“There are enormous numbers of pieces to this puzzle,” the anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon wrote to me in February 2009. “The problem is to sort out this mess and find the [pieces] that will lead you to the closest approximation to the truth.”
Taken out of context, Chagnon might have been describing his own experience studying the Yanomamö people. He faced a monumental task in the South American fieldwork he began in 1964. The Yanomamö language was metaphorically rich, the conditions dangerous.
Yet in studying the Yanomamö, Chagnon elected to conduct not only traditional ethnographic research, but also complex quantitative research. Besides bringing in a shotgun to deal with predators, Chagnon also lugged solar-powered computers to his remote research site when they became available.
But Chagnon, in that February 2009 email, wasn’t talking about his own work. He was advising me about mine.
I was trying, as a historian of science, to understand the culture in which Chagnon lived: academic anthropology. Specifically, I was trying to figure out why the American Anthropological Association had put Chagnon on trial from 2001 to 2002 over charges made by the self-styled “anthropological journalist” Patrick Tierney.
In the email he signed “Shaki” — the name the Yanomamö had given him, translating roughly to “pesky bee” — I don’t think Chagnon was suggesting he found me unqualified or potentially lacking in fortitude. I think he was sympathetically acknowledging the challenges I faced.
Much had happened before and after Tierney had first publicly accused Chagnon and the late geneticist James Neel of high crimes and misdemeanors in a New Yorker article published in October 2000. That article excerpted the book that would emerge soon after, Darkness in El Dorado: How Scientists and Journalists Devastated the Amazon (Norton).
Tierney’s claims included most significantly that Neel and Chagnon likely started a 1968 measles epidemic among the Yanomamö. In Tierney’s fantasy, Neel and Chagnon used a measles-causing vaccine and, in a Nazi-style eugenic experiment, let the resultant epidemic run wild. There were plenty of other charges made against Chagnon by Tierney — making up data, causing warfare, harming the Yanomamö with blatantly false representations, and so on.
Two of Chagnon’s critics in anthropology, Terence Turner and Leslie Sponsel, didn’t wait for Tierney’s works to appear in public before lighting the fuse of the “impending scandal.” They wrote to the AAA president to alert her that the “profession as a whole” would soon be under scrutiny. “In its scale, ramifications, and sheer criminality and corruption,” they concluded, the scandal was “unparalleled in the history of anthropology.”
As I’ve been reading over my correspondence with Nap since his death last month at the age of 81, I find myself perversely, selfishly grateful for the complete failure of the AAA’s leadership. If the AAA had bothered — like other scientific societies — to listen to scholars who checked the evidence, including people like the historians M. Susan Lindee, Robert Cox, Diane Paul, and John Beatty, then they might never have bungled the task so badly.
That means I would never have gotten to spend a year with a hundred of Nap’s friends and enemies, thinking hard about how we get “to the closest approximation to the truth” — and why some scholars don’t seem to see that as their primary duty.
It wasn’t difficult for me to see why Nap rubbed some people the wrong way. One time we were traveling to California on the same flights to attend the same conference — we both lived in Michigan — and at the outset of the trip I insisted he use the airport’s loaner wheelchair to save his energy. (He was suffering from COPD, presumably from decades of breathing in smoke from cooking fires and unfiltered cigarettes.)
No doubt feeling like I was diminishing his manhood, he proceeded to introduce me to the TSA agent as his “good-looking personal assistant.” When I told the agent, with some exasperation, that I had a Ph.D., Nap explained that he enjoyed very qualified assistants.
Only later did I realize this was probably meant as one of his inside jokes. When Chagnon first agreed to work with me on the history of what happened to him at the AAA, he had laid out two conditions: I must spell the name of the people he studied “Yanomamö,” and I must never suggest he had been Neel’s assistant.
Later, he imposed one additional condition: I must not mention that he had been hospitalized from stress by the AAA affair.
But in general he understood he had to be the subject, that it was my turn to be a pesky bee. He answered all my questions, found records I needed, and helped me think about what I might be missing. He was always interested in whatever I found, even if the substance pissed him off.
Asked to write this retrospective, to check my sense of Chagnon I called two colleagues of his with whom I hadn’t spoken in years: Raymond Hames of the University of Nebraska at Lincoln and Edward Hagen at Washington State University at Vancouver.
They knew Nap far better than I did. Hames collaborated for many years with Chagnon in field research on the Yanomamö. Hagen had been a graduate student in Chagnon’s department at the University of California at Santa Barbara when Tierney’s claims broke. Hagen took on the task of looking into Tierney’s claims, circulating his findings in real time during the height of the controversy.
Like all of the people I met who had worked closely with Nap, Ray and Ed never had a misty view of the man. They readily acknowledge he could be difficult, even inappropriate.
That said, Ray and Ed both confirmed my sense of Nap’s worldview — that he always tried to put the pursuit of truth before his own needs. Like every scholar, Chagnon could certainly dig in his heels. But he saw scientific knowledge as something to which one often had to sacrifice oneself.
In our recent conversations, Ed and Ray both told me about cases where Chagnon checked collaborators’ and critics’ claims alike against his own data and published the results, reversing or adding nuance to his stance.
Some scholars don’t seem to see the truth as their primary duty.
Challenged on his statistical claims about the relatively high reproductive success of men who have killed others, for example, Chagnon re-analyzed his data, correcting some problems with his original claims. He also gave others his data to check and to publish with re-analyses using better statistical methods. He certainly wasn’t a perfect scholar — Chagnon would sometimes overstate claims, as Hames observed in our conversations — but he did take seriously many challenges to his work and looked to data to try to get “to the closest approximation of the truth.”
My own experience working with Chagnon on his history confirmed this. He sometimes recalled details incorrectly — for example, he might reverse the order of two events, or attribute a remark to the wrong person. Whenever I presented him the documentary evidence of his apparent error, he fully engaged.
The peer-reviewed article I ultimately published in Human Natureabout the AAA task force is the angriest academic piece I have ever written. I know why: I had come to realize that, if there had ever been a legitimate factual basis for an investigation by the AAA of major ethical crimes, Chagnon himself would have acknowledged that.
The reason he was willing to work with me for over a year was not because he had a big ego — which he did. It was because he knew the “closest approximation to the truth” would exonerate him. He knew that Tierney had misrepresented so much.
The chair of the AAA task force knew it too. That was Jane Hill, former president of the AAA. During my research, Sarah Hrdy shared with me a previously confidential message, dated April 15, 2002, in which Hill responded to Hrdy’s concerns about the task force’s work.
“Burn this message,” Hill told Hrdy. “The book [by Tierney] is just a piece of sleaze, that’s all there is to it (some cosmetic language will be used in the report, but we all agree on that). But I think the AAA had to do something because I really think that the future of work by anthropologists with indigenous peoples in Latin America — with a high potential to do good — was put seriously at risk by its accusations, and silence on the part of the AAA would have been interpreted as either assent or cowardice. Whether we’re doing the right thing will have to be judged by posterity.”
It’s easy to understand the calculation Hill and others were making. Sympathetic to their subjects, anthropologists had turned en masse by 2000 to the question of how to witness and hopefully stop abuses and atrocities.
Sometimes that rescue work meant condemning colleagues. Nap made an easy target. But too often, as in this case, well-meaning anthropologist-activists were coming up with stories of good and evil without checking them against reality.
“I don’t dismiss the importance of thinking about moral frameworks,” Hagen told me. “That has a really important place in the academy.” But, he said, being resistant to facts means someone is engaged in something other than scholarship.
For his part, Hames pointed out that, by not being scientific — by favoring advocacy over scholarship — anthropologists were increasingly becoming just another interest group able to be ignored by government authorities.
Of course, the failure of facts in the Darkness case extended beyond academe. If The New Yorker and W.W. Norton had done proper fact-checking, so much mischief would have been avoided.
Still, the AAA made it all much worse. The AAA could have done what the National Academy of Sciences, the American Society of Human Genetics, the International Genetic Epidemiology Society, and the Society for Visual Anthropology did: looked at the facts and condemned Tierney. Instead, the AAA thanked Tierney “for his valuable service.”
A kangaroo court. A show trial. That’s how many saw the AAA investigation. The AAA membership eventually voted to rescind acceptance of the report.
“It was really amateur hour” at the AAA, Hagen told me. We talked about how it mirrors what we see in some other academic investigations, including under Title IX — career-determining decisions made without relatively cold factual examinations. Investigations that feel more like medieval witch trails.
Has it been getting better or worse? That’s an empirical question. I don’t know the answer. It sure doesn’t feel to me as if academics and journalists are spending more time these days being careful, fact-checking, admitting and correcting mistakes.
Consider the recent blog post published by science journalist John Horgan at Scientific American’s website, in which, in light of Nap’s death, he revisits his review of Darkness in El Dorado for the New York Times Book Review.
Horgan now confesses that, warned by Chagnon’s most prominent allies not to support Tierney’s falsehoods, he doubled down in his influential review: “I ended up making my review of Darkness more positive. I wanted Darkness to get a hearing.” He apologizes now not for amplifying a work full of lies, but only for understating the subtleties in Chagnon’s work.
In his 2000 review of Darkness for the Washington Post, the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins also endorsed Tierney’s bullshit. In that review, speaking of things he knew nothing about, Sahlins seconded Tierney’s sharp criticism of Chagnon for pressing the Yanomamö for information about their dead: “As for the dead,” Sahlins wrote, “they are completely excluded from Yanomami society, ritually as well as verbally, as a necessary condition of the continued existence of the living.”
“It’s a goddamned lie,” Hames told me when we talked soon after Nap died. “You walk into any Yanomamö village on any evening, and you will hear people mourning their beloved deceased family members. You will hear the sobbing. They never forget.”
The Yanomamö dead, Ray told me, “are not forgotten and obliterated from memory. They’re kept alive by the people who love them.”
After we hung up, I thought about why Ray was harping on this particular factual error. Then it came to me.
The people who became like kin to Chagnon never expected the people who considered themselves journalists and scholars to loveNap.
They did, however, expect that journalists and scholars would feel as Nap did — that we ought to always be aiming for the earthly truth. Because that is how we can begin to take care of each other.
