Galileo's Middle Finger (40 page)

launched a referendum
:
American Anthropological Association, “Referendum on
Darkness in El Dorado
& Danger to Immunization Campaign,” adopted Nov. 2003, http://www.aaanet.org/cmtes/ethics.Referendum-on-Darkness-in-El-Dorado-Task-Force.cfm?renderforprint=1.

ratio of 11 to 1
:
Approximately 14.5 percent of those eligible to vote on this AAA referendum did so: Kimberley Baker, AAA section & governance coordinator, to Alice Dreger, personal e-mail communication, Jan. 4, 2011; quoted in Dreger, “
Darkness
’s Descent,” 229.

another referendum
:
American Anthropological Association, “Referendum #3: To Rescind the El Dorado Task Force Report” (2005), http://www.aaanet.org/stmts/05ref_eldorado.htm.

Task Force Report
:
American Anthropological Association,
El Dorado Task Force
papers, submitted to the Executive Board as a final report May 18, 2002, 2 vols. (Washington, D.C.: American Anthropological Association, 2002). As noted below, the Report was eventually removed from the AAA Web site but is still available (along with a treasure trove of related documents) at the AnthroNiche Web site of Douglas W. Hume. See http://anthroniche.com.darkness-in-el-dorado/archived-resources/position-statements.html.

ratio of about 2.5 to 1
:
Approximately 11 percent of those eligible to vote did so; Kimberley Baker, AAA section & governance coordinator, to Dreger, personal e-mail communication, Jan. 4, 2011;quoted in Dreger, “
Darkness
’s Descent,” 229.

to kill each other
:
See the remarks by Davi Kopenawa in vol. 2, p. 25, of the Task Force Report.

Chagnon’s story
:
Interview with Napoleon A. Chagnon, Traverse City, Michigan, Jan. 4–5, 2009; approved version returned Jan. 22, 2009. I asked Napoleon Chagnon to check all personal material about him in this and the next chapter not otherwise included in approved versions of interview notes, and he did so, confirming the material on Oct. 20, 2012.

Chagnon’s 1968 monograph
:
Napoleon Chagnon,
Yanomamö: The Fierce People
(New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1968).

South American anthropologists
:
Interview with Napoleon Chagnon, Jan. 4–5, 2009; see also Dreger, “
Darkness
’s Descent,” 227–28.

Chagnon wrote to Neel
:
Interview with Napoleon Chagnon, Jan. 4–5, 2009; the letter from Chagnon to Neel and Roche was dated Dec. 2, 1996 (copy provided by Napoleon Chagnon).

YANOMAMA
-1968-
INSURANCE
:
Lindee mentioned this folder in her Sept. 21, 2000, letter to colleagues, referenced above.

he had essentially withdrawn the data
:
See Raymond Hames, “The Political Uses of Ethnographic Description,” in
Yanomami: The Fierce Controversy and What We Can Learn from It,
ed. Robert Borofsky (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005): 119–35.

Ed Hagen, Michael Price, and John Tooby
:
See Tooby, “Jungle Fever,” and see Hagen, Price, and Tooby,
Preliminary Report
.

when Wilson was presenting
:
This story was recounted to me by Chagnon during our January 4-5, 2009, interview and also by Edward O. Wilson in our telephone interview on Aug. 24, 2009.

AAA meeting in the 1970s
:
Chagnon also tells this story in
Noble Savages: My Life Among Two Dangerous Tribes—the Yanomamö and the Anthropologists
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013), 384.

Margaret Mead and Samoa
:
Derek Freeman,
Margaret Mead and Samoa: The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983).

The Fateful Hoaxing of Margaret Mead
:
Derek Freeman,
The Fateful Hoaxing of Margaret Mead: A Historical Analysis of Her Samoan Research
(Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1999).

“in the groves of Academe”
:
Freeman as quoted in Paul Shankman,
The Trashing of Margaret Mead: Anatomy of an Anthropological Controversy
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009), 10.

fiction he had spun as nonfiction
:
For a complete account of Freeman’s mistreatment of Mead, see Shankman,
Trashing.

“collected throughout her fieldwork”
:
Martin Orans,
Not Even Wrong: Margaret Mead, Derek Freeman, and the Samoans
(Novato, CA: Chandler & Sharp, 1996), 99.

“from the quicksand of controversy”
:
Shankman,
Trashing
, 19.

“over 40% were sexually active”
:
Paul Shankman, “The ‘Fateful Hoaxing’ of Margaret Mead: A Cautionary Tale,”
Current Anthropology
54, no. 1 (Feb. 2013), 51–70; quotation from p. 59.

“address important public issues”
:
Shankman,
Trashing
, 108.

“crucial junctures in his argument”
:
Ibid., 12.

get the informant to turn on Mead
:
Shankman, “‘Fateful Hoaxing.’”

“
these two women in Mead’s field notes”
:
Ibid., 59.

even to himself
:
Shankman,
Trashing
, 60–61.

threatened those who did
:
Ibid., 38.

“was a Soviet agent”
:
Ibid., 54.

“but we can’t say it!”
:
Ibid., 56.

CHAPTER 6: HUMAN NATURES

in anthropology or journalism
:
See Alice Dreger, “
Darkness
’s Descent on the American Anthropological Association: A Cautionary Tale,”
Human Nature
22 (2011): 225–46.

The Highest Altar
:
Patrick Tierney,
The Highest Altar: The Story of Human Sacrifice
(New York: Viking, 1989).

Chicago Public Radio
:
Interview of Patrick Tierney by Victoria Lautman on WBEZ Chicago (Nov. 22, 2000), transcribed by Valerie Thonger.

previous scholars who had looked
:
See, e.g., Edward H. Hagen, Michael E. Price, and John Tooby, “Preliminary Report on
Darkness in El Dorado,
” Department of Anthropology, University of California–Santa Barbara (unpublished, 2001), http://www.angelfire.com/sk2/title/ucsbpreliminaryreport.pdf.

“named Marcel Roche”
:
Patrick Tierney,
Darkness in El Dorado: How Scientists and Journalists Devastated the Amazon
(New York: Norton, 2001), 60.

New Yorker
article
:
Patrick Tierney, “The Fierce Anthropologist,”
New Yorker,
Oct. 9, 2000, 50–61; see p. 57.

article Chagnon had coauthored
:
James V. Neel, Willard R. Centerwall, Napoleon A. Chagnon, and H. L. Casey, “Notes on the Effects of Measles and Measles Vaccine in a Virgin-Soil Population of South American Indians,”
American Journal of Epidemiology
91, no. 4 (1970): 418–29.

Yanomami Warfare
:
R. Brian Ferguson,
Yanomami Warfare: A Political History
(Sante Fe, NM: School of American Research Press, 1995).

Ferguson told me
:
Telephone interview with R. Brian Ferguson, July 28, 2009; corrections received Oct. 1 and 20, 2009.

“important resource for my research”
:
Tierney,
Darkness,
xvii.

confirmed in an e-mail
:
Martins to Dreger, personal e-mail communication, June 5, 2009; quoted in Dreger, “
Darkness
’s Descent,” 231.

Chagnon had written to Hames
:
Napoleon A. Chagnon to Raymond Hames, personal e-mail communication, Nov. 6, 1995; quoted with permission in Dreger, “
Darkness
’s Descent,” 231.

“appear to be
deliberately
fraudulent”
:
Hagen, Price, and Tooby, “
Preliminary Report,”
1.

Turner was regularly making flight connections
:
Terence Turner, telephone interview with Alice Dreger, Feb. 4, 2009; approved notes returned Feb. 8, 2009.

Turner acknowledged to me
:
Ibid.

in part to go after Chagnon
:
See, e.g., Lêda Leitão Martins, “On the Influence of Anthropological Work and Other Considerations on Ethics,”
Public Anthropology: Engaging Ideas,
May 27, 2001, http://anthroniche.com/darkness_documents/0480.htm.

Martins had publicly taken Chagnon to task
:
For Martins’s use of the truncated quotation, see Martins, “On the Influence.” For a full translation of the quotation, which originally appeared in the Brazilian magazine
Veja
, see Robert Borofsky, ed.,
Yanomami: The Fierce Controversy and What We Can Learn from It
(Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005), 309.

Salesian missionaries, with whom he had come to blows
:
These disputes are discussed in Napoleon Chagnon,
Noble Savages: My Life Among Two Dangerous Tribes—the Yanomamö and the Anthropologists
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013).

on handout tables at an AAA conference
:
See Robin Fox, “Evil Wrought in the Name of Good,”
Anthropology Newsletter
35 (Mar. 1994): 2; Eric R. Wolf, “Demonization of Anthropologists in the Amazon,”
Anthropology Newsletter
35 (Mar. 1994), 2.

distributed by the Salesians
:
Frank A. Salamone, “Theoretical Reflections on the Chagnon-Salesian Controversy,” in Frank A. Salamone and Walter R. Adams, eds.,
Explorations in Anthropology and Theology
(Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1997), 91–112.

“Last Tribes of El Dorado”
:
Patrick Tierney, “
Last Tribes of El Dorado: The Gold Wars in the Amazon Rain Forest”
(scheduled for New York: Viking, 1994, apparently never published; page citations are from bound advance uncorrected proofs obtained via interlibrary loan).

Viking wouldn’t give
:
I discuss this in Dreger, “
Darkness
’s Descent,” 234.

pass himself off as a Chilean gold miner
:
Tierney, “
Last Tribes
,” 29, 75, 87, 88, 131.

carried mercury into the rain forest
:
Ibid., 71.

illegally purchased a shotgun
:
Ibid, 71.

without first undergoing appropriate quarantine
:
Ibid., 172, 181.

without first obtaining the required legal permission
:
Ibid., 19, 124, 127. Tierney may have felt he was justified in doing this because he seems to have seen FUNAI as hopelessly corrupt; see pp. 182–83, 205, 210.

self-confessed murderers
:
Ibid., 69, 115, 138, 149, 163, 396.

gotten another man killed
:
Ibid., 327.

housed, fed, protected, and encouraged by local Roman Catholic priests
:
Ibid., 30, 50, 120, 216, 229, 231, 234, 272, 297, 298.

Father Saffirio responded
:
Interview by Alice Dreger of Giovanni Saffirio, Cleveland, July 8, 2009; approved notes received Aug. 12, 2009.

“in Roraima”
:
Ibid.

“big picture of a fine scholar”
:
Ibid.

Frechione informed me
:
Interview by Alice Dreger of John Frechione, Pittsburgh, July 8, 2009; approved notes returned July 30, 2009.

2001 interview with Brandon Centerwall
:
John Frechione interview of Brandon S. Centerwall, Oct. 27, 2001, http://anthroniche.com/darkness_documents/0102.htm.

Turner had Brandon
on record
:
Regarding the additional supporting evidence from Terence Turner, see Dreger, “
Darkness
’s Descent,” 232–33.

suggesting that Humbert Humbert
:
Brandon S. Centerwall, “Hiding in Plain Sight: Nabokov and Pedophilia,”
Texas Studies in Literature and Language
32, no. 3 (Fall 1990), 468–84.

I wrote to ask him to confirm
:
Alice Dreger to Brandon Centerwall, personal e-mail communication, Feb. 11, 2009.