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ANTIFA INFO-BULLETIN
News * Analysis * Research * Action
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SPECIAL EDITION
- September 22, 2000 -

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ANTHROPOLOGY, EUGENICS, GENOCIDE:
Hideous Human Experimentation Tied to National Security State-Linked
"Anthropologists"
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CONTENTS:

1. AFIB: Fascism's "Scientific" Face.
2. THE CHRONICLES OF HIGHER EDUCATION [US]: Scholars Fear that Alleged
Misdeeds by Amazon Anthropologists will Taint Entire Discipline.
3. Details of Genocidal Experiments on the Yanomami People by National
Security State-linked "Academics".

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FASCISM'S "SCIENTIFIC" FACE
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By Tom Burghardt
Editor, Antifa Info-Bulletin

Under cover of "national security", gruesome Nazi-like projects were
carried out by the U.S. National Security State throughout the Cold War
period and beyond. When revelations emerged several years ago that the U.S.
Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) sponsored "medical" research that injected
gravely ill patients with radioactive plutonium with neither their
knowledge nor their consent, a firestorm gripped Washington and forced the
Energy Department to release thousands of pages of files documenting the
hideous trail of suffering and death inflicted by government-funded
"research." (See Eileen Welsome's 1993 Pulitzer Prize-winning series, "The
Plutonium Experiment" in The Albuquerque Journal, November 15-17 1993).

Now a new book slated for release next month by investigative journalist
Patrick Tierney, "Darkness in El Dorado," New York, W.W. Norton & Co.,
threatens to rip the mask of respectability from the faces of several
prominent anthropologists who conducted genocidal experiments on the
Yanomami people of Venezuela in the late 1960s--with funds provided once
again by the AEC.

At the center of the controversy is James V. Neel, a human geneticist based
at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor; Neel died last February.
According to Tierney, Neel and his colleagues injected the Yanomami with an
experimental vaccine for measles--with predictable and disastrous results.
According to galley proofs of Tierney's forthcoming book provided to
anthropologists opposed to such "research", Neel and his team knew well in
advance that the vaccine, which medical researchers maintain must never be
given to people who lack any natural immunity to the disease such as the
Yanomami, produced measle-like symptoms that were fatal "to hundreds,
perhaps thousands" of Amazonian tribespeople. Evidence has surfaced that
Neel knew such unethical experimentation would produce a mass outbreak of
the disease but proceeded despite this knowledge in order to "prove" his
racist theories of eugenics and male dominance.

There is also evidence that Neel and others, in collaboration with corrupt
Venezuelan officials and U.S. multinational mining corporations conspired
to "open-up" Yanomami lands to illegal gold-mining concessions with the
anthropologists providing necessary "cover" for developers.

While one wing of the National Security State showered cash for unethical
"medical research" described by one experimenter as having "a little of the
Buchenwald touch," the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency virtually invented
the field of "mass communications research" as a component of U.S.
"psychological operations" at home and abroad. (See: Christopher Simpson,
Science of Coercion, New York, Oxford University Press, 1994). According to
Simpson:

"Government psychological warfare programs helped shape mass communication
research into a distinct scholarly field, strongly influencing the choice
of leaders and determining which of the competing scientific paradigms of
communication would be funded, elaborated, and encouraged to prosper. The
state usually did not directly determine what scientists could or could not
say, but it did significantly influence the selection of who would do the
'authoritative' talking in the field."

With Tierney's revelations, we now are beginning to learn that the National
Security State's "public-private partnership" extended into the field of
social science and anthropology--with disastrous results for the victims of
government-funded criminality.

That "scientists" such as Neel and others described in the reports below
would engage in experiments that held the potential of genocide in order to
"prove" fascistic theories of "genetic male dominance" with its
unmistakable subtext of white supremacy should come as no surprise to AFIB
readers. Indeed, the origins of eugenics research and its heinous
application by Hitler's Nazi regime are inextricably linked to racist
practices in the U.S. by American-based eugenics researchers and lawmakers
during the 1920s and '30s. (See: Stefan Kuhl, The Nazi Connection:
Eugenics, American Racism, and German National Socialism, New York, Oxford
University Press, 1994).

As spurious ideologies of "sociobiology" and eugenics enjoy a resurgence
among European and North American academics tied to the U.S. National
Security State and neo-Nazi outfits such as the Pioneer Fund, racist and
fascist discourse on an allegedly "criminal black underclass" are tailored
to today's "lock 'em up and throw away the key" mentality that permeates
the U.S. ruling class and well-funded "scholarly" pit-bulls at a score of
North American universities. Is it really a surprise that those who today
deem an entire generation of black and working class youth "expendable", so
much fodder to be trampled underfoot by killer cops, racist courts and the
so-called "prison-industrial complex", trace their theoretical lineage to
"scientists" who deserve nothing less than the fate dished out to Hitler's
underlings at Nuremburg?

At the very least, those who conducted genocidal experiments on the
Yanomami people must by brought to task for their crimes. But those who
funded and clandestinely approved of such "research" as a means to preserve
a criminal American capitalist order rooted in a history of genocide,
slavery and plunder must also be exposed, confronted and brought to account.

As the "world's sole superpower" continues to bask in the glory of having
"won the Cold War" against an alleged "Evil Empire", once more we ask: when
will "glasnost" force imperialism to reveal the full extent of its heinous
crimes against humanity?

*****
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SCHOLARS FEAR THAT ALLEGED MISDEEDS BY AMAZON ANTHROPOLOGISTS WILL TAINT
ENTIRE DISCIPLINE
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THE CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION
Wednesday, September 20, 2000
http://chronicle.com/free/2000/09/2000092001n.htm
By D.W. MILLER

Some anthropologists fear that their discipline faces a scandal because of
the imminent publication of a book charging several prominent researchers
with egregious misbehavior in their work with Amazon tribes. Some scholars
are calling on the American Anthropological Association to investigate the
charges, while one of those accused says he is trying to prevent The New
Yorker from publishing an excerpt from the book without his reply.

In Darkness in El Dorado: How Scientists and Journalists Devastated the
Amazon, which will be published by W.W. Norton within the next couple of
months, an investigative journalist named Patrick Tierney accuses certain
researchers of fomenting deadly disease and violence among the Yanomami, an
indigenous people of Venezuela. Some scholars are worried that the
allegations will make it harder for all cultural anthropologists who do
fieldwork to persuade their subjects and the public that they are
responsible, objective, and trustworthy.

Some of those whose standards are under attack say the book's claims are
inaccurate.

Advance copies of the book are hard to come by, because the publisher has
run out of galley proofs and won't have more until the finished books are
printed in the next month or so. Mr. Tierney was not available for comment.
But two anthropologists who have read the proofs were moved to write to the
president and the president-elect of the American Anthropological
Association, describing the book in detail and asking that the association
respond to the charges.

In an e-mail message intended only for the officers, but obtained by The
Chronicle, the scholars write that "impending scandal" will damage the
discipline's public image and "arouse intense indignation and calls for
action" among members of the association. "In its scale, ramifications, and
sheer criminality and corruption," the scandal "is unparalleled in the
history of anthropology."

Mr. Tierney spent 10 years on the book, which criticizes scholars and
journalists for abetting the demise of the Yanomami, a remote tribe in the
Amazon river basin. The Yanomami have attracted the intense interest of
scholars since the 1960's, in part because they seemed relatively untouched
by the influences of modern industrial society. In books such as Napoleon
A. Chagnon's The Yanomamo, now in its fifth edition, scholars have
documented the violent nature of that people and suggested that such
behavior is natural in premodern societies.

According to the e-mail message, which has been circulating widely among
anthropologists, Mr. Tierney outlines his view that scholars have been
violating professional ethics in their research for the last 30 years -- to
the detriment of the Yanomami.

One of his most explosive charges is that in 1968, James V. Neel, a human
geneticist at the University of Michigan and a pioneering researcher of the
Yanomami who died last February, deliberately injected tribespeople with a
controversial vaccine for measles. Among those who, like the Yanomami,
lacked any natural immunity to measles, the vaccine was known to cause
measles-like symptoms and proved deadly to hundreds, perhaps thousands.
Even after the epidemic began, according to the book, Mr. Neel prevented
the afflicted from receiving medical treatment.

The authors of the e-mail message, Terence Turner of Cornell University and
Leslie E. Sponsel of the University of Hawaii-Manoa, go on to infer Mr.
Neel's motives from Mr. Tierney's reporting. According to the scholars'
letter, Mr. Neel caused the measles epidemic in order to test his eugenic
theories about the evolutionary utility of male domination. In Mr. Neel's
view, write the e-mail's authors, "'natural' human society ... consisted of
small, genetically isolated groups, in which ... dominant genes
(specifically, a gene he believed existed for 'leadership' or 'innate
ability') would have a selective advantage, because male carriers of this
gene could gain access to a disproportionate share of the available
females."

Mr. Turner, who was chairman of an anthropological commission on the
Brazilian Yanomami, and Mr. Sponsel, who has edited several volumes on
endangered indigenous cultures, speculate that Mr. Neel was hoping to
prove, against the scientific consensus, that small, genetically isolated
groups were not, in fact, more vulnerable to diseases spread by other
populations.

Mr. Neel is not alive to respond to the book's allegations, but other
researchers come in for criticism, too. For instance, the book offers new
information for old charges that Mr. Chagnon falsified evidence in his
studies. It claims that Mr. Chagnon, a retired anthropologist and former
colleague of Mr. Neel's, had encouraged Yanomami villages to stage fights
with each other so that he could film them, and that these re-creations
fostered bitterness that led to real violence long after the cameras had
been packed up. The book also says that Mr. Chagnon participated in Mr.
Neel's vaccine project.

When contacted for comment on the book, Mr. Chagnon declined to be
interviewed, citing past coverage of his research and its critics in The
Chronicle that he considers unfair. But he has sent an e-mail message to
colleagues, inviting them to help him defend himself.

In that message, he condemned Mr. Sponsel and Mr. Turner's "scandalous
implications" and wrote that he was alerting former colleagues whose
reputations might also be harmed by the book.

So far, the association has not responded publicly to the allegations.
According to Glenn Baly, a spokesman for the association, officers will
release a statement about the book today. Until then, the association will
not say whether it will formally investigate the matter.

It is not clear that the association has the means to investigate or
discipline any scholar found to have violated its code of ethics. For one
thing, the association's committee on ethics no longer regards the
investigation of alleged violations to be part of its job. Instead, the
committee now serves mainly to educate association members about their
ethical responsibilities.

In 1998, says Joe Watkins, an anthropologist with the Bureau of Indian
Affairs and the head of the ethics committee, "the association decided it
was no longer going to be a group that was going to go out and censure
anthropologists."

Mr. Watkins hasn't yet read the book, and doesn't claim to speak for the
committee, which has not yet met to discuss the matter. But, he says, "if
such allegations as I've heard about might be shown to be true, or at least
indisputable, then I imagine the association might try to find a way to
sanction an individual." That might mean censure, he says, or a request
that the scholar resign from the organization.

Mr. Watkins also says that the association might consider asking another,
neutral institution, such as the American Association for the Advancement
of Science, to adjudicate allegations of impropriety. "I think some sort of
investigation is necessary," he says. "Anthropology has had some black eyes
in the past decade, especially over treatment of native peoples.

"If anthropology does not react and find out what basis in reality these
allegations have," he adds, "then anthropology is going to suffer, because
there's going to be lots of questions from foreign governments of anyone
who tries to initiate fieldwork."

Kristen Hawkes, an anthropologist at the University of Utah and a
professional acquaintance of Mr. Chagnon's, calls Mr. Turner and Mr.
Sponsel's e-mail "inflammatory" and the book's charges "astonishing."

"It's horrifying to see this happen to someone I know for careful science,"
she says. "I find it completely unbelievable that he would participate in
anything damaging to the Yanomami. He's not a genocidal guy."

The controversy, which has been the subject of quiet debate among
anthropologists, is about to find a mass audience. The New Yorker will
publish an excerpt of Darkness in El Dorado in early October, and the book
will reach bookstores soon after.

According to his e-mail message to colleagues, Mr. Chagnon is discussing
the article with the magazine's editors to ensure it does not libel him,
and is considering an offer to "publish my side of the story" in the same
issue. A spokeswoman for the magazine declined to comment.

That will surely not be Mr. Chagnon's only opportunity to defend his work.
Barbara Johnston, the head of the anthropology association's committee on
human rights, is trying to organize a forum at the anthropologists' annual
meeting in November. Although Mr. Chagnon has been invited to join Mr.
Tierney, Mr. Turner, and Mr. Sponsel on a panel there, he has already
declined to be part of what he calls in his e-mail message a "feeding
frenzy in which I am the bait."

Copyright 2000 by The Chronicle of Higher Education
Courtesy of an AFIB subscriber.

*****
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DETAILS OF GENOCIDAL EXPERIMENTS ON THE YANOMAMI PEOPLE
BY NATIONAL SECURITY STATE-LINKED "SCIENTISTS"
____________________________________________________________________

Date: Thu, 31 Aug 2000 12:08:06 -0400 To: Louise Lamphere, President,
American Anthropological Association (lamphere@unm.edu)
Don Brenneis, President-elect, American Anthropological Association
(brenneis@cats.ucsc.edu)

From: Terry Turner, Professor of Anthropology, Cornell University. Head of
the Special Commission of the American Anthropological Association to
Investigate the Situation of the Brazilian Yanomami, 1990-91
(tst3@cornell.edu)
Leslie Sponsel, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Hawaii,
Manoa. Chair of the AAA Committee for Human Rights 1992-1996
(sponsel@hawaii.edu)

In re: Scandal about to be caused by publication of book by Patrick Tierney
(Darkness in El Dorado. New York. Norton. Publication date: October 1,
2000).

Cc.
Barbara Johnston, Chair, Committee for Human Rights
(bjohnston@igc.org)
Joe E. Watkins, Chair, Committee on Ethics (jwatkins@telepath.com)
Joanne Rappaport, President, Society for Latin American Anthropology
(rappapoj@gusun.georgetown.edu)
Ruben G. Mendoza, President, Association of Latina and Latino Anthropology

Madam President, Mr. President-elect:

We write to inform you of an impending scandal that will affect the
American Anthropological profession as a whole in the eyes of the public,
and arouse intense indignation and calls for action among members of the
Association. In its scale, ramifications, and sheer criminality and
corruption it is unparalleled in the history of Anthropology. The AAA will
be called upon by the general media and its own membership to take
collective stands on the issues it raises, as well as appropriate
redressive actions. All of this will obviously involve you as Presidents of
the Association-so the sooner you know about the story that is about to
break, the better prepared you can be to deal with it.

Both of us have seen galley copies of a book by Patrick Tierney, an
investigative journalist, about the actions of anthropologists and
associated scientific researchers (notably geneticists and medical
experimenters) among the Yanomami of Venezuela over the past thirty-five
years. Because of the sensational nature of its revelations, the notoriety
of the people it exposes, and the prestige of the organs of the academic
establishment it implicates, the book is bound to be widely read both
outside and inside the profession. As both an indication and a vector of
its public impact, we have learned that The New Yorker magazine is planning
to publish an extensive excerpt, timed to coincide with the publication of
the book (on or about October 1st).

The focus of the scandal is the long-term project for study of the Yanomami
of Venezuela organized by James Neel, the human geneticist, in which
Napoleon Chagnon, Timothy Asch, and numerous other anthropologists took
part. The French anthropologist Jacques Lizot, who also works with the
Yanomami but is not part of Neel-Chagnon project, also figures in a
different scandalous capacity.

One of Tierney's more startling revelations is that the whole Yanomami
project was an outgrowth and continuation of the Atomic Energy Comissions
secret program of experiments on human subjects James Neel, the originator
and director of the project, was part of the medical and genetic research
team attached to the Atomic Energy Commission since the days of the
Manhattan Project. He was a member of the small group of researchers
responsible for studying the effects of radiation on human subjects. He
personally headed the team that investigated the effects of the Hiroshima
and Nagasaki bombs on survivors,. He was put in charge of the study of the
effects of atomic bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and later was involved
in the studies of the effects of the radioactivity from the experimental A
and H bomb blasts in the Marshall Islands on the natives. The same group
also secretly carried out experiments on human subjects in the USA. These
included injecting people with radioactive plutonium without their
knowledge or permission,in some cases leading to their death or
disfigurement (Neel himself appears not to have given any of these
experimental injections). Another member of the same AEC group of human
geneticists and medical experimenters, a Venezuelan, Marcel Roche, was a
close colleague of Neel's and spent some time at his AEC-funded center for
Human Genetics at Ann Arbor. He returned to Venezuela after the war and did
a study of the Yanomami that involved administering doses of a radioactive
isotope of iodine and analyzing samples of blood for genetic data. Roche
and his project were apparently the connection that led Neel to choose the
Yanomami for his big study of the genetics of "leadership" and differential
rates of reproduction among dominant and sub-dominant males in a
genetically "isolated" human population. There is thus a genealogical
connection between the the human experiments carried out by the AEC, and
Neel's and Chagnon's Yanomami project, which was from the outset funded by
the AEC.

Tierney presents convincing evidence that Neel and Chagnon, on their trip
to the Yanomami in 1968, greatly exacerbated, and probably started, the
epidemic of measles that killed "hundreds, perhaps thousands" (Tierney's
language-the exact figure will never be known) of Yanomami. The epidemic
appears to have been caused, or at least worsened and more widely spread,
by a campaign of vaccination carried out by the research team, which used a
virulent vaccine (Edmonson B) that had been counter-indicated by medical
experts for use on isolated populations with no prior exposure to measles
(exactly the Yanomami situation). Even among populations with prior contact
and consequent partial genetic immunity to measles, the vaccine was
supposed to be used only with supportive injections of gamma globulin. It
was known to produce effects virtually indistinguishable from the disease
of measles itself.

Medical experts, when informed that Neel and his group used the vaccine in
question on the Yanomami, typically refuse to believe it at first, then say
that it is incredible that they could have done it, and are at a loss to
explain why they would have chosen such an inappropriate and dangerous
vaccine. There is no record that Neel sought any medical advice before
applying the vaccine. He never informed the appropriate organs of the
Venezuelan government that his group was planning to carry out a
vaccination campaign, as he was legally required to do. Neither he nor any
other member of the expedition, including Chagnon and the other
anthropologists, has ever explained why that vaccine was used, despite the
evidence that it actually caused or at a minimum greatly exacerbated the
fatal epidemic.

Once the measles epidemic took off, closely following the vaccinations with
Edmonson B, the members of the research team refused to provide any medical
assistance to the sick and dying Yanomami, on explicit orders from Neel. He
insisted to his colleagues that they were only there to observe and record
the epidemic, and that they must stick strictly to their roles as
scientists, not provide medical help.

All this is bad enough, but the probable truth that emerges, by
implication, from Tierney's documentation is more chilling. There was, it
turns out, a compelling theoretical motive for Neel to want to observe an
epidemic of measles, or comparable "contact" disease, or at least an
outbreak virtually indistinguishable from the real thing-precisely the
effect that the vaccine he chose was known to cause-and to produce one for
this purpose if necessary. This motive emerges from Teirney's documentation
of Neel's extreme eugenic theories and his documented statements about what
he was hoping to find among the Yanomami, interpreted against the
background of his long association with the Atomic Energy Commission's
secret experiments on human subjects.

Neel believed that "natural" human society (as it existed everywhere before
the advent of large-scale agricultural societies and contemporary states
with their vast populations) consisted of small, genetically isolated
groups, in which, according to his eugenically slanted genetic theories,
dominant genes (specifically, a gene he believed existed for "leadership"
or "innate ability") would have a selective advantage, because male
carriers of this gene could gain access to a disproportionate share of the
available females, thus reproducing their own superior genes more
frequently than less "innately able" males. The result, supposedly, would
be the continual upgrading of the human genetic stock. Modern mass
societies, by contrast, consist of vast genetically entropic "herds" in
which, he theorized, recessive genes could not be eliminated by selective
competition and superior leadership genes would be swamped by mass genetic
mediocrity. The political implication of this fascistic eugenics is clearly
that society should be reorganized into small breeding isolates in which
genetically superior males could emerge into dominance, eliminating or
subordinating the male losers in the competition for leadership and women,
and amassing harems of brood females.

A big problem for this program, however, was the tendency, generally
recognized by virtually all qualified population geneticists and
epidemiologists, for small breeding isolates to lack genetic resistance to
diseases incubated in other groups, and their consequent vulnerability to
contact epidemics. For Neel, this meant that the emergence of genetically
superior males in small breeding isolates would tend to be undercut and
neutralized by epidemic diseases to which they would be genetically
vulnerable, while the supposedly genetically entropic mass societies of
modern democratic states, the antitheses of Neel's ideal
alpha-male-dominated groups, would be better adapted for developing genetic
immunity to such "contact" diseases.

It is known that Neel, virtually alone among contemporary geneticists,
rejected the genetic (and historical) evidence for the vulnerability of
genetically isolated groups to diseases introduced through contact from
other populations. It is possible that he thought that genetically superior
members of such groups might prove to have differential levels of immunity
and thus higher rates of survival to imported diseases. In such a case,
such exogenous epidemics, despite the enormous losses of general population
they inflict, might actually be shown to increase the relative proportion
of genetically superior individuals to the total population, and thus be
consistent with Neel's eugenic program. However this may have been,
Tierney's well-documented account, in its entirety, strongly supports the
conclusion that the epidemic was in all probabilty deliberately caused as
an experiment designed to produce scientific support for Neel's eugenic
theory.

This remains only an inference in the present state of our knowledge: there
is no "smoking gun" in the form of a written text or recorded speech by
Neel. It is nevertheless the only explanation that makes sense of a number
of otherwise inexplicable facts, including Neel's known interest in
observing an epidemic in a small isolated group for which detailed records
of genetic and genealogical relations were available, his otherwise
inexplicable selection of a virulent vaccine known to produce effects
virtually identical with the disease itself, his behavior once the epidemic
had started (insisting on allowing it to run its course unhindered by
medical assistance while meticulously documenting its progress and the
genealogical relations of those who perished and those who survived) and
his own obdurate silence, until his death in  February, as to why he
carried out the vaccination program in the first place, and above all with
the lethally dangerous vaccine.

The same conclusion is reinforced by considering the objectives of the
anthropological research carried out by Chagnon under Neel's initial
direction and continued support. Chagnon's work has been consistently
directed toward portraying Yanomami society as exactly the kind of
originary human society envisioned by Neel, with dominant males (the most
frequent killers) having the most wives or sexual partners and offspring.
If this pristine, eugenically optimal society could be shown to survive a
contact epidemic with its structure of dominant male polygynists
essentially intact, regardless of quantitatively serious population losses,
Neel might plausibly be able to argue that his eugenic social vision was
vindicated. If the epidemic was indeed produced as an experiment, either
wholly or in part, the genetic studies on the correlation of blood group
samples and genealogies carried out by Chagnon and some of his students
thus formed integral parts of this massive, and massively fatal, human
experiment.

As another reader of Tierney's ms commented, Mr. Tierney's analysis is a
case study of the dangers in science of the uncontrolled ego, of lack of
respect for life, and of greed and self-indulgence. It is a further
extraordinary revelation of malicious and perverted work conducted under
the aegis of the Atomic Energy Commission.

Tierney's revelations begin, but do not end, with the 1968 epidemic. There
are many more episodes and sub-plots, almost equally awful, to his
narrative of the antics of anthropologists among the Yanomami. Enough has
been said by this time, however, for you to see that the Association is
going to have to make some collective response to this book, both to the
facts it documents and the probable conclusions it implies.There will be a
storm in the media, and another in the general scholarly community, and no
doubt several within anthropology itself. We must be ready.

Tierney devotes much of the book to a critique of Napoleon Chagnon's work
(and actions). He makes clear Chagnon has faithfully striven, in his
ethnographic and theoretical accounts of the Yanomami, to represent them as
conforming to Neel's ideas about the Hobbesian savagery of "natural" human
societies , and how this constitutes the natural selective context for the
rise to social dominance and reproductive advantage of males with the gene
for "leadership" or "innate ability" (thus Chagnon's emphasis on Yanomami
"fierceness" and propensity for chronic warfare, and the supposed
statistical tendency for men who kill more enemies to have more female
sexual/reproductive partners). He documents how all these aspects of
Chagnon's account of the Yanomami are based on false, non-existent or
misinterpreted data. In other words, Chagnon's main claims about Yanomami
society, the ones that have been so much heralded by sociobiologists and
other partisans of his work, namely that men who kill more reproduce more
and have more female partners, and that such men become the dominant
leaders of their communities, are simply not true. Thirdly and most
troublingly, he reports that Chagnon has not stopped with cooking and
re-cooking his data on conflict but has actually attempted to manufacture
the phenomenon itself, actually fomenting conflicts between Yanomami
communities, not once but repeatedly.

In his film work with Asch, for example, Chagnon induced Yanomami to enact
fights and aggressive behavior for Asch's camera, sometimes building whole
artificial villages as "sets" for the purpose, which were presented as
spontaneous slices of Yanomami life unaffected by the presence of the
anthropologists. Some of these unavowedly artificial scenarios, however,
actually turned into real conflicts, partly as a result of Chagnon's policy
of giving vast amounts of presents to the villages that agreed to put on
the docu-drama, which distorted their relations with their neighbors in
ways that encouraged outbreaks of raiding. In sum, most of the Yanomami
conflicts that Chagnon documents, that are the basis of his interpretation
of Yanomami society as a neo-Hobbesian system of endemic warfare, were
caused directly or indirectly by himself: a fact he invariably neglects to
report.

This is not just a matter of bad ethnography or unreflexive theorizing:
Yanomami were maimed and killed in these conflicts, and whole communities
were disrupted to the point of fission and flight. (Brian Ferguson has also
documented some of this story, but Tierney adds much new evidence). As a
general point, it is clear that Chagnon's whole Yanomami oeuvre is more
radically continuous with Neel's eugenic theories, and his unethical
approach to experimentation on human subjects, than appears simply from a
reading of Chagnon's works by themselves.

Chagnon is not the only anthropologist mentioned in Tierney's narrative.
Some of his students, like Hames and Good, are also dealt with (not so
unfavorably). The French anthropologist, Jaques Lizot, also gets a chapter.
He has had nothing to do with Neel or Chagnon (in fact has been a trenchant
and cogent critic of their work), but he has an Achilles heel of his own in
the form of a harem of Yanomami boys that he keeps, and showers with
presents in exchange for sexual favors (he has also been known to resort to
young girls when boys were unavailable). On the sexual front, there are
also passing references to Chagnon himself demanding that villagers bring
him girls for sex. There is still more, in the form of collusion by Neel
and Chagnon with sinister Venezuelan politicians attempting to gain control
of Yanomami lands for illegal gold mining concessions, with the
anthropologists providing "cover" for the illegal mine developer as a
"naturalist" collaborating with the anthropological researchers, in
exchange for the politician's guaranteeing continuing access to the Indians
for the anthropologists.

This nightmarish story--a real anthropological heart of darkness beyond the
imagining of even a Josef Conrad (though not, perhaps, a Josef
Mengele)--will be seen (rightly in our view) by the public, as well as most
anthropologists, as putting the whole discipline on trial. As another
reader of the galleys put it, This book should shake anthropology to its
very foundations. It should cause the ield to understand how the corrupt
and depraved protagonists could have spread their poison for so long while
they were accorded great respect throughout the Western World and
generations of undergraduates received their lies as the introductory
substance of anthropology. This should never be allowed to happen again.

We venture to predict that this reaction is fairly representative of the
response that will follow the publication of Tierney's book and the New
Yorker excerpt. Coming as they will less than two months before the San
Francisco meetings, these publication events virtually guarantee that the
Yanomami scandal will be at its height at the Meetings. This should give an
optimal opportunity for the Association to mobilize the membership and the
institutional structure to deal with it. The writers, both emeritus members
of the Committee for Human Rights, have arranged with Barbara Johnston, the
present chair of the CfHR, that the open Forum put on by the Committee this
year be devoted to the Yanomami case. This seemed the best way to provide a
venue for a public airing of the scandal, given that the program is of
course already closed. With Johnston's consent, we have invited Patrick
Tierney to come to the Meetings and be present at the Forum. He has
accepted. He has also agreed to have a copy of the book ms sent to
Johnston, for the use of the CfHR. We have also tentatively agreed with
Barbara that the CfHR should draft a press release, which the President
(either or both of you) could (if you and the Executive Board approve)
circulate to the media. There are obviously human rights aspects of this
case that make the CfHR appropriate, but the Ethics Committee, the Society
for Latin American Anthropology, and the Association for Latina and Latino
Anthropology should also be notified and involved, separately or jointly.
These obviously do not exhaust the possibilities--- a lot of thought and
planning remains to be done. Our point is simply that the time to start is
now.

Courtesy of an AFIB subscriber.

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