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As is perhaps fitting given the evolutionary orientation of the University of Michigan's Anthropology Department at the time he received his doctorate (1966), Chagnon has emphasized an adaptive/evolutionary perspective in his writings. In the first edition of Yanomamö, for example, he stressed that one needed to see Yanomamö social life as an adaptation not only to the physical environment but also to the social and political environment—including chronic warfare.

Readers should keep in mind several points regarding Napoleon Chagnon as they proceed further into the politics surrounding the controversy.

First, Chagnon is a good writer. His chapter "Doing Fieldwork among the Yanomamö" has become a classic in the social sciences. It portrays in vivid terms his early fieldwork experiences in a way that captures the imagination of readers within and beyond anthropology. His basic ethnography of the Yanomami, Yanomamö, has sold perhaps three million copies—far more than any other ethnographic work in modern times.

Second, Chagnon is a dedicated field-worker. Unlike most anthropologists of his or the present generation, Chagnon has—admirably in my view—striven to go back to the Yanomami year after year to study them through time. He has made at least twenty-five visits since beginning his fieldwork among them in 1964, has resided among the Yanomami for over sixty-three months, and has visited more than sixty of their villages. Few anthropologists can make such a claim, especially for a group in a remote region that is far from the creature comforts of their own homes. The problem is that when the Venezuelan and Brazilian governments restricted his field access, Chagnon engaged in various efforts, some of them in violation of Venezuelan law, to continue studying the Yanomami.

Third, Chagnon is controversial. His adaptive/evolutionary approach runs counter to the dominant trend in cultural anthropology, which focuses on how cultural contexts shape human behavior. He is more concerned with the biological underpinnings of human behavior. In trying to make sense of Yanomami conflicts over women, Chagnon states (as quoted in an article about him in Scientific American): "I basically had to create . . . my own theory of society." The article continues: "Chagnon's Darwinian perspective on culture jibed with Harvard University scientist E. O. Wilson's 1975 treatise on animal behavior, Sociobiology. Chagnon—who tends to refer to his detractors as Marxists and left-wingers—thus became identified with that school of thought, which also made him unpopular among social scientists who believe that culture alone shapes human behavior" (Wong, 2001:2). Chagnon writes, "For better or worse, there is a definite bias in cultural anthropology favoring descriptions of tribal peoples that characterize them as hapless, hopeless, harmless, homeless, and helpless. . . . The Yanomamö are definitely not that kind of people, and it seemed reasonable to me to point that out, to try to capture the image of them that they themselves held. They frequently and sincerely told me . . . 'We are really fierce; Yanomamö are fierce people'." (1992 b:xv).

As previously noted, this depiction of the Yanomami as the "fierce people" has been challenged by other Yanomami specialists. There is a political context to this. During the debates over whether or not to set aside a large reserve in Brazil for the Yanomami in the 1980s and early 1990s—one was finally established in 1992—various Brazilian politicians used the depiction of the Yanomami as violent to suggest that they needed to be split up into several small reserves to reduce conflict among them. (The plan, not coincidentally, would have allowed for more gold mining in the region.) What upset many Yanomami specialists was that Chagnon spoke out against this misuse of his work by Brazilian politicians only in the English-speaking press, never in the Portuguese-speaking press of Brazil, where it would have done the most good.

Fourth, Chagnon has been far more forthcoming regarding the details of his fieldwork than have most anthropologists. He is quite open, for instance, about the manipulative techniques he adopted to gather information when informants lied to him, as well as about the lies he himself told to keep Yanomami from asking for his food. He openly admits that the Yanomami made death threats against him. Few anthropologists have been as candid about their fieldwork experiences as Chagnon, and fewer still at the time he wrote about them. Most anthropologists depict their fieldwork in fairly rosy terms, whether or not they actually experienced it that way. The problem for Chagnon is that certain of the fieldwork details he is so forthcoming about violate the American Anthropological Association's code of ethics