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THE FIERCE ANTHROPOLOGIST

Did Napoleon expeditions harm one of the most tribes?

BY PATRICK

I n November, 1964, Napoleon A.

Chagnon, a twenty-six-year-old
American anthropology graduate stu-
dream of El and other fantasies
about the New World. The German nat-
uralist Alexander von Humboldt, who
dent, arrived in a jungle village in visited the area at the turn of the nine-
Venezuela, to study one of the most re- teenth century, wrote, “Above the Great
mote tribes on earth-the Yanomami In- Cataracts of the Orinoco a mythical land
dians. At the time, the boundaries be- begins . . . the soil of fable and vi-
tween Venezuela and Brazil were still sion.” The themselves were
uncertain. The upper Orinoco, with its rumored, by other tribes and by the earli-
tumultuous rapids and impassable water- est explorers, to be “wild” and
falls, had dangerous that, in 1920, one of
the sixteenth century making its moun- the first Americans to encounter them,
tain redoubts a perfect blank slate for the the geographer Hamilton Rice, opened Over three decades, made more
5 0 T H E N E W Y O R K E R , O C T O B E R 9 , 2 0 0 0
than twenty trips into territory. In 1968, he put on tribalfeathers (above left); in 1987, he brought a solar-powered computer.
fire with a machine gun, fearing that the labor, marriage practices, trading, and second of twelve children. He earned his
Yanomami were cannibals. Four years feasting. What was most striking about doctorate in anthropology at the Uni-
later, Rice met the Yanomami again and them was, he wrote, “the importance of versity of Michigan, and obtained a grant
wrote that not the fierce and in- aggression in their culture.” The from the National Institute of Mental
tractable people that legends ascribe them mami, he concluded, lived in a “state of Health to study the Yanomami. “The
to be, but for the most part poor, under- chronic warfare”: Fierce People” was published at the
sized, inoffensive creatures who eke out a height of the Vietnam War, when vio-
miserable existence.” I had the opportunity to witness a good lence was the subject of national debate,
The reality that. Chagnon encoun- many incidents that expressed individual vin- and it became, in effect, the ethnographic
dictiveness on the one hand and collective
tered was, in many ways, stranger than bellicosity on the other. These ranged in seri- text for the sixties. In 1997, Chagnon
anything previously imagined. In ousness from the ordinary incidents of wife told an interviewer for the Los Angeles
The Fierce People,” which was beating and chest pounding to dueling and Times that he had written about the
oreanized raidine bv that set out with
published in 1968, Chagnon gave both a the” intention of ambushing and killing men Yanomami in reaction to the “garbage”
harrowing account of a prehistoric tribe from enemy villages. he had learned in graduate school about
and a sobering assessment of what “noble savages.”
was like for people whom he later re- Between 1968 and 1972, Chagnon
ferred to as “our contemporary ances- made five more expeditions into hen Chagnon first encountered
tors.” “The Fierce People” eventually mami country, exploring increasingly the Yanomami, they were thought
became one of the most widely read remote villages. In a 1974 book, “Study- to be the largest unacculturated aborigi-
ethnographical books of all time, selling ing the and in subsequent nal group on earth. They slept on bark
almost a million copies in the United editions of his first book, he describes hammocks slung around the periphery of
States alone. Buttressed by subsequent surviving a murder attempt by his communal roundhouses with open cen-
films about the Yanomami made by whom he frightens off with a ters, called They practiced ritual
Chagnon and a documentary filmmaker, and a close encounter with a jaguar, which combats-a graded series of exchanges,
Timothy the book became a stan- sniffs him in his hammock Despite re- starting with chest pounding and esca-
dard text in anthropology classes world- peated death threats, he pushes on into lating into duels with long poles. For gar-
wide, and it has gone through five revised uncharted territory, where he discovers dening, they relied on cutting tools that
editions, the last one in 1997. an isolated group, whose members he had been obtained through circuitous
“The Fierce People” was written with calls “the Fiercer People.” Abandoned trade links with the outside world. Their
the verve of an adventure story but was by a Yanomami guide, he hollows out a staple food, which constituted seventy
grounded in extensive empirical research. log canoe and returns downriver. per cent of their diet, was plantains, an
The book opens with this description of Since the turn of the twentieth cen- import to the New World. Even their ge-
Chagnon and an American missionary tury, anthropologists had been inspired netic makeup was unusual. The
named James Barker, stumbling into a to venture farther and farther afield in mami lack the so-called Diego Factor,
Yanomami village: search of “pure”people, uncontaminated an antigen found in other Mongoloid
by the Industrial Revolution. In the peoples, including Amerindians. Some
I . . . gasped when I saw a dozen burly, nineteen-twenties, Margaret Mead went scientists have hypothesized that they
naked, sweaty, hideous men staring at us to the South Pacific and wrote her best- are descended from the first people to
down the shafts of their drawn arrows! Im-
mense wads of green tobacco were stuck be- seller “Coming of Age in Samoa.” Mead cross the Bering Strait, twenty thousand
tween their lower teeth and lips making them described native in idyllic terms that years ago.
look even more hideous, and strands of spoke to the war-weary mood of the The Yanomami had developed a com-
green slime dripped or hung from their nos-
trils. We arrived at the village while the men time, while overlooking some of the less plex belief system about their origins,
were blowing a hallucinogenic drug up their pleasant aspects of Samoan life, such as their afterlife, and their vulnerability to an
noses. . . . I just stood there holding my note- the high incidence of violent rape. underworld of demons who were out to
book, helpless and pathetic. . . . What sort of
a welcome was this for the person who came “The Fierce People” was the product destroy souls by spreading disease.
here to live with you and learn your way of of a different period. Chagnon, who was many tribal societies, the Yanomami be-
life, to become friends with you? born in 1938, had spent an austere child- lieved that their souls were also threatened
hood in small-town, rural Michigan; his by the taking of photographs.) Each vil-
By 1968, Chagnon had spent nine- father was an undertaker, and he was the lage had shamans who maintained con-
teen months with the Yanomami. During stant vigil against the forces of evil by
this time, as he writes, he “acquired some casting spells on perceived enemies.
proficiency in their language and, up to a Today, there are an estimated
point, submerged myself in their culture seven living in hun-
and their way of life.” He studied the dreds of villages, spread out over about
Yanomami in a broad variety of aspects, seventy thousand square miles in
from their travel habits to their technol- em Venezuela and northern Brazil. They
ogy, use of hallucinogens, agriculture, in- speak four distinct dialects, and there are
tellectual life, social and political struc- enormous regional variations in trade,
tures, patterns of settlement, division of warfare, and degrees of contact with the

52 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 9, 2000

outside world. At the time of Chagnon’s
first expedition, most of the Yanomami
were mountain dwellers. They did not
have much in the way of metal tools or
personal possessions. They practiced
slash-and-burn agriculture, and they
spent much of their time on long treks of
hunting and gathering. They did not use
canoes-there are no navigable rivers in
the they had little use
for clothes, other than a cotton waistband
for women and a penis string for men. In-
creasingly, however, the Yanomami were
leaving the mountains to settle along the
main course of the Orinoco. There, dur-
ing the nineteen-fifties, missionaries had
established outposts, and Venezuelan
government workers had set up centers
for treatment of malaria, which had be-
come endemic along the river. Some of
the Yanomami in the lowlands were be-
ginning to wear Western clothes, and
they had settled into a relatively sedentary
life style, which they supported by grow-
ing crops, begging, and performing ser-
vices for outsiders. It was among these
Yanomami that Chagnon established his
headquarters, at the confluence of the
Orinoco and Mavaca rivers, next door
to the Mavaca mission in the village
of Bisaasi-teri.
Chagnon arrived in Yanomami terri-
tory in an aluminum rowboat with an Among anthropologists, this conclusion that, among the Yanomami, the
outboard motor. He was carrying axes contradicted the conventional wisdom act of killing bestowed status.
and machetes to give to the villagers as that primitive warfare was the result of This paper had considerable impact
payment for their cooperation. Although competition for hunting territories, beyond the field of anthropology. Ed-
the people of Bisaasi-teri were accus- land, or trade routes. Chagnon later said ward 0. and other sociobiolo-
tomed to receiving a trickle of trade that his findings had come as a surprise to gists accepted it as important evidence of
goods in return for their work in the mis- him, too. In 1988, he told a reporter for the genetic origins of human violence. In
sion, the sudden windfall created a sensa- US. News “I went down a preface to Chagnon’s 1992 book,
tion. In a letter from the field, Chagnon looking for shortages of resources. The Last Days of Eden,” which is
writes that the first recipients of his gifts, But it turns out they are fighting like hell “The Fierce People” adapted for a general
whom were male, immediately left over women.” audience, lauded Chagnon’s syn-
the village for remote settlements, where Over a period of thirty years, thesis of evolutionary biology and cul-
the axes and machetes could be used for non led some twenty expeditions into ture as a “master work”
trade. One of the most startling con- Yanomami territory and collected an un-
clusions of “The Fierce People” is that
Yanomami warfare was caused largely by
competition among marriageable men
paralleled body of data, which he pre-
sented in two books and more than thirty
articles. Perhaps Chagnon’s most endur-
L ike most undergraduate anthro-
pology students in the
seventies, I admired “The Fierce People”
over females, who-thanks to the wide- ing achievement was explaining the for its vivid research and unsentimental
spread practice of female Yanomami’s seemingly savage behavior approach. In part inspired by Chagnon’s
were in scarce supply. In another letter in a way that shed new light on natural example, I set out, in 1983, to do a study
from the field, Chagnon noted, “This selection. In 1988, he published an article of ritual murder in the Andes. Like
particular war got started the day I ar- in Science entitled “Life Histories, Blood Chagnon, I concluded that, among some
rived in the field (cause: woman steal- Revenge, and Warfare in a Tribal Popu- tribes, committing ritual murder was a
ing), and it is getting hotter and hotter.” lation,” in which he reported that the prestigious act. In 1989, I decided to study
The Yanomami’s need to wage war, he Yanomami men who murdered had twice the Yanomami, first in the
observed, encouraged the breeding of as many wives and three times as many Amazon gold rush had brought epi-
males-and this, in turn, led to more war. offspring as non-murderers had. He con- demics, guns, alcohol, and prostitution,
THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 53
and then in Venezuela, along the Orinoco Brazil, where Chagnon had spent some has been conducting research among the
and in the mountains. Over the next ten time in 1967, and where he claimed to Yanomami since 1969. In 1994, he and
years, I made six trips to the have found a group that demonstrated the another Yanomami researcher at the in-
Orinoco region, spending fifteen months most extreme form of Yanomami “treach- stitute wrote a letter to the American
in field and visiting thirty of the vil- ery.” However, according to the authori- Human Behavior and Evolution Society,
lages that Chagnon had studied. What I tative sociologist John Peters, who lived which claimed that Chagnon had got
found was sharply at odds with what there 1958 to 1967, the group had important mortality-rate statistics
Chagnon described. participated in only four raids in half a In the past decade, some of
In “The Fierce People,” Chagnon century. These raids, he said, had been non’s colleagues, as well as Catholic

arrived, the Yanomami bad begun leaving the mountains to settle near missions along the Orinoco.

wrote that the Yanomami were “one ‘provoked not by competition for women, sionaries in the field, have expressed con-
of the best nourished populations thus as Chagnon had written, but by the spread cern about the impact of his research on
far described in the anthropological/ of new diseases, which prompted angry Yanomami culture. Kenneth Good, who
biomedical Chagnon’s accusations of witchcraft. worked with Chagnon while researching
“burly” men, the villagers I encountered Others, too, were bewildered by some his Ph.D., has lived among the
were-as Rice had observed in of Chagnon’s writings. The linguist mami for twelve years-longer than any
tiny and scrawny, smaller than most Jacques who had been encouraged other American anthropologist. Good
rican Pygmies. According to data com- by Claude Levi-Strauss at the College de calls Chagnon “a hit-and-run anthropol-
piled by L. a biological France, has lived for twenty-five years ogist who comes into villages with
anthropologist at the University of Col- with the Yanomami. In 1994, crit- loads of machetes to purchase coopera-
orado, the adult males average four feet icized Chagnon in the American tion for his research. Unfortunately, he
nine inches in height, and the women for obscuring the identity of twelve creates con&t and division wherever he
four feet seven inches. The children have villages in his homicide study, making it goes.” During his years among the
some of the lowest weight-for-height ra- difficult for other anthropologists to ver- Good witnessed a single war, and
tios among Amazonian Indians. More- ify his data. The German ethnologist the only time he felt endangered was
over, Chagnon’s account of Yanomami Eibl-Eibesfeldt, a former head of on his first, nervous night in the field,
warfare seemed greatly exaggerated. I vis- the human-ethnology department at the in 1975, when Chagnon and another
ited a village on the Mucajai River, in Max Institute, outside Munich, anthropologist, both drunk, burst into
54 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER
his hut, tore his mosquito netting, and his village: “He had his bird feathers tween them and the antagonistic people
pushed him out of his hammock in a adorning his arms. He had red-dye paint of He said that, in return, the
mock raid. all over his body He wore a loincloth like Mishimishimabowei-teri had bestowed
the Yanomami. He sang with the chant on him the name of their village-an

I n 1995, Brian Ferguson, an anthropol-

ogist at Rutgers University, published a
book entitled “Yanomami Warfare: A
of his shamanism and took yopo’-a honor usually reserved for chiefs. “I was
powerful hallucinogen used by their village,” Chagnon writes. “Their vil-
mami shamans to make contact with lage was me.”
Political History,” which challenged the spirits. “He took a lot of yopo. I was ter- Chagnon, who retied this year as a
sociobiological theories drawn from rified of him. He always fired off his professor of anthropology at the Uni-
“The Fierce People” and other studies pistol when he entered the village, to versity of California in Santa Barbara,
by Chagnon. Ferguson, whose book an- prove that he was fiercer than the still retains his eminence in the field.
alyzes hundreds of sources, wrote that mami. Everybody was afraid of him Irven a professor of biological
most of the Yanomami wars on record cause nobody had seen a anthropology at Harvard, says, “Chag
were caused by outside disturbances, par- man-“acting as a shaman. He said to was both first and thorough. Fist in the
ticularly by the introduction of steel my brother Samuel, who was the head- sense that very, very few anthropological
goods and new diseases. Ferguson noted man, ‘What is your mother’s name?’ My studies have been carried out by an an-
that axes and machetes became highly brother answered, ‘We Yanomami do thropologist who was first on the scene.
coveted among the Yanomami as agri- not speak our names.’ Shaki”--the Thorough in the sense that Chag has
cultural tools and as commodities for mami’s name for Chagnon-“said, ‘It visited at least seventy-five Yanomami
trade. In his account, evangelical mis- doesn’t matter. If you tell me, I’ll villages on both sides of the Venezuela
sionaries, who arrived in Yanomami ter- you.’ So, although they didn’t want to, the and Brazil borders. I cannot think of a
ritory during the fifties, inadvertently people sold their names. Everyone cried, comparably thorough survey among any
plunged the region into war when they but they spoke them. It was very sad.” cultural group by any anthropologist.
disbursed axes and machetes to win con- Ferguson described an incident, in Chag gathered very detailed and docu-
verts. In time, some of the missions be- 1972, when Chagnon arrived in the village mented data on the villages-so much so
came centers of stability and sources of of Mishimishimabowei-teri, approxi- that another investigator could study the
much needed medicine. But Chagnon, mately seventy miles upriver same population and come to a different
whose study of Yanomami mortality teri. In exchange for blood samples, which conclusion. Chagnon’s study was ‘scien-
rates took him from village to village, dis- he was collecting for his genealogical tific’ in the best sense of the word.”
pensed steel goods in order to persuade study, Chagnon distributed machetes to a In 1995, Chagnon agreed to meet
the people to give him the names of their nearby rival village, whereupon the head- with me in his office in Santa Barbara. By
violation of tribal taboos. man of Mishimishimabowei-teri, an ag- this time, I had become a human-rights
In a chapter entitled “The Yanomamo gressive man named Moawa, threatened, activist on behalf of the Yanomami and
and the Anthropologist,” Ferguson de- Chagnon wrote, to “bury an ax” in his other Amazon tribes. I had written a
scribed how these methods destabilized head if he didn’t give his last machete to a piece in the New York Times that was
the region-in effect, promoted the sort man Moawa designated. Chagnon com- critical of one of Chagnon’s Venezuelan
of warfare that Chagnon attributed to plied, but when he was safely back at his friends and colleagues, Charles
the Yanomami’s ferocity By Chagnon’s home base, in Bisaasi-teri, he vented his and Chagnon was angry about it.
own account, he shuttled between enemy feelings in a way that shows how deeply In recent years, he had become such a
villages and cultivated who he had become enmeshed in local politics. controversial figure for his research among
might be considered ‘aberrant’ or ‘abnor- In “Studying the Chagnon the Yanomami that the Venezuelan gov-
mal outcasts in their own society,” and writes, “I told the Bisaasi-teri that I ernment had prohibited him from reen-
give him tribal secrets in ex- planned never to return to Moawa’s tering Yanomami country Chagnon re-
change for beads, cloth, fishhooks, and, lage. . . . I was tired of having people fused to answer any of my substantive
above all, steel goods. To get the data he threaten to kill me. I was alarmed at how questions about his troubles, saying that,
wanted, Chagnon, by his own account, close some of them had come. I told at some later date, he planned to write
began ‘bribing’ children when their el- them that I would do ‘the same’ to Moawa about them himself During the prepara-
ders were not around, or capitalizing on as he did to me, should he ever venture to tion of this article, he was again asked to
animosities between come to [mission] to visit.” answer questions about his work with
son writes that Chagnon stirred up vil- In a review of Ferguson’s book in the Yanomami. After first agreeing to
lage rivalries by behaving like a regional American Anthropologist, Chagnon talk in depth to The New Yorker, he
big man and an “un-Yanomami . . wild blamed the missionaries for any de- changed his mind a few days later and
card on the political scene.” stabilization, pointing out that the con- declined to comment.
This depiction of Chagnon was sup- flicts had broken out long before 1964,
ported by many of the Yanomami with when he arrived. In the 1997 edition ne of Chagnon’s most important
whom I spoke. In 1996, in the village of
Momaribowei-teri, a man named Pablo
of “The Fierce People,” he wrote that 0 academic mentors was the cele-
he had been something of a savior to brated geneticist Dr. James Neel, who
Mejia told me that when he was twelve the people of Mishimishimabowei-teri, was a member of Chagnon’s Ph.D. ad-
he had witnessed Chagnon’s arrival in helping to broker “neolithic peace” be- visory committee at the University of
THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 9, 2000 55
 the physical anthropologists.” Each per-
son was also photographed and paid
with what Neel called “a ‘cash’ transac-
tion based on trade goods.”
Neel had learned of an outbreak of
measles that had occurred the previous
fall among Brazilian Yanomami in vil-
lages more than a hundred miles from
the Venezuelan missions. For what he
later called “an exercise in preventive
medicine,” Neel’s team brought a thou-
sand doses of live measles vaccine into the
upper-Orinoco region. Neel was eager to
collect data on vaccine responses. At the
time, geneticists wanted to study tribal
people who had no measles antibodies,
in order to determine how their immune
responses differed fi-om those in modem
societies. In 1966, Francis Black, a ge-
neticist at Yale, had vaccinated a Brazilian
tribe, the Tiiiyo, with a measles vaccine,
not ordering any lunch, going to eatyours. in the hope of using the vaccine virus as
“a model of natural measles.” He found
that the Tiriyo’s post-vaccination fevers
were extraordinarily high, the tempera-
ture elevations were nearly three times
Michigan. Neel, who died earlier this process of natural selection and pro- those of other races that had been given
year, first achieved fame in the field of in- moted genetic entropy. Tribal people, the same vaccine.
herited disease and then headed the in his view, were likely to have supe- Black had chosen the widely used
Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission, rior genetic material because they lived Schwarz measles vaccine, rather than an
which was established after the war to according to the survival-of-the-fittest older vaccine, the Edmonston B, cit-
study survivors of the bombings of Hi- principle-that is, they were ruled by ing “the risk of severe febrile response”
roshima and Nagasaki. Between 1965 polygamous chiefs who had triumphed with the Edmonston B vaccine. In 1962,
and 1972, he received more than two over their rivals. He hoped that by study- when an immune-compromised child
million dollars fi-om the Atomic Energy ing the Yanomami he might be able to with leukemia died after receiving
Commission to compare the isolate specific genes for male leader- monston B, one of the vaccine’s inven-
mutation rates of the Japanese survivors ship-or, as he put it, an “Index of Innate tors, John Enders, of Harvard, had cau-
with those of the Yanomami and other view of the Yanomami as a tioned that the strain was dangerous for
“primitive tribes” that had not been ex- superior breeding not generally immune-depressed people. Measles vac-
posed to radiation. The immediate goal shared by Neel’s medical colleagues. cines were also known to produce unusu-
was to determine the effects of radiation Most of them believed that the ally severe reactions in people suffering
on the genetic material of cells. The ulti- . mami, like other Amerindian tribes, were from anemia, dysentery, or chronic expo-
mate goal was to help set radiation safety immune-depressed. sure to malaria-d the Yanomami suf-
standards in the United States. In January, 1968, Neel’s team, which fered from all three.
Chagnon became, as Neel put it, included Chagnon, and a Vene- Two years after Black conducted his
the “indispensable cultural anthropolo- zuelan doctor, Marcel arrived on study, Neel took the Edmonston B vac-
gist” in Michigan’s Human Genetics the upper Orinoco. Chagnon was sent cine, rather than the Schwarz, into
Department. Between 1966 and 1971, ahead of the others to secure, as he later nomami territory. None of the other
Chagnon made six trips to Brazil and wrote, “agreements from the members of Neel’s team seem to have
Venezuela, as a member of a multi- to provide endless outstretched brown participated in this decision, and there is
disciplinary team led by Neel to make arms into which many needles would no evidence that any of them would
what Neel described as the most com- be stuck for the next weeks.” have known the difference between the
prehensive study of a tribal people ever described the process in notes for one two vaccines. In January, 1968, Venezu-
attempted. of his films: “The villagers are studied ela had begun a national vaccination
Neel had long been interested in on a production line: numbers are as- project, administering the Schwarz vac-
unadulterated societies. A self-professed signed to them; specimens of their cine in three diluted doses, on the rec-
eugenicist, he believed that modern blood, saliva, and stools are collected; ommendation of the Centers for Dis-
democracies, with their free breeding impressions of their teeth are made; ease Control, in Atlanta. In the United
among large populations, violated the and they are weighed and measured by States, where many children still

5G THE NEW’ YORKER, OCTOBER 9, 2000

 the Edmonston vaccine-it is no broke out among the Venezuelan ing the Ocamo mission, and going into
longer used anywhere in the mami as soon as Chagnon and the his. “They already carried the dis-
it was given with an accompanying dose rived at the Ocamo mission. The measles, ease,” he told me, twenty-eight years later.
of gamma globulin, which reduces the Neel and Chagnon wrote, had been “Few of them returned, because the ma-
fevers by half Neel had his research- brought by a fourteen-year-old Brazilian jority died.”
ers administer Edmonston B without worker, who had come to Ocamo with It cannot be determined with any
gamma globulin to forty tribespeople at other workers. They said that Roche had accuracy how many died after receiv-
a mission on the Ocamo River. According made “a tentative diagnosis of measles” ing the vaccination. Chagnon has said
to the director of Venezuela5 vaccination in the Brazilian teen-ager, and added that no one who was vaccinated got
department, Dr. Betancourt, they that Roche’s diagnosis was “uncertain,” measles, and, according to the medical
did so without the department’s permis- because the boy’s symptoms could not consensus at the time, the Edmonston B
sion. (A science historian at the Univer- be distinguished from “any of a variety vaccine virus was not, in itself, conta-
sity of Pennsylvania, Susan Lindee, was of ‘jungle fevers.’ (And the boy showed gious. Today, scientists still do not know
recently quoted in Time to the effect that no signs of a measles rash.) whether people who have been vacci-
Venezuelan officials gave permission for eight years later, I talked to Roche in nated with Edmonston B can transmit
the vaccinations. She has since told The Venezuela, in the offices of a scientific measles.What is certain is that the ef-
New Yorker that her evidence for the journal of which he was the editor. He fects of an epidemic, in which hundreds
claim was erroneous.) told me that he did not remember hav- in a relatively short period, were
Over the next three months, the ing diagnosed measles in the Brazilian especially devastating on a people who
worst epidemic in the his- boy. Indeed, according to the Mavaca; believed that some new black magic
tory broke out. On the basis of three mission records, Roche and another doc- must have brought on the disease and
mission journals, data of the expedition tor reported that the team’s arrival had who, at the first sign of the measles rash,
itself, and interviews with Yanomami coincided with an ongoing epidemic of panicked and fled from their homes
survivors and with other witnesses, I de- bronchopneumonia, whose symptoms into the forests, away from further med-
termined that the course of the epidemic match those that Neel and Chagnon de- ical attention.
closely tracked the movements of Neel’s scribed in the fourteen-year-old boy. A government nurse who was in the
team. It broke out in the three settle- Chagnon and Roche began vaccinat- area at the time, Juan Gonzalez, helped
ments that received the vaccinations ing the Ocamo Indians with the Yanomami collect the bodies of
the Ocamo mission, the Mavaca mis- ston B for purely “preventive” reasons, the dead for cremation. “They hung
sion, and a village called Patanowa-teri. Roche later told me. According to Neel the children in baskets from the trees,”
Because quarantines were not rigorously and Chagnon, cases of “moderately se- he recalls. “The cadavers were placed
imposed, the disease spread to dozens of vere measles” appeared among the vac- inside the baskets, all rolled up tightly,
villages scattered across thousands of cinated Yanomami six days after they like a metallic foil. The women were
square miles. It is estimated that between were inoculated. The fevers Neel and more loosely wrapped, in leaves, and
fifteen and twenty per cent of the Chagnon recorded were, on average, far they were left hanging in hammocks out
mami who contracted measles died in higher than previous responses to the in the wild among the trees. They tied
the epidemic. Edmonston B vaccine-so high that the men up on poles, higher up in the
they could not be distinguished from branches. What a stench there was.

A child’s unmarked grave lies next

to a dirt airstrip at the Catholic
Ocamo mission. Thirty years ago, a
the fevers of natural measles. Then Ro-
berto Baltasar died. According to his fa-
ther, vaccinated Yanomami began flee-
Nothing but dead Yanomami. The
nomami say that they died from that
vaccine. That’s why even now some of
small cross was erected at this spot, but it
could withstand the tropical weather.
The remains in the grave are those of
a year-old boy named Roberto
sar, who died on February he
was the first clearly diagnosed case of
measles among the Venezuelan
mami recorded in the mission journals.
According to Vitalino Baltasar, the boy’s
father, Roberto had come down with the
disease after being vaccinated by
non, under the direction of Neel.
In a 1970 paper entitled “Notes on
the Effect of Measles and Measles Vac-
cine in a Virgin-Soil Population of South
American Indians,” Neel and Chagnon
tell a different story, In their account, a
single case of measles coincidentally
them don’t want to be vaccinated. I don’t measles. . . . We’re going to be able to Yanomami could easily spread the dis-
know how to explain it either, because document the whole gamut of measles ease to others by journeying to nearby
we initially believed that that first vac- in this group.” villages to trade. (Apparently, this hap-
cine had come to help us. Instead, it Later, Chagnon asks Neel to sum- pened. A group of Ocamo Yanomami
came to destroy us.” mon more doctors, from Caracas, to who had sold blood to Neel’s researchers
who died in 1994, left about treat the measles, and Neel agrees. Their for knives, machetes, and other trade
twenty thousand feet of raw footage radio operator, whom they call Rous- goods travelled upriver to visit village
of the expedition, along with sound seau, says that he will contact people in called Shubariwa-teri, which was then
tapes, to the Smithsonian Institution. Caracas and request antibiotics devastated by measles.) Chagnon sug-
The first mention of the measles out- de la of the ef- gests that Neel take quarantine precau-
break on the soundtrack is heard on the fects of the vaccine-and adds that the tions at Mavaca, and he urges that doc-
eighteenth of February, three days after vaccine may bring de tors be flown in from Caracas to care for
Roberto Baltasar’s death. On that day, outbreaks of measles. After listening to the Ocamo Yanomami. Neel agrees. He
recorded Neel giving him instruc- Rousseau, Chagnon cautions Neel, “But then orders his younger colleagues to
tions on filming measles victims ‘at the he’s trying to interpret all of them to move farther up the Orinoco, into the
team’s base camp, at Mavaca, where a mean that it’s a reaction to the vaccina- tribe’s heartland.
second vaccination center had been es- tion, which I don’t think is a wise thing
tablished. “Let me tell you what we want
to get-extreme severe morbilliform
rash,” Neel says. “Can you get this? . . .
to do.” Chagnon seems bewildered by
the extent of the outbreak. He says,
“Now we have measles at Mavaca and
D uring the epidemic, Neel,
non, and
winning films. One was
made two

Both eyes. He has the typical Ocamo, and I don’t know where else it A Multidisciplinary Study,” which pre-
form rash on both cheeks. . . . I’m afraid don’t know when it arrived.” sents a general overview of Neel’s re-
you’re going to [see] some severe cases of Later, he tells Neel that the Ocamo search objectives. The other was “The
Feast,” which documents the celebra-
tion of a military alliance between two
formerly hostile villages. “The Feast”
is widely considered one of the finest
ethnographic films ever made, because
of how it depicts the Machiavellian
underpinnings of tribal festivities. In
Asch’s notes, he explained the back-
ground to the film: “To conduct raids
and to protect itself from attack, a
village must ally itself with
neighboring villages. The feast is a
means by which these intervillage al-
liances are formed. To prepare for a
feast, the village is first cleaned. Gal-
lons of banana soup for the guests are
cooked and stored in large troughs. The
guests, waiting outside the village, send
in an emissary who chants a greeting
and brings back food to his people. The
guests burst in, dancing and brandishing
their weapons, whiie the hosts recline in
their hammocks. Feasting, trading, and
games of ritual violence then take place.
Sometimes these ‘games’ escalate into
real massacres.”
Both “A Multidisciplinary Study’
and “The Feast” were filmed in the vil-
lage of Patanowa-teri. Twenty-eight
years later, when I visited there, a tribal
elder named Kayopewe told me, through
a translator, that before Chagnon and
arrived with their equipment the
village had fallen into ruins and was
largely abandoned. It was reconstructed
and reoccupied, he said, only after
non promised that if the villagers moved custom for two villages to celebrate such visits into tribal territories. The first
back in and held a peacemaking feast a union by choosing a new enemy, and group to defend Yanomami rights was
with their neighbors from a hostile after feasting together the new allies formed in Brazil, and a split developed in
lage called Mahekoto-teri he would give launched a raid on a thiid village, killing anthropology between the researchers
every man among them a machete. a woman in the process. One day, when who wanted simply to observe tribal
opewe said that the whole had, in tried to film a doctor who was ture and those who wanted Indians to
effect, been by the filmmakers. treating a sick man from the village of have land rights and health care. From
partly confirmed this account in Mavaca, Neel interrupted him. “I don’t 1976 until 1985, Chagnon was prohib-
an article published in the journal want any of this,” he said. “You’re here to ited from reentering Yanomami terri-
in 1972. In a description of document the kind of study we’re trying tory. During those years, he and his wife,
the making of “The Feast,” he said that to make. Anyone can walk into a village Carlene, raised two children, and he be-
Chagnon had sent him, three and treat people. This is not what we’re came a popular lecturer at Northwestern
mami, and a young Protestant mission- here to do.” and then at the University of California
ary, Daniel Shaylor, on an eleven-day After Neel’s researchers departed, many at Santa Barbara.
trek to Patanowa-teri, a “mountain hide- of the Mahekoto-teri and Patanowa- In 1985, Chagnon, accompanied by a
out” far from the vaccination centers teri became sick and died. It is not clear University of California graduate student,
along the Orinoco. “After finding [the] what they died of, because they may have Jesus Cardozo, who was Venezuelan,
Patanowa-teri we set up an aircraft radio been exposed to many different patho- in reentering Yanomami territory.
and reached Napoleon at Mavaca. He gens, including colds, the Edmonston B He returned to Mishimishimabowei-teri,
convinced the headman to move back virus, and malaria. (Shaylor, the expedi- where he hoped to finish his long-term
into an old garden near the Orinoco tion’s translator, had arrived in Patanowa- study of the relationship between
River where the genetics expedition teri with malaria, where he became so mami homicide and reproductive suc-
could work with them and we could take sick that he had to be evacuated.) In cess. Cardozo, who no longer has cordial
film.” A large shipment of metal pots 1996, when I showed the elders of both relations with Chagnon, went on to help
duly arrived as payment for the villagers’ villages a video of “The Feast,” many of create the Venezuelan Foundation for
cooperation. In 1995, according to an the old men wept. Kayopewe said, “We Anthropological Research, which pro-
article in the Visual Anthropology Re- broke out in sores and rash on our faces, motes Yanomami education and land
view, Chagnon said, “I did not ‘stage’ and it burned really badly. One of us rights. As Cardozo later recalled of the
this-it happened naturally. They could died at the village [where the filming expedition, “We hadn’t even got our boat
not have cared less about our interests in took place]. We left him there and fled moored to the shore at Mavakita”-a
filming and are the kind of people who into the jungles. An old man would die. Mishimishimabowei-teri village that
would not do something this costly and We would tie him up in the trees. And had broken off from the main group
time consuming for two whole commu- then a young woman would die, and we following various epidemics in the early
nities simply to accommodate the film- would leave her in a basket. We kept seventies-“when Yanomami started
ing interests of outsiders.” dying off and dying off.” When the men coming out and shouting, ‘Go away!
Other payments were required--so heard a translation of the soundtrack of Shaki brings [illness].’ Within
many that Chagnon radioed for another ‘A Multidisciplinary Study,” in which our first twenty-four hours there, three
plane to bring in more trade goods. Neel claimed that the Patanowa-teri children died-two in the night and an-
When Chagnon distributed the goods, had been saved from measles, thanks to other in the morning.” Although there
he created what seems, on the sound- the vaccinations, there was a chorus of was no connection between Chagnon’s
track, to be pandemonium. Later, when protest. Horemu!” (“Lies, lies.“) arrival and the deaths, the events were
and asked a group of One man told me, “Shaki stole our spir- seen as further evidence of the anthro-
Yanomami to cut some bananas in front its, and we have never been the same.” pologist’s malefic power. “On our sec-
of the camera, they suddenly burst into a ond night, half of the village fled into
y the mid-seventies, the Yanomami the forest to get away from us.”
frenzied dance-“screaming at the top
of their lungs, waving branches of leaves
in the air,” as later wrote in
B had become the most intensively
studied and filmed tribal group in the
After another day of searching for
a community where he could continue
lines. filmed the scene, assuming world. In Paris in 1978, a festival was de- his genealogical research, Chagnon
that it was a “garden ritual.” When the voted to films about them. As scientists, found a village, Iwahikoroba-teri, that
Yanomami finally stopped, Chagnon news teams, filmmakers, and others com- was willing to receive the expedition.
asked them, “What was that all about?” peted for footage and new data about “When we arrived at Iwahikoroba-teri,
“Isn’t that what you just asked us to the tribe, some of the Yanomami along everybody was sick, throwing up and
do?” the headman replied. the Orinoco became part-time film ex- moaning and lying down in their ham-
The filming of “The Feast” also had tras and anthropological informants. mocks,” Cardozo said. “I remember a
unforeseen consequences. When At the same time, native-rights advo- little girl, Makiritama. She was vomit-
non invited the Patanowa-teri’s former cates began to criticize outsiders---gold ing blood. She was defecating blood,
enemies, the Mahekoto-teri, to partici- miners, journalists, missionaries, scien- too. I remember her husband-she was
pate as guests, he created a new alliance. tists-claiming that cultural disruption very young, she was to be his future
According to Chagnon, it is Yanomami and epidemics invariably followed their wife-showed me where she was

THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 59

 In 1989, Chagnon proposed bringing
a BBC film crew to Bisaasi-teri to com-
memorate the twenty-fifth anniversary
of his arrival in the village. By this time,
many more Yanomami had left the
highlands to live near the missions along
the Orinoco and its tributaries, where
they could attend schools, get medical
care, and eat a more varied diet. The
Yanomami at the missions were con-
siderably more robust than those in
the hills, and they had learned how
to market their own handicrafts through
a trade cooperative run by elected rep-
resentatives. Along the Orinoco and
rivers, it was no longer easy for
researchers to hire Yanomami porters,
informants, or film extras. When the
Yanomami at Bisaasi-teri learned that
“He passed away last week. Can him a message?” Chagnon was returning, they instructed
their representative, a former guide of
. Chagnon’s named Dimanawa, to
write a letter asking the anthropologist
to keep away, because his contained
ting up and everything. And I went up article appeared, the Brazilian military so much “fighting and bloodshed.”
to Chagnon and said, ‘You know these chief of staff cited the Yanomami’s tru- manawa wrote, “We do not want you to
people are really sick. Some of them culence as a reason for breaking up their make any more films.” Again, the Vene-
could die. I think we should go and get lands. A past president of the Brazilian zuelan government cancelled Chagnon’s
medical help.’ Chagnon told me that I Anthropological Association, Maria permit, citing the “turmoil” that his visit
would never be a scientist. He said, ‘No. Carneiro da Cunha, wrote a would provoke.
No. That’s not our problem. We didn’t letter to the Newsletter in
come to save the Indians. We came to which she held Chagnon accountable, in turned for help to
study them.’
For the next several weeks, Chagnon
part, for the government’s actions against
the Yanomami. In an article entitled
C Carias, his old friend. A distin-
guished botanist, Brewer-Carias had
collected homicide data, numbering “The Academic Extermination of the been criticized by environmentalists and
each Yanomami’s chest or arm with a Yanomami,” which was published in the human-rights activists for allegedly ac-
Magic Marker, posing the Yanomami Brazilian cultural journal quiring, under the pretense of doing
for identification photographs, and pay- two anthropologists, Alcida Ramos and research in rain forests, land for gold
ing them with trade goods. He summa- Bruce Albert, wrote, “Few indigenous mining---charges that he emphatically
rized his findings in an article in Science, people . . . have had their image as deni- denies. Through Brewer-Carias,
which was published in February, 1988. grated as have the Yanomami, who had non made another powerful ally, Cecilia
The article was noted in the misfortune of being studied by a Matos, the mistress of the Venezuelan
for providing a new, though grim North American anthropologist named President, Carlos Andrts Perez, and
model for human evolution: “Through Napoleon Chagnon.” the head of a foundation that had been
violence male seems to en- Chagnon responded to da Cunha in set up to assist indigenous and peasant
hance his reproductive success and that the Anthropology Newsletter by saying families. Chagnon, Brewer-Carias, and
of his kin: he becomes ‘fitter.’ that he could not control the press’s ten- Matos devised a plan to create a
But Yanomami specialists generally dency to sensationalize his findings, and mami reserve in the Siapa
rejected the study. In a number of an- that he should not be held responsible for an area of thousands of square miles in
thropological journals, they challenged the failure of Brazilians to defend the which the Indians would live in pro-
Chagnon’s findings on ethical, statisti- rights of indigenous people. In his 1992 tected isolation. Only scientists would
cal, linguistic, and interpretive grounds. revised edition of for which be allowed into the area, to study the
And Chagnon’s presence in the he dropped the subtitle “The Fierce Peo- Yanomami at a research center run by
he was mentioned in the Los Angeles ple,” he drew a distinction between re- Chagnon and Brewer-Carfas.
Times, in February, 1988, as having said searchers who sought objective facts, like Between August, 1990, and Septem-
that when the Yanomami were not hunt- him, and other anthropologists, who ber, 1991, Chagnon and Brewer-Carfas
ing, or searching for honey, they were were motivated by a sense of political ac- organized a dozen expeditions by heli-
often killing one another-became pro- tivism and who “hold a romantic, copter into the Siapa region for journal-
vocative. Less than a year after the Times seauian view of primitive culture.” ists and scientists, in order to build up
GO THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 9, 2000
national and international support for the first outsiders to revisit the area batted malnutrition, intestinal parasites,
their project. Three of the villages that since Chagnon’s tumultuous helicop- and, more recently, malaria. But what
were visited by Chagnon, Brewer-Car&, ter descents, and we found the villages they could not comprehend-and what
and their entourage were badly damaged very different from his descriptions. had shaken their world-was the sud-
by the helicopters. In 1991, Chagnon In articles and in interviews, Chagnon den arrival of visitors who seemed to
described one of these events in an arti- had said that the Siapa Yanomami offer an easier life and, at the same time,
cle for the magazine Santa Barbara, en- were healthy, well fed, and peaceful. sowed so much confusion. For them,
titled “To Save the Fierce People”: “A Here, in the tribe’s unspoiled heartland, Chagnon had come to personify every-
few feet from landing, we aborted when steel goods were scarce, and the homi- thing that both attracted and repulsed
we saw the leaves of their roofs being cide rate among men was much lower them about our culture. They wanted
blown away by the chopper’s downblast. than it was in the lowlands along the him, and they didn’t want him, and they
We saw people fleeing in terror and men Orinoco. could not forget him.
throwing sticks and stones at us as we re- What De Souza and I discovered, After twelve days of trekking, we
treated up and away.” however, was a fearful, broken society. reached Ashidowa-teri, the village
Dr. Carlos Botto, the director of At Narimobowei-teri, the first village where a number of Yanomami had
the Amazon Center for the Investiga- that Chagnon’s helicopter had dam- been injured when Chagnon’s helicopter
tion and Control of Tropical Disease, in aged, men with drawn arrows greeted blew away a roof. They were living in
Puerto Ayacucho, was in the village of us, fearing that we were enemy raiders. looked like inadequate
Ashidowa-teri when Chagnon landed At night, we listened to the chanting of lean-tos, and they were the most sickly,
in his helicopter and part of the shamans who were trying to exorcise dispirited Yanomami I had seen in Ven-
collapsed. “When the poles of the roof the demonic flying machine that had ezuela. As soon as we entered their
fell, a number of Yanomami were in- descended upon their village, dispensing clearing, a man grabbed my hand, held
jured, and we had to treat them,” Botto both wonderful trade goods and, they it to his feverish forehead, and cried,
recalls. had to rescue people who believed, terrible disease. At another vil- (“Sickness.“) Many of the
were buried under the poles and roofing lage, Toobatotoi-teri, which Chagnon people had painted their faces black, in
of the It was a serious situation. described as “the last uncontacted group mourning, and most of the children
The shamans and elders began to prac- in this region,” we came to a clearing looked malnourished.
tice their chanting because of the col- where shamans were trying to induce At night, in the firelight of circled
lapse of the The expedition left helicopters to land by chanting and hearths, the Yanomami sang about the
a tragic scar.” dancing. The plan, apparently, was to mysterious arrival of the helicopters
In September, 1993, Chagnon and trick any outsiders into unloading their and their strange riders. Then the peo-
were named to a Presi- steel gifts and then to scare them into ple around the campfires began mourn-
dential commission, which was given leaving-quickly, before they could in- ing for their departed kin. The head-
broad powers over the fect the people with colds and fevers. man, Mirapewe, said to me, “If you
and political future. The attorney gen- Life in the Siapa Highlands had always could count the dead, you would see
eral’s office, leaders of the Catholic been a struggle. The villagers had com- how many of us there were.”
Church, and native-rights groups op-
posed the appointments, and three hun-
dred representatives from nineteen In-
dian tribes rallied in the streets of Puerto
Ayacucho, the capital of the state of
Amazonas, in an effort to have Chagnon
and expelled from
mami territory. On September
Chagnon was escorted to Caracas by
an Army colonel, who confiscated his
field notes and advised him to leave the
country-which he did.
In the United States, Chagnon re-
mained highly regarded. Earlier that
year, he had been elected president of
the prestigious Human Behavior and
Evolution Society.

I September of 1996, after undergo-

ing a quarantine, I trekked
for seventeen days into the Siapa High-
lands with a Brazilian malaria-control
worker, Marinho De Souza. We were “Hey, who wants to bear a great single-malt story?”