Summary Of Napoleon Chagnon's Darkness In El Dorado

When discussing human nature, anthropologists don’t One popular controversy within the anthropological community is based on the Yanomami indians. The Yanomami, or Yanomamo, are the largest “relatively isolated tribe” in South America; located in large, mountainous areas of northern Brazil and southern Venezuela in the Amazon jungle. Their current population stands at about thirty-five thousand, all of which are concentrated in several different parts of the South American jungle. Many anthropologists have taken an interest in this tribe, such as Napoleon Chagnon, and have attempted to study each aspect of their lives. In his book, Darkness in El Dorado, investigative journalist Patrick Tierney accuses Napoleon Chagnon and James Neel, along with several other anthropologists, of numerous cases of misconduct in their work with the Yanomami peoples. His accusations have raised a lot of questions over how the Yanomami were perceived, and how they behave in reality- it also brought into question Chagnon’s ethics. The main focus of this controversy is anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon. Chagnon is one of the most infamous and well-known anthropologists in the world. Over the years, he has visited the Yanomami people multiple times in order to research their way of life, since they are, as he calls them, our “contemporary …show more content…
One example is American anthropologist John Tooby. In his article Jungle Fever, Tooby talks about the investigations he had to conduct against both anthropologists, as president of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society- a society to which Chagnon was a “prominent” member. Tooby recounts his conversations with several scientist over the measles epidemic that plagued the Yanomami, and whether the cause could have been the various vaccines that Neel and his team used. What he found was that Tierney had exaggerated his