Chagnon Debate Essay -- essays papers

Chagnon Debate In Patrick Tierney’s article â€Å"The Fierce Anthropologist,† he discussed the faults that are, or may be, present in Napoleon Chagnon’s anthropological research of the Yanamamo, or â€Å"The Fierce People,† as Chagnon has referred to them in his best-selling book on the people. Due to Chagnon’s unparalleled body of work in terms of quantity and, as many argue, quality, Marvin Harris draws heavily on his research to support his point, which is that the origin of war is ecological and reproductive pressure. One should question Harris’s theories (and all theories), especially in the light of the aforementioned article, but I do not believe his arguments are, or should be, adversely affected by the information presented in this article. The claim that the Yanamamo are an extremely militant people is pervasive in Chagnon’s work, and Harris uses this as the basis for his arguments. However, Tierney claims that â€Å"Chagnon’s account of Yanamami warfare seemed greatly exaggerated.† (Pg. 54). Another integral part of Chagnon’s research, which Harris cites, was that the Yamamamo wage war because of women. John Peters, in Tierney’s article, presented a differing opinion stating that, â€Å"these raids [referring to the four raids carried out in half a century by a group that Chagnon said ‘demonstrated the most extreme form of Yanamami â€Å"treachery.†Ã¢â‚¬â„¢ (Pg. 54).] †¦had been provoked not by competition for women, as Chagnon had written, but by the spread of new diseases, which prompted angry accusations of witchcraft.† These, among a slew of other discrepancies, cast an especially doubtful light on Chagnon’s research, and thus Harris’s conclusions. Harris reasons that if Yanamamo warfare is indeed caused by fights over women that this is caused not only by lack of females due to female infanticide which is legitimized through male supremacy which is legitimized through warfare, but also the males’ failure to bring home meat. In Cannibals and Kings Harris writes, â€Å"From the account of Helena Valero, a Brazilian captured by the Yanomamo, we know that wives make a point of taunting their husbands when the supply of game falters†¦ The men themselves, after returning empty-handed, become touchy about real or imagined insubordination on the part of their wives and younger brothers. At the same time, the failure of the men emboldens wives and unmarried junior males to ... ...logists to verify his data,† and that, â€Å"(pg. 54) he [the German ethnologist Irenaus Eibl-Eibesfeldt] and another Yanomami researcher at the institute wrote a letter to the American Human behavior and Evolution Society, which claimed that Chagnon had got important mortality rate statistics wrong.† (Pg. 54) Even if these claims of deceiving information and others of plain false information (â€Å"In ‘The Fierce People,’ Chagnon wrote that the Yanomami were ‘one of the best nourished populations thus far described in the anthropological/biomedical literature.’ Unlike Chagnon’s ‘burly’ men, the villagers I encountered were – as Rice had observed in 1924 – tiny and scrawny.† [Pg. 54]) Are all true I don’t believe the vast majority of Chagnon’s research was falsified or misleading – nearly 40 years of false, purposefully misleading information would be an absurd, pointless task of monumental proportions. Overall, I do not believe Harris’s theories are, or should be, damaged significantly even in a worst case scenario (described by Tierney). His theory could stand alone without the evidence provided by the Yanomamo and in all probability the conclusions drawn from them were, indeed, valid.