Science Friction_ Where the Known Meets the Unknown - Michael Shermer [50]
As Eric and I were busy working with our hammocks and nets, all of a sudden out of the night two big figures burst into the hut screaming, “Aaaaaaaaaahhhhhhh!” grabbing us, and shoving us toward our hammocks, ripping the mosquito netting. My heart skipped a beat. I heard Eric gasp. Bracing myself against a table to keep from falling, I twisted around and saw in the glow of the Coleman Chagnon and the French anthropologist, both of them completely drunk. . . .
Still screaming, I grabbed Chagnon with one arm and the Frenchman with the other and went stampeding out the door with them. There something tripped me up, and I sprawled on the ground, watching as Chagnon and his friend rolled into the eight-foot-deep pit from which the Indians had excavated clay for the hut. Lying there panting, I looked up and saw Lizot emerge from the darkness. “Tranquilo, Ken, tranquilo,” he said. “Take it easy, they were just joking.”13
Note that Tierney leaves off Lizot’s qualifier “they were just joking.” It was a prank! Tierney turned horseplay into horror. Sure, Good was not amused by the caper, and no doubt alcohol enhanced the pranksters’ enthusiasm for playing a practical joke before the long grind of fieldwork was to begin. But regardless of how it is received, a prank is not an “attack” or a “raid.”
In my interview with Chagnon he initially called Tierney a “disgusting, slippery, conniving guy,” but later reflected that perhaps Tierney’s book was simply a case of self-deception, where the author’s political agenda of protecting the Yanomamö forced him to misread the data and ethnographies of those he perceived as harming his self-assigned charges.14 At first I went along with Chagnon in his assessment, as I have witnessed firsthand how powerful self-deception can be among such ideologues as creationists and Holocaust deniers. The more you believe in your own cause, the easier it is to get others to go along. While there may be some self-deception at work here, I fail to see how it can account for the butchering Tierney made of this humorously intended escapade.
Finally, what of Chagnon’s “attack dogs”? It turns out that Chagnon is a serious dog trainer—he even wrote a book on the subject titled Toward the Ph.D. for Dogs: Obedience Training from Novice Through Utility, published by Harcourt in 1974. Chagnon was merely demonstrating to his students his highly trained dogs.
The Anthropology Wars
Tierney’s book is only the latest in a long line of skirmishes and battles that have erupted in the century-long anthropology wars. The reason such controversies draw so much public attention is that what’s at stake is nothing less than the true nature of human nature, and how that nature can most profitably be studied—through rigorous quantitative science or through some other set of methods.
Derek Freeman’s lifelong battle with the legacy of Margaret Mead, for example, was not really about whether Samoan girls are promiscuous or prudish. Mead’s philosophy (which she inherited from her mentor Franz Boas) that human nature is primarily shaped by the environment was apparently supported by her “discovery” that Samoan girls are promiscuous (because in other cultures promiscuity is taboo and therefore sexual behavior—and by implication all behavior—is culturally malleable). Freeman says Mead was duped by a couple of Samoan hoaxers and had she been more rigorous and quantitative in her research she would have discovered this fact before going to press with what became the all-time anthropological bestseller—Coming of Age in Samoa. But, says Freeman, Mead’s ideology trumped her science and anthropology lost.15
So heated can these debates become that in at least one instance it has led to the fissioning of an academic department.