Notes

Introduction

It was this aspect of Yanomamö cultural geography : This means they had not been ravaged by epidemic diseases and their population was distributed among the expected numbers of children, adults, old people, etc. Most tribes are so demographically disrupted when anthropologists reach them that the kinds of fieldwork I discuss in this book cannot be done there.

The Social Contract (1762) : See Ellingson, 2001, for an erudite history of the Noble Savage idea; see Keeley, 1996, for a summary of how anthropologists and archaeologists have used the noble savage concept, and Pinker, 2002, for how it has been used in general social science thinking.

biological and evolutionary matter : Alexander, 1979.

who laid down his life : The anecdote was reported by English geneticist John Maynard Smith, who claims to have heard J. B. S. Haldane say this or something very similar. Maynard Smith was the editor of the Journal of Theoretical Biology , in which Hamilton’s two theoretically important papers appeared. Even now major issues are reappearing in evolutionary theory. For example, E. O. Wilson’s 2012 book, The Social Conquest of Earth, raises once more the issue of group selection versus individual selection, and what he says seemingly calls into question Hamilton’s eloquent solution to this problem laid out in his two 1964 papers on inclusive fitness or, as John Maynard Smith called it, kin selection theory. As Richard Dawkins said in 2012 in a highly critical review of Wilson’s book with reference to Hamilton’s work: “It truly is a beautiful theory.” Dawkins, 2012.

In my view, and I agree with Dawkins, it is the theory that best explains the importance of genetic kinship in all forms of life, including social insects, social animals, humans in the environments of history, and tribesmen like the Yanomamö. It is the key to understanding the question that Alexander caused me to start thinking about in the first place because nepotism lies at the heart of understanding cooperation and sociality in human societies.

Needless to say a large fraction of major theoreticians in evolutionary biology reject Wilson’s arguments for group selection, but one of them, David Sloan Wilson, an advocate of group selection, argues, somewhat regretfully, that the empirical and theoretical issues are so complex that neither Dawkins nor Wilson has gotten them right (2012). He argues that these individuals are simply two luminaries among a much larger group of experts and there is more consensus among this group than meets the eye. But other luminaries, Steven Pinker among them, are now voicing their disapproval of E. O. Wilson’s attempted resurrection of group selection. Pinker, 2012. D. S. Wilson essentially dismisses the conflict by arguing that the days of pitting kin selection against group selection are over, largely because many things that have been taken as examples of group selection are now being usefully framed in terms of inclusive fitness theory and many things that were formerly explained in terms of kin selection are being framed in terms of multilevel or group selection. But lurking uncomfortably in my memory is the comment I once heard W. D. Hamilton make: in almost all cases where group selection is said to work these have been reduced to a solution in which individual-level selection has been also shown to be operating. That is not the same thing that D. S. Wilson is saying.

Finally, it is appropriate in thinking about these issues to recall the pithy anecdote by George C. Williams (1966) that a herd of fleet deer is not the same thing as a fleet herd of deer.

kinship rules : Chagnon, 1982.

toward increased social and political complexity : These developments can also go the opposite way, toward decreasing complexity: the important issue is that, through long-term studies, one can identify which developments do what to social trends.

general reading audience : My 1992 book, Yanomamö: The Last Days of Eden , is largely an expansion on my original textbook, Yanomamö , but with the more difficult and technical material on kinship and social organization eliminated and sections of new text added.

Chapter 1. Culture Shock: My First Year in the Field

evangelical missionaries : These were members of the New Tribes Mission. Although most of them were Americans, those working in Venezuela included missionaries from Canada, England, Denmark, and other countries.

Venezuelan Yanomamö in 1950 : Several other New Tribes missionaries may have made contact with the Yanomamö at Platanal in 1948. Dan Shaylor, personal communication.

lots of bareto : The wet season begins in early April and lasts until October or November, the heaviest rains falling in May and June when any travel—by foot or by open canoe—is very unpleasant.

foreboding presence : Some thirty-five to forty anthropologists have now done fieldwork among the Yanomamö since I started. By the mid-1970s things had changed radically and it is not surprising that some anthropologists who choose to be critical of some of my findings say that they never saw any of the things that Chagnon reports. They probably stayed with the Salesian missionaries, who by the mid-1970s, had missions with cement floors, flush toilets, screened windows, electricity, tables and chairs, kerosene refrigerators, and running water.

in my doctoral thesis : Chagnon, Napoleon A. 1966. Yanomamö Warfare, Social Organization and Marriage Alliances. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Michigan. University Microfilms. Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Englishman named Ashley Montagu : Born in London, his name at birth was Israel Ehrenberg.

evolution of biological organisms : See White, 1949.

a “primitive stage” in human social history : Harris, 1968, p. 197.

living expenses for one year : NIMH was one of two major federal agencies that funded research by advanced graduate students in most universities and was a major source of funding in anthropology. The other agency, a more common funder, was the National Science Foundation. Few universities provide research funding for their graduate students. Instead they expect them to find research funds on their own by applying to NSF, NIMH, or other agencies and private foundations.

survivors of the atomic bombings : Neel and Schull, 1991.

research among the Xavante : Neel et al., 1964.

from James Spuhler : Spuhler also had a joint appointment in Neel’s Human Genetics Department.

members in Neel’s department : Some people seem to assume that Neel was one of my professors at Michigan—a mentor of sorts. This is not true. I took no courses from Neel and met him only on the eve of my departure to do my first fieldwork. By that time almost all of my formal course work for the Ph.D. degree was completed, as I describe in the text.

anthropologist Johannes Wilbert : Wilbert joined the faculty of the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1962 and remained there for his entire career.

variations found among them : Wilbert, 1966.

Venezuelan Waika Indians : The German anthropologist Otto Zerries (Zerries, 1964) had spent some months among the Yanomamö in Barker’s first village, Mahekodo-teri, studying material culture. His research assistant, Meinhard Schuster (Schuster, 1958), published generally accurate but superficial observations on Yanomamö social organization.

from the University of Michigan : Seriously ill individuals were normally flown out to Puerto Ayacucho by the missions who, in the villages we visited in 1966, had already been seen by doctors before we arrived.

Chapter 2. Discovering the Significance of the Names

a system of writing : All languages have structure and grammar, but only some of them are written.

Yanomamö, and German : I had learned German in my freshman year at Michigan Tech and continued to learn it on my own after transferring to the University of Michigan. Ann Arbor was largely settled by Germans and several of my favorite restaurants had German-speaking personnel, so I had frequent opportunities to speak German and improve my skill in this language. In addition, the research institute in Venezuela, IVIC, had many German-speaking scientists and while I was there I spoke German more frequently than I spoke Spanish.

Venezuelan Malarialogía : The men who worked for the Malarialogía systematically dispensed antimalaria pills to the Yanomamö who lived in villages on or close to the rivers and periodically sprayed their shabonos with DDT. In this area of Venezuela most of the Malarialogía employees were called creoles.

about 120 pounds : For detailed anthropometric data see R. Spielman, 1971. See also Hames, Chagnon, and Oliver on Kedebaböwei-teri children, 2005.

first menstrual period : There are few features of Yanomamö culture that can be used to measure time. The place of a female’s first menstruation is one of them. For example, if a female had her first menstruation in the same place she was born, then most likely her mother’s group lived there at least twelve years, perhaps longer.

what garden : Over time the names of shabonos change, but the names of gardens are almost never forgotten. Shabonos have to be reconstructed periodically—usually about every three years. Sometimes the Yanomamö call the new shabono by a different name. Babies, when due, are normally born in the garden, where the mother and her female attendants have more privacy. They almost always give me the name of the garden when I ask where a child was born. There will be many more gardens and garden names than shabonos and shabono (village) names.

people to study : Some of the Ye’kwana I got to know well chastised me for studying the Yanomamö and invited me to study them instead. One of the reasons was that the Yanomamö are secretive about their names and genealogies, whereas the Ye’kwana were extremely willing to talk about these topics—and would not lie to me about them.

blood relative to everyone else : I will discuss in more detail what “being related” means. In most Yanomamö villages the vast majority of individuals are related to upwards of 90 percent of all other individuals no matter how many ‘families’ there are in the village. See Chagnon, 1979a, fig. 4–5, pp. 129–31, “Quartiles of Village Population Relatedness.”

“female cross cousin” : This is a simplified discussion of Yanomamö kinship classification and marriage rules. I will expand on this material in chapter 12 . For an even more detailed discussion of Yanomamö kinship, see Chagnon, 1997, ch. 4. A sixth edition of this monograph is scheduled to appear in 2012.

a nabä : a subhuman : The Yanomamö are extremely ethnocentric and believe that all non-Yanomamö are subhuman.

Individuals of the same age : Sahlins, 1968; Fried, 1967.

within the group : See Chagnon, 1979a, 1979b, and Chagnon and Bugos, 1979.

to calculate approximate ages : They also have rich vocabularies to describe the various growth stages of plants, insects, animals, and other living things.

his waist string : Boys are eager to begin tying their penises to their waist strings and would be ridiculed if they failed to do so when they reached the “appropriate” degree of maturity.

their political system : Politics and political activities are almost everywhere the domain of males. The name taboo for females is observed more to avoid drawing attention to them when they are sick and/or very old or for incest prohibitions—sons-in-law are not supposed to use the names of their mothers-in-law.

the less angry (hushuwo) : The word hushuwo has several meanings. It is used to describe ordinary anger, but in the context of grief after the death of a close relative, it means something like: an emotional state of intense sadness and grief, associated with unpredictable and uncontrollable emotions that verge on acts of violence. It is, therefore, potentially dangerous to casually say the name of someone who is recently deceased in the presence of his or her close kin . . . especially adult males.

beg for steel tools : Even the Yanomamö villages I contacted that had never before been visited by outsiders had machetes and axes, often badly worn ones, but also sometimes relatively new ones obtained in trade with other, distant Yanomamö villages.

generation of ancestors : I always avoided using young informants because they didn’t know as much as older people. On the few occasions I had to use young female informants—captives from other villages I wanted to know about—I would have another person in my hut to chaperone the session.

an agouti-tooth knife : Agoutis are small rodents whose sharp incisors are used by the Yanomamö as small cutting tools—“knives”—when an incisor is affixed to a short stick with pitch and vine wrapping.

presentable as a visitor : When I traveled with the Yanomamö I normally wore a T-shirt, swimming trunks, and tennis shoes, all of which got soaked within an hour of travel, either by perspiration or by my wading through rivers and streams. However, I always carried a piece of red cloth in my backpack that I used as a loin cloth to “ceremoniously” enter a village. The Yanomamö encouraged me to do this to put on a display as they did.

the main group had : See Chagnon, 1979, pp. 86–131, for statistical details and discussion of village composition by patrilineages.

Chapter 3. Raids and Revenge: Why Villages Fission and Move

peaceful terms with the Bisaasi-teri : The village name “Monou-teri” derives from mono u meaning “lagoon.” “Bisaasi-teri” derives from the commonly found roofing palm plant, called bisaasi. The suffix teri means “people” or “people of.”

gardens began producing : When a group moves, it clears new gardens and, once these begin producing, the group moves into them and builds its permanent shabono. Meanwhile, people build and sleep in simple temporary yanos —“camping” huts—which can be made in less than an hour.

their leader, their waiteri : Waiteri means “fierce one.” They had several waiteris , but Matowä was the most waiteri in the village, the headman, and an unokai (see below).

in this particular war : As my association with the Bisaasi-teri continued I became more and more identified with them and this affected how some of their enemies viewed me.

two Patanowä-teri headmen : Very large villages often have two (or more) headmen, usually the senior men from the largest patrilineages in the village. Very often these men are cross-cousins and are married to each others’ sisters. (See chapter 12 on Yanomamö social organization.)

firewood and my backpacks : I carried one of the packs and my guide carried the other.

blocked shut for the night : I obliged them, but thankfully no situation ever arose in which I had to consider taking this kind of action.

all men are Yanomamö : One of my critics would later accuse me of being the “classic” example of the Heisenberg principle, i.e., unwittingly influencing what I was there to observe. In short, he accused me of causing the “wars” I witnessed, like this one, because I allegedly had such a “vile” personality and communicated this to the Yanomamö, thus causing them to become vile, aggressive, and warlike. (Cockburn, 1991.) This accusation was too bizarre to respond to. However, I and all other anthropologists are aware that simply by being in a relatively uncontacted village we have an effect on what we report.

with the bark removed : In other raid rehearsals I witnessed, the no owa was made from thatch—bunches of vegetation tied together to look like a human with legs and a head.

after they killed an enemy : Several years after this raid, Matarawä, even then just a youth, was killed by raiders from the village of Daiyari-teri. He went fishing at night too close to their village, they caught him, and riddled his neck and chest with many arrows. But his assassins did what I consider an honorable thing. His body fell into the river. Lest it disappear forever, they dived in, recovered it, and tied it with vines to the riverbank so his kinsmen would find it and be able to cremate it. His assassins knew him well, liked him, but they were now on opposite sides of a new war, and so they killed him.

the sexual lives : I once had an amusing conversation with Meyer Fortes, a distinguished British anthropologist renowned for his fieldwork among several African tribes. After we got to know each other well (he had invited me to spend my 1980 sabbatical leave at King’s College, Cambridge University, where we had many conversations), he whispered to me: “How often have you seen the Yanomamö copulate?” I whispered back: “Never.” He then said to me that in his years among the Tale, one of the African tribes he was famous for studying, “I’ve never seen the Tale do it either.”

the shabono on their lagoon : They finally abandoned this shabono a few months later when their new gardens across the Mavaca were producing.

snuff tube with ebene : Ebene is a generic word used for Yanomamö hallucinogens, all of which are of vegetable origin. In this area the two most commonly used hallucinogens are hisiomö and yakowana. Of the two, the first is the more desirable and comes from the tiny seeds of a large tree. The other comes from the inner bark of a different tree. See Chagnon, LeQuesne, and Cook, 1971.

EEA : Symons, 1979.

Environments of History : Alexander, 1979.

ARE : Irons, 1998.

Chapter 4. Bringing My Family to Yanomamöland and My Early Encounters with the Salesians

his generous offer : Both my wife and I came from large and relatively poor families. Both of us remember that as children our families lived, at times, in houses that did not have indoor plumbing and we were familiar with the discomforts of having to use an outhouse.

Barker had developed : Barker did not reveal to me the extensive materials he had on the Yanomamö language, perhaps because he mistrusted me because I told him that I had been raised Catholic. He was suspicious of Catholics because of the problems he had had with the Salesian missionaries. In any case, I think the only way to learn Yanomamö is to live with the Yanomamö themselves, something Lizot and I both did, but which the Salesians did not do.

female cross-cousins : Cousin, sibling, and other kinship terms are explained in chapter 12 , p. 324.

by the Catholic Church : Chagnon, 1986. Newsweek , where I described Venezuela as “the last Theocracy in the Western Hemisphere.”

Venezuela’s remote areas : This policy has been going on in Latin America since the Spanish conquest. When I moved to Santa Barbara, California, in 1984 and saw the chain of Catholic missions along the Pacific coast, I knew I was witnessing this same longtime policy among the Yanomamö, with its devastating effects on their health.

colleague named Gene Higdom : Dan Shaylor, personal communication, January 13, 2010.

sites was occupied in 1950 : This was probably true in 1950, but either late in 1950 or early in 1951 a New Tribes missionary by the name of Flora Troxell lived for a time with one of the groups on the lower Ocamo, possibly at the mouth of the Ocamo. Remarkably, she had a wooden leg. Dan Shaylor, personal communication, January 13, 2010. In 1954 Hector Acebes said he met her at Tama Tama in 1951.

as Mahekodo-teri : One Yanomamö name for the uppermost reaches of the Orinoco River is Mahekodo kä u. But, in fact, this river is a branch that splits away from the main stream of the Orinoco at the rapids known as Raudal Peñascal , very near the headwaters of the Orinoco and the Brazilian border.

reduce them to living there : The practice, as I mentioned above, was widespread in the Spanish colonization of the Americas: a reducción is a word that means, historically, a community of Native Americans who have been “converted” to Catholicism, usually by being forced to settle at or near a Catholic mission and required to attend the mission school. The native people are dissuaded from (and in some cases, punished for) speaking their native language.

months at a time : I was prevented from returning to the Yanomamö by a small group of Venezuelan anthropologists for a ten-year period from 1975 to 1985 that included establishment in the Upper Orinoco of these Salesian policies. I did not learn about them until these policies were discontinued at least for the Yanomamö. See Lizot, 1976.

effectively amounted to purchasing : From 1975 to 1985 opposition to my study of the Yanomamö by Venezuelan anthropologists had become so intense that they succeeded in having a policy passed that no “foreign” (meaning American) anthropologists were given permits from the Venezuelan “Indian Bureau,” the Oficina Central de Asuntos Indigenas (OCAI). The head of this group was an anthropologist named Eddie Romero, whose wife was an archaeologist at IVIC. OCAI was controlled by Venezuelan anthropologists until about 1985, when it was moved into the Ministry of Education. See Lizot, 1976.

alliances, and warfare : Chagnon, 1974, pp. 180–82.

films on the Yanomamö : The Feast and Yanomamö: A Multidisciplinary Study.

beginning to annoy the Salesians : After 1975 the Salesians began criticizing me and my work to Venezuelan authorities because I was “violating the Yanomamö name taboo”—that is, I was asking about deceased individuals who might possibly have died from their introduced shotguns. I believe they were using the name taboo to hide the shotgun deaths. However, by the early 1970s most of my fieldwork was being done among the Yanomamö villages known collectively as Shamatari, where the Salesians had no knowledge of my field procedures. The only Salesian who might have had firsthand knowledge of my interview procedures was Padre Cocco. Padre Bórtoli did not arrive in the area until about 1975.

Chapter 5. First Contact with New Yanomamö Villages

my valuable trade items, or madohe : Madohe means “material possessions” but in the context of the possessions of foreigners, it means their “trade goods.”

give valuable madohe to them : The Yanomamö do this to every foreigner. My critics dishonestly claim or naïvely seem to believe that only my trade goods had special properties such that my paying informants with my madohe made them “dependent” on me and caused wars among Yanomamö because they coveted the novel steel tools I brought into their area. However, long before I arrived, the Salesian Missions, especially Padre Cocco’s mission at Ocamo, had distributed thousands of steel tools to the Yanomamö. See Chagnon and Asch, Ocamo Is My Town. The Yanomamö were engaged in wars long before either I or the Salesians arrived, as I describe throughout this book.

from Mömariböwei-teri : As I explained in chapter 1 , he was the first Yanomamö I met as I passed through Tama Tama into their area.

to find Sibarariwä’s village : The Mavaca River seemed to have an aura of mystery and danger in 1965. For example, the creole men who worked for the Malarialogía seemed to be reluctant to ascend it more than a half hour by motorized dugout from where it flowed into the Orinoco. They had also heard of “Shamatari treachery.”

Amerindian populations : Measles also decimates other, non-indigenous, isolated populations whenever long periods of time elapse between exposure to the illness. In such isolated demographic situations the entire population, when exposed to measles, contracts the disease and everyone becomes sick, including adults, thus leading to high death rates because adult caregivers cannot help the children and infants.

didn’t feel like coming : Karina had gotten a measles vaccination from one of the medical doctors in our group some ten days earlier and was at the end of his period of reaction to the vaccination. Our expedition had fought the measles epidemic for weeks. By this time the Venezuelan government was sending in medical doctors, more vaccines, and other medical supplies, and had taken over the work of containing the 1968 measles epidemic. One tragic new outbreak did occur at about this time, caused I believe by the failure of a Salesian priest at Platanal, Padre Sanchez, to evacuate a Brazilian man who had recently arrived at his mission sick with measles. This man caused many of the Yanomamö there and in neighboring Patanowä-teri to contract measles and numbers of them died.

“He got it right!” : This is how I routinely used Yanomamö personal names all during my sixty months of fieldwork. My use—or alleged misuse—of personal names would later become the topic of an investigation of my “ethical misconduct” by the American Anthropological Association. Most anthropologists probably never worked among people who had a name taboo, but many of them acted as though they knew and understood how the taboo worked.

Chapter 6. Geography Lesson

was called Bisaasi-teri : Since the Yanomamö frequently rename their villages, any maps with current village names would soon be out of date. The names of the Yanomamö villages at the mouth of the Mavaca, for example, have changed numerous times since I first went there in 1964 because the villages have subdivided many times, even though they have remained within sight of each other.

in the local jungle : I’ve spoken to many fieldworkers who studied tribes in other parts of the world whose experiences were comparable: their native informants invariably had an exceptional sense of direction and distance between places familiar to them.

child-bearing, death, etc. : Anthropology also has had a theoretical interest in what is generally known as “rites of passage” and these phenomena are also nongeographical.

early in my fieldwork : Chagnon, 1974, p. 160.

Chapter 7. From Fieldwork to Science

other universities as well : Paul and Beatty, 2000; Baur, IGES-ELSI Committee, et al., 2001.

We spent many days : Neel et al., 1970.

“inbreeding coefficient” : The “f” statistic is a measure of how much genetic material is shared by two people who are related. A mating of these two people would produce an “inbreeding coefficient” for their offspring that is half the value of the “relatedness coefficient.”

“zoological perspective” : Tiger and Fox, 1966.

this interesting issue : Chagnon, 1966; 1967; 1968a; 1968c; 1972.

hours upstream by large dugout : The Venezuelans use the name bongo to refer to a large native dugout canoe used to transport loads of heavy cargo, like full fifty-five-gallon gasoline barrels, cement, etc. They are often “planked up” by adding boards along both gunwales to carry larger loads. Palm-thatched or sheet-metal roofs are sometimes added for comfort and rain-proofing.

children in the village : Neel and I would later be accused of deliberately withholding gamma globulin when we vaccinated the Iyäwei-teri at Ocamo.

Chapter 8. Conflicts over Women

Females appear : Keeley, 1996.

Crow Creek site : Zimmerman and Whitten, 1980; Zimmerman, 1981; Zimmerman, J. Gregg, and P. S. Gregg, 1981; Zimmerman and Bradley, 1993.

reached the Americas : This date is significant because it eliminates the frequently invoked argument that “colonial influence after Columbus” made the American Indians warlike: before that, they were allegedly peaceful and among whom war and violence were rare or nonexistent.

Or, perhaps, these injuries : See P. L. Walker on forensic studies of different groups of North American skeletal remains that show many wounds and injuries: 1989; 1997; 2001; Walker et al. 2005.

John Morgan : Morgan, 1852.

“Don’t ask” : Chagnon, 1974, p. 82.

inseminated by other men : See Dickemann, 1979, and on claustration.

films ever made , Dead Birds : Gardner, 1964.

“Among the sources” : Heider, 1970, p. 100.

University of Michigan : Larson, 1987.

accounting for only 6 percent of it : Ibid., Tables 8 and 9. While there is significant variation in “causes” of war in the New Guinea Highlands, fighting over women is among the more frequently reported ones. The relationship of women to warfare and conflicts in other Highland tribes neighboring the Ilaga Dani is less clear.

Kapauku: While revenge for homicides is common, among the Kapauku “most wars start because of violations of the husband’s sexual exclusive rights, the delict of adultery, as well as the rape of a married woman is considered the most heinous of crimes. The penalty is execution.” Pospisil, 1958, p. 167.

Western Dani (Konda): Here, disputes over women are the most frequent causes of “brawls” (22 cases out of 52:42.3 percent). About 19 percent of Konda wars start over women, but twice as many start to avenge previous killings. About 22 percent of the wars were over “property,” mostly resulting from disputes over pigs. O’Brien, 1969, Table 11.

Western Dani (Wanggulam): Dutch anthropologist Anton Ploeg (Ploeg, 1969) documents 131 cases of “trouble” over the course of twenty-five years. Seventy-five were bow-and-arrow fights in which 142 people were killed. The second most frequent cause of wars was conflicts over women; theft of property was the most frequent.

Lower Grand Valley: Myron Bromley, a mission linguist and anthropologist, lived among the Dani for thirty-eight years (1954–92). His observations are particularly valuable because they include a period of time before the government established political control over the Grand Valley in 1958. Warfare was perpetual, especially at boundaries separating large confederacies or alliances of many groups. He discusses twenty cases of “a system of seizure, particularly of married women and pigs.” Bromley, 1981, p. 10. Eight of these cases were over women, six were over pigs, and six over theft.

and reproductive resources : This theme is explored more systematically in Chagnon, 1990; see also Chagnon, 1988.

and some of the British sociologists : This approach goes back to F. Barth and some of the British sociologists. Irons and I have discussed this approach frequently in private, and I have published about it in articles about Yanomamö “wars.”

Sex ratio deviations : The sex ratio is expressed as the ratio of males to females multiplied by 100, thus, 107/100 x 100 equals a sex ratio of 107.

my early publications : Chagnon, 1968c.

warfare and politics : I believe I was the first anthropologist to observe, document statistically, and draw attention to this striking phenomenon among tribesmen, making it a theoretically important issue for the first time.

“lurid activity” : Harris, 1968.

including humans : See Alexander, 1979.

abduction is greatly reduced : This has important implications for theories about the origin and evolution of cooperation. One of the best known theories, tit-for-tat (Axelrod and Hamilton, 1981), is based on the assumption that interacting individuals or groups are able to inflict the same amount of punishment on each other. The Yanomamö—and probably all societies—are constantly trying to achieve the ability to inflict more harm on competitors than the competitors can reciprocate: they constantly try to violate the assumptions in tit-for-tat. For the Yanomamö, this means trying to achieve larger village size compared to those of their immediate neighbors and enemies.

treat them better : My data on shuwahimou women are largely anecdotal. I cannot give an accurate estimate of what percentage of women among the Yanomamö have succeeded in fleeing from husbands but my guess would be that it is in the range of 5 percent. Many more, of course, attempt to flee but are recovered by their angry husbands and his friends—and severely punished.

they never before did : Alexander Cockburn (Cockburn, 1991), claimed that I had such a “vile personality” that it somehow infected the otherwise peaceful Yanomamö, who then became vile in turn and began engaging in acts of violence, which I then dutifully observed and described—thereby exemplifying a stunning instance of the Heisenberg principle. R. B. Ferguson (Ferguson, 1995) also claimed that I caused animosity, jealousy, and conflicts by the way I gave metal tools to the Yanomamö.

Ritchie visited : Ritchie, 1996, p. 10.

central role in Yanomamö culture : For example works by both missionaries and anthropologists. See Jank, 1977; Peters, 2000; Ales, 1984. Lizot’s 1976 book, Le Cercle de Feux (Circle of Fires), denounces me in the preface for “overemphasizing Yanomamö violence” in some of my publications and then ironically proceeds to report even more violence among the people Lizot lived with.

established by faith : One article of faith is that Noble Savages don’t abduct women from their neighbors. During a talk I gave in 1999 at a major research university in Wisconsin to faculty members and graduate students in science (including anthropology) a young female faculty member objected to my discussion of abductions among the Yanomamö on the grounds that “we females in anthropology do not like to hear about things like this. It is demeaning to women.”

but rule breakers : Many social scientists emphasize the difference between humans and other animals by drawing attention to the fact that only humans make “rules” (and laws) about the appropriateness of their behavior. For them a culture hero is someone like Moses—the lawgiver. But humans not only make rules; we develop complex schemes to break these rules (Alexander, 1979; Chagnon, 1982). The truly distinctive thing about humans is not that we make rules, but that we make rules in order to break them, a kind of educational message for others to heed when the rule breaker is punished.

response to a male : Male and female anthropologists studying the same tribe sometimes come up with radically different characterizations of the “realities” they report. Perhaps the most widely known case involves Margaret Mead’s work. For example, one of her husbands was a prominent English anthropologist, Reo Fortune, who had studied, among other peoples, a Melanesian tribe known as the Arapesh (Mountain Arapesh). One of his publications was a straightforward account of their warfare. Mead later visited the same people. Her publications on the same tribe seem to deny the very existence of the warfare Fortune described. She portrayed them as friendly, peaceable people.

rises to 87 percent : To get this percentage, we must subtract the 91 females who are less than eleven years old from the total number of females: 302 – 91 = 211. This must be divided into the number of married females eleven years or older (194 – 9 = 185). 185/211 = 88.7, which I rounded down to 88 percent.

jumps to 76 percent : The math: 302 – 91 = 211; 161/211 = 76 percent.

such a child : This is a particularly important issue in my fieldwork because I try to visit and learn about the people in many different and widely dispersed villages and doing this takes an enormous amount of travel time and cost. This is a chronic problem faced by anthropological field researchers. The trade-off is this: is it better to get more in-depth knowledge about a smaller, and possibly unrepresentative village, or try to get data on a more comprehensive sample and be able to document the variability that always exists in a larger number of small, widely dispersed villages?

there were 135 males : Sex ratios can be, and often are, measured at different levels of the population—such as the point of conception, point of birth, average age at marriage of females (or males), people over age fifty, etc.

(“Fierceness Complex”) : In my 1968c publication I described the “Waiteri Complex” as a new model suggesting how preferential female infanticide led to a shortage of females and how this, in turn, led to fighting among men and eventually to intervillage warfare. Divale and Harris (1976) then appropriated this idea and called it the “male supremacist complex” without mentioning that their model derived from mine. Harris was the co-editor of the volume in which my original article was published, so it was highly unlikely that he didn’t know about my article.

are notable examples : Blaffer-Hrdy, 1977.

did these things : In 1985 a Venezuelan official from the Indian Commission (OCAI) came to the Yanomamö area to find me. He wanted me to make an official, formal, notarized statement about the Yanomamö practice of infanticide. A female member of the Venezuelan congress had heard that some Indians in Venezuela killed infants and she vowed to find the perpetrators, try them for murder in a court of law, and advocate harsh punishments for them. She was obviously referring to the Yanomamö and my publications on them. In my formal statement to OCAI about Yanomamö infanticide practices I said that I had never witnessed an infanticide and that these reports therefore might be inaccurate. I added that the compassionate and effective teachings of many missionaries had probably resulted in the abandonment of this vile practice. The first part of my statement was factually correct and that ended the matter. However, from that point onward, I stopped collecting systematic data on Yanomamö infanticide. Much to my dismay, Marvin Harris (then of Columbia University) accused me of “withholding data on infanticide” because it would support his theory that Yanomamö were adjusting “land-man ratios” through infanticide, that is, they were making the world safe for peccaries, armadillos, and monkeys, etc. by controlling their population growth through selective female infanticide to ensure that future Yanomamö would have enough protein in their diets. This was a component in the “great protein debate” that Harris and I had from the 1970s through the 1990s and part of a larger, but infrequently discussed, theoretical issue of whether Marxist or Darwinian theory would eventually prevail in American scientific cultural anthropology.

the women by name : Intense mate guarding by Yanomamö husbands leads to a relatively high degree of paternal certainty, as previously discussed.

One woman had : Biocca, 1996, pp. 34–35.

Chapter 9. Fighting and Violence

opinion and public action : The Yanomamö represent a kind of tribal horticultural society that most anthropologists consider to be egalitarian. See Fried, 1967.

to the ground : I filmed one of these fights in 1965. This footage can be seen in the film Yanomamö: A Multidisciplinary Study. Neel, Asch, and Chagnon, 1971.

even deadlier clubs, called himo : Since himo clubs take hours to make and must be prepared in advance of a club fight, they clearly cannot be used in spontaneous club fights, as most club fights are. There are, however, club fight challenges sent to neighboring villages and participants have time to make himo clubs before appearing for a club fight. But since steel machetes and axes are always found in most villages due to trade, these can also be used to intimidate or threaten opponents that the one who wields the weapon might escalate a club fight to a fight with weapons that are potentially lethal. A himo club visibly displayed in a nabrushi club fight is, however, more likely to be used than a machete or an ax—which are definitely more likely to be lethal. A himo club does ensure that injuries will be more severe than those caused by nabrushi clubs.

individuals in Caucasian populations : Lahr and Wright, 1996; Lahr, 1996. South American Indian crania from the Fuegians and Patagonians are extremely robust, but there is some debate about whether this can best be explained by allometry (big skulls are more robust) or by genetic/environmental effects. Rolando González-José, personal communication.

death of some person : See Chagnon, 1988.

particularly aggressive headman : His name was Heawä and he lived in Mahekodo-teri. One of the victims of his Salesian-provided shotgun was the headman of Makorima-teri, a man named Säsäwä, but he also shot and killed several men in other villages, including in the Ashidowä-teri area far to the south of his village.

Although shotguns : My informants provided other examples. As I relate elsewhere, Padre Cocco was initially skeptical of my information that the Yanomamö were using shotguns to kill one another until a Yanomamö he called Carlito told both of us about a raid on an isolated village on the Harota River in which several people were killed. Heawä, a son of the headman of the Mahekodo-teri, shot and killed the headman of Makorima-teri during my fieldwork. His older brother Asiawä killed a young woman in Upper Bisaasi-teri. Both men obtained their shotguns at the Salesian mission at Platanal, according to my Yanomamö informants.

these villages for many years : Ritchie, 1966, provides a translation of an account that happened in a village that was subsequently evangelized by the Dawson family, who were initially associated with the New Tribes Mission but later became an independent nonaffiliated mission.

in the mid-1960s : Biocca, 1996.

with “Ocamo Village” : This village was known from at least 1965 to the present as Iyäwei-teri, the village whose members lived at Padre Cocco’s Salesian mission at the mouth of the Ocamo.

which I was : Venezuelan police are frequently poorly educated trigger-happy goons with automatic weapons and unquestioned authority to shoot to kill for trivial reasons. One of them once shoved the barrel of his machine gun into my belly because I was wearing a Boy Scout belt with a brass buckle, which he claimed was a piece of “military” equipment. During one of my trips to Venezuela, American Peace Corps workers were summarily shot dead in downtown Caracas with their hands high above their heads, pleading and saying who they were in fluent Spanish. So far as I know, their assassins were never investigated, punished, or reprimanded.

this area themselves : See Chagnon, 1966; 1991, for my discussion of the Kohoroshitari and Karawatari Yanomamö.

including English in 1970 : Biocca, 1996. Quotations are from the Kodansha Press paperback edition, which I used as a text in my anthropology courses at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

headman named Ruwahiwä : My own monograph, widely used in college courses in anthropology, begins with a prologue that describes this nomohori according to what my Yanomamö informants told me (Chagnon, 2011).

possible Patanowä-teri treachery : This nomohori did not involve a third neutral or friendly village. See my comments above where I explain how a convincing deception can sometimes lure members of a village to a trick.

It must have been : Helena Valero, Yanoáma (New York: Kodansha, 1996).

yet a third one kept the original name : Much confusion arises because the Yanomamö frequently change their village “identities” and take on new—sometimes temporary—village names. I ultimately resorted to using the names of the headmen of each group in an attempt to resolve this kind of confusion. Village names might change frequently, but the Yanomamö remember who was the “founder” or who were the prominent leaders of these newly named subgroupings. This tribal name confusion is commonplace in the historical ethnology of almost all native South American peoples, especially those located in the Amazon drainage.

tribes like the Yanomamö : In the 1970s when more contact between the Yanomamö and Venezuelan culture was developing, one Yanomamö man was being trained in practical nursing in the town of Puerto Ayacucho, where he learned about police and law. He excitedly told me about this when he realized that “law” would deal with homicides and this meant the end of blood revenge—and his worry that he might be a legitimate target of revenge for killings that his brothers had been involved in. Chagnon, 1988.

with the Patanowä-teri : Some of my older informants claimed that the Hasuböwä-teri were originally part of the “Aramamisi-teri” population and therefore relatives of the Shamatari. While there was considerable intermarriage between the Namowei-teri and ancestral Hasuböwä-teri, many of the latter may in fact be more closely related to the Shamatari. If so, their complicity in the nomohori at Amiana in about 1950 is not surprising.

wounded could recover : The Bisaasi-teri were also called Kreiböwei-teri at this time and assumed the name Bisaasi-teri only later.

close genetic kinsman : The meticulous genealogies I collected over the course of many years were intended to be as close to genetic pedigrees as I could make them. See Chagnon, 1974, for a discussion of the genealogical methods I used to collect these genealogies.

a “cultural nature” : See my discussion in Chagnon, 1982, and in this book. The prominent English mathematical geneticist John Maynard Smith, at the project’s final meeting in King’s College, Cambridge University, stopped his presentation, looked directly at me, and asked: “I can’t understand why you anthropologists think this theory applies to ‘chaps’ [Homo sapiens].” He later endorsed the position that it did—presumably because he would have looked very silly as a biologist who claimed that natural selection theory did not apply to humans. See Chagnon, 1982, and my discussion of the paper I gave at the end of the King’s College research project that provoked Maynard-Smith’s remarkable question.

an average of 1.63 wives : These comparisons are statistically significant for all age categories. See my original 1988 article for the statistical tests. The same is true for the data given on p. 277.

persists to this day : For a sampling, see Carneiro da Cunha, 1989; Lizot, 1989; 1994; Ferguson, 1989; Albert, 1989; Moore, 1990; Kemp and Fry, 2004; Borofsky, 2005.

Chapter 10. First Contact with the Iwahikoroba-teri

“become a jaguar” : See Chagnon and Asch, 1976.

under Neel’s supervision : Ward went on to a successful career in human genetics in several U.S. universities and eventually Oxford University.

not take samples : After Neel’s medical team worked with me the first time in 1966, word spread quickly and widely that I took medical people with me into villages, people who cured their sicknesses and who also took blood and other tissue samples. By 1966 I had also developed a reputation among the Yanomamö for being honest, fair, and “amusing” that was independent of my association with medical researchers. Nevertheless, the good reputation I had among the Yanomamö—even in villages I never visited regularly—made their acceptance of the medical researchers with me much easier.

holds out for the trip : I had recently broken my left ankle in Ann Arbor when a ladder I was standing on collapsed while I was cleaning leaves out of the gutters of my house.

several weeks earlier : I mistakenly said “first day’s march” when it was the second day’s march on my previous trip.

growling and howling at us : This is part of the ritual intimidation that visitors are exposed to when they arrive at a village, but in this case, they seemed very nervous and apprehensive.

demeanor of a headman : I learned later that day that his name was Börösöwä.

carrying a Brazilian-made machete : The machete had a wooden handle, tightly wrapped with braided copper wire. They can be found only in Brazil. The Iwahikoroba-teri were obviously trading with villages far to their south, whose members in turn were in trade contact with other Yanomamö located near or at mission posts in Brazil. The Iwahikoroba-teri were at war with the Yanomamö villages to their north and no Venezuelan-made machetes were reaching them.

didn’t know how large it was : We had contacted the main group of Iwahikoroba-teri, which probably numbered 170 or so people. Hiakama’s group had recently fissioned away from them. It probably contained another sixty or seventy more people. Later, in the mid-1980s, I managed to contact all the Iwahikoroba-teri subgroups, which by that time consisted of four separate villages that numbered approximately 350 people. By then three of these groups were living he borara , that is, in separate shabonos that were within a few hundred yards from each other.

my aluminum voladora : In the Venezuelan Amazonas this means any aluminum boat on which you can put an outboard motor and travel fast. The word comes from volar, to fly.

out to Caracas : Ryk Ward and I kept in contact periodically for the next thirty years. We resumed correspondence when the Darkness in El Dorado accusations against me and James V. Neel erupted in 2000. Ryk started writing a book to repudiate Patrick Tierney’s astonishing claims. He died of a heart attack while bicycling to his office in 2003.

Chapter 11. Yanomamö Origins and the Fertile Crescent

timbers with axes : Today they use steel axes they obtain by trade from other Indians and, more recently, from missionaries and other outsiders. Very old informants have told me that before steel tools, much of the felling of trees was accomplished by placing firewood at the base of large trees and burning the base of the tree to kill it. As trees die, they lose their leaves and sunlight reaches the ground. No Yanomamö ever told me that he used a stone ax to fell trees, although stone axes are commonly found in the Yanomamö area, presumably made and used by the native peoples who preceded the current inhabitants. It is not known if these people were ancestors of the contemporary Yanomamö. On one of my field trips (1975) I invited two senior anthropologists to join me to advise several of my graduate students in potential field methods they might use. One of them, Robert L. Carneiro, did an experiment with a young Yanomamö man and had him haft a stone celt (a polished stone ax) by securing it to a piece of wood with vines. The celt was found locally and was an archaeological artifact, presumably once used to chop wood. Carneiro estimated how efficient the stone ax was compared to a modern steel ax (Carneiro, 1979). Not surprisingly, the stone celt was much less effective at chopping down even small trees than a steel tool—an ax or a machete—was.

a fairly regular pattern : Carneiro, 1961; Conklin, 1961.

into which they could expand : Freeman, 1955.

“typical” hunter/gatherers : Just before I retired from UCSB in 1999, I was attempting to get one of my archaeology graduate students, Nathan Craig, into an abandoned Yanomamö village site that I had lived in and had documented extensively in my 1974 book (Chagnon, 1974). The plan was to test various archaeological hypotheses having to do with social status differentials that could possibly be inferred by an archaeologist who later discovered this site and who examined the refuse heaps that were left by the inhabitants. I was unable to get Craig the necessary permission.

on only one side : Contemporary tribes like the Ye’kwana, who live to the north of the Yanomamö, now use very large toasting pans made from steel, which they purchase in Caracas.

here, indicated by A–G : Page 301 originally appeared in my doctoral dissertation (Chagnon, 1966). It was subsequently reproduced in all of the editions of my college textbook on Yanomamö culture (1968, 1977, 1983, 1992, 1997, and 2011). More details on Yanomamö settlement histories, village fissions, and geography in this region can also be found in Chagnon, 1974a; Chagnon, 1991.

“big gardens” : See Chagnon, 1991, for more details.

the mission seemed to provide : The Yanomamö avoid raiding mission posts, knowing or assuming that at least some of the Yanomamö there might have firearms.

rivers without canoes : A few areas along the Orinoco, however, are high enough above the river that flooding is a much smaller risk. The few groups of Yanomamö who have moved to these areas appear to have chosen them because of this feature.

“the worst mistake” : Diamond, 1987.

potatoes, wheat, etc. : See also Diamond’s popular 1997 book, Guns, Germs, and Steel.

lacked sufficient nutritional : By that time in human history socioeconomic classes and social stratification had emerged so that it is likely that only the lower (but numerically predominant) classes actually “paid” this price.

leaves, saplings, and vines : My longtime disagreement with Marvin Harris about the “cause” of Yanomamö warfare was in large part a product of Harris’s view that the only important scarce strategic material resource in Yanomamöland was animal protein, a shortage he simply invented and never empirically documented. One could have made a better case that the Yanomamö may have been fighting over scarce supplies of roofing leaves and poles used in shabono construction. This scarcity, as distinct from Harris’s speculations about protein, can be documented empirically. But it, too, does not explain the causes of warfare and violence among the Yanomamö.

fertile crescent areas of Venezuela : Chagnon, 1991.

and the Shamatari : Chagnon, 1991.

as well as a Karawatari : On one of my visits to Mishimishimaböwei-teri I noticed that a friend of mine, one of the younger political leaders, was not there. When I asked where he was they told me there had been a fight and he left in anger. The way they said it was “Karawatari hamö a koraiyoma,” which translates as “He went back home to his own people, the Karawatari.” He was about as “Shamatari” as any Yanomamö.

upper Siapa River : I made first contact with the Doshamosha-teri in 1990 with Venezuelan naturalist Charles Brewer-Carías, with whom I had worked many years earlier in several of the biomedical expeditions that involved Drs. Neel, Roche, and Layrisse.

had visited by 1968 : Chagnon, 1968b.

circumscription in the Andean area : Carneiro, 1961; 1970.

along the Andes Mountains : In 1970 Carneiro published an important theoretical paper presenting a more general theory of the origin of the state. He further elaborated his earlier arguments on environmental circumscription and how in the presence of warfare and increasing population density, it set into motion social processes leading to increased social and political complexity and, ultimately, to the origin of states and empires in both the New World (Aztecs and Incas) and the Old World (Egypt, Mesopotamia, China, and India). His revised theory added two new variables: social circumscription and resource concentration. His model for social circumscription was my 1968 account of what was happening to Yanomamö groups in this “fertile crescent” area. Carneiro notes: “Thus, while still at the autonomous village level of political organization, those Yanomamö subject to social circumscription have clearly moved a step or two in the direction of higher political development.” Carneiro, 1970, p. 737.

into the Siapa Basin : They also crossed over the Unturan Mountains, where the headwaters of the Shanishani come very close to the upper Siapa near Doshamosha-teri.

The table below summarizes my findings : From Chagnon, 1997, p. 88.

Chapter 12. Yanomamö Social Organization

because of polygyny : By this I mean demographically intact tribes, not those that have been decimated by recently introduced diseases, militarily oppressed by states who attempt to control them, and forcibly relocated on “reservations” with other tribal groups to whom they may or may not be related. Almost all anthropological research in North American tribes has been done in groups like this.

level of reproductive success : The highest “natural” female fertility in a noncontracepting population is found among the Hutterites and is slightly higher than ten children per woman.

I report : I also report that the Yanomamö kinship system is of the “bifurcate-merging” type with the “Dravidian” cousin classification and, specifically, this is what other anthropologists define as the Iroquois kinship system. Humans have developed only six distinct kinds of kinship systems. All human societies have one of these six.

than can matrilineages : I demonstrated this in a computer analysis of Yanomamö kinship and descent, using achieved completed fertility of both sexes in a large group of Yanomamö villages (Chagnon, 1979b).

lovestruck juveniles : This is not to say that something we might classify as love does not exist among the Yanomamö. The Love Hypothesis does not, however, adequately account for who marries whom and who actually does the work of begetting in primitive societies. There is a large literature on romantic love and many of my good colleagues who are members of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society (HBES) and I have serious arguments about this issue. The subject is often discussed in the field called evolutionary psychology—a collection of psychologists, biological anthropologists, sociologists, and other evolutionary social scientists who originally called themselves (or were called by others) sociobiologists. The cultural anthropologists who were initially sociobiologists now mostly belong in a group called “evolutionary ecology.”

Amazonian tribesmen : Kroeber, 1948 and Maybury-Lewis, 1979, on “dual organization” societies in the Amazon Basin.

marriageable females occurs : See Murdock, 1957, for frequencies and types of cross-cousin marriages cross-culturally.

efficient dual organization as possible : To illustrate why this is so would make this discussion extremely complicated. One can imagine a third patrilineage named “Z” wanting to intrude into the ideal system shown on page 321, causing one of the existing two lineages to have to give women to a third group to the displeasure of its “regular” exchange partners.

villages I have studied : For some statistical data see Chagnon, 1979, chapter 4 , and summarized in Chagnon 1997, chapter 4 .

“husband” exchange system : Matrilineal human societies in fact do just this.

primitive societies : In the field of anthropology, the word primitive is a technical term and has been used to characterize a particular kind of social organization that dominated hunting and gathering bands and early agricultural (slash-and-burn) societies. It is not a pejorative term unless someone wants to deliberately denigrate a social competitor by associating the word primitive with ideas from outside the context in which this word has been traditionally and technically used in anthropology.

The Elementary Systems of Kinship : This influential work was published in English by Beacon Press in 1969. The original 1949 edition was in French.

lineage are descended : Human geneticists like my late longtime collaborator James V. Neel also refer to “founders” or “founder effect,” but rely in most cases on anthropologists or sociologists to provide specific empirical demographic and genealogical data where human societies are concerned.

sisters in most cases : Headmen are almost always polygynous and in most cases one or more of their spouses come from the other numerically dominant lineage(s).

societies that have lineages : The major exception is the bint amin marriage rule in some Arab-speaking communities, where men can marry their parallel cousins.

their “close” cross cousins : Chagnon, 1979, chapter 4 , fig. 4.13; 1997, 5th ed.

“work of the Devil” : Padre Cocco explicitly cited this goal in the Salesian “attract and reduce” agenda. He believed that monogamy would render the Yanomamö “civilized, desirable” but would be accomplished in time only with persistent efforts. See Chagnon and Asch, Film: Ocamo Is My Town.

evolution of political society in our species : See Alexander, 1979, for arguments of a theoretical biologist who has a consummate interest in human social evolution.

Chapter 13. Three Headmen of Authority

described by many anthropologists as egalitarian : See Fried, 1967, on tribal egalitarianism.

Marshall Sahlins and Morton Fried : Several of the works of both have had an enormous impact on anthropological theories and views of the tribal world and are now canonical texts. Sahlins, 1965; 1968; 1972; Fried, 1967.

as well as power : Fried’s discussion of the differences between these two concepts is very good. He points out that a dictionary has authority, which is different from what a police force or army has: power, especially over life and death. The sanctions lying behind and underpinning what a police force can legally do are “odious”—like being legally authorized to kill someone who refuses to comply. The sanctions lying behind “law” are almost always odious. That distinguishes “law” from “customs”—what most tribesmen have. There is a large literature on whether or not the “customs” of tribesmen are sufficiently similar to “law” to regard them as such. See Fried (1967) for references to these works.

closer to 300 people : Village size in all the examples below fluctuated during the thirty-five years of my fieldwork. The figure I use is the approximate median size during these years.

member of that mashi : Both men are shown in my 1975 film (most of the footage was shot in 1968) with Timothy Asch, The Feast. They were later killed with a shotgun obtained from someone at a Salesian mission.

always welcomed me : In 1990 one of the Salesian (Catholic) missionaries’ “converts” went into Patanowä-teri and told them I was killing their babies with my photographs and “driving their game away with the noise of my helicopters” on my most recent field trip. The latter allegation is made by anthropologists who denounce illegal Brazilian gold miners ( garimpeiros ) who entered their area after 1987. After 1987, Salesians also repeatedly told the Yanomamö I was a garimpeiro. Thus the new headman threatened to kill me with his ax as a consequence of these astonishing and sinister accusations. See the discussion of my relations with the Salesians in the following chapters.

most likely by Krihisiwä : In The Feast there is a memorable scene where Krihisiwä is cleaning and scraping the village plaza, urging all the others to join in and help. Headmen sometimes must lead by example.

water was collected : When they are confined inside the palisade they urinate at the back of their houses and defecate onto leaves, then throw the package over the wall or take it out the next day to discard in the woods.

Amazonian bird : It is known as pajui in Spanish and mutum in Portuguese. Guan is also used in the English language.

“asking questions for a month!” : Morton Fried, in his preface to Chagnon 1974a, wrote: “It blows the mind, mine at least, to know that Chag does not live among the Yanomamö merely with canoes and outboard motors and Coleman lamps and boxes of soft pencils and specifically selected notepaper, but with reams of IBM printouts!”

leads to higher prestige : Cultural success does not always lead to biological success, an exception to the general theoretical proposition developed by William Irons (Irons, 1979a).

Yanomamö rules of etiquette : This group of Patanowä-teri visitors had separated from Krihisiwä’s group and by then was living a considerable distance away from Krihisiwä’s people. By 1990 Krihisiwä had died, some say from an infected arrow wound he sustained sometime after my last visit to his village.

away from his group : Several of these victims were dispatched with assistance from others in the raiding party, but most of these killings were attributed to Möawä alone.

More remote lineage members : See Irons, 1979b; Chagnon, 1982.

respect his father-in-law : In-law avoidance is part of the prohibition against incest.

my water supply : Yanomamö family water supplies were usually kept in open cooking pots and contained debris, insects, fish scales, animal hair, etc. For sanitation reasons, I kept my own water supply in plastic jugs with screw-on tops.

most of the day : By “my house” I mean the section of the shabono they had provided for me, next to the headman.

Dedeheiwä would be his mentor : Dedeheiwä is shown in Magical Death , a film I shot in 1971. It is a dramatic documentation of Yanomamö shamanism and drug use.

south of Mishimishimaböwei-teri : I subsequently contacted the Yeisikorowä-teri by helicopter in 1990. They were in an extremely remote area in the then unknown Siapa River valley. They were also volatile and aggressive and were divided into at least three groups living he borara. I took a complete census with ID photographs of all three groups.

was already menopausal : The mother-in-law avoidance taboo seems to be intended to minimize the possibility that a young son-in-law might become sexually attracted to his wife’s mother. Many women have marriageable daughters when they are in their early to mid-thirties and still sexually attractive.

in an isolated and unacculturated village : Mishimishimaböwei-teri always had 275 to 300 inhabitants during my studies and must have been close to 450 people a few years earlier before Sibarariwä and his followers fissioned away. In other areas, years after sustained contact with missionaries, formerly smaller villages now approach 500 or more inhabitants in some regions. They do not, however, all live under one roof in these changed circumstances but, generally, in smaller, nontraditional mud huts that are sometimes widely scattered up and down the river adjacent to the mission post. One can hardly call them a “single” community now.

screamed at the Ironasi-teri : Sibarariwä’s community took the name Ironasi-teri for their group, which they later changed to Kedebaböwei-teri.

he meant what he said : A similar argument between women was filmed in 1971 when Asch and I documented an ax fight that broke out in this village. Asch and Chagnon, 1975.

at least one war : See Chagnon, 1990.

so long as Möawä lived there : After Möawä died in the late 1970s, a group of Mishimishimaböwei-teri men approached me in Mavaca to inquire if I would again start coming back to their village, explaining that Möawä had died and that they knew he was the reason I had stopped visiting them. They also went on to say that after his death, many Yanomamö from other villages had resumed visiting them. “Everybody is now happy with us and friendly again,” they explained. Möawä was good at making war but bad at making peace.

Chapter 14. Twilight in Cultural Anthropology

precise quantification : I specifically mean “any pair of related Yanomamö” who have at least one ancestor in common. The vast majority of Yanomamö are related in this way. See Chagnon, 1979, chapter 4 , “quartiles of relatedness.”

political parties, etc. : There are many theories about how this transformation occurred. Only a few of them focus on the social institutions that had to change for this to happen. One in particular that was seminal in my own thinking was Morton Fried’s 1967 book, The Evolution of Political Society. Ironically, Fried was very much opposed to what I was doing with my “biological” analysis of Yanomamö genealogies and told me so when I asked him to write the foreword to my 1974 book, which he did. When Fried was a visiting professor at Michigan I took two courses from him that helped me refine my own views of the importance of kinship and its biological underpinnings in and its role in the evolution of political society.

“it is not about biology” : Sahlins (1976) and Alexander (1979) also refer to this characterization of Schneider’s view of kinship, especially as presented in a 1972 article “What is kinship all about?” W. D. Hamilton gave a hypothetical scenario at a talk I attended in Ann Arbor to the effect that if people like Sahlins believed that kinship had nothing to do with biology, then he’d like to see their reaction to the nurse in charge of the pediatric ward when they came to claim their own baby: “Just take any one of them—they’re all alike. Kinship has nothing to do with biology.”

his book Sociobiology : Wilson, 1975.

subordinate discipline : She also expressed her cynical views of sociobiology at about this time. She said of Wilson something to the effect that when you study bugs you think like a bug.

Evolutionary Biology : Chagnon and Irons, 1979.

“I’ve finally figured out” : See Trivers, 1971; 1972; 1974 for some of the most important papers on evolutionary theory he has written.

new theoretical insights : Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection was developed before the concept of the gene was known, that is the units through which natural selection operated. The concept of the gene revolutionized Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection. Lamentably, the rediscovery of Mendel’s work and the awareness of the gene had almost no impact on anthropological theories of cultural evolution. Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection applied only to living, reproducing, organisms. Cultures, which cultural anthropologists studied, were not living organisms. This led to fanciful arguments about analogy versus homology, that cultures “behaved” like living organisms, that the equivalent of “genes” might be some cultural element called “memes,” etc. Perhaps the best solution was to simply look at culture change as an historical process different from biological evolution of living reproducing organisms.

the auspices of the AAAS : Some of the prominent biologists there included Richard Dawkins, George C. Williams, William D. Hamilton, and Stephen J. Gould. All but Gould were supporters of Wilson and sociobiology.

rival to his theory : This was abundantly clear in a later debate that Harris had with Harvard anthropologist Irven DeVore, who led the 1968 Harvard group’s participation in the Chagnon-Irons presentations at the AAA meetings in Washington, D.C., in 1976. Harris’s position was essentially if we don’t stop sociobiology from spreading in anthropology, we will only have ourselves to blame! In Harris’s view, sociobiology was likely to replace the extreme cultural determinism on which most of cultural anthropology “theory” was based.

his recent book : The Selfish Gene: Dawkins, 1976.

extremely dangerous : Cultural anthropologists never seem to tell us what is dangerous about any idea. Those who agree seem to take it on the authority of the speaker that the mere assertion that something is dangerous makes it dangerous.

possible correlation : William Irons proposed in his 1976 paper that “cultural success” in humans might be correlated to “biological success,” presumably reproductive success especially in males. My 1988 paper in Science was a dramatic illustration of Irons’s hypothesis.

water with mercury : Mercury was used to amalgamate the gold particles and cause them to drop to the bottom of the slurry, where they could more efficiently be recovered. The mercury killed fish and other wildlife and, of course, was toxic to humans.

my college monograph : The first edition was published in 1968, the second in 1977, and the third in 1983. I dropped this subtitle in the fourth edition, published in 1992. Subsequent editions were published without the subtitle.

do harm to them : The translation of the word into other languages caused problems because in some other languages the equivalent of “fierce” was more easily applied to animal-like behavior.

Brazilian Yanomamö : In 1993, six years after the Brazilian gold rush began, a group of Brazilian garimpeiros attacked and massacred many of the residents of Hashimo-teri, a Yanomamö village just inside Venezuela on the Venezuelan/Brazilian border. This is the only reliably documented case of lethal violence caused by the 1987 Brazilian gold rush directly affecting a group of Yanomamö in Venezuelan territory. See Chagnon, 1993a; 1993b.

the following accusations : The complete text of the ABA accusations and my response to them were published in the newsletter of the AAA in 1989 and are available on Doug Hume’s website.

activist anthropologists : Brazilian plans to divide the Brazilian Yanomamö into multiple small, isolated reserves were publicly revealed years before my Science article appeared or my ethnographic work became known outside the field of anthropology. This policy was never enacted, but the plan was said by my opponents in Brazil and the United States to have been caused by my anthropological publications on the Yanomamö. See Survival International, “Yanomami Timeline”: “1978: Brazilian government proposes to split Yanomami area into 21 separate pockets of land; the plan would mean the destruction of the Yanomami if approved. Under pressure from NGOs supporting the Indians, the plan is shelved.”

object of the disagreement : To this date not one of my anthropological critics has provided any evidence of empirical findings differing substantially from mine by providing comparable data from their own field research. No critic has provided mortality statistics on causes of death due to violence on the Yanomamö groups he has studied.

the scientific approach : See Gross and Levitt, 1994, for their concerns about the growing attacks on science and the scientific method by what they characterized as “the academic left.”

“The [ postmodernist ] model” : R. D’Andrade, 1995. “Moral Models in Anthropology,” Current Anthropology, 36:399–408.5.

Chapter 15. Confrontation with the Salesians

for a variety of reasons : As early as the mid-1970s there were enough films about the Yanomamö made by filmmakers from several different countries that Jean Rouch, the famous French filmmaker and pioneer in cinéma vérité, held an international film festival in Paris. Since Timothy Asch and I had, by then, made some twenty films on the Yanomamö, we were invited to his festival, where our films occupied a central place.

Italy and Germany : In the late 1960s and 1970s a Spanish Salesian priest, Padre Gonzalez, attempted to establish a “tourist destination” in Platanal, the most remote Salesian mission on the Orinoco River. International flights from several European cities to “The Stone Age in Platanal” with a stopover in Caracas, were advertised in some tourist brochures. Padre Cocco was opposed to tourism on such a grand scale but seemingly went along with a more discreet version of it. Padre Cocco brought Hioduwä, the headman of the Iyäwei-teri at Ocamo, to Rome to meet the pope in the early 1960s, perhaps one of the first Yanomamö not only to leave Amazonas, but to travel to Europe.

in university classrooms : This film was distributed in 1975 and remained in its original format until 1997, when it was released as a much more elaborate ‘interactive’ film on CD-ROM, Ax Fight Interactive , in 1997 (Biella, Chagnon, and Seaman). The 1997 version included an immense amount of data I had collected in Mishimishimaböwei-teri after the original film was shot. In 2012 a revised version of this film will be distributed by Pennsylvania State University’s Media Sales Division.

depredations of the miners : In 1987 John Saffirio, a Consolata priest and anthropologist I had helped for several years, was visiting me in Santa Barbara, California. He received an international telephone call at my house from Dom Aldo Mangiano, the Consolata bishop of Roraima, who informed him that he could not return to his Yanomamö mission on the Catrimani River because garimpeiros had taken it over. He said that the government had also informed him that he had to withdraw his missionary staff from several of the Yanomamö villages where the Consolata order had missions. They had to be shut down because of the invasion by miners.

Salesian missions in Venezuela : Bórtoli was Padre Cocco’s successor in about the mid-1970s.

Puerto Ayacucho : Chagnon, Bórtoli, and Eguillor, 1988.

anthropologists resented me : According to one of the IVIC researchers who attended an IVIC-wide meeting in the early 1970s, someone asked, “Why is it that the IVIC anthropologists dislike Chagnon so much?” She told me that Roche replied to the question with a brief retort: “They are all jealous of his academic accomplishments.”

other “leaders” with them : In 1991 I took James Brooke, Latin American bureau chief for the New York Times , into one of the new Yanomamö villages that Charles Brewer and I had just contacted. When we left the Yanomamö area we passed through the Salesian mission at Ocamo. Brooke was asking questions in Spanish to one of the Yanomamö, a man I had known since he was a child. Padre Cocco had given him the Spanish name Francisco. While repacking I was listening as he related to Brooke how he and several other “leaders” accompanied a group of nuns to the OCAI office in Caracas to file a complaint against “Shaki”—my Yanomamö name. He said that a woman he did not know actually wrote out the complaint against me. He mentioned that the nuns asked all the Yanomamö in the party to sign their names on the complaint. He claimed that he and most of the others refused to sign the complaint, but that Dimanawä signed it with no hesitation.

the “mistress” : She was the lifetime consort of Carlos Andrés Pérez, by whom she had had several children, who were duly baptized in the Catholic Church. President Pérez’s wife appeared at state functions with him but would typically discreetly withdraw after her official presence was no longer required. However, in a Catholic country it was politically unwise for a prominent politician to attempt to divorce a spouse to whom he was legally married in an official wedding ceremony in the Catholic Church and that, I was told, was why Pérez lived with Cecilia Matos and did not divorce his legal wife.

mining operations : There were, of course, many Venezuelan scientists who knew a great deal about Venezuela’s mineral, lumber, ranching, etc. potential, but the national population at large was basically uninformed about these and there were no popular calls to open up the frontiers of Venezuela’s Amazonas . . . except for the short-lived program in the mid-1970s known as Conquista del Sur.

scientific researchers and missionaries : Various groups of Venezuelan anthropologists had made two proposals to designate the area a reserve for Indians but officials in the Venezuelan government appeared to have been very skeptical about both of them and no action was taken. I was told that one reason was that both of the proposals included suggestions or proposed requirements that seemed to put the Venezuelan anthropologists in strategically important administrative positions that were not integrated into the apparatus of the national bureaucracy. Venezuelan politicians were fearful that the anthropologists were likely to turn this area into a political entity, like some kind of indigenous “nation” that operated independently from the Venezuelan government.

some thirty-two thousand square miles : ABC’s Prime Time Live accompanied me and Charles Brewer to this area and filmed CAP, who promised to establish a “protected” area in Venezuela. ABC produced a film that was shown on U.S. television in 1991 and repeated six months later when the Venezuelan president established this protected area.

minerals in this area : The infamous “dossier” that Tierney and Martins circulated makes this charge.

permanent Salesian mission : After 1989 many at the Salesian Missions were openly hostile to me and encouraged the Yanomamö at their missions to steal from me. They began spreading lies about me—how I was now working for garimpeiros , that my ID photos were killing Yanomamö babies, etc.

the Salesians to read : See Chagnon, 1997, for a discussion of my “discovery” that Ushubiriwä could read. In 1985, during the first year of a three-year NSF project, I stopped at the village he then lived in. To my immense surprise, he could read the file I opened on my laptop computer that included the names of everyone in his village . . . and the names of their deceased parents, including his own father! He simply jabbed me in the ribs and giggled about it—we both now knew what the secret of “writing” was capable of. He was not disturbed by the fact that I knew his dead father’s name. Indeed, he and everyone else assumed that I knew the names of every one of their dead relatives, but I was extremely circumspect about using them unless the circumstances permitted—as they sometimes do.

during the argument : One of the Venezuelans with Brewer filmed this discussion with an 8 mm camera.

Teodardo Marcano : Marcano was affiliated with a Venezuelan medical program called Parima-Culebra. They were trying to start a local health program for the Yanomamö and I periodically collaborated with them. I hoped to help them create a successful rural health program for all of the Yanomamö.

shabono was located : This was the village to which I had taken the German ZDF-TV film crew five years earlier.

they got sick : Salesian attempts to “attract and reduce” this and other, related Shamatari groups of the Upper Mavaca began in the early 1970s, as I explain in the fifth edition of Yanomamö (Chagnon, 1997). The tragic fate of the Kedebaböwei-teri is spelled out in more detail in chapter 8 of Yanomamö .

Yanomamö angry : Finkers, 1994. The Salesians know that I will investigate Ushubiriwä’s death if I ever get back to the Mavaca area and find out what the circumstances were and who was responsible for his death. This time, the intent of my inquiry will be personal, not simply demographic. Finkers’s article also gratuitously claims that I had promised Ushubiriwä a “new outboard motor.” This is a lie. When the Salesians give a Yanomamö a complicated item like an outboard motor, as they did in this case, they thereby assume the responsibility of replacing parts and keeping it in good repair. Salamone (2001) found this attack on me by Finkers to be detrimental to my attempts to make peace with the Salesians at that time.

shot and hacked to death : Chagnon, 1993.

one of the members : Brewer later told me that this was the first time a non-Venezuelan was included in a Venezuelan presidential commission.

becoming a state : Statehood for the Venezuelan Amazonas was officially granted in 1996.

the Salesians’ official journal : The Salesians have considerable control over the printed news and the televised news. In the heated debate that took place in 1993 one of the major Venezuelan television channels, Venevision, scheduled a repeat broadcast of a recent documentary their film crew made of me, Charles Brewer, and some of the medical people we worked with among the Yanomamö. When the Salesians learned of this, they pressured the top executives of Venevision to kill the scheduled broadcast, outraging the woman who produced and directed it, Marta Rodriguez. She tearfully called Charles Brewer while I was there to explain that the repeat program had been suddenly canceled, and she explicitly blamed the Salesians for pressuring the Venevision executives to cancel the broadcast.

Venezuela’s Gaceta Oficial : This Commission remained official for at least three years. I want to emphasize this point because in the utter madness that followed, one of the false claims made by both the Salesians and some of my anthropological detractors was that this “presidential commission” was immediately dissolved a day or so after being created and replaced with a new one headed by the Salesian Missions and the Salesian bishop of Amazonas. That is simply not true. In fact, the alleged replacement presidential commission could not have been official without being so designated in the Gaceta Oficial de Venezuela , which it never was.

a military coup : A military coup by members of the air force was in fact attempted in 1992 while I was living among the Yanomamö and I had difficulty getting out of Venezuela as a result. Many of the officers involved in the failed coup had to flee and take refuge in other Latin American countries like Peru and Ecuador. Some were eventually allowed to come home and resume their rank and activities in the Venezuelan Air Force, but at a price: Brewer told me that he believes they were compelled to give false testimony against us as part of a plan to impeach CAP and discredit his consort, Cecilia Matos. Some of them claimed, for instance, that they saw us doing “mysterious things,” like paying undue attention to and guarding a large metal cylinder in one of their helicopters. This was taken as evidence that we were “guarding” a container filled with gold that we had illegally collected. The fact of the matter was that the top of a large cylinder of liquid nitrogen needed by the medical team had gotten lost, and the liquid nitrogen was slopping around and spilling out of the cylinder. If any liquid nitrogen had gotten onto our skin it would have instantly frozen the flesh. Some of us were trying to prevent that from happening.

for the night : Parima B had been, since the early 1960s, a very remote New Tribes Mission post very close to the Brazilian border. At about the time of the garimpeiro /Brazilian penetration of the immediately adjacent Brazilian territory in 1987, the Venezuelan military established a military post at Parima B and lengthened the dirt airstrip there. The military personnel were persistently attempting to seduce the Yanomamö women and their presence was a constant threat to the Yanomamö.

Chapter 16. Darkness in Cultural Anthropology

some in Europe : See Salamone, 1997, pp. 97–98, for confirmation that the Salesians sent these.

“just the opposite” : Neither Lizot nor Eibl (Iranaeus Eibl-Eibesfeld) was able to provide data on Yanomamö mortality rates due to new diseases to refute my findings.

no meaningful research : I have heard from anthropology colleagues and journalists who work in southern Venezuela that Cardozo spends almost all of his time at the Salesian mission at Boca Mavaca and rarely spends time in villages that are not within the regular visiting orbit of the Salesians. Father Enzo Cappelletti (1994) asserts that there are three anthropologists among the Salesians who work among the Yanomamö. If Cardozo published anything in an anthropological journal in either Venezuela or the U.S. and other centers where anthropological research papers are normally published, I am confident I would know about it.

by Terence Turner : See Salamone, 1997b, for discussion of the development of the Chagnon-Salesian disagreement and the Salamone session of the 1994 AAA meetings and phone discussions with Turner.

The President of Venezuela : Turner, Anthropology Newsletter, May 1994, p. 48.

Skomal’s advice was incorrect : William Irons was later told by John Cornman, Executive Director of the AAA, that giving equal space in the Newsletter was the “implicit policy” of the AAA. Cornman told Irons that they violated their policy of allowing a victim to respond in the same issue where s/he has been attacked, and said the AAA made a mistake in this case.

did not inform me : See Salamone, 1997b, for his discussion about having a phone discussion with Turner prior to the meetings.

prominent leader in Brazil : See Winkler, 1994, for the article she wrote that covered Salamone’s session at the 1994 AAA meetings in Atlanta.

Salamone’s several : Salamone, 1997a, 1997b, 2006. Michael D’Antonio interviewed Salamone in 2000 and reported: “ ‘The Salesians have educated every Venezuelan president in history and most of its other leaders,’ explains Frank Salamone, an anthropologist at Iona College in New York. Salamone has worked for the Salesians and the order refers journalists with questions about the Yanomamo issue to him.” Some of the most unprofessional and demeaning comments Salamone has made about me can be found in the interview he gave to Andrew Brown, author of The Darwin Wars, in the Daily Telegraph Magazine (March 3, 2001). These comments were made after Patrick Tierney’s Darkness in El Dorado was published. Salamone supported Tierney’s claims. Salamone, in short, represents the Salesians.

Salamone states : Salamone, The Yanomami and Their Interpreters.

“his gold mining operation” : Sometime between 1972, when I last collaborated with Brewer in the IVIC/University of Michigan biomedical research project, and about 1990, when we resumed our collaboration with the support of the Venezuelan president, Brewer had purchased an interest in a gold mining operation in Estado Bolivar, well outside of the Yanomamö area and where gold mining was legal. He was in the process of selling his interest in this mining concern when our collaboration began again in 1990. He never discussed his gold mining interests with me, but I became aware of them when an extremely critical and very political article by Leda Martins and Patrick Tierney appeared in the op-ed section of the New York Times in 1995 that attacked Brewer for alleged illegalities and destructive consequences of this gold mining operation.

“forbade” the pilot : The air taxi service that brought me into Abruwä-teri did not want to jeopardize their status as the only officially approved air taxi service for the Yanomamö area. Kobenawä’s threat to make trouble for them was taken seriously by both the air taxi service and by the FUNAI office in Boa Vista. However, there were literally scores of bush pilots who would eagerly fly garimpeiros or anyone else into Yanomamö territory illegally.

“Curiously, when I first” : Dreger goes on to say that I wrote Raymond Hames an email about asking Tierney if he knew anything about this secret dossier, which he denied. Dreger had by then interviewed both Martins and Turner and references her following remarks to these interviews: “Notably, right about the time Chagnon was writing this to Hames in 1995, Patrick Tierney was introducing Leda Martins to Terence Turner, at the Pittsburgh airport (Martins 2009; confirmed in Terence Turner 2009). The three—Tierney, Martins, and Turner—would continue to meet several times there over the next few months. Within a few years, Martins went on to earn her Ph.D. in anthropology under Turner, and to publish criticisms of Chagnon.” Dreger, 2011, p. 7.

quietly be approved : Unknown to the UFR rector, Alcida Ramos had been recently named as head of an important national council that controlled permissions for researchers, including anthropologists, to work in any indigenous tribal areas. It was highly unlikely that I would be allowed into the Brazilian Yanomamö area so long as she held this position.

medical practitioners : I had repeatedly tried to develop such a program with various Venezuelan medical groups, but there always seemed to be obstacles.

the New Yorker published : Tierney, 2000.

hotel auditorium : Others included Yvonne Maldonado, Magdalena Hurtado, Susan Lindee, Trudy Turner, and Sharon Kaufman.

Jesus Cardozo : Cardozo’s “affiliation” is given as Venezuela’s Office of Indigenous Affairs (OCAI) by at least one journalist, D. W. Miller, who writes for the Chronicle of Higher Education. He says “[Cardozo] announced that his agency was declaring a moratorium on permits for research in that nation’s hinterland. . . . Some audience members gasped, as if realizing for the first time that the conflict over anthropological ethics is hardly academic.” http://anthroniche.com/darkness_documents/0286.htm . It is doubtful that Cardozo officially represented OCAI or was an employee of OCAI.

for the first night : Most people who attend the large anthropology meetings like this one are practicing anthropologists, mostly employed by colleges and universities, but anyone who belongs to the American Anthropological Association by paying for a membership can attend.

“The Fierce People” : Terence Turner is a former student of Maybury-Lewis as is James Peacock, a former AAA president who was soon commissioned to investigate Tierney’s accusations.

denigrate me : I heard from a former president of the World Wildlife Fund and the wife of a U.S. congressman about derogatory comments that a senior officer of Cultural Survival made to them about me.

Peacock Committee : The members of the Peacock Committee were Janet Chernela, Linda Green, Ellen Gruenbaum, Joe Watkins, Linda Whiteford, and Philip Walker. Although Peacock seemed to be the chair of the AAA Task Force, the chair was ultimately Jane Hill from the University of Arizona. Hill might have become chair after Peacock’s report was written.

Louise Lamphere : This memo became known to the general public only in 2011 when Douglas Hume obtained a copy of it and posted it on his website: http://anthroniche.com/darkness_documents/0612.pdf .

produced a report : http://anthroniche.com/darkness_documents/0612.pdf .

members of the task force : They are Janet Chernela (Florida International University), Fernando Coronil (University of Michigan), Raymond Hames (University of Nebraska), Trudy Turner (University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee), and Joe Watkins (University of Oklahoma). http://anthroniche.com/darkness_documents/0577.pdf .

El Dorado Task Force : The Members of the El Dorado Task Force and the justification for creating it are spelled out in an AAA document entitled “Working Papers of the American Anthropological Association El Dorado Task Force Submitted as a Preliminary Report” and can be accessed at http://anthroniche.com/darkness_documents/0577.pdf . The confidential Peacock Report members, what they considered, and their recommendations can be found at http://anthroniche.com/darkness_documents/0612.pdf .

relevant sources : Hagen, Price, and Tooby, 2001, and Tooby, 2000.

were examined : See Appendices VII and VIII in Hagen, Price, and Tooby, 2001.

“attack dog” : http://anthroniche.com/darkness_documents/0511.htm .

not supported : See especially Alberts, 2000, for the statement made as president of the National Academy of Sciences.

patently false : Tooby, 2000.

I started putting : Tooby, 2000, Slate , October 25, 2000.

were inaccurate : Reprinted in Appendix II, p. 60, of Hagen, Price, and Tooby, 2001.

the young Balthasar : William Oliver, former Chairman of the Pediatrics Department at the University of Michigan and a participant in several of our expeditions, sent a letter to the New Yorker challenging the data in Tierney’s article, “The Fierce Anthropologist.” Oliver’s letter was published in a subsequent issue of the New Yorker and can be found also in the UCSB Preliminary Report as Appendix X, pp. 81–86. It is a concise and accurate listing of the critical medical events, including Tierney’s fanciful and dishonest account of Roberto Balthasar. Oliver flatly says, “His report is factually incorrect.” Oliver then writes, “On February 13, 1968, Baltasar [ sic ] brought his one-year-old son, Roberto, to the Ocamo Mission for treatment. Neel wrote that the infant had a very high fever, intense conjunctival infection, extreme shortness of breath and findings of pneumonia but no rash. He was given penicillin, tetramycin, a cardiac stimulant and quarantined in the infirmary. Following a short phase of improvement, his condition deteriorated. He died on February 15, 1968. There is no record of Vitalino Baltasar [ sic ] or his son receiving measles vaccine. In retrospect, it is likely that both had wild measles, but atypical for absence of a classical rash.”

investigators have demonstrated : See, for example, Tooby, 2000, Hagen et al., 2001, and Dreger, 2011.

following words : http://chronicle.com/article/National-Academy-of-Sciences/9116/ .

They warned : Some of the dangers of spreading false information about the safety of vaccines in third-world countries are spelled out in the Referendum: http://anthroniche.com/darkness_documents/0438.htm .

10 to 1 : See Tooby, 2000, Katz, 2000, on the safety record of the Edmonston B vaccine.

critical article : “Guilt by Association: The Culture of Accusation and the American Anthropological Association’s Investigation of Darkness in El Dorado,” American Anthropologist 106, no. 4 (December 2004).

task force : http://anthroniche.com/darkness_documents/0438.htm .

smaller margin : http://chronicle.com/article/Anthropologists-Rescind-Report/121225/ .

who visited Mavaca : The AAA Task Force who visited the Mavaca area to investigate Tierney’s claims prevented a legitimate AAA task force member from going there, Raymond Hames, who resigned as a consequence. But among the AAA visitors to Mavaca was Terence Turner, who was not a member of the AAA Task Force and had not done ethnographic work among the Yanomamö. But he, as a concerned advocate of Native Rights, seemed to be able to ignore AAA rules and policies with nobody raising issues.

“Marlowe said” : Nicholas Wade, New York Times , Science section, Dec. 13, 2010.

Dreger writes : Dreger, 2011, pp. 12–13.

“Burn this message” : Obtained via email from Hrdy, November 6, 2009; used with Hill’s permission from November 6, 2009; emphasis in original.

“I can’t imagine” : Mann, 2009.

article in Human Nature in 2011 : Dreger, 2011.

witch hunt : Lancaster and Hames, 2011.

preparing the infamous dossier : While Martins initially acknowledged to Dreger in 2009 that she wrote the dossier, she subsequently changed her story and told Dreger that Tierney wrote it and explained that all she did was translate it into Portuguese and then clandestinely made it available to FUNAI and activists who were trying to prevent me from conducting research among the Brazilian Yanomamö. This raises the question of whether she lied to Dreger and that the actual reason for changing her story was that she was soon to go up for a tenure review and if it was on record (in Tierney’s book) that she wrote the dossier, this might jeopardize her bid for tenure at Pitzer College.

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