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Tierney never claimed, then, that Chagnon was the sole cause of the violence he recorded. Tierney's research—and that of others, such as Brian Ferguson—does show that some of Chagnon's actions had the effect of promoting conflicts that he then attributed to the ferocity of the people he was studying. (Tooby writes, irrelevantly, that other pre-state societies have higher rates of violence, but he never refutes Tierney's argument that Chagnon's account of warfare among the Yanomamö was exaggerated.) Tierney pointed out that missionaries gave machetes to the Yanomamö, beginning in the '50s, and that it was a cause of warfare. But Chagnon's machete trade was distinctive, Tierney showed, and distinctly destabilizing. Chagnon provided machetes in exchange for the names of dead relatives, a violation of tribal taboos, and in doing so, he contributed to discord among the Yanomamö. Chagnon also gave some Yanomamö villages a large number of machetes at once in exchange for their participation in his research projects. In one case, Tierney reported, he created an alliance between two villages which resulted in a raid on a third village and a death. In another case, which Chagnon describes in his book Yanomami: The Fierce People, the act of choosing one village over another for collecting blood samples in exchange for machetes resulted in conflict. According to one tribal leader Tierney spoke to, Chagnon promised machetes to those who would take part in an alliance that Chagnon created in order to make the film The Feast.

With agriculture came the gross social and sexual inequality, the disease and despotism, that curse our existence.

revisionist interpretation

Just count our advantages

The prized Inuit cultural value of independence, the lack of a written language, and the harsh reality of surviving in the unforgiving Arctic environment were ill-suited to any centralized political structure.

Increased Political Awareness and Activism In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the increasing numbers of educated Inuit youth returning to their settlements energized the Inuit, particularly with regard to regaining traditional territories with their abundant natural resources. A main focus of the Inuit's emerging political activism was to ensure they would have greater involvement in the decisions surrounding the disposition of the land's resources, particularly in the energy sector, and to obtain a greater measure of economic stability and prosperity through the processing and sale of these resources. Throughout the late 1900s, the Inuit were generally successful in reaching settlements with national governments granting their claims to large expanses of their traditional territory.

Language policy in Rwanda has revolved around three languages — Kinyarwanda, the indigenous language of Rwandans, French and English

In the aftermath of the 1994 genocide, the Rwandan government has worked strenuously to develop the country and construct a new national image; the shift in language policy from French to English is part of this ambitious project.

The Rwandan government’s decision to transition from French to English as the country’s main official language is part of the country’s play to join the East African Community (EAC) and to ease economic relations with its neighbours and South Africa.

Hence Neel’s terrible experiments on the Yanomami, in a kind of grim downgrade of the Malthusian ethics of “Survivor.” He wanted to disprove the vulnerability of small, isolated groups to epidemics, seeking to show that though a disease such as measles might wreak awful havoc, his alpha-dominated males would be better adapted to evolve genetic immunity to these “contact” diseases. Many might die but the survivors would be of ever more superior stock. In their letter to the head of the Anthropological Association Turner and his colleague Sponsel write carefully that “Tierney’s well-documented account, in its entirety, strongly supports the conclusion that the epidemic was in all probability deliberately caused as an experiment designed to produce scientific support for Neel’s eugenic theory.”