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Erin Brennan

What are the major questions concerning the Darkness in El Dorado controversy? - 63 views

The American Anthropological Association is called on to take action on the allegations made by Patrick Tierney, an investigative journalist, about the genetic and medical experiments conducted by ...

Questions

James Granderson

El Dorado Interim Report/Request for Information - 1 views

  • El Dorado Task Force
  • activities that may have resulted in personal gain to scientists, anthropologists and journalists while contributing harm to the Yanomami
  • activities by anthropologists, scientists and journalists that may have contributed to malnutrition, disease and disorganization
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  • evolution of various codes of ethics and ethical guidelines existing during the time a particular set of actions occurred
  • That damaging representations of the Yanomami were published and repeated even after such representations were criticized as likely to cause them harm
  • That a program of vaccination of Yanomami undertaken by James Neel in 1968 caused an epidemic of measles
  • That practices of anthropologists in the field were unethical, ignoring legal constraints and ethics codes and tending, either through oversight or purposefully, to exacerbate violence, spread disease, and violate the dignity of individual Yanomami through, for instance, inappropriate sexual relations
  • our response to the allegations will not always be to determine whether they are true or false, since in many cases this is simply undeterminable.
  • That anthropologists, especially Americans, and others generally ignored threats to the Yanomami and gave the highest priority to continuing established programs of research of no immediate benefit to the Yanomami
  • That anthropologists and others working with the Yanomami have not adequately addressed malnutrition, disease, and disorganization among them
  • That experiments involving the injection of radioactive iodine were carried out among the Yanomami without attention to the principles of informed consent then in effect
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    Interim report that details specific allegations made against Neel and anthropologists in "Darkness in El Dorado." 
J Scott Hill

Code of Ethics - 0 views

  • Approved February 2009 I. Preamble Anthropological researchers, teachers and practitioners are members of many different communities, each with its own moral rules or codes of ethics. Anthropologists have moral obligations as members of other groups, such as the family, religion, and community, as well as the profession. They also have obligations to the scholarly discipline, to the wider society and culture, and to the human species, other species, and the environment. Furthermore, fieldworkers may develop close relationships with persons or animals with whom they work, generating an additional level of ethical considerations. In a field of such complex involvements and obligations, it is inevitable that misunderstandings, conflicts, and the need to make choices among apparently incompatible values will arise. Anthropologists are responsible for grappling with such difficulties and struggling to resolve them in ways compatible with the principles stated here. The purpose of this Code is to foster discussion and education. The American Anthropological Association (AAA) does not adjudicate claims for unethical behavior. The principles and guidelines in this Code provide the anthropologist with tools to engage in developing and maintaining an ethical framework for all anthropological work.
  • Download the Code of Ethics (PDF)
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    The AAA Code of Ethics provides a thought provoking and informative look into some of the responsibilities Anthropologists have to their research subjects, the community of anthropologists, and the wider public.   The nature of anthropological fieldwork is particularly fraught with ethical conundrums.  
J Scott Hill

Friday Five: Leading Digital Ethnographers | Edelman Digital - 0 views

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    This five anthropologists are good example of how anthropologists are contributing to the understanding of how information technology is transforming us.  Equally important, they illustrate the many applied and basic research endeavors for anthropologists on the web.
Mia Gooding

Kenan Malik's review of 'Darkness in El Dorado' by Patrick Tierney - 0 views

  • In the twentieth century, the consequences of racial science led anthropologists to reject naturalistic explanations and to see human behaviour as dictated largely by culture, not biology
  • all too often anthropologists saw what they wanted to
  • The most prominent of the new generation of sociobiological anthropologists was the American Napoleon Chagnon
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  • Chagnon presented the Yanomamo as a fierce, primitive tribe whose mores opened the window onto our own past ('our contemporary ancestors' as Chagnon has described them).
  • linked Yanomami violence to genetic success
  • Chagnon revealed that men who had killed had more than twice as many wives and three times as many offspring as non-killers. The idea that murderous violence enhanced Yanomami men's reproductive success was manna for sociobiologists.
  • Chagnon's paper is one of the most widely cited scientific studies of all time - and one of the most fiercely criticised.
  • Tierney presents a convincing case that Chagnon has consistently overestimated Yanomami violence, and that he himself was responsible for fomenting much of it
  • Patrick Tierney's Darkness in El Dorado
  • Tierney accuses Chagnon, among other things, of scientific fraud, sexual abuse, political corruption and, most sensationally, genocide
  • Chagnon, and his mentor the geneticist James Neel, may have deliberately infected Yanomami with measles, beginning an epidemic that wiped out hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of people, as part of a grotesque experiment to test the impact of natural selection on primitive groups.
  • Tierney's book, they claim, is 'a case study of the dangers in science of the uncontrolled ego'.
  • humans are an inherently violent and aggressive species. Chagnon himself has said that violence 'may be the principal driving force behind the evolution of culture'
  • Chagnon had changed the political balance between different Yanomami groups by favouring some over others, and by selectively providing steel goods and weapons to certain groups. Chagnon was apparently given to bursting into villages decorated in war paint and brandishing a shotgun. Yanomami men soon realized that their own displays of aggression would be rewarded with machetes and other highly prized tools.
  • Chagnon was an active participant in the wars. Yanomami men were fighting for access not to women but to Chagnon himself.
  • In 1968 a measles epidemic decimated the Yanomami population. At exactly the same time, Chagnon had embarked on an expedition to the Amazon under the leadership of the geneticist James Neel. During that expedition the two men initiated a programme of inoculation against measles to protect the Yanomamo. According to Tierney, however, it was that very programme of inoculation that caused the epidemic in the first place.
  • Tierney quotes several people who hint darkly that an epidemic might have been exactly what Neel wanted. Moreover, once the epidemic was under way, Neel and Chagnon 'refused to provide any medical assistance to the sick and dying Yanomami', insisting that 'they were there only to observe and record the epidemic, and that they must stick strictly to their roles as scientists, not provide medical help.'
  • Neel rejected the medical orthodoxy that the Yanomami were genetically susceptible to measles, believing that the Yanomamis' survival-of-the-fittest lifestyle had given them immune systems more robust than those of us in pampered modern societies have. The epidemic would prove Neel's theories.
  • Tierney produces very little direct evidence to back up his monstrous claims.
  • The consensus is that the measles epidemic began before Chagnon and Neel arrived in Venezuela, and that they initiated their inoculation programme precisely because they were aware of the earlier outbreak
  • used Edmonston B
  • after receiving advice from the Venezuelan government
  • In many ways Darkness in El Dorado raises more questions about Tierney's motives, and those of Chagnon's other critics, than it does about Chagnon's own work.
  • What Tierney is questioning is the very possibility of a scientific anthropology. Anthropologists cannot simply be observers, as traditional scientific objectivity requires, but must actively take sides in any political struggle involving the peoples they are studying. And in such a struggle the norms of scientific objectivity become subordinate to the political aims
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    I find this article interesting because it not only describes Tierney's point of view of Chagnon in 'Darkness in El Dorado' but it questions Tierney's own credibility of accusing Chagnon for such outrageous crimes.  It describes his reasoning behind all his claims but also points out the last of factual evidence he presents with them.
J Scott Hill

ANTHROPOLOGIST BIOGRAPHIES -Ortner - 1 views

  • This article is the beginning of Ortner’s latest project: American ethnography and the examination of the relationship between class and capitalism in America. When she began her career anthropology, Ortner notes that research in America was unheard of. Since the advent of postmodernism, reflexivity and the exploration of experience that form an anthropologist's perspective have gained greater validity. Ortner’s current research is thus follows her high school classmates, whose culture helped form her perspective.
  • his was a previously inarticulated method of cultural analysis, but one nonetheless used frequently by anthropologists. Her purpose was to explicate this analysis before applying it to her monograph on the Sherpas on which she was simultaneously working.
  • There are two types of main symbols: summarizing and elaborating. Summarizing symbols, not surprisingly, combine several complete ideas into one symbol or sign that the participant perceives. This single symbol stands for all of these ideas simultaneously. This summarizing occurs often with sacred symbols such as the American flag. Summarizing symbols act as a catalyst in order to make an impact on the respondent.
Andrew Pennington

Darkness in El Dorado Controversy : SAGE Knowledge - 1 views

  • Five years after its publication, this unprecedented controversy was still rife with debate and far from settled. Moreover, it goes to the very heart of anthropology, with broad implications for every anthropologist. Primarily, it is a matter of professional ethics and more generally, of values. Values have been a sincere concern of various practitioners of anthropology since its beginnings about 150 years ago. For example, many anthropologists have demonstrated their humanitarian commitment through advocacy work in promoting the survival, welfare, and rights of indigenous societies struggling under the pressures of Western colonialism and the genocide, ethnocide, and ecocide often associated with it.
James Granderson

Napoleon Chagnon, Anthropologist, Discusses His Dramatic Career from Northern Michigan - 1 views

  • Yanomamö: The Fierce People
  • 1968 University of Michigan medical expedition
  • Chagnon
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  • 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.
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    In an interview, Chagnon explains his take on how the measles epidemic was really introduced. 
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    Damning accusations have been publicly and factually refuted and Chagnon's reputation largely cleared, but...
James Granderson

Napoleon Chagnon Elected to the National Academy of Sciences - 0 views

  • His election not only vindicates Chagnon of unfounded accusations that have undermined his reputation and career, but is an achievement that reflects well upon our discipline.
  • highest honors bestowed upon a US scientist.
  • complex nature of humans as alternately cruel and kind, both warlike and peaceable
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  • Inspired by Patrick Tierny’s Darkness in El Dorado, which accused Chagnon and deceased geneticist James Neel of intentionally infecting Yanomamö Indians with measles, the AAA set up the “El Dorado Task Force” (TF) to examine Chagnon and Neel’s ethical conduct
  • relegate this shameful event into history and restore Chagnon’s reputation as one of the great anthropologists of the 20th century
  • is developing a large, institutionally accessible database containing genealogical and demographic data, population and conflict histories, photographs, maps and other unpublished data on large, remote villages in the Siapa Basin
  • Noble Savages: My Life among Two Dangerous Tribes, the Yanomamö and the Anthropologists
Erin Brennan

The Fierce anthropologists - 0 views

  • Chagnon, aged 63, is one of the most distinguished anthropologists alive.
  • But he has also made plenty of enemies. Some are professional. Chagnon’s explanation of Yanomamö violence was deeply controversial, both. among people who understand it as a general theory of human nature (which it is meant to be), and among those who see it only as a particular explanation of Yanomamö culture. The Yanomamo are not, in fact, exceptionally violent by the standards of aboriginal people.
  • Chagnon’s enemies believe the Yanomamö sometimes fought because he had paid them to act for his cameras.
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  • It was at this stage that a journalist named Patrick Tierney, who had earlier written a book claiming that human sacrifice survived among some Indian Andean tribes, spent a year there. Darkness in El Dorado, the book on Tierney’s adventures among the gold miners which was to have been published by Viking in 1995, never appeared. Instead, last year WW Norton announced it was publishing his book, which had now become a tale of ‘How scientists and journalists devastated the Amazon’,
  • Chagnon had enjoyed good relations with the Roman Catholic Salesian missionaries who control access to most of the region. Indeed, the relationship was so good, he told me, that he was asked by one priest to arrange the murder of another missionary who had gone off the rails and taken up with a Yanomamö concubine far up the river (he declined). But the relationship started to unravel as the Yanomamö grew more famous.
  • Some of his enemies are personal. He is by all accounts a boisterous man (he calls the two professors who have attacked him ‘absolute zeros’). Moving among the Yanomamö, Chagnon had the sort of personality — or discovered it in himself— that could thrive and impose itself on a brutal and treacherous political environment. For the first months of his fieldwork, while he was learning the language, the Yanomamö systematically lied to him. He needed to collect genealogies in order to trace the histories of the people he moved among, yet among the Yanomamö there is a taboo against using people’s names, and especially’ the names of the dead.
  • Neel and Chagnon ‘greatly exacerbated’ and probably started the epidemic of measles that killed so many Yanomamö. They caused or at least worsened the epidemic by their use of a virulent vaccine (Edmonston B) that was quite wrong for use on a population like this with no prior exposure to measles.
  • The most Tierney would concede at a press conference is that ‘the question of transmissibility [whether the vaccine could have caused the epidemic] is still up in the air’, at which point Dr Yvonne Maldonado, the expert on infectious diseases and childhood immunisation on the panel, finally lost her cool: ‘You’re not a physician, not an epidemiologist and not even a scientist as far as I can tell... There is absolutely no evidence for transmissibility.’ By now she was almost shouting at the man two feet away from her. ‘There is no evidence! The vaccine did not cause an epidemic. It did not cause deaths.’
  • No one doubts that the situation of the Yanomamo and of the other indigenous peoples of South America is truly dreadful.
  • When I pressed Professor Sponsel on the question of whether he should have checked these damaging allegations that a colleague had been responsible for hundreds of deaths before passing them on. he grew quite heated. ‘I’m not a medical doctor. My role, ethically, was to alert the AAA because of my concern with human rights. After that, the only role I had was to respond to questions when people asked me in a civil, polite manner. Terry Turner and I wrote that memo to the two top people in the organisation and sent copies to four other people in the committee on ethics. Whoever leaked it is the one who should be sanctioned or censured.
J Scott Hill

A Family Tree in Every Gene - 0 views

  • Who speaks of "racial stocks" anymore? After all, to do so would be to speak of something that many scientists and scholars say does not exist. If modern anthropologists mention the concept of race, it is invariably only to warn against and dismiss it. Likewise many geneticists. "Race is social concept, not a scientific one," according to Dr. Craig Venter—and he should know, since he was first to sequence the human genome.
  • But now, perhaps, that is about to change
  • The dominance of the social construct theory can be traced to a 1972 article by Dr. Richard Lewontin, a Harvard geneticist, who wrote that most human genetic variation can be found within any given "race." If one looked at genes rather than faces, he claimed, the difference between an African and a European would be scarcely greater than the difference between any two Europeans.
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  • Three decades later, it seems that Dr. Lewontin's facts were correct, and have been abundantly confirmed by ever better techniques of detecting genetic variety. His reasoning, however, was wrong. His error was an elementary one, but such was the appeal of his argument that it was only a couple of years ago that a Cambridge University statistician, A. W. F. Edwards, put his finger on it.
  • Genetic variants that aren't written on our faces, but that can be detected only in the genome, show similar correlations. It is these correlations that Dr. Lewontin seems to have ignored. In essence, he looked at one gene at a time and failed to see races. But if many—a few hundred—variable genes are considered simultaneously, then it is very easy to do so. Indeed, a 2002 study by scientists at the University of Southern California and Stanford showed that if a sample of people from around the world are sorted by computer into five groups on the basis of genetic similarity, the groups that emerge are native to Europe, East Asia, Africa, America and Australasia—more or less the major races of traditional anthropology.
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    "A Family Tree in Every Gene By Armand Marie Leroi Published on: Jun 07, 2006 Armand Marie Leroi, an evolutionary developmental biologist at Imperial College in London, is the author of Mutants: On Genetic Variety and the Human Body." This Article is a fairly sensible, nuanced, defense of the race concept based on recent genetic analyses of hundreds of genetic variables at a time.   
Erin Brennan

Indonesia-Minangkabau - 0 views

  • Minangkabau
  • The Minangkabau--who predominate along the coasts of Sumatera Utara and Sumatera Barat, interior Riau, and northern Bengkulu provinces--in the early 1990s numbered more than 3.5 million. Like the Batak, they have large corporate descent groups, but unlike the Batak, the Minangkabau traditionally reckon descent matrilineally. In this system, a child is regarded as descended from his mother, not his father. A young boy, for instance, has his primary responsibility to his mother's and sisters' clans. In practice, in most villages a young man will visit his wife in the evenings but spend the days with his sister and her children. It is usual for married sisters to remain in their parental home. According to a 1980 study by anthropologist Joel S. Kahn, there is a general pattern of residence among the Minangkabau in which sisters and unmarried lineage members try to live close to one another, or even in the same house.
  • Indonesia, a vast polyglot nation, has made significant economic advances under the administration of President YUDHOYONO but faces challenges stemming from the global financial crisis and world economic downturn. Indonesia's debt-to-GDP ratio in recent years has declined steadily because of increasingly robust GDP growth and sound fiscal stewardship. The government has introduced significant reforms in the financial sector, including in the areas of tax and customs, the use of Treasury bills, and capital market supervision. Indonesia's investment law, passed in March 2007, seeks to address some of the concerns of foreign and domestic investors. Indonesia still struggles with poverty and unemployment, inadequate infrastructure, corruption, a complex regulatory environment, and unequal resource distribution among regions. The non-bank financial sector, including pension funds and insurance, remains weak. Despite efforts to broaden and deepen capital markets, they remain underdeveloped. Economic difficulties in early 2008 centered on high global food and oil prices and their impact on Indonesia's poor and on the budget. The onset of the global financial crisis dampened inflationary pressures, but increased risk aversion for emerging market assets resulted in large losses in the stock market, significant depreciation of the rupiah, and a difficult environment for bond issuance. As global demand has slowed and prices for Indonesia's commodity exports have fallen, Indonesia faces the prospect of growth significantly below the 6-plus percent recorded in 2007 and 2008.
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  • Landholding is one of the crucial functions of the female lineage unit called suku. Since the Minangkabau men, like the Acehnese men, often merantau (go abroad) to seek experience, wealth, and commercial success, the women's kin group is responsible for maintaining the continuity of the family and the distribution and cultivation of the land. These groups are led by a penghulu (headman). The leaders are elected by groups of lineage leaders. As the suku declines in importance relative to the outwardly directed male sphere of commerce, however, the position of penghulu is not always filled after the death of the incumbent, particularly if lineage members are not willing to bear the expense of the ceremony required to install a new penghulu.
  • ice, cassava (tapioca), peanuts, rubber, cocoa, coffee, palm oil, copra; poultry, beef, pork, eggs
  • Indonesia has a stated foreign policy objective of establishing stable fixed land and maritime boundaries with all of its neighbors; Timor-Leste-Indonesia Boundary Committee has resolved all but a small portion of the land boundary, but discussions on maritime boundaries are stalemated over sovereignty of the uninhabited coral island of Pulau Batek/Fatu Sinai in the north and alignment with Australian claims in the south; many refugees from Timor-Leste who left in 2003 still reside in Indonesia and refuse repatriation; a 1997 treaty between Indonesia and Australia settled some parts of their maritime boundary but outstanding issues remain; ICJ's award of Sipadan and Ligitan islands to Malaysia in 2002 left the sovereignty of Unarang rock and the maritime boundary in the Ambalat oil block in the Celebes Sea in dispute; the ICJ decision has prompted Indonesia to assert claims to and to establish a presence on its smaller outer islands; Indonesia and Singapore continue to work on finalization of their 1973 maritime boundary agreement by defining unresolved areas north of Indonesia's Batam Island; Indonesian secessionists, squatters, and illegal migrants create repatriation problems for Papua New Guinea; piracy remains a problem in the Malacca Strait; maritime delimitation talks continue with Palau; Indonesian groups challenge Australia's claim to Ashmore Reef; Australia has closed parts of the Ashmore and Cartier Reserve to Indonesian traditional fishing and placed restrictions on certain catches
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    Landholding is one of the crucial functions of the female lineage unit called suku. Since the Minangkabau men, like the Acehnese men, often merantau (go abroad) to seek experience, wealth, and commercial success, the women's kin group is responsible for maintaining the continuity of the family and the distribution and cultivation of the land. These groups are led by a penghulu (headman). The leaders are elected by groups of lineage leaders. As the suku declines in importance relative to the outwardly directed male sphere of commerce, however, the position of penghulu is not always filled after the death of the incumbent, particularly if lineage members are not willing to bear the expense of the ceremony required to install a new penghulu.
J Scott Hill

Food For Thought: Meat-Based Diet Made Us Smarter : NPR - 0 views

  • Our earliest ancestors ate their food raw — fruit, leaves, maybe some nuts. When they ventured down onto land, they added things like underground tubers, roots and berries.
  • "You can't have a large brain and big guts at the same time," explains Leslie Aiello, an anthropologist and director of the Wenner-Gren Foundation in New York City, which funds research on evolution. Digestion, she says, was the energy-hog of our primate ancestor's body. The brain was the poor stepsister who got the leftovers.
  • "What we think is that this dietary change around 2.3 million years ago was one of the major significant factors in the evolution of our own species," Aiello says.
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  • cut marks on animal bones appeared
  • that could have been made only by a sharp tool.
  • But Aiello's favorite clue is somewhat ickier — it's a tapeworm. "The closest relative of human tapeworms are tapeworms that affect African hyenas and wild dogs," she says.
  • Besides better taste, cooked food had other benefits — cooking killed some pathogens on food.
  • It breaks up the long protein chains, and that makes them easier for stomach enzymes to digest. "
  • collagen is very hard to digest. But if you heat it, it turns to jelly."
  • starchy foods like turnips, cooking gelatinizes the tough starch granules and makes them easier to digest too. Even just softening food — which cooking does — makes it more digestible. In the end, you get more energy out of the food.
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    Interesting audio piece on cooked food, meat, and the evolution of our big brains.
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