ARGUABLY the most famous ethnography ever, Napoleon Chagnon’s Yanomami: The fierce people has been a course classic since it appeared in 1968, and has influenced thousands. It, and Changon’s subsequent popular and academic books, put him squarely into the pantheon of anthropology’s greats.
Then in 2000, investigative journalist Patrick Tierney published Darkness in El Dorado, accusing Chagnon of various misdemeanours during his 25 sojourns to the Yanomami’s homeland on the Brazil-Venezuela border. The accusations included: fabricating data for a 1988 paper that purported to show the evolutionary basis for violence; increasing the people’s levels of bellicosity through distribution of…
