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My Life Among Two Dangerous Tribes -- the Yanomamo and the Anthropologists
Simon & Schuster
February 2013
On Sale: February 13, 2013
544 pages ISBN: 0684855100 EAN: 9780684855103 Kindle: B006VJN2FE Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction Memoir
ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT SCIENTIFIC MEMOIRS OF OUR TIME
When Napoleon Chagnon arrived in Venezuela’s Amazon
region in 1964 to study the Yanomamö Indians, one of the
last large tribal groups still living in isolation, he
expected to find Rousseau’s “noble savages,” so-called
primitive people living contentedly in a pristine state of
nature. Instead Chagnon discovered a remarkably violent
society. Men who killed others had the most wives and
offspring, their violence possibly giving them an
evolutionary advantage. The prime reasons for violence,
Chagnon found, were to avenge deaths and, if possible,
abduct women. When Chagnon began publishing his
observations, some cultural anthropologists who could not
accept an evolutionary basis for human behavior refused to
believe them. Chagnon became perhaps the most famous
American anthropologist since Margaret Mead—and the most
controversial. He was attacked in a scathing popular book,
whose central allegation that he helped start a measles
epidemic among the Yanomamö was quickly disproven, and the
American Anthropological Association condemned him, only to
rescind its condemnation after a vote by the membership.
Throughout his career Chagnon insisted on an evidence-based
scientific approach to anthropology, even as his
professional association dithered over whether it really is
a scientific organization. In Noble Savages, Chagnon
describes his seminal fieldwork—during which he lived among
the Yanomamö, was threatened by tyrannical headmen, and
experienced an uncomfortably close encounter with a
jaguar—taking readers inside Yanomamö villages to glimpse
the kind of life our distant ancestors may have lived
thousands of years ago. And he forcefully indicts his
discipline of cultural anthropology, accusing it of having
traded its scientific mission for political activism.
This book, like Chagnon’s research, raises
fundamental questions about human nature itself.
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