Since David Graeber’s widely cited tweet on Saturday, Savage Minds has been able to confirm (read: Marshall sent me an email) that Marshall Sahlins has resigned from the National Academy of Sciences and that his resignation has been accepted. As Sahlins tells it, his main reason for the resignation is Chagnon’s election to the US’s National Academy of Sciences:
By the evidence of his own writings as well as the testimony of
others, including Amazonian peoples and professional scholars of the
region, Chagnon has done serious harm to the indigenous communities
among whom he did research. (See my review of Tierney in the Washington
Post, 2000, below). At the same time, his “scientific” claims about
human evolution and the genetic selection for male violence–as in the
notorious study he published in 1988 in Science–have proven to be
shallow and baseless, much to the discredit of the anthropological
disciple. At best, his election to the NAS was a large moral and
intellectual blunder on the part of members of the Academy. So much so
that my own participation in the Academy has become an embarrassment.
Sahlins’s low opinion of Chagnon is as old as everybody else’s, and amply documented in his widely-cited review of Darkness in El Dorado. There, he writes that
The truth claims of the argument presented by Chagnon in Science may have had the shortest half-life of any study ever published in that august journal. Chagnon set out to demonstrate statistically that known killers among the Yanomami had more than twice as many wives and three times as many children as non-killers. This would prove that humans (i.e., men) do indeed compete for reproductive advantages, as sociobiologists claimed, and homicidal violence is a main means of the competition. Allowing the further (and fatuous) assumption that the Yanomami represent a primitive stage of human evolution, Chagnon’s findings would support the theory that violence has been progressively inscribed in our genes.
But Chagnon’s statistics were hardly out before Yanomami specialists dismembered them by showing, among other things, that designated killers among this people have not necessarily killed, nor have designated fathers necessarily fathered. Many more Yanomami are known as killers than there are people killed because the Yanomami accord the ritual status of man-slayer to sorcerers who do death magic and warriors who shoot arrows into already wounded or dead enemies. Anyhow, it is a wise father who knows his own child (or vice versa) in a society that practices wife-sharing and adultery as much as the Yanomami do. Archkillers, besides, are likely to father fewer children inasmuch as they are prime targets for vengeance, a possibility Chagnon conveniently omitted from his statistics by not including dead fathers of living children. Nor did his calculations allow for the effects of age, shamanistic attainments, headship, hunting ability or trading skill–all of which are known on ethnographic grounds to confer marital advantages for Yanomami men.
Supporters of Chagnon, and lately Chagnon himself, have defended his sociobiology by referring to several other studies showing that men who incarnate the values of their society, whatever these values may be, have the most sex and children. Even granting this to be true–except for our society, where the rich get richer but the poor get children–this claim only demonstrates that the genetic impulses of a people are under the control of their culture rather than the other way around. For dominant cultural values vary from society to society, even as they may change rapidly in any given society. There is no universal selective pressure for violence or any other genetic disposition, nor could genes track the behavioral values varying rapidly and independently of them. It follows that what is strongly selected for in human beings is the ability to realize innate biological dispositions in a variety of meaningful ways, by a great number of cultural means. Violence may be inherently satisfying, but we humans can make war on the playing fields of Eton, by sorcery, by desecrating the flag or a thousand other ways of “kicking butt,” including writing book reviews. What evolution has allowed us is the symbolic capacity to sublimate our impulses in all the kinds of cultural forms that human history has known.
Sahlins is particularly suited to analyze debates about Chagnon because Sahlins has examined in detail how micro histories become macro histories and vice versa. Debates about the quality of Chagnon’s work really are not about Chagnon himself. Rather, they are opportunities for politically engaged anthropologists and holier than thou Anthropological Scientists to have their favorite argument. Again. The result is what Sahlins calls the ‘structural amplification’ of local disputes:
Feuding local groups assume the identities of larger collectivities – the way Catalan villagers, for example, became Frenchmen and Spaniards – and thereby engage these collectivities in their own petty issues. The structural effect is a chiastic pattern of affinities and enmities, as the greater entities also enter the lists against the lesser factions of the other side. In the upshot, the local causes are prosecuted as larger oppositions, and the larger oppositions as local causes
I expect pissed-off lefties like Terry Turner to be ready to take the fight to the enemy. What I always find so depressing about these periods of academic blood letting is how poorly the ‘scientists’ behave as they extol an ideal of dispassionate objectivity while simultaneously savaging anyone who suggests to them that they may not be living up to their own ego ideal.
I spend a lot of time thinking about Jared Diamond because, despite his empirical errors, he has a program for a science of humanity that he has thought a lot about, and which is worthy of consideration. I don’t agree with most of what he says, but it is worth engaging, because thinking through it makes one smarter. None of this is true of Chagnon. I think Jon Marks is right on the money when he writes:
Napoleon Chagnon is a sadder story [than Jared Diamond], because he is not a pseudo-anthropologist, but an incompetent anthropologist. Let me be clear about my use of the word “incompetent”. His methods for collecting, analyzing and interpreting his data are outside the range of acceptable anthropological practices. Yes, he saw the Yanomamo doing nasty things. But when he concluded from his observations that the Yanomamo are innately and primordially “fierce” he lost his anthropological credibility, because he had not demonstrated any such thing. He has a right to his views, as creationists and racists have a right to theirs, but the evidence does not support the conclusion, which makes it scientifically incompetent.
It’s hard for me to claim to give an objective response to Sahlins’s decision to resign. The man was my thesis advisor. He was a guest at my wedding. So when I applaud his decision to leave NAS you can decide for yourself how you want to take it. In my opinion, NAS is losing a great scholar and scientist, and gaining the Ward Churchill of anthropology.
After all is said and done, the facts about Chagnon are straightforward: just because some of your enemies distrust science doesn’t mean you’re any good at it.And just because some people dislike your work for political reasons doesn’t mean every criticism of your work is invalid. In the struggle to create a healthy, empirical, and robust anthropology for the twenty-first century, NAS has chosen the wrong side.
Inside Higher Ed has a story on this here.
Thanks, Strong. What a kerfluffle.
You can play an interesting game with the membership list of the National Academy, which is here:
http://www.nasonline.org/member-directory/?q=&site=nas_members&requiredfields=(member_section:Anthropology)
It is dominated by archaeologists, and although of course everyone who is in there deserves it, the list is more noteworthy for who isn’t on it than by who is. Try drawing up a list of the people you would expect graduate students to have read, and match it up against the list of members. Without Sahlins, there are surprisingly few anthropologists in the NAS whom (IMHO) one might reasonably consider to be among the intellectual leaders in anthropology.
All I can say is that since the heyday of people like Chagnon, and Sahlins too, Anthropology seems to have taken a huge nosedive into irrelevance. And now, with impending catastrophe in the academic world, thanks to all those many years of recklessly blowing tuition/debt bubbles, the field is in very real danger of vanishing altogether. Unless young people, with the guts to offer fresh and exciting ideas without worrying too much about who might be offended, are encouraged, instead of being intimidated, I see no future for Anthropology outside the usual academic disputes. Such disputes, rooted in an ever more puritanical and inquisitorial absorbtion with what can only be called (yes!) “political correctness,” have turned the most stimulating branch of the academic world into the deadliest, in every sense of the word.
I, like Sahlins, cannot accept Chagnon’s theories regarding either the “pristine” status of the Yanoama or the primordial origins of violence. While my own arguments have been directed largely at people like Steven Pinker and Richard Wrangham, they apply equally well to this aspect of Chagnon’s work. So I must say I welcome the critique Sahlin presents in the excerpt quoted above, and for the most part agree. With the critique. NOT the attack — which as I see it is not only unwarranted, but also highly intimidating to young anthropologists with fresh ideas that might turn out to be controversial some day.
Anyone caring to examine the contents of the blog they’ll be directed to by clicking on my moniker above will see for themselves that my politics are well to the left of center, with some pretty strong Marxist overtones. And yet, sorry, but I’m not offended by Chagnon’s attacks on me and my ilk.
Everything I’ve read of Chagnon’s and also seen (cinematically) strikes me as the work of a dedicated researcher with original and fascinating methods and ideas. I don’t care a whit that I disagree with some of his conclusions and I don’t care a whit that some of his methods might be perceived as insensitive or even offensive — to some. HIs stories of his conflicts with both the culture of the Yanoama and that of the Salesian missionaries strike me as unusually honest, brave, and ultimately both fascinating and educational.
Some of our greatest thinkers and creators have breathed fire, both holy and unholy, and offended a great many of their contemporaries. I’m thinking Freud, I’m thinking Nietzsche, I’m thinking Dostoevsky, Sartre, Baudelaire, Picasso, Artaud, etc., etc. So sorry, I can’t participate in all the self-righteous broohaha over Chagnon.
So Chagnon is wrong. Does he need to be thrown under a bus?
I think I’m in sympathy with docG’s comment above. Perhaps I’m being naive, but I thought the best way for us to settle our academic disagreements is through research and publishing data, theories, and conclusions that are judged to be superior than our antagonist’s publications?
I haven’t followed this story as closely as some, but on the surface Sahlins move seems to represent a transformation of the conflict out of the arena of measured debate and into the symbolic. Is this because the ordinary routes of countering bad ideas with good ideas hasn’t worked? If this is about more than spectacle, then why is the spectacle necessary?
I’m sure they didn’t think it would come down to sides.
Chagnon is a very interesting guy, but the debate surrounding him is way out of proportion, and in any other discipline would be a minor spat. Anthropologists love melodrama and discussing their discipline and its ‘future’. Both of those things are uninteresting. Put it all together and you’ve got one big fat yawn.
Agree with Jon Marks above. In what kind of bizarro-world would we be talking about Sahlins and Chagnon as the mascots of anthropology within the sciences?
I had to take a look back at my “What’s wrong with anthropology?” essay:
“Any working scientist will be wrong about most of the details, if we revisit his work after fifty years. What makes anthropology weak today is that so many anthropologists learn nothing about scientific anthropology after Boas.”
something that seems lost in the rhetoric of those above who might call the dispute a “yawn” or express fear for the that rarity, the delicate graduate student, is any recognition chagnon’s ethical failures. if it only were a matter of his work being empirically wrong, one might be able to feel some sympathy; if he were somehow right but out of fashion, more so. however, it is clear that in addition to being wrong, chagnon caused real harm to the people with whom he worked. moreover, this harm was possible because of chagnon’s basic theoretical premises. if that isn’t a reason for being “thrown under the bus” i don’t know what is
I agree with docG for the most part. A question, however: Why did it take Sahlins a year to resign? Chagnon was elected last year. Is it simply because his new book and the immense publicity surrounding it has re-ignited this tired debate?
That aside, I believe both men should be in the NAS. There are other reports that Sahlins resigned because of NAS involvement in military research (see Inside Higher Ed piece). Which leads one to ask, which was the PRIMARY reason for Sahlins’s resignation?
Chagnon was instrumental in ensuring that Yanomami people had access to a measles vaccine that Neel’s blood tests had shown was necessary to prevent an epidemic from devastating the community. Moreover, there has been no proven connection whatsoever between Chagnon’s writings and any damage whatsoever to any Yanomami people. Chagnon seems like a really weird guy and a self-aggrandising maniac, but he doesn’t seem to have done any Yanomami people any actual harm. If you have evidence showing that he did, then present it; if you don’t, quit it with the character assassination.
This is why this elicits a great big yawn from me: almost all of the claims against Chagnon are zombie arguments. And zombies are really passe.
Yes, Al, I agree. This is classic revisionist thinking: that anyone whose view of certain indigenous groups clashes with theirs is somehow responsible for all the horrible atrocities that have been visited on so many of these people. We see it very clearly in the so-called “Great Kalahari Debate,” to which I’ve devoted a fair amount of research. Somehow, those who have worked hardest to inform the world of the historical importance of a particular group have somehow “damaged” them by identifying them as “primitive,” and thus making them vulnerable to their many detractors. Never mind that these same detractors could care less about what any anthropologist might have to say on the matter.
It would be nice if anthropologists had enough clout in the world to make a difference in this respect, but unfortunately they don’t. Chagnon “sinned” by telling the truth as he saw it. And sorry, but if science isn’t about telling the truth, then it’s nothing at all. Why bother?
Nicholas Wade writes it up here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/26/science/national-academy-of-sciences-scholar-resigns-over-napoleon-chagnons-admission.html
Last line: “Dr. Chagnon said he was familiar with those criticisms but called them invalid and said none had been published in a peer-reviewed journal.”
(Brian Ferguson published his critiques of Chagnon in American Ethnologist, which is indeed peer-reviewed.)
As evidence towards this assertion, I submit the above comment thread.
From Dorothy Thompson’s introduction to The Poverty of Theory
“Of course it produced responses. Some of these emerged at an extraordinary evening at a History Workshop conference in Oxford in December 1979. This was for some reason held in a dimly-lit ruined building, and had been set up as a discussion. It ended up however as an emotionally-charged event whose repercussions continued for months if not for years.
…At the end of the evening a leading History Workshop character asked whether he would continue to publish relevant material. Edward replied that he thought he would not be publishing much of anything for a while, since he felt that his time would be taken up trying to organize opposition to cruise missiles in Britain. The answer was ‘Cruise what Edward?'”
“The answer was ‘Cruise what Edward?'” Rilly.
The rise of the neoliberal academy.
“I expect pissed-off lefties like Terry Turner to be ready to take the fight to the enemy. What I always find so depressing about these periods of academic blood letting is how poorly the ‘scientists’ behave as they extol an ideal of dispassionate objectivity while simultaneously savaging anyone who suggests to them that they may not be living up to their own ego ideal.”
It’s not just the ‘scientists’ Witness an author on this blog “Sahlins move seems to represent a transformation of the conflict out of the arena of measured debate and into the symbolic.”
Such wounded reasonableness. “Why is Sahlins getting so angry?” A question asked from tribal loyalty, except for the fact that its tribal loyalty while denying even the possibility that that’s what it could be.
Tribal loyalty is human. The model of collaborative reason denies politics, so that arguments from authority and dripping with condescension if not outright contempt are allowed against outsiders. “What do women want?” the concerned men ask each other. “Why are they so angry?” Should it mean something that men are all scientists? Should it help their argument? Should it hurt?
Language is politics. The academy needs more open argument not less. It needs intellectual bloodsport to counter bureaucratic politesse, the intellectual model of the courtroom to counter the model of the lab. Courts aren’t barbaric they’re necessary. The defenders of Chagnon, not only “scientists” but petty bureaucrats, pretend politics are beneath them, but they live by it.
It’s not a “kerfuffle” it’s a fight over the definition of moral responsibility. If you don’t want to argue about that, stop pretending you have any intellectual interests at all. You’re just a happy technician. The model of the neoliberal academy.
What’s with dissing Ward Churchill. he’s kind of the opposite of Chagnon, if you consider indigenous nations survival and stuff like that to be important.
“it is clear that in addition to being wrong, chagnon caused real harm to the people with whom he worked.”
I am also really interested if any concrete harm can be traced to Chagnon’s depiction of the Yanomami in his work. There are definitely severe methodological and ethical problems with his work, and presenting the Yanomami as fierce, violent and primitive is wrong regardless if it had any negative consequences for them whatsoever. But it isn’t clear to me if this controversy became as big as it did because Chagnon caused harm on the people he studied, or if the intensity of the controversy is based on the deeply held theoretical commitments and personal animosities of the various actors involved.
justaguy writes “But it isn’t clear to me if this controversy became as big as it did because Chagnon caused harm on the people he studied, or if the intensity of the controversy is based on the deeply held theoretical commitments and personal animosities of the various actors involved. ”
These are not mutually exclusive possibilities. Regarding the first, my understanding is that Chagnon’s portrayal of the Yanomamo as nasty, brutish and fierce played into the failure of the Venezuelan and Brazilian governments to move early to prevent or halt gold mining in their territory and other abuses of Yanomamo rights. Chagnon did not have to pull the trigger, but he could create an impression of Yanomamo that left them vulnerable to governments that had little interest in indigenous rights and could use his work as a justification.
Moreover, since anthropology in South American countries is closely allied to indigenous rights activism, Chagnon’s research looked like simple exploitation of indigenous communities primarily for his personal professional gain, and was often interpreted as one more form of Yanqui exploitation of The South.
“Chagnon’s portrayal of the Yanomamo as nasty, brutish and fierce played into the failure of the Venezuelan and Brazilian governments to move early to prevent or halt gold mining in their territory and other abuses of Yanomamo rights.”
Yet the very different portrayal of African Bushmen, as for example “The Harmless People,” is thought by revisionist anthropologists to have played into the hands of neo-colonial exploiters eager to appropriate their lands for similarly nefarious purposes. If you do a search on the “Great Kalahari Debate” you’ll find extremely vicious accusations of this sort, comparable to the accusations hurled at Chagnon.
The common thread uniting these two controversies is, indeed, as Chagnon himself has suggested, a postmodernism-inspired atmosphere of self-righteous, “politically correct” revisionism based largely on ideological differences, and only minimally on either evidence or common sense.
“Chagnon’s research looked like simple exploitation of indigenous communities primarily for his personal professional gain, and was often interpreted as one more form of Yanqui exploitation of The South.”
Similar charges could be leveled at a great many anthropologists, including self-described “activists,” whose principal motivation could nevertheless be seen as academic advancement.
“The common thread uniting these two controversies is, indeed, as Chagnon himself has suggested, a postmodernism-inspired atmosphere of self-righteous, “politically correct” revisionism based largely on ideological differences, and only minimally on either evidence or common sense.”
But Chagnon’s portrayal of the Yanomami as fierce, and primitive isn’t empirical, and there are methodological problems with his portrayal of them as violent apart from any ethical concerns. That makes it difficult to turn the Chagnon affair into a conflict between ideology and evidence.
Survival International has compiled a list of materials from experts, anthropologists and the Yanomami on the Chagnon debate, and how Chagnon’s work has been disastrous for the tribe.
Visit http://www.survivalinternational.org/articles/3272 for statements from Davi Yanomami, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Philippe Descola, and Manuela Carneiro da Cunha, as well as an open letter signed by over dozen anthropologists who _absolutely disagree with Napoleon Chagnon’s public characterization of the Yanomami as a fierce, violent and archaic people, [and] deplore how Chagnon’s work has been used throughout the years – and could still
be used – by governments to deny the Yanomami their land and cultural rights._
Leading Brazilian professor of anthropology Eduardo Viveiros de Castro says the Yanomami are anything but the nasty, callous, sociobiological robots Chagnon makes them look like.
Philippe Descola and Manuela Carneiro da Cunha h
Survival International has compiled a list of materials from experts, anthropologists and the Yanomami on the Chagnon debate, and how Chagnon’s work has been disastrous for the tribe.
Visit http://www.survivalinternational.org/articles/3272 for statements from Davi Yanomami, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Philippe Descola, and Manuela Carneiro da Cunha, as well as an open letter signed by over dozen anthropologists who “absolutely disagree with Napoleon Chagnon’s public characterization of the Yanomami as a fierce, violent and archaic people, [and] deplore how Chagnon’s work has been used throughout the years – and could still be used – by governments to deny the Yanomami their land and cultural rights.”
I’ll add one more point before bowing out, since things are heating up, as they should.
I had arguments with David Graeber 30 years ago and later in Chicago when I realized. putting it bluntly, that anthropologists as academics no longer understand culture because they don’t understand their relation to the culture they’re a part of.
Any filmmaker will tell you that moral questions are the most important ones. To a humanist they’re the most interesting and most fun. They’re the good stuff. Everything else and you’re just a bricklayer or a file clerk of some sort or another. But here the good stuff is treated as a side issue that’s gotten in the way of science.”The Great Kalahari Debate” The moral questions are front and center. But the debate itself makes people uncomfortable.
The offense taken at Zero Dark 30 was that questions had gotten in the way of answers. What if torture works sometimes, as it did in Germany 10 years ago (Magnus Gäfgen) and it’s still wrong? In Lincoln and Argo it was the other way around. Too many answers not enough questions. And the CIA won the oscar for best picture. Chagnon would never have ended up as important as he is if moral questions were seen as interesting in themselves. Obviously they bored him a bit. And obviously also for some there’s a good career to be made in moralism. But reminding people of that is just another way of avoiding the questions of morality itself. And Chagnon is a moralist isn’t he? The argument is that his moralism made him incompetent scientist.
If you’re wondering about your relations with the people you study, and you know you can’t treat them the way you treat your mother, just as an experiment spend a week treating your mother the way you’d treat the people you study. And when that makes you scared, you know you’ve hit the sweet spot, until you get lazy and your subjects or you mother call you an asshole. And then you get scared again, as you should be. Anthropologists are part scholar and part scientist. Scientists are just plumbers. That’s my side of that argument.
What do I know about science I’m only an artist? I know the only anthropological films that are more than visual file clerking are by Wiseman. He’s one of the most important filmmakers alive and he calls them fictions. He keeps his eye right in the sweet spot.
I’m with Sahlins. But I’m too young to feel this old.
Chagnon’s ethnography apart, this whole debate about “primitive violence” amazes me. The modern westerns e eastern nations have warred for decades now, resulting in a death toll of millions and million. Now there is a public eulogy of a “surgical war” made by drone bombings, and people write books about how peaceful “we are” in relation to some hobbesian indigenous permanent “state of war”. Although there is war, and there is violence and there is massacre everywhere, there is always the desperate necessity of justifying the violence of the modern states with the claim that they made the world peaceful.
Sahlins was brave enough to face this pseudoscience of a “violent human nature” in opposition to the peaceful “civilized westerner”. The modern Nations and States have their merits, but to ignore the fact they also build and enforce themselves through violence is just hilarious.
Interview of Sahlins by David Price (Counterpunch), published today:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/02/26/the-destruction-of-conscience-in-national-academy-of-sciences/
I’m sorry, but over and over again in the anthropological literature on “tribal” peoples, in Africa, Melanesia, and many other places, including the Americas, we find the phrase “endemic warfare.” And in many other cases there are clear signs of head hunting, cannibalism, etc. I don’t subscribe to the notion that this somehow proves our ancestors were more violent than we are — that’s clearly absurd — but at the same time I wonder why Chagnon somehow gets chosen as whipping boy when any number of other anthropologists have also characterized the societies they’ve studied as warlike and violent.
If you have a problem with Chagnon’s science, well, at least he attempted some sort of systematic study, while in most cases I have the feeling such characterizations are based essentially on personal observation and hearsay.
In protest against Sahlin’s resignation from the NAS, I have decided to join it. I take this momentous step as a gesture of solidarity with all the many fine scientists who find themselves stuck with an undesirable person in their midst, in the spirit of the ancient adage: there is always room for one more.
It’s pretty obvious that moral questions have any answer you like, as long as you’re willing to accept certain premises. This makes discussions nihilistic and inherently open-ended, rather than merely rendered open-ended by human inability (as science is). This is the very opposite of interesting. Moral questions are merely practical questions; whether or not to cross the road is as much a moral question as whether or not to kill someone.
That may be another part of why the Chagnon debate is so dull. It’s just the moralistic fallacy over and over again; it would be bad if that were true, so it isn’t. It is indeed the rubbish that gets in the way of science. Science is exciting, fun, and joyous. Moral discussions are just so much blather if they don’t depend on a solid empirical and rational foundation, and even then they’re things to get out of the way early so that we can get onto the really good stuff: finding out about this universe, which we only get one chance to see.
Chagnon shouldn’t have tarred an entire group of people with an epithet derived from only one of their activities. He should probably have been more cautious about interacting with media outlets, as well. That seems to be about the extent of his actual wrong-doings vis-a-vis Yanomami people.
Can a debate get more boring than this? Probably not.
I find it depressing that many people only manage to find something interesting in lowland South America – a fascinating mish-mash of language families, horticultural practices, animals, rites, history, village forms, and ecological circumstances (Yanomami is, IIRC, effectively a language isolate, which in Eurasia or Africa would warrant significant scientific interest in its own right) – when they want to claim that someone else is lacking in proper ethical standards.
We shouldn’t solely be interested in the world when it concerns us morally. That could only ever result in a dull, nihilistic view of the universe.
And yes, I have to agree with docG here: warfare is endemic in almost any instance where states are absent, as far as the archaeological and ethnographic records tell us.
If you know of an instance in which this unequivocally is not the case, do not hesitate to let me know. I’d be fascinated to find such a thing.
Oublier Napoleon, perhaps, and replace it with questions of who the Yanomami are, how we know, and what difference this might make. In 1978, Jean Rouch assembled a conference on Yanomami film at his outfit within the Musee de l’Homme. Chagnon and Asch were there, as were Japanese, French, Yugoslav, and other filmmakers. Two days of film and one day of heated debate on who/what were the Yanomami, that was filmed. No trace of the videos (?) and no one has examined the debate. For a serious alternative to the Ax Fight and such films, people should check out Juan Downey’s Yanomami film The Laughing Alligator, that is available streaming from Image Union. Downey showed his film at a visual anth conference in 1978 and (with one exception) the anthros dismissed it as ‘exploitation for the sake of art’. In my view, Downey’s film does away with the typecasting that had enabled anthropological insight and expertise (Yanomami are X) at the cost of exchange, negotiation, and possible equivalence.
“And yes, I have to agree with docG here: warfare is endemic in almost any instance where states are absent, as far as the archaeological and ethnographic records tell us.”
I’m glad you agree with me, Al, but it would be better if it were for the right reasons. In fact there are traditional, non-state societies where endemic warfare is in fact absent. Warfare, yes, from time to time, in order to resist encroachment or enslavement by more aggressive groups, but endemic warfare, no. It is absent in many places, but typically in refuge areas, such as dense forests, deserts, islands, mountains, etc., where traditional non-violent societies have retreated specifically to escape warlike groups.
My studies of the African Pygmies and Bushmen have convinced me that these peoples especially have preserved non-violent traditions going all the way back to the time of their most recent divergence, possibly 100,000 years ago. So if Chagnon wants to argue that “modern” humans are genetically like chimpanzees, I would retort that we are in fact far more like bonobos. Genetically. In many other respects we have gone astray. But not the Pygmies and Bushmen, no. They remain non-violent. If you don’t believe me, well, you need to read my book: http://soundingthedepths.blogspot.com/
Immediate-return foragers, including various groups in Africa, usually are less war-like than other non-state societies, and I should have qualified my statement. This is for the fairly simple reason that they don’t have any motivation to engage in group violence. But I think it’s probably going a bit far to suggest that they are preserving lifestyles going back 100,000 years, especially because the forest peoples now speak Bantu languages almost uniformly, and because there has clearly been a great deal of shifting in terms of the economies of Khoesan speakers (herding, etc, which is attested in the linguistic and archaeological records for much of southern Africa from before the arrival of agriculture and Bantu languages). These societies will also leave less evidence of their violence in the archaeological record; they won’t have built any palisades or sited their villages in strategic locations, for instance.
And of course Khoe people, herders and close linguistic relatives of the San ‘bushmen’ (indicating recent divergence from a common ancestor), have exhibited plenty of instances of organised violence, including taking the initiative in attacking and killing the Portuguese pirate Francisco de Almeida and his men in 1510. This was clearly a planned raid conducted by people who knew what they were doing when it came to fighting other groups. Communal violence seems to be related more to the economy than anything else, and not to do with a 100,000 year old tradition of non-violent living.
“And yes, I have to agree with docG here: warfare is endemic in almost any instance where states are absent, as far as the archaeological and ethnographic records tell us.”
The archaeological and historical evidence shows that pre-colonial Amazonian basin had a lot of river based “confederacies”, with war, trade and alliances existing at the same time. Guess you could say the same about Fourteenth Century Europe and its states.
The irony about the “endemic warfare” where there are no States, is that nobody tries to qualify what kind of warfare there was. According to Thevet and Staden’s accounts, the Tupian cannibals did not wage war to exterminate their enemies. Instead of ethnocide, the idea was to enable conflict and vengeance through skirmishes that happened once in a while – and ended in long duration cannibal rites, were the victim stayed as a very particular kind of captive, married a local woman, etc. Were those warring societies? Yes, of course, but their whole idea was to make war and war was its own end. Brazilian history, with its 19th century full of peasant and Amerindian massacres perpetuated by the army is what keeps me awake at night.
Of course people qualify what they mean by warfare in non-state societies. This is the normal thing to do – Chagnon, Pinker, and Diamond have done so, to take only three of Anthropology’s Most Hated. Very few people believe that genocide is the intent, because it usually isn’t, and in many cases that would clearly be a losing strategy. In eastern Indonesia, for instance, the end of the dry season would be accompanied by headhunting raids, which involved the theft of animals and harvested crops and, naturally, the taking of plenty of heads. The crops and animals were necessary in such a dry, unforgiving environment – killing off the population would clearly not benefit the headhunters. But this was truly endemic warfare in the absence of states (or, at the very least, in the absence of any strong states), with villages sited so as to take advantage of strategic features, the construction of palisade walls, effects in every sphere of life from trade to agriculture to marriage and religion, etc.
I believe similar patterns can also be found in the South American lowlands, including the construction of palisades around village sites, something only necessary if warfare is ever-present. (‘River-based confederacies’ were not the only game in town, especially as Heckenberger, I think, has shown that such polities were not confined exclusively to riverine environments). It may not have been all warfare all the time, and it may not have involved genocide, but that doesn’t mean sedentary non-state societies with delayed-return economies don’t tend to fight other communities more regularly than either immediate-return foragers or state societies, resulting in a far higher rate of death by human hands.
If questions of morality were only practical we wouldn’t need lawyers. As it is, give me the nihilism of lawyers, including and especially underpaid public defenders, over the idealism of philosophers. Lawyers have a formal relation to their clients. They’re paid advocates.
How primitive is that?
Housewives invented feminism, railroad porters started the civil rights movement and teary-eyed drag queens mourning the death of Judy Garland started the public fight for gay rights. No one gave a damn about the Jews and until recently no one gave a damn about the Palestinians.
Practice precedes theory.
I haven’t seen that Downey vid in years, and of course I forgot about Rouch. That was stupid.
“Science is exciting, fun, and joyous…” Enthusiasm is more dangerous than heroin.
In my view, the Yanomamo engage in activity more accurately described as feuds, not “warfare.” See Leslie Sponsel’s “Into the Heart of Darkness” in the edited volume NonKilling Societies, available online or at Doug Hume’s anthroniche site.
Of course, we’re talking about activity that occurred, what, 30, 40+ years ago, when Chagnon described it. Is there any evidence that feuding has decreased, increased, stopped altogether? I am not aware of any recent research on the Yanomamo since Venezuela designated it a “no research” zone, especially for foreigners. Has this changed?
I have to reiterate my agreement with docG on these points: Chagnon’s fieldwork is nothing short of amazing in terms of the data he collected; I disagree with his analysis and findings based in sociobiology; he was badly treated by his colleagues in the AAA, and ultimately vindicated by the membership.
There is some evidence that his representations of the Yanomamo as fierce, primordial, Stone Age, etc. (which I also disagree with) were used by powerful interests to justify land invasions, design non-contiguous island reservations to separate them so they “wouldn’t kill each other” (Albert). This was arguably beyond his control; it is also arguable that he could have done more to publicly object/denounce these invasions and projects.
His election to the NAS is what it is. Sahlins resigned in protest, including because the NAS has agreed to collaborate in military projects. That’s his right, and I respect his decision, though I don’t necessarily agree with it.
“And of course Khoe people, herders and close linguistic relatives of the San ‘bushmen’ (indicating recent divergence from a common ancestor), have exhibited plenty of instances of organised violence, including taking the initiative in attacking and killing the Portuguese pirate Francisco de Almeida and his men in 1510. This was clearly a planned raid conducted by people who knew what they were doing when it came to fighting other groups. Communal violence seems to be related more to the economy than anything else, and not to do with a 100,000 year old tradition of non-violent living.”
So it would seem, yes. However,
“To make the point as strongly as I can: if we were to learn that certain Bushmen groups had erected skyscrapers and were driving over paved roads on home-made bicycles two hundred or even two thousand years ago, that would have no bearing on the method I am describing here . . .”
To understand the method (and I don’t mean Stanislavsky!), you GOTTA read the book. And if you don’t WANNA read the book, then read at least the intro: http://soundingthedepths.blogspot.com/2011/02/introduction.html
Sheesh, here I am a fellow of the National Academy of Sciences, and I STILL can’t get no respect. . .
Although I do not agree with a lot of Diamond’s propositions I don’t hate him. I like the fact that he puts some ideas in the table and create a fuss. And I always tell myself that I need to read Pinker’s works with more attention. On the other hand, I am familiar with Chagnon works, its topic and the debate around it, and all I can say is that I’m not convinced by his arguments. Aside from the political and ethical implications in what he did, I think Chagnon did not understand a lot about the Yanomami and Amerindian societies in general and made big exaggeration and wrong assumptions surrounding amazonian warfare, relatedness and kinship. It does not matter how much data you gather if your premises and observation are wrong.
Anyway, regarding Amazonian pre-colonial history, I was thinking about the Central Amazonia, the Amazon river itself and the Omagua, Aysuare, Paguana and Cocama occupation. Heckenberger’s findings in the Xingu area contribute to the hypothesis that they had “polites” or “federations” in Amazonian Basin. According to my colleagues the occurrence of palisades, pits and other warlike structures is restricted to some archaeological sites and is recurrent in a specific time frame. Some speculate that it must be related to the Tupi arrival in the Amazon river, coming from the Atlantic Coast.
Why don’t we be really nasty? Has anyone stopped to consider that for someone as old, established, and distinguished as Sahlins, resigning from the NAS may amount to little more than giving the finger to an old enemy and rekindling a bit of attention to the academic quarrels on which they stand on opposite sides? The downside cost is near zero.
What has the gesture achieved? A bit of media attention that is already yesterday’s news (what were they on about?) for most readers. A flurry of Punch and Judy exchanges on anthropology-related sites. Tempest in a teapot. Perhaps a footnote in a future history of the field.
Having just suggested small and spiteful motives of no great consequence for Sahlins’ action, I must also, in good conscience, recommend his masterful summary of Western political thought: The Western Illusion of Human Nature. A masterful tour de force, it compresses the core of his thought into 66 pages available as a free download from the Prickly Pear Press.
The Western Illusion of Human Nature can be found at
http://ebooksfreeforyou2.blogspot.com.ar/2012/11/marshall-sahlins-western-illusion-of.html?goback=%2Egde_120314_member_217401936
There is a rising international response supporting Sahlins’ stance. Marshall shared with me a message he received form Professor, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, of the National Museum, Rio de Janeiro, in which de Castro wrote,
“Chagnon’s writings on the Yanomami of Amazonia have contributed powerfully to reinforce the worst prejudices against this indigenous people, who certainly do not need the kind of stereotyping pseudo-scientific anthropology Chagnon has chosen to pursue at their cost. The Yanomami are anything but the nasty, callous sociobiological robots Chagnon makes them look – projecting, in all likelihood, his perception of his own society (or personality) onto the Yanomami. They are an indigenous people who have managed, against all odds, to survive in their traditional ways in an Amazonia increasingly threatened by social and environmental destruction. Their culture is original, robust and inventive; their society is infinitely less “violent” than Brazilian or American societies.
Virtually all anthropologists who have worked with the Yanomami, many of them with far larger field experience with this people than Chagnon, find his research methods objectionable (to put it mildly) and his ethnographic characterizations fantastic. Chagnon’s election to the NAS does not do honor to American science nor to anthropology as a discipline, and it also bodes ill to the Yanomami. As far as I am concerned, I deem Chagnon an enemy of Amazonian Indians. I can only thank Prof. Sahlins for his courageous and firm position in support of the Yanomami and of anthropological science.”
http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/02/26/the-destruction-of-conscience-in-national-academy-of-sciences/
Thanks where thanks are due. But the world is cruel. Justin Bieber has 35,060,015 Twitter followers.
That certainly makes sense in terms of timing. Are there any published works setting out the evidence for this?
…so let’s all live joyless science-free lives where legal argumentation counts for more than finding out about the world. If yours is a humanist position, then humanism is rubbish.
Methinks this could only be true if you define ‘violence’ in a particular way. Not that Brazilian and American society, especially in the 1960s, was wonderful, by any means, but per capita violence is clearly lower than in Yanomami communities, and the emphasis on being a killer is, or at least was, less. The argument, it seems to me, should focus on overriding the idea that violence in a community justifies destroying it with violence.
Marshall Sahlins following on from Marcel Mauss is a man of enormous integrity and a life time debunker of anthropological bunk. Not to mention an incredible wit as everyone knows. We need more like them.
@Al West
“Are there any published works setting out the evidence for this?”
I heard this hypothesis in a conference by Eduardo Goés Neves, one of Heckenberger’s collaborators researching in Central Amazonia. I think Lathrap held a similar hypothesis in the “Upper Amazon”, forty years ago!
Yes, I thought he had said something along those lines – I was rather hoping for something newer, though, especially given that many of the earlier models have been overturned (‘tropical forest culture’, etc), and given that there is now much more data to go by. Thanks for the hint, though.
@Al West
For someone who finds the whole Chagnon debate dull and boring, you’ve spent an inordinate amount of time commenting on it.
Not as new as Heckenberger, but you should check out Peter Stahl in Reviews of Archaeology–can’t remember the date– he was in a similar feud, as was Heckenberger, with Betty Meggers. This spilled in to Science magazine and American Antiquity @ 2000-2001.
Also check out the Amazonian Dark Earth literature, and a new edited volume by D. Schaan on sacred landscapes in Amazonia.
@John: not quite sure how the Justin Bieber comment follows from the Counterpunch excerpt. Clarification?
Additionally, does the world not being fair mean we should just passively accept inequality, abuse, and a lack of ethics? I can’t help but see a connection between those who posted ‘who cares if Chagnon was unethical and abusive of/to the Yanomami’ and subject position, including in relation to a rather limited understanding of what constitutes (a) harm–especially in relation to structural and symbolic violence, structural inequality, and diminished health and longevity. Then again, if one is not being adversely affected by these issues, because unlike the Yanomami they are understood not only as human but as The Universal Human Being (the de facto norm for all comparisons of appropriate humanity), then I guess it becomes easier not to see what ‘real’ harm Chagnon did to the Yanomami–or others, by advancing sociobiological theories of some human beings as evolutionary throwbacks and inherently violent and aggressive.
Perhaps rethinking why anthropological ethics matter and what constitutes (a) harm is worth rethinking. Including in relation to ‘scientific’ research from biological anthropologists, such as discussed here: http://blogs.plos.org/neuroanthropology/2012/08/21/social-position-drives-gene-regulation-of-the-immune-system/.