Napoleon Chagnon

Napoleon Chagnon
Born	(1938-08-27) August 27, 1938 Port Austin, Michigan
Nationality	American
Institutions	University of Michigan Pennsylvania State University Northwestern University UC-Santa Barbara University of Missouri
Alma mater	University of Michigan (B.A., M.A., Ph.D.)
Thesis	Yanomamö Warfare, Social Organization and Marriage Alliances (1966)
Doctoral advisor	Leslie White
Known for	Reproductive theory of violence, ethnography of Yanomamö
Influences	Meyer Fortes, Sewall Wright, E.O. Wilson

Napoleon Alphonseau Chagnon (/ˈʃæɡnən/ SHAG-nən; born August 27, 1938) is an American anthropologist, professor of anthropology at the University of Missouri in Columbia and member of the National Academy of Sciences. Chagnon is known for his long-term ethnographic field work among the Yanomamö, a society of indigenous tribal Amazonians, in which he used an evolutionary approach to understand social behavior in terms of genetic relatedness. His work has centered around the analysis of violence among tribal peoples, and, using socio-biological analyses, he has advanced the argument that among the Yanomami violence is fueled by an evolutionary process in which successful warriors have more offspring. His 1967 ethnography Yanomamö: The Fierce People has become a bestseller and is frequently assigned in introductory anthropology courses.

Admirers have him as having been a pioneer of scientific anthropology. Chagnon has been called the "most controversial anthropologist" in the United States in a New York Times Magazine profile preceding the publication of Chagnon's most recent book, Noble Savages: My Life Among Two Dangerous Tribes—the Yanomamö and the Anthropologists, a scientific memoir.

Early life and education

Chagnon was born in Port Austin, Michigan and was the second of twelve children. After enrolling at the Michigan College of Mining and Technology in 1957, he transferred to the University of Michigan after his freshman year and there received a bachelor's degree in 1961, an M.A. in 1963, and a Ph.D. in 1966 under the tutelage of Leslie White. Based on seventeen months of fieldwork begun in 1964, Chagnon's thesis examined the relationship between kinship and the social organization of Yanomamö villages.

Career

Chagnon is best known for his long-term ethnographic field work among the Yanomamö, a society of indigenous tribal Amazonians that live in the border area between Venezuela and Brazil. Working primarily in the headwaters of the upper Siapa and upper Mavaca Rivers in Venezuela, he conducted fieldwork from the mid-1960s until the latter half of the 1990s. According to Chagnon, when he arrived he realised that the theories he had been taught during his training had shortcomings, because contrary to what they predicted, raiding and fighting, often over women, was endemic. Due to his constantly asking questions, Chagnon was nicknamed "pesky bee" by the Yanomamö. A major focus of his research was the collection of genealogies of the residents of the villages that he visited, and from these he would analyze patterns of relatedness, marriage patterns, cooperation, and settlement pattern histories. The degree of kinship was seen by Chagnon as important for the forming of alliances in social interactions, including conflict.

Chagnon's methods of analysis are widely seen as having been influenced by sociobiology. As Chagnon described it, Yanomamö society produced fierceness, because that behavior furthered male reproductive success. According to Chagnon, the success of men in violent interaction and even killing, was directly related to how many wives and children they had. At the level of the villages, the war-like populations expanded at the expense of their neighbors. Chagnon's positing of a link between reproductive success and violence cast doubt on the sociocultural perspective that cultures are constructed from human experience. An enduring controversy over Chagnon's work has been described as a microcosm of the conflict between biological and sociocultural anthropology.

Chagnon's ethnography, Yanomamö: The Fierce People was published in 1968 and later published in more than five editions and is commonly used as a text in university-level introductory anthropology classes, making it the all-time bestselling anthropological text. Chagnon was also a pioneer in the field of visual anthropology. He collaborated with ethnographic filmmaker Tim Asch and produced a series of more than twenty ethnographic films documenting Yanomamö life. The ethnographic film The Ax Fight, showing a fight among two Yanomami groups and analyzing it as it relates to kinship networks, is considered a classic in ethnographic film making.

In 2012 he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. Marshall Sahlins, who has been a major critic of Chagnon resigned from the Academy and cited Chagnon's induction as a reason.

Controversies

Darkness in El Dorado

In 2000, Patrick Tierney in his book Darkness in El Dorado accused Chagnon and his colleague James Neel, among other things, of exacerbating a measles epidemic among the Yanomamö people. Groups of historians, epidemiologists, anthropologists, and filmmakers, who had direct knowledge of the events, investigated Tierney's claims. These groups ultimately rejected the worst allegations concerning the measles epidemic. In its report, which was later rescinded, a task force of the American Anthropological Association (AAA) was critical of certain aspects of Chagnon's work, such as his portrayal of the Yanomamö and his relationships with Venezuelan government officials.

The AAA convened the task force in February 2001 to investigate some of the allegations made in Tierney's book. Their report, which was issued by the AAA in May 2002, held that Chagnon had both represented the Yanomamö in harmful ways and failed in some instances to obtain proper consent from both the government and the groups he studied. However, the Task Force stated that there was no support to the claim that Chagnon and Neel began a measles epidemic. In June 2005, however, the AAA voted over two-to-one to rescind the acceptance of the 2002 report, noting that "although the Executive Board's action will not, in all likelihood, end debate on ethical standards for anthropologists, it does seek to repair damage done to the integrity of the discipline in the El Dorado case".

Most of the allegations made in Darkness in El Dorado were publicly rejected by the Provost's office of the University of Michigan in November 2000. For example, the interviews upon which the book was based all came from members of the Salesian Society (an official society of the Roman Catholic Church) which Chagnon had criticized, and thus angered, in his book.

Tierney has since claimed that "Experts I spoke to then had very different opinions than the ones they are expressing now."

Brazilian director José Padilha revisits the Darkness in El Dorado controversy in his documentary Secrets of the Tribe. The film, screened at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival was nominated for a Grand Jury Prize. It includes testimonials from key players. Alice Dreger, an historian of medicine and science, who considers herself an outsider to the debate, concluded after a year of research that Tierney's claims were false and the American Anthropological Association was complicit and irresponsible in helping spread these falsehoods and not protecting "scholars from baseless and sensationalistic charges".

Anthropological critiques of his work

Anthropologist Marshall Sahlins, one of Chagnon's graduate teachers, has criticized Chagnon's methods, pointing out that Chagnon acknowledges behavior contemptible to his informants by violating food-sharing obligations. Sahlins has claimed that Chagnon's trade of steel weaponry for blood samples and genealogical information amounted to "participant-instigation" which encouraged economic competition and violence. Lastly, Sahlins has argued that Chagnon's publications, which contend that violent Yanomami men are conferred with reproductive advantages, make false assumptions in designating killers and omit other variables that explain reproductive success. In 2013, Sahlins resigned from the National Academy of Sciences, in part in protest of Chagnon's election to the body. Other researchers of the Yanomami such as Brian Ferguson have argued that Chagnon himself contributed to escalating violence among the Yanomami by offering machetes, axes, and shotguns to selected groups to elicit their cooperation.

Written works

Books

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Film

Chagnon worked with ethnographic filmmaker Tim Asch to produce at least forty films on Yanomamo culture, including The Feast (1969), The Ax Fight (1975), and Magical Death (1988). These films, especially The Ax Fight, are widely used in anthropological and visual culture curriculum and are considered to be among the most important ethnographic films ever produced.

See also

• Visual anthropology
• The Trap (television documentary series); Chagnon features in The Trap, a BBC documentary.

External links

• Brockmann, John. "Edge Special Event feat. Napoleon Chagnon", Edge.org, 6 June 2013.
• Silva, Stacey. "Meeting The Fierce People", Daily Nexus, 20 January 1988.
• D'Antonio, Michael. "Napoleon Chagnon's War of Discovery", LA Times Magazine, 30 January 2000.
• Grossman, Andrew. "Napoleon Chagnon's Waterloo", The Dartmouth Review, 30 October 2000.
• Wallace, Scott. "Napoleon in Exile", National Geographic Adventure Magazine, April 2002.
• Napoleon Chagnon at the Internet Movie Database