Napoleon A. Chagnon (1938–2019)

This book is all sour grapes. Resentment, bitterness, grudges, bad attitude. Don't read NOBLE SAVAGES for a balanced perspective, or a thorough explanation of the conflicts that defined Chagnon's career. He's telling his side of the story only.

What's more -- what's worse -- is that NOBLE SAVAGES is not a book about the Yanomamo. It's a book about Napoleon Chagnon. Even though he spends most of the book describing his fieldwork, the Yanomamo themselves are stuck in the background. Chagnon show more discusses them as types -- the headmen are fierce and despotic, the young warriors who haven't killed yet are full of bluster and threats, the warriors who have killed are calmer but more deadly. Individuals don't emerge from the pack; nobody takes on a distinct personality, no named individual emerges as a unique human being, distinct from his type. And don't expect to read about women; Chagnon ignores them utterly.

Because he's pretty busy talking about himself. I know where he did his graduate studies, where he got his grants, what universities hired him. I know how he got along with his (white, male) colleagues. I know what he ate for breakfast, what he wore, how he partitioned the hut he lived in. When he encounters a village of Yanomamo for the first time, he likes to tell us what they've heard about HIM, how excited they are to see HIM. He managed, in the tale of one such excursion, to recount zero anecdotes about the Yanomamo but tell us exactly how many times he had to flee into the bushes because of his diarrhea.

It's hard to draw any real conclusions about the academic value of Chagnon's work from NOBLE SAVAGES. Maybe he collected some valuable data. Maybe he presented it accurately in his early publications. Maybe he didn't. What I do know, from reading the book, is that he appears to be a jerk. And that he describes his treatment of the Yanomamo in ways that made me cringe.

Why cringe? Because he thinks it's cute to talk about how he hired a few boys to stay up all night inside of his hut and shoot at rats if they got close to his sleeping wife during her brief visit to his field site. Because he talks about walking into a village for the first time and, when his hosts offer him a hut to sleep in, saying thanks, but could you build a bigger hut? Because he never hesitates to trade Yanomamo labor for trinkets, asking them to carry, carve, and guide in exchange for fishhooks and the occasional cooking pot. I wonder what the daily wage was in Caracas for the average laborer in the 1960s and 1970s? I wonder if Chagnon's payments for services rendered were ever, ever fair?

There was one particular incident that made my blood boil. Chagnon wanted to visit a distant village known for being hostile. All his local informants insisted that these villagers were aggressive, liable to kill any visitors, and they were too terrified to make the trip. Chagnon tried to bully adults into guiding him but they kept fleeing once they came near the hostile village's location. Finally, after several aborted attempts, Chagnon bullied a 12-year-old boy into taking him. The 12-year-old tried to get out of it by pretending to be sick, but Chagnon just bundled him into a canoe and insisted he'd be fine. Then he mocked the kid for being "sullen".

Another unappealing aspect to NOBLE SAVAGES is Chagnon's insistence that he'd met "wild indians". He repeatedly refers to the Yanomamo as "pristine" and "wild" and "uncontacted", and gloats over being one of the only, or the very last person, to witness their ceremonies. He insists that as a "pristine" culture, the Yanomamo can stand in for all tribes, at all times. That the contemporary Yanomamo are the same a primitive, Paleolithic man. Generalizations of this kind are ridiculous. No culture is timeless. Not all cultures with like technology are like in organization, behavior, etc. It's a long-disproved fallacy that Chagnon repeats uncritically, because it flatters him, the heroic anthropologist.

It's especially untrue in regards to the Yanomamo. In NOBLE SAVAGES Chagnon tells us that by the time he started his fieldwork, missionary groups had already introduced steel tools like machetes and rifles as bribes to win over the Yanomamo. Medical technicians visited regularly to distribute malaria pills. And, later on in the book, Chagnon copies whole pages from the memoir of a Brazilian woman who was kidnapped by the Yanomamo in the 1930s. The Yanomamo practice slash-and-burn horticulture. They grow non-native crops like bananas and plantains, and, Chagnon estimates, have done so for at least a couple of hundred years. This is not "pure" and "uncontacted" culture.

And then there's the way that Chagnon describes other anthropologists. Chagnon repeatedly uses the term "political correctness" as an insult. Ditto for "activist" and "radical". He insists that post-modernism is anti-science, and defines the word 'racist' as "an accusation often used by radical cultural anthropologists to deprecate anything that can be construed as having been inspired by sociobiology".

Whatever you think about academia, Chagnon's ability to lump his enemies together into an undifferentiated mass makes it hard to take his insights into human nature or culture very seriously. He's self-absorbed and incurious. He doesn't see nuance. And he's a total douche.

Note: I received this book free from Edelweiss in exchange for an honest review. show less

This book is all sour grapes. Resentment, bitterness, grudges, bad attitude. Don't read NOBLE SAVAGES for a balanced perspective, or a thorough explanation of the conflicts that defined Chagnon's career. He's telling his side of the story only.

What's more -- what's worse -- is that NOBLE SAVAGES is not a book about the Yanomamo. It's a book about Napoleon Chagnon. Even though he spends most of the book describing his fieldwork, the Yanomamo themselves are stuck in the background. Chagnon show more discusses them as types -- the headmen are fierce and despotic, the young warriors who haven't killed yet are full of bluster and threats, the warriors who have killed are calmer but more deadly. Individuals don't emerge from the pack; nobody takes on a distinct personality, no named individual emerges as a unique human being, distinct from his type. And don't expect to read about women; Chagnon ignores them utterly.

Because he's pretty busy talking about himself. I know where he did his graduate studies, where he got his grants, what universities hired him. I know how he got along with his (white, male) colleagues. I know what he ate for breakfast, what he wore, how he partitioned the hut he lived in. When he encounters a village of Yanomamo for the first time, he likes to tell us what they've heard about HIM, how excited they are to see HIM. He managed, in the tale of one such excursion, to recount zero anecdotes about the Yanomamo but tell us exactly how many times he had to flee into the bushes because of his diarrhea.

It's hard to draw any real conclusions about the academic value of Chagnon's work from NOBLE SAVAGES. Maybe he collected some valuable data. Maybe he presented it accurately in his early publications. Maybe he didn't. What I do know, from reading the book, is that he appears to be a jerk. And that he describes his treatment of the Yanomamo in ways that made me cringe.

Why cringe? Because he thinks it's cute to talk about how he hired a few boys to stay up all night inside of his hut and shoot at rats if they got close to his sleeping wife during her brief visit to his field site. Because he talks about walking into a village for the first time and, when his hosts offer him a hut to sleep in, saying thanks, but could you build a bigger hut? Because he never hesitates to trade Yanomamo labor for trinkets, asking them to carry, carve, and guide in exchange for fishhooks and the occasional cooking pot. I wonder what the daily wage was in Caracas for the average laborer in the 1960s and 1970s? I wonder if Chagnon's payments for services rendered were ever, ever fair?

There was one particular incident that made my blood boil. Chagnon wanted to visit a distant village known for being hostile. All his local informants insisted that these villagers were aggressive, liable to kill any visitors, and they were too terrified to make the trip. Chagnon tried to bully adults into guiding him but they kept fleeing once they came near the hostile village's location. Finally, after several aborted attempts, Chagnon bullied a 12-year-old boy into taking him. The 12-year-old tried to get out of it by pretending to be sick, but Chagnon just bundled him into a canoe and insisted he'd be fine. Then he mocked the kid for being "sullen".

Another unappealing aspect to NOBLE SAVAGES is Chagnon's insistence that he'd met "wild indians". He repeatedly refers to the Yanomamo as "pristine" and "wild" and "uncontacted", and gloats over being one of the only, or the very last person, to witness their ceremonies. He insists that as a "pristine" culture, the Yanomamo can stand in for all tribes, at all times. That the contemporary Yanomamo are the same a primitive, Paleolithic man. Generalizations of this kind are ridiculous. No culture is timeless. Not all cultures with like technology are like in organization, behavior, etc. It's a long-disproved fallacy that Chagnon repeats uncritically, because it flatters him, the heroic anthropologist.

It's especially untrue in regards to the Yanomamo. In NOBLE SAVAGES Chagnon tells us that by the time he started his fieldwork, missionary groups had already introduced steel tools like machetes and rifles as bribes to win over the Yanomamo. Medical technicians visited regularly to distribute malaria pills. And, later on in the book, Chagnon copies whole pages from the memoir of a Brazilian woman who was kidnapped by the Yanomamo in the 1930s. The Yanomamo practice slash-and-burn horticulture. They grow non-native crops like bananas and plantains, and, Chagnon estimates, have done so for at least a couple of hundred years. This is not "pure" and "uncontacted" culture.

And then there's the way that Chagnon describes other anthropologists. Chagnon repeatedly uses the term "political correctness" as an insult. Ditto for "activist" and "radical". He insists that post-modernism is anti-science, and defines the word 'racist' as "an accusation often used by radical cultural anthropologists to deprecate anything that can be construed as having been inspired by sociobiology".

Whatever you think about academia, Chagnon's ability to lump his enemies together into an undifferentiated mass makes it hard to take his insights into human nature or culture very seriously. He's self-absorbed and incurious. He doesn't see nuance. And he's a total douche.

Note: I received this book free from Edelweiss in exchange for an honest review. show less

This is more a memoir than an anthropological study, documenting Chagnon's studies of Yanomamo culture over a span of 30 years. Chagnon is extremely bitter: he is on a mission to out his detractors as politically correct / Marxist / non-scientific activists. But he need not take this approach, because many laypeople will enjoy learning about Yanomamo culture more than about academic disputes.

His enemies are split into a few camps. Many just don't like Chagnon as a person. They focus on his show more supposed ill-treatment of the Yanomamo; his selfishness, such as getting tribesmen to build him a larger hut or rewarding children for shooting rats for his comfort; and his meddling trade of machetes for information. The more nuanced criticism is Chagnon extrapolates backwards in time without much historical evidence. Jared Diamond, in contrast, paints a broad picture using a wide range of scientific evidence outside of immediate observation.

The crux of this work is the correlation between violence and offspring: well-known killers are more likely to take more wives and father more children. I'm not sure why this is so absurd a proposition. The idea seems to annoy Christian missionaries and activists alike. We see such correlations frequently in the animal kingdom, and such assertions about non-humans are readily accepted. But cultural anthropology has split into a scientific approach (sociobiology) and a postmodernist one which holds there are no objective truths.

It seems plausible to me that competition for females has important evolutionary consequence alongside competition for materials such as land and food. Chagnon terms these facets reproductive and somatic resources respectively. Traditionally, only somatic resources are considered relevant. That said, Chagnon is probably going too far in the way he characterises competition for material resources as insignificant among the Yanomamo. Nor does correlation imply causation: the underlying cause may be bigger, stronger, healthier men have more children and also tend to fare well in battle. After years of fighting for credibility, balancing arguments cannot be further from Chagnon's mind.

The last few chapters descend into a long-winded political defence with little interesting content. Recommend you skip or skim these to maintain your sanity. show less

As a true classic in the literature of cultural anthropology "Yanomamo" was as influential as Margaret Mead's "Coming of Age in Samoa" in the way that it brought a rather foreign culture to a wide Western audience. As with Mead though there are lingering questions about the author and his relationship to his subjects. Aside from these this book is one of the few that gives a glimpse of a group of Amazonian natives who, at the time of it's writing, had very little contact with outsiders. The show more ceremonies and lifestyle presented are perhaps as foreign as ever to those in the "civilized" world as our technologically saturated society continues to remove us from meaningful interactions with the natural world. While the people profiled in this book are considered "primitive" and still close to the stone age by the author may actually be survivors from a greater civilization, which collapsed, that once flourished in the Amazon basin and whose archaeological remains are just now being found. This new information was unavailable to Chagnon and led to his belief that they were analogous to stone age people and had survived unchanged while the rest of the world advanced around them. If you have an interest in tribal societies or Amazonia this short book may pique your interest to pursue this fascinating group of people though works by other scholars. This tribe's name is alternately spelled Yanomami. show less