Neel And Chagnon example essay topic

Controversy has surrounded Chagnon for years. Much of it is driven by pettiness: less successful anthropologists envy the influence Chagnon wields. They are offended, too, by the hard-headed, scientific approach he takes into the field, and they harbor ideological resentments for the way Chagnon has described the Yanomamo. Friedl makes the argument that to understand society and its sex roles one must not use example from the worlds cultures as Chagnon did. Friedl states that the differences, biologically speaking, can be clarified by looking at known examples of the earliest forms of human society and examining the relationship between social organization and social roles.

The anthropologist believes that the factors in a society that cause male dominance need to be researched because once these factors are understood than one can apply this knowledge to the constant changes in the sex roles due to the modern society. Patrick Tierney describes Chagnon as a fraud, and worse: a murderer who deliberately spread a measles epidemic among the Yanomamo tribe. Chagnon, according to Tierney and his allies, consciously destroyed thousands of lives. The charges are astonishing, and they have been reported virtually everywhere, often without skepticism.

Chagnon is the target of one of the greatest smear campaigns ever waged against a scholar. One of Tierneys more startling revelations is that the whole Yanomamo project was an outgrowth and continuation of the Atomic Energy Commissions secret program of experiments on human subjects. James Neel, the originator and director of the project, was part of the medical and genetic research team attached to the Atomic Energy Commission since the days of the Manhattan Project. He was a member of the small group of researchers responsible for studying the effects of radiation on human subjects.

Tierney presents convincing evidence that Neel and Chagnon, on their trip to the Yanomamo in 1968, greatly exacerbated, and probably started, the epidemic of measles that killed many Yanomamo men and women. The epidemic appears to have been caused, or at least worsened and more widely spread, by a campaign of vaccination carried out by the research team, which used a virulent vaccine (Edmonson B) that had been counter-indicated by medical experts for use on isolated populations with no prior exposure to measles. It was known to produce effects virtually indistinguishable from the disease of measles itself. Medical experts, when informed that Neel and his group used the vaccine in question on the Yanomamo, typically refuse to believe it at first, and then say that it is incredible that they could have done it, and are at a loss to explain why they would have chosen such an inappropriate and dangerous vaccine. There is no record that Neel and Chagnon sought any medical advice before applying the vaccine.

He never informed the appropriate organs of the Venezuelan government that his group was planning to carry out a vaccination campaign, as he was legally required to do. Neither he nor any other member of the expedition, including Chagnon and the other anthropologists, has ever explained why that vaccine was used, despite the evidence that it actually caused or at a minimum greatly exacerbated the fatal epidemic. In one survey, Chagnon estimated that a quarter of adult Yanomamo men die at the hands of other Yanomamo. He also reported data showing that Yanomamo men who kill produce more offspring than those who do not. In other words, killers have greater reproductive success than non-killers.

For sociobiologists like Chagnon who believe human behavior and culture are the result of natural selection it is a very important discovery. For many anthropologists, however, sociobiology's genes-to-culture pipeline is a gentrified form of racism, and Chagnon is their enemy. Chagnons greatest opponent may not be Tierney, but Terence Turner, a Cornell University anthropologist who has also studied Amazonian's. Turner Believed that sociobiology is an un viable and logically indefensible reductionism. Furthermore, according to Tierney, Chagnons pronouncements about the intrinsic violence of the Yanomamo have actively hurt them. Turner believes that politicians and businessmen who want to exploit the Yanomamo homelands for their rich gold deposits use Chagnons work to demonize the tribe for standing in their way.

Chagnon will continue to be a controversial figure, only because he is a sociobiologist. If the Yanomamo are an authentic glimpse at what human prehistory might have looked like, of course, Tierneys theory is dead wrong and Chagnons empirical observations provide evidence for it. While cultural anthropologists had been willing to excuse Neel work from the early seventies because he was not one of the ma geneticist dabbling far a fieldChagnons work struck long after the lines in the sociobiology debate had been drawn. Chagnon, so far as most anthropologists were concerned, had come out on the wrong side, espousing a genetic determinism at odds with postmodern notions of the primacy of culture and environment. Attitudes in anthropology have changed significantly, since the late sixties, but Chagnon has not changed with them, while anthropologists were concerned with native peoples rights, Marxist analysis, and other nontraditional approaches blaming Chagnon for his beliefs. Chagnon was a throwback to an earlier area and, with his popularity, a black eye on the new, sensitive face of the discipline..