Review by New York Times Review
AS I read "Noble Savages," Napoleon A. Chagnon's memoir of his years among the Yanomamö, an isolated Amazonian tribe, I started hearing Linda Ronstadt's cover of "Poor, Poor Pitiful Me," first as a low background hum that grew louder and more insistent across the book's 500-plus pages. For the uninitiated, Chagnon is an American anthropologist whose 1968 book "Yanomamö: The Fierce People," which argued that "primitive" people didn't live in the peaceable societies Rousseau had imagined but instead fought bitterly, put him at the center of several long-running controversies. In "Darkness in El Dorado" (2000), the writer Patrick Tierney claimed that Chagnon and his research partner, the geneticist James V. Neel, exacerbated the 1968 measles epidemic among the Yanomamö; and that Chagnon aggravated the violence he claimed was endemic by distributing machetes and guns as payment to his informants. The American Anthropological Association convened a special task force to look into the accusations. Its two-volume report concluded that while Chagnon may have misrepresented the Yanomamö, no evidence backed up the measles allegations. The committee was split over whether Neel's fervor for observing the "differential fitness of headmen and other members of the Yanomami population" through vaccine reactions constituted the use of the Yanomamö as a Tuskegee-like experimental population. Heavy charges, grave deliberations, fraught conclusions: what better context for a meditation on how truth is produced in the social sciences? But while "Noble Savages" - a lively and paranoid romp through the thick jungles of the Amazon and the thicker tangles of academic and religious intrigue - might generate more publicity for Chagnon, I doubt it will do his reputation much good. Portraying himself as an innocent caught between two dangerous tribes, Chagnon spares no perceived enemy, including, it seems, the people on whose backs he built his career. Perhaps it's politically correct to wonder whether the book would have benefited from opening with a serious reflection on the extensive suffering and substantial death toll among the Yanomamö in the wake of the measles outbreak, whether or not Chagnon bore any responsibility for it. Does their pain and grief matter less even if we believe, as he seems to, that they were brutal Neolithic remnants in a land that time forgot? For him, the "burly, naked, sweaty, hideous" Yanomamö stink and produce enormous amounts of "dark green snot." They keep "vicious, underfed growling dogs," engage in brutal "club fights" and - God forbid! - defecate in the bush. By the time the reader makes it to the sections on the Yanomamö's political organization, migration patterns and sexual practices, the slant of the argument is evident: given their hideous society, understanding the real disaster that struck these people matters less than rehabilitating Chagnon's soiled image. But the problems bedeviling "Noble Savages" are not the stinking "primitives" or the politically correct academy, but the book's Manichaean rhetorical structure, simplistic representation of the discipline and questionable syllogisms. This final problem is especially acute given that Chagnon contends that cultural anthropology lacks a rigorous evidencebased scientific outlook. In "Noble Savages," the good guys and bad guys are easy to discern. Marxists and cultural anthropologists are, by definition, bad. Rousseau was wrong and is bad. Hobbes got it right and is good. "Sinister" Salesian Catholic missionaries have been out to get Chagnon ever since he refused their request to murder one of their own, who fathered a child with a local woman, and for revealing that they were distributing shotguns among the tribe. (When Chagnon handed out guns, he suggests, he inconvenienced himself, not the Yanomamö.) The Yanomamö are a deceitful, stubborn and murderous people. "Real" scientists are always good, and Chagnon is eager to convince us he is a real scientist, exploding myths and speaking truth to power. Yet his arguments in this book rely on slippery qualifications, dubious presumptions and nonreplicable claims. Chagnon's findings can't be tested since, as he takes pains to remind us, most contemporary Yanomamö are now "acculturated," their "wild" eyes dimmed. Obviously one doesn't have to be among "Stone Age warriors" to be mortally threatened, attacked by bugs or lack a proper coffee maker. But you cannot experience Chagnon's fantastic journey to the heart of darkness unless you believe, as he does, that you are peering across eons of time. Ditto with his core set of rhetorical syllogisms: (a) Neolithic man was a Hobbesian creature brutally competing for Darwinian reproductive advantage; (b) the Yanomamö are Neolithic pen who desire women; therefore, (c) the Yanomamö are competing for reproductive advantage. But paying attention to desire and sexuality need not entail a theoretical paradigm of reproductive fitness. A different set of presuppositions would lead you elsewhere. And what of these "primitives," who "duck-waddled in closer and wiggled in to have their feel" of their first white man? Leave aside the contrasting comparative data from other societies: we discover midway through the memoir that a "jungle grapevine" had long ago sent very accurate portraits of him to far distant groups. Surely bush telegraphs also conveyed word of what was likely to occur when white men showed up with guns and machetes. And yet, perhaps knowing this all too well, the Yanomamö look after Chagnon when he is stranded or in need. Like most people, the Yanomamö seem to combine forms of care with those of violence. No doubt facing public accusations of large-scale wrongdoing must be harrowing. But "Noble Savages" starts by backing out of one tragedy only to end in another. It is less an exposé of truth than an act of revenge. If your belief in your culture's superiority is founded on thinking of other societies as prehistoric time capsules, then you will enjoy this book. If not, say a requiem for the trees and make an offering to the pulp mill. The author was accused of exacerbating an epidemic and aggravating violence by distributing weapons. Yanomamö Indians, Chagnon says, defied Rousseauian notions of peaceable natives. Elizabeth Povinelli is a professor of anthropology and gender studies at Columbia University. She is the author, most recently, of "Economies of Abandonment: Social Belonging and Endurance in Late Liberalism."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [February 17, 2013]
Review by Booklist Review
Chagnon, author of a best-selling college textbook on the isolated Yanomamo tribe of the Amazon basin, was branded a heretic for violating the received wisdom of anthropology that societies untouched by modern civilization are generally peaceful, and when they're not, the reasons stem from fighting over scarce resources. After living among them for five years, Chagnon found the Yanomamo fierce fighters over women. He would ultimately spend 35 years studying the tribe, drawing on the disciplines of anthropology, archaeology, and biology to offer a complex portrait of the isolated tribe. His study came at a time of turmoil within his profession as political correctness and growing activism on behalf of native populations conflicted with more scientific and Darwinian notions of natural selection. Chagnon is as critical of his own early naivete in living among the Yanomamo as he is of cultural anthropology itself, which he describes as more religious than scientific. This is a fascinating look at a severely isolated tribe as it evolved into a more complex society as well as a scathing look at the tensions within an academic discipline in transition.--Bush, Vanessa Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Few social scientists end up as famous or contentious as American anthropologist Chagnon, whose unusually extensive field work among a highly remote Amazonian people, the Yanomamo, led to unorthodox conclusions about primitive societies in general and the Yanomamo's warlike nature in particular. In 2000, however, a veritable academic firestorm arose after Patrick Tierney's Darkness in El Dorado: How Scientists and Journalists Devastated the Amazon charged Chagnon, among others, with harming, deliberately or inadvertently, his research subjects, not least by starting a measles epidemic-an accusation that provoked his official condemnation (later reversed) by the American Anthropological Association. This memoir, Chagnon's first book for a general audience, recounts with confident prose and self-effacing humor his intense immersion, from 1964 onward, within this fascinating people and their jungle environment. It also critiques the Amazon's politically powerful, "sinister" Salesian Catholic missionaries, as well as the "ayatollahs of anthropology" for their Marxist-derived agenda and Rousseauian "noble savage" ideals, which run counter to his own Hobbesian beliefs. In this invaluable book, Chagnon (Yanomamo: The Last Days of Eden) delivers a gripping adventure travelogue. His take on the corrupting relationship between politics and science is as likely to restoke the flames of debate as settle outstanding accounts. Agent: John Taylor Williams, Kneerim & Williams Agency. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Anthropologist Chagnon's memoir begins as a riveting account of the years he spent doing fieldwork among the Yanomamo, in 1964 a largely uncontacted group of South American Indians of the upper Orinoco River watershed jungles in southern Venezuela. Chagnon (adjunct research scientist, Univ. of Michigan; The Yanomamo) clearly explains the scientific and biological approach to cultural anthropology that he applied to his studies of Yanomamo violence, ideas that put him at odds with cultural anthropologists. Chagnon details the serious conflicts that he had with other cultural anthropologists who disagreed with his interpretations and with the Salesian Society of the Roman Catholic Church, which had begun to establish mission outposts among the Yanomamo. Patrick Tierney's Darkness in El Dorado (2000) damaged Chagnon's reputation with its attacks on him. However, Chagnon unflinchingly defends himself on all of the ethical charges and points out that many of Tierney's accusations against him are now considered to have been based upon inaccurate information. Chagnon is a consummate storyteller and has successfully created an engaging and richly descriptive chronology of his professional life while not shying from the anthropological controversies that have dogged him for many years. Verdict The book is geared toward informed lay readers, but some knowledge of current anthropological theory is necessary for a complete understanding. This memoir is bound to be popular-and deservedly so.-Elizabeth Salt, Otterbein Univ. Lib., Westerville, OH (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A cultural anthropologist defends his deeply engaged lifetime of work with the Amazon Indians. Chagnon first arrived among the Yanomam in the Amazon basin on the border of Venezuela and Brazil in 1964 as a graduate student at the University of Michigan, and his initial fieldwork yielded a seminal textbook on the tribe. Living among these isolated people, the author gained their trust; learned their language, customs and reproductive patterns; and patiently constructed their genealogies, history of wars, way of life and "village fissions." He found right away that the Yanomam were undergoing a significant transformation from a primitive societal system to a more complex, larger and political system. Chagnon draws from the work of theoretical biology to propound the importance of "kinship behaviors" among the Yanomam, who were constantly stressed by the threat of attack from hostile tribes and practiced this form of reproductive selection in order to survive. Indeed, having closely observed these people, the author concludes that "maximizing political and personal security was the overwhelming driving force in human, social and cultural evolution." Many of Chagnon's observations--e.g., that the Yanomam fought over women--did not jibe with the thenpolitically correct notions of native peoples, and his research was censured at home. Moreover, Chagnon's work in the field coincided with enormous changes in the field of anthropology, such as the challenge by E.O. Wilson's studies in "sociobiology," which Chagnon embraced. His subsequent research ran afoul of various academic and political authorities and native rights groups, and the author was even accused of starting a lethal measles epidemic among the Yanomam. In the last section of the book, the author tediously rebuts the "smear campaigns." More than two-thirds of this rehabilitative work is a fascinating, accessible study of a little-known people.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
