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‘Noble Savages: My Life Among Two Dangerous Tribes —The Yanomamo and the Anthropologists’ by Napoleon A. Chagnon

By Rachel Newcomb,February 22, 2013

Napoleon Chagnon’s “Noble Savages” is a sprawling book that explores his complicated relationship with the Yanomamo Indians of Venezuela, as well as his war with anthropology. Author of one of the best-selling anthropology texts of all time, “Yanomamo: The Fierce People” (1968), Chagnon was later vilified by activists, journalists and anthropologists for exploiting the Yanomamo. This occasionally unwieldy yet engaging memoir is his attempt to explain his work to a lay audience while also putting to rest those accusations, which effectively blacklisted him in the field of anthropology.

When Chagnon first met the Yanomamo Indians, their arrows drawn, they were a group of “burly, naked, sweaty, hideous men nervously staring us down,” their lips distended from chewing huge chunks of tobacco. “Strands of dark green snot dripped or hung from their nostrils . . . drizzled from their chins down to their pectoral muscles,” a side effect of the Yanomamo’s tendency to blow hallucinogens up their noses. To Chagnon, the Yanomamo offered the chance to study a population seemingly unsullied by contact with the Western world, although by the time he arrived in 1964, missionaries and Catholic priests had already begun making inroads. Nevertheless, he found these Indians to be sufficiently unacculturated for his studies. He writes that “this was the last chance for an anthropologist to observe this fascinating social and political transition that terminated with the development of the political state and ‘civilization.’ ”

Chagnon’s descriptions of his fieldwork are more thematic than chronological, with chapter topics that range from reasons for Yanomamo raids and revenge to his early experiences bringing his family to the field. Much of this book is preoccupied with the argument that initially made Chagnon a controversial figure in anthropology: that the bellicose behavior of the Yanomamo originated in conflicts over women rather than over resources. Additionally, those Yanomamo who were killers of men had greater reproductive success than non-murderers. Thus, Chagnon believed, the Yanomamo offered a glimpse of humankind’s Hobbesian origins, before law and society intervened to rein in our essentially warlike nature.

Such assertions put him at odds with the prevailing anthropological view that humankind was essentially egalitarian and peaceful prior to the rise of settled agriculture, a stance that he calls both “Eurocentric and ethnocentric.” He writes that “the argument that tribesmen are egalitarian because nobody has ‘privileged’ access to ‘strategic’ material resources . . . erroneously projects our own political and economic views into the Stone Age.”

In the final fourth of the book, Chagnon descends into a blow-by-blow account of the attacks against him, which came from all corners: journalists, priests and activists for indigenous people. Some of the grievances were academic — for example, that Chagnon gave undue weight to biological over cultural explanations for Yanomamo behavior or that he had exaggerated Yanomamo aggression to prove his point. But other accusations were more devastating, especially the allegation that he had contributed to a measles epidemic. After tackling the more extreme charges, he criticizes anthropology for abandoning science in favor of “witnessing” the wrongs committed against native peoples. In his view, the influence of postmodernism has taken anthropology even further away from science, calling into question the possibility of truth and objectivity. These postmodernists, he says angrily, are now the “barefoot” activists who are teaching your children.