My parents dont even know what anthropologists do?

Sahlins resigns on February 13,2013.

What was he doing for 8 months?

Who are the referents? Such a statement simply undermines your position in this or any other debate.

You’re late. Besides the fact that he is dead, they already questioned him in France.

“Actually, I can provide some revealing insight into at least one possible reason why Chagnon was repeatedly denied a research permit to continue work with the Yanomami in Venezuela. I was in the audience when he gave a colloquium at the Department of Anthropology of the Venezuelan Institute of Scientific Investigations outside of Caracas in March 1975. During the discussion period one of the Venezuelan anthropology graduate students, Juan Scorza, asked him what he had done to help the Yanomami with their practical problems during all of his time that he conducted research with them. He was noticeably silent for quite some time, apparently that question had never crossed his mind, or perhaps he was trying to formulate an appropriate answer in that venue. Finally, he answered that the Yanomami receive a lot of trade goods from him. Then he stated that he could file a report with the government office in charge of Indigenous Affairs about the problems faced by the Yanomami, but they wouldn’t pay attention anyway. After Chagnon and his associates left many from the audience ascended to a seminar room upstairs in the Department where they expressed their outrage at such
blatant irresponsibility and irrelevance in the face of the serious health and other problems faced by the Yanomami. There were many witnesses to this fiasco, including five members of Chagnon’s research team during the colloquium, one of whom was Raymond Hames.”
http://anthroniche.com/darkness_documents/0617.htm

Please, kids, grow up.

You consider Chagnon’s behavior (e.g. carrying arms, lying about the substance of his food and not sharing etc) reasonable given his circumstances. Is this an accurate assessment? Please understand that many Amerindian people (myself included) were raised with a distrust of anthropologists. Of course this doesn’t translate to every single person, at every single moment. But the antagonism is definitely in the air. My particular situation is ironic because now I am in an Anthropology PhD program. But what is even more ironic is how “we” (here I am referring to those in the discipline or even those willing to make comments about it on a blog such as this) could betray the disciplinary importance of fieldwork by overlooking or worse yet condoning our academic predecessors transgressions against the people we work among.

Is that his best shot? Sorry, but I can’t blame the guy for being well armed in such an obviously dangerous environment. Though I’m wondering where in the jungle he managed to plug his stun gun battery. And it’s not easy to see how he would be able to feed an entire village, as was apparently expected by the Yanoama. (I refuse to use that clunky term, Yanomamo.) Many indigenous people have been known to make demands of that sort and I’m sure many anthropologists have run into similar problems trying to satisfy everyone. I think Sahlins needs to get a sense of humor. The frankfurter and peanut butter story is hilarious.

If you read Tristes Tropiques you’ll find a similar story about manipulating children to learn the names of adults, via Levi Strauss. So maybe we should be going after him next.

The link to Graeber’s tweet for those wanting to following the Twitter conversation: https://twitter.com/davidgraeber/status/305288419817431041

Hauser’s finished
http://chronicle.com/blogs/percolator/report-says-former-harvard-psychologist-fabricated-falsified/30748