Part of Chagnon’s disruptiveness no doubt resulted from his blustery, macho self-conception, but his research goals may have been an even bigger source of problems. He wanted to collect genealogical information from the Yanomami. This is a tricky proposition, to say the least, given that the Yanomami consider it disrespectful to speak names out loud. Naming the dead requires breaking one of the strongest taboos in their culture. Juan Finkers, who lived among them for twenty-five
years, says, “To name the dead, among the Yanomami, is a
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grave insult, a motive of division, fights, and wars.” Anthropologist Marshall Sahlins described Chagnon’s research as “an absurdist anthropological project,” trying to work out ancestor-based lineages “among a people who by taboo could not know, could not trace and could not name their ancestors—or for that matter, could not bear to hear their own names.”31
Chagnon dealt with his hosts’ taboo by playing one village off against another. In his own account, he: began taking advantage of local arguments and animosities in selecting my informants.. traveling to other villages to check the genealogies, picking villages that were on strained terms with the people about whom I wanted information. I would then return to my base camp and check with local informants the accuracy of the new information. If the informants became angry when I mentioned the new names I acquired from the unfriendly group, I was almost certain that the information was accurate.. I occasionally hit a name that put the
informant into a rage, such as that of a dead brother or sister
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that other informants had not reported.
To recap:
1. Our hero swashbuckles into Yanomami lands, bringing machetes, axes, and shotguns he presents to a few select groups, thereby creating disruptive power imbalances between groups.
2. He detects and aggravates preexisting tensions between communities by goading them to disrespect each other’s honored ancestors and dead loved ones.
3. Inflaming the situation further, Chagnon reports the offenses he’s provoked, using the resulting rage to confirm the validity of his genealogical data.
4. Having thus inflicted and salted the Yanomami’s wounds, Chagnon sallies forth to seduce the American public with tales of derring-do among the vicious and violent “savages.”
The word
Yanomami. It signifies “a powerful nonhuman with deeply
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disturbed tendencies and wild eccentricities.” Since 1995, Chagnon has been legally barred from returning to the lands of the Yanomami.
When anthropologist Leslie Sponsel lived among the Yanomami in the mid-1970s, he saw no warfare, just one physical fight, and heard a few loud marital disputes. “To my surprise,” writes Sponsel, “people in [my] village and three neighboring villages were simply nothing like ‘the fierce people’ described by Chagnon.” Sponsel had brought along a copy of Chagnon’s book, with its photos of fighting Yanomami warriors, as a way to explain the sort of work he was doing. “Although some of the men were absorbed by the pictures,” he writes, “I was asked not to show them to children as they provided examples of undesirable behavior. These Yanomami,” Sponsel concluded, “did not value fierceness in any positive way.”34
For his part, in over a decade living among them, Good witnessed a single outbreak of war. He cut his association with Chagnon eventually, having concluded the emphasis on Yanomami violence was “contrived and distorted.” Good later wrote that Chagnon’s book had “blown the subject out of any sane proportion,” arguing that “what he had done was tantamount to saying that New Yorkers are muggers and murderers.”
For a certain kind of journalist (or evolutionary psychologist), nothing is more satisfying than exposing hippie hypocrisy. A recent headline from Reuters reads, “Hippie Apes Make War
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as Well as Love, Study Finds.” The article states, “Despite their reputation as lovers, not fighters, of the primate world, bonobos actually hunt and kill monkeys..” Another assures us that “Despite ‘Peacenik’ Reputation, Bonobos Hunt and Eat Other Primates Too.” A third, under the headline “Sex Crazed Apes Feast on Killing, Too,” opens with an audible sneer: “As hippies had Altamont [where Hell’s Angels killed a concert-goer], so bonobos have Salonga National Park, where scientists have witnessed the supposedly peace-loving primate hunting and eating monkey children.” “Sex crazed”?
