At my oldest kids’ primary school in the 1990s, study of the Yanomamö bushmen permeated the curriculum. By the time my oldest daughter moved on from the school to seventh grade, I believe she “knew” — much of what she was taught isn’t true — more about the Yanomamö than she did about American history.
I should have been paying more attention, but I had other battles to fight with the school. The story behind the Yanomamö is fascinating and controversial. Napoleon Chagnon was the anthropologist who lived with the Yanomamö and popularized them in his 1968 study, Yanomamö: The Fierce People (6th edition).
Chagnon’s findings regarding the Yanomamö were of the politically incorrect variety, the foremost of which had to do with “the primacy of reproductive conflict,” as Charles Mann called it in his outstanding Wall Street Journal review/essay on Chagnon’s compelling memoir Noble Savages: My Life Among Two Dangerous Tribes–The Yanomamö and the Anthropologists (2013).
I was recently reminded of the book and pulled it down from the bookshelf. It is still in print, still intensely interesting, and still timely.
Chagnon lived with the Yanomamö for some 20 years over the course of his career. He found his up close and personal view of the Yanomamö somewhat disquieting. Mann observed, for example:
Early in “Noble Savages,” the author describes his encounter with the Yanomamö who were aiming their bows at him: “Immense wads of green tobacco were stuck between their lower teeth and lips,” he writes, “making them look even more hideous. Strands of dark green snot dripped or hung from their nostrils—strands so long that they drizzled from their chins down to their pectoral muscles and oozed lazily across their bellies, blending into their red paint and sweat.” The description emphasizes his point: Village life is dirtier and more unpleasant than civilized life—get real! Later he explains that the mucus, the byproduct of a snorted drug, is next to impossible to wipe off in a land without handkerchiefs or tissue paper. Nonetheless, this is not the kind of language that will soothe the troubled indigenous-rights activist.
Chagnon was lucky to have escaped with his life from his close encounter with the Yanamamo. My kids’ teachers somehow overlooked the downside of tribal life among the Yanomamö in their study.
As interesting as Chagnon’s professional observations and discoveries were, they paled next to the row they triggered within academic anthropology. Chagnon was defamed and hounded by his professional colleagues, a story that Mann told in some detail in his essay/review.
The row takes up the last three chapters of Chagnon’s memoir (and continues for a few pages more in the Acknowledgments that follow them). The New York Times Sunday Magazine explored it as well in Emily Eakin’s article “How Napoloeon Chagnon became our most controversial anthropologist.” Eakin observed: “Chagnon…turned the romantic image of the ‘noble savage’ on its head.” He had to pay the price.
Elizabeth Povinelli is a professor of anthropology and gender studies at Columbia University. She is the author, most recently, of Between Gaia and Ground: Four Axioms of Existence and the Ancestral Catastrophe of Late Liberalism. She was therefore the perfect vessel of the au courant takedown that Chagnon obviously required.
Povinielli’s review of Noble Savages in the New York Times Book Review provided a good sample of the seething hostility that Chagnon aroused within the profession. The review is patently malicious.
By contrast, Nicholas Wade’s assessment of Chagnon’s lifework in the Science section of the Times was a model of sobriety. Reading Chagnon, Wade found, one might be persuaded to give war a chance:
One of Dr. Chagnon’s discoveries was that warriors who had killed a man in battle sired three times more children than men who had not killed.
His report, published in Science in 1988, set off a storm among anthropologists who believed that peace, not war, was the natural state of human existence. Dr. Chagnon’s descriptions of Yanomamö warfare had been bad enough; now he seemed to be saying that aggression was rewarded and could be inherited.
Wade’s meticulous summary of Chagnon’s findings has more in the same vein:
[I]t made perfect sense that the struggle among the Yanomamö, and probably among all human societies at such a stage in their history, was for reproductive advantage.
Men form coalitions to gain access to women. Because some men will be able to have many wives, others must share a wife or go without, creating a great scarcity of women. This is why Yanomamö villages constantly raid one another.
The raiding over women creates a more complex problem, that of maintaining the social cohesion required to support warfare. A major cause of a village’s splitting up is fights over women. But a smaller village is less able to defend itself against larger neighbors. The most efficient strategy to keep a village both large and cohesive through kinship bonds is for two male lineage groups to exchange cousins in marriage. Dr. Chagnon found that this is indeed the general system practiced by the Yanomamö.
And this:
After overtaxing one of his informants, the shaman Dedeheiwä, about the reason for a succession of village fissions into smaller hostile groups, Dr. Chagnon found himself rebuked with the outburst, “Don’t ask such stupid questions! Women! Women! Women! Women! Women!”
Surely this could not stand — as Wade recounts.
Chagnon died in 2019 at the age of 81. His Times obituary is here. Matthew Blackwell set Chagnon’s story in its proper context in the Quillette essay “The dangerous life of an anthropologist.” Noble Savages is his testament.
JOHN adds: The myth of the noble savage is an old one, going back at least to Tacitus’s writings about the Germans. Tacitus portrayed German tribesmen as noble savages as a commentary on what he saw as the degraded culture of contemporary Rome. That motive has never changed for 2,000 years: writing that seeks to elevate less-advanced societies is always intended as a critique of the writer’s own society. Hence liberal outrage at the idea that an anthropologist might tell the truth about the Yanomamo.
