FORUM Perspectives On Tierney's Darkness in El Dorado.pdf

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C u r r e n t A n t h r o p o l o g y Volume 42, Number 2, April 20012001 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. All rights reserved 0011-3204/2001/4202-0004$2.00

CA FORUM ONANTHROPOLOGY IN PUBLIC

Perspectives onTierneys Darkness inEl Dorado

fe rnando coron i lDepartments of Anthropology and History, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Mich. 48019 , U.S.A.([email protected] ). 5 xii 00

Given the heated debates preceding its publication, thereception of Patrick Tierneys ( 2000 ) Darkness in El Do- rado risks becoming entangled in sterile academic bat-tles about turfs and personalities. This would be unfor-tunate, for the book offers a controversial account of theimpact of Western research on an indigenous population

that should urge us to think hard about our work. Evenbefore its publication, Darkness in El Dorado became aJanus-faced text that in calling attention to methodo-logical and ethical shortcomings of scientic research inthe Amazon also brought attention to faults in its ownproduction. This should not obscure its contribution ormake us forget that the central issue in this drama, afterall, should be the Yanomami. Far from worrying aboutthe possible discredit this book may bring to anthropol-ogy, we ought to welcome the chance it offers to broadenits concern with the ethics and politics of knowledgeproduction in the West.

Under what conditions does one produce knowledge?To what end does one produce knowledge? How can one

produce meaningful knowledge? I draw these questionsfrom Susan Sontags reections on her play Alice in Bed ,about the life of Alice James ( New York Times, October29 , 2000 ). Alice, Sontag says, nds it difcult to meetlifes demands. How to respond to a beggar? You canwalk on, knowing you cant change a beggars life bygiving him money. Or you can give everything you have.Or you can give one warm coin. All three ways of actingseem wrong. Alice is constantly thinking about the ques-tion, the great question: How does one live? How oughtone to live? How can one live better?

Tierneys harrowing account forces us to ask how per-sonal and professional ethical questions are dened and

connected. His merit is to have brought together a vastamount of information about Western anthropologicaland medical practices carried out among the Yanomamiand to have situated these practices within the networkof institutional connections that made them possible andthe ideologies of science and history that have renderedthem so popular. At the books heart is a two-strandedargument concerning the work among the Yanomami bythe anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon and the geneticistJames Neel. One strand follows their involvement in acomplex set of medical practices centering on the col-lection of blood samples and a measles vaccination cam-paign. The other traces Chagnons spectacular career asthe creator of the Yanomami as anthropologys well-known erce people. While Tierneys focus is on in-dividuals, his book locates them in two relevant con-texts: the cold war and the Vietnam War, during whichcurrents of evolutionary genetics, sociobiology, and cul-tural anthropology claiming that aggression plays a pos-itive role in human evolution found broad support, andthe Venezuelan petrostate culture of clientelism, whichfostered a network of corrupt politicians and business-men with interests in the Yanomami and their territoryfor reasons of prot and power. His discussion arguesthat the work of Chagnon, Neel, and other scientistsbrought the Yanomami neither empowerment nor well-being but fragmentation and destruction.

The rst strand of the book, which occupies less thanone-tenth of Tierneys text but has received the mostpublic attention, argues that Neel and Chagnon collectedblood samples for the Atomic Energy Commission tocompare mutation rates in populations contaminated byradiation with those in one uncontaminated by it and atthe same time carried out an experiment on immunityformation among an isolated population involving ameasles vaccination program. According to Tierney, al-though a safer and cheaper vaccine was already available,Neel chose the Edmonston B vaccine because it producedantibodies that would allow for comparison of Europeanand Yanomami immune systems and prove the lattersability to generate levels of antibiodies similar to thoseof populations previously exposed to the disease. Tier-neys most controversial and damaging charge is thatthese activities may have led to a deadly outbreak ofmeasles. While medical experts agree that no vaccinecould have caused an epidemic, it is still not clear whythis outdated vaccine was chosen or what measures weretaken to care for those affected by its known reaction.

The books second and more signicant strand centerson Chagnons anthropological work. Tierney argues thatChagnon created the myth of the Yanomami as theerce people through his own personal brand of phys-ical and symbolic violence against them. On the basisof extensive research, Tierney claims that Chagnon usedhis power and material resources to obtain information,often through bribes and coercion, about personal namesand genealogies (which are taboo to reveal), created di-visions by distributing valuable goods among differentfactions, promoted warfare for lm performances, andmisrepresented the Yanomami as an extraordinarily vi-


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266 F cur ren t an thropology Volume 42 , Number 2 , April 2001

olent people. In numerous publications respected schol-ars (including Albert, da Cunha, Ferguson, Good,Jimenez, and Ramos) have long criticized Chagnonspractices, data, and essentialist and ahistorical argu-ments about such issues as Yanomami violence and itsreproductive value. Scholars and activists in Venezuelaand Brazil have argued that while Chagnon is entitledto have his views and is not responsible for the use othersmake of them, he is accountable for not having spokenagainst those who use his images to legitimize protectingthe Yanomami against themselves by taking their ter-ritories and undermining their autonomy. Tierney re-ports that after Chagnon was barred from Yanomami ter-ritory by Venezuelan authorities he sought access to itthrough an alliance with two high-prole Venezuelans:Cecilia Matos, the mistress of then President Carlos An-dres Perez (who was impeached for corruption), andCharles Brewer Caras, an ex-Minister of Youth turnedmining entrepreneur. Had there not been a public uproarin Venezuela protesting their plan, they might have beenable to establish a private biosphere in Yanomami ter-ritory, a sort of scientic hacienda where they wouldhave had control over people and resources. This rejec-tion by academic and political authorities in Venezuelahad limited impact on the reception of Chagnons workin the United States.

While the market value of Tierneys book undoubtedlycomes from the sensational marriage of these twostrands, its intellectual value has already suffered fromtheir unfortunate union. As with a marriage, one mayspeculate whether this pair was brought together bybonds of conviction or of convenience. One may alsowonder about the discrepancy between the rush to judg-ment that made possible the books most marketableclaim about the measles epidemic and the much morecarefully supported discussion about Chagnons work.The books scholarly value may also be undermined byTierneys propensity to explain social effects in terms ofpersonal intentions and to personalize structural rela-tions. This has already provoked defensive reactions thatrisk turning substantive discussions into proclamationsabout the intentions or integrity of individual scientists.A urry of statements from leading institutions aboutNeels personal and scholarly integrity has already servedto cast a protective shadow over Chagnons work. Thesimple fact that even an outdated vaccine cannot causea measles epidemic has led some to dismiss the rather

complex issues raised by the rest of the book. In thedebate in the United States, so focused on the technicalaspects of the epidemic, the concerns and informationof scholars from Brazil and Venezuela about Chagnonswork have been fundamentally absent.

The controversy surrounding this book makes evidentthat in matters of knowledge, as in real estate, locationis decisive. Most of the information Tierney presents haslong been public knowledge in Venezuela and Brazil andhas circulated in U.S. academic circles. Yet Tierneysbook, by bringing this information together and by pre-senting it in the United States through a major com-mercial press, has shaken academic circles in this coun-

try and public opinion in Venezuela and Brazil. InVenezuela the government has already decided to createa high-level investigative commission whose work mayhave more than ornamental effects, given President Cha-vezs mandate to combat past corruption. There are alsosigns that in the United States this debate may evolveinto a serious engagement with the politics of knowledgethat acknowledges the special responsibility of thosewho work in a center of power that has profound impacton the rest of the world.

Like Sontags Alice, we are constantly confronted withsocial suffering. When Jesus Cardozo, a Venezuelan an-thropology student doing eldwork in a Yanomami vil-lage under Chagnons direction, asked his adviser tobring medical help to an acutely illYanomami girl, Chag-non reportedly replied that Cardozo would never be ascientist. A scientist doesnt think of such things. Ascientist just thinks of studying the people. . . . We didntcome to save the Indians. We came to study them(quoted by Tierney, p. 184 ). ThoughChagnon refused thisaid, he offered goods in exchange for information in thepursuit of science. As scholars, even as we may aid inparticular situations, our privilege is to be able to respondto social suffering by producing knowledge that showsthat isolated acts of assistance cannot undo the struc-tures of domination that produce it. Our gift, our re-sponsibility, is to work to produce forms of understand-ing that make intolerable the conditions that maintaininjustice in any form, including our use of the privilegeof science itself.

a l a n g . f i xDepartment of Anthropology, University of California,Riverside, Calif. 92521 , U.S.A. 5 xii 00

Tierney employs the methods of a reporter and an ad-vocate to document the harm done to the Yanomami ofVenezuela since the beginnings of anthropological andbiomedical research among them in the 1960 s, but thereis sufcient guilt-by-association, innuendo, and misrep-resentation in his book to call his conclusions intoquestion.

The Hippocratic oath, Primum Non Nocere, re-quires the physician to focus on the individual patientswell-being. Scientic research is often justied as bring-ing other benets such as increased knowledge, but even

so, societal good should not come at the cost of harm tohuman subjects. For Tierney, however, seemingly any biomedical research is unethical; all studies for Tierneyare experiments (however observational their meth-ods), and all experiments that do not directly benetthe community involved in the study are criminal (p.43 ). Thus James Neel, a recently deceased distinguishedhuman geneticist as well as physician, who carried outan extensive series of biomedical studies of the Yano-mami, is criminalized.

Although Neel is not alone in being demonized byTierney, I propose to focus on the allegations against himin this review, since Tierney says (p. 297 ) that Neel was


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coron i l e t a l . Perspectives on Darkness in El Dorado F 267

the key to comprehending the Yanomami tragedy andI know his work well. The pattern of errors (includingincorrect citations of sources) apparent in Tierneystreatment of Neels work shows serious problems withhis general case that the Yanomami have suffered greatharm as a result of scientic research .

Perhaps the most alarming claim prior to the bookspublication was that hundreds, perhaps thousands (p.53) of Yanomami had been killed by a measles epidemicwhich if not caused by was at least exacerbated by Neelsteam. In chapter 5, Outbreak, Tierney no longerassertsthat Neel knowingly caused the epidemic by using alive virus vaccine. Dr. Samuel Katz, one of the devel-opers of the vaccine, is now cited (p. 80 ) as saying thatvaccine virus has never been transmitted to susceptiblecontacts and cannot cause measles even in intimate con-tact. Furthermore, at the open discussion session of theAmerican Anthropological Association on the Yano-mami issue in November 2000 , the initial case of mea-sles was identied as havingoccurred in September 1967 ,months before Neel arrived in Venezuela. Thus Tierneycannot establish that Neel introduced measles to theYanomami; rather, he attempts to document a patternof callous disregard for Yanomami life as the team ruth-lessly pursued its scientic goals in the face of the epi-demic, and he continues to insinuate that experimentswere being performed to test various quirky theories.

Why should Neel want to experiment with humanlives? Tierney seems to think that a credible motive isNeels supposed eugenic theories. Neel and his eugenicmissionaries engineered a bold creation myth, a fero-cious Garden of Eden, where the healthy, well-fed Yan-omami fought for the fun of it and killed their infantdaughters for sexual pleasure (p. 313 , emphasis added).In chapter 4, Atomic Indians, Tierney creates his(mythical) case for Neel as a eugenicist. He states thatNeels openly eugenic views made him something of apariah outside his specialty (p. 38 ), failing to note thatNeel was a member of the National Academy of Sciencesand a recipient of the National Medal of Science. Moreto the point, Neel can be called a eugenicist only in thebroadest sense. Four bioethicists in their book on ge-netics and justice state that the core belief common toall eugenicists was concern for human bettermentthrough selectionthat is, by taking measures to ensurethat the humans who do come into existence will becapable of enjoying better lives and of contributing to

the betterment of lives of others (Buchanan et al. 2000 :42 , emphasis added). While this might appear an un-exceptionable aim, the problem came in the mea-sures to be takeninvariably the changing of thebreeding practices of human beings. Here is where Neelparted company with classical eugenics. He never ad-vocated selective breeding practices. He merely pointedout the selective consequences of Yanomami polygyny(Neel 1980 ) and noted with irony the extreme unlikeli-hood that populations in the industrialized world wouldadopt Yanomami marriage practices. His prescriptionsfor the gene pool (Neel 1994 ) all involved manipulatingthe environment rather than genetics. These included

efforts to control population growth, euphenics or thereshaping of environments to ameliorate the expressionof our varied genotypes (Neel 1994 :353 ), keeping mu-tation rates as low as possible through control of expo-sure to environmental mutagens, and providing coun-seling to prospective parents to decrease thetransmission of genetic diseases. None of these ideasbear any resemblance to classic eugenic schemes.

Neel did have a theory of the evolution of what is nowoften called social intelligence (Byrne 1995 ). He arguedthat since headmen were often highly polygynous theydifferentially passed their genes to the next generation.If some heritable attributes were associated with head-manship (Neel avoided calling this intelligence, sinceit included much more than IQ), then the differentialfertility consequent on polygyny would increase theirfrequency through time. The set of characteristics, dueto many genes at many loci, was very close to that spec-ied in the social intelligence model (see Neel 1994 :

186 87) and included knowledge of tribal history andlaw, the ability to speak persuasively, and being skilledin battle and the hunt. This model is simply a descriptionof natural selection for polygenic traits the outcome ofwhich is an increase in gene frequencies for social in-telligence in the population as a whole. It is surely pos-sible to argue about whether this model applied to theYanomami or more widely, but it is not by itself a eu-genic model or necessarily evil. However, in the handsof Tierney this model is transmuted into the leadershipgene, which is located at paired alleles (whatever thatmight mean) and concentrated in the offspring of dom-inant, polygynous chiefs (p. 40 ) and is characterized asreecting quirky ideas about hierarchies of violence andgenetic selection (p. 13).

Now, it is possible that this is simply a misunder-standing. In many places scattered through the text thereis ample evidence that Tierney has only the vaguest ideaof genetics or Neels actual ndings. A truly ludicrousexample is his saying that Neel attributed the short stat-ure of the Yanomami to genetic microdifferentiation(p. 263 ), not realizing that this concept refers to one ofNeels major research resultsthe marked local differ-entiation in gene frequencies among villagesratherthan selection for small body size.

Elsewhere Tierneys misrepresentations cannot be dis-missed as this kind of error. For instance, he associatesunethical experiments in the University of RochesterMedical School with Neel, who was company com-mander and ran much of the hospital (p. 301 ). Butrather than running the hospital, the page cited by Tier-ney from Neels autobiography ( 1994 :22 ) says that hedrilled the students in military exercises required bytheir army service. This is a particularly useful exampleof Tierneys misuse of citations, since it is so easilychecked. What of all the personal interviews he cites thatcannot be checked?

Other factual errors and misinterpretations too nu-merous to detail in this short review can be viewedon the web (e.g. http://national-academies.org/nas/eldo


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rado, http://slate.msn.com/HeyWait/ 00 -10-24 /HeyWait.asp, and http://www.umich.edu/ urel/darkness.html).

But what of the Yanomami in all this? They are theones who have sustained harmwhy should we careabout James Neel? This is exactly the false ethic of theclassical eugenicists, the failure to deal with the tensionbetween social good and individual liberties, rights, andinterests (Buchanan et al. 2000 :30 ). The greater good ofcalling attention to the situation of the Yanomamishould not be achieved at the expense of James Neelsreputation. Tierneys, in my opinion, profoundly im-moral book does harm to individual researchers, to an-thropology, and potentially to the health and welfare ofindigenous peoples insofar as they may now reject bio-medical research and vaccination.

p e t e r p e l sResearch Centre Religion and Society, University of Amsterdam, Oudezijds Achterburgwal 185 , 1012 DK Amsterdam, The Netherlands ( [email protected] ).5 xii 00

Instead of joining the chorus of those arguing in the pressand on the Internet about what really happened whenscience intervened in Yanomami society, I would like todraw attention to the representations of these events.What kind of book has Tierney written? Its title suggestssomething like Conrads Heart of Darkness or, behindthat, Roger Casements Putumayo report (see Taussig1992 ): a genre of colonial revelation that relies on thepromise to unmask a public image of professed good in-tentions and expose the violence it hideseven if theseintentions are the objectivist ones of Chagnons anthro-pology or Neels medical research rather than Kurtzsactivist vision of improving the native. Such a genre re-quires an attack on a widely shared public image, a targetthat Tierney provides in the person of Napoleon Chag-non (rather than James Neel, as many comments havesuggested) partly because he is the best-known Amer-ican anthropologist since Margaret Mead (p. 8). Sub-sequently, Tierney presents an enormous mass of detailin a more or less chronological sequence (which raisesthe question whether a thematic ordering would haveproduced a more concise statement of his claims, thusreducing the book to more manageable proportions).Massive presentation of detail characterizes conspiracy

theories: the sheer bulk of scholarship is meant to pre-pare for an interpretive leap from undeniable facts to analmost unbelievable secret hiding behind a public image(Hofstadter 1967 :38 ). The genre of conspiracy theory isemblematic of a popular mode of Western moral reason-ing: the emotive theory that the public profession ofgood intentions usually hides the pursuit of personal in-terests (MacIntyre 1981 ).

However, identifying its stereotype genre and dis-course does not, of course, imply that the books factsare wrong. Describing a conspiracy is, contrary to whatsome of Tierneys critics have argued, a scholarly pursuit(Hofstadter 1967 :37 ). It relies on a mode of representation

that claims to tell it like it is, a genre that, like thescience adhered to by many of Tierneys critics, is notsupposed to lie. On the one hand, only a quarter of Tier-neys facts is sufcient to show that science does lie andthat none of the parties concerned is in a position to saywhat really happened out there in the Orinoco region.On the other, the identication of Tierneys book as aspecies of revelatory prose allows one to ask whetherthere actually were secrets to expose and conspiracies tounmask. If the answer to that question is that the proseof revelation produces the secrets it pretends to reveal(rather than nding them out there)and I thinkthat is the casewe nd ourselves faced with a far morecomplex ethical conundrum. Rather than asking whatviolence is hidden behind false representations of goodintentions or objective facts, it suggests that the act ofresearch itself may be violentregardless of the truth ofthe representations produced.

Tierney suggests that Neels hidden research and the-oretical interests made him violate the Hippocratic oathhe subscribed to in public. Here, Tierney shows himselfto be a sophisticated conspiracy theorist, foras far as Ican judge from the book and the commentaries circu-lated on the Internethe rarely seems to overstep thelimit of his presentation of data, leaving the imaginativeleap towards an unbelievable secret largely to his readers.The leap required (and actually made by, among others,Terence Turner and Leslie Sponsel and a number of jour-nalists acting on their supposedly condential letter tothe American Anthropological Association) would arguethat Neel inherited a callous attitude towards the Hip-pocratic oath from colleagues who participated in theAtomic Energy Commissions lethal experiments on pa-tients in the study of human responses to nuclear radi-ation; that he let this attitude loose on Yanomami, re-sulting in a measles vaccination experiment withpossibly fatal consequences, as well as a refusal to min-ister to Yanomami patients when required by the mea-sles epidemic; and that this all happened to prove a pointof theory about leadership genes arising from an earlyversion of what we now call sociobiological reasoning.

Most of the factual links required for this imaginativeleap seem to be missing or awed: the direct link be-tween the AECs secret programs and the Atomic BombCasualty Commission is only suggested (p. 310 ), Tierneynever explicitly states that the Edmonston B measlesvaccine had contagious results among Yanomami (pp.

7980 ), and Neels supposed theory about leadershipgenes turns out to be based on the testimony of TerenceTurner only (pp. 3940 ). However, this does not makeTierneys suggestion that Neel inherited a less-than-re-sponsible attitude towards patients from his military su-periors less plausibleit clearly calls for more research.More important, Tierney provides evidence (in the formof Timothy Aschs tape recordings of the measles ex-pedition) that Neel and Chagnon wereeven if only mo-mentarilyworried that the vaccine might have lethalresults after all, against medical expectationsbutperhapsbecause of doubts about what the vaccine would do toa previously unstudied virgin population. He also gives


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reason to doubt their public claim that they gave up alltheir research plans in order to vaccinate a ring aroundthe epidemic (pp. 73 , 78 , 89 ). So even if the suggestedconspiracy is not supported by factual detailif there isno secretdoubts about a possible violation of the Hip-pocratic oath by the procedures of medical researchremain.

Unfortunately for us anthropologists, such doubtsnow translated to the anthropologicalequivalent of theHippocratic oath: the injunction not to harm the peoplewe studyare strengthened when we turn to Tierneysaccusations of Chagnon. Building on and supported byprevious critics of Chagnons popular image of the Yan-omami as a erce people, Tierney elaborates Ramoss(1987 ) argument that different anthropological interven-tions have produced different representations of Yano-mami and Fergusons ( 1995 ) argument that Chagnon mayhave fostered aggression among Yanomami rather thanmerely recording it. He provides sufcient evidence tosuggest that Chagnon may have convinced the lm-maker Timothy Asch to portray Yanomami as violentpeople, that he scared Yanomami by being possessed bya particularly violent spirit, and that he used a doubtfulmode of eliciting secret data by playing one village offagainst another. Most damaging for Chagnon, his asso-ciation with the Venezuelans Charles Brewer and CeciliaMatos, who used journalism and research (at least partly)as a cover for attempts to reduce Yanomami living spacein their own (mining) interests, has not, as far as I know,been challenged. Still, none of this suggests that therewere secrets to conceal and conspiracies to unmask (eventhe Brewer/Matos connection to Chagnons research isopenly documented). Moreover, by seeming to exonerateAsch and contextualizing Jacques Lizots dubious sexualinterventions in Yanomami society by showing that hehad a genuine concern for Yanomami welfare, Tierneyhighlights the personalized, accusatory approach to-wards Chagnon with which he started his account. Thus,the ethical issue is reduced to the personal and secretbetrayal of the proper goals of scientic practice ratherthan a consideration of the possible violence that sci-entic research in general may entail.

Anthropologists have been concerned with the way inwhich their research interventions in the societies stud-ied have modied their representations of these societiesat least from the critique of Orientalism onwards. Itis unfair to single out Chagnon in this respect, even if

it proves to be true that he was associated with some ofthe more violent repercussions of outside interventionin Yanomami life. Tierneys book would have been muchbetter (but might not have sold as many copies) withoutthe revelatory prose and its concomitant suggestion thatsome publicly shared ethical code has been violated byspecic scientists. I feel that the book could haveclaimed a better place in the anthropological literatureby elaborating, in an empirically informed historical ac-count, on the suggestion that the primitivist nostalgiaof the representations of Yanomami by Chagnon, Lizot,and others draw from a much wider eld of ethnographicrepresentations, including a tradition of colonial reve-

lations of spurious virgin populations (anthropologicalEl Dorados) discovered time and time again in Ama-zonian forests ever since Alexander von Humboldt. Butit is much more important that a different style of writ-ing could have improved the presentation of Tierneysmost damningand, I feel, well-documentedindict-ment: that the recent experience of many Yanomamiconvinces them (in present-day ethical terms, by theirown informed consent) that medical and anthropolog-ical researchers bring xawara (a poisonous, contagious,and lethal smoke or black magic) that destroys theirway of life (p. 282 ). That is a predicament that escapesany simplistic profession of good or bad intentions orclaim to know what really happened. Never mindwhether Yanomamis perception of scientic researcherstells it like it is or that researchers did not reallyharm them. It is, after all, such perceptions of researchas well that anthropological versions of the Hippocraticoath are meant to prevent.

c h a r l e s l . b r i g g s a n d c l a r a e .m a n t i n i - b r i g g sDepartment of Ethnic Studies, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, Calif. 92093 -0522 ,U.S.A. ([email protected] ). 4 xii 00

Going against the grain, perhaps, we suggest that Tier-neys Darkness in El Dorado potentially raises someveryimportant issues. Its publication could even leave theworld a better place. Unfortunately, the book does nothelp its readers sort out what is really at stake in thedebate. Nor, from what we have seen, have the many e-mails,web pages, reviews, statements, andpublic forumshelped spark a discussion that could contribute to im-proving the well-being of Yanomami or any other indig-enous population in South America.

Indeed, some of the anthropological defenses that havebeen mounted threaten the institutional strength of thediscipline as much as they distort Tierneys argument.There is a tendency here to assimilate Tierney to anantiscience positionto cast him as just one morecharacter in the ranks of the humanists, postmodernists,and other threats to the power and legitimacy of sciencein anthropology. It is very hard to sustain this reading ofDarkness in El Dorado . A great deal of the book consistsof amateur epidemiology and demography, attempting to

put together fragmentary data regarding outbreaks ofmeasles and other infectious diseases without much un-derstanding of clinical, microbiological, immunological,or fertility issues. Epidemiologists generally have morerespect for the difculties that plague assertions as towhere an epidemic began or how it was transmitted.Tierney invokes what Derrida refers to as a metaphysicsof presence, using narrative detail in placing himself inscene after scene in order to displace Chagnons ac-counts. Oddly, he does not draw heavily on ethnography;his counterassertions generally portray motives in com-monsense journalistic terms rather than by attemptingethnographic analysis. He employs many of the rhetor-


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ical tropes that he attributes to his adversaries, laudinga stunning statistical correlation (p. 176 ), speaking insexist terms of a headman who had accumulatedmore wives (p. 174 ), claiming to supply the real geo-graphical coordinates of communities (p. 207 ), and laps-ing recurrently into disappearing-cultures rhetoric (Idoubt anyone will ever be able to do such a study again,anywhere in the world [p. 273 ]). Eileen Welsomes sum-mary of Atomic Energy Commission research seems toprovide an apt characterization of Tierneys conclusionabout the studies of Napoleon Chagnon and Jacques Li-zot, his main adversaries: They were not just immoralscience, they were bad science (quoted on p. 309 ). Dark- ness in El Dorado is not an attack on scientic anthro-pology. The science-antiscience debate has already suf-ciently oversimplied anthropological arguments andsplit enough departmentsthere is no reason here to addfuel to the re.

What is truly sinister about framing the issue as abattle for truth and visibility in the press between twogringo professionals is that it helps marginalize everydayconditions of life and death among communities clas-sied as indigenous in Venezuela, both in Amazonasstate and elsewhere. The sensational assertion that vac-cinating people with Edmonston B caused a measles ep-idemic or that anthropological expeditions created orat least extended outbreaks of infectious disease drawsattention away from the way in which racialized popu-lations become expendable in general. For an indigenouspopulation in Delta Amacuro state in eastern Venezuela,for example, Wilbert ( 1980 ) suggests that prepubescentmortality in the 1950 s1970 s was 49%. Recent statisticsplace mortality in the rst year of life at 36% (SOCSAL[1998 ]), and some 500 people died in a cholera outbreakin 1992 93 (Briggs with Mantini-Briggs n.d.). A recentstatement issued by the World Health Organization(1997 ) suggests that the health of indigenous populationsworldwide is deplorable. Kim et al. ( 2000 ) suggest thatsteep rises in social inequality within and between coun-tries are creating alarming health conditions among thepoor. This story is far more important than the reputa-tions of two seemingly healthy North Americans, andthe scandal caused by Darkness in El Dorado seems tobe doing little to render it newsworthy. If improving ev-eryday health conditions in Yanomami communities re-ally mattered to Tierney more than to Chagnon, the sub-ject might have taken center stage before the nal two

pages of the book.Another unfortunate common feature of anthropolog-ical responses to the scandal is the tendency to blameYanomami health conditions on the Ministry of Healthand Social Development. To be sure, the MHSD needsto face up to its failure adequately to protect the healthof indigenous populations, just as the U.S. Public HealthService and New York ofcials need to take responsi-bility for the unconscionable infant mortality rates inHarlem. Indeed, President Chavezs Minister of Health,Gilberto Rodrguez Ochoa, has recently been assignedthe task of transforming the public health systemin sucha way as to challenge social inequality rather than ex-

tending and naturalizing it. Tierney mentions the inu-ence of the French embassy and multinational corpora-tions without pausing to reect on the role of othernation-states, businesses, and international organiza-tions (such as the World Bank and the InternationalMon-etary Fund) in creating the global economic conditionsand shaping Venezuelan social policies in such a way asto render health conditions more precarious. In a re-markable footnote (n. 42 , p. 384 ), he cites the U.S. StateDepartment ofcial Gare Smith as having criticized theVenezuelan government for failing to do more for theYanomami; he does not seem to have asked Smith howthis assertion squares with the pressure that the U.S.embassy in Caracas places on Venezuela for more pri-vatization and neoliberal cutbacks. If anthropologists de-fend themselves by Third-Worlding Venezuela andbashing public health professionals, they certainly can-not expect to form partnerships aimed at improvinghealth conditions.

When forced to reconcile health policies and demo-cratic rhetoric with unacceptable rates of mortality, well-trained and well-intentioned public health practitionersfrequently draw on an anthropological rhetoric of cul-ture. The Indians, it is asserted, are unable to under-stand modern hygiene, prefer shamans to doctors, andthe like; epidemics and everyday death are thus to beexplained by culture rather than institutional racism orstructural adjustment (see Briggs with Mantini-Briggsn.d.). AnthropologistsNorth American, European, andVenezuelancontribute to the development of thesedeadly logics, often unwittingly, through their employ-ment by or collaboration with the MHSD and in state-ments to newspapers, reports, ethnographies, and casualconversations. Paul Farmer ( 1999 ) argues that epidemi-ologists use cultural reasoning in constructing immod-est claims of causality worldwide. But inuences andblame are complex hereanthropologists also some-times oppose institutional appropriations of cultural ac-counts. Good-cop-versus-bad-cop stories are too simpleto handle these complex relations. Tierney opposes theerce people image that is one of the more strikingcandidates for generating state policies of benign neglect,but he contributes to widespread images of indigenousVenezuelans as mendicants, as incapable of counting tomore than two (in spite of his frequent allusions to bi-lingual Yanomami, who would presumably know Span-ish or Portuguese numerals), and as incapable of thinking

of the past or the future (a false Whoranism). Thesesorts of cultural images help to place racialized and poorpopulations at the mercy of unscrupulous researchers,as the United Statess own Tuskegee syphilis experi-ment suggests. Tierney joins Chagnon in largely ignor-ing the role of Yanomami and other indigenous activists,who do much more than just protest abuses suffered atthe hands of researchers.

Although anthropologists do not enjoy total controlover institutional uses of the ethnographic images thatthey generate, they can think about the effects that par-ticular images are likely to have on health, political rep-resentation, and legal protections, and they can syste-


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matically study how images of culture are used,denounce their abuse, and collaborate with communityleaders and government ofcials in countering denigrat-ing stereotypes. Neither the anthropological angst northe journalistic coverage generated by Darkness in ElDorado seems to have raised the serious and potentiallyproductive question how anthropology helps shape suchlife-and-death issues. It is high time for the real debateto begin.

r a y m o n d h a m e s Anthropology Department, University of Nebraska,Lincoln, Nebr. 68588 , U.S.A. ( [email protected] ).4 xii 00

Darkness in El Dorado appears to be a serious scholarlywork; its author worked on it for ten years, traveled tomany of the villages where Yanomamo ethnographersworked, and interviewed 90 people (myself included).However, I would argue that the 1,599 footnotes thatfestoon it are mere adornments to enhance itscredibility.It strikes me as comparable to a legal brief prepared bya rogue district attorney prosecuting scientists forallegedcrimes against humanity. The prosecutor is aided andabetted by anthropologists who are avowed enemies ofthe accused. A tremendous amount of evidence is sub-mitted. Evidence that exonerates the accused is sup-pressed. The lay and professional publics are outraged bythe revelations.

Quickly, historians of science, anthropologists, bio-medical researchers, professional associations, univer-sity committees, and journalists begin to examine theevidence and soon conclude that the fundamental claimsare without foundation. Those who gave depositionsclaim that they were quoted out of context or answeredhypotheticals. In fact, much of the evidence exoneratesthe accused. At this point in this sad affair it is abun-dantly clear that James Neel and Napoleon Chagnon didnot cause or attempt to cause a measles epidemic buttried to prevent one from spreading; that James Neel wasnot a eugenicist and in fact worked against the goals ofeugenicists; that Timothy Asch did not fraudulentlystage Yanomamo lms; and that Marcel Roche was notattempting to use radioactive iodine tracers to cause ge-netic mutations. The evidence assembled by expert pan-els to refute Tierneys statements has been made avail-

able by colleagues of the accused at the University ofCalifornia, Santa Barbara (http://www.anth.ucsb.edu/ucsbpreliminaryreport.pdf), a commission of the Uni-versity of Michigan (http://www.umich.edu/ urel/darkness.html), the National Academy of Sciences (http://www 4.nationalacademies.org/nas/nashome.nsf/b 57ef1bf2404952 b852566 dd00671 bfd/ 57065 f16 ff258371852569920052 d283 ?OpenDocument), and the International Ge-netic Epidemiology Society (http://hydra.usc.edu/iges/neelresolution.html), to mention but a few entries in alist that grows longer weekly. This sort of outpouring ofsupport from the scientic profession is perhaps withoutprecedent in the history of anthropology.

It has been clearly demonstrated that Tierneys fun-damental claims rest on misreadings of the evidence andunfounded surmises. Why, one might ask, should webother to examine the rest of his charges? The answeris that anthropologys role as objective witness and sup-porter of indigenous rights is threatened. Some of thecharges can easily be evaluated through an examinationof the literature he cites and/or ignores, while othersdraw on interviews and documents to which we have noaccess. I will focus on the former and limit my reviewto claims about Chagnons alleged fabrications of Yan-omamo warfare.

Key to understanding Tierneys interpretive method isthe work of Ferguson ( 1995 ), who, from an intensive read-ing of the ethnographic and historical literature andwithout ever having done any ethnographic research onthe Yanomamo, concludes that competition over tradegoods is the main cause of Yanomamo warfare. Fergu-sons technique is to document Chagnons presence inan area and then note Chagnons report of the outbreakof violence after his visit (sometimes weeks, months, oryears later). Where Chagnon does not visit he makes noreports of warfare. Since Chagnon distributed tradegoods, trade goods cause warfare. Tierney extends thistechnique in his explanation of a 1968 measles epidemic.Neel and Chagnon entered the area to do research and ameasles epidemic erupted; therefore, it was caused byNeel and Chagnon. More commonly we nd Tierneydescribing Chagnons having visited a village and thenquoting a Yanomamo informant to the effect that afterChagnons visit some Yanomamo had died, usually ofmalaria or a respiratory infection. If warfare and deaththrough infectious disease are common events, they willreliably follow the visit of a trade-goods-distributingeth-nographer. Of course, births, marriages, and village re-locations are also events that reliably follow ethnogra-phers visits. Obviously, this method is so powerful thatit can demonstrate similar causation of any such event.

The ethnographic accounts we have on the Yanomamospeak of intracultural trade as the main source of West-ern trade goods. In some cases Yanomamo have raidedwith the specic intention of acquiring trade goods, butmost of such raids took place well before the arrival ofanthropologists. Yanomamo ethnographers have amplydemonstrated that warfare predates the widespread in-troduction of trade goods. More to the point is the de-tailed ethnographic research of John Peters, who has

lived with and studied the Yanomamo since 1967 . Petersis thanked in the acknowledgments for his commentsand encouragement (Tierney 2000 :xviii), and his re-search on demography (Early and Peters 1990 ) is cited.Not cited is his ethnography of the Brazilian MucajaiYanomamo, in which he presents case-study historicaldata on warfare to examine Fergusons thesis about steelgoods and warfare and concludes that the Yanomamoreally like trade goods but warfare revolves around re-venge ( 2000 :207 20 ). Nearly all the ethnographers whohave published on the Yanomamo specically deny thatmaterial resources (land, game, or trade goods) are thecause of Yanomamo warfare (Ales 1990 :89 ; Albert 1985 :


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table 1 Adult Male Mortality from Warfare among Yanomamo

GroupEthnog-rapher

Adult MaleMortality

(%) Source

Shamatari Chagnon 40 Albert ( 1989 )Shamatari and

Namowei-teriChagnon 38 Melancon ( 1982 :

3334)Mucajai Early and

Peters27 Early and Peters

(2000 :129 )aNamowei Chagnon 24 Albert ( 1989 )Haiyamo Hames 12 Albert ( 1989 )Central Lizot 1024 Albert ( 1989 )Catrimani Albert 14 Albert ( 1989 )

a My estimate.

2429 ; Barker 1961 ; Eguillor Garca 1984 :133 35 ; Lizot1977 ; Chagnon 1988 ), and revenge is the most importantcause of that warfare. Tierney ignores this criticalinformation.

In numerous places Tierney claims that Chagnon hasexaggerated Yanomamo violence. He is not alone in thisaccusation. It has been made by other Yanomamo eldresearchers, including Lizot ( 1994 ), Albert ( 1989 ), andGood (Good and Chanof 1991 ). It is unclear whether theyare saying that Chagnon overgeneralizes, warfare beingintense only where he did his research, or that warfareis less important than he believes in his own area ofstudy. It is therefore important to examine what theseethnographers say about warfare in their own researchareas.

Lizots charge is belied by his own statements. In thenarration for Warriors of the Amazon , a lm shot in hislong-time research village for which he was the ethno-graphic consultant, we nd the following: The neces-sity of these lessons is reinforced by the threat of warfarethat overshadows their lives. Although men may onlygo off to ght two or three times a year, they live in astate of vigilance (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/transcripts/ 2309 warr.html). In a recent letter to theVenezuelan newspaper El Nacional (http://www.el-nacional.com/eln 17112000 /f-pc 4s1.htm: 17 Novem-ber 2000 ), Lizot condemns Tierneys book and defendsChagnon against charges of starting a measles epidemicand causing war with trade goods. Here he says that war-fare is a constitutive trait of Yanomamo social and po-litical organization. In the same letter he repeats hischarge that Chagnon tends to exaggerate Yanomamo vi-olence, but it is difcult to square this charge with hisown statements about the fundamental pervasiveness ofwarfare in their daily lives (see also Lizot 1984 : esp.3637). Catherine Ales, a French colleague of Lizot whohas been working on and off with the Yanomamo fornearly three decades in the more peaceful Parima region,echoes Lizots statement on Yanomamo warfare: InYanomami society, the system of aggression is a consti-tutive element of their social organization ( 1984 :110 ,my translation). This comes near the end of an article

in which she details habitual forms of Yanomamo ag-gression from shouting matches to duels to raiding andconcludes that duels, sorcery, and war are ways of de-fending private and collective rights (see also Ales 1990 :92 ).

Finally, Peters recently published ethnography on theYanomamo has a chapter on warfare which begins withthe following sentence: Anyone who is even minimallyacquainted with the Yanomami is familiar with the cen-tral role of war in this culture ( 2000 :207 ). The last twosentences of the chapter read: Humans are killedalmostas easily as monkeys in the forest. There is no shame,no guilt, and little conscience in the killing, althoughthere will be a fear that the murder might be avengedby raid or sorcery in future ( 2000 :220 ). From three dif-ferent ethnographers we have summary statements thatwarfare is either central to or constitutive of Yanoma-mo social organization. Again, Tierney ignores thesesources.

One way to determine if Chagnon has exaggeratedYanomamo warfare is to look at the adult male mortalityfrom warfare (fraction of all males older than 16 who diefrom war) documented in different areas of the Yano-mamo distribution by other ethnographers. A few yearsago Bruce Albert, a major critic of Chagnon, providedsuch data in this journal ( 1989 ). I have modied his table(1989 :637 , table 1) by adding two new sources (table 1).Mortality from warfare is clearly higher in the Shamatariarea than in any other, but another of Chagnons groups,the Namowei-teri, has a mortality rate very similar tothose of groups studied by Peters and Lizot. Perhaps onecan argue, as does Tierney, that Chagnon cooks hisdata to make warfare appear more intense. In that regard,Lizots observations about the accuracy of Chagnonsdata are worth considering. In n. 9 of an article ( 1994 )critical of Chagnons work he says of his mortality sta-tistics: Chagnons gures seem to me to be close toreality. He goes on to note that the Yanomamo he andChagnon studied were unacculturated and more warlikethan the acculturated Yanomamo studied by others suchas Albert. He is able to make such an assessment becausehis area of study slightly overlaps with Chagnons, hehas visited many of the villages Chagnon studied, andthey have had informants in common.

The reviews here and elsewhere will surely be fol-lowed by journal articles, professional symposia, editedvolumes, and perhaps even monographs devoted to an

evaluation of Tierneys fantastic and reckless claims.Over the long term I am condent that the disciplineand the individuals harmed will recover. What worriesand saddens me is the enormous short-term damage thatthis will inict on native peoples.

s u s a n l i n d e eDepartment of the History and Sociology of Science,University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pa. 19104 ,U.S.A. ([email protected] ). 5 xii 00

More than once as the controversy over this book un-folded reporters and others told me the number of foot-


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notes in Tierneys chapter on the measles outbreak: 147 .I have now tallied the total number of footnotes in theentire book including the appendix ( 1,599 ). Such num-bers seem to interest people. It is considerably more dif-cult to quantify the evidentiary force and legitimacy ofthese footnotes. My own assessment is perhaps sug-gested by the fact that I have rewritten this review sev-eral times in an effort to make it difcult for anyone toextract a decontextualized endorsement on some futureweb page or book jacket. This accounts for the somewhatstilted style, for which I apologize.

On its own terms, the book is well within a traditionaljournalistic genre, the expose of injustice, with a strongemphasis on making the victims visible and empatheticby giving them names and identities and perspectivesand voices. Eileen Welsomes ( 1999 ) Plutonium Files isa somewhat comparable study of a different group ofhuman subjects, those involved in AEC radiation tests.Tierneys engagement with the Yanomami, which re-ects this journalistic formula, is the most respectableaspect of his work. His Yanomami speakers have intenseand visible agency, and while I never fully trust the story-teller the stories are nonetheless compelling, even riv-eting. There is the emergence of the strange young leaderCesar Dimanawa and the remarkable life of Helena Val-ero, who was kidnapped at 12 by a Yanomami group andbecame Yanomami. There is Yarima, who married theanthropologist Kenneth Good but could not live in NewJersey and left her children there to return to the forest.There is the image of Yanomami lmmakers producingtheir own documentary about the activities of a NationalGeographic lm crew. To his credit, Tierney does notconstruct the Yanomami as silent or unable to speak forthemselves.

In Tierneys further defense, Napoleon Chagnon seemsto have provided ample testimony to his many enemies,and Tierney draws some of his most damaging quotesfrom Chagnons own published work. I am not sure whatChagnon was practicing, but I do not think it was thesort of thing students should be encouraged to emulate,and I consider it extremely unfortunate that his workhas been so widely and so uncritically distributed to stu-dents in the United States as a model of anthropologicalresearch.

Tierneys credibility problems, however, make readingevery sentence in this book an exercise in hermeneutics.There was a moment in the text, on the second or third

reading, when I began to feel that I was developing someexpertise, some uency, in Tierneys style. It was whenhe began to discuss a section of the 1968 tape recordingin which, he writes, a [Yanomami] man muttered a sen-tence including the word horemu, meaning lying orfaking (p. 105 ). I felt uent when I could see, imme-diately, the sentences porous structure and instability.Tierneys wording is characteristically vague (a man?),and the quote about horemu is followed immediatelyby a disclaimer saying that the tapes still await com-petent translation. Was Tierneys translation incom-petent? And didnt Tierneys wording leave open the pos-sibility that the muttered sentence including the word

horemu was in fact something like we are not lyingor faking would be wrong or something equally in-nocuous, irrelevant, or difcult to interpret? When I readthis passage and could see its porosity, I began to becondent of Tierneys xed grounds of reference and ofhis self-subversion.

That self-subversion takes the form of apostasy. Tier-ney is a disappointed adventurer, denouncing the mas-culine seductions that once enthralled him and alsodrawing on them at every turn, invoking personal riskas central to authenticity, foregrounding his researchacumen, and mirroring the epistemological frames of hisprimary actors. The resulting text is incoherent, keepingthe reader always slightly uncomfortable with content,evidence, and narrative track.

Tierney for example expresses high condence in Yan-omami reports of numbers of deaths in one chapter (mostof his data on measles and other disease deaths comefrom Yanomami reports) and in another states that Yan-omami reports of deaths from warfare cannot be takenas true because the Yanomami do not count higher thantwo and, in another discussion, because they do not nec-essarily distinguish between physical death and spiritdeath. He castigates the behavior of Napoleon Chagnonand Timothy Asch and then says that he himself wouldhave behaved even more inappropriately in the same sit-uation. He constructs science as an evil knowledge sys-tem linked to nuclear weapons and corporate capital andprepares his own technical charts from data in the New England Journal of Medicine or from his own eld re-search into Filming Deaths (p. 121 ). He chooses tolocate himself in the terrain of courageously excavatedpure fact and then neglects to worry too much aboutaccuracy. He also picks up threads from different peopleand different institutions and amalgamates them for thepurposes of the narrative stream. Thus his James V. Neelseems to be a composite character, with the basic per-sona of a generic evil scientist (see any recent disastermovie) combined with aspects of the y geneticist H. J.Muller, the mouse geneticist William Russell, and oc-casionally even Neel himself. And Tierneys AtomicBomb Casualty Commission seems to be a cross betweenDouglas MacArthur, the AEC, and the Manhattan Pro-ject instead of the tenuous and insecure institution itwas until 1974 . Some of Tierneys details are correct, butthey apply to different people, different institutions, dif-ferent issues, different periods. This is disorienting when

one knows the subject and opaque when one does not.The text twists and turns, bringing up details that arenot quite relevant, evoking paranoiac vistas, jumping be-tween unrelated events in ways that suggest conspira-cies,and oscillating between technocratic rationality andemotive experience and between rage and love. And allthis, I suspect, provides the narrative tension. Readingit is like watching someone self-destruct for a good cause.Tierney is a aming Buddhist monk. One cannot quiteturn away.

From my examination of the evidence presented inrelation to the 1968 measles epidemic,I assume that onlyabout one-sixth of what Tierney reports has any general


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basis in what might be understood to be actual events.Yet even diluted to one-sixth strength, it is a terrifyingstory of unintended consequences, ignorance, cruelty,and self-deception by anthropologists and other scien-tists, physicians, government ofcials, missionaries, andjournalists. The story and characters are astonishing,andthey grow larger and more astonishing in every chapteruntil they are literally all bound together in an evil globalconspiracy (p. 310 ).

When I began to read Neels eld notes about his workwith the Yanomami in Venezuela in early 1968 , I lingeredover the names of those vaccinated and the names of thesmall villages in which they lived. At Coshiwora-tedi,Boshidoma had a bad rash from the 8th to the 16 th ofFebruary, but Cajicumwa had only a slightheadache afterthe vaccination. At Bisaasi-tedi, the infant Coima ijiyuwas not vaccinated because he was too small and young.I wondered if for them, for Boshidoma or Cajicumwa,being vaccinated was desirable or terrible. I wondered ifthey would have chosen the vaccine or chosen to taketheir chances with the measles that was making its waydown the Orinoco River. I wondered how it felt to in-teract with the American geneticist andhis teams. I won-dered, too, if Neel might have sought the resources andthe personnel to make possible a comprehensive andwell-coordinated vaccination program instead of a hap-hazard stopgap program as an add-on to a project focusedon other, more important things like blood and datacollection.

I wish very much that someone else had written Tier-neys book. I wish someone had written it who couldhave both told the story in a way that would attractattention (this Tierney has been able to do) and also beencareful about records and claims and done justice to thelabyrinthine world of the Yanomami. Tierneys handlingof the measles epidemic is inexcusable and irresponsible,and his portraits of his primary actors are deeply awed.His 1,599 footnotes are little more than textual display.Yet even with all its manifest weaknesses, the book hasopened a public debate. Its unstable narrative has pro-voked many of us to look at ethnographic and geneticpractices with disturbing, if not novel, questions.

The Yanomami have been asked to participate in manydifferent stories over the years. They have been asked tobe Stone Age people who could reveal how human ev-olution occurred and therefore how society should beorganized. They have been asked to be the seductive

messengers of the potential of liberal humanism. Theyhave also been asked to demonstrate the terrible impactof industrialized steel goods and technocratic rationality.Yet who should bear the burden of such chaotic indus-trialized longings?

a l c i d a r i t a r a m o sDepartamento de Antropologia, Universidade deBraslia, 70 .910 -900 Braslia, D.F., Brazil([email protected] ). 4 xii 00

The dust jacket of Darkness in El Dorado reects thehyperbolic tone of the whole book. On the front cover,

a subtitle promises to show how scientists and journal-ists devastated the Amazon; government-sponsoredswarms of road builders, tens of thousands of gold min-ers, national and foreign lumber companies, and stateand private agribusiness megaprojects apparently do notcount. On the back cover, one nds an equally puzzlingcharacterization of the book by the anthropologist LeslieSponsel: in many respects, the most important bookever written about the Yanomami. This sentence mayhave been taken out of context for publicity reasons butmust strike the reader as odd when applied to a book ofuncertain importance that is not about the Yanomami.Other bombastic statements permeate the text, such asproclaiming Chagnon the best-known American an-thropologist since Margaret Mead (p. 8) and attributingto him the power to cast a spell on the whole world ofanthropology (p. 313 ). Stylistic excesses notwithstand-ing, very serious issues are raised even when the authorstretches his journalistic imagination to its limits.

A particularly disturbing aspect of the book is the in-coherence that was introduced when the author madesignicant changes in the galley proofs. These proofs hadbeen widely circulated and became the object of an ex-traordinary electronic panic in the academic world. Thelate and extensive revisions have made a confusing andsometimes contradictory tangle of what was a key ele-ment in the galleys, the forceful denunciation of a pat-tern of unethical behavior towards the Yanomami ofVenezuela by the geneticist James Neels research teamin the late 1960 s. The revised text that was publishedretains part of this denunciation while simultaneouslyundercutting it and fails to address the resulting incon-sistency. Chapter 5, the main locus of the authors ac-cusations, originally closed with hints of cover-up op-erations with the disappearance, like the ashes of theYanomami dead, of important lmfootage. Now it endsby giving Neel the benet of the doubt: At times, Neelgenuinely wanted to help the Yanomami and sincerelythought he was doing so (p. 82 ). Whereas in the galleysNeel emerged as an aggressive scientist intent on car-rying on his atomic-genetic experiments at all costs, inthe published version Neel and his assistants are reducedto a bunch of bewildered men at a loss amidst a ravagingmeasles epidemic. Anyone who has ever experienced thepandemonium of a generalized epidemic consuming 80to 90% of an indigenous community can appreciate theiroverwhelming sense of urgency and disorientation (Ra-

mos 1995 ). Tierney insists that Neel used the wrongmeasles vaccine and more than insinuates that, insteadof protecting the Yanomami, the Edmonston B live viruscaused the 1968 epidemic that aficted the Upper Ori-noco communities. Although acknowledging expertopinions that the vaccine virus cannot cause epidemics,Tierney afrms his view through a tangle of poorly de-scribed acts, facts, and dates involving Neels team. Forinstance, on p. 71 Neel is said to have ordered the epi-demic lmed by Timothy Asch, but on p. 95 he does notwant to show the sick on lm. On the same page heobjects to his teams administering medicines to the In-dians, which he considers a waste of research time, but


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on p. 96 he anxiously radios Caracas asking forantibiotics.

It took a patient step-by-step ne-combing through thechaotic chapter 5 by a group of Brazilian epidemiologists,two of them seasoned professionals in epidemics amongthe Brazilian Yanomami, to unravel the sequence ofevents described by Tierney (Lobo et al. 2000 ). The mea-sles epidemic that closed in on Neels team originatedin two points of Yanomami territory on the Brazilianside: Apiau in April/May 1967 , radiating to Mucaja inlate 1967 , and Toototobi in September/November 1967 ,spreading out to Upper Demini and over the mountainsto Venezuela along the trails frequently used by the Yan-omami in their intervillage visitations. By January, whenNeel and his team arrived at Ocamo, the epidemics hadreached a number of Venezuelan villages, and the vac-cines were administered too late. In short, the epidemicsarrived before the vaccine, as Neel himself asserted inhis autobiography ( 1994 :162 ). This Brazilian document,as well as several others by experts on epidemiologyavailable on web sites, provides technical data to refuteTierneys major argument for a vaccine experiment usingthe Yanomami as guinea pigs.

Without the prop of the experimental vaccine, Dark- ness in El Dorado loses much of its edge and becomesjust one more narrative of unethical scientic behavior.The powerful accusation of medical experiments in-volving a highly respected scientist and a highly exoti-cized people saved this book from the near-oblivion towhich another tabloid-style volume about Yanomamiethnologists in Venezuela, Mark Ritchies ( 1996 ) Spiritof the Rainforest , was consigned.

Darkness in El Dorado has been commended (by Ter-ence Turner on the dust jacket) for its solid documen-tation. Indeed, there is a profusion of end notes, but thesenotes require closer examination. For instance, to chal-lenge Chagnons data on Yanomami polygyny, Tierneychooses a sentence from a Waorani ethnography (n. 104 ,chap. 10). To support his description of the sad historyof the Marashi-teri and their struggle with the gold rushhe cites an article by Bruce Albert written about a dif-ferent Yanomami community well before the gold rush.

If as a self-styled epidemiologist Tierney does not farevery well, his ethnography is equally infelicitous. Al-lusions to marriage rules, shamanism, the spirit world,and ceremonial dialogues are regurgitated garbled pas-tiches of written ethnographies and bits of information

picked up from interpreters in his crusade through Ve-nezuelan villages. Tierney achieves his best results inhis proper role as journalist, particularly in chapter 11 ,where he tracks Venezuelan documents and news itemsfor information that might elucidate the convolutedBrewer Caras affair, the latters association with Chag-non, and the involvement of government ofcials ingrandiose schemes in Yanomami lands.

Tierney also has the merit of forcefully bringing theissue of research ethics to the attention of the academiccommunity. By relentlessly exposing at full volume theshocking behavior of foreign anthropologists in Vene-zuela, he has succeeded in achieving what several of us

anthropologists in Brazil apparently failed to do in thesober key of academic discourse when we tried to alertNorth American social scientists to the harmful effectsof careless ethnographic renderings of Yanomami life (Al-bert 1989 , 1990 ; Albert and Ramos 1988 , 1989 ; Carneiroda Cunha 1988 ).

Even when these scandals are cut down to ordinarysize, unobstructed by sensationalism, there is still plentyof dirty laundry on display in anthropological academia,particularly in the United States. In his genetic projectswith Yanomami virgin-soil populations (Neel 1994 :161 ), did Neel follow international protocols such as the1964 Helsinki I Declaration or the 1947 Nuremberg In-ternational Tribunal requiring the informed consent ofhuman subjects? Did Chagnon observe these normswhen he drew liters of Yanomami blood and took themaway to the United States, violated the name secrecy ofthe dead, and forced a movie camera on a people noto-riously averse to photographs? What has happened to theYanomami blood? What procedures have been observedregarding the intellectual rights of the Yanomami? Howlong can the anthropological community in the UnitedStates continue to ignore the social consequences ofunethical ethnographic writing? How long can claims tosocial science neutrality be upheld?

Tierneys own work is not above criticism. After cas-tigating both Chagnon and Lizot for their abusive camerawork, including the lming of a woman in her deaththroes and her subsequent cremation, Tierney proceedsto display photographs of sick and dying women andchildren (unnumbered photos between pp. 164 and 165 ,p. 226 ). After condemning Chagnon for bribing the Yan-omami into violating their own mores, Tierney quin-tupled his Yanomami guides salary (p. 276 ) to persuadehim to continue their jungle pilgrimage retracing thesteps of Chagnon, the hero and philosophical inspirationof his undergraduate days (pp. xxiiixxiv). In Tierneyshands, Yanomami warfare becomes a ght over accessto anthropologists (p. 276 ), a bizarre spin-off of the Chag-non-Harris obsession with Yanomami violence. Puppetsof the anthropologists trading whims, Tierneys Yano-mami show no cultural coherence, no will of their own,and blindly kill each other for Western trinkets. In theheart of Tierneys Darkness in El Dorado , the Yanomamiare described as the tiniest, scrawniest people in theworld (p. 8), perpetually in a state of hunger because ofecological constraints and anthropological abuses. Along

the lines of the epithets profusely applied to these In-dians over the years, the unsuspecting reader would bejustied in labeling these Yanomami the hungry people . The prejudice here is all the more apparent whenthe yardstick Tierney chooses to measure proper humanheight is the people in the United States today (p. 265 ).Caught in mounting competition among Western egos,the Yanomami have constantly been used by opportun-ists who seem far more concerned to advance their owncareers than to address the issues of the Indians well-being and dignity.

The irony of all this is that the Yanomami, portrayedas the most primitive tribe on earth, are currently dem-


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onstrating a tremendous talent as students in an edu-cation program launched in 1995 by the Brazilian NGOComissao Pro-Yanomami. In just ve years, these mono-lingual people have mastered the technology of writing,produced their own texts, acquired teaching skills,learned educated Portuguese, and passed ofcial examson microscopy. Where, then, is that primitiveness but inthe eye of the beholder?

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