P.A.O. Productions
Search the site
Search the site
Search the site
The Fierce People?
Chagnon should have considered the effect his actions would have on the Yanomami, and devised a more culturally appropriate method of study. Studying earlier literature and information before making contact would have suggested the unfeasibility of his approach. At the very least, better observation of the effects of his methods during his first visit to the Yanomamö in 1964 should have led to a reformulation of his methods for subsequent visits. Neither of these was borne out. In his concern with his own agenda - Chagnon effectually forced the capitalist doctrine of “free exchange” over a non-Western culture and implicitly treated the Yanomamö as easy targets for bribery. For these and other reasons, which are discussed in this paper, it is clear that Napoleon Chagnon was unethical in his research and representation of the Yanomami.
Failure to review earlier literature
The first thing to do before beginning field research is to conduct preliminary research - to review earlier accounts and observations made by others. During the decades preceding Chagnon’s first visit to Venezuela, Christian missions, in an effort to win converts, distributed highly coveted farming implements among the Yanomami. The competition that resulted from this strategy drove many tribes to warfare. As a researcher, Chagnon should have made note of the outcome of these missionaries’ efforts and devised a better strategy for gleaning information. Having set up headquarters in the village of Bisaasi-teri, in the vicinity of one of the missions, he must have been aware of the results of the missionary strategy. Nevertheless, he continued to blithely bribe Yanomami for information. Taking advantage of the Yanomamö need for resources to further his own ends constituted a clear breach of ethics. Besides the missionary data, Chagnon also should have reviewed the data collected by Hamilton Rice, who encountered the Yanomami in 1920 and again in 1924. Chagnon’s descriptions of the Yanomami suggest an unfamiliarity with this earlier work.
Lack of objectivity
Having apparently overlooked or discounted this earlier information, what did Chagnon aim to prove? Chagnon himself put it best when he told an interviewer for the Los Angeles Times that he had written “in reaction to the ‘garbage’ he had learned in graduate school about ‘noble savages.’” Apparently, having heard rumors of the savageness of the Yanomami, he set out to prove the existence of this modal personality. He was therefore predisposed to interpret everything he witnessed or experienced based on the assumption of this personality, even when, as on many occasions, these incidents were clearly rooted in his own actions. He assumed that the Yanomami “need” to conduct warfare.
Chagnon’s biases were probably influenced to some extent by those of his mentor, James Neel, a self-professed geneticist and eugenicist who led the multi-disciplinary teams of which Chagnon was a part. Neel believed that the principles of natural selection operate most freely in groups such as the Yanomami; perhaps this theoretical orientation is at the root of Chagnon’s own genetic bias. Operating under the assumption that violence was inevitable, Chagnon tied the practice of female infanticide to warfare and the doctrine of natural selection to posit a genetically based explanation of Yanomamö violence. He advanced this explanation as the objective reality despite an underlying lack of scientific objectivity. In so doing, he ignored one of the cardinal ethical guidelines set forth by the American Sociological Association (but applicable in anthropological research as well): researchers must maintain scientific objectivity.
Failure to adopt a scientific research method
In order to collect valid data in field research, it is necessary to be a good observer of incidents and practices in a culture. The operative word here is “observe;” this does not imply staging events to serve the ends of the researcher. When the actions of those under study are coerced or otherwise directly influenced, their validity as ethnographic data must be called into question. Chagnon committed this methodological transgression while filming “The Feast,” a pseudo-documentary of Yanomamö tribal life. In order to obtain a film of a Yanomamö peacemaking feast, he offered to provide every man in each of two enemy villages a machete if the village of Patanowa-teri were reconstructed and a feast held there. In effect, Chagnon paid the tribesmen for the film footage he was later to present to high praise. This misleading presentation of his “data” is ethically unsound, at least in the anthropological and social science communities.
Indeed, accounts of Chagnon’s anthropological adventures are full to the brim with similar instances of buying off informants to obtain information. According to his own accounts, Chagnon sought out “informants who might be considered ‘aberrant’ or ‘abnormal’ outcasts in their own society” and exchanged valuable goods with them for information about their villages. Aside from the question of whether data collected by such methods are truly valid, there is the question of the methodological soundness of such an approach. These data were presented apparently without much effort at confirmation by other means (descriptions of Chagnon’s behavior in the Tierney article suggest Chagnon gathered information about a village haphazardly and then moved on). Once again, the presentation of such data as unequivocally true is ethically unsound.
Treatment of research subjects
The most damning arguments against Chagnon, ethically speaking, have to do with his treatment of the Yanomami. He continually invaded their privacy and treated them in an undignified manner, even to the point of parodying and disrespecting their religious beliefs. The following cases provide an illustration.
In order to gather information for his genealogical records, Chagnon needed the names of individuals and their ancestors. The Yanomami protested that they did not speak these names, but Chagnon paid them in goods to bribe them into doing so. He also bribed children and took advantage of conflicts between individuals to gather information pertaining to subjects about which, because of tribal taboos, he had no claim to know. Such undignified actions were not limited to bribery and coercion; on at least two occasions Chagnon blatantly disrespected Yanomamö religious beliefs. Pablo Mejía, a Yanomamö who spoke with Tierney, related an incident he witnessed as a boy which involved Chagnon in a parody of the village shaman. Chagnon copied the shamanistic dress and song, and used copious amounts of yopo, a hallucinogenic drug ordinarily taken for the purpose of making contact with the spirit world. According to Mejía, Chagnon “always fired off his pistol when he entered the village, to prove that he was fiercer than the Yanomami. Everybody was afraid of him.” In another instance, a drunken Chagnon, with a comrade, staged a “mock raid” against the living quarters of a fellow anthropologist who was conducting research among the Yanomani for his Ph.D. These instances of such blatant disregard for Yanomamö beliefs and practices are ethically inexcusable.
Failure to take a cultural relativist approach
One of the main goals of anthropological research is to accurately report the beliefs and practices of the people under study. In order to do this, the researcher must, as stated earlier, maintain her objectivity and act as an observer, not as a catalyst. However, the researcher must also adopt a research orientation sensitive to the particular idiosyncrasies of the culture under observation; that is to say, she must adopt a cultural relativist approach. As made painfully obvious in any number of instances, Napoleon Chagnon failed woefully in this respect.
The Yanomani, prior to Chagnon’s initial visit, were dependent on slash-and-burn agriculture but lacking in metal tools. Some, who had settled in the village of Bisaasi-teri, supported their lifestyle in part through “a trickle of trade goods” received for services performed. When Chagnon arrived on the scene, heavily laden with valuable agricultural implements such as machetes, he failed to consider the impact that such a sudden, rapid influx of tradable goods would be likely to have on Yanomamö culture. These goods, on his first and on subsequent expeditions, Chagnon distributed as payment for the cooperation of Yanomami who provided information or blood samples for his research. Chagnon made a practice of visiting village after village, trading valuable supplies for data of often questionable validity. Haphazard distribution of these resources (sometimes to only one of two rival groups) both created and exacerbated conflicts among the Yanomami.
One particularly tragic result of Chagnon’s approach occurred as part of the activities following the peacemaking festivities discussed earlier. His goal was to get footage of a feast ordinarily held to celebrate the military alliance of two villages, but Chagnon failed to consider the entire cultural meaning of such an occasion. The two newly allied villages followed the custom of choosing a new common enemy; after the feast a third village was raided and one person was killed. This could have been prevented had an active hand not been taken in determining outcomes for the people under study. As Chagnon was studying the Yanomami in general, all villages collectively constituted his group of research subjects. Both directly and indirectly, questionable methodology led to the harm of many of these subjects as side effects of warfare. One very important ethical guideline invoked for research involving human subjects is that the subjects not be harmed. Thus the breach of ethics here is clear.
Was Chagnon qualified to conduct research among the Yanomami?
An examination of the arguments presented thus far raises the question of whether Napoleon Chagnon was really qualified, academically and temperamentally, to do research among the Yanomami. His account of their allegedly high rate of violence based on genetic factors must be reconsidered. A much more likely explanation is found in his bumbling version of anthropological research - his actions led directly to the onset of violence. That is, of course, if one accepts the accounts of other anthropologists and researchers who have done studies of the Yanomami. Kenneth Good, for example, has witnessed a single war during his twelve years among them, in contrast to the great many apparently witnessed by Chagnon (no doubt as the result of his own activities). Data from other researchers, some of which predates Chagnon’s work (as in the case of the data collected by Hamilton Rice in 1924, forty years before Chagnon’s first journey to Venezuela) support a much more benevolent view of the Yanomamö lifestyle as quite different from the “state of chronic warfare” described in Yanomamö: The Fierce People. These criticisms are too numerous and too uniform to ignore.
Regarding his own assertions, Chagnon has continued to argue for their validity, even in the face of mounting criticism over the ethics of his research methods. These ethical challenges are too strong to ignore, yet Chagnon appears to have ignored them both during his research expeditions and afterward. In fact, he feels that he has done at least two Yanomamö villages a favor by serving as a “broker of peace!” It is worth noting that the headman of one of these villages, the village of Mishimishimabowei-teri, threatened to kill Chagnon if he did not provide a machete to a designated man; Chagnon had been distributing axes in the rival village in exchange for blood samples. This was interpreted as further evidence of Yanomamö violence, when it should have been interpreted as the result of inter-village conflicts born of a misguided approach to ethnographic research.
A survey of literature by Brian Ferguson (1995) found that most documented wars among the Yanomami could be attributed to factors from outside the communities, such the introduction of metal goods and diseases. Chagnon’s anthropological efforts threw a wrench in the stability of the entire region.
All this leads me to doubt the temperamental suitability of Napoleon Chagnon as an ethnographic researcher among these people. Someone who either cannot see the negative outcomes of his own work or chooses to ignore them, and who continues to utilize these same research methods in visit after visit is not ethically qualified to conduct field research.
Conclusion
Napoleon Chagnon continues to bask in eminence and professional respect for his thorough research among the Yanomami. Although he has been expelled from Yanomamö territory, the negative effects of his research continue in government policies and Yanomamö social organization. I do not mean to imply in this paper that Chagnon is wholly at fault; as stated earlier, he was a member of a multidisciplinary team led by James Neel between 1966 and 1971. The extensive damage done as a result of Neel’s measles vaccinations has been documented; however, this in no way lessens the deleterious influence of Chagnon’s work, and in any event is not the subject of this paper. Rather than being studied for its prestige and early influence, Chagnon’s work should be studied from the standpoint of ethics, much like the Stanley Milgram and Laud Humphreys cases are studied in the fields of psychology and sociology. The importance of preventing further such outrageous breaches of ethics in ethnographic research is clear.