-Caveat Lector-
Macho anthropology
Did scientists start a deadly epidemic to prove that humanity is innately
violent -- or are they victims of politics?
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Juno Gregory
Sep. 28, 2000 | In an extraordinary "open letter" to the American
Anthropological Association last week, Terence Turner of Cornell University
and Leslie Sponsel of the University of Hawaii alerted the association -- and
hundreds of participants on several e-mail lists who received the forwarded
message -- to the upcoming publication of "Darkness in El Dorado: How
Scientists and Journalists Devastated the Amazon," a book by investigative
journalist Patrick Tierney. Turner and Sponsel grimly informed the AAA that
the book was an "impending scandal" that would "arouse intense indignation"
in the public mind. There was certainly indignation to spare in the letter
itself: "In its scale, ramifications, and sheer criminality and corruption
[the scandal] is unparalleled in the history of Anthropology."
Tierney's book, which is to be extensively excerpted in the New Yorker in
early October, contains an extensive catalog of astonishing -- and, many say,
incredible -- allegations against several highly regarded anthropologists who
conducted detailed ethnographic studies in the jungle highlands of Venezuela
and Brazil over the past 35 years. Most explosively, Tierney alleges that:
American geneticist James Neel performed a monstrous biological experiment on
the Yanomamo Indian tribe by deliberately introducing a dangerous measles
virus, thereby causing hundreds of deaths.
Napoleon Chagnon, perhaps America's most famous anthropologist, participated
in Neel's epidemiological experiment, staged tribal ceremonies and violence
for documentary cameras, fudged scientific data and tried to carve out a
personal kingdom within the Yanomamo reserve.
If true, these allegations would not only call these men's personal integrity
into question but undermine the validity of their research, which has been
influential in framing some popular assumptions about human evolution and
behavior. Chagnon's work, in particular, has been widely cited as supporting
the view that men are the engines of evolutionary improvement because they
are inherently violent competitors for sexual access. In this view, the most
aggressive "winners" in prehistory had the most sex with the most women, and
passed on their superior fighting genes to the largest number of children. As
a corollary, this theory says that our evolution was driven by hierarchical
processes, so that the most "natural" human social system is one of dominance
rather than cooperation.
The political implications of such views are obvious, and Neel and Chagnon
have long come under fire because of the uses that could be -- and, in
Chagnon's case, have been -- made of their work. Politics, Chagnon and his
defenders say, is what is really behind Tierney's book and Turner and
Sponsel's letter to the AAA. "The Turner letter is transparently an attempt
to destroy a man's career and plow salt into the ruins," says journalist
Andrew Brown, author of "The Darwin Wars." Chagnon himself called Turner and
Sponsel's letter "extremely offensive" and said that Tierney, Turner and
Sponsel have already accused him of many of these crimes, in print and
verbally at academic meetings, repeatedly over the past decade. "This is just
a more elaborate extension of their long vendetta against me," he said.
Chagnon, for his part, has not been shy about returning the salvos lobbed at
him over the years. He portrays his professional enemies as "leftists" and
"Marxists," politically correct bleeding hearts who are out to suppress the
truth simply because they find it unpalatable. While Chagnon's critics can
boast overwhelmingly higher numbers (including most Indian organizations,
human rights groups, missionaries, environmentalists, researchers and
government officials in Venezuela), Chagnon has a coterie of impressive,
high-profile defenders and allies in the scientific community. Most of them
declined to talk on the record, but their contempt for Chagnon's accusers was
visceral. Turner, one Chagnon partisan told me, is a "swirling sophist."
Chagnon also has many sympathizers in the major media, perhaps because of the
growing popularity of the cultural views that his research supports. In
short, Chagnon seems to have considerably more famous firepower on his side,
and that adds up to a significant public relations advantage in the United
States and Britain. I soon discovered, when I began asking questions, that
many of Chagnon's friends are certain, even before they have read Tierney's
book, that the charges against Chagnon, Neel and other anthropologists will
prove to be merely "ugly politics." They confidently frame the conflict as
Chagnon's manly "hard evidence" against his softheaded critics' "emotional
assertions."
So, are Tierney's red-hot allegations about Neel and Chagnon legitimate?
Tierney's most shocking suggestion -- played for all it was worth by Turner
and Sponsel -- is that in 1968, Atomic Energy Commission geneticist Neel, his
protégé Chagnon and a respected Venezuelan physician named Marcel Roche
deliberately inoculated a sample population of Yanomami Indians with
Edmonston B, a dangerous and totally inappropriate live-virus measles
vaccine. Coincidentally with the vaccinations, and following the researchers'
path, a full-blown measles epidemic broke out among the Yanomami. Tierney
quotes several people who hint darkly that an epidemic might have been
exactly what Neel was seeking.
Neel, who died in February, considered himself, as he titled his 1994
autobiography, a "Physician to the Gene Pool." He thought that modern
culture, with its supportive interventions on behalf of the weak, was
"dysgenic." It had strayed too far from humankind's original "population
structures": small, relatively isolated tribal groups where men competed with
one another -- violently -- for access to women. In these societies, Neel
assumed, the best fighters would have the most wives and children, and pass
on more of their genetic "index of innate ability" to the next generation,
leading to a continual upgrading of the quality of the gene pool. But among
modern humans, Neel wrote, the "loss of headmanship as a feature of our
culture, as well as the weakening of other vehicles of natural selection, is
clearly a minus."
Tierney never establishes what definitive data he thinks Neel's tiny research
team could have hoped to obtain in the midst of a widespread, out-of-control
epidemic. But there were things Neel would have been anxious to discover
about Yanomami resistance to disease. Historically, small and isolated
populations tend to become more and more susceptible to "contact diseases"
from outsiders, and all those generations of genetic improvement might go for
naught if a village could be wiped out in a matter of days by an intruding
microbe. On the other hand, if the "best" males of Neel's ideal tribal
societies also had better resistance to disease, an epidemic would be likely
to further concentrate their superior genes.
Susan Lindee, of the Department of the History and Sociology of Science at
the University of Pennsylvania, reviewed Neel's 1968 field notes on the
epidemic immediately after hearing about Turner and Sponsel's letter to the
AAA. "Neel was a Cold Warrior deluxe, and an elitist," she wrote in an e-mail
summarizing her findings. He was "confident about his hierarchical rankings
of races, sexes, civilizations, fields of knowledge production, and forms of
social organization." She suggested that his confidence may even have
extended to seeing the Yanomami as "primitives" who could be legitimately
used for research into the conditions of human evolution.
But her review of Neel's notes indicates that the outbreak of measles caught
Neel and Chagnon very much by surprise. Tierney himself found audiotapes in
the National Archives, recorded by filmmaker Timothy Asch during the first
days of the epidemic, that show that Neel and Chagnon were increasingly
distressed and puzzled at the astonishing coincidence of their vaccinations
and a virulent outbreak of measles. Putting Neel's field notes and Tierney's
narrative together, it seems highly unlikely that Neel and Chagnon actually
intended to start an epidemic. But that doesn't mean they didn't start it
unintentionally.
By 1968 Edmonston B was considered by most immunization professionals to be
out-of-date. Other, more modern vaccines were available, vaccines that used
much weaker viruses and were cheaper and easier to administer. Even with an
accompanying dose of gamma globulin to control the antibody response, the
Edmonston B vaccine tended to cause extreme reactions. Without gamma
globulin, as Neel himself wrote in a 1970 article on the epidemic in the
American Journal of Epidemiology, the vaccine reaction was, "in some cases,
as severe as the disease itself among Caucasian children."
But Neel wouldn't have been worried that the Yanomami would come to any
permanent harm if he used the vaccine on them. Lindee stated that Neel's
notes show that he visited the Centers for Disease Control to discuss the
vaccination protocol some months before he went to Venezuela. Samuel Katz, a
Duke University pediatrician and an acknowledged expert on immunization
research and development, posted several facts about Edmonston B to the
e-mail lists and Web sites discussing the Turner letter, facts that Neel
would undoubtedly have been told when he consulted the CDC. Although some
populations' reactions had been significantly greater with Edmonston B than
with newer, more attenuated vaccines, there had never been any deaths
associated with Edmonston B trials. And, Katz said -- perhaps most important
for Neel -- even among sick and malnourished children in Nigeria and other
underdeveloped countries, "there was never any transmission of vaccine virus
to susceptible contacts."
In spite of Katz's assurances, it seems to me that the simplest explanation
that fits all the documented facts in Tierney's book is that the live
Edmonston B vaccine, contrary to all expectations, produced at least one
transmissible case of measles in the Yanomami. Evidence pointing in that
direction includes Neel's attempt after the fact to blame the outbreak on a
dubious "subclinical" case at Ocama mission village, and his apparent concern
about how the whole matter might be viewed by history. (The copies of his
field notes Lindee reviewed were in a file marked "Yanomamo-1968-Insurance.")
The lone transmissible case probably occurred among the first group of 40
people Chagnon immunized -- without suppressive gamma globulin therapy -- at
Ocama on Jan. 22, 1968.
Hundreds of Yanomami died of measles in the 1968 epidemic. In his book,
Tierney heavily overstates the possibility of genocidal conspiracy, and there
is certainly no "smoking gun," but I'm not surprised that Neel felt the need
for an "insurance" policy. The outbreak of a transmissible virus from the
live vaccine was not something he could have anticipated, but using Edmonston
B on a remote Amerindian population in the first place was unwise, and some
of my e-mail correspondents -- who prefer not to be quoted by name --
consider it "ethnocidal" negligence.
Tierney's account of anthropological crimes goes on from there. In the same
year as the measles epidemic, 1968, Chagnon, Neel's young protégé, was about
to become famous for a popular and influential book he published about his
earlier experiences among the Amazonian Indians of Venezuela. "Yanomamo: The
Fierce People" sold millions of copies and has been used extensively in
anthropology education ever since. Chagnon and filmmaker Asch also
collaborated on a series of riveting and award-winning documentaries
depicting Yanomami village life, bizarre hallucinogenic ceremonies and
gut-wrenching Stone Age battles. The Yanomami soon became the best-known
tribal people in the world, and the main thing people knew about them was
that they were extraordinarily violent. Few undergraduates who saw "The Ax
Fight" forgot the ugly thud at the peak of the struggle, apparently the sound
of someone's head being struck with an ax.
Tierney makes a kind of running parable out of the vast amount of
ethnographic filmmaking that went on in the late '60s and early '70s. The
films contributed greatly to Chagnon's growing reputation, and at the same
time portrayed a distorted image of the Yanomami to the outside world.
Tierney reports on an article Asch wrote later that claimed Chagnon would
become "bitter" if Asch tried to film anything other than aggressive
behavior. Asch said that when he urged Chagnon to film women's activities,
Chagnon "whipped around" and asked, "What makes you think there are any
women's activities?"
But Chagnon didn't just edit out peacefulness from his exciting documentaries
on the Yanomami. Many incidents and set pieces were actively staged,
including Chagnon's own dramatic entrance into a native village. But even
when the action was not being overtly choreographed, the presence of
filmmakers and anthropologists probably altered the Yanomami's behavior.
Tierney quotes Asch and several Yanomami participants in the films who said
that it quickly became clear to the Yanomami that Chagnon would reward them
with intensely desirable steel machetes and cooking pots for displays of
violent behavior and fierce posturing.
Filming also exacerbated tribal tensions, altered the wealth structure of the
society and, perhaps most important of all, introduced disease. "The
protagonists of Chagnon and Asch's most famous films all met with disaster,"
Tierney asserts. "Chagnon's computer printouts, blood samples, ID photos,
maps and films were all scientific supports for an American saga in which
anthropologists triumphed over intransigent Indians and the Indians politely
died off camera. Critics who garlanded these pictures really underestimated
the artistry involved. They gave blue ribbons to the greatest snuff films of
all time."
Tierney's tolling of anthropological sin continues in a lengthy chapter
examining Chagnon's most famous and influential scientific paper, published
in 1988. Chagnon burnished his already glowing reputation in this article in
Science, outlining almost perfect scientific evidence that directly supported
his mentor Neel's theories about human evolution. Based on the vast amounts
of genealogy data and blood samples that he had laboriously collected from
dozens of Yanomami communities, Chagnon announced that he had discovered an
intriguing and statistically significant trend: Yanomami men who had killed
other men tended to have more wives -- and more children -- than those who
weren't killers.
This was an extraordinarily important finding. The idea that murderous
violence enhanced Yanomami men's reproductive success definitively debunked
what Chagnon had once called "all the crap about the Noble Savage." Perhaps,
Chagnon's study implied, we really are an inherently violent and aggressive
animal species, constrained toward peacefulness in our modern lives only by
an "unnatural" veneer of dysgenic civilization. At least that's how many
people interpreted it.
Tierney's book raises convincing and serious questions -- and makes some
flat-footed assertions -- about Chagnon's necessarily intrusive and divisive
research methods, his "checkbook anthropology" and the effects of his film
shoots. He charges that Chagnon's own presence disrupted traditional cultural
values, trade patterns and political balances of power, so that far more
violence followed in his wake than was present before he arrived. But the
questions he raises about this landmark study are perhaps the most crucial of
all. If, in spite of all the allegations about Chagnon's behavior, he
nevertheless provided valuable, honest and important information about the
nature of human beings, shouldn't he be forgiven for breaking a few eggs on
the way to his historic omelet? So how valid, ultimately, is Chagnon's most
famous contribution to anthropological science?
One major problem Tierney reports, culled from the furious exchanges in the
journal articles that followed Chagnon's article, was that Chagnon had no
objective evidence of the homicides his "killers" had committed, but based
his figures on the number of men who had undergone "unokaimou," a difficult
ritual purification for murder. But "unokai," as men who had undergone the
ritual called themselves, didn't undertake it solely for causing death in
battle. Many unokaimou were performed for deaths men thought they had caused
by spells, animal surrogates like jaguars or snakes or magical procedures
such as "stealing footprints."
Even when it came to war, often a man did not know for sure if he had killed
anyone, having perhaps only fired an arrow into a melee during a skirmish.
But he would undergo the penance anyway, just to be sure. Figures on war
deaths also showed that many more men claimed to have killed on their raids
than had actually died in battle. In short, the relationship between actual
physical homicide and unokai status in Chagnon's study was, at best,
uncertain. If the men he counted weren't really murderers, were his
conclusions valid?
Perhaps the most critical problem in a study that purported to show the
differential reproductive success of killers -- or at least men who claimed
to be killers -- was that Chagnon deliberately left out the living children
of the men who were dead.
R. Brian Ferguson, an anthropologist at Rutgers University and author of
"Yanomami Warfare: A Political History," thinks this was an important
omission. His examination of the personal histories of a number of Yanomami
war leaders indicated that there is ample reason to believe that the most
warlike men were likely to be killed themselves, cutting short their
reproductive years. Chagnon himself points out that retaliation and revenge
are crucial factors in Yanomami violence. "Adding in deceased men and their
offspring could lower the unokais' measured reproductive advantage," Ferguson
notes in his book. "It is certainly within the realm of possibility that
unokai men would be found to have fewer offspring than non-unokai men."
Ferguson told me that it has been 11 years since Chagnon publicly promised
that he would publish some new data that would answer Ferguson's question,
but the data has not yet appeared.
Tierney himself examines some of Chagnon's data as it appears on the
interactive CD of "The Ax Fight," and takes it apart in a convincing manner.
"His charts on fertile killers looked good on paper," Tierney writes, "but
there was no way to confirm or refute them. Not only were the 'killers'
anonymous, so were the twelve villages they came from." Tierney says that he
was finally able to "penetrate" Chagnon's data by combining his own visits to
villages in the field with global positioning system locations and mortality
statistics. From there he goes on to show that significant parts of Chagnon's
data are misleading. I expect that this chapter will cause the most volcanic
reaction among Chagnon's friends and supporters, because here Tierney, a mere
investigative journalist with minimal "official" credentials, has fired on
Chagnon's scientific Fort Sumter. Tierney has committed the ultimate act of
academic war in accusing Chagnon of cooking his books.
Ultimately, for a variety of reasons that Tierney documents in eye-glazing
detail, Chagnon was expelled from Yanomamo territory in 1993 by the
government of Venezuela. One major cause of this ejection was that Chagnon
apparently attempted -- with the help of Cecilia Matos, the mistress of
Venezuela's later-impeached President Andrés Pérez -- to get himself and his
longtime friend, swashbuckling illegal gold miner Charlie Brewer Carías,
named as the sole administrators of a special "scientific reserve" segment of
the Yanomami homelands.
"Getting involved with Charles Brewer Carías is probably the worst mistake of
Chagnon's anthropological career," says anthropologist Kim Hill of the
University of New Mexico, a Chagnon defender who is also quoted in Tierney's
book. Like others, Hill surmises that Chagnon hooked up with the disreputable
adventurer out of desperation, when political storms and a relentless
campaign of what Hill describes as "academic repression" induced the
government of Venezuela to revoke Chagnon's permits to visit his beloved
Yanomami. "Chagnon flipped out when they cut off access," says Hill.
Chagnon's ill-advised attempt to create what Tierney calls a "private jungle
kingdom" outraged many Yanomami and their "bleeding heart" advocates. Tierney
quotes Nelly Arvelo Jiménez, an American-educated Venezuelan anthropologist,
who wondered how Chagnon could have "dared" to associate himself with
"environmental predators and economic gangsters" like Brewer.
Over the years the Yanomami reputation for savagery, which Chagnon had
elevated and celebrated, has clearly and directly encouraged violence against
them -- including a horrific massacre by a gang of Brazilian gold miners in
July 1993 -- as well as unjust treatment at the hands of their governments,
which have made direct use of Chagnon's research as justification for
isolating and partitioning Yanomami homelands.
If Chagnon's material, films and data paint honest pictures of the Yanomami,
it would be totally unfair to blame him for the ugly uses that have been made
of his work. Nevertheless, it seems the Yanomami themselves do blame him, and
when Chagnon turned to corrupt wheeler-dealer Brewer for political help in
maintaining access to his research subjects, he infuriated them and
accelerated their determination to keep him out of their country.
Chagnon's supposed crimes will be formally investigated by the American
Anthropological Association, starting at the group's annual meeting in
November, and the organization's president assured the anthropological
community, in another widely circulated open letter, that it would consider
Chagnon's case fairly. But the AAA, one of Chagnon's friends told me, is "a
joke." Another wrote to me in e-mail, "It is worth pointing out that the last
time the American Anthropological Association was asked to engage in special
pleading on behalf of a totemic matter was when there was a resolution
actually passed against the work of Derek Freeman, who exposed Margaret
Mead's work for the shabby confabulation it actually is."
The conjuring up of Mead is interesting under the circumstances. Some feel
that the cultural potency of her classic -- and now discredited -- "Coming of
Age in Samoa" was only surpassed by Chagnon's "The Fierce People." Mead made
her major ethnographic blunders under the influence of the educational
theories of her mentor Fritz Boas and her own wish to see an idyllic native
culture free of sexual taboo. She saw what she wanted to see, and the natives
cooperated, telling her what she wanted to hear. Mead's error was in pressing
her ethnography into the service of her politics and her preconceptions, a
danger that most honest anthropologists acknowledge is ever present in all
fieldwork, and that Tierney hints is the major reason Chagnon's science so
conveniently coincided with his mentor's theories and his own romantic vision
of manhood.
Tierney bought into that vision himself, originally. In the beginning, he
says, he very much admired the audacious, Indiana Jones-style anthropologist.
"He seemed preternaturally resourceful to me, a veritable hero -- as he was
to many other undergraduate males in the late sixties and early seventies."
But like so many other of Chagnon's friends and collaborators over the years,
Tierney became disillusioned.
The most intriguing defection was that of filmmaker Timothy Asch, who first
became upset with Chagnon over "Magical Death," a documentary Chagnon made on
his own in 1971, which showed Yanomami men in a bizarre ceremony of visiting
symbolic death on the children of their enemies and a ritualistic "eating of
babies' souls." Asch considered that film especially prejudicial to the
Yanomami, but he also had his doubts about his own films, feeling that they
were biased and incomplete.
Tierney quotes from an interview Asch gave to a film magazine: "'Chagnon was
so stuck in simple theories that, right away ["The Ax Fight"] became a real
joke,' Asch said. 'It is funny with its simplistic, straight-jacketed,
one-sided explanation ... I was feeling, you know, halfway into making the
film, this great suspicion of the whole field beginning to fall apart before
my eyes.'" In 1992 Asch also admitted that while editing "The Ax Fight" in a
Massachusetts studio, it was he who created the awful thunking sound that
became so emblematic of Yanomami violence -- by striking a watermelon.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
About the writer
Juno Gregory is an independent journalist who specializes in military,
economic and scientific subjects. She is a graduate of the University of
California's School of International Relations.
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