See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.

net/publication/257568751

Napoleon A. Chagnon: Noble Savages: My Life Among Two Dangerous Tribes

— The Yanomamö and the Anthropologists

Article  in  Human Ecology · June 2013

DOI: 10.1007/s10745-013-9585-9

CITATION READS

1 648

1 author:

Lee Cronk
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey
68 PUBLICATIONS   1,361 CITATIONS   

SEE PROFILE

All content following this page was uploaded by Lee Cronk on 20 February 2014.

The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file.

Hum Ecol
DOI 10.1007/s10745-013-9585-9
Napoleon A. Chagnon: Noble Savages: My Life Among Two
Dangerous Tribes — The Yanomamö and the Anthropologists
New York: Simon and Schuster, 2013. ISBN: 0684855100
Lee Cronk
# Springer Science+Business Media New York 2013
In the spring of 1982, I took a course taught by the famous
Napoleon Chagnon. He had recently arrived at Northwest-
ern University, and I was about to graduate, so as far as I
knew at the time it would be my last opportunity to learn
something about this man who even then was a living
legend within the discipline of anthropology. The subject
matter of the course was political anthropology, and al-
though the required readings by such leaders in the field as
F. G. Bailey and Morton Fried were certainly stimulating,
the best part of each class was always Chagnon’s fascinating
accounts of life among the Yanomamö. One day, he began
to tell a story about a man named Wide Asshole. Before he
had gotten very far, one of my fellow students burst out:
“Wait a minute. What kind of a parent names a kid ‘Wide
Asshole’?” Without missing a beat, Chagnon turned to the
student and said, “Well, what kind of parent names a kid
Napoleon?”
To those who don’t know him personally, Napoleon
Chagnon is larger-than-life, an iconoclastic anthropologist
whose work is admired by many and reviled by a few. In
contrast, that episode from a class more than 30 years ago
sums up the Napoleon Chagnon that I know: Quick-witted,
self-deprecating, wonderful with students, and, without a
doubt, anthropology’s leading expert on the Yanomamö of
Venezuela and Brazil. The best and most important thing I
can say about Chagnon’s memoir Noble Savages is that this
is the same Napoleon Chagnon that comes through in its
pages. The book is a pleasure to read, rich with new details
about Chagnon, his fieldwork among the Yanomamö, and
L. Cronk (*)
Department of Anthropology, Rutgers University,
New Brunswick, NJ, USA
e-mail: lcronk@anthropology.rutgers.edu
the many challenges he has faced not only there but also
among his own colleagues.
The book consists mainly of an account of Chagnon’s
fieldwork among the Yanomamö, written in a much more
compelling, personal, and less technical style than his pre-
vious work on the topic, Studying the Yanomamö (Chagnon
1974). He describes his culture shock upon first arriving
among the Yanomamö, his efforts to learn their language,
and his daily struggles with the facts of life in a wet, tropical
environment. The result is what might be called “serious
fun.” While there is plenty in the book that is deadly (and I
mean that literally) serious, there is also a healthy dose of
Chagnon’s trademark, self-effacing humor. Consider, for
example, how he describes himself after having settled in
and adopted local standards of personal hygiene: “I reeked
like a smoked jockstrap left to mildew in the bottom of a
dark gym locker” (p. 24).
Although much of the book’s content will be familiar to
readers of Chagnon’s other books on the Yanomamö, it also
contains a considerable amount of information that has not
been previously published. Most of this concerns the lives
and deaths of Yanomamö women, including information
about female infanticide, female sexuality, and abduction.
Much is also revealed regarding the political situation in
Venezuela generally and at his field site in particular, in-
cluding some deeply shocking revelations about some of the
Salesian missionaries who have worked there. Chagnon has
also done an excellent job of incorporating material from
other sources, such as Helena Valero’s account of her ab-
duction and subsequent captivity among the Yanomamö
(Biocca 1996) and Mark Ritchie’s (1996) description of
the life of a Yanomamö shaman.
There are many ways to judge the quality of an ethnog-
raphy. However, most of them depend on what the reader is
hoping to learn about a particular society – its religion, its

economy, and so on. One metric that can be applied to any
ethnography is simply how open and revealing it is regard-
ing the sources of its claims about a group of people: Who
wrote it? How did he or she choose to study a particular
group? What methods of data collection were used? What
challenges to data collection had to be overcome? How and
within what theoretical framework were the data analyzed?
These “ethnographic text formation processes” are analo-
gous to archaeological site formation processes. Just as
archaeologists need to a deep understanding of how their
sites were formed – erosion patterns, the actions of
burrowing animals, sedimentation, and so on – so do con-
sumers of ethnographies need clear information regarding
how they came to exist (Cronk 1998). Unfortunately, many
ethnographers pay little attention to this aspect of their
writing, preferring instead to present their conclusions as
faits accomplis, providing little information about how they
arrived at them. In contrast, not only Noble Savages but also
the various editions of Chagnon’s monograph (Chagnon
2012) and his fieldwork account Studying the Yanomamö
(Chagnon 1974) are exemplary in this regard. Chagnon was
reflexive before it was fashionable, always making it abun-
dantly clear to his readers who he is as a person, how he
interacted with the Yanomamö, and how he collected and
analyzed his data. Future generations of scholars will have
little trouble understanding not only how the Yanomamö of
the late twentieth century lived their lives but also how we
came to know so much about them.
Given the book’s subtitle (“My Life Among Two
Dangerous Tribes — The Yanomamö and the Anthro-
pologists”), readers might expect those two tribes to
receive more or less equal time in Noble Savages.
Fortunately, that is not the case: The Yanomamö receive
much more attention than do anthropologists, who be-
come prominent only in the book’s later chapters. Early
on, however, Chagnon does foreshadow the problems he
was to face later in his career as a result of his honesty
regarding the data he had collected. For example, he
quotes University of Michigan anthropologist Norma
Diamond as advising him against honestly reporting
his findings: “We shouldn’t say that native people have
warfare and kill each other. People will get the wrong
impression” (p. 30). This is essentially an abbreviated
form of the reaction many anthropologists had to his path-
breaking 1988 article in Science showing that Yanomamö men
who had participated in the killing of another person (unokais)
had higher marital and reproductive success than men who
had not done so (Chagnon 1988). Chagnon argues – persua-
sively, in my opinion – that his data were solid and that his
findings were valid.
I was particularly relieved to discover that the odious Patrick
Tierney (2001), a self-described journalist who flung false and
horrifying accusations at Chagnon and his collaborator James
Hum Ecol
Neel in a now notorious book called Darkness in El Dorado,
does not make an appearance until near the end of the
book. Given how much of Chagnon’s time has been
wasted over the past decade or so defending himself
against Tierney’s accusations, one might expect Chagnon
to spend more time on the topic. But the accusations have
been proven wrong, the American Anthropological Associ-
ation has retracted its report on the matter, and Chagnon is
clearly ready to move on from what a period that he
describes as being like “a blurry bad dream” (p. 450). It
is to be hoped that the rest of the discipline of anthropol-
ogy will follow his example while also never again
allowing itself to be so distracted and misled by such
outrageous falsehoods. Not only anthropologists but also
all other scientists must realize that witch hunts, lynch
mobs, and vigilantism have no place in scholarship.
Readers who do want to know more about the Tierney
episode would do well to read not only Noble Savages but
also Thomas Gregor and Daniel Gross' (2004) and Alice
Dreger’s (2011) analyses of how the matter was handled by
the AAA.
At the end of that course back in 1982, Chagnon took me
aside and asked me whether I had considered going into an-
thropology. If I remember correctly, his exact words were
something along the lines of “Anthropology needs people like
you!” I had indeed considered it, and, after earning a Master’s at
Wisconsin, I returned to Northwestern to work with Chagnon
and his long-time friend and collaborator William Irons on my
Ph.D. Although Chagnon left my committee when he moved to
the University of California at Santa Barbara, we remained in
touch, and eventually he, Irons, and I edited a volume of essays
together (Cronk et al. 2000). All this is my way of acknowl-
edging the fact that Napoleon Chagnon has had an enormous,
positive impact on my life and my career. The discipline of
anthropology also must acknowledge its own debt to Chagnon.
A good way to begin this process would be for anthropologists
and their students to read and learn from his memoir, Noble
Savages. I highly recommend it.
References
Biocca, E. (1996). Yanomama: The Story of Helena Valero, a Girl
Kidnapped by Amazonian Indians, [As told to Ettore Biocca.]
Kodansha International, New York. [First English translation,
1970, E. P. Dutton.].
Chagnon, N. A. (1974). Studying the Yanomamö. Holt, Rinehart, and
Winston, New York.
Chagnon, N. A. (1988). Life Histories, Blood Revenge, and Warfare in
a Tribal Population. Science 239: 985–992.
Chagnon, N. A. (2012). Yanomamö, 6th ed. Wadsworth, Belmont.
Cronk, L. (1998). Ethnographic Text Formation Processes. Social
Science Information/ Information sur les Sciences Sociales 37(2):
321–349.
Hum Ecol
Cronk, L., Chagnon, N. A., and Irons, W. (eds.) (2000). Adaptation and
Human Behavior: An Anthropological Perspective. Aldine de
Gruyter, Hawthorne.
Dreger, A. (2011). Darkness’ Descent on the American Anthropological
Association: A Cautionary Tale. Human Nature 22(3): 225–246.
Gregor, T. A., and Gross, D. R. (2004). ‘Guilt by Association’: The Culture
of Accusation and the American Anthropological Association’s
View publication stats
Investigation of Darkness in El Dorado. American Anthropologist
106(4): 687–698.
Ritchie, M. A. (1996). Spirit of the Rainforest: A Yanomamö Shaman
Story. Island Lake Press, Chicago.
Tierney, P. (2001). Darkness in El Dorado. How Scientists and
Journalists Devastated the Amazon. W. W. Norton, New
York.