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Back to Subjects - Anthropology

Chagnon Debate

Chagnon Debate In Patrick Tierney’s article “The Fierce Anthropologist,” he discussed the faults that are, or may be, present in Napoleon Chagnon’s anthropological research of the Yanamamo, or “The Fierce People,” as Chagnon has referred to them in his best-selling book on the people. Due to Chagnon’s unparalleled body of work in terms of quantity and, as many argue, quality, Marvin Harris draws heavily on his research to support his point, which is that the origin of war is ecological and reproductive pressure. One should question Harris’s theories (and all theories), especially in the light of the aforementioned article, but I do not believe his arguments are, or should be, adversely affected by the information presented in this article. The claim that the Yanamamo are an extremely militant people is pervasive in Chagnon’s work, and Harris uses this as the basis for his arguments. However, Tierney claims that “Chagnon’s account of Yanamami warfare seemed greatly exaggerated.” (Pg. 54). Another integral part of Chagnon’s research, which Harris cites, was that the Yamamamo wage war because of women. John Peters, in Tierney’s article, presented a differing opinion stating that, “these raids [referring to the four raids carried out in half a century by a group that Chagnon said ‘demonstrated the most extreme form of Yanamami “treachery.”’ (Pg. 54).] …had been provoked not by competition for women, as Chagnon had written, but by the spread of new diseases, which prompted angry accusations of witchcraft.” These, among a slew of other discrepancies, cast an especially doubtful light on Chagnon’s research, and thus Harris’s conclusions. Harris reasons that if Yanamamo warfare is indeed caused by fights over women that this is caused not only by lack of females due to female infanticide which is legitimized through male supremacy which is legitimized through warfare, but also the males’ failure to bring home meat. In Cannibals and Kings Harris writes, “From the account of Helena Valero, a Brazilian captured by the Yanomamo, we know that wives make a point of taunting their husbands when the supply of game falters… The men themselves, after returning empty-handed, become touchy about real or imagined insubordination on the part of their wives and younger brothers. At the same time, the failure of the men emboldens wives and unmarried junior males to probe the weaknesses of husbands, seniors, and headmen. Adultery and witchcraft [as mentioned above] increase in fact and fancy. Factions solidify and tensions mount.” (Pg. 77). According to Harris, this almost always precedes Yanamamamo warfare. If Tierney’s accounts concerning warfare and the derivatives of warfare are correct, this makes Harris’s arguments incredible. On the other hand, Tierney’s viewpoint is arguable. As Irven Delfore, a professor of biological anthropology at Harvard, points out in, “The Fierce Anthropologist,” “Chag was both first and thorough…thorough in the sense that Chag has visited at least 75 Yanamami villages on both sides of the Venezuelan and Brazilian borders…Chag gathered very detailed and documented data on the villages – so much so that another investigator could study the same population and come to a different conclusion.”(Pg. 55). This seems to be exactly what Harris has done. In fact, Harris begins the chapter “Proteins and the Fierce People” by pointing out a different in opinion stating that “Chagnon – who knows them best – has denied that the high level of homicide within and between villages is caused by reproductive and ecological pressures.” (Pg. 67). Harris goes on to use others, as well as Chagnon’s own evidence to disprove his claim. Harris shows how fighting over women is correlated to reproductive pressure, and there is a shortage of meat in the area in which the Yanamamo reside – this is quite obviously a type of ecological pressure. Harris’s use of evidence outside of Chagnon’s own indicates that he has done research on the Yanamamo (and would probably be somewhat familiar with them as an ethnographer besides) and was, in all likelihood, familiar with the dispute concerning the reliability of Chagnon’s work. As a respected ethnographer, he would probably be ridiculed if he presented vital evidence from a highly questionable source. Also, Harris does not necessarily need to use the Yanamamo as evidence – he had already made his point in the previous chapter and made logical transitions and arguments to support it. However, one could argue that Chagnon’s faults damage Harris’s credibility for using him as a major source (and probably knowingly), and thus shed doubt on Harris’s book as a whole and possibly make his entire argument concerning warfare, male supremacy, and female infanticide buncombe. I do not agree with this view because I believe that Harris provides a sound logical argument that holds strong without evidence to support it. The evidence he does present is superfluous, but makes his points stronger. To argue successfully with Harris’s conclusion would need a strong contrary logical base, which a single article like Tierney’s “The Fierce Anthropologist” cannot provide. In addition to this, I believe that Tierney glorified Chagnon’s faults and downplayed his anthropological successes. The one thing that concerns me most is Tierney’s claim that Chagnon has falsified data. In the article, Tierney says, “Lizot criticized Chagnon for obscuring the identity of twelve villages in his homicide study, making it difficult for other anthropologists to verify his data,” and that, “(pg. 54) he [the German ethnologist Irenaus Eibl-Eibesfeldt] and another Yanomami researcher at the institute wrote a letter to the American Human behavior and Evolution Society, which claimed that Chagnon had got important mortality rate statistics wrong.” (Pg. 54) Even if these claims of deceiving information and others of plain false information (“In ‘The Fierce People,’ Chagnon wrote that the Yanomami were ‘one of the best nourished populations thus far described in the anthropological/biomedical literature.’ Unlike Chagnon’s ‘burly’ men, the villagers I encountered were – as Rice had observed in 1924 – tiny and scrawny.” [Pg. 54]) Are all true I don’t believe the vast majority of Chagnon’s research was falsified or misleading – nearly 40 years of false, purposefully misleading information would be an absurd, pointless task of monumental proportions. Overall, I do not believe Harris’s theories are, or should be, damaged significantly even in a worst case scenario (described by Tierney). His theory could stand alone without the evidence provided by the Yanomamo and in all probability the conclusions drawn from them were, indeed, valid. Bibliography:

Word Count: 1051