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James Granderson

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

anthroniche.com/...0305.htm

Chagnon measles missionary Sanchez Asch Padilha darkness

shared by James Granderson on 06 Feb 13 - No Cached
  • Yanomamö: The Fierce People
  • 1968 University of Michigan medical expedition
  • Chagnon
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • 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.
  • James Granderson on 06 Feb 13
     
    In an interview, Chagnon explains his take on how the measles epidemic was really introduced. 
  • Erin Brennan on 06 Feb 13
     
    Damning accusations have been publicly and factually refuted and Chagnon's reputation largely cleared, but...
Stephanie Hegarty

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=3&ved=0CEAQFjAC&url=http%3... - 2 views

www.google.com/url

darkness Neel

shared by Stephanie Hegarty on 06 Feb 13 - No Cached
  • Stephanie Hegarty on 06 Feb 13
     
    a devastating measles epidemic broke out "coincident with," to use Neel's phrasing, his arrival in the field in 1968. Neel indicated he had brought two thousand doses of measles vaccine and had planned to hand these over to mis- sionaries in the region. But faced with the epidemic, Neel and his team vaccinated many Yanomami as well. Here is how Neel described his actions: "Much of our carefully designed protocol for that expedition was quickly scrapped as we dashed from village to village, organizing the missionaries, ourselves doing our share of immunizations but also treatment when we reached villages to which measles had preceded us. We always carried a gross, almost ridiculous excess of antibi- otics - now we needed everything we had, and radioed for more" (1994:162). To what degree this description accurately reflects Neel's actions during the epidemic is one of the critical questions in the controversy. Tierney accused Neel of wors- ening the measles epidemic through his actions; others have suggested Neel could have done more than he did to save Yanomami lives during the epidemic.
Erin Brennan

The Fierce anthropologists - 0 views

anthroniche.com/...0400.htm

Chagnon Tierney Yanomami evidence immorality violence accusations

shared by Erin Brennan on 06 Feb 13 - No Cached
J Scott Hill liked it
  • 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.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • 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.
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

started by J Scott Hill on 31 Jan 13 24 follow-ups, last by Erin Brennan on 06 Feb 13
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