16
Darkness in Cultural Anthropology
The Smear Campaigns Begin
In the spring of 1994 packages of derogatory hate mail were sent to officers of all of the granting agencies who had supported my Yanomamö research; editors of the several publishing companies who had published my books; the chancellor, several deans, and the chairman of my department at the University of California, Santa Barbara; and heads of anthropology departments of many other universities in the United States and some in Europe. Many of these people wrote to me expressing their disgust at receiving these packages, some saying they were simply revolting.
These packages contained self-serving cover letters from two Salesians, Father Enzo Cappelletti and Bishop Ignacio Velasco, as well as a highly critical letter about my Yanomamö research written by French anthropologist Jacques Lizot, who, Bishop Velasco’s letter explained, was asked by the Salesians to write this letter.
Bishop Velasco’s letter, dated January 20, 1994, was addressed to Father Cappelletti, director of the U.S. headquarters of the Salesian Missions in New Rochelle, New York, and explained the Venezuelan Salesian vicariate’s alleged role in investigating the Hashimo-teri massacre that I wrote about in the previous chapter. Bishop Velasco denounced me and Charles Brewer, whom he described as members of the “so called Presidential Commission” appointed by Venezuelan president Ramón Velásquez. Bishop Velasco referred to two recent articles I had written about the massacre that were published in the New York Times and the London Times as among various articles in various parts of the world in which I “accused” the Salesians in “different ways.” I took the main point of his letter to be the enclosed extraordinarily vicious attack on me and my research by Lizot. Lizot’s letter emphasized that he, a Yanomamö expert, contested the demographic data I published that implicated Salesian policies in high death rates due to diseases. Lizot wrongfully said that my demographic data said “just the opposite.”
Lizot also downplayed the Salesian tactic of luring the Yanomamö to their missions by offering them shotguns. He said that “the rifles (sic ) arrive here from Brazil, crossing the border . . .” and were given out by the Venezuelan military, or were provided by the few Venezuelan creoles who visited the Salesian missions. (In fact, I had been told by some Yanomamö that Lizot himself provided them with shotguns and ammunition.) Lizot was one of my longtime academic detractors who also studied the Yanomamö for many years.
Among his several criticisms of me, Cappelletti refuted my claim that the 1915 Law of the Missions explained Salesian secular authority, because these privileges had long since been replaced by a real secular authority. Cappelletti’s main point seemed to be that the presidential commission appointed by Venezuelan president Velásquez on September 9, 1993, to investigate the Hashimo-teri massacre “was repealed on September 14, five days later, due to the general outcry against the members of the Commission. The press, politicians, anthropologists, the Yanomami themselves and the Salesians objected to the persons chosen [by the president of Venezuela].”
This statement is not true. This presidential commission was the only legally authorized Venezuelan investigation of the Hashimo-teri massacre and was not dissolved until January 1997, over three years later.
The package also contained articles from recent Venezuelan newspapers that covered the Hashimo-teri massacre that criticized me and, to a lesser extent, Brewer, for our participation in the investigation. More articles in the Venezuelan news media were devoted to attacks on me and Brewer than to the tragic massacre of the Yanomamö at Hashimo-teri, as I mentioned in the previous chapter.
The packages reflected a considerable amount of sophistication in how they were assembled, the list of recipients, the hierarchy of administrative officials at my university, and the list of agencies and their addresses that funded portions of my research.
Shortly after the first packages of derogatory mail were sent out by the Salesians, my disgruntled former Venezuelan student Jesus Cardozo visited me at UCSB on March 23. He was already an anthropology graduate student at UCSB when I joined the faculty in 1984 and, since he indicated that he wanted to study Venezuelan natives, he was assigned to me as an advisee. I had taken him into the Yanomamö area in 1985. After a few days in the field on his first field trip with me, he angrily denounced me and my research colleague, Raymond Hames. Hames and I had left him at Haoyaböwei-teri, a small Yanomamö community across the river from the Salesian satellite mission post of Mavakita, while we went two days farther up the Mavaca River to Mishimishimaböwei-teri to work there. On our way back downstream several weeks later, we coincidentally slept on the riverbank at Mavakita some hundred yards downstream from Haoyaböwei-teri. Cardozo heard our motor and dispatched several Yanomamö in a canoe to take a message to us. The message said he wanted a ride back down to the main Salesian mission at Mavaca and needed my help in paying the Yanomamö for the work they had done for him. Early the next morning I left Hames at our camp and went back to the Haoyaböwei-teri shabono where Cardozo was staying. When I began “paying” the Yanomamö, he didn’t like the way I proceeded: I gave the headman a machete, one of the most valuable trade items I had provided to Cardozo to pay informants for his work. He protested, saying that this man had done no work for him and didn’t deserve a machete. I explained to him that it didn’t make any difference: you must give the headman a big item, whether or not he did any work, simply because he was the headman.
Within two days of seeing his first Yanomamö when Hames and I took him to this village, Cardozo told us that he knew how to treat the Yanomamö, because they were all Venezuelans like he was and his “brothers” and you have to treat them like children, like spoiled teenagers, if they misbehave. And he was apparently doing that, which annoyed and angered the Yanomamö headman. When we finished paying the Yanomamö, which took much longer than was necessary because Cardozo kept objecting to what I paid each informant, we returned to the camp. Hames and I had a subsequent confrontation with Cardozo over his behavior when we tried to load the canoe. When we reached Mavaca late that afternoon, Cardozo took refuge with the Salesian missionaries. I am aware of no meaningful research he has done among the Yanomamö since then. On his 1994 visit he tried—and failed—to have me removed from his doctoral committee. During my tenure there, he never did finish his Ph.D. at UCSB.
Cardozo, like a handful of other former graduate students and colleagues, seemingly found it easier to make a name for themselves in the ethnography of the Yanomamö by denouncing me rather than by expending the necessary time-consuming effort working in remote undesirable field conditions and producing academically acceptable research. On his 1994 visit, Cardozo informed me that it was a crime in Venezuela to make false claims about others, such as my claim that the Salesians had systematically provided shotguns to the Yanomamö over the years and some of these shotguns were used to kill other Yanomamö. Such a crime, he went on, involved a prison sentence. Then he made it clear that it was possible that I would be arrested if I were to return to Venezuela. He wanted me to know that the current attorney general of Venezuela was a good friend of the Salesian Bishop of Caracas (Ignacio Velasco, formerly Bishop of Amazonas) and, most likely, would favor the Salesians in a legal suit against me for libelous statements about them.
In May 1994 Fr. Cappelletti published a critical article about me in the Newsletter of the American Anthropological Association. To my surprise, the same issue of that newsletter also included a critical article about me by Terence Turner. I found it unusual that a prominent Salesian functionary and one of my long-term activist anthropological critics would coincidentally publish critical articles about me in the same issue of an anthropological journal because my disputes with these parties did not overlap. Turner had published occasional critical remarks about me over a number of years and had publicly denounced me at a number of anthropology meetings. I had published nothing in response to his attacks. In the Anthropology Newsletter in September 1994 Charles Brewer and I responded to the attacks on us by Cappelletti and Turner.
Cappelletti’s article in the AAA’s newsletter repeated many of the same arguments that Bishop Velasco had made. Turner’s very long article in the “Commentary” section of the newsletter cited a number of my alleged misdeeds and reminded the reader twice that “Chagnon’s sociobiological theories” were a component in my dispute with the Salesians. My “sociobiological theories” had nothing to do with my dispute with the Salesians. Turner intended to remind the readers of the AAA newsletter who opposed sociobiology about my unacceptable theories. Turner falsely claimed that Charles Brewer was being investigated by the Venezuelan government for his alleged illegal mining interests in tribal areas and repeated the false claim that Charles Brewer and I were not authorized to investigate the massacre at Hashimo-teri:
The President of Venezuela did in fact appoint such a commission on September 9, but dissolved it only five days later after massive protests by indigenous organizations, anthropologists and other academics, politicians, and missionaries against the presence of Brewer-Carías [Brewer was also known as Brewer-Carías] and Chagnon on the Commission. This was ten days before Chagnon and Brewer had themselves flown in an Air Force plane to Haximu, representing themselves as members in good standing of the Presidential Commission. Meanwhile, the President appointed a new Commission, which proceeded to the site, arriving . . . after Chagnon and Brewer-Carias.
This false statement would become a staple of the Salesians and the activist anthropologists. It would reappear again and again.
When Brewer and I responded to Cappelletti and Turner, we were told by Susan Skomal, the editor of the Anthropology Newsletter , that our response would appear in the correspondence section and had to be limited to five hundred words. When I asked for space equal to that of Cappelletti and Turner, Skomal held firm and added that Turner’s long article “was of general interest to the members of the association” and a second article on the same topic would be unnecessary. I later learned that we should have been given equal space and that Skomal’s advice was incorrect.
The 1994 Annual Meetings of the AAA
On November 14, 1994, an anthropologist named Frank Salamone, who taught “missiology” and anthropology at Iona College, phoned me saying that he was holding a session at the upcoming annual meetings of the AAA in Atlanta two weeks from then and wanted me to participate in it. He told me that Padre José Bórtoli, the head of the Salesian mission posts in Venezuela’s Amazonas Territory, had come to New Rochelle, New York, and was staying with Father Enzo Cappelletti, the director of the Salesian Missions in the United States. Salamone said that he and Cappelletti were good friends and referred to Bórtoli by his first name. Iona College has no official connections to the Salesian order, but is in New Rochelle, New York, where the U.S. headquarters of the Salesian Missions are located. At the AAA meetings in Atlanta I was to discuss with Bórtoli my disagreements with some of the policies of the Salesian missionaries.
Salamone proposed a co-edited volume in which we would discuss what Salamone (and others) later characterized as the “ugliest war” between anthropology and the Catholic Church in the history of our discipline. He wanted to restrict the book to my dispute with the Salesians but I insisted on including other groups such as the New Tribes Missions. Salamone agreed to this suggestion. I had no difficulty finding an enthusiastic and reputable academic publisher for the proposed book—the publisher of my very successful monograph, Yanomamö , the most popular monograph ever used in introductory anthropology courses in American universities.
On the night before Salamone’s session he, some Salesians, and I went out to dinner. Although the Salesians and I were now openly criticizing each other, I still hoped we could patch up our differences during the several discussions we would have at these meetings. Attending this dinner was an American-Irish Salesian priest whom I didn’t know who worked for Cappelletti at the Salesian headquarters. His name was Donald Delaney. During the dinner he several times privately warned me in a stern and serious tone of voice to the effect, We will get back at you; the Salesians are not some trivial order of the Catholic Church that you can criticize with impunity. Salamone never mentioned when he first called me that he had just taken a trip to the Salesian mission at Mavaca, Bórtoli’s home base, at the invitation of the Salesians. His traveling companion was Father Delaney. Salamone had also contacted Terence Turner, something else he did not inform me about.
In Salamone’s AAA session Fr. Bórtoli and I made position statements about our respective disagreements with each other in a generally amicable way, focusing on the implications for the Yanomamö and Ye’kwana of the Biosphere Reserve that Charles Brewer and I were instrumental in helping create: Bórtoli acknowledged our role in persuading President Carlos Andrés Pérez to create this special area.
Near the end of the meeting Salamone called upon Turner, who was standing at the back of the small, crowded room. Turner denounced me angrily for, among other things, “undermining” the position of Davi Kobenawä, a Brazilian Yanomamö who was “emerging” as a politically prominent leader in Brazil.
I was annoyed that Salamone called on Turner to respond to what I had said. It was immediately clear to me that Salamone had arranged for Turner to be there and to make a provocative statement. When offered the opportunity to respond to Turner, I said, “you are goddamned right I want to respond, but this meeting is to attempt to establish some kind of détente between me and the Salesians and not to add more fuel to the existing flames . . . Turner’s remarks are not contributing to that end.”
After the 1994 AAA meetings, Salamone and I began exchanging the chapters we each had written for our proposed volume and made suggestions to each other. As we neared our publication date, Salamone added a chapter that was a list of the political accusations the Salesians had made in the Venezuelan newspapers intended to discredit me.
When I contacted our publisher and informed them that I intended to add a chapter to challenge the claims in Salamone’s new chapter, the publisher decided to cancel our contract because it realized that the issues were political as well as academic and had no place in a volume intended for undergraduate courses in anthropology.
Salamone’s several subsequent publications on my dispute with the Salesians indicate that his relationship with them was hopelessly biased in their favor. I had assumed that Salamone originally contacted me in the spirit of cooperation and professionalism, but his behavior thereafter led me to conclude that he had a hidden agenda intended to discredit me and make the Salesians look like victims of my allegedly unfair criticisms of them.
Over the next few months I also learned that Fr. Cappelletti was planning to advertise for a psychologist to “analyze” me from a distance and publish his results, known in advance, that I was a psychopath. Salamone states: “It was with some effort that Delaney and I persuaded Cappelletti to remain cool and not hire a psychologist to do a profile on Chagnon, for example. Cappelletti ranted that he would spend $20,000 on such a study.”
Enter Patrick Tierney
In the spring of 1994 I began getting emails and telephone calls from colleagues all over the United States about a writer named Patrick Tierney, who had contacted them asking for information about me. It was clear to them that Tierney wanted information they might know that was uncomplimentary and derogatory.
About a year after I began getting these warnings I received a call from the UCSB legal office. One of the employees there informed me that Tierney had requested through the federal Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) a summary of the dollar amount of research support I had received from UCSB since I had joined the faculty. This person told me that “he was extremely surprised and insisted that the amounts simply had to be much larger.”
On October 2, 1995, Tierney appeared in Campbell Hall on the campus of UCSB, where I was giving a lecture to a large class of undergraduates. When my lecture ended, he approached me, introduced himself as a journalist, and asked if he could talk with me. I bluntly replied that I knew about his attempts to get derogatory information about me and told him that I had no interest in talking to him. As I walked away from him I thought that this might be an opportunity to find out what he was up to, so I turned and invited him to my office the next morning.
When he appeared, I asked him for his press credentials. He didn’t have any. I then confronted him about an error-ridden article he had co-authored with a Leda Martins on the op-ed page of the New York Times in April about the alleged environmental destruction that Charles Brewer had done to the Venezuelan environment by “his gold mining operation.” We had a rather heated discussion about the inaccuracy of his information and the unsupported claims he and Martins had made about Brewer.
I then asked him about a “dossier” that I had heard about from a number of colleagues that he was allegedly putting together on me. He denied any knowledge of such a dossier. We spoke for only about a half-hour, at which point I told him I had work to do and indicated that our conversation was over.
Sabotaging My Trips to the Yanomamö
In 1995 I was approached by editors of Veja magazine, one of Brazil’s most popular newsmagazines, to do a story on the Yanomamö Indians on the Brazilian side of the border. I had not been to the Yanomamö in Brazil since my first (and at that time only) trip there in 1967. Veja editors assured me that they could arrange the necessary research permits from FUNAI, the Brazilian agency that regulated access to areas where Brazilian Indians lived.
I was very interested in this invitation because it could inform some of my most recent field studies on several villages that were now on the Brazilian side of the border. Between 1990 and 1992 I had contacted and studied a cluster of new Yanomamö villages in Venezuela’s Siapa River basin that were near the Venezuelan-Brazilian border and were closely related to several villages just over the border in Brazil. Indeed, the headman of Doshamosha-teri, a village I studied on Venezuela’s Siapa River, was a brother to a headman in one of the Brazilian villages, Abruwä-teri. Immediately to the west of Abruwä-teri were many villages of the Kohoroshi-teri and Karawatari of the Cauaburi drainage, whose members had captured and held Helena Valero during the early years of her captivity.
I traveled to Boa Vista, Brazil, by way of Santa Elena, a small Venezuelan town near the Brazilian border. Boa Vista is the capital of the northernmost Brazilian state, Roraima, an area that was highly dependent on mining and cattle ranching. From Boa Vista I was able to fly by a local air taxi service directly to the Yanomamö village of Abruwä-teri, in the Amazonas state of Brazil. I spent some ten days or so in Abruwä-teri collecting genealogies that tied them to the people I had been studying in Venezuela and recording detailed information on how the villages had fissioned away from the several groups on the Venezuelan side of the border. Some of the villages the Abruwä-teri discussed were still, in 1995, minimally contacted, if at all, and still isolated in a very remote area of southern Venezuela. From the Venezuelan side, I had several months earlier flown over and photographed several of them, some of which were relatively large—in the 150-inhabitant range to judge from the sizes of their shabonos.
My activist opponents in Brazil had discovered that I had entered Yanomamö villages there and were now frantically attempting to interdict my research. They sent a protest message, a dossier, to FUNAI’s office and contacted their resident Yanomamö “chief,” Davi Kobenawä, urging him to intervene. Kobenawä “forbade” the pilot of my small plane from landing in an area where Kobenawä had influence.
The secret dossier I had been told about was used several additional times to sabotage my intended field trips. This was the first time. Alice Dreger, a historian of science who interviewed many of the major players in the scandal I am about to describe and later wrote an article about it, writes: “Curiously, when I first asked [Leda] Martins about the dossier, she told me she had written it: ‘I wrote the dossier and gave it to Funai.’ But she later changed her claim to me as follows: ‘Patrick Tierney wrote the Chagnon dossier and I translated [it] to Portuguese. . . . I presented the dossier to Brazilian authorities (FUNAI employees) and human rights advocates who were looking for information on Chagnon who was seeking permission to go inside the Yanomami Territory in Brazil. I was the one who circulated the dossier in Brazil because people knew and trusted me. I trusted Patrick and did not check his references.’ ”
By some creative maneuvering of aircraft and swapping fuel supplies with other pilots, my pilot managed to get me out of Abruwä-teri and back to Boa Vista. When I landed late that day a Brazilian journalist introduced himself to me as the local correspondent of one of Brazil’s most important newspapers, O Globo. He wanted to interview me. I was very tired and asked if he could see me in the morning.
The next morning he joined me for breakfast at my hotel. He pulled out a document that he said had just been given to him the day before. It had a list of accusations he wanted me to address and answer. I invited Antonio Mari, the Brazilian photographer whom Veja had assigned to this story, to join us to translate. The document turned out to be the dossier that I had been told about. This was the first time that I saw a copy of it.
The Brazilian journalist read me several of the charges from the document that, even to him, seemed preposterous and were clearly intended to discredit me politically. I had to laugh at some of them: for example, that I had been largely responsible for “destabilizing” the Venezuelan government and causing it to collapse in 1993. The journalist gradually realized that the questions were essentially all political attacks on me. His final question was something to the effect that, You are accused of saying that Davi Kobenawä is not the chief of the Brazilian Yanomamö and that his statements are largely constructed by his foreign mentors. I replied that it was true because I had visited and studied some sixty different Yanomamö villages, and the leaders in those villages had no authority outside their own villages unless they were being groomed by outsiders like missionaries, politicians, or leaders of NGOs. He said, “Most of us in the press also hold that view, but it is not something that is popular if you put it into your published articles.” He thanked me for my time and then handed me his copy of the dossier.
I left Brazil the next day. I was later informed by Mari that the dossier had also been sent to the FUNAI office but arrived too late for them to withhold my permit, which was the intent of the senders.
My 1997 Lecture Trip to UFR
On my Veja trip to Brazil I had initiated contacts with administrative officials at the Federal University of Roraima (UFR) in Boa Vista. We began planning a formal long-term collaboration between UFR and the University of California, Santa Barbara. The Brazilian academics seemed enthusiastic and very pleased with this possibility and sent one of their administrators to Santa Barbara to begin discussions. The plan was to make possible exchanges of both anthropology students and faculty from the two campuses and develop a graduate anthropology program at UFR.
As part of the initiation of this program I agreed to give a series of free lectures—a “mini-course” in anthropology—at UFR and take a group of their anthropology students into one or more Yanomamö villages in Roraima to provide them with some hands-on fieldwork training.
I took a second trip to Boa Vista in March 1997, again by way of Santa Elena in Venezuela. I chose this route because it was much cheaper and faster than going via Brasilia, Rio, or São Paulo, the normal route most travelers coming from the United States would take. My visit coincided with a sensational denunciation of me on March 4, in O Estado de São Paulo , by Brazilian activist anthropologist Alcida Ramos, one of my longtime detractors and a coauthor of the attack on me in the 1989 Anthropology Newsletter following my 1988 article in Science. She had apparently been informed of my trip and timed her denunciation in a major Brazilian newspaper to correspond with my arrival. Her vitriolic article was sufficient to arouse several indigenous “leaders” in Roraima, including Davi Kobenawä, and their NGO advocates to protest. As a result of her article FUNAI immediately rescinded the permit that had been approved to allow a group of Brazilian anthropology students from UFR to visit any Yanomamö village for field training under my supervision. The “chief” of one indigenous group, the Makuxi, the tribe that Leda Martins was studying, sent a letter to the rector of UFR in Boa Vista through his lawyer protesting my presence in Roraima and urging the rector to suspend any collaboration with me.
The rector invited me to dinner to assure me that the cancellation of my permit was just a temporary setback and that FUNAI officials privately assured him that after the bad press subsided, the permit for me to take students into Yanomamö villages would quietly be approved. I gave two weeks of lectures at UFR and returned to Santa Barbara, convinced that doing traditional academic anthropological fieldwork in Brazil in collaboration with Brazilian anthropologists was not feasible. The exchange program with the UFR died and was never pursued further.
I also found the contrast in the forces affecting the native peoples of Brazil’s Roraima area to be impossible to comprehend. The lands of the indigenous people were being invaded by merciless exploiters who were, in some cases, ruthlessly killing the native people. But instead of doing something useful and effective to stop this, the presumably “enlightened” anthropological forces in Brazil were forbidding most anthropologists even to visit the native people. Consequently the indigenous people now depended on the handful of radical anthropologists who jealously controlled their destinies. These same radical anthropologists informed the native people who the bad people were that they must vigorously denounce. The bad people turned out to be other anthropologists, mostly American anthropologists, and not the economic forces in Brazil and Venezuela destroying the lands and way of life of the indigenous people.
My 1998 Trip to Venezuela
In 1998 I again tried to continue my work among the Venezuelan Yanomamö. I had been approached by several medical researchers from the University of Cincinnati who wanted me to participate in a psychiatric study of the Yanomamö. I agreed to do so on the condition that their project would also include a practical public health component, namely, reliable long-term access by the Yanomamö to secular medical services that would meet the approval of the Venezuelan health authorities and would ultimately involve Venezuelan medical practitioners.
I had also been in contact with a number of State Department officials in Washington and in the American embassy in Caracas who were very cooperative and interested in helping the Yanomamö. Through them, one of the undersecretaries of state, Gare Smith, contacted me in Santa Barbara and asked if I could take him into the Yanomamö area as a visitor so he could see unacculturated Amazon Basin Indians first hand. At the same time the State Department was being pressured by American NGOs to take an interest in Amazon Basin tribes in response to frequent news reports of abuses of them by nationals in South American countries. He did not want to make the trip an “official” State Department visit, but since he had other business at the embassy in Caracas he wanted to combine his official trip with an unofficial visit to the Yanomamö.
When word of my arrangement with Smith became known in Venezuela, several Salesian priests showed up at the American embassy wanting an immediate meeting with Smith. Among them was my former UCSB graduate student Jesus Cardozo, who was now working closely with the Salesians.
In August the medical team from the University of Cincinnati and I traveled to Venezuela to carry out their study. I had earlier agreed to meet with Smith and other members of the State Department at my hotel that evening to discuss the details of our plans to go into the Yanomamö area. I didn’t know about the officials’ meeting with the Salesians that day. When Smith and a State Department colleague showed up at my hotel they told me that the Salesians were adamantly opposed to my going into the Yanomamö area and even more opposed to him or any State Department official traveling with me.
Smith said the Salesians had a long list of specific complaints about me and my research that had been produced by a group of supposedly internationally prominent anthropologists. They showed me a copy of a fax document that had just been sent to the Salesians and to Venezuelan officials that day. Its content was almost identical to the dossier that the Brazilian journalist gave me in 1995, but it also reflected specific complaints that appeared in the denunciation of me by Alcida Ramos in the Brazilian newspapers. Smith gave me the fax.
The Cincinnati medical doctors and I departed for home soon after. We were not allowed to go into the Yanomamö area. Once again, the “secret dossier” had successfully sabotaged my field plans.
A day or so later Smith and his State Department companions were taken on a Venezuelan air force helicopter trip to the Yanomamö area that was highly publicized in Venezuelan newspapers. Jesus Cardozo and his Salesian supporters were his guides and sponsors.
Smith later sent me a long note summarizing what had happened on the trip. Apart from concluding that Cardozo and the Salesians had a nearly fanatical hatred of me, he explained how Cardozo was adamant about having the State Department arrest me and put me in prison for crimes I had allegedly committed against the Yanomamö. When Smith asked him what crimes I committed, he said that Cardozo replied that I worked for the U.S. government and the Atomic Energy Commission (portions of my research had been funded by government agencies such as NIMH, NSF, and the AEC as I have discussed). Smith said he replied that he also worked for the U.S. government. Did that make him a criminal as well? He added that when the plane landed Cardozo angrily stalked off without saying good-bye and seemed annoyed that the State Department would not arrest me.
Retiring in 1999
In 1999 I decided to retire early from UCSB. My interest—indeed, my passion—in anthropology was field research, discovering new information about the people I studied, the Yanomamö, and where they fit into the evolving human saga. I taught the largest course my department offered—upwards of nine hundred students—and probably produced as many successful Ph.D.s as anyone in my department. I could have stopped doing research and taught small, specialized courses while continuing to publish articles that reported the results of my field studies. But I decided that if I could no longer continue my field studies of the Yanomamö, who were changing very rapidly—and I desperately wanted to document them before those changes were widespread—then remaining in academia would be unsatisfying and frustrating. What I loved most about anthropology was no longer possible. I was also very angry with those who were sabotaging my field research efforts, the preparation for which was very expensive and which I had to pay out of my own pocket.
My wife and I sold our modest home in Santa Barbara and moved back to Michigan.
An Impending Scandal
About a year after I moved to Michigan, Raymond Hames, one of my former students, sent me an email. He began by telling me how sorry he was that he had to be the one to send me this message, for it contained the text of one of the most hateful and despicable accusations a professional academic could possibly get.
This text was written by two anthropologists—Terence Turner and Leslie Sponsel—who had been longtime critics and detractors of mine. Their long email, sent in October 2000, was addressed to the president and president-elect of the American Anthropological Association and to a list of other people in the organization. Dated October 1, 2000, it began,
Madam President, Mr. President-elect:
We write to inform you of an impending scandal that will affect the American Anthropological profession as a whole in the eyes of the public, and arouse intense indignation and calls for action among members of the Association. In its scale, ramifications, and sheer criminality and corruption it is unparalleled in the history of Anthropology . . . This nightmarish story—a real anthropological heart of darkness beyond the imagining of even a Josef Conrad (though not, perhaps, a Josef Mengele)—will be seen (rightly in our view) by the public, as well as most anthropologists, as putting the whole discipline on trial. As another reader of the galleys put it, This book should shake anthropology to its very foundations. It should cause the field to understand how the corrupt and depraved protagonists could have spread their poison for so long while they were accorded great respect throughout the Western World and generations of undergraduates received their lies as the introductory substance of anthropology. This should never be allowed to happen again.
They were describing a book that was about to be published, Patrick Tierney’s Darkness in El Dorado: How Scientists and Journalists Devastated the Amazon. The principal targets were me, James V. Neel, and other members of the team of researchers who participated in or had anything to do with our attempts to abort the 1968 measles epidemic that struck the Yanomamö, which I have earlier described. It was my highly successful monograph on the Yanomamö through which “generations of undergraduates received their [my] lies as the introductory substance of anthropology.”
Not long after the incendiary Turner-Sponsel email circulated, sensational stories began appearing in the press. One of the first, in the British Guardian , made this claim on its front page: “Scientists ‘killed Amazon Indians to test race theory.’ ” Then, on October 9, the New Yorker published an excerpt from the soon to be published book.
I began getting calls from journalists and reporters from all over the world representing major news outlets, clamoring to have my response to the astonishing claims, especially the central sensational claim that I and my colleagues had started a lethal epidemic of measles among the Yanomamö thirty-two years earlier.
I denied the accusations, but those who called were only interested in getting me to add some juicy comments they could use in their report. I recall one caller, a woman who worked for Time magazine, telling me, after I said the accusations were false, that it didn’t really matter: Time simply had to publish something on this sensational story because Newsweek and other Time competitors were carrying the story. It didn’t matter if the story was true or false—it was sensational and involved allegedly suspicious activities of prominent scientists.
The American Anthropological Association Responds
The 2000 meetings of the American Anthropological Association were held November 17–20 in San Francisco. I had canceled my membership in the AAA in the late 1980s because the field of cultural anthropology had effectively become, in my estimation, an unintelligible mumbo-jumbo of postmodern jargon and a place where cynical assaults on the scientific approach were commonplace. I knew, however, that Tierney’s book would be out soon, and that the Turner-Sponsel email and the sensational excerpt in the New Yorker made it likely that I would be a central issue at the AAA meetings. If anything were to be done by the professional community in response to the book, the 2000 annual meeting would most likely be where it would start.
I wasn’t quite prepared for the call I got from Louise Lamphere, the president of the AAA, to whom the Turner-Sponsel memo was directed. She invited me to be on the panel that would discuss the accusations made in Tierney’s book. I was astonished when she told me that Tierney had been invited to sit on this panel. In an open forum the panel would discuss the accusations Tierney made against me, Neel, and others about our 1968 Yanomamö expedition. (Neel had died about a year earlier.) I suddenly felt very uncomfortable, as if these accusations against me were already considered to be true by the officers of the AAA. Several others were also going to be on the stage with Tierney in the large hotel auditorium. Among those invitees were Jesus Cardozo and Nohely Pocaterra, a diputado (legislator) from the Venezuelan government who was also a Venezuelan Indian (Wayuú) and active in Venezuelan native rights movements.
I declined Lamphere’s invitation to attend because I suspected that this forum would turn into a frenzy of acrimonious, self-righteous, politically correct denunciations, and I had no interest in becoming the bait in such a feeding frenzy. I informed her that I would ask Professor William Irons of Northwestern University, my longtime friend and colleague, to represent me at this meeting should that be necessary.
Remarkably, this was the only time that any official of the AAA invited me to participate in any discussion or invited my response to any accusation that Tierney, Turner, Sponsel, or their various committees said about me in the ensuing years during which the AAA “investigated” the accusations made against me and Neel. Yet this “investigation” lasted for over five years and whole sessions of AAA annual meetings were devoted to aspects of the investigation, the last as recent as 2011 at the New Orleans meetings of the AAA, in which three separate events were devoted to this theme.
Five of the speakers on the 2000 panel were critical of Tierney and challenged his accusations to the extent they were known from his New Yorker article (his book had not yet been published) and the Turner-Sponsel email. Two others (Cardozo and Pocaterra) were sympathetic to the several accusations Tierney made about Neel and me. More than eight hundred people crowded into the auditorium the first night.
The AAA organizers opened the second evening’s session to questions from the audience in an open-mike discussion. This session was also filled to capacity: estimates of the size of the crowd on the second night were over one thousand, slightly higher than the estimates for the first night. Two of my former UCSB undergraduate students recorded the second session and sent me their recordings. What I heard on their tapes was shameful and depressing. For example, a female Peace Corps volunteer recalled bitterly and dramatically that she once visited Mavaca and I would not take her and her friends with me into the remote Shamatari region I was studying. She self-righteously claimed that I was discourteous to her. The audience applauded. A Ugandan man was recognized: he berated the U.S. government for introducing HIV/AIDS and the deadly Ebola virus into his African tribe back home. He also received loud applause. David Maybury-Lewis, head of Harvard University’s Social Anthropology Department, denounced me for my alleged unacceptable and reprehensible field methods and the alleged harm I had done to the Yanomamö by subtitling the early editions of my college monograph “The Fierce People.” He was also applauded. One of his books on the Xavante tribe in Brazil is entitled The Savage and the Innocent. It is not known how much psychological harm the Xavante suffered as a consequence of this book title.
In addition to his academic post at Harvard, Maybury-Lewis was also the founder (with his wife, Pia) and director of Cultural Survival, a major NGO advocating the rights of native peoples. In 1987 I had created my own NGO, which I called the Yanomamö Survival Fund, because I was worried that the 1987 gold rush in Brazil would lead to the occupation of Venezuelan mission posts by armed garimpeiros as had happened in Brazil. My Yanomamö Survival Fund was intended to provide medical aid to the Yanomamö for the new diseases that inevitably follow influxes of outsiders into isolated indigenous areas: upwards of forty thousand garimpeiros had invaded Yanomamö territory in Brazil and were approaching the Venezuelan border. Perhaps Cultural Survival regarded my nonprofit Yanomamö Survival Fund as a competitor for charitable donations because it attempted to denigrate me. The president of Survival International’s American branch was Terence Turner, one of David Maybury-Lewis’s former students.
Another NGO, Survival International, also treated me hostilely. In the website Evolutionary Psychology in May 2002, Stephen Corry of the London office of Survival International said, among other things, that my data on Yanomamö violence was fabricated.
The Peacock Committee
One of the first steps the AAA took during the November 2000 meeting in San Francisco was to set into motion a plan to investigate the charges that Tierney made against me, Neel, Charles Brewer, and others. But their attention was focused mainly on the accusations against me and, to a lesser extent, Neel. Patrick Tierney’s Darkness in El Dorado: How Scientists and Journalists Devastated the Amazon was published in December 2000.
Former AAA president James Peacock, another former student of Maybury-Lewis, was asked to form a committee to do this. When I learned about the existence of this committee, I wrote to the AAA and asked to know who the members were. I was told that the committee’s membership was confidential. This answer surprised me. In light of the legal principle called due process, I wondered how I, the accused, was not allowed to know who my accusers were or what, for that matter, my alleged crimes were.
The members of the Peacock Committee, I subsequently learned from a memo dated January 21, 2001, and sent to AAA president Louise Lamphere, included only one person I knew well, a physical anthropologist from my former department at UCSB.
The Peacock Committee’s only role seems to have been to look into the accusations Tierney made against Neel, me, and others in his book and, from this, to advise the executive board of the AAA whether an “investigation” of Tierney’s accusations warranted action. The Peacock Committee members considered Tierney’s book chapter by chapter and then put together a list of issues they deemed worth investigating. The committee produced a report for the AAA executive board. Peacock submitted the committee’s recommendations to AAA president Lamphere on January 21, 2001.
The Investigation That Never Was
Officers of the AAA repeatedly insisted that their investigation was not an investigation but an “inquiry” because the rules of the AAA Ethics Committee forbade the AAA to “investigate” accusations of misdeeds by its members. Yet the Peacock Committee several times described its mission in precisely these terms, seven times on the first page of Peacock’s “Executive Summary” and many times elsewhere. For example,
This Task Force was charged to consider allegations in Patrick Tierney’s Darkness in El Dorado (and related material) in order to recommend to the AAA President and Executive Board whether and, if so, how an investigation of these allegations be carried out by the AAA.
The Committee recommends that the AAA carry out an investigation.
This investigation would entail three levels . . . .
A document issued by Jane Hill sometime in November 2001 (the date is not given) lists the members of the task force investigating the Peacock Committee’s findings. The AAA’s executive board established this task force, known as the El Dorado Task Force, “to conduct what the Board termed an ‘inquiry’ on the allegations . . . contained in Darkness in El Dorado , by Patrick Tierney. Such an ‘inquiry’ is unprecedented in the history of the Association. . . .” Note that the word inquiry is put in quotes.
Hill appointed various members of the task force to investigate the accusations made or suggested by Tierney or others:
1. Measles were introduced to the Yanomamö area in 1968 by Neel’s team and followed Neel’s team everywhere it went, spreading further;
2. The Edmonston B measles vaccine used by Neel’s team was dangerous and contraindicated;
3. Neel’s team withheld medical care from the Yanomamö;
4. Chagnon was a disciple of Neel and his “sociobiological” theories underpinned Neel’s eugenics beliefs;
5. Chagnon subscribed to Senator Joseph McCarthy’s right-wing political views;
6. Neel’s objectives in his study of the Yanomamö over many years, especially his expedition in 1968, were scientific. The measles vaccination component of his study had nothing to do with humanitarian objectives;
7. Other anthropologists refute Chagnon’s claims;
8. Chagnon and Asch “staged” their twenty-two films, and used fake sets. Yanomamö died because they acted out dangerous violent scenes at Chagnon’s instructions;
9. Chagnon used enormous quantities of trade goods to bribe informants to reveal tabooed names of dead relatives, which he frequently spoke openly and loudly in their villages;
10. Chagnon had two German shepherd attack dogs that he used to intimidate large weight-lifter types in bars and regularly made his graduate students submit to training sessions as the targets of these attack dogs;
11. Chagnon had a pistol that he frequently used to intimidate the Yanomamö by firing it in their villages;
12. Chagnon associated in Venezuela with “criminal types” like Charles Brewer and Cecilia Matos, the longtime consort of Venezuelan president Carlos Andrés Pérez. They established an enormous “biosphere reserve” actually intended for gold mining and to prevent other anthropologists from studying the Yanomamö of Venezuela.
Various accusations were examined independently by Ed Hagen, Michael Price, and John Tooby at UCSB. They inspected the scientific literature, using both Tierney’s cited sources and other relevant sources. The ethnographic film accusations were examined by two prominent ethnographic filmmakers, Peter Biella and Jay Ruby, who were familiar with the films Asch and I made. The “attack dog” claims were investigated by William Irons. Many people in the academic community have examined the claim that Neel’s and my 1968 expedition to the Yanomamö started a measles epidemic.
Tierney’s claims were also thoroughly examined by several national scientific publications and organizations, such as the International Genetic Epidemiology Society, the American Journal of Epidemiology , and the National Academy of Sciences. They found that the allegation regarding the measles epidemic was not supported by the evidence.
John Tooby, my former departmental colleague at UCSB, said that it took him only a few hours to determine that Tierney’s measles epidemic allegation was patently false. Tooby describes how he did this:
I started putting in calls to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. Conversations with various researchers, including eventually Dr. Mark Papania, chief of the U.S. measles eradication program, rapidly discredited every essential element of the Tierney disease scenarios. For example, it turns out that researchers who test vaccines for safety have never been able to document, in hundreds of millions of uses, a single case of a live-virus measles vaccine leading to contagious transmission from one human to another—this despite their strenuous efforts to detect such a thing. If attenuated live virus does not jump from person to person, it cannot cause an epidemic. Nor can it be planned to cause an epidemic, as alleged in this case, if it never has caused one before.
Tooby’s article about his investigation appeared in Slate on October 25, 2000. However, Terence Turner, who coauthored with Leslie Sponsel the sensational email warning the president of the AAA of the “impending scandal” that provoked the AAA to initiate its investigation, acknowledged in an email on September 28, 2000, to Samuel Katz, the co-developer of the vaccine used by Neel’s team on our expedition, that the allegations regarding the measles epidemic in Tierney’s book were inaccurate.
But if the central allegation in Tierney’s book was false, why did his other accusations cause such a sensational scandal in the media and in academia? Part of the reason is that some people believe falsehoods and conspiracy theories because they like to think that their more esteemed colleagues got to the top by subterfuge. Another reason is that this scandal was simply too juicy a story for members of the press to ignore, including the editors of the New Yorker. But another and perhaps a more important reason was that my belief in a biologically evolved human nature—what Edward O. Wilson called sociobiology—was unacceptable to most cultural anthropologists and other academics. Tierney’s book, the Turner-Sponsel warning to the AAA senior officers, and the subsequent witch hunt conducted by the AAA fit into an existing narrative opposing evolution in the field of cultural anthropology. I was one of the most visible figures in anthropology who espoused this despised view. Tierney’s accusations gave opponents of my viewpoint an opportunity to discredit sociobiology.
The damage done to me and my work by the false accusations in this book devastated my research career, damaged my health, gravely distressed my family—and the family of James V. Neel, who died before Tierney’s book was published. I was so overwhelmed by incessant calls from reporters during the first several weeks of the press coverage that, early one morning in October 2000, I collapsed from the stress and had to be hospitalized. Two of Neel’s children are medical doctors like their father and were especially outraged at the distortion of medical science in the ugly accusations that Tierney, Turner, and Sponsel made about their father.
One of my colleagues, William Irons, mentioned to me that he had flagged all of Tierney’s accusations against me in the margins of the book and they numbered some 106 separate accusations. That doesn’t include additional accusations against Charles Brewer, Jacques Lizot, and documentary filmmaker Timothy Asch. Most of Tierney’s accusations have been systematically repudiated by independent researchers. Any reader can check this for himself at http://www.anth.ucsb.edu/ucsbpreliminaryreport.pdf and at Douglas Hume’s website at http://anthroniche.com/ . Hume’s website is scrupulously neutral and includes materials supporting both sides of the controversy.
Darkness in Darkness in El Dorado
Tierney cites Yanomamö “eyewitnesses” (unnamed or untraceable) to the alleged crimes that Neel and I committed. But Tierney could not have received Venezuelan OCAI permission to enter Yanomamö territory when he says he did unless the Salesian Missions approved of his visits and invited him there, as they did with Salamone and others who are sympathetic to their viewpoints. Tierney had access to the health records of the Salesian missions, which could have happened only if the Salesians approved of him.
Tierney cites the death from measles at the Ocamo Salesian mission of a child named Roberto Balthasar. But Balthasar’s father was a Brazilian, and although he was allegedly married to an Indian woman, Tierney provides no information that she was Yanomamö. Curiously, he does not document in the book the hundreds of deaths that he claims were caused by our use of the Edmonston B measles vaccine. If such deaths occurred, why don’t the Salesian mission records confirm this? Why is the only measles death described that of the young Balthasar?
Similarly the Mavaca Salesian mission, upstream from Ocamo, recorded no deaths from measles during the period Tierney writes about. The Yanomamö community there, Bisaasi-teri, since its move to that location had been medically ministered to by members of the New Tribes Mission and, at the time of the 1968 measles epidemic, by the French medical doctors who arrived there with our expedition, and by Neel’s medical team. To be fair, the Salesian mission at Mavaca was just getting under way in 1968 and may not have had any medical records yet because these were normally kept by nuns and nuns had not arrived there by 1968. The third Salesian mission, Platanal, had only a temporary priest from the Salesian mission at Esmeralda in 1968, Padre Sanchez, and no nuns. Tierney says we bypassed the Salesian mission at Platanal, but in fact we spent the night there and failed to vaccinate the local Mahekodo-teri only because they were not home: they were en route to Patanowä-teri to attend a feast, as I described earlier. We vaccinated most of the members of the large village of Patanowä-teri before the Mahekodo-teri arrived and used the last of our vaccine on the Patanowä-teri.
Tierney tells a very sad story of the reaction of the “elders” at Patanowä-teri and Mahekodo-teri (as if they were the same village) weeping when he showed them the film I made with Asch, The Feast, allegedly because they saw many of their dead kinsmen in the film, who Tierney implies all died of measles. I cannot think of anything more offensive and reprehensible than to show the Yanomamö motion picture film footage of their deceased relatives. For someone who faults me in such self-righteous, outraged, and moralistic terms for learning the true names of deceased people and whispering them back into the ears of my informants, Tierney displays blatant insensitivity and callousness.
Tierney’s copious endnotes are often misleading and even inaccurate, as several investigators have demonstrated. In his chapter criticizing my 1988 lead article in Science and my “sociobiological” theories, Tierney refers to an incident that occurred in an extremely remote location in approximately 1950. I had pieced together this event from many hours of interviews with many informants because it was central to an account of their settlement patterns, yet Tierney cites a reference to the event as if he had found an eyewitness to it. Here is what Tierney said about this event on page 168 of Darkness in El Dorado: “The single biggest battle in Yanomami warfare occurred on February 3, 1951. It was a nomohori , a treacherous feast given by Riakowa, the Iwahikoroba-teri headman, in which eleven to fifteen men from Kreibowei-teri (the Bisaasi-teri’s village at the time) were killed.” Tierney cites an early visitor, Hector Acebes, author of Orinoco Adventure , page 242, as the source of this information. In that book, Acebes describes a very brief visit in Tama Tama in about 1951 with one Flora Trexel, an elderly missionary woman who told him the following: “She also said that a war had started on February 3 between the Guaicas of the Upper Siapa and those of the Orinoco, but she did not know if the fighting had ended or who was winning.”
Trexel was a colleague of James Barker, the first American who lived among the Venezuelan Yanomamö long enough to become fluent in their language. Barker had only recently heard about this incident and most likely passed this information on to Trexel. It is very doubtful that Barker knew the exact date of this event because he told me in 1965 that he had learned about it from Shinanokawä, the headman of Mahekodo-teri, who had recently visited this area. The Yanomamö do not have any accurate means to specify the dates of events. Everything else in Tierney’s discussion of this event was information that I had published based on my interviews with the Yanomamö survivors who were victims of this nomohori. That information is not contained in Orinoco Adventure. But of course Tierney could not cite me as the source of this information in the same book in which he was attacking me.
In the same chapter, titled “To Murder and Multiply,” a cynical reference to my 1988 Science article reporting the reproductive success of unokai warriors, Tierney ends with this bizarre paragraph:
Yet there was something familiar about Chagnon’s strategy of secret lists combined with accusations against ubiquitous Marxists, something that traced back to his childhood in rural Michigan, when Joe McCarthy was king. Like the old Yanomami unokais , the former senator from Wisconsin was in no danger of death. Under the mantle of Science, Tailgunner Joe was still firing away—undefeated, undaunted, and blessed with a wealth of offspring, one of whom, a poor boy from Port Austin, had received a full portion of his spirit.
Somehow my 1988 Science article illustrates my sociobiological bias, which in turn, is connected to my allegedly right-wing views in this ridiculous discussion of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s alleged influence on that “poor boy” from Port Austin, Michigan.
Dawn after the Darkness
In May 2002 the AAA accepted the Final Report of the task force, a two-volume document. Among the findings the AAA included in the Final Report was an interview by anthropologist Janet Chernela of Brazilian Yanomamö Davi Kobenawä, who claimed that when I briefly visited his village in 1967 I commissioned the adult men to go out and kill neighboring Yanomamö: I would give the most pay to those who killed the most. Kobenawä was nine or ten years old when I briefly visited his village over thirty years earlier. He was, however, exposed to Brazilian activists after 1967, who told him this and similar stories. The story is absolutely false. The AAA at one point linked to a website on which young anthropology students taking their first classes in anthropology were encouraged by their instructors to express their opinions on my morality and ethics, and the harm my work inflicted on the Yanomamö. The AAA eventually removed the link.
The AAA’s investigation had been opposed from the start by a small group of senior anthropologists for a variety of reasons, mainly because they knew such investigations were impermissible under the AAA’s own rules and also because some of the accusations against me and Neel were unfair and likely to be untrue. The Chronicle of Higher Education summarized some of the reasons that senior anthropologists opposed this investigation in the July 2005 issue in the following words: “The report came under immediate and heavy criticism from several scholars. Those critics claimed that the panel’s composition was biased, that Mr. Chagnon had not been afforded due process, and that the association’s Web site had propagated (in ‘comments’ pages associated with the task-force report) a new stream of lurid and unsubstantiated allegations against Mr. Chagnon.”
In November 2003, Thomas Gregor and Daniel Gross drafted a referendum on vaccine safety and managed to get it placed on a ballot that the entire membership of the AAA could vote on. They warned the members of the AAA about the dangers of having the AAA go on record as opposing the use of vaccines among the native inhabitants in third-world countries. Neel’s group had used a vaccine, Edmonston B, that had been used successfully before—18 million times—and had never in its history caused measles as described in Darkness in El Dorado. Their referendum passed by a margin of more than 10 to 1. Gregor told me later that he suspected that many anthropologists viewed this referendum as an opportunity to express their opposition to the task force “investigation” and to Turner and Sponsel’s role in it.
Gregor and Gross then published a meticulously researched and extremely critical article in the American Anthropologist in 2004 that elaborated the mistakes the AAA had made, calling attention to, among other criticisms, the violations of the association’s own rules and guidelines.
They then placed a second referendum on the AAA ballot in June 2005. That referendum called for the rescission of the AAA’s acceptance of the final report of the task force. Their second referendum also passed, but by a smaller margin: 846 to 338 (about 2.5 to 1).
These results clearly indicated that the leadership of the AAA was significantly out of step with the AAA membership. Gregor was of the opinion that Turner and Sponsel were probably caught unawares by the first vote on vaccine safety and may have organized and enjoined their supporters to cast their votes on the second referendum.
Nearly five years passed between the November 2000 annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association in San Francisco where Tierney’s accusations were first aired and the rescission of the AAA’s acceptance of the El Dorado Task Force report in June 2005.
Those five years seem like a blurry bad dream. What seems to stand out in this fog are the many articles that were published about this scandal and how ill-informed, misleading, or outright wrong many of them were, and how self-righteous, unkind, and cynical many were.
I spent a good deal of time contacting and exchanging information with colleagues in Venezuela, especially Ye’kwana leader Jaime Turon, who was the democratically elected alcalde (mayor) of the Alto Orinoco—elected by both the Ye’kwana and Yanomamö residents of that vast area. He was never interviewed by members of the AAA task force who went to this area, yet some of these same people were incensed about my “undermining” Davi Kobenawä, whose sphere of influence and whose authority in Brazil are much smaller. Turon was a democratically elected Native Amazonian leader.
At Turon’s request, I sent at least two of his letters to the American Anthropological Association, Tierney’s publisher, W. W. Norton, and the editor of the New Yorker , requesting that he and the Venezuelan Yanomamö be heard. None of them responded to me or to Turon. So I include here a letter he wrote to me:
La Esmerelda, 10/21/03
Mr. Tierney’s book has been translated into Spanish as The Plundering of El Dorado and we are [only] now able to read it. It is for this reason that we are annoyed with all his lies. Tierney describes events that took place 30 years ago and when he was in the Upper Orinoco he promised us various forms of medical aid, including hospitals. Some members of the AAA [task force] who visited Mavaca last year say they are participating in a medical program that we have not even heard of. One of the members of this commission claimed in a publication that she will be developing a public health program with the participation of a number of Yanomamö from the Mavaca region. They accuse Dr. James Neel, [Dr.] Marcel Roche, and you of manipulating us when, in reality, you were the only ones that helped us in your many visits in the 1960s and 1970s at a time when there were no medical programs or public health programs for us.
I spent a great deal of time during the El Dorado years providing information to colleagues here in the United States who were attempting to counter the false information that some journalists, anthropologists, and academics were putting into the various news outlets.
Finally, I spent years trying to write this book, scrapping much of the effort many times because of the anger that kept creeping into my writing, giving it a very depressing tone. Everything I wrote during this time was contaminated by the lingering stench associated with Darkness in El Dorado.
I also remembered what I did not do. I did not travel much, did not fish much, did not hunt grouse and pheasants over my German shorthaired pointers, did not go to many concerts, did not read much fiction for pleasure, and did not spend more time with members of my family, all of which I had planned to do when I left Santa Barbara to come back to Michigan.
Cultural Anthropologists: The Fierce People
Cultural anthropology differs from the other subfields of anthropology such as archaeology, physical anthropology, and linguistics by being the only branch that has historically embraced and advocated explicitly nonscientific or even antiscientific approaches to explaining the external world. Yet throughout the history of anthropology and despite a wide range of variation in approaches and “styles” in cultural anthropology, there has always been a core group of anthropologists who maintain that anthropology—all branches of anthropology—is, in the final analysis, a scientific discipline. The National Academy of Sciences acknowledges this by making the discipline of anthropology a subdivision of the overall taxonomy of the sciences that it and other international academic organizations recognize.
But in the past twenty or so years the field of cultural anthropology in the United States has come precipitously close to abandoning the very notion of science. In 2010 the leadership of the AAA attempted to eliminate the very word science as a central component in the discipline. Science writer Nicholas Wade wrote this in the New York Times on December 9, 2010:
Anthropologists have been thrown into turmoil about the nature and future of their profession after a decision by the American Anthropological Association at its recent annual meeting to strip the word “science” from a statement of its long-range plan. The decision has reopened a long-simmering tension between researchers in science-based anthropological disciplines—including archaeologists, physical anthropologists and some cultural anthropologists—and members of the profession who study race, ethnicity and gender and see themselves as advocates for native peoples or human rights.
The schism is between those cultural anthropologists (like me) who regard cultural anthropology as a science and those who believe, as Brazilian anthropologist Alcida Ramos recently put it, that “to do anthropology” is to do something inherently political, or as Nancy Scheper-Hughes put it, anthropology is a “forensic activity” in which today’s practitioners are expected to look for and denounce the wrongs committed to the native peoples by other anthropologists who have studied them. In a word, the schism in cultural anthropology is between those who do science and those whose exclusive goal is to speak on behalf of native peoples, an activity that they define as being incompatible with science. This latter view is not only wrong, it borders on irresponsibility.
Wade noted the immediate roots of the schism in cultural anthropology in the same article:
During the last 10 years the two factions have been through a phase of bitter tribal warfare after the more politically active group attacked work on the Yanomamo people of Venezuela and Brazil by Napoleon Chagnon, a science-oriented anthropologist, and James Neel, a medical geneticist who died in 2000. With the wounds of this conflict still fresh, many science-based anthropologists were dismayed to learn last month that the long-range plan of the association would no longer be to advance anthropology as a science but rather to focus on “public understanding.”
To their credit, some of the cultural anthropologists who still belong to the AAA did not complacently accept the decision of the AAA’s executive board. They fought this new declaration, demanding that it be reconsidered. Four days later Nicholas Wade quoted Frank Marlowe, then president-elect of the AAA affiliate subsection the Evolutionary Anthropology Society: “ ‘We evolutionary anthropologists are outnumbered by the new cultural or social anthropologists, many but not all of whom are postmodern, which seems to translate into antiscience,’ Dr. Marlowe said.”
Those who narrowly define cultural anthropology as primarily an “advocacy” activity, that is, a political activity, as most Brazilian anthropologists view the field, are undermining the entire anthropological profession.
Final Comments
Alice Dreger, a historian of science at the Feinberg School of Medicine, Northwestern University, became interested in highly visible recent cases in which an academic was singled out by members of his own profession and in which his professional association not only did nothing to intervene on his behalf but seemingly acquiesced in the persecution that followed. She interviewed a large number of the major players in the Darkness in El Dorado scandal, including committee heads and officers in the AAA who played major roles in the investigation. Dreger writes:
What’s really disturbing is that so many people who participated in the AAA’s investigations of Neel and Chagnon seem to have understood what Tierney’s book really amounted to. For example, Janet Chernela, who served on both the Peacock Commission and the Task Force, told me this: “Nobody took Tierney’s book’s claims seriously. I was surprised that James Peacock, who is a very careful and fair person, favored going forward with the Task Force.” This begs the question of why Chernela went forward with an investigation that followed the path of Tierney. Compare the words of Jane Hill, the former president of the AAA who chaired the Task Force. On April 15, 2002, after [Raymond] Hames resigned from the Task Force, Sarah Hrdy wrote to Jane Hill objecting to the situation and got this response from Hill: “Burn this message. The book is just a piece of sleaze, that’s all there is to it (some cosmetic language will be used in the report, but we all agree on that). But I think the AAA had to do something because I really think that the future of work by anthropologists with indigenous peoples in Latin America—with a high potential to do good—was put seriously at risk by its accusations, and silence on the part of the AAA would have been interpreted as either assent or cowardice. Whether we’re doing the right thing will have to be judged by posterity.”
So, even though Tierney’s book was “just a piece of sleaze,” Chagnon, the late Neel’s legacy, the Chagnon and Neel families, and these two men’s colleagues were put through a major investigation to preserve the field for other American anthropologists? Why did Hill not say publicly what she said to Hrdy? Why not admit that Chagnon must be publicly strung up to save anthropology from “just a piece of sleaze”?
Dreger concluded that so problematic were the AAA’s actions, that “I can’t imagine how any scholar feels safe” as a member.
Two of my colleagues, Jane Lancaster, editor of Human Nature , and Raymond Hames, wrote this editorial comment on the occasion of the publication of Alice Dreger’s article in Human Nature in 2011 that criticized the AAA and several of its past and present officers for mishandling the Darkness in El Dorado scandal:
Science has a special place and currency in American society. Purging science from the AAA’s Long Range Plan will lose us our credibility, the ability to testify and advocate for effective change, and hence our power to do good. We become just another special interest group by abandoning evidence-based testimony which trumps special interest group advocacy in the courts, public opinion, and the legislative process. So once again the status of science in anthropology has been challenged. Scientific anthropologists merit full respect and backing and should not be pushed into corners or swept under a rug or even worse, as Alice Dreger documents . . . come under attack by our own major professional organization to pacify those who initiated a witch hunt.
There are ways to discourage the behavior of self-righteous renegade anthropologists like Turner and Sponsel. They should be prohibited from holding any future office in the AAA or serving on any official AAA committee because of their reprehensible behavior in the Darkness in El Dorado scandal.
We should also recall at this point the warning that I quoted from Paul Gross that “the barefoot anthropologists, the activists, will be teaching your children.” One of the activists who played an important role in trying to sabotage my research, Leda Martins, is teaching your children in the Claremont College System (Pitzer College) in the Los Angeles area. I find it ironic, unfair, and shameful that her academic appointment seems to be a reward for her way of dealing with academics whose views she dislikes. I believe that most departments in an American university would neither grant her tenure nor promote her to a higher rank if they knew how she tried to prevent a senior anthropologist from conducting research. In his book, Tierney thanks her for preparing the infamous dossier used to sabotage the last three of my field trips.
Let me end by quoting Magdalena Hurtado’s comments made at the 2000 annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association in San Francisco. She was an invited speaker at the AAA’s Darkness in El Dorado panel. Hurtado is an American-trained Venezuelan anthropologist who has worked with several different Amazon Basin tribes in South American countries and has seen firsthand the deleterious consequences of governmental complacency and neglect of the human rights of Amazonian tribesmen not only in health issues, but also in land rights and even protection from lawless citizens who sometimes attack and kill them with impunity. She and her husband, anthropologist Kim Hill, have been to the Yanomamö area and have carefully followed the scandal discussed in this chapter. They are both on the anthropology faculty of Arizona State University.
Throughout South America, local governments allocate meager and inadequate resources to indigenous help programs and only a fraction of these resources is ever seen by native communities due to rampant corruption and embezzlement. Furthermore, laws that protect indigenous rights are infrequently implemented. For example, in 1986, I reported to the Direccion de Asuntos Indigenas of Venezuela that only 1 indigenous land title was legitimate out of 152 that had been initially decreed by President Rafael Caldera in 1972. Several months later, Peruvian government officials threatened to expel my husband and me from our field site because we had treated the sick during a massive respiratory epidemic in a remote Machiguenga village. In 1991 several of our Hiwi Indian collaborators were murdered without cause by Venezuelan nationals. All these events were reported to government officials with no response. They were ignored along with many other instances of wrongdoing observed by us and countless other anthropologists. Darkness in El Dorado did not come from actions of a geneticist, a sociobiologist and a filmmaker in one tiny corner of the Amazon. It has been produced through hundreds of years of racist colonialism and neglect. The devastation of the Amazon will only stop when governments and international agencies respond to human rights violations in an effective manner with the help of scientists.
I agree with Magdalena Hurtado that the harms inflicted on native Amazonians are caused primarily by actions and attitudes of “civilized” people, most notably the “Indian” policies—official or unofficial—of their national governments, Brazil and Venezuela in particular.
But what about those some 40-odd anthropologists who have spent anywhere from a few weeks to, in a few cases, a year or more among the Yanomamö? Let me conclude with this story, told to me by a Venezuelan anthropologist.
A man from Caracas was visiting Switzerland and witnessed a traditional maypole ceremony where contestants attempt to climb a greased pole to retrieve the flag on top to win the event. A large crowd of Swiss citizens was enthusiastically shouting at each contestant as he entered the ring, which was cordoned off by a stout rope and guards, preventing the onlookers from entering the arena. The Venezuelan man exclaimed: “We have the same kind of ceremony in Venezuela! And we, too, have to rope off the area to prevent people from rushing in and dragging the contestant down!” A puzzled Swiss official replied: “No. You have it all wrong. We cordon off the area to prevent the crowd from getting in to help the contestant get to the top!”
The Venezuelan could have meant cultural anthropologists from France, Brazil, Venezuela, and those American anthropologists who depend on them to keep others from climbing the maypole.
Acknowledgments
This book took a long time to write because an extraordinary academic scandal exploded in the national and international press shortly after I signed the contract to write this book in 1998 and before it appeared in print in 2013. Before I thank my academic colleagues let me first express my gratitude to Bob Bender, my editor at Simon & Schuster, for having had the patience of Job waiting for me to finish this book. His skillful editing has made the text more coherent than what I gave to him, and much of the success of this book, if it will have any, will be due in large measure to his editorial skills.
I will here simply call this academic scandal Darkness in El Dorado. Along with a number of medical colleagues and a few others, I was accused in 2000 of starting a lethal epidemic of measles among the Yanomamö Indians some thirty years earlier, native Amazonians among whom I spent my entire career studying and whom I had grown to love and admire. I discuss this scandal in the final chapters of the book, and what I say there is most likely not going to be the end of my end of this discussion.
I want to especially acknowledge my gratitude to my Venezuelan colleague Charles Brewer-Carías for making it possible for me to meet then-Venezuelan President Carlos Andrés Pérez in 1998, who made it possible for both of us to continue our research in Yanomamö villages we had recently discovered, villages in the Siapa River Basin that were yet uncontacted and demographically pristine. President Pérez acted effectively to follow our recommendation to create a Biosphere Reserve to safeguard the Ye’kwana and Yanomamö Indians who lived there, an area of some 32,000 square miles on the Venezuelan border with Brazil. I also want to thank another Venezuelan colleague, Issam Madi, for keeping me informed of events in the Venezuelan states of Amazonas and Bolívar that have affected the various groups of native peoples there after 1994.
Many of the people to whom I owe an incalculable debt are the friends, colleagues—and the academics in other fields I did not know personally—who effectively contested and challenged the accusations against me and the medical colleagues I worked with earlier in my research career.
John Tooby, Michael Price, and Edward Hagen immediately established a website associated with the Department of Anthropology at the University of California at Santa Barbara from which I had retired the previous year. Tooby was on the Anthropology faculty, and both Price and Hagen were then graduate students whom we both advised. Their website, still accessible at http://www.anth.ucsb.edu/ucsbpreliminaryreport.pdf , was started in 2000 and was periodically updated as new reports and investigations appeared. They themselves reviewed many of the primary published resources cited by my Inquisitors and showed that a large fraction of the citations were either wrong or had nothing to do with the accusations made against me or said just the opposite of what was claimed. Their website, no longer being updated, also preserves many of the original articles and emails that were central to accusations or repudiations in this scandal, some of which are cited in this book.
A similar but more immediate effort was made at the University of Michigan, where I earned all of my degrees in anthropology and where I subsequently served on the faculties of both the Anthropology Department and the Department of Human Genetics in the University of Michigan’s School of Medicine. In 2000, when the Darkness scandal exploded in the press, two of my University of Michigan colleagues in the Anthropology Department, Kent Flannery and Joyce Marcus, conducted an investigation for the Provost’s Office of the University of Michigan and concluded that the accusations against James V. Neel and me were without merit. Their investigation took place because the field research for my doctoral dissertation at Michigan was done among the Yanomamö, and James V. Neel, founder and longtime chairman of that department, joined me in the field in 1966 and, with a small team of medical doctors and advanced graduate students in medicine and/or human genetics, initiated a bio-medical research project among the Yanomamö. I was subsequently offered a position in the Department of Human Genetics by Neel. Our collaboration continued in annual field trips until 1972 when I moved to the Pennsylvania State University and Neel’s interests turned to other research issues.
Several of my colleagues in anthropology, Thomas Gregor at Vanderbilt University, Daniel Gross at the World Bank, and William Irons at Northwestern University, were also concerned and alarmed by the enthusiasm with which elected officers and members of the Executive Board of my professional association, the American Anthropological Association (AAA), seemingly endorsed the accusations contained in Darkness in El Dorado and spoke out against them and repeatedly challenged them in publications and by their numerous direct communications with various officials in the AAA. Tom Gregor and Dan Gross also made very useful suggestions, especially to Chapter 16 , where I described some of the committees the AAA created to conduct its investigation of me and James V. Neel, topics they themselves also investigated, wrote major papers on, and with which they were intimately familiar. Many other colleagues protested what the AAA did in a similar fashion, including Raymond Hames, who was asked to serve on the AAA Task Force on El Dorado charged with investigating me but who resigned when he discovered how biased and politically vindictive some members of this committee were. I am grateful for the long-term and costly efforts some of these colleagues put into their attempts to keep the public image of this association reputable at a time when many senior and influential academic leaders in other fields were becoming skeptical about the professional integrity of the AAA, as it was developing the reputation of being irrelevant to serious mainstream academic discussions of major issues of concern to the public. As one of my colleagues cynically commented, “It is no wonder that scientists in other fields view anthropologists as people who would eat their own offspring.”
I also thank two of my former undergraduate students at UCSB, Amanda Grimes and Nathan Resch (now married to each other), for traveling from Santa Barbara to San Francisco at their own expense for the 2000 annual meetings of the AAA and for recording what every speaker said during the two major public open mike sessions about me and my alleged activities among the Yanomamö that were the major focus of the Darkness in El Dorado scandal and the then-impending AAA investigation of me. I also want to thank Betsy Myers of the Traverse Area District Library for her work in finding many references for me as this book neared completion.
I would like to thank those colleagues who read earlier drafts of some of the general material that appears in this book and made useful comments on them. Steven Pinker and Richard Dawkins read a very early draft of one of the chapters just as the Darkness scandal was breaking in 2000 and put a great deal of their time and effort into this, and I am grateful to them. Mary Ann Harrell, a former editor at the National Geographic Society and a dear friend, also read several of the earlier chapters and made useful editorial suggestions. I am grateful for her recommendations and for her longtime interest in my Yanomamö research and encouraging me to keep at it . . . and to ignore my detractors.
I also want to thank Edward O. Wilson for reading and making suggestions on the brief account I wrote about our participation in the 1976 “sociobiology” debate in Washington, D.C., when the InCAR radicals sullenly listened to the speakers, and then rose up and attacked Wilson, knocked him down, and poured pitchers of water on him while shouting ugly accusations of racism, facism, etc., about his research. Later that evening, at the Smithsonian, Wilson had a debate with one of my persistent anthropological critics, Marvin Harris, whose statements that night about me stunned Wilson. Wilson discovered that night just how treacherous anthropologists can be when they denigrate a competitor if their own “theories” are threatened by his research—as I discuss in Chapter 14 . I also want to thank Ed Wilson for the regular phone calls he made to me to cheer me up and assure me of his support during the period immediately following the appearance of Darkness in El Dorado. He knew how depressing it can be when your own colleagues attacked you for some alleged political agenda they maliciously claim you are promoting, as Marxist biologists Richard Lewontin and Stephen J. Gould, his own departmental colleagues at Harvard, attacked him this way after his influential book Sociobiology appeared.
Finally, I want to thank Richard D. Alexander for not only reading most of the manuscript as it was nearing completion and making extensive comments on it, but also for the many conversations we have had since the early 1970s about the remarkable breakthroughs in theoretical biology that affected our respective research activities and theoretical interests and those of the several graduate students who worked with both of us—Mark Flinn, Laura Betzig, and Paul Turke in particular. I look forward to resuming my direct contact with Alexander as a consequence of my appointment in 2012 as an Adjunct Research Scientist at the University of Michigan, where I will be putting my many years of data on the Yanomamö into an archive to be managed and ultimately distributed by the University of Michigan’s Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) in the Institute of Social Research (ISR) to qualifying universities that subscribe to their programs.
© CHRISTOPHER CHAGNON
NAPOLEON A. CHAGNON is Distinguished Research Professor and Chancellor’s Chair for Excellence in Anthropology at the University of Missouri and adjunct research scientist at the University of Michigan and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. He formerly taught at the University of California–Santa Barbara, Penn State, Northwestern, and the University of Michigan. He is the author of five academic books and lives in Columbia, Missouri.
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