Science Friction_ Where the Known Meets the Unknown - Michael Shermer [49]
In a private e-mail that was forwarded to and published in Newsweek (without Chagnon’s permission), the embattled anthropologist expressed himself like a true alpha male: “I am encouraged to believe that The New Yorker and W. W. Norton [Tierney’s excerpter and publisher] are sticking their peckers into a very powerful pickle slicer.”8
In a two-page account designed to arouse emotion in the reader (it does), Tierney recounts a story told to him by the anthropologist Kenneth Good, who spent twelve years among the Yanomamö (first as a graduate student of Chagnon, then with the German ethologist Iranäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt, and finally with the cultural anthropologist Marvin Hlarris). Good recalled in a 1995 interview with Tierney that he and Chagnon “used to go down to bars and drink together. It was an embarrassment, but I did it because he was going to be my chair. He was the type of guy who had German shepherd attack dogs, and he’d have people come over to his house in the afternoon and he d have the students dress up in padded suits and have the dogs attack them. Oh, yes. They’d have to put out an arm or a leg and the dog would attack. Students could get injured.”9 Tierney then turns to Good’s book, Into the Heart, to retell the story of a violent outburst by Chagnon. Here is how Tierney describes it:
During his first, nervous night in the jungle, Good was terrified when two screaming men burst inside, pushed him into a table, and ripped his mosquito netting. In the ensuing tussle, all three men wound up sprawling on the ground, bruised and covered with mud, but not before Good recognized his assailants as Chagnon and another anthropologist, both drunk. Good, a tall, husky man, was so angry he threw Chagnon, who is much smaller, over an embankment.
“Tranquilo, Ken,” Lizot said, as he helped bring peace.
Fortunately, Chagnon could not remember what had happened to him when he woke up, rather bruised and muddy, the next day. Good never forgot the experience, however. It was the only time anyone ever attacked him in Yanomamiland. “In my twelve years, I witnessed only one raid.”10
Attack dogs and drunken brawls—it would appear from this narrative that Chagnon is the fierce one, not the Yanomamö. Perhaps, as Tierney argues, even the occasional acts of violence committed by the Yanomamö were nothing more than Chagnon-stimulated outbursts, like something out of The Gods Must Be Crazy, where the mere introduction of a Coke bottle disrupts the entire !Kung culture (Chagnon’s critics began making this analogy soon after the film’s release).11 As the jacket flap copy for Darkness in El Dorado dramatically concludes: “Tierney explores the hypocrisy, distortions, and humanitarian crimes committed in the name of research, and reveals how the Yanomami’s internecine warfare was, in fact, triggered by the repeated visits of outsiders who went looking for a ‘fierce’ people whose existence lay primarily in the imagination of the West.”
Tierney’s tale above was so inflammatory that I read it aloud to my associates at Skeptic, exclaiming about Chagnon, “Can you believe this guy?” I privately wondered whether we all had been duped by him. In fact, Darkness in El Dorado is filled with such stories, told mostly in Tierney’s words with snippets of partial quotes from his various sources. This literary style always makes me uneasy, so when I interviewed Good I asked him about this incident. He indicated that it happened pretty much as Tierney summarized it, adding that it was more than a little irritating that his mosquito net was torn (malaria-carrying mosquitoes infest the Amazon) and that he was not at all amused by his mentor’s inappropriate behavior.12
It was with much interest, then, that when Good kindly sent me a copy of Into the Heart that I read the original account. Here is Good’s rather different description of the event Tierney portrayed as an act of inebriated violence:
Chagnon, Lizot, and the French anthropologist all knew the Yanomami, and of course their reputation for violence, and