Word: anthropologist
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Hmmm. An anthropologist, I guess, must be bemused to find that such a large, multi-ethnic, complex and contradictory country, after months of relentless and scandalously expensive politicking, found itself reduced to a choice between two white male baby boomers, sons of powerful politicians, dauphins from Harvard and Yale. A rather narrow band of culture represented there, one would think. At least Bill Bradley knew how to play basketball; at least John McCain's character was formed by the experience of war, and by years on the inside of a North Vietnamese prison. The great American diversity had labored...
...would an anthropologist learn much from all of that? I might take refuge in the predictable subject of television. Television dominates and distorts whatever it touches (witness American sports); it has skewed and corrupted American democracy by imposing the need to raise vast sums of campaign money, thereby putting too much of American public life up for sale...
Tierney also takes on the swashbuckling ethnographer Napoleon Chagnon, whose 1968 volume Yanomamo: The Fierce People first made the tribe famous and whose books continue to be staples of college anthropology courses. Chagnon has been challenged before, notably by Rutgers University Newark anthropologist Brian Ferguson, whose 1995 book on Yanomami warfare suggested that the presence of foreigners, Chagnon in particular, sparked much of the conflict among the Yanomami. Tierney's charges go further. He claims that Chagnon manipulated his data to support his sociobiological thesis that natural selection favored Yanomami who were genetically prone to violence. Moreover, he asserts that...
...addition to Chagnon and Neel, another scientific heavyweight--French anthropologist Jacques Lizot, who lived among the Yanomami for 25 years--is targeted by Tierney. He describes Lizot as keeping a virtual harem of Yanomami boys and exchanging gifts for sexual favors...
...real issue is not the squabbles of academics. It is how to help save the Amazon's largest tribe from modern diseases and threats to their land. "The Yanomami have been in danger of extinction on a lot of fronts--from investigators, missionaries, government officials, miners," says Venezuelan anthropologist Nelly Arvelo. "Everyone must bear some responsibility...