my small tape recorder and later entered them into my three-by-five vocabulary cards and, eventually, into my growing dictionary (43-46).
 
Discovering the “Name Taboo” and the Structure of Yanomamö Society
 
          There were things I could try to learn as I learned new words and phrases, but this was somewhat hazardous in the sense that (1) the Yanomamö were practical jokers and would play mischievous tricks on me, and (2) they would sometimes get me into trouble by having me repeat things aloud that angered others within earshot.
            Let me give some examples to illustrate one dimension of Yanomamö humor. Their word for pubic hair is weshi—the word means to have substantial amounts of hair in your pubic area… They found women with an abundance of pubic hair sexually provocative… The Yanomamö have another word… beshi, which means ‘to be horny.’ You don’t admit in public that you are horny and you don’t ask people in public if they are horny… One day a young man asked me what I thought was a question about the hair on my body… He knew I sometimes confused these two words. He asked me… “Are you [beshi] horny?” …which I mistakenly heard as… “Do you have [weshi] public hair?” …There was a small crowd of young men with me. They all watched and listened attentively When I said “Awei! Ya beshi!” (“Yes, I’m horny!”) they broke into uproarious laughter because they had set me up to confuse the two words—and I fell into their trap… [T]he Yanomamö think it is appropriate to verbally insult a nearby person by having someone else—a stranger—say the offensive words. The offended person then becomes angry with the person who was commanded to utter the insult or offensive word… It is as if getting someone else, especially a stranger, to say the insulting phrase the initiator of the insult is mysteriously invisible and not culpable…
            As my language proficiency increased I gradually began collecting facts about their kinship rules, beliefs, social relationships, and, generally, the kinds of things you can’t learn simply by looking with your eyes… What I really had to find out was how the Yanomamö organized themselves socially and how their ‘political system’ worked… [The] “social organization” [of tribal societies like theirs] was embedded within the complex matrix of kinship, descent from common ancestors, and marriage arrangements… Both men and women remarry when their spouses die or are killed. In addition, many men have several wives at the same time (polygyny) or several wives that they divorce (“throw away”) and then replace. Finally, in some cases, a few men share the same wife (polyandry) until one of them can find a wife for himself… All Yanomamö men would like to have multiple wives but not all of them are able to. Marriage success is largely dependent on how many ascending generation patrilineal male relatives a young man has: these men can help younger men in their own lineage find wives—usually after the older men find wives for their own sons. [T]he size of his father’s patrilineage—and thus its prominence in village politics—is also important because other men want or at least prefer to give their daughters to men in prominent lineages. …[L]arger villages are able to retain more of their women because they have to promise fewer of them to allies and they are able to coerce more women from smaller allied villages…
          Ties of kinship, descent, and marriage were only part of the puzzle of how their social and political system worked. I also had to establish two additional dimensions of this puzzle: the spatial or geographical dimension and the historical dimension… Geography: I had to collect the names of the villages… where each life historical event took place… History: Over time the members of any given… village have moved… as they… establish new villages. Relationships among villages are an important political fact of life for the Yanomamö… (46-49).

Social Intricacies of Name Avoidance
 
…The Yanomamö have what anthropologists call a name taboo… [S]trangers are generally suspect and viewed with distrust because the Yanomamö believe they are likely to inflict supernatural harm on them. To know someone’s personal name is, in a sense, to ‘possess’ some kind of control over that person, so the Yanomamö initially do not want strangers to know their personal names… The longer the stranger remains among them, the less concerned they are about the outsider learning their names and, of course, the less able they are to prevent him from learning them…
          The name taboo has several functions in the Yanomamö status system. Among other things it is strategically implicated in and central to understanding the Yanomamö social and political systems… It was difficult for me to think about the Yanomamö as having a “status system” because, according to the picture I had gotten from my anthropology training, people like the Yanomamö were “egalitarian” and nobody had higher status than anyone else his or her age, except, possibly, for the short-lived times that a “chief” spoke for the group in dealings with other groups—as in trading or chance meetings. Then, after these brief circumstances, the chief would revert in status from first among equals to just another male of his age group… 
          When I was a graduate student, my more advanced graduate classes on primitive social organization informed me that differences in status in all human societies were basically determined by “differential access to scarce, strategic material resources.” We were taught that this condition did not obtain in tribal societies because there was no wealth as such… Individuals of the same age and same sex have the same social and political status. Kinship had nothing to do with biology.
          This was a fundamental message of Marxist social science that dominated most departments of anthropology in the 1960s, especially those departments that were considered to be “scientific.” For reasons I’ve never understood, “science” and “Marxism” were linked together. One implied the other because, I suppose, both were materialistic and involved a logic of cause and effect, which I understood and accepted. What I didn’t accept was the subtle “Marxist” message that academics who found cause-and-effect important in science also had to actively advocate a social agenda of egalitarianism or socialism. Science as such did not advocate anything.
          What I found from my fieldwork was that the political leaders in all Yanomamö villages almost always have the largest number of genetic relatives within the group. I also found that some people, in addition to political leaders, had higher status than others, and that political status among the Yanomamö depended to a very large extent on the numbers and kinds of biologically defined (genetic) relatives one has in the community and was entirely unrelated to “control” one had over allegedly “scare strategic resources.” In short, it was apparent to me as an observer of their daily behavior that material things mattered much less to the Yanomamö than biology, for example, genetically related kinsmen—contrary to the prevailing anthropological wisdom derived from Marxism.
          My training… led me to believe that people like the Yanomamö had virtually no status differentials other than age or sex. Once could not add to one’s status by, for example, striving to be bigger, more influential, more likely to be listened to… It should be stated at the outset that Yanomamö males are concerned about their status and they strive for esteem… Objecting to the public use of your name is a kind of status consciousness among the Yanomamö, and those who can compel others to desist from doing this acquire higher status earlier in life… 
In this sense, the taboo on using names serves to endorse and reinforce the differential status system among males—and this might be its central function in their political system… Among males, it is also a way of showing deference to another, an acknowledgment of the high status of another male, and a display of awareness of an individual’s social clout, which, by definition, is what politics boils down to… Yanomamö girls and women, on the other hand, have very little status compared to boys and men of the same age. The Yanomamö are male chauvinists (49-55).
 
The Yanomamö “Sabotage” My Genealogical Research
 
            In my early attempts to learn everyone’s names I inadvertently set into motion a bizarre and clandestine counterresponse by the mischievously inclined among them. Had I not been the victim I might have found their elaborate scheme rather funny, even admirable in a mischievous way. It had to do with a different aspect of the name taboo and it went like this. When a person dies, his or her name is not supposed to be used aloud again in that village. This aspect of the name taboo is intended to avoid reminding the close kinsmen of the death of a loved one, which would provoke sadness and grief…
            Complicating the problem of collecting genealogies was the fact that a large number of Yanomamö have two (or even more) names. This makes it difficult to cross-check one informant’s story with another informant’s… Usually in cases where there are several names, one is the “true” name and the other(s) are nicknames or derogatory names that people use behind the person’s back or in distant villages, which, in general, denigrate their neighbors when they are out of earshot.
            One of the most prominent and famous men in the area where I worked was named… “Shinbone.” He sired forty-three children by eleven wives and was the past headman of his group… But people in other, unrelated villages who were either disrespectful or contemptuous called him by an equally well-known derogatory name: … “Plugged-up Anus” …
            I quickly learned that I had to do my genealogical work privately—informants would be unwilling to say the names of adults who lived in their village if others were listening… I would test each new informant I worked with by cautiously asking them questions about remotely related deceased ancestors of a set of people that many earlier informants had repeatedly and independently given me identical answers to. If they independently confirmed what many other older informants had secretly told me, they passed the test and I would continue working with them… and ask them questions about new people, or about another generation of ancestors… I was now seeing patterns that suggested why some people acted as a group and favored or disfavored people both within their village or in other villages.

Discovering the Elaborate Sabotage…

          The Yanomamö are very ethnocentric and seize on the slightest of differences to make invidious distinctions between “them” and “us.” … Most males usually come back home if they marry a girl in a different village, but they often marry someone in their own village. Most Yanomamö girls want to be given in marriage to someone in their own village—because they will have brothers who will protect them from a possibly cruel husband. But the major strategy of intervillage political alliances is to get your allies to give you marriageable females—and to promise to give some of your girls in the future as a quid pro quo. These relationships strengthen ties among the villages and provide additional security, despite the fact that some of the strength is based on “credit.” Thus, some girls are, as part of the price of alliance, required to live among strangers in the villages of their new husbands, who can and often do inflict severe punishments on them for their suspected or imagined infidelities…
          After my census work—the main purpose of my visit… [to a neighboring village]—was over… I strolled around the village and visited with the residents, making small talk. To show them how much I knew about Yanomamö people and places, I softly mentioned the name of the… headman and some incident that involved both of us… My face flushed with embarrassment and anger as… everybody was laughing hysterically… The name I had been given for the wife of the …headman… translated to something very vulgar like “Hairy Cunt.” It seemed that the [tribesmen] …had collectively conspired to tell me a bunch of whopping lies about people’s names. Each… would relate to my other informants the specific false names he had given me for other residents. They had come up with “new” names for almost all of the adult residents… It must have been a somewhat time-consuming and elaborate hoax…
          Hairy Cunt was married to the headman, Long Dong, their youngest son was Asshole, and so on. All of these names had been given to me solemnly, with a straight face, whispered into my ear softly and followed by the solemn whispered warning: “Don’t tell anyone I gave you this name!” …If I had not gone to another village and innocently mentioned these “secret” names, I would have been totally ignorant of the elaborate hoax… [they] had played on me. I made this discovery some six months into my fieldwork! …[T]he Yanomamö have a wicked humor. They enjoyed duping others, especially the unsuspecting and gullible anthropologist who lived among them (59-67)…
 
Raids and Revenge: Why Villages Fission and Move
 
          …[W]hy should these… closely related groups be fighting with each other and threatening to kill each other? It didn’t make any sense if I looked at this situation in terms of what I had been trained to expect: kinsmen should be nice to each other, but yet on my first day in the field, they had bloody heads from clubbing each other in the recovery raid—and now they threatened to kill each other. I knew I had to find out more about how these groups were interrelated and the specific reasons why they broke up.
            The most inexplicable thing to me in all of this was that they were fighting over women. My anthropology textbooks and my professors had taught me that on the “rare” occasions that tribesmen fought, it was inevitably over some scarce material resource like cultivable land, water supplies, rich hunting areas, etc. Yet the Yanomamö said they were fighting over women. I anticipated skepticism when I reported this… (68-69).
            Unokais [i.e., Yanomamö men who had killed an enemy in battle] have an unusual status in their villages. Most outsiders do not know about them, or about the unpretentious and rarely discussed high status they have. Even a diligent, curious anthropologist might not learn about them if he studied a village that has not engaged in warfare or where no individuals in that village had killed another human in the recent past.
            Unokais are both respected and somewhat feared because they have demonstrated a willingness to kill people and are likely to kill again. In a political context, the military credibility and strength of a village can be measured by how many unokais it contains—with the caveat that village size is extremely important as well… (92-93).
 
Conflicts Over Women
 
            The archaeological record reveals abundant evidence that fighting and warfare were common prior to the origin of the political state and, in much of the Americas, prior to the coming of Europeans. Females appear to have been prized booty in those cases where large numbers of skeletons—victims of massacres—have been found together.
          One of the most important archaeological sites containing this kind of evidence is located in South Dakota—the Crow Creek site… A terrible massacre occurred there in about AD 1325, some 175 years before Columbus reached the Americas… It is believed that a large force of enemy warriors appeared on foot without warning one day, breached the unfinished palisade, burst into the village, and showered the residents with arrows, stones, and firebrands… The raiders killed most of the residents and burned their houses to the ground. Dismembered and mutilated corpses were strewn amid the burned lodges… The survivors eventually returned cautiously and dragged the mutilated corpses of their kinsmen into the fortification ditch and hastily buried them there. They apparently never returned to this tragic place.
          There were approximately five hundred victims… The attackers mutilated many of the bodies and took trophies from them, such as scalps, hands, and feet… A demographic analysis of the some five hundred skeletons indicated that many young women between the ages of twelve and nineteen years and young children of both sexes were missing, most likely having been taken away as captives. Thew young women presumably became extra mates for their captors, as would the pre-reproductive female children… We don’t know directly how common fighting over women or the practice of taking females as captives was in the past—archaeological sites like Crow Creek are rare and ethnographic accounts are often silent about fights over women even if they take place while the anthropologist is there.
          But eyewitness accounts by early travelers and accounts by Europeans who lived many years as captives of tribesmen suggest that the practice was rather widespread… Acquiring additional females of reproductive age has probably always been the most prized outcome of intergroup conflict in the long history of our species and the purpose for which these conflicts most often arose. Polygyny was relatively inexpensive for most of that history because acquiring the material ability to support extra wives or mates depended less on first obtaining wealth itself and more on the ability to manipulate male alliances that effectively deployed lethal violence and the threat of lethal violence to this end. Perhaps if we viewed the human ability to harness, control, and prudently deploy violence for reproductive advantage, we could consider this skill the most important of all strategic resources… 
          [T]he whole purpose and design of the social structures of tribesmen seems to have revolved around effectively controlling sexual access by males to nubile, reproductive-age females… the efficient regulation of sexual access to females by males and the role that male coalitions play in this process. Most of the regulation and control is expressed by the systems of descent, kinship classifications, marriage rules, and incest proscriptions that humans have developed, practices that have been the central—and increasingly ignored—subject of cultural anthropology… My many hours of taped interviews… found [the Yanomamö ] are very clear about the importance of women in their conflicts… 
          Most people are also surprised to learn that some Yanomamö men often mistreat their wives—they beat them with pieces of firewood, shoot them with barbed arrows in a nonfatal part of their bodies, chop their arms and upper bodies with axes and machetes, press burning chunks of firewood against their bodies, and do other things that most of us would find revolting and vile… Yanomamö men are intensely jealous of their wives and always seem to be tracking them, always aware of what they are doing—and what sexually active males in the village are also doing. The men spend a good deal of time mate guarding, especially when their mates are not pregnant and the husbands might be cuckolded… Indeed, the ethnographic evidence that a major cause of warfare among tribesmen is the desire for women is so obvious that it is remarkable that so many anthropologists dismissed my reports that most Yanomamö fights start with arguments over women…
          Warfare, club fights, wife-beating, etc. are conflicts over resources that are useful or necessary for survival and reproduction, which is to say, useful in an evolutionary sense. The theory of natural selection is not simply a theory about survival, but a theory about reproductive survival… The social science approach focuses heavily on group survival in the physical sense… A more sophisticated—and comprehensive—approach draws attention to the biological dimensions of natural selection and the importance of individual survival. 
          Reproductive resources include not only members of the opposite sex (mates) but also those immediate neighbors and allies who take risks (and sometimes suffer costs) helping you to acquire and protect your mates. These allies are useful, if not crucial in a social sense. Historically, these useful allies have mainly been kin: genetic relatives or individuals whose reproductive interests overlap with your own… They sometimes pool their abilities to wield violence on your behalf and, in this sense, cooperative violence and its deployment can be thought of as a kind of biosocial or sociobiological resource… (214-221).
 
Sex Ratios
 
…What I knew for sure by my own observations was that: (1) there was a demonstrable shortage of females, (2) the Yanomamö engaged in infanticide… , and (3) informants said they preferred male newborns to female newborns because “male babies are more valuable.” …However, the shortage of females among the Yanomamö is real, apart from the absolute numbers of the two sexes. The reason has to do with polygyny, the marriage of one man to two or more women. Many Yanomamö men have multiple wives—as many as five or six wives simultaneously. This means that many other men will have no wives… (223-224).
 
Yanomamö Abduction of Females
 
…It is always strong groups taking women from weak groups, that is, men in large, powerful villages taking women from men in smaller, politically weak villages … A small fraction of abducted women are taken by raiders who are at war… Women abducted this way are usually gang-raped by the raiders en route home, and once reaching the home village, gang-raped by any and all willing males there, sometimes by visiting men from allied villages if any are present. The raping can go on for many days.
          The unfortunate captives are eventually taken as wives by local men. Headmen frequently take them as wives and, I discovered, sometimes do so to terminate the raping and eliminate this disruptive source of sexual frenzy and chaos in the village. Headmen sometimes “share” them with younger brothers for a while and might later give the women to them as their own exclusive wives.
Rapes also occur independently of abductions. Men from larger, more powerful villages—a group of hunters for example—will occasionally find a man and his wife in the jungle and, while some of them restrain the husband, the others rape her. Subsequent retaliation depends, once again, on the relative sizes of the two villages. It would be imprudent for a group of hunters from a small village to do this to a man and his wife who are from a much larger nearby village…
Yanomamö frequently abduct women they know—and may even have grown up with as children… The core villages I studied had a total population of 769, and an average of 22.6 percent abducted females in them (225-228)…
          Anthropologists who collect the traditional kinds of data among tribesmen now find themselves in the peculiar position of being censured simply for reporting their observations in academic journals because these data will offend some group that believes in the concept of the Noble Savage. Never mind that this concept is inconsistent with ethnographic facts. This virtual Noble Savage is a construct based on faith: in that respect anthropology has become more like a religion—where major truths are established by faith, not facts (232).
 
The Sexual Life of Yanomamö
 
          Field-working cultural anthropologists are (or should be) aware of two kinds of “truth” that they eventually report from their field studies: (1) what the natives say they do, and (2) what the natives actually do. Sometimes these are nearly identical, but more often the discrepancy between them is very large… Many people [of all societies] lie, cheat, and covet when they think they can get away with it. These are cost-benefit kinds of activities: if the benefits are high and the costs or penalties small (or if they are unlikely to be caught), people often violate society’s rules. The Yanomamö are just like us—not only rule makers, but rule breakers…
 
Rule 1. Pregnant women should not have sex…
 
Eleven of the thirteen pregnant women (85 percent) are currently engaged in sex, so the proscription against sex during pregnancy is not very robust… 
 
Rule 2. Nursing females should not be sexually active…
 
Of all the nursing females… 59 of 95… 64 percent—are engaged in sex…
 
Rule 3. Prepubescent girls should not be sexually active…
 
…the youngest age category (0-10) includes most of the pre-pubescent females, and only one female in this category is sexually active, a girl of nine years… But 9 prepubescent girls in category 11-19 are having sex… so 64 percent of them are violating the taboo.
 
Rule 4. Marriage for females is almost universal…
 
…the percentage of females over ten years of age who are married… [is] 87 percent…
 
The percentage of sexually active females [over the age of 11] is 76 percent… (232-240)…
 
About 4 percent of women between 11 and 19 years are reported to have killed at least one of their own infants at birth, and approximately 20 percent of females over age 19 have done so (246)…
 
Scientific Summary of Yanomamö Warfare
 
…My twenty-five years of findings on Yanomamö warfare… identified 137 living men in the villages I was studying who were unokais, that is, warriors who had killed someone… Sixty percent (83 of the 137) …had participated in the killing of only one person… The others had participated in the killings of two or more people. One man had participated in the killings of sixteen people… Two-thirds of all living Yanomamö over the age of forty have lost one or more close genetic kinsman—a father, brother, husband, or son—to violence… Approximately 45 percent of all the living adult males in my study were unokais, that is, had participated in the killing of at least one person. That is an extraordinarily high percentage, but this statistic might not be unusual among pre-contact tribesmen had they been studied by anthropologists when they were demographically intact… (273-274).
 
The Differential Reproductive Success of Yanomamö Unokais
 
[My research] …included a number of additional findings that disturbed, even offended, a number of my colleagues in cultural anthropology, colleagues who clearly favored the Noble Savage view of tribesmen. But these findings were empirical. Had I been discussing wild boars, yaks, ground squirrels, armadillos, or bats, nobody in the several subfields of biology would have been surprised by my findings. But I was discussing Homo sapiens—who, according to many cultural anthropologists, stands apart from the laws of nature. They say that the only “nature” Homo sapiens has is a “cultural nature.”
            …I summarized the reproductive success of unokais compared to non-unokais of their same approximate age… For all ages pooled, unokais have an average of 1.64 wives compared to an average of 0.63 for non-unokais… It should be intuitively clear that if unokais are more successful at acquiring wives, they are likely to have more children as well… unokais have, on average, 4.91 children compared to same-age non-unokais, who average only 1.59 offspring each, that is, unokais have three times as many offspring as non-unokais…
            There have been some thirty or more anthropologists who began fieldwork among the Yanomamö after I began. They all could have easily collected comparable data on unokais and variations in reproductive success… Not one of them did this. Yet some of these anthropologists claim I have “exaggerated” Yanomamö violence even though they have not produced their own data… They could have demonstrated their statistical findings on how much violence and violent causes of death took place… Unfortunately, this is not how cultural anthropology now operates. Those among my anthropological colleagues who openly and frequently criticize my findings without providing comparable data… only convince academics in adjacent disciplines that cultural anthropology is not only not scientific, but it is not capable of being scientific. The finger, instead, should be pointed at those who never collect relevant data but simultaneously condemn their colleagues whose hard-won data sometimes lead to conclusions they find uncomfortable (275-277)…
 
Male Coalitions, Warfare, and the Distribution of Women
 
            Despite the skepticism widely shared in the now politically correct anthropological profession, the ethnographic and archaeological evidence overwhelmingly indicates that warfare has been the most important single force shaping the evolution of political society in our species. Warfare has been chronic, with the few possible exceptions where humans migrated so far out from their home ranges that they had no neighbors. Probably the biggest threat to early human groups came from neighbors—the people in the next valley over.
            Because intergroup conflicts over local resources (such as females) increase with local group size, continued growth in community size was constantly limited by these conflicts. Such conflicts are most easily resolved by group fissioning: making conflicts less likely by reducing the size of the group. But since there is safety in numbers, there were countervailing pressures to continue to grow. The result was constant pressure for adult males to develop kinship-defined coalitions that peaceably distributed females and pooled their collective abilities to wield force against other groups.
            As I see it, the most probable long-term evolutionary scenario in the development of human sociality was constant but slow growth of community size followed by fissions of communities once they reached sizes of 50-75 people… It seems that the primary source of conflict within stateless human groups is young females of reproductive age who have neither fathers nor husbands to safeguard them. They constitute a major cause of potential instability and strife among the Yanomamö: aggressive adult males between the approximate ages of 15 and 40 constantly want to copulate with them and/or appropriate them for their exclusive reproductive interests. They are a source of conflict in Yanomamö communities and in many other tribally organized societies that lack the institutions associated with the political state—law, police, courts, judges, and odious sanctions.
            I suggest that conflicts over the means of production—women—dominated the political machinations of men during a vast span of human history and shaped human male psychology. It was only after polygyny became “expensive” that these conflicts shifted to material resources—the “gold and diamonds” my incredulous colleagues alluded to—and the material means of production. By that time, after the agricultural revolution, the accumulation of wealth—and its consequence, power—had become a prerequisite to having multiple mates… (332-333)…
 
Political Status and the Myth of Primitive Egalitarianism
 
Pre-state societies—tribesmen like the Yanomamö—are described by many anthropologists as egalitarian: everyone is more or less interchangeable with any other person of the same age and same sex, so status differentials are essentially determined by age, sex, and occasionally the ephemeral characteristics of leaders. This is definitely not the case among the Yanomamö. If my teachers (and anthropology textbooks) got anything wrong, it was their misunderstanding of the notion of egalitarianism… Among the Yanomamö, tribesmen differ in their ability to command and order others around because of differing numbers of kinsmen they can deploy in their service, whether they are unokai, and other nonmaterial attributes.
          I concluded that this myth about differential access to resources was so pervasive and unchallenged in anthropological theory because anthropologists come from highly materialistic, industrialized, state societies and tend to project what is “natural” or “self-evident” in this kind of word back into prehistory. In our world, power, status, and authority usually rest on material wealth. It follows that fighting over resources is more “natural” and therefore comprehensible to anthropologists than fighting over women. The traditional anthropological view of egalitarianism is remarkably Eurocentric and ethnocentric… Such a view erroneously projects our own political and economic views into the Stone Age… Because the general bias in anthropological theory draws heavily from Marxist sociopolitical theory, even “scientific” anthropological discussions of social status, primitive economics, political structure, and so forth tend to be viewed in terms of struggles over material resources (cultural materialism).
          Struggles in the Stone Age, I am convinced, were more about the means of reproduction. That makes human biology and psychology central to a truly comprehensive scientific theory of how humans behave. Darwin’s theory of evolution is a theory about reproductive survival (337-338)…
 
Twilight in Cultural Anthropology: Postmodernism and Radical Advocacy Supplant Science
 
…My theoretical views on the anthropology of human behavior became increasingly affected by new discoveries in theoretical biology, including the rapidly growing awareness among biologists and some anthropologists that the “unit” on which natural selection operated most effectively was the individual, not the group. The traditional anthropological view of natural selection emphasized the importance of the “group,” “society,” and “culture.” By the mid-1970s anthropologists in general were increasingly hostile to the works of [scholars] …who represented the new thinking…
 
Genealogies and Sociobiology
 
…My genealogical data could be used to express precisely what cultural anthropologists meant when they spoke of the intimacy and solidarity tribesmen felt for each other when they were “close kin” as distinct from “distant kin or non-kin.” I could, in fact, express precisely how closely or remotely and pair of Yanomamö were related to each other because genealogies, like pedigrees used by animal breeders, were susceptible to precise quantification. Indeed, I was astonished that cultural anthropologists had failed to use these quantitative measures when almost all of them solemnly endorsed the anthropological truths that (1) social relationships in the tribal world were “embedded” in kinship institutions, that (2) closeness of kinship was the central component in “social solidarity,” and (3) the political state emerged only when the “tribal design” based on kinship, descent, and marriage among related neighbors was supplanted by nonkinship institutions such as law, labor unions, police, armies, craft guilds, political parties, etc. In short, cultural anthropologists maintained that the political state and civilization were possible only when kinship-based social institutions were overthrown and replaced with these non-kin social institutions.
          In my opinion there were two reasons why American cultural anthropologists in particular failed to take advantage of quantitative measures of kinship (and genealogies) and use them in their theoretical analyses. One of the reasons—perhaps the more important one—[was] …that many of the founding theoretical figures in American anthropology …did their field studies in the Americas long after the tribes they studied had been decimated by epidemic diseases, defeated by the U.S. Army, forced to settle on reservations that often included remnants of other, unrelated tribes, had been exposed to the effects of colonial expansion and other forces of acculturation, and in the Southwest, hundreds of years of mission efforts by various orders of the Catholic Church whose practice was to attract Indians to live at their missions. …Thus, in their own fieldwork it was probably futile to view kinship relations as hardly more than a “polite” system of classifying mostly genealogically unrelated neighbors into categories that had, in most cases, no correspondence to genetic (biological) reality. The much touted “genealogical method” was, on closer inspection, more of a British colonial method: British anthropologists historically studied very large tribes in Africa that tended to be more demographically pristine than were tribes in the Americas… The second reason for not valuing kinship studies is that cultural anthropologists—trained in the United States eschew quantitative measures of genetic kinship because of the widespread biophobia built into cultural anthropological theory, which results in deep suspicion and contempt for biological ideas. This peculiar contradiction has been characteristic of anthropology for over a century… 
          In 1975 Edward O. Wilson, a… distinguished biology professor at Harvard University, published his book Sociobiology. It rapidly became controversial in the social sciences especially among a small number of mostly Marxist academics. It was a masterful and comprehensive overview of the history of evolutionary thinking, explanatory milestones achieved by scores of researchers in the recent histories of biology, demography, ecology, taxonomy, theoretical genetics, animal behavior, psychology, sociology, anthropology, and other fields. Apart from being stunningly erudite, it was a politically innocent book in the sense that it simply illustrated how recent ideas in evolutionary theory had developed and how they might be applied to better understand how human beings in particular evolved to have the social capacities and characteristics we see in ourselves… [M]ost of the book was about the accomplishments of others and how their findings and accomplishments were leading to a grand “synthesis of knowledge” that shed new light on human nature.
          I remember having discussions with several senior anthropologists… whose reaction to Wilson’s book was initially enthusiastic. But once the implications of the last couple of chapters were publicly discussed, prominent academics in anthropology began to distance themselves from Wilson’s book. One of the reasons was that Wilson oversimplified a number of features of tribesmen… but even more annoying to them was Wilson’s claim that sociobiology would most likely become the overriding and comprehensive theoretical framework in the life sciences, one that would subsume other sciences—including anthropology and sociology—as subordinate components in a new field he called sociobiology.
          But because anthropology—here I specifically mean cultural anthropology—had always been suspicious of theories and ideas from biology, a negative reaction against Wilson’s new book spread swiftly in anthropology. The criticisms often had contemptuous undertones, almost as though Wilson had violated some sacred rule that cultural anthropologists held inviolate… Sociobiology soon became a term used by anthropologists as shorthand for almost everything hateful in the history of Homo sapiens: wars, fascism, racism, colonialism, capitalism, eugenics, elitism, genocide, etc… (378-382).
 
The 1976 Meeting of the American Anthropological Association [AAA]
 
…Our training had emphasized the role that culture played in human social relationships while completely ignoring the evolution of human behavior. The view from anthropology was that psychologists studied human behavior and anthropologists studied culture. Ever since Durkheim, cultural anthropology was skeptical about not only psychology and biology, but any theory that emphasized the biological underpinnings of behavior…. By now Wilson’s book was widely condemned and denigrated by cultural anthropologists… 
          An astonishing and unprecedented crisis developed just as the 1976 meetings of the AAA began… The ballroom in which the business meeting was held was full beyond capacity. A motion had been placed on the agenda by opponents of sociobiology aimed at preventing the sessions… [discussing potential applications of sociobiology to problems in cultural anthropology that a colleague and] I had organized.
          Because sociobiology was an effort to apply Darwinian—biological—principles to human behavior… [we] were dumbfounded that such an anachronistic and organized opposition to Darwin’s theory of evolution would blemish anthropology in 1976. It was as if the last two bastions of opposition to the theory of evolution by natural selection were fundamentalist fire-and-brimstone preachers and cultural anthropologists! 
          Heated debate and impassioned accusations of racism, fascism, and Nazism punctuated the frenzied business meeting that night… Margaret Mead, the “Mother Goddess” of anthropology, stood up to address the motion to prohibit our sessions. A hush fell over the assembly. She began by expressing her opposition to… [the] idea of a “science of sociobiology” that would possibly subsume anthropology as a subordinate subdiscipline. However, she said, in spite of her opposition… she felt that the motion as worded was essentially a “book burning” motion and, for that reason, she thought that it was not something our association should advocate and be identified with. She then sat down, somewhat regally, and the vote on the motion was taken almost immediately. The motion was defeated, but not by a wide margin. Our sessions on “sociobiology” were allowed to take place.
          Nevertheless, anthropological opposition to sociobiology did not cease. It just operated from the shadows because many members of the AAA realized that day that a sizable faction of the association was tolerant of biological views in cultural anthropology… (383-385).
 
The Sociobiological Debates on U.S. Campuses
 
Shortly after the AAA meetings a number of debates about sociobiology were organized on several major U.S. campuses… Two groups of academics debated each other: those who were opposed to sociobiology and those who defended it and the academic right to explore the scientific implications of this new approach. The “opposed” group had a larger pool to choose from because, by that time, the very word sociobiology had become a lightning rod in the social sciences on college campuses. The defenders were fewer (or less willing to debate the issue) but included some of the most distinguished academics in the field of biology and a much smaller number of social scientists.
          One of the pro-sociobiology participants that I frequently ran into at these debates, Robert Trivers, said to me at one of them: “I’ve finally figured out what they mean by a ‘balanced’ debate. For every clear demonstration of how effective a sociobiological explanation is of some phenomenon, it must be ‘balanced’ by a completely nonsensical appeal to B.S., emotions and political correctness.” (385)
 
The Ultimate Debate Sponsored by AAAS
 
          After several such debates, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), one of the most prestigious and authoritative scientific bodies in the country, sponsored its own debate in 1978 hoping to put an end to the squabbling and to the unreasonable and false accusations against those who wished to study human behavior with new theoretical insights into natural selection…
          Finally, it was Wilson’s [the author of Sociobiology] turn to speak… He sat down, took out his paper, and began speaking. Suddenly the sullen people sitting in the first rows immediately in front of the podium exploded from their seats and jumped onto the stage, shouting angry insults at Wilson, jostling and pushing him around. They grabbed the pitchers of ice water from the table and poured them over Wilson’s head, continuing to shout angry and ugly epithets at him.
​          The moderator… tried to calm them down to keep order, shouting “Please stop! Please stop! I’m one of you people… I’m also a Marxist! This is unacceptable!” …it didn’t work: the “Marxists” continued to attack Wilson… It was the most hateful, frightening, and disgusting behavior I’ve ever witnessed at an academic assembly—and all the more shameful because it took place at a meeting sponsored by a venerable and prestigious association. We subsequently learned that the sullen and cowardly people who attacked Wilson were from a radical organization known as the International Committee Against Racism (InCar) (385-387)…
 
Opposition to Sociobiology over the Next Decade
 
…By the early 1980s, sociobiological cultural anthropological research was being discriminated against in granting agencies like the anthropology division of the National Science Foundation (NSF). Referees who held strong prejudicial views against sociobiological research would fault socio biological applications for “methodological” deficiencies and give them very low grades. One “poor” grade was enough to kill a research application… In 1981… NSF complied with our suggestion that a list of academically competent reviewers be created to evaluate proposals that had sociobiological goals. Success rates of sociobiological proposals increased accordingly.
          Prejudicial views against sociobiological research were also a problem in publications submitted to important peer-reviewed academic journals, but evidence for this is more difficult to prove… Unjustified and prejudicial views of a colleague’s research objectives also surfaced in tenure and promotion decision in academia… (390-391).
 
My 1988 Article in Science
   
        …My name had been recommended as someone whose research might be of interest to a more general audience and it bridged disciplines like anthropology, biology, and demography. [The editor] …asked me to submit an article to Science from my research among the Yanomamö on a topic of my own choosing, but warned me that it would have to go through the same strenuous review process that all articles were subjected to, meaning Science would not publish it unless the peer review process found it worthy…
            As my paper was going through the peer review process, a large number—upwards of forty thousand—of renegade Brazilian gold miners illegally entered Yanomamö territory in Brazil and began mining gold there, using hydraulic pumps that destroyed the pristine rivers and contaminated the water with mercury. There was great concern and outrage among native rights advocates and nongovernmental organizations that were advocating for the preservation of the pristine Amazon rain forests and the native people who lived there…
            A small group of my persistent and academically jealous opponents in anthropology tried to link my research among the Yanomamö to the Brazilian gold rush. I found it astonishing because of my twenty or so different field trips to the Yanomamö by 1987, only one had been made to Brazil, in 1968… On that particular trip, my medical collaborator… was able to show that the Yanomamö had no antibodies for measles, a disease that is especially lethal in isolated native populations. This single discovery probably saved hundreds if not thousands of Yanomamö because it led, the next year, to our efforts to thwart an epidemic of measles that broke out in the Venezuelan Yanomamö area…
            One of my misdeeds, according to my detractors, was the fact that the subtitle of the first three editions of my college monograph was “The Fierce People”—a phrase the Yanomamö themselves frequently used to emphasize their valor, braveness, and willingness to act aggressively on their own behalf. My detractors claimed that this subtitle was demeaning and I was guilty of inflicting psychological harm on the Yanomamö and causing other evil people to do harm to them.
            Thus, just at the moment that concerned anthropologists—particularly activist anthropologists associated with survival groups—were denouncing the [Brazilian miners] …[my] lead article in the most influential American science journal appeared… that documented the correlation between success at warfare and high reproductive success among Yanomamö men. To have a lead article in Science suggesting that “killers have more kids” was like pouring gasoline on a smoldering fire… My detractors immediately attempted to associate my article—and all of my work—with the depredations, real and imagined, that Brazilian gold miners inflicted on the Brazilian Yanomamö (392-394)…
 
Outrageous Accusations… Published by the AAA
 
          Shortly after my article in Science appeared a group of anthropologists drafted a list of accusations against me under the imprimatur of …the Brazilian Anthropological Association. The accusations appeared in a document that was a formal complaint to the Ethics Committee of the American Anthropological Association… I was dumbfounded. The president of my professional association and a former departmental colleague wanted me to approve the publication of something addressed to the AAA Ethics Committee, most likely a formal complaint against me, without even giving me a chance to read what it contained! …Needless to say, I told [the president] …that I would not give him my permission to rush this mysterious document into press where it might escape more serious scrutiny by scientists. He was disappointed, handed me the document, said he would be in touch soon, and departed.
            The actual authors did send a “letter of complaint” to the editor of Science that was nearly identical… [to the document I received]. It turned out that the complaint came from the Brazilian Anthropological Association, implying that a large group of Brazilian anthropologists were involved in drafting it… The complaint sent to the editor… had to be signed by the authors because Science does not accept anonymous complaints. That complaint was forwarded to me.
            The authors turned out to be… [anthropologists] known less for their ethnographic accomplishments than for their efforts as political advocates… [one of whom] once complained about me to the effect that “what Chagnon fails to understand is that doing anthropology in Brazil is a political activity.”
            The document was not published by the AAA’s Anthropology Newsletter until January 1999… [and] was a mistake-ridden and intemperate condemnation of my [work] …and included the following accusations…
1.   It was “racist”… ;
2.   I was guilty of complicity in genocide;
3.   I had faked my data;
4.   I had deliberately concealed the fact that diseases were the primary source of 
      mortality among the Yanomamö in order to make violent deaths appear to be  
      the most common cause of death among them;
5.   I was encouraging and abetting sensational, negative press coverage of the        
      Yanomamö at a time when they were being invaded by miners;
6.   My Science article was a major reason why Brazilian officials set into motion a
      plan to separate the Yanomamö into twenty-one “micro” reservations… (394-
      397).
 
A New Direction for American Anthropology
 
          The subject matter of the “social” sciences is not as easily delineated as the subject matter of the “natural” sciences—and some observers even regard the very phrase “social science” as a contradiction in terms… Nevertheless, most anthropologists attempt to follow rigorous conventions when they collect field data and publish them. They usually follow the procedures and methods of science to the extent they can. One fundamental rule is that you should not make claims that are not true and cannot be verified by independent researchers using the same or similar methods.
          Archaeologists, physical anthropologists, and anthropological linguists are able to adhere more rigorously to the proposition that anthropology is a science because the stuff they deal with—pottery, house types, bones, grammar, etc.—are ontologically more factual than, for example, [social taboos]… They generally endorse the proposition that most disagreements can be resolved by independent observers collecting new data, by repeating the questioned observations, or by making sure that differences in results are not due to, for example, possibly real differences in the objects, items, communities, tribes, or whatever, that are the object of the disagreement.
          However, cultural anthropology, as distinct from these other sub-branches of the field of anthropology, contains two mutually incompatible and often contending factions. Many cultural anthropologists do subscribe to the methods and procedures associated with science and, historically, cultural anthropologists were comfortable with the word science as a general description of the kind of activity they engaged in. But many others—possibly the majority of cultural anthropologists today—prefer to look at themselves as nonscientists and, in many cases, are outspoken in their insistence that cultural anthropology is not a branch of science, but rather of the humanities…
          Today the many cultural anthropologists (or social anthropologists, as they are known in Great Britain) who prefer to think of what they do as a branch of the humanities regard their movement as “postmodernism.” …For some of them ”truth” and “facts” are merely subjective categories, ideological constructs, inventions of a subjective observer. Science and the scientific method are viewed by these cultural anthropologists with skepticism, suspicion, and even disdain…    
          [R]espect for science and the scientific method was beginning to weaken in many universities and colleges by the end of the 1960s. The French thinkers, Derrida and Foucault in particular, began to influence curricula in several fields of the social sciences. Postmodernism was incompatible with and often antagonistic toward the scientific approach. The very notion that the external world had an existence independent of the observer was challenged. Moreover, the scientific view was usually said to be exploitative and designed to keep the poor, the disenfranchised, ethnic minorities, and women in subordinate social positions.
          Those who adopted the postmodernist intellectual stance and who disagreed with an observer reporting something that a postmodernist didn’t like could denounce the observer as racist, sexist, biological determinist, and fraudulent. Or he could claim that the objective observer invented politically incorrect data… Increasing numbers of American cultural anthropologists—and many academics in other disciplines—began to view their role in the academy as one of advocacy of various causes having to do with the harm that industrialized nations, especially capitalist ones, were inflicting on the earth’s rivers, forests, ecological systems, and, most of all, the remaining tribesmen, ethnic minorities, illegal immigrants, the homeless, and others. In principle these genuine and meritorious concerns were not incompatible with the general historical traditions and accepted canons of ethics and behavior assumed by professionals in the sciences… But somewhere along the way the anthropology profession was hijacked by radicals who constituted the “Academic Left,” an aphorism coined by biologists Norman Levitt and Paul Gross in their superb book, Higher Superstition…
          Anthropologists should become “witnesses” and “name the wrongs” that have been done to the peoples that their predecessors studied, that is, the wrongs done by fellow anthropologists. Field research locations were no longer exotic, distant places where some anthropologist did his or her field research, but rather they were crime scenes… [T]oday’s cultural anthropologists should focus on the “crimes” committed by previous anthropologists and what they must now do to provide restitution to the victims of their “scientific” research…
          The denunciation of me in an official publication… of the AAA was something of a turning point not only in my own professional career, but also, I believe, in American anthropology. It seemed to legitimize unprofessional attacks on me and my research and other researchers like me. The “New Anthropology” seemed to legitimize the view that… the Ph.D. degree in cultural anthropology was the equivalent of a license to identify and hunt for the bad guys, “in offices down the hall” …
          As this trend became increasingly apparent, Paul Gross, a distinguished biologist from the University of Virginia, commented in 2001 on the damage that this trend was causing:

"Thirty years ago the distinction between technical disagreements and moral-political warfare began to dissolve. A whole generation of students and teachers became convinced that everything, including scientific inquiry, is inextricably political because knowledge itself was inextricably a social—i.e., a political—phenomenon. Politics, meanwhile, is a matter too important for niceties. Berkley anthropologist Nancy Scheper-Hughes exemplified these enthusiasms when she demanded from her colleagues, in 1995, a 'militant anthropology, the education of a new cadre of ‘barefoot anthropologists’ that I envision must become alarmists and shock troopers—the producers of politically complicated and morally demanding texts and images capable of sinking through the layers of acceptance, complicity, and bad faith that allow the suffering and the deaths to continue…'" 
 
Gross concluded his essay by noting that “the barefoot anthropologists, the activists, will be teaching your children.” And in fact they are (398-402).
 
The Gathering Storm
 
          A storm was brewing in cultural anthropology by the late 1990s. This storm seemed to presage something ugly and unprecedented because parties had already begun to publicly and sometimes clandestinely denounce and denigrate each other, even essentially sabotaging research projects, and shamelessly trying to ruin opponents academically. These storm clouds were characterized by the following trends:

Biophobia: the chronic opposition in cultural anthropology to ideas from biology that purported to help account for what humans in all cultures did… 

Postmodernism and the notion that “facts” were merely “constructs” of the human mind and, consequently, that there was no “real world” independent of its observer. Objectivity could therefore not exist. What one person observed was not verifiable by another, and the repetition of empirically sound observations could no longer serve as the standard by which some kind of “truth” could be reached in anthropology. Thus science and the scientific method was just another arbitrary way to look at things, much like witchcraft, astrology, or dreams. Remarkable as it seems, many anthropologists seemed to prefer the latter approaches.

Activism and advocacy, the act of using your accumulated knowledge, prestige, education, deep commitment to some cause, and to direct the education, authority, and prestige normally associated with your position in society to advocate some political cause. This activism usually occurred with respect to causes that were “morally” or “ethically” correct in some absolute sense compared to the “immoral” or “ethically reprehensible” views of your competitors. Because your cause was moral and theirs was not, you could use false claims against competitors based on your presumed authority” (402-403)…
 
The Smear Campaigns Begin
 
            In the spring of 1994 packages of derogatory hate mail were sent to officers of all of the granting agencies who had supported my Yanomamö research; editors of the several publishing companies who had published my books; the chancellor, several deans, and the chairman of my department… and heads of anthropology departments of many other universities… Many of these people wrote to me expressing their disgust at receiving these packages, some saying they were simply revolting… The packages reflected a considerable amount of sophistication in how they were assembled, the list of recipients, the hierarchy of administrative officials at my university, and the list of agencies and their addresses that funded portions of my research…
            [F]ormer graduate students and colleagues, seemingly found it easier to make a name for themselves… by denouncing me rather than by expending the necessary time-consuming effort working in remote undesirable field conditions and producing academically acceptable research… My activist opponents in Brazil had discovered that I had entered Yanomamö villages there and were now frantically attempting to interdict my research. They sent a protest message, a dossier, to [the office of the National Indian Foundation] …and contacted their resident Yanomamö “chief,” …urging him to intervene… [The chief] “forbade” the pilot of my small plane from landing in an area where [he] …had influence. The secret dossier I had been told about was used several additional times to sabotage my intended field trips… (423-432).
 
Retiring in 1999
 
          In 1999 I decided to retire early… My interest—indeed, my passion—in anthropology was field research, discovering new information about the people I studied, the Yanomamö, and where they fit into the evolving human saga. I taught the largest course my department offered—upwards of nine hundred students—and probably produced as many successful Ph.D.s as anyone in my department. I could have stopped doing research and taught small, specialized courses while continuing to publish articles that reported the results of my field studies. But I decided that if I could no longer continue my field studies of the Yanomamö , who were changing very rapidly—and I desperately wanted to document them before those changes were widespread—then remaining in academia would be unsatisfying and frustrating. What I loved most about anthropology was no longer possible. I was also very angry with those who were sabotaging my field research efforts, the preparation for which was very expensive and which I had to pay out of my own pocket… (437).
 
An Impending Scandal
 
            About a year after [retirement] …one of my former students… sent me an e-mail. He began by telling me how sorry he was that he had to be the one to send me this message, for it contained the text of one of the most hateful and despicable accusations a professional academic could possibly get. This text was written by two anthropologists—Terrence Turner and Leslie Sponsel—who had been longtime critics and detractors of mine. Their long email… was addressed to the president and president-elect of the American Anthropological Association and to a list of other people in the organization. Dated October 1, 2000, it [contained the following accusations]:
 
"We write to inform you of an impending scandal that will affect the American Anthropological profession as a whole in the eyes of the public, and arouse intense indignation and calls for action among members of the Association. In its scale, ramifications, and sheer criminality and corruption it is unparalleled in the history of Anthropology… This nightmarish story—a real anthropological heart of darkness beyond the imagining of even a Josef Conrad (though not, perhaps, a Josef Mengele)—will be seen (rightly in our view) by the public, as well as most anthropologists, as putting the whole discipline on trial… This book should shake anthropology to its very foundations. It should cause the field to understand how the corrupt and depraved protagonists could have spread their poison for so long while they were accorded great respect throughout the Western World and generations of undergraduates received their lies as the introductory substance of anthropology. This should never be allowed to happen again."
 
They were describing a book that was about to be published, Patrick Tierney’s Darkness in El Dorado: How Scientists and Journalists Devastated the Amazon. The principal targets were me… and other members of the team of researchers who participated in or had anything to do with our attempts to abort the 1968 measles epidemic that struck the Yanomamö… It was my highly successful monograph on the Yanomamö through which “generations of undergraduates received their [my] lies as the introductory substance of anthropology.” …Not long after the incendiary… email circulated, sensational stories began appearing in the press. One… made this claim on its front page: “Scientists ‘killed Amazon Indians to test race theory.’ … (437-439).
 
The American Anthropological Association Responds
 
          …I had canceled my membership in the AAA in the late 1980s because the field of cultural anthropology had effectively become, in my estimation, an unintelligible mumbo-jumbo of postmodern jargon and a place where cynical assaults on the scientific approach were commonplace… I knew, however, that… [i]f anything were to be done by the professional community in response to [the accusations made in Tierney’s book] …the 2000 annual meeting would most likely be where it would start…
          [Tierney and I were invited to sit on an AAA panel that] would discuss the accusations Tierney made against me… and others about our 1968 Yanomamö expedition… I declined [the] …invitation to attend because I suspected that this forum would turn into a frenzy of acrimonious, self-righteous, politically correct denunciations, and I had no interest in becoming the bait in such a feeding frenzy… Remarkably, this was the only time that any official of the AAA invited me to participate in any discussion or invited my response to any accusation… in the ensuing years during which the AAA “investigated” [them]… Yet this “investigation” lasted for over five years and whole sessions of AAA annual meetings were devoted to aspects of the investigation…
          Officers of the AAA repeatedly insisted that their investigation was not an investigation but an “inquiry” because the rules of the AAA Ethics Committee forbade the AAA to “investigate” accusations of misdeeds by its members. Yet the [investigating] …Committee several times described its mission in precisely these terms, seven times on the first page of… [the] “Executive Summary” and many times elsewhere… The AAA’s executive board established… the El Dorado Task Force, “to conduct what the Board termed an ‘inquiry’ on the allegations … Such an ‘inquiry’ is unprecedented in the history of the Association…” Note that the word inquiry is put in quotes… 
          [The investigated accusations included that Chagnon and others introduced and spread Measles in Yanomamö areas, they withheld medical treatment and had humanitarian aims, they endorsed “sociobiological” theories that underpinned “eugenics” beliefs, they “staged” twenty-two films, “used fake sets,” and caused Yanomamö deaths “because they acted out dangerous violent scenes at Chagnon’s instructions,” Chagnon subscribed to Senator Joseph McCarthy’s right-wing political views, other anthropologists refute his claims, he bribed “informants to reveal tabooed names of dead relatives, which he frequently spoke openly and loudly in their villages,” hue used “two German shepherd attack dogs that he used to intimidate large weight-lifter types in bars and regularly made his graduate students submit to straining sessions as the targets of these attack dogs,” he frequently intimidated Yanomamö by firing a pistol in their villages, he associated with criminals to establish “an enormous ‘biosphere reserve’ actually intended for gold mining and to prevent other anthropologists from studying the Yanomamö in Venezuela.”]
          …Terence Turner, who coauthored with Leslie Sponsel the sensational email… that provoked the AAA to initiate its investigation, acknowledged… that the allegations regarding the measles epidemic in Tierney’s book were inaccurate… But if the central allegation in Tierney’s book was false, why did his other accusations cause such a sensation scandal in the media and in academia? Part of the reason is that some people believe falsehoods and conspiracy theories because they like to think that their more esteemed colleagues got to the top by subterfuge. Another reason is that this scandal was simply too juicy a story for the members of the press to ignore… But another and perhaps a more important reason was that my belief in a biologically evolved human nature… was unacceptable to most cultural anthropologists and other academics…. I was one of the most visible figures in anthropology who espoused this despised view. Tierney’s accusations gave opponents of my viewpoint an opportunity to discredit sociobiology.
            The damage done to me and my work by the false accusations in this book devastated my research career, damaged my health, gravely distressed my family… I was so overwhelmed by incessant calls from reporters during the first several weeks of the press coverage that, early one morning in October 2000, I collapsed from the stress and had to be hospitalized… Most of Tierney’s [106] accusations have been systematically repudiated by independent researchers... at http://www.anth.ucsb.edu/ucsbpreliminaryreport.pdf and... http://antroniche.com (439-446)…
 
Dawn after the Darkness
 
            The AAA’s investigation had been opposed from the start by a small group of senior anthropologists for a variety of reasons, mainly because they knew such investigations were impermissible under the AAA’s own rules and also because some of the accusations against me… were unfair and likely to be untrue. The Chronicle of Higher Education summarized some of the reasons that senior anthropologists opposed this investigation… in the following words: “The report came under immediate and heavy criticism from several scholars. Those critics claimed that the panel’s composition was biased, that Mr. Chagnon had not been afforded due process, and that the association’s Web site had propagated… a new stream of lurid and unsubstantiated allegations against Mr. Chagnon.” …
            Thomas Gregor and Daniel Gross… published a meticulously researched and extremely critical article in the American Anthropologist in 2004 that elaborated the mistakes the AAA had made, calling attention to, among other criticisms, the violations of the association’s own rules and guidelines. They then placed a… referendum on the AAA ballot… [that] called for the rescission of the AAA’s acceptance of the final report of the task force… [It passed] 846 to 338 (about 2.5 to 1)… These results clearly indicated that the leadership of the AAA was significantly out of step with the AAA membership…
            Nearly five years passed between the November 2000 annual meeting… and the rescission of the AAA’s acceptance of the El Dorado Task Force report in June 2005… Those five years seem like a blurry bad dream. What seems to stand out in this fog are the many articles that were published about this scandal and how ill-informed, misleading, or outright wrong many of them were, and how self-righteous, unkind, and cynical many were… (449-450).
 
Cultural Anthropologists: The Fierce People
 
            Cultural anthropology differs from the other subfields of anthropology such as archaeology, physical anthropology, and linguistics by being the only branch that has historically embraced and advocated explicitly nonscientific or even antiscientific approaches to explaining the external world. Yet throughout the history of anthropology and despite a wide range of variation in approaches and “styles” in cultural anthropology, there has always been a core group of anthropologists who maintain that anthropology--all branches of anthropology—is , in the final analysis, a scientific discipline. The National Academy of Sciences acknowledges this by making the discipline of anthropology a subdivision of the overall taxonomy of the sciences that it and other international academic organizations recognize.
            But in the past twenty or so years the field of cultural anthropology in the United States has come precipitously close to abandoning the very notion of science. In 2010 the leadership of the AAA attempted to eliminate the very word science as a central component in the discipline… In a word, the schism in cultural anthropology is between those who do science and those whose exclusive goal is to speak on behalf of native peoples, an activity that they define as being incompatible with science. This latter view is not only wrong, it borders on irresponsibility…
            To their credit, some of the cultural anthropologists who still belong to the AAA did not complacently accept the decision of the AAA’s executive board. They fought this new declaration, demanding that it be reconsidered… Those who narrowly define cultural anthropology as primarily an “advocacy” activity, that is, a political activity… are undermining the entire anthropological profession…
            Two of my colleagues, Jane Lancaster, editor of Human Nature, and Raymond Hames… criticized the AAA and several of its past and present officers for mishandling the Darkness in El Dorado scandal:

"Science has a special place and currency in American society. Purging science for the AAA’s Long Range Plan will lose us our credibility, the ability to testify and advocate for effective change, and hence our power to do good. We become just another special interest group by abandoning evidence-based testimony which trumps special interest group advocacy in the courts, public opinion, and the legislative process… Scientific anthropologists merit full respect and backing and should not be pushed into corners or swept under a rug or even worse, as Alice Dreger documents… come under attack by our own major professional organization to pacify those who initiated a witch hunt."
 
There are two ways to discourage the behavior of self-righteous renegade anthropologists like Turner and Sponsel. They should be prohibited from holding any future office in the AAA or serving on any official AAA committee because of their reprehensible behavior… We should also recall at this point the warning that I quoted from Paul Gross that “the barefoot anthropologists, the activists, will be teaching your children.” One of the activists who played an important role in trying to sabotage my research… is teaching your children… I find it ironic, unfair, and shameful that her academic appointment seems to be a reward for her way of dealing with academics whose views she dislikes. I believe that most departments in an American university would neither grant her tenure nor promote her to a higher rank if they knew how she tried to prevent a senior anthropologist from conducting research. In his book, Tierney thanks her for preparing the infamous dossier used to sabotage the last three of my field trips.