The Erotic-Fierce People: A Case Study in Fuzzy Logic
On July 7,1947, a spacecraft crash-landed near Roswell, New Mexico. Aboard was an alien anthropologist sent here from an advanced civilization to study the newly emerging intelligence that calls itself “wise man.” Whether or not that self-assessment is accurate was of great interest to the Galactic Federation, for this species had just achieved mastery of atomic fission, and thus could be a potential threat to the galactic peace. The Galactic Anthropological Association wanted to know if this formerly primitive people was basically “erotic” and thus there would be no need to worry about them, or if they were inherently “fierce,” in which case further monitoring and missionary reeducation might be required.
From the subject’s (our) perspective the fundamental flaw in the inquiry is that humans are not so easily pigeonholed into such clear-cut categories as “fierce” or “erotic.” We are both (and a lot more), the nature and intensity of our behavior being dependent upon a host of biological, social, and historical variables. If an alien anthropologist had crashed in Europe in 1943, our intrepid observer would surely have called us the “fierce” people. But if, say, the landing cite was Woodstock, New York, or San Francisco, California, in 1968, ET would likely have labeled us the “erotic” people. Local and historical context matters, and any description based on an isolated context is grossly oversimplified and hopelessly incomplete. This is why we need anthropologists, the scientific observers of our planet’s rich diversity of people and cultures.
There is a maxim anthropologists often cite about the geopolitics of diplomacy and warfare among indigenous peoples: The enemy of my enemy is my friend. In reality, of course, the maxim applies to virtually all groups, from bands to tribes to chiefdoms to states—recall the temporary friendship between the United States and the USSR from 1941 to 1945 that promptly dissolved into the cold war upon Germany’s defeat. I thought of this maxim when I interviewed journalist Patrick Tierney about his book Darkness in El Dorado: How Scientists and Journalists Devastated the Amazon. Tierney had recently been pummeled by a panel of experts in front of a thousand scientists gathered at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association. At the heart of Darkness in El Dorado is the question of whether humans are by nature erotic, fierce, or both. Among the many scientists whom Tierney attacks is the anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon, whose study of the Yanomamö people of Amazonia is arguably the most famous ethnography since Margaret Mead’s Samoan classic, Coming of Age in Samoa. Since Chagnon has a reputation as an intellectual pugilist who had accumulated a score of enemies over the decades, I fully expected that the scientists would rally around Tierney in a provisional alliance. With a couple of minor exceptions, however, there was almost universal condemnation of the book. A British science writer who witnessed the verbal thumping said: “If I had taken such a beating as Tierney I would have crawled out of the room and cut my throat.”37
Humans are storytelling animals. Thus, following Darwin’s Dictum that “all observation must be for or against some view if it is to be of any service,” we can recognize that Tierney’s story argues against the view that he believes has been put forth by certain anthropologists about the Yanomamö and, by implication, about all humanity. Chagnon, he points out, subtitled his best-selling ethnographic monograph on the Yanomamö The Fierce People. Tierney spares no ink in presenting a picture of Chagnon as a fierce anthropologist who sees in the Yanomamö nothing more than a reflection of himself (figure 10). Chagnon’s sociobiological theories of the most violent and aggressive males winning the most copulations and thus passing on their genes for “fierceness,” says Tierney, is a Rorschachian window into Chagnon’s own libidinous impulses.
Figure 10. Napoleon Chagnon: The Man Who Called the Yanomamö “Fierce”
Anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon accompanies two Yanomamö men on a 1995 field study. (Courtesy of Napoleon Chagnon)
Tierney’s strongest case may be against the French anthropologist Jacques Lizot, who calls the Yanomamö “the erotic people.”38 Lizot, Tierney claims, engaged in homosexual activities for years with so many Yanomamö young men, and so frequently, that he became known in Yanomamöspeak as bosinawarewa, which translates politely as “ass handler” and not so politely as “anus devourer.”39 In response to these claims not only did Lizot not deny the basic charges (that also included exchanging goods for sex), but he admitted to Time magazine: “I am a homosexual, but my house is not a brothel. I gave gifts because it is part of the Yanomamö culture. I was single. Is it forbidden to have sexual relations with consenting adults?”40 No, but Tierney disputes both the age of Lizot’s partners and whether or not they consented, and suggests that even if it were both legal and moral this is hardly the standard of objectivity one might have hoped for in scientific research, and that it is Lizot who best deserves the descriptive adjective “erotic.”
So which is it? Are the Yanomamö fierce or erotic, or are these descriptive terms for their anthropological observers? Carping over minutiae in Chagnon’s research methods and ethics has dogged him throughout his career, but it is secondary to a deeper, underlying issue in the anthropology wars. What Chagnon is really being accused of is biological determinism. To postmodernists and cultural determinists, calling the Yanomamö “fierce” and explaining their fierceness through a Darwinian model of competition and sexual selection indicts all of humanity as innately evil and condemns us to a future of ineradicable violence, rape, and war. Are we really this bad? Are the Yanomamö?41
The Yanomamö skirmish is only the latest in a long line of battles that have erupted in the century-long anthropology wars. The reason such controversies draw so much public attention is that what’s at stake is nothing less than the true nature of human nature and how that nature can most profitably be studied.
Anthropologist Derek Freeman’s lifelong battle with the legacy of Margaret Mead, for example, was not really about whether Samoan girls are promiscuous or prudish. Mead’s philosophy, inherited from her mentor, Franz Boas, that human nature is primarily shaped by the environment, was supported by her “discovery” that Samoan girls are promiscuous, whereas in other cultures promiscuity is taboo. Freeman argues that Mead was duped by a couple of Samoan hoaxers, and had she been more rigorous and quantitative in her research she would have discovered this fact before going to press with what became the all-time anthropological best-seller—Coming of Age in Samoa. According to Freeman, Mead’s ideology trumped her science, and anthropology lost.42 His 1983 book, Margaret Mead and Samoa: The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth, triggered a paroxysm within the anthropological community, as he recalled:
The 1983 annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association in Chicago included a special session dedicated to my book, but strangely I was not invited to defend myself. Now I know why. One eyewitness described it as “a sort of grotesque feeding frenzy,” while another told me “I felt I was in a room with people ready to lynch you.” At the annual business meeting later that day, a motion denouncing my refutation as “unscientific” was moved, put to the vote, and passed. In the December, 1983 issue of the American Anthropologist, no fewer than five different critiques of my book were published, but I was denied the usual right of simultaneous reply. My rejoinder, when it did appear, some six months later, was limited to one tenth of the space that had been given to my critics.43
Anthropology is a sublime science because it deals with such profoundly deep questions as the nature of human nature. But to even ask such questions as “Are we by nature good or evil?” overlooks the complexity of human affairs. The failure of Darkness in El Dorado has less to do with getting the story straight and more to do with a fundamental misunderstanding of the plasticity and diversity of human behavior. Tellingly, the fourth edition of Chagnon’s classic work Yanomamö dropped the subtitle The Fierce People. Had Chagnon determined that the Yanomamö were not “the fierce people” after all? No. He realized that too many peopl
e were unable to move past the moniker to grasp the complex and subtle variations contained in all human populations, and he became concerned that they “might get the impression that being ‘fierce’ is incompatible with having other sentiments or personal characteristics like compassion, fairness, valor, etc.”44 In fact, the Yanomamö call themselves waiteri (fierce), and Chagnon’s attribution of them as such was merely attempting “to represent valor, honor, and independence” that the Yanomamö saw in themselves. As he notes in his opening chapter, the Yanomamö “are simultaneously peacemakers and valiant warriors.” Like all people, the Yanomamö have a deep repertoire of responses for varying social interactions and differing contexts, even those that are potentially violent: “They have a series of graded forms of violence that ranges from chest-pounding and club-fighting duels to out-and-out shooting to kill. This gives them a good deal of flexibility in settling disputes without immediate resort to lethal violence.”45
Chagnon has often been accused of using the Yanomamö to support a sociobiological model of an aggressive human nature. Even here, returning to the primary sources in question shows that Chagnon’s deductions from the data are not so crude, as when he notes that the Yanomamö’s northern neighbors, the Ye’Kwana Indians—in contrast to the Yanomamö’s initial reaction to him—“were very pleasant and charming, all of them anxious to help me and honor bound to show any visitor the numerous courtesies of their system of etiquette,” and therefore that it “remains true that there are enormous differences between whole peoples.”46 Even on the final page of his chapter on Yanomamö warfare, Chagnon inquires about “the likelihood that people, throughout history, have based their political relationships with other groups on predatory versus religious or altruistic strategies and the cost-benefit dimensions of what the response should be if they do one or the other.” He concludes: “We have the evolved capacity to adopt either strategy.”47
As an example of this moral plasticity, Chagnon summarized the data from his now-famous Science article revealing the positive correlation between levels of violence among Yanomamö men and their corresponding number of wives and offspring. “Here are the ‘Satanic Verses’ that I committed in anthropology,” Chagnon joked, as he reviewed his data:
I didn’t intend for this correlation to pop out, but when I discovered it, it did not surprise me. If you take men who are in the same age category and divide them by those who have killed other men (unokais) and those who have not killed other men (non-unokais), in every age category unokais had more offspring. In fact, unokais averaged 4.91 children versus 1.59 for non-unokais. The reason is clear in the data on the number of wives: unokais averaged 1.63 wives versus 0.63 for non-unokais. This was an unacceptable finding for those who hold the ideal view of the Noble savage. ‘Here’s Chagnon saying that war has something good in it.’ I never said any such thing. I merely pointed out that in the Yanomamö society, just like in our own and other societies, people who are successful and good warriors, who defend the folks back home, are showered with praise and rewards. In our own culture, for example, draft dodgers are considered a shame. Being a successful warrior has social rewards in all cultures. The Yanomamö warriors do not get medals and media. They get more wives.48
Despite the mountains of data Chagnon has accumulated on Yanomamö aggression, he is careful to note the many other behaviors and emotions expressed by the Yanomamö: “When I called the Yanomamö the ‘fierce people,’ I did not mean they were fierce all the time. Their family life is very tranquil. Even though they have high mortality rates due to violence and aggression and competition is very high, they are not sweating fiercely, eating fiercely, belching fiercely, etc. They do kiss their kids and are quite pleasant people.”49
In contrast to Chagnon’s depiction of the Yanomamö as “fierce,” many commentators (such as Tierney) hold up anthropologist Ken Good’s book, Into the Heart: One Man’s Pursuit of Love and Knowledge Among the Ynomami, to argue the case that they are “erotic.” Into the Heart is a page-turner because the very features of Yanomamö culture that Chagnon’s critics claim he overemphasizes are, in fact, present in spades in every chapter of Good’s gripping tale. As Chagnon’s graduate student, Good immersed himself in Yanomamöland, but in time found himself falling in love with a beautiful young Yanomamö girl named Yarima.50 As the years passed and he was occasionally forced to leave Yanomamöland (to renew his permit or attend conferences or work on his doctoral dissertation), he became emotionally distraught over leaving Yarima alone. Why? When Yarima came of age (defined in her culture as first menses), she and Good began living together and consummated their “marriage” (Yanomamö do not have a marriage ceremony per se; instead a couple, usually the man, declares that they are married and the two begin living together). Good’s problem was that he was all too aware of the very human nature of Yanomamö men. “They will grab a woman while she is out gathering and rape her. They don’t consider it a crime or a horrendously antisocial thing to do. It is simply what happens. It’s standard behavior. In such a small, enclosed community this (together with affairs) is the only way unmarried men have of getting sex.”51
Good’s worries were justified and the universal emotion of jealousy was no less intense in this highly civilized, educated man than it was in any of the people he was studying to earn his Ph.D. In short, Good was on an emotional roller coaster from which he could not extricate himself.
I felt the tension, and I tried to deal with it. I wanted to think that Yarima would be faithful to me. But I knew the limits of any woman’s faithfulness here. Fidelity in Ynomami land is not considered a standard of any sort, let alone a moral principle. Here it is every man for himself. Stealing, rape, even killing—these acts aren’t measured by some moral standard. They aren’t thought of in terms of proper or improper social behavior. Here everyone does what he can and everyone defends his own rights. A man gets up and screams and berates someone for stealing plantains from his section of the garden, then he’ll go and do exactly the same thing. I protect myself, you protect yourself. You try something and I catch you, I’ll stop you.52
Many antisocial behaviors, such as theft, are kept at a minimum through such social constraints as shunning or such personal constraints as fear of violent retaliation. But, as Good explains, sex is a different story because “The sex drive demands an outlet, especially with the young men. It cannot be stopped. Thus the personal and social constraints have less force; they’re more readily disregarded.” As a consequence women are often raped, an act they themselves must keep secret for fear of retaliation from their husbands against them. If the wife is young and childless, “the husband might find he cannot tolerate it; he might lose control utterly and embark on violent action. He badly wants to at least get his family started himself, rather than have someone else make her pregnant.”53
Chagnon’s ethnography of the Yanomamö people is a case study in the application of fuzzy logic to human nature. In Yanomamö Chagnon notes that the variation in violence observed by different scientists can be accounted for by a concatenation of intervening variables, such as geography, ecology, population size, resources, and especially the contingent history of each group, where “the lesson is that past events and history must be understood to comprehend the current observable patterns. As the Roman poet Lucretius mused, nothing yet from nothing ever came.”54
Many other anthropologists who have studied the Yanomamö corroborate Chagnon’s data and interpretations. Even at their “fiercest,” however, the Yanomamö are not so different from many other peoples around the globe (recall Captain Bligh’s numerous violent encounters with Polynesians and Captain Cook’s murder at the hands of Hawaiian natives), even when studied by tender-minded, nonfierce scientists. Evolutionary biologist Jared Diamond, for example, told me that he found the role of warfare among the peoples of New Guinea that he has studied over the past thirty years quite similar to Chagnon’s depiction of the role of warfare among the Yanomamö.55
Final
ly, if the last five thousand years of recorded human history is any measure of a species’ “fierceness,” the Yanomamö have got nothing on either Western or Eastern “civilization,” whose record includes the murder of hundreds of millions of people. Homo sapiens in general, like the Yanomamö in particular, are the erotic-fierce people, making love and war far too frequently for our own good as both overpopulation and war threaten our very existence.
Figure 11. The Fierce Side of Human Nature
Despite Patrick Tierney’s claim that Chagnon has exaggerated the level of aggression and rape among the Yanomamö, Kenneth Good documented both, here showing “two men duel over the infidelity of one of their wives.” (Courtesy of Kenneth Good) (bottom) Many Yanomamö men have deep scars on their heads from such battles. (Courtesy of Napoleon Chagnon)
The Myth of Pure Good: Noble Savages and Beautiful People
In 1670, the British poet John Dryden penned this expression of humans in a state of nature: “I am as free as Nature first made man / When wild in woods the noble savage ran.” A century later, in 1755, the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau canonized the noble savage into Western culture by proclaiming, “nothing can be more gentle than him in his primitive state, when placed by nature at an equal distance from the stupidity of brutes and the pernicious good sense of civilized man.” From the Disneyfication of Pocahontas to Kevin Costner’s ecopacifist Native Americans in Dances with Wolves, and from postmodern accusations of corrupting modernity to modern anthropological theories that indigenous people’s wars are just ritualized games, the noble savage remains one of the last epic creation myths of our time. Within this myth lies the antithesis of the myth of pure evil, and that is the myth of pure good. The latter is just as detrimental toward a deeper understanding of human moral nature as is the former. The evidence from all the human sciences overwhelmingly supports the view that humans are good and bad, cooperative and competitive, selfish and altruistic. The potential for the expression of both moral and immoral behavior is built into human nature. How, when, and where such behaviors are expressed depends on a host of variables. But the myth of the noble savage extends far beyond what Rousseau envisioned and is still embraced today by many scientists, academics, and social commentators in what I call the Beautiful People Myth (BPM). The BPM is the fable of pacifist and ecofriendly humans ruined only by the plight of modernity and the burden of Dead White European Males. I have characterized the myth in the following manner:
Science of Good and Evil Page 11