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Napoleon Chagnon with a Yanamamo family in the Amazon. (University of California-Santa Barbara Photo)

JUNGLE FIGHT! Former U-M Scholar at Center of Academic, Media Dispute

Nation's Most Famous Anthropologist Has Roots in Thumb, Northern Michigan

February 17, 2013       Leave a Comment
By: Dave Rogers

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Today Port Austin and Onaway: Tomorrow the World.

He's not Indiana Jones, but the jungle exploits of Michigan's Napoleon Chagnon may be more sensational than those of the movie star depicted by Harrison Ford.

His book has sold over a million copies and is the best-selling anthropology text of all time.

Chagnon wrote that the remote Amazon tribe of Yanomamo were "innately violent" and engaged in "chronic warfare". Rival anthropologists argued that the Yanomamo became violent after Chagnon offered machetes, axes and shotguns to elicit their cooperation.

Some critics say the tribe, considered the least developed in the world, merely gave answers they thought Chagnon wanted, a charge similar to ones leveled against the famed Margaret Mead who found Pacific Islanders passive.

Port Austin native Napoleon Chagnon's study of the isolated Yanomamo Indian tribes of the Amazon and the resulting controversy are the focus of The New York Times in a lengthy cover story today.

Born in Port Austin, Chagnon grew up in Onaway, in Presque Isle County, northern Michigan. He graduated from Onaway High in 1956, won a scholarship and went on to fame, and fortune as well as controversy.

He is retired from the University of California-Santa Barbara and now teaches at the University of Missouri.

The young anthropology graduate student from the University of Michigan in 1964 started on a journey "that would last a lifetime, and take him from one of the most remote places on earth to an international controversy," National Public Radio commented.

NPR assessed the monumental impact of Chagnon's work:

"That controversy would divide his profession and impugn his reputation. Eventually he would come to redefine the nature of what it is to be human."

Chagnon is out with a new book called "Noble Savages: My Life Among Two Dangerous Tribes -- The Yanomamo and the Anthropologists." It is published by Simon & Schuster.

It's the latest salvo in an anthropologist's war that has raged more than 40 years; it seems Chagnon angered Salesian priests, Roman Catholic missionaries who control much of the jungle lair of the Yanomamo, whom he criticized in his 1968 book "The Fierce People."

The priests in turn gave damaging interviews to documentary filmmakers and authors who have attacked him, such as Patrick Tierney in his book "Darkness in El Dorado," which leveled charges of researcher contamination of studies.

MyNorth.com wrote in 2010: "Among Tierney's worst accusations: That a 1968 University of Michigan medical expedition, which included Chagnon and was led by renowned geneticist Dr. James Neel, abetted or even caused a deadly measles epidemic that broke out nearly simultaneously with the team's arrival in the jungle.

"The book's most damning accusations have been publicly and factually refuted and Chagnon's reputation largely cleared, but a new movie, Secrets of the Tribe, made by Brazilian filmmaker Jose Padilha and premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January, resurrects the old charges, again insinuating Chagnon's guilt in the Amazon measles affair."

Ironically, given his conflict with the Salesian priests and a bishop, Chagnon was raised in a Roman Catholic family, one of 12 children, and reportedly once yearned to be a priest.

In an article in LA Times Magazine in 2000, Michael D'Antonio wrote: "Chagnon said he'd found a society in which homicide and warfare were common and the most violent men wound up with the most wives and children. In his view, the Yanomamo--and by extension, all humans--fought not because fighting was essential to survival but because they were programmed for violence in a lawless society. Survival of the fittest, at least in Yanomamo terms, means survival of the meanest.

"Few ethnographers can tell a story better than Chagnon, and "Yanomamo: The Fierce People,"as it was titled for its first printing in 1968, became the best-selling anthropology text of all time."

The common complaint is that Chagnon embraces sociobiology, which D'Antonio describes as "a stream of academic thought that emphasizes the role of innate biological urges, some genetically based, in human behavior.

"Sociobiology can inflame those who fear that an overemphasis on genes starts science on the slippery slope toward eugenics, a genetic-purity movement powerful early in the 20th century. It contributed to such political ideas as Nazism and in the U.S. was cited to justify many discriminatory practices, including the forced sterilization of thousands of institutionalized people."

In the late 1970s, D'Antonio recalls, at the beginning of the debate over sociobiology, reactions were so intense that Harvard's E.O. Wilson, a proponent, was doused with a pitcher of water and knocked to the floor when he appeared to debate the issue at an academic forum.

Chagnon describes encountering the Yanomamo tribe for the first time in an interview with NPR's Jacki Lyden:

"When I looked up, I gasped at what I saw: a dozen of hideous-looking men with green slime running out of their noses, looking at us down the shafts of their drawn arrows. And I was startled, shocked, and the next thing that I realized I had about 20 very unpleasant dogs circling me as if I were to be their next meal."

After visiting several villages he recalled: "I mentioned cautiously the name of the head man and his wife, and they just burst out laughing because, in effect, they had told me that the names of these two people were various components of one's genitalia."

On shattering the anthropological paradigm of peace in the jungle:

"One of the first things I noticed was that they weren't living in a blissful state of nature, but in fact were actively engaged in raiding, club fighting, chest pounding. The next thing that I noticed was that most of their fights started with, or revolved around, abduction of women. ... I was shattering two rather sacred myths in anthropology. One is that natives in a state of nature are not really blissful, and two, they were fighting when they did fight over females -- reproductive opportunities -- and these were two rather serious challenges to the received wisdom of the anthropological times of the 1960s."



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Dave Rogers

Dave Rogers is a former editorial writer for the Bay City Times and a widely read,
respected journalist/writer in and around Bay City.
(Contact Dave Via Email at carraroe@aol.com)

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