Anthropologist Struggles To Save A Warrior Tribe

The Yanomamö are among the most violent people ever studied, yet Napoleon Chagnon is battling to protect them from the likes of us SANTA BARBARA, CALIF.—When a Yanomamö headman complained to Napoleon Chagnon that a missionary was intimidating the village’s shamans, the feisty anthropologist decided to remove his mantle of scientific detachment and take action. The next time the missionary came rushing into the village center to stop the dancing, Living with a tribe in which violence and murder is a accepted as a part of daily life keeps Chagnon on his toes. He remember a number of incidents, in which a wrong step could have ended his research—or even his Iife. One afternoon Chagnon on found that villagers had taken the new floorboards for his canoe chopping them into paddles for their own craft. After lecturing all hearers on how hard he had worked to fashion and lay eachboard. Chagnon with calm finality cut loose every Yanomamö canoe into the current of the Orinoco River. Their headman later congratulated him. By this kind of bravado, he has several times escaped the deadly cons quences of Yanomamö wrath. Yet Yanomamö diplomacy is a subtle art. At another time while trading machete for samples of villagers’ blood needed for one of his studies, Chagnon was ordered by the headman not to give the presents to a group in disfavor. "I needed those blood samples," Chagnon recalls He continued to dole out machetes. The headman took an axe and held it over the anthropologist’s head. “If you touch that last machete," he told Chagnon. "I'll kill you right now." What happened? “I gave the headman the machete." Chagnon answered “What do you think I am stupid An old-style scientist like Margaret Mead might have been horrified by the idea of an anthropologist intervening so directly in an indigenous culture. But these days, “primitive” tribes can no longer be protected from change, argues Chagnon, “and a scientist has an obligation to do what he can to ameliorate the impact of civilization on the people that he is studying. Indeed, the notion of anthropologists turned advocate and activist is no longer considered radical. “You wouldn’t be in anthropology, and devote years of your life to live and work with [a group of people], if you didn’t have a degree of empathy,” explains Bruce Knauft, an Emory University anthropologist. As a result, it is hard to stand by when a whole culture is threatened. “You are the only voice these people have.” says Knauft. But for Chagnon, the path to activism has not been swift—or smooth. While he may have once helped to ward off a few overzealous missionaries he has not forcefully taken up the Yanomamo cause some scientists say. “For many years, he has been criticized for not taking action,” says Richard Lee of the University of Toronto. and even as he now leaps into the fray, Chagnon has come under fire from a group of Brazilian anthropologists, who charge that he shares blame for the plight of the tribes he has been studying. The accusations center around the portrait of the Yanomamo that Chagnon has painted. His years on research shows that the group of Indians ranks among the most violent cultures ever studied. Killing, primarily for revenge, is an accepted part of Yanomamo life; in one study of 12 villages. Chagnon found that nearly one-third of the deaths of adult males came at the hand of fellow Indians. Chagnon also makes the controversial claim that the roots of these revenge killings are biological rather than cultural. The reason, he argues, is that violence has Darwinian rewards; Yanomamö men who kill have more wives and offspring than their less bellicose relatives. This surprising conclusion arises from the unusual nature of Yanomamö warfare. Conflicts commonly begin over sexual matters, Chagnon eiplains. Suspicion of seducing someone’s wife, for example, can escalate from shouting to duels of chest punching to clubbing. If a death results, a village can fission and former members may enter a cycle of revenge killing. Forcible appropriation of women from visitors will also set off a series of revenge raids. On the surface, revenge killing appears counterproductive, since successful raiders make themselves and their kin prime targets for retaliation. Yet swift retaliation serves as a deterrent, Chagnon believes. Yanomamö men who will- ingly go on raids and participate in killing earn reputations as waiteri, or fierce ones. Villages with many waiteri are feared and respected, and their women are safer from abduction. This picture of a violent society angers some Brazilian anthropologists. They charge that it fuels racism and helps justify ill treatment of the Yanomamö. Chagnon’s investigations of Yanomama violence larel being used by the powerful lobby of mining interests as an excuse for the invasion of these Indians’ lands,” wrote Carneiro da Cunha, president of the Association Brasileira de Anthropologi, in a letter to the American Anthropological Association earlier this year. Nonsense, replies Chagnon. He suggests that the Brazilian anthropologists, frustrated by their own inability to pressure their government into keeping miners out of Yanomamo territory, are lashing out at an easy target. As David Givens of the American Anthropological Association says: “An thropologists who work in another country make good scapegoats. It easy to accuse them of creating problems, when the problems are already there.” Certainly, political imbroglio are one of the occupational hazard of anthropology, particularly when scientists play the role of activist Witness the case of Darrell Posey, an anthropologist and biologist from Kentucky who has been studying the Kaiapó, another group of warrior tribes in Brazilian Amazonia. Earlier this year, Posey helped bring two of the tribe’s lead ers to Washington, D.C. to protest the destruction of their rain forest home by a proposed dam. In August, the Brazilian government responded by bringing charges against Posey for violating a law prohibiting foreigners from meddling in Brazil’s internal affairs. If found guilty, said a spokesman for the country’s federal police, Posey will be expelled from Brazil, effectively ending his scientific work with the Kaiapó. But while anthropologists bicker, or worry about cutting themselves off from their research the world’s primitive peoples continue to suffer. The Yanomamö current problems, for example, began in 1985 when gold was discovered on the group’s traditions] lands. Within two years, the initial trickie of miners had turned into a flood. When Catholic missionaries in the area protested the invasion, the Brazilian government’s Indian agency (Fundacão Nacional do Indio—or Funai) responded by sending soldiers to throw out both the miners and missionaries. Now the area is closed off to all missionaries, journalists, researchers, and doctors. But miners still manage to pass through the regional capital of Boa Vista into Yanomamö territory, and their numbers, says Chagnon, “are growing day by day.” "It is clear that the miners could be stopped,” says the anthropologist. “All the military has to do is shut off gasoline to the small airplanes that fly in supplies to the miners.” But the government lacks the will. Chagnon believes that many local businessmen and politicians are “in cahoots” with the miners, allowing the prospectors into Yanomamö territory in exchange for a share of the profits. Will Chagnon’s attempt to influence the Brazilian authorities through the world press benefit the Yanomamö? The scientist admits that the articles that have appeared so far have had no discernible effect on government policies. But he hopes that more pressure will bring results—and besides, he doesn’t know what he can do. Roberta Friedman is a freelance writer based in Santa Cruz, Calif.

Anthropologist Struggles To Save A Warrior Tribe

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