Science Friction_ Where the Known Meets the Unknown - Michael Shermer [57]
The village I’m living in really thinks I am the be-all and the end-all. I broke the final ice with them by participating in their dancing and singing one night. That really impressed them. They want to take me all over Waicaland to show me off. Their whole attitude toward me changed dramatically. Unfortunately, they want me to dance all the time now. You should have seen me in my feathers and loincloth!41
Contrast this passage, quoted by Tierney to incriminate Chagnon, with Good’s explanation of why he did nearly the same thing as Chagnon did in order to be accepted into Yanomamö culture.
What people, even some anthropologists, do not understand is how truly different it is to live with people whose conception of morality, laws, restrictions, controls differs so radically from ours. If you don’t protect yourself, if you don’t defend yourself, if you don’t demand respect—you don’t survive. It’s as simple as that. If you act down here as you would up there, you’ll be so intimidated, so worked over, you’ll be running out of here. And lots of guys have been.42
Despite these rather brutish descriptions of the Yanomamö, Good concludes: “The point is that it’s what you want to see, it’s what you are drawn to write about. And that’s supposedly anthropology Chagnon made them out to be warring, fighting, belligerent people, confrontations, showdowns, stealing women, raping them, cutting off their ears. That may be his image of the Yanomami; it’s certainly not mine.”43
This is spin-doctoring. The entire second half of Good’s book is a spellbinding narrative about how Good spent most of his time warding off men from his wife who, despite his best efforts, was gang-raped, beaten, had an earlobe torn off, and was stolen by a man while Good was away renewing his permit. And Good admits that this “was more or less standard conduct. Men will threaten, and they’ll carry out their threats, too. They’ll shoot a woman for not going with them. I know of more than one woman who has been killed for rejecting advances made under threat. What usually happens is that she goes along with it. There isn’t any choice. You go and make the best of it.”44
Who is the Hobbesian anthropologist? As an outsider with no relationship to any of the players in this anthropological drama, and no commitment to any theoretical position within the science, I fail to see any difference between Chagnon’s description of the Yanomamö and Good’s. Tierney has merely spin-doctored them toward his cause. The photographs in figures 5.1 and 5.2 visually illustrate these descriptions.
Science as a Candle in the Dark
The psychology and sociology of science is interesting and important in understanding the history and development of scientific theories and ideas, but the bottom-line question here is this: Did Chagnon get the science right? Some anthropologists question the level of violence reported by Chagnon, claiming that they have recorded different (and often lower) rates in other areas of Yanomamöland. Good, for example, is quoted by Tierney as saying: “In my opinion, the Fierce People is the biggest misnomer in the history of anthropology.” Did he mean that, I asked him?
All along I have felt that Chagnon has not represented the Yanomamö accurately. I feel he might have slanted, or even cooked, some of his data. In over a dozen villages in the course of a dozen years of research, I never saw what Chagnon reported that he saw in terms of the violence both within and between villages. I have said from the beginning that (1) Chagnon did bad fieldwork, or (2) there was something wrong with the villages Chagnon studies, or (3) Chagnon was in a “hot” area with a lot of activity whose disruptive forces led to higher levels of violence.45
What about Chagnon’s data, I wondered? It strikes me as heavily quantitative and easily checkable. “Yeah, well, let me tell you about anthropological ‘data,’” Good retorted.