Napoleon Chagnon: Noble Savages: My Life Among Two Dangerous Tribes — the Yanomamo and the Anthropologists,
Risvolto
When Napoleon Chagnon arrived in Venezuela’s Amazon region in
1964 to study the Yanomamö Indians, one of the last large tribal groups
still living in isolation, he expected to find Rousseau’s “noble
savages,” so-called primitive people living contentedly in a pristine
state of nature. Instead Chagnon discovered a remarkably violent
society. Men who killed others had the most wives and offspring, their
violence possibly giving them an evolutionary advantage. The prime
reasons for violence, Chagnon found, were to avenge deaths and, if
possible, abduct women.
When Chagnon began publishing his
observations, some cultural anthropologists who could not accept an
evolutionary basis for human behavior refused to believe them. Chagnon
became perhaps the most famous American anthropologist since Margaret
Mead—and the most controversial. He was attacked in a scathing popular
book, whose central allegation that he helped start a measles epidemic
among the Yanomamö was quickly disproven, and the American
Anthropological Association condemned him, only to rescind its
condemnation after a vote by the membership. Throughout his career
Chagnon insisted on an evidence-based scientific approach to
anthropology, even as his professional association dithered over whether
it really is a scientific organization. In Noble Savages,
Chagnon describes his seminal fieldwork—during which he lived among the
Yanomamö, was threatened by tyrannical headmen, and experienced an
uncomfortably close encounter with a jaguar—taking readers inside
Yanomamö villages to glimpse the kind of life our distant ancestors may
have lived thousands of years ago. And he forcefully indicts his
discipline of cultural anthropology, accusing it of having traded its
scientific mission for political activism.
This book, like Chagnon’s research, raises fundamental questions about human nature itself.
Polemiche
Le memorie di Napoleon Chagnon riaccendono la disputa sulla ferocia degli indios che lo studioso attribuisce a un meccanismo evolutivo: chi uccide si procura più donne
Ennio Caretto La Lettura
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