Kirkch01's List: Darkness

• Tierney presents convincing evidence that Neel and Chagnon, on their trip to the Yanomami in 1968, greatly exacerbated, and probably started, the epidemic of measles that killed "hundreds, perhaps thousands"
• the members of the research team refused to provide any medical assistance to the sick and dying Yanomami, on explicit orders from Neel.
• Neel believed that "natural" human society (as it existed everywhere before the advent of large-scale a gricultural societies and contemporary states with their vast populations) consisted of small, genetically isolated groups, in which, according to his eugenically slanted genetic theories, dominant genes (specifically, a gene he believed existed for "leadership" or "innate ability") would have a selective advantage, because male carriers of this gene could gain access to a disproportionate share of the available females, thus reproducing their own superior genes more frequently than less "innately able" males. The result, supposedly, would be the continual upgrading of the human genetic stock. Modern mass societies, by contrast, consist of vast genetically entropic "herds" in which, he theorized, recessive genes could not be eliminated by selective competition and superior leadership genes would be swamped by mass genetic mediocrity.
• This remains only an inference in the present state of our knowledge: there is no "smoking gun" in the form of a written text or recorded speech by Neel.
• As another reader of Tierney's ms commented, Mr. Tierney's analysis is a case study of the dangers in science of the uncontrolled ego, of lack of respect for life, and of greed and self-indulgence. It is a further extraordinary revelation of malicious and perverted work conducted under the aegis of the Atomic Energy Commission.
• There is still more, in the form of collusion by Neel and Chagnon with sinister Venezuelan politicians attempting to gain control of Yanomami lands for illegal gold mining concessions, with the anthropologists providing "cover" for the illegal mine developer as a "naturalist" collaborating with the anthropological researchers, in exchange for the politician's guaranteeing continuing access to the Indians for the anthropologists.
• This nightmarish story--a real anthropological heart of darkness beyond the imagining of even a Josef Conrad (though not, perhaps, a Josef Mengele)--will be seen (rightly in our view) by the public, as well as most anthropologists, as putting the whole discipline on trial.

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• geneticist at the University of Michigan and a pioneering researcher of the Yanomami who died last February, deliberately injected tribespeople with a controversial vaccine for measles.
• One of his most explosive charges is that in 1968, James V. Neel, a human
• According to the scholars' letter, Mr. Neel caused the measles epidemic in order to test his eugenic theories about the evolutionary utility of male domination. In Mr. Neel's view, write the e-mail's authors, "'natural' human society ... consisted of small, genetically isolated groups, in which ... dominant genes (specifically, a gene he believed existed for 'leadership' or 'innate ability') would have a selective advantage, because male carriers of this gene could gain access to a disproportionate share of the available females.
• "I think some sort of investigation is necessary," he says. "Anthropology has had some black eyes in the past decade, especially over treatment of native peoples.
• "I find it completely unbelievable that he would participate in anything damaging to the Yanomami. He's not a genocidal guy."

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• The book's second and more significant strand centers on Chagnon's anthropological work. Tierney argues that Chagnon created the myth of the Yanomami as the "fierce people" through his own personal brand of physical and symbolic violence against them.
•  While the market value of Tierney's book undoubtedly comes from the sensational marriage of these two strands, its intellectual value has already suffered from their unfortunate union. As with a marriage, one may speculate whether this pair was brought together by bonds of conviction or of convenience. One may also wonder about the discrepancy between the rush to judgment that made possible the book's most marketable claim about the measles epidemic and the much more carefully supported discussion about Chagnon's work. The book's scholarly value may also be undermined by Tierney's propensity to explain social effects in terms of personal intentions and to personalize structural relations. This has already provoked defensive reactions that risk turning substantive discussions into proclamations about the intentions or integrity of individual scientists. A flurry of statements from leading institutions about Neel's personal and scholarly integrity has already served to cast a protective shadow over Chagnon's work. The simple fact that even an outdated vaccine cannot cause a measles epidemic has led some to dismiss the rather complex issues raised by the rest of the book. In the debate in the United States, so focused on the technical aspects of the epidemic, the concerns and information of scholars from Brazil and Venezuela about Chagnon's work have been fundamentally absent.
• When Jesús Cardozo, a Venezuelan anthropology student doing fieldwork in a Yanomami village under Chagnon's direction, asked his adviser to bring medical help to an acutely ill Yanomami girl, Chagnon reportedly replied that Cardozo would never be a scientist. "A scientist doesn't think of such things. A scientist just thinks of studying the people. ... We didn't come to save the Indians. We came to study them"
• The pattern of errors (including incorrect citations of sources) apparent in Tierney's treatment of Neel's work shows serious problems with his general case that the Yanomami have suffered great harm as a result of scientific research .
• Why should Neel want to experiment with human lives? Tierney seems to think that a credible motive is Neel's supposed eugenic theories. "Neel and his eugenic missionaries engineered a bold creation myth, a ferocious Garden of Eden, where the healthy, well-fed Yanomami fought for the fun of it and killed their infant daughters for sexual pleasure" (p. 313, emphasis added). In chapter 4, "Atomic Indians," Tierney creates his (mythical) case for Neel as a eugenicist.
•  Neel did have a theory of the evolution of what is now often called "social intelligence" (Byrne 1995 ). He argued that since headmen were often highly polygynous they differentially passed their genes to the next generation. If some heritable attributes were associated with headmanship (Neel avoided calling this "intelligence," since it included much more than IQ), then the differential fertility consequent on polygyny would increase their frequency through time. The set of characteristics, due to many genes at many loci, was very close to that specified in the social intelligence model (see Neel 1994 :186–and included knowledge of tribal history and law, the ability to speak persuasively, and being skilled in battle and the hunt. This model is simply a description of natural selection for polygenic traits the outcome of which is an increase in gene frequencies for social intelligence in the population as a whole. It is surely possible to argue about whether this model applied to the Yanomami or more widely, but it is not by itself a "eugenic" model or necessarily evil. However, in the hands of Tierney this model is transmuted into the "leadership gene," which is "located at paired alleles" (whatever that might mean) and "concentrated in the offspring of dominant, polygynous chiefs" (p. 40) and is characterized as reflecting "quirky ideas about hierarchies of violence and genetic selection" (p. 13).
• What kind of book has Tierney written? Its title suggests something like Conrad's Heart of Darkness or, behind that, Roger Casement's Putumayo report (see Taussig 1992 ): a genre of colonial revelation that relies on the promise to unmask a public image of professed good intentions and expose the violence it hides—even if these intentions are the objectivist ones of Chagnon's anthropology or Neel's medical research rather than Kurtz's activist vision of improving the native. Such a genre requires an attack on a widely shared public image, a target that Tierney provides in the person of Napoleon Chagnon (rather than James Neel, as many comments have suggested) partly because he is "the best-known American anthropologist since Margaret Mead" (p. 8)
• Darkness in El Dorado appears to be a serious scholarly work; its author worked on it for ten years, traveled to many of the villages where Yanomamö ethnographers worked, and interviewed 90 people (myself included). However, I would argue that the 1,599 footnotes that festoon it are mere adornments to enhance its credibility. It strikes me as comparable to a legal brief prepared by a rogue district attorney prosecuting scientists for alleged crimes against humanity. The prosecutor is aided and abetted by anthropologists who are avowed enemies of the accused. A tremendous amount of evidence is submitted. Evidence that exonerates the accused is suppressed. The lay and professional publics are outraged by the revelations.
• It has been clearly demonstrated that Tierney's fundamental claims rest on misreadings of the evidence and unfounded surmises.
• I wish very much that someone else had written Tierney's book. I wish someone had written it who could have both told the story in a way that would attract attention (this Tierney has been able to do) and also been careful about records and claims and done justice to the labyrinthine world of the Yanomami. Tierney's handling of the measles epidemic is inexcusable and irresponsible, and his portraits of his primary actors are deeply flawed. His 1,599 footnotes are little more than textual display. Yet even with all its manifest weaknesses, the book has opened a public debate. Its unstable narrative has provoked many of us to look at ethnographic and genetic practices with disturbing, if not novel, questions.
•  Even when these scandals are cut down to ordinary size, unobstructed by sensationalism, there is still plenty of dirty laundry on display in anthropological academia, particularly in the United States.

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