What Exactly Is the Yanomami Controversy?

The Accusations, continued . . .

(4) Tierney accuses Chagnon of fabricating the data used in Chagnon's most famous article, which appeared in Science in 1988. The article asserted that Yanomami men who murdered tended to have more wives and more children—or, phrased another way, that violence was an evolutionary adaptive principle (5) Tierney asserts that Chagnon acted unethically in collecting the genealogies needed for Chagnon's and Neel's research. The Yanomami have a taboo against naming deceased relatives. When asked about deceased relatives, Yanomami would invent names, essentially making a shambles of Chagnon's genealogical data. Tierney claims that Chagnon used unethical techniques to get around this difficulty. (6) Tierney asserts that Chagnon's self-depiction as being the first outsider to make contact with several Yanomami villages is untrue. Long before Chagnon arrived, Helena Valero, an outsider who was kidnapped by the Yanomami in 1932 and who lived among them for fifty years, had visited all the villages Chagnon claimed to have contacted. And (7) Tierney accuses Chagnon of violating Venezuelan law while participating in a plan with two prominent Venezuelans to establish a private Yanomami reserve that would have been controlled by the three of them. This is termed the FUNDAFACI (Foundation to Aid Peasant and Indigenous Families) project. For Chagnon, the project represented a way around the restrictions placed on his visiting the Yanomami by the Venezuelan government.

The publicity generated by Tierney's Darkness in El Dorado became part of the controversy. Here is a sampling of what the media said. ABC News.com reported: "Another red-hot scientific scandal. This time anthropologists and geneticists are getting a noisy wake-up call. A book written by journalist Patrick Tierney, titled Darkness in El Dorado, . . . raises a stink so high that the space station astronauts will get a whiff of it" (Regush 2000). Time asked: "What Have We Done to Them? . . . A new book charges scientists with abusing the famous Yanomami tribe, stirring fierce debate in academia" (Roosevelt 2000). USA Today noted that the "face of anthropology stands riddled with charges that its practitioners engaged in genocide, criminality and scientific misconduct" (Vergano 2000). Business Week added: "Tierney makes a persuasive argument that anthropologists for several decades engaged in unethical practices" (Smith 2000). The New Yorker spread across its cover: "What happened in the jungle? Patrick Tierney reports from South America on the anthropologist who may have gone too far" (October 9, 2000: cover overleaf).

How did anthropologists respond to the media reports? The New York Times wrote: A "new book about anthropologists . . . has set off a storm in the profession, reviving scholarly animosities, endangering personal reputations and, some parties say, threatening to undermine confidence in legitimate practices of anthropology" (Wilford and Romero 2000). The Chronicle of Higher Education reported: "Some anthropologists fear that their discipline faces a scandal because of the imminent publication of a book charging several prominent researchers with egregious misbehavior in their work with Amazon tribes. . . . Scholars are worried that the allegations will make it hard for all cultural anthropologists who do fieldwork to persuade their subjects and the public that they are responsible, objective, and trustworthy" (Miller 2000b).

As time went on, other accusations were piled on top of the ones listed above.

Regarding Neel, there were two. First, critics suggested that he had never gotten informed consent for his medical research among the Yanomami. (Informed consent, touched on above, involves getting formal permission from subjects to conduct research on them and is required today in all medical research.) Even if standards of informed consent during the 1960s differed from those existing today, several critics asked if Neel couldn't have done more to inform the Yanomami about the details of his research. This constitutes a critical issue because many Yanomami today claim that they had been led to expect additional medical assistance that drew on the results of Neel's research among them. This assistance has not been forthcoming. Second, with the publication of Tierney's book many Yanomami came to realize that the blood collected during Neel's research was still being preserved in American laboratories. They felt they had never been informed that this would occur. While some Yanomami want to be suitably paid for their deceased relatives' blood, others want it destroyed, viewing it as a sacrilege to preserve the blood of dead Yanomami. What the Yanomami concur on is that they want to reopen negotiations regarding the blood and are willing to contest continued use of it until a suitable agreement is reached.

Regarding Chagnon, three accusations came to the fore. First, various anthropologists in Brazil and the United States brought up the old question of why Chagnon had never openly opposed misuse of his work in the Brazilian press. It seemed a violation of the American Anthropological Association's ethical injunction to do no harm. Second, some anthropologists brought up Chagnon's earlier criticism of Davi Kopenawa, a prominent Yanomami activist who played a key role in the effort to establish a Yanomami reserve in Brazil. They asked if it was right that an anthropologist should undermine the work of an indigenous activist seeking to protect his people. And third, there was the question of how Chagnon should distribute the more than $1 million he made in royalties from his best-selling book Yanomamö. Chagnon at one time had set up a fund to assist the Yanomami, but there is no record of the fund ever doing anything to help them. Many asked, shouldn't Chagnon share some of this money with the Yanomami who assisted in the research? Clearly, Chagnon could not have written the book without their help.

As the controversy continued, Tierney was subjected to criticism as well. Several supporters of Neel and Chagnon suggested that Darkness in El Dorado was full of inaccuracies. They described many of the footnotes used to back up statements in the main text as distortions of the original sources. Some critics suggested Tierney's book was little more than a malicious, irresponsible attack on two prominent scientists.

With all the attention focused on the Yanomami controversy, we might ask whether the Yanomami have benefited in some way from the controversy that has swirled around them. To date, the answer is essentially no. Despite all the publicity and all the good intentions expressed by anthropological organizations and anthropologists, the Yanomami essentially still live under the same tenuous health conditions as before. This is a scandal in itself. It suggests that the Yanomami seem, for many anthropologists, to be primarily tools for intellectual argument and academic advancement.