Galileo's Middle Finger (19 page)

At this point, Tierney’s book wasn’t even out yet, nor was the
New Yorker
article
he’d written summarizing his most horrifying claims, but thanks to press attention to the Turner-Sponsel memo, all hell broke loose. The AAA leadership decided to convene a highly publicized special session for the upcoming meeting in November 2000 in San Francisco, and the circus quickly grew so large that it started to require extra tents. Then the AAA leadership upped the ante, creating an El Dorado Task Force to look more deeply into Tierney’s claims. Although Chagnon was obviously being put on trial at the AAA, no one from the association ever issued him a
formal invitation to defend himself
. He was to be tried in absentia.

In sharp contrast to the AAA,
various other scholarly bodies
rose up immediately to object to what they saw as obvious falsehoods in Tierney’s work and by implication in the Turner-Sponsel memo. Fact-based criticisms of Tierney were issued by the National Academy of Sciences, the American Society of Human Genetics, the International Genetic Epidemiology Society, and the Society for Visual Anthropology. The
University of Michigan
—where Chagnon had been a graduate student and then faculty member, and where Neel had done most of his work—also issued a devastating point-by-point rebuttal of Tierney’s most problematic claims.

Why was the response of the AAA so anomalous? The answer can’t be that the AAA leadership remained unaware of factual challenges to Tierney’s claims, including devastating criticisms from
Susan Lindee
, a senior historian of science at the University of Pennsylvania who had written extensively about Neel. As soon as she got the Turner-Sponsel letter via e-mail, Lindee dropped everything except her class and ran over to Neel’s archives at the American Philosophical Society to see if she had missed something major. On the contrary, she immediately found extensive evidence that Tierney had gotten many things wrong. She
issued an open letter
saying so, and later reported her findings in person at the AAA meeting. Lindee found clear signs that the outbreak of measles had predated Neel’s arrival with the vaccines, so he could not have caused the epidemic, as Tierney, Turner, and Sponsel suggested. And although Tierney claimed Neel had tried to stop his colleagues from treating the Yanomamö so he could run a Nazi-like experiment to see who would live and who would die, Lindee found substantial evidence that Neel had done all he could to get ahead of the epidemic and save those who were already infected.

Lindee had hardly been alone in quickly and publicly presenting evidence that challenged Tierney’s most shocking claims.
Thomas Headland
, a missionary and anthropologist with contacts in the region, gathered and presented additional evidence that the 1968 epidemic predated the expedition’s arrival. Historians of science
Diane Paul and John Beatty
presented evidence that—contrary to the implications that Neel’s funding from the Atomic Energy Commission meant he was up to an extraordinary bit of no good—about half of all federally funded American geneticists at the time had AEC funding. Lindee, Paul, and Beatty, historians with essentially no horse in this race, also challenged the
portrayal of Neel as a Nazi-like eugenicist
.

Meanwhile, one scholar of the Yanomamö after another showed evidence that, contrary to the claims of Tierney, Turner, and Sponsel, Chagnon had not invented the Yanomamö reputation for ferocity, fighting, and abducting women. In spite of Tierney’s portrayal of Chagnon as the bringer of strife to a naturally Edenic people, various anthropologists and historians pointed to evidence for Yanomamö conflict and the kidnapping of fertile women dating back to long
before Chagnon was even born
.

Yet in spite of all these clear declarations that Tierney’s book amounted to a house of cards, the AAA had gone full steam ahead. That meant the AAA essentially bolstered Tierney’s claims against Chagnon and the late Neel and provided PR for Tierney’s book and
New Yorker
article, too. The Tierney-inspired free-for-all conducted under the auspices of the AAA enabled “scholars” to stand up at microphones and debate whether Chagnon was a “
swashbuckling misogynist
” and a fomenter of violence, to claim that various American and European scientists had been responsible for
spreading Ebola around Africa
, and to use the AAA Web site to throw up utterly undocumented charges against colleagues.

Some anthropologists did try to fight back
. In 2003, Tom Gregor of Vanderbilt University and Dan Gross of the World Bank
launched a referendum
in the AAA explicitly criticizing Tierney’s book and the AAA El Dorado Task Force (and thus implicitly criticizing Turner and Sponsel) for misrepresenting the Yanomamö measles vaccine history in such a way as to undermine ongoing vaccine campaigns that otherwise had the potential to save vulnerable people all over the world. The referendum passed by a
ratio of 11 to 1
. Then in 2005, Gregor and Gross put forth
another referendum
to withdraw the AAA’s acceptance of the
Task Force Report
. The motion passed by a
ratio of about 2.5 to 1
. Impressive, particularly considering that by then a fair number of science-oriented anthropologists apparently had quit the AAA because of what its leadership had done to Chagnon, Neel, and science itself. (One of my closest friends in East Lansing, a scientific anthropologist at Michigan State, told me that he had dropped his AAA membership right after the AAA had tried Chagnon in the kangaroo court held at the San Francisco meeting.)

But those referenda, coming fairly late in the game, couldn’t possibly undo the damage done to Chagnon’s and Neel’s reputations. Indeed, in some ways, they simply muddied the filthy waters more. When I came to the story, in spite of the AAA membership’s vote four years earlier to rescind acceptance of the Task Force Report—to essentially take back any hint of a guilty verdict—the report remained up on the AAA Web site, without any attached notice of the rescission. It included a number of ruinous (and completely unsupported) claims, including the allegation that Chagnon had paid his Yanomamö subjects
to kill each other
.

As for Chagnon, it seemed pretty clear his career had essentially been halted by the whole mess. He was supposed to have retired with his wife Carlene to this house in the Michigan woods so he would have a place to hunt, to fish, to run his dogs, and to write his memoirs. But from what I was hearing, his memoirs seemed to be stalled. And perched on a bluff, reachable only down a long driveway, this house seemed to me less like a sanctuary than a fortress.

 • • • 

N
OT LONG AFTER
I
ARRIVED
,
Nap Chagnon offered me a mug of coffee and a chair in his home office, and we sat down to start talking. I first reminded him of what I’d told him earlier regarding my standard interview method: We would talk, I would take notes, and then I’d return the notes to him. He could change them however he wished—add or delete anything—and I would use only what he approved as being on the record. At that, he started his story, and I started typing. Soon he paused to express skepticism that I could type fast enough to actually get down what he was saying. I read back to him exactly what he had said so far, including his skepticism about my typing speed. He raised his eyebrows and we really got down to business.

Subjects like Chagnon—people who spent their lives as professional interviewers of sources—prepare in advance what they will tell you, and there is no way to redirect them. I knew this, and so I braced myself for waiting out what it was he felt I needed to know, before we could get to what I wanted to know.
Chagnon’s story
was by turns fascinating and complex, circular and gossipy, important and banal. I felt rather as if I was trying to drink from a fire hose, but I just kept typing and nodding, stopping him only once in a while to ask him to spell a name for me.

Chagnon’s story tended toward the tribal; that is, it was pretty clear there were people on his side (good guys) and people against him (bad guys). The undercurrent included a story of social class, one that made a lot of sense to me. The physician Neel had been upper-crust and well established. He’d been a man who tended to keep his whites white even in the jungle, a man who had immodestly titled his autobiography
Physician to the Gene Pool.
Chagnon, by contrast, came from a large working-class family and had had to struggle to make his way into the world of universities. Chagnon seemed to have understood from the start that he’d never really be welcomed into the blue-blooded Ivy League anthropologists’ club, no matter how important his work became. I got the sense that, down in Venezuela, Chagnon had more readily related to the Yanomamö than to some of the American academics on the expeditions. He knew what it was like to hunt for your food, to get tispy with your chums around a campfire, and to sit around telling lewd stories.

Chagnon completely immersed himself in life with the Yanomamö, quickly becoming vastly more conversant in their rich language than Neel ever would.
Chagnon’s 1968 monograph
tells of his hardships, his adventures, and his scientific findings, portraying neither himself nor the Yanomamö as heroes or saints. In fact, Chagnon admitted in that book to having been fooled by the Yanomamö during data collection. They took advantage of his inexperience to introduce all sorts of scatological jokes into the eager young anthropologist’s records, such that Chagnon lost months of work that had to be completely done over. The book tracks the lives of “the fierce people,” focusing in depth on the forms of and motivations for fighting, including especially women-stealing. From it, I understood why Chagnon got pissed off when people referred to him as Neel’s assistant or graduate student. He had been neither, but more to the point, he’d been pretty damned ballsy to do the work he’d done out there in the name of anthropology. And he’d brought back an astonishing store of scientific data.

As we talked, Chagnon fleshed out for me just how far back Terence Turner’s obsession with him went. Tierney’s book had hardly been the start of Turner’s attacks; it had simply been the best ticket Turner had ever gotten to ride. Now at Cornell, Turner had been trying for more than a decade to go after Chagnon with claims of bad behavior, and to some extent, he had joined with
South American anthropologists
, who (Chagnon said) didn’t appreciate Chagnon’s competition in “their” area. They had all made it harder and harder for Chagnon to get research permits in the area, until finally he had had to give up. That led to his decision to retire from the University of California–Santa Barbara (UCSB). He wasn’t interested in endless teaching and committee work without any prospect of getting back to the indigenous people he’d come to know and make known.

A few years before he left UCSB, though, Chagnon had gotten hints about what might be coming from Tierney. A book rep from Norton had stopped by during a visit to another faculty member to warn Chagnon confidentially. After talking to the rep,
Chagnon wrote to Neel
and another colleague who was implicated—a Venezuelan physician named Marcel Roche—to warn them. Apparently in response to Chagnon’s letter, Neel pulled his relevant field notes and related materials, items that could prove conclusively what happened in 1968, and put photocopies of them all in a single folder marked
YANOMAMA-1968-INSURANCE
—insurance against lies. In 2000, that message-in-a-bottle from the late Neel was one of the key folders in the American Philosophical Society archives in Philadelphia that Lindee used to counter Tierney’s claims.

After many hours of listening and transcribing, I told Chagnon my fingers were going to fall off if we didn’t take a break, and I suggested we start back up in the morning the next day. I asked him what time he wanted to reconvene. He suggested five thirty—nearly three hours before dawn at that time of year. His wife, Carlene, objected, but I told her I had come to do this work, and if that was what time Nap wanted to start, I’d get up. But then I renegotiated for six
A.M
. I asked Chagnon if he had always been a morning person. He said no, it was an old habit from the field, back when the village he’d stay in was so small that as soon as light broke the “damned Indians” would wake him up with their morning noise. The way he said it suggested he missed it.

Before I went to bed, I stood in the living room for a while with Carlene, looking up at the big photographic prints on the wall. These were beautiful photos Nap had taken of the Yanomamö decades before. He was an astonishing photographer; any museum would have been glad to mount an exhibit of this work. One picture featured a beautiful little boy practicing shooting an arrow up into the air. Another featured a tender moment between a mother and child. And still another, a group of men negotiating a possible trade of a dog, the dog in the center clearly nervously aware of what was afoot.

“Tell me,” Carlene said to me, her eyes starting to water, “how can they say the man who took these pictures would hurt these people? How can they say that?” It was obvious to her, as it was now to me, that these were essentially family photos. People like Tierney, Turner, and Sponsel seemed to want to make a special claim of being the defenders of oppressed people like the Yanomamö, to position themselves as the white hats to Chagnon’s black. But Chagnon seemed to have a gut-level sympathy for the Yanomamö, a sympathy perhaps less articulate than his critics’, yet easily as deep. Claims that Chagnon’s work had harmed the Yanomamö were the ones that stung him most sharply. And the truth was that, in practice, he had actively tried to stop use of his data to oppress the Yanomamö; for example, when he found out that the data he had collected on Yanomamö infanticide might be used by the Venezuelan government against them,
he had essentially withdrawn the data
. Like Bailey, like Palmer, like so many others, this was a scientist out primarily for truth, but never at the
cost
of justice.