Napoleon A. Chagnon (1938–2019)

This is more a memoir than an anthropological study, documenting Chagnon's studies of Yanomamo culture over a span of 30 years. Chagnon is extremely bitter: he is on a mission to out his detractors as politically correct / Marxist / non-scientific activists. But he need not take this approach, because many laypeople will enjoy learning about Yanomamo culture more than about academic disputes.

His enemies are split into a few camps. Many just don't like Chagnon as a person. They focus on his supposed ill-treatment of the Yanomamo; his selfishness, such as getting tribesmen to build him a larger hut or rewarding children for shooting rats for his comfort; and his meddling trade of machetes for information. The more nuanced criticism is Chagnon extrapolates backwards in time without much historical evidence. Jared Diamond, in contrast, paints a broad picture using a wide range of scientific evidence outside of immediate observation.

The crux of this work is the correlation between violence and offspring: well-known killers are more likely to take more wives and father more children. I'm not sure why this is so absurd a proposition. The idea seems to annoy Christian missionaries and activists alike. We see such correlations frequently in the animal kingdom, and such assertions about non-humans are readily accepted. But cultural anthropology has split into a scientific approach (sociobiology) and a postmodernist one which holds there are no objective truths.

It seems plausible to me that competition for females has important evolutionary consequence alongside competition for materials such as land and food. Chagnon terms these facets reproductive and somatic resources respectively. Traditionally, only somatic resources are considered relevant. That said, Chagnon is probably going too far in the way he characterises competition for material resources as insignificant among the Yanomamo. Nor does correlation imply causation: the underlying cause may be bigger, stronger, healthier men have more children and also tend to fare well in battle. After years of fighting for credibility, balancing arguments cannot be further from Chagnon's mind.

The last few chapters descend into a long-winded political defence with little interesting content. Recommend you skip or skim these to maintain your sanity.… (mehr)