Napoleon Chagnon

Early life and education

Chagnon was born in Port Austin, Michigan and was the second of twelve children. After enrolling at the Michigan College of Mining and Technology in 1957, he transferred to the University of Michigan after his freshman year and there received a bachelor's degree in 1961, an M.A. in 1963, and a Ph.D. in 1966 under the tutelage of Leslie White. Based on seventeen months of fieldwork begun in 1964, Chagnon's thesis examined the relationship between kinship and the social organization of Yanomamö villages.

Career

Chagnon is best known for his long-term ethnographic field work among the Yanomamö, a society of indigenous tribal Amazonians that live in the border area between Venezuela and Brazil. Working primarily in the headwaters of the upper Siapa and upper Mavaca Rivers in Venezuela, he conducted fieldwork from the mid-1960s until the latter half of the 1990s. According to Chagnon, when he arrived he realised that the theories he had been taught during his training had shortcomings, because contrary to what they predicted, raiding and fighting, often over women, was endemic. Due to his constantly asking questions, Chagnon was nicknamed "pesky bee" by the Yanomamö. A major focus of his research was the collection of genealogies of the residents of the villages that he visited, and from these he would analyze patterns of relatedness, marriage patterns, cooperation, and settlement pattern histories. The degree of kinship was seen by Chagnon as important for the forming of alliances in social interactions, including conflict.

Chagnon's methods of analysis are widely seen as having been influenced by sociobiology. As Chagnon described it, Yanomamö society produced fierceness, because that behavior furthered male reproductive success. The genealogies showed that men who killed had more wives and children than men who did not kill. At the level of the villages, the war-like populations expanded at the expense of their neighbors. Chagnon's positing of a link between reproductive success and violence cast doubt on the sociocultural perspective that cultures are constructed from human experience. An enduring controversy over Chagnon's work has been described as a microcosm of the conflict between biological and sociocultural anthropology.

Chagnon's ethnography, Yanomamö: The Fierce People was published in 1968 and later published in more than five editions, selling nearly a million copies, and is commonly used as a text in university-level introductory anthropology classes, making it one of the bestselling anthropological texts of all time. Chagnon was also a pioneer in the field of visual anthropology. He collaborated with ethnographic filmmaker Tim Asch and produced a series of more than twenty ethnographic films documenting Yanomamö life. The ethnographic film The Ax Fight, showing a fight among two Yanomami groups and analyzing it as it relates to kinship networks, is considered a classic in ethnographic film making.

In 2012 he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. Marshall Sahlins, who has been a major critic of Chagnon, resigned from the Academy and cited Chagnon's induction as a reason.

Darkness in El Dorado

In 2000, Patrick Tierney, in his book Darkness in El Dorado, accused Chagnon and his colleague James V. Neel, among other things, of exacerbating a measles epidemic among the Yanomamö people. Groups of historians, epidemiologists, anthropologists, and filmmakers, who had direct knowledge of the events, investigated Tierney's claims. These groups ultimately rejected the worst allegations concerning the measles epidemic. In its report, which was later rescinded, a task force of the American Anthropological Association (AAA) was critical of certain aspects of Chagnon's work, such as his portrayal of the Yanomamö and his relationships with Venezuelan government officials.

The AAA convened the task force in February 2001 to investigate some of the allegations made in Tierney's book. Their report, which was issued by the AAA in May 2002, held that Chagnon had both represented the Yanomamö in harmful ways and failed in some instances to obtain proper consent from both the government and the groups he studied. However, the Task Force stated that there was no support to the claim that Chagnon and Neel began a measles epidemic. In June 2005, however, the AAA voted over two-to-one to rescind the acceptance of the 2002 report, noting that "although the Executive Board's action will not, in all likelihood, end debate on ethical standards for anthropologists, it does seek to repair damage done to the integrity of the discipline in the El Dorado case".

Most of the allegations made in Darkness in El Dorado were publicly rejected by the Provost's office of the University of Michigan in November 2000. For example, the interviews upon which the book was based all came from members of the Salesians of Don Bosco, an official society of the Catholic Church, which Chagnon had criticized and angered.

Alice Dreger, an historian of medicine and science concluded after a year of research that Tierney's claims were false and the American Anthropological Association was complicit and irresponsible in helping spread these falsehoods and not protecting "scholars from baseless and sensationalistic charges".

Anthropological critiques of his work

Chagnon's work with the Yanomamö has been widely criticized by other anthropologists. Anthropologists have critiqued both aspects of his research methods as well as the theoretical approach, and the interpretations and conclusions he draws from his data. Most controversial has been his claim that Yanomamö society is particularly violent, and his claim that this feature of their culture is grounded in biological differences that are the result of natural selection.

The anthropologist Brian Ferguson has argued that Yanomamö culture is not particularly violent, and that the violence that does exist is largely a result of socio-political reconfigurations of their society under the influence of colonization. Bruce Alberts has rejected the statistical basis for his claims that more violent Yanomamö men have more children. Others have questioned the ethics inherent in painting an ethnic group as violent savages, pointing out that his Chagnon's depiction of the Yanomamo as such breaks with anthropology's traditional ethics of trying to describe foreign societies sympathetically, and have argued that his depictions have resulted in increased hostility and racism against the Yanomamö by settlers and colonists in the area. However, it is noted that Albert “cannot demonstrate a direct connection between Chagnon’s writings and the government’s Indian policy.” and that the idea that scientists should suppress unflattering information about their subjects is troubling and supports the idea that nonviolence is a prerequisite for protecting the Yanomami.

The anthropologist Marshall Sahlins, one of Chagnon's graduate teachers, has criticized Chagnon's methods, pointing out that Chagnon acknowledges engaging in behavior that was disagreeable to his informants by not participating in food-sharing obligations. Sahlins has claimed that Chagnon's trade of steel weaponry for blood samples and genealogical information amounted to "participant-instigation" which encouraged economic competition and violence. Lastly, Sahlins has argued that Chagnon's publications, which contend that violent Yanomami men are conferred with reproductive advantages, make false assumptions in designating killers and omit other variables that explain reproductive success. In 2013, Sahlins resigned from the National Academy of Sciences, in part in protest of Chagnon's election to the body. Other researchers of the Yanomami such as Brian Ferguson have argued that Chagnon himself contributed to escalating violence among the Yanomami by offering machetes, axes, and shotguns to selected groups to elicit their cooperation. Chagnon charged local Salesian priests with supplying guns to the Yanomami who then used them to kill each other.

In his autobiography, Chagnon states that most criticisms of his work are based on a postmodern and antiscientific ideology that has arisen within anthropology, in which careful study of isolated tribes has been replaced in many cases by explicit political advocacy that denies less pleasant aspects of the Yanomamö culture, such as warfare, domestic violence, and infanticide. Chagnon also states that his beliefs about sociobiology and kin selection are misinterpreted and misunderstood, similarly due to a rejection of scientific and biological explanations for culture within anthropology.

Film

Chagnon worked with ethnographic filmmaker Tim Asch to produce at least forty films on Yanomamo culture, including The Feast (1969), The Ax Fight (1975), and Magical Death (1988). These films, especially The Ax Fight, are widely used in anthropological and visual culture curriculum and are considered to be among the most important ethnographic films ever produced.