ANTHROPOLOGY IN DARKNESS

A decade ago the American journalist Patrick Tierney published an incendiary book called Darkness in El Dorado. Tierney had spent more than ten years investigating the work of the anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon, and of Chagnon’s mentor, the geneticist James Neel. He accused Chagnon, among other things, of scientific fraud, sexual abuse, political corruption and, most sensationally, of genocide.

Chagnon was one of the most distinguished anthropologists of his generation, who had made his name as a pioneer of sociobiology and of evolutionary accounts of violence. He had spent a lifetime studying the Yanomamo, an Amazonian tribe that live on borderlands of Brazil and Venezuela. Chagnon presented the Yanomamo as a fierce, primitive tribe, given to murderous violence, whose mores opened the window onto the human past (‘our contemporary ancestors’ as he described them). Most controversially, he linked Yanomami violence to genetic success. The more people a man had killed, Chagnon claimed, the more wives and children he was likely to have. Violence, in his view, enhanced Yanomami men’s reproductive success.