Internet Source: Discover Magazine Blogs: Gene Expression, February 25, 2013
Source URL (Archive.org): http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2013/02/noble-savages-right-method-wrong-results-right-enemies/#.US1A8ugp_VQ
By Razib Khan
I read Noble Savages, Napoleon Chagnon‘s memoir, last week. There isn’t much to say about this book that’s revelatory, but it definitely was a page turner. As far as my personal tastes go there was a little too much autobiography, and not enough science, in Noble Savages. But it’s a long work, so in absolute terms there’s a lot of science to dig into if you want to skim over the personal sections (frankly, I had a hard time keeping all the various tribes and individuals straight). There have been many reviews of Noble Savages since it came out last week. If you haven’t read the profile in The New York Time Magazine, I advise you to do so right now. At Scientific American John Horgan put up a post which illustrates how Chagnon has become a sort of token in the tribal wars between scientists (or scientists and no-scientists). You can see this in two reviews at The New York Times, one which consists of an extended sneer from a professor of cultural anthropology and gender studies, Elizabeth Povinelli, while the second treatment from Nicholas Wade reads almost as a panegyric. Charles C. Mann navigates the middle path in his review, being critical in some instances, but by and large praising the memoir.
Considering what I learned, and didn’t learn, from Noble Savages was an interesting experience for me. Though I have never read Chagnon’s prose at length (I have read his 1988 Science paper), much of what he says about anthropologists could have been written by me. Or, perhaps more accurately much of what I have written could have been written by Chagnon! This may simply be a function of the long arm of cultural influence and social networks, as those who have influenced me were influenced by Chagnon. The strength of the invective sometimes took me aback, and I think that this aspect explains Elizabeth Povinelli’s unfair review. Her rendering of Chagnon’s characterization of the people he studies is absolutely misleading. Povinelli makes out as if Chagnon depicted the Yanomami shabbily. That is not the case at all. Rather, he depicted them as human beings, with all the positives and negatives that entails. Some of the Yanomami are horrible people, while others are noble. When I say I don’t understand even where to begin with much of modern American cultural anthropology, this is the sort of thing that I’m confused about. How could anyone not expect a candid appraisal of another people to not reflect both their positives and negatives? They are after all people. On the other hand Napoleon Chagnon depicts his anthropological colleagues in a very shabby manner (I think somewhat justified, but that doesn’t change the real nastiness of the tactics here). I suspect this naturally triggers the unpleasant appraisals from individuals such as Elizabeth Povinelli. But the since no one cares if Chagnon bad-mouths anthropologists but anthropologists, they have to make out as if he is bad-mouthing the Yanomami.
There are important qualifications to make here though. In Noble Savages Chagnon outlines his break with cultural materialists, exemplified by scholars such as Marvin Harris. In his telling the materialists were too focused on acquisition of wealth as the ends of competition and Malthusian scarcity of resources. In contrast Chagnon began to focus more on a sociobiological model as his career progressed. Where Harris and company would see resources, Chagnon replaced that with reproduction. This was, and is, fundamentally a scientific dispute. In contrast in later years Chagnon tussled with a set of anthropologists who may colloquially be referred to as “postmodern,” and who place social justice and activism on equal footing with a positivistic understanding of human social phenomena. It is toward the second group that Chagnon has the greatest ill will, though it is a close thing (for example, Harris engaged in standard misrepresentations which are par for the course among those who oppose ‘genetic determinism’). The conflict with the materialists was by and large a matter of an understanding of the nature of the facts, even if it got emotional and personalized. The conflict with the postmodernists was by and large a disagreement about what anthropology should be about.
I’m not going to rehash the issue at the heart of what anthropology should be about at this point. If you are reading me, you know what I think. Since my latest round of attacks on anthropology I have received many emails. Some are from academics who appreciate my volleys. Others are from students who are confounded by the nature of academic anthropology and share my frustration. I was even told that my name and my blog had been mentioned in a lecture at a large university as an example of ‘genetic determinism.’ There is no possibility of amicable resolution of disagreement here, because many anthropologist’s disagree with someone like me on fundamental premises. Whether they accept the characterization or not, I accuse them of being enemies of truth. Obviously it is even more emotionally explosive for Napoleon Chagnon. He is an eminent anthropologist, and, he has been slandered as a ‘Josef Mengele’! I don’t expect that someone attacked as a Nazi would give any intellectual quarter to his antagonists, nor should they be expected to. The score settling in Noble Savages gets a bit tiresome, but Chagnon is running out of time to hit back at enemies who have wounded his reputation in a low manner. This reaction is simply human nature at work.
In regards to more substantive matters, the difference between science and non-science in many cases is that the former is progressive, contingent, and robust to the passage of time. In contrast, the latter is subject to fad and fashion. There will come a day when the modern social justice oriented anthropologists will be denounced by future generations of self-righteous radicals, just as the old line Marxists were pushed aside by their descendants (for example, see the estrangement between Theodore Adorno and student activists in the late 1960s). The postmodern activist contingent in modern cultural anthropology matters now insofar as it muddies the truth and addles the minds of youth, but it does not matter over the long term because future generations tire of the fictions of the past (inevitably they concoct their own delusions, but that’s another matter). In contrast, if Chagnon is right on the science his memory will persist. I see no evidence that Chagnon is a Nazi, but the reality is that the memory of people with genuine Nazi sympathies have been valorized because their science was right. The problem though is that I suspect in important ways Chagnon is wrong.
My issue is encapsulated on page 237: in passing Napoleon Chagnon observes that malaria is endemic in Yanomamöland. This is a big deal: disease is a critical biological and material variable in any society. The world before malaria and after malaria is almost certain to be very different. As outlined in Charles C. Mann’s books before the arrival of Europeans and Africans many diseases we take for granted as features of life in the tropics, such as malaria, were not present in the New World. Malaria not only kills, it enervates. Malarial conditions have reshaped the human geographic landscape. As coastal Italy became malarial in the 1st millenium A.D. settlements which had flourished in antiquity relocated to the hills. This introduced an enormous economic cost, which persisted down to modern times, as villagers had to make do with marginal farmland, or were forced to endure daily treks to distant fields which were in malarial zones. On the social dimension the world of southern Italy fragmented, as mountain villages were arguably more disconnected from trade networks than their coastal predecessors had been. Italy became more localized and small scale, as endemic disease reshaped the ecological parameters under which civilization could flourish. History does not always progress linearly, rather, it is characterized by sharp corrections.
Chagnon refers to the Yanomami as a pristine and primitive people who can serve as models for man before the state. In short, they’re real life examples of the sort of societies described in War Before Civilization. But the history of humans extends for at least tens of thousands of years before civilization (you could argue millions). That history can be stylized into a monochromatic hunter-gatherer past, but I suspect that misses real diversity. Additionally, the modern hunter-gatherers we have are likely not a typical sample, because they exist in marginal territories where agricultural lifestyles are not viable. But most importantly the Yanomamö are slash and burn agriculturalists, for whom Old World crops are central to their subsistence and production. Chagnon does not hide this at all, but he seems to feel that it is of no consequence. He highlights that by elaborating how by material culture alone the Yanomami might actually be analogized to hunter-gatherers. Therefore, the focus on inter-personal relationships and reproductive output. But overall I find this attempt at recasting them as human archetypes unpersuasive.
Chagnon is certainly not unaware of these sorts of objections. He no doubt disagrees. Perhaps one day I might have a beer with Chagnon in Columbia, Missouri, to hash things out. Really I feel ridiculous having these objections on some level because I’m not an anthropologist with a strong mastery of the literature, let alone the professional experiences which he has, which might lend a certain subtly to his interpretations. I’d like to know why he believes what he believes. Even if I am not persuaded, I feel I have learned a great deal from his work at this point, and I feel I would learn more from the nature of our disagreements. I feel the same about Marvin Harris, whose work I’ve read and appreciated. Harris was not a fan of sociobiological models, but I understood what his disagreements were, and what ours would be. In fact I probably have a bias toward economic and cultural materialism to a much greater extent than Chagnon. Though I’m obviously not a Marxist in a deep sense, on occasion I can sound like one because of the importance of production as the ‘environment of evolutionary adaptedness.’
Humans are complex. Social sciences such as economics and psychology which are more explicitly scientific in ambition are subject to the fact that statistical analysis can be easily manipulated and misused. The same holds with biology, especially biomedical science. Obviously these problems are also rife in cultural anthropology. The study of humans by individuals who ‘embed’ themselves in societies is going to cause all sorts of problems in interpretation and bias. In Noble Savages Napoleon Chagnon explicitly and implicitly acknowledges this repeatedly. His quest for a scientific cultural anthropology is a difficult one, a herculean task. Some have criticized his specific field work among the Yanomami, but Chagnon repeatedly protests in Noble Savages that the critics don’t fight statistics with statistics. Rather, they simply critique. And that is the whole problem with much of modern cultural anthropology: there isn’t even the attempt to be wrong. Being wrong can be incredibly constructive in the process of generating responses. But it is a wrongness which is clear, distinct, and precise. If you don’t know what you are wrestling with you are dancing with shadows. When it comes to the descriptive and general aspect of humans as a study much of modern cultural anthropology forgoes wrestling with reality, intractable though it may seem, for mannered ‘discourse’ and posturing. Where one can criticize economics for simplifying human interaction, much of cultural anthropology has reacted to the complexity by veering away from tackling the problem of modeling and generalizing. Instead of integrating insights from other disciplines such as cognitive science and behavioral economics to break down the wall of complexity, anthropologists bow down to specific and impenetrable complexity as if it was an unknowable God.
But where in one area many anthropologists have fled from clarity, in another they have become much more aggressive. In Noble Savages Chagnon heaps contempt upon his critics and professional rivals who he perceives to have become political and social actors more than scholars. There is a whole area of anthropology where the emphasis is on a vision of human affairs informed by justice. This is anthropology as values, not scholarship, because even most anthropologists would agree that there is no easy universal set of values across human societies aside from the basics (e.g., don’t eat your babies, don’t have sex with your mother, etc.). It is crystal clear that Napoleon Chagnon has biases which color his interpretation of events. That he was an actor in the very affairs he describes. But it strikes me as implausible that any of his critics have clean hands in this domain. When pushed on the matter many of Chagnon’s critics may admit that they have their own commitments and biases, but in pragmatic events which impact careers and public perception of their field it is Chagnon and others with whom they have political disagreements with who are enemies of people whom they study, while they are the protectors. This is fine in politics, that is the game that is played in that domain. But it is not so edifying for scholarship, which benefits from a level of emotional detachment from the world, allowing for reflective contemplation. There are causes we all care about, but there are organizations and people who are active in promoting those causes, without confusing the matter with the idea that their passions are informed by reason and scholarship. Politics channels values, Ph.D. theses which are a collection of facts do little to forward that project. In contrast, Ph.D. theses are sullied and tainted by political associations.
Noble Savages is useful as a personal historiography of anthropology. Napoleon Chagnon’s career has spanned the ascendancy of cultural materialists, the eruption of sociobology, and now the dominance of activists and those who are skeptical of science. Chagnon is not subtle or sneaky about his biases, so even if you find his perspective distasteful, it is easy enough to extract the personal color from the relevant historical details. Much of the narrative reads like an adventure travel log, and no doubt that will be what “hooks” some, though hopefully they’ll stay for the science. On many substantive points it may be that Chagnon’s model will be seen to be too simplistic. The evolutionary biology which he drank up a generation ago has moved on and developed itself. But a future scientific understanding of anthropology will extend and build up from the sort of outlook which people such as Chagnon bring to the table. They are of course flawed human beings, but one can confidently state that that is the norm, not the exception. The other stream of cultural anthropology will continue to evolve and fissure, as a thousand ‘discourses’ bloom. Ultimately I hope that the two viewpoints move past each other’s horizons, never to meet again. Astronomy has benefited from its divorce from astrology. Just like the Yanomami the tribes of scholars may need to fission to preserve social harmony, lest a club-fight break out.
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