Group items tagged

deadly measles epidemic

Brazilian gold rush on the Yanomamö

this of course conflicted with ethical or moral principles.

How did that measles epidemic get started? Chagnon: It was introduced to the Yanomamö in Brazil. The young daughter of a missionary brought it back from a trip to Manaus. The incubation period is about two weeks—she was perfectly healthy when she left Manaus. There’s good documentation of this origin of the 1968 epidemic. The missionary published this account, and it should have ended there. All serious investigators accept this account.

First published in 1968, Yanomamö: The Fierce People is arguably the best selling anthropology textbook of all time (move over Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa). But Chagnon’s career has been as tumultuous as it has been epic. For decades his peers hotly debated his view that humans had, as he describes it, an "evolved nature in addition to a learned nature." Then a book released in 2000, Darkness in El Dorado: How Scientists and Journalists Devastated the Amazon, by Patrick Tierney, turned those academic skirmishes into all-out war on Chagnon and his career.

a new movie, Secrets of the Tribe, made by Brazilian filmmaker Jose Padilha and premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January, resurrects the old charges, again insinuating Chagnon’s guilt in the Amazon measles affair. And once again, Chagnon is waging a defense.

Chagnon: What I do is collect factual, empirical data as distinct from dealing only in subjective stories like myths as some cultural anthropologists do. I’m trying to push the study of societies toward an empirical set of scientific procedures. I do, however, also collect and study myths, the understanding of which lies more in the arena of comparative literature … which can also be studied scientifically, even with evolutionary theory, as some of my former students do.

We were able to show with my census data that 25 people died of an upper respiratory infection a day or two before, including the headman and a very famous leader I had known for 25 years.

In July of 1993 Brazilian gold miners brutally attacked a Yanomamö village, decapitating women and children with machetes and murdering about a dozen people in all.

In fact, you actually allowed Padilha access to the valuable footage that you and filmmaker Timothy Asch shot of the Yanomamö.

persuaded me about his firm commitment to truth, the scientific method, and objectivity in reporting, I allowed him access to my films. Then when the film came out it was just a piece of trash.

Chagnon: The film ignorantly misrepresents the facts.

was horrified to find, in 1968, that the Salesian Priest, Padre Sanchez, had a Brazilian man with an active case of measles at this mission and urged him to get this man out or he would expose all of the Yanomamö to the disease—and told him that the Yanomamö were now coming back from Patanowä-teri where they had attended a feast.