Book Review
Noble Savages: My Life Among Two Dangerous Tribes—The Yanomamo and the Anthropologists, by Napoleon A. Chagnon
(Simon & Schuster, 544 pp., $32.50)
[From review]
Their language is unwritten and unrelated to any others spoken in South America, a testament to their long isolation. They didn’t even have a clear sense or delineation of individual words when Chagnon began working with them. He struggled to find symbols for sounds in the Yanomamo language that had no equivalent in English. Math was an issue, too. Chagnon was conducting a detailed study that included compiling extensive demographic data to understand how Yanomamo culture operated. But the Yanomamo have no numbers past two, and they don’t use calendars, so they have little idea how old they are, or how far in any unit of measure one village might be from another. Compiling a census of a single village was a time-consuming chore.
[. . .]
He determined that as many as 30 percent of all Yanomamo men died in violent confrontations, often over women. Abductions and raids were common, and Chagnon estimated that as many as 20 percent of women in some villages had been captured in attacks.
[. . .]
In a 1988 Science article, he estimated that 45 percent of living Yanomamo adult males had participated in the killing of at least one person. He then compared the reproductive success of these Yanomamo men to others who had never killed. The unokais—those who had participated in killings—produced three times as many children, on average, as the others. Chagnon suggested that this was because unokais, who earned a certain prestige in their society, were more successful at acquiring wives in the polygamous Yanomamo culture.
[. . .]
protestors attacked the eminent Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson when he rose to speak, knocking him down and dousing him with cold water. Critics, meanwhile, charged Chagnon with faking his data and branded him a racist.
http://www.city-journal.org/2014/bc0413sm.html
STEVEN MALANGA
Welcome to the Jungle
Napoleon Chagnon’s study of human nature in the Amazon—and the academy
13 April 2014
[From review]
Their language is unwritten and unrelated to any others spoken in South America, a testament to their long isolation. They didn’t even have a clear sense or delineation of individual words when Chagnon began working with them. He struggled to find symbols for sounds in the Yanomamo language that had no equivalent in English. Math was an issue, too. Chagnon was conducting a detailed study that included compiling extensive demographic data to understand how Yanomamo culture operated. But the Yanomamo have no numbers past two, and they don’t use calendars, so they have little idea how old they are, or how far in any unit of measure one village might be from another. Compiling a census of a single village was a time-consuming chore.
[. . .]
He determined that as many as 30 percent of all Yanomamo men died in violent confrontations, often over women. Abductions and raids were common, and Chagnon estimated that as many as 20 percent of women in some villages had been captured in attacks.
[. . .]
In a 1988 Science article, he estimated that 45 percent of living Yanomamo adult males had participated in the killing of at least one person. He then compared the reproductive success of these Yanomamo men to others who had never killed. The unokais—those who had participated in killings—produced three times as many children, on average, as the others. Chagnon suggested that this was because unokais, who earned a certain prestige in their society, were more successful at acquiring wives in the polygamous Yanomamo culture.
[. . .]
protestors attacked the eminent Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson when he rose to speak, knocking him down and dousing him with cold water. Critics, meanwhile, charged Chagnon with faking his data and branded him a racist.
http://www.city-journal.org/2014/bc0413sm.html
STEVEN MALANGA
Welcome to the Jungle
Napoleon Chagnon’s study of human nature in the Amazon—and the academy
13 April 2014
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