Napoleon Chagnon

In 2000, Patrick Tierney, in his book Darkness in El Dorado, accused Chagnon and his colleague James V. Neel of unethical behavior, such as, among other things, manipulating data, and of exacerbating a measles epidemic among the Yanomamö people.[18][19]

Most of the allegations made in Darkness in El Dorado were publicly rejected by the Provost's office of the University of Michigan in November 2000.[20] For example, the interviews upon which the book was based all came from members of the Salesians of Don Bosco, a congregation of the Catholic Church, which Chagnon had criticized and angered.[12]

The American Anthropological Association convened a task force in February 2001 to investigate some of the allegations made in Tierney's book. Their report, which was issued by the AAA in May 2002, held that Chagnon had both represented the Yanomamö in harmful ways and failed in some instances to obtain proper consent from both the government and the groups he studied. However, the Task Force stated that there was no support to the claim that Chagnon and Neel began a measles epidemic.[19] In June 2005, however, the AAA voted over two-to-one to rescind the acceptance of the 2002 report.[21]

Alice Dreger, an historian of medicine and science, concluded after a year's research that Tierney's claims were false and the American Anthropological Association was complicit and irresponsible in helping spread these falsehoods and not protecting "scholars from baseless and sensationalistic charges".[22]

The controversy is covered in the 2005 book Yanomami: The Fierce Controversy and What We Can Learn from It by anthropologist Robert Borofsky.[23]

Chagnon's work with the Yanomamö was widely criticized by other anthropologists.[3][24][25] Anthropologists critiqued both aspects of his research methods as well as the theoretical approach, and the interpretations and conclusions he drew from his data. Most controversial was his claim that Yanomamö society is particularly violent, and his claim that this feature of their culture is grounded in biological differences that are the result of natural selection.[3]

The anthropologist Brian Ferguson argued that Yanomamö culture is not particularly violent, and that the violence that does exist is largely a result of socio-political reconfigurations of their society under the influence of colonization.[26][27] Bruce Albert rejected the statistical basis for his claims that more violent Yanomamö men have more children.[28][29] Others questioned the ethics inherent in painting an ethnic group as violent savages, pointing out that Chagnon's depiction of the Yanomamö as such breaks with anthropology's traditional ethics of trying to describe foreign societies sympathetically, and argued that his depictions resulted in increased hostility and racism against the Yanomamö by settlers and colonists in the area.[30][31][3] Emily Eakin countered that Albert "cannot demonstrate a direct connection between Chagnon's writings and the government's Indian policy" and that the idea that scientists should suppress unflattering information about their subjects is troubling and supports the idea that nonviolence is a prerequisite for protecting the Yanomamö.[3]

The anthropologist Marshall Sahlins, one of Chagnon's graduate teachers,[32] criticized Chagnon's methods, pointing out that Chagnon acknowledged engaging in behavior that was disagreeable to his informants by not participating in food-sharing obligations.[15][25] Sahlins claimed that Chagnon's trade of steel weaponry for blood samples and genealogical information amounted to "participant-instigation" which encouraged economic competition and violence.[25] Lastly, Sahlins argued that Chagnon's publications, which contend that violent Yanomamö men are conferred with reproductive advantages, made false assumptions in designating killers and omit other variables that explain reproductive success.[25] In 2013, Sahlins resigned from the National Academy of Sciences, in part in protest of Chagnon's election to the body.[15][33][34] Other researchers of the Yanomamö such as Brian Ferguson argued that Chagnon himself contributed to escalating violence among the Yanomamö by offering machetes, axes, and shotguns to selected groups to elicit their cooperation.[26][27][24][35][23][3] Chagnon said that it was instead local Salesian priests who were supplying guns to the Yanomamö, who then used them to kill each other.[3]

In his autobiography, Chagnon stated that most criticisms of his work were based on a postmodern and antiscientific ideology that arose within anthropology, in which careful study of isolated tribes was replaced in many cases by explicit political advocacy that denied less pleasant aspects of the Yanomamö culture, such as warfare, domestic violence, and infanticide. Chagnon stated that much of his work has undermined the idea of the 'Noble savage' – a romanticized stereotype of indigenous people living in synchrony with nature and uncorrupted by modern civilization.[36] Chagnon also stated that his beliefs about sociobiology and kin selection were misinterpreted and misunderstood, similarly because of a rejection of scientific and biological explanations for culture within anthropology.[36]

As a result of the controversy and the alleged unethical practices with the Yanomami,[37] Chagnon was officially barred from studying the Yanomami and from reentering their country in Venezuela.[38][39]