Word: yanomami
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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...
...filmmakers, journalists and do-gooders who have studied them, publicized them and labored to "save" them for four decades? Last week the question ricocheted through academia as scientists responded to charges of fraudulent research, intellectual vendettas, sexual misbehavior and unethical experimentation that has spread disease and death through the Yanomami. "This nightmarish story [is] a real anthropological heart of darkness beyond the imagining of even a Joseph Conrad (though not, perhaps, a Josef Mengele)," warned two professors, Cornell University's Terence Turner and the University of Hawaii's Leslie Sponsel, in a memorandum to the American Anthropological Association...
...uproar was prompted by allegations in investigative journalist Patrick Tierney's upcoming book Darkness in El Dorado: How Scientists and Journalists Devastated the Amazon. Tierney, author of an earlier book on human sacrifices among the Inca, spent 11 years researching the Yanomami's exposure to the outside world. In his most hotly contested charge, he claims that during a research project funded by the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, the late James Neel, a human geneticist at the University of Michigan, used a measles vaccine on the Yanomami that helped spread an epidemic, killing "hundreds, perhaps thousands" in a population...
...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...
Reached in Paris, Lizot called the charges "disgusting." He added, "I am a homosexual, but my house is not a brothel. I gave gifts because it is part of the Yanomami culture. I was single. Is it forbidden to have sexual relations with consenting adults? People say 'boy,' and they mean anywhere from postpubescent to 25 years...