by Alice Dreger
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he had collected on Yanomamö infanticide might be used by the Venezuelan government against them, he had essentially withdrawn the data.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.
The next day, in the dull dark of the winter Michigan morning, we started again, Chagnon offering me only black coffee, Carlene still in bed, their hunting dog Darwin, a German shorthaired pointer, lying on the floor next to us, alternately farting and snoring. I started to walk Chagnon through what I really wanted to know—what wasn’t already in the record. What had it been like, surviving this controversy? What moments came back to him when he thought about living through it? He told me he remembered, particularly vividly, how much it had meant to him when he got the call from Danny Gross telling him of the successful vote among the AAA membership to rescind acceptance of the AAA’s El Dorado Task Force Report. He told me of his colleagues at UCSB—Ed Hagen, Michael Price, and John Tooby in particular—fighting back by showing Tierney’s twisted use of sources and quotations. And he told me of how his friend Ed (E. O.) Wilson at Harvard, the founder of sociobiology, had called him every week to make sure he knew he was not alone.
Decades before, Chagnon had been the one defending Wilson. The most vivid instance had to be the time in 1978 when Wilson was presenting about sociobiology at a special session of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington, D.C. Wilson had broken his leg recently, so he was in a cast that stretched almost from his ankle to his hip. As he tried to speak, several members of the self-proclaimed “International Committee Against Racism” had rushed the stage, declared Wilson all wet, and dumped a pitcher of water over his head. Chagnon had been at the back of the auditorium, but he rushed up to try to knock heads together as necessary. Probably best for all, the ensuing pandemonium blocked Chagnon’s path. But Chagnon had been more effectual in various other venues at defending Wilson, particularly against what Wilson felt were misrepresentations by Richard Lewontin and Stephen Jay Gould, who were also at Harvard and who claimed to speak for the oppressed.
When the El Dorado storm hit, Wilson made sure to call Chagnon often to remind him of what mattered and give him some sympathy. As he told me of the colleagues who had moved to help him, Chagnon started to choke up. Naturally, I started to lose it too, as I always do in such situations, but I just let the tears dribble down my cheeks without making a noise. I typed as quietly as I could. Then Chagnon stood up suddenly and announced to me and Darwin, “I have to go to the men’s room.” He climbed around Darwin and made his way out of his home office to the hallway bathroom.
When he returned a few minutes later, he started in on a completely different story, confusing me thoroughly. It was a story about driving around Washington, D.C., with Margaret Mead. I knew from what Chagnon and others had told me that he and Mead had had a long and probably somewhat contentious scholarly relationship, given their very different portraits of human sexuality. In her popular 1928 book, Coming of Age in Samoa, Mead had presented Samoan culture as one that, without much fuss or fear, allowed many adolescents to sexually experiment—to fool around in ways that in the 1920s would have shocked the average American. This was a very different story of “primitive” human sexuality from Chagnon’s, which told of Yanomamö males regularly engaging in fierce fighting over women. By Chagnon’s account, human sexual relations tended to be tense affairs, involving violent abductions and even homicide. By Mead’s, human sexual relations meant making love, not war. Moreover, Chagnon had leaned toward biological explanations for what he saw as commonalities in human behavior, whereas Mead was more inclined to notice cross-cultural differences and explain them via social structures.
Whatever their dissimilarities in worldview, however, Mead had always been a mensch for science—for free inquiry and free speech—and Chagnon appreciated that. He hastened to tell me of the time he and his best friend, the anthropologist Bill Irons, had tried to hold the first session on sociobiology in anthropology at a AAA meeting in the 1970s. A motion had been put forth to cancel the session because of the supposed dangers of sociobiology. Mead stood up and said the attempted ban was akin to book burning. Her words turned the vote in Chagnon and Irons’s favor, saving the session just moments before Ed Wilson arrived to participate.
Now, back from his temporary retreat to “the men’s room,” Chagnon wanted to tell me another story of Mead as mensch. When the politicking against him in South America got so bad that Chagnon was being denied access to the field, Mead offered to go with him to the Venezuelan embassy in Washington, D.C., to try to fix the situation. Driving the two of them to the embassy, Chagnon became hopelessly lost in the diagonal-and-circular maze of Washington streets. He recalled to me, with his face downcast, that Mead had harrumphed at him: “You would think this famous anthropologist who can find his way all around the jungle could find his way around a city in the U.S.!”
Chagnon paused and looked up at me. “You would think this mean, nasty anthropologist could hold it together when being interviewed.”
I stopped typing and said to him, in as manly a fashion as I muster, that this shit was hard on a person, and it was understandable someone might get a little emotional.
He seemed at that moment a strikingly ordinary old man—wizened, mortal, spent.
• • •
MARGARET MEAD DIDN’T LIVE to see the ruining of her professional reputation. The New Zealand anthropologist Derek Freeman didn’t publish his book Margaret Mead and Samoa: The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth until 1983, five years after Mead’s death. After that highly publicized work from Harvard University Press, Freeman’s misleading claims about Mead went through even better publicized iterations, and with each pass, they had more successfully damned Mead’s scientific reputation. By 1999, with the publication of The Fateful Hoaxing of Margaret Mead, Freeman had refined and simplified the story, mark
eting it perfectly for the sound-bite world: Determined by her personal political agenda to paint a sex-positive view of Samoan adolescence, Mead had allowed herself to be duped by two young Samoan women who had simply been joshing her with sexual fish tales of licentious adolescence. Mead had completely misrepresented human sexuality to the world because she’d been stupid enough to buy the joke these two young women were playing on her. Just an ideologically blinded dupe, according to Freeman, Mead turned out to be a dangerous spoiler of the scientific record on the nature of sex. In Freeman’s words, “Never can giggly fibs have had such far-reaching consequences in the groves of Academe.”
To pull off the fiction he had spun as nonfiction, Freeman had employed a rather brilliant methodology. First, he made sure his work appeared on the surface to be pure scholarship—just one expert anthropologist using good data to dismantle the supposedly shoddy data collection of a predecessor. Although it was riddled with misrepresentations of Mead, Freeman’s “scholarship” looked real enough to pass (at least until good scholars came along to check it).
Alongside his dishonest rewriting of Mead’s data, Freeman also rewrote Mead’s worldview, making her out to be an absolute cultural determinist hostile to any biological or evolutionary explanations of human nature. By portraying her erroneously as so scientifically simple-minded and so obviously outdated, Freeman was able to persuade people to write Mead off—and not only folks at the biological-determinist (sociobiological) extreme of the nature-nurture controversy, but also people in the theoretical middle. After all, what kind of idiot thinks we’re all nurture and no nature!
In reality, Mead, like most twentieth-century scientists, had a reasonably complex view of human behavior, assuming and seeing contributions from both biology and culture. That was one reason she was sympathetic to the work Chagnon was doing; he, too, saw both biology and culture as important. But Freeman needed Mead to be an extremist as well as a dupe, a kind of groovy 1960s antiscience anthropological tourist in a big straw hat.
This image then allowed Freeman to deploy the last bit of his clever methodology—to swoop in to play, in his own grandiose words, “The Heretic” to the supposed Cultural Church of Margaret Mead, to make it a battle between two “greats,” thus making himself as great as Mead. By boldly reducing Mead to a big-name ideological hack, Freeman could play Galileo, saving science from mere dogma. Freeman appeared to be not only a brilliant scholar, but a hero, as well.
Freeman was well into his relentless assault on Mead’s reputation when a number of cultural anthropologists tried to step in to right the factual wrongs. In his 1996 book, Not Even Wrong: Margaret Mead, Derek Freeman, and the Samoans, the anthropologist Martin Orans used Mead’s own field notes to show “that such humorous fibbing could not be the basis of Mead’s understanding. Freeman asks us to imagine that the joking of two women, pinching each other as they put Mead on about their sexuality and that of adolescents, was of more significance than the detailed information she had collected throughout her fieldwork.” Freeman had thoroughly misrepresented Mead’s work, creating such a fantastical account that it was “not even wrong” because it was essentially fiction.
Finding himself as appalled as Orans had been by Freeman’s defamation of Mead, the anthropologist Paul Shankman of the University of Colorado–Boulder decided to devote a sizable chunk of his professional energies trying “to extricate Mead’s reputation from the quicksand of controversy.” Performing expert historical analysis, Shankman showed that what Mead really drew on for her conclusions was data “collected on 25 adolescent girls of whom over 40% were sexually active” and from interviews with Samoan men and women. In his 2009 book, The Trashing of Margaret Mead: Anatomy of an Anthropological Controversy, Shankman readily acknowledged that Mead saw herself as “a citizen-scientist. Not content with being a bookish academic, she wanted to be a public intellectual and activist, using ethnographic data to address important public issues.” In other words, yes, she had a political agenda. In writing up her populist gospel of sexual permissiveness (a gospel she lived in her personal life), Mead certainly had oversimplified Samoan society, downplaying violent rape and the fact that women were discouraged from reporting, and downplaying, too, the beatings delivered upon those who violated sexual norms. But following Orans, Shankman was able to use Freeman’s own records to show that he knew Mead’s work to be substantially more sophisticated and rigorous than his negative portrait of it. In Shankman’s words, “Freeman was able to advance his argument only by very selective use of information, including the creative use of partial quotations and the strategic omission of relevant data at crucial junctures in his argument.”
Curiously, when he died in 2001, Freeman intentionally left behind in archives the documentation that would ultimately undo him. Perhaps he had so completely bought into the tale he had spun that it never occurred to him to fear leaving this self-defeating evidentiary trail. As Shankman discovered, the stash includes a key interview with one of the two “joshing” informants, showing that the interview was set up to get the informant to turn on Mead. Eerily reminiscent of the twisted facts in the Bailey controversy, in his analysis of the Freeman-Mead controversy, Shankman also found that “there is no information on sex from these two women in Mead’s field notes.” In other words, Freeman misrepresented not only the role of Mead, but also that of the two supposed “joshing informants.”
But why? Shankman’s digging suggests that not only was Freeman interested in pushing a particular biology-heavy view of human nature (for which he needed a naive Mead as foil), but he also suffered from a weird obsession with Mead, whom he saw as a threat to anthropology, to Samoans, and even to himself. He appeared to genuinely believe it was his duty to be the big man who would take Mead down. Freeman had no patience for those who might get in his way and sometimes threatened those who did. Perhaps even more disturbing, Freeman seems to have shown signs of delusion—deep delusion. Shankman tells of Freeman’s 1961 trip to Sarawak, where he viewed sexually graphic tribal statues at a local museum: “Freeman was convinced that the erotic statues [there] not only were a perversion of authentic tribal culture but were also exerting a form of mind control over Freeman through their hypnotic power, a power that he was determined to break. Freeman also believed that the statues were being used by [a colleague] and the Soviet Union to subvert the local government. Indeed, Freeman thought [the colleague’s wife] was a Soviet agent.” Freeman then proceeded to destroy one of the statues. Concerned by his bizarre behavior, authorities eventually banned Freeman from further research in Sarawak. One of his colleagues told Shankman, “We all know he’s crazy, but we can’t say it!”
So as it turns out, it was not Margaret Mead or her supposedly joking informants but the strange Derek Freeman who managed to “hoax” the world. Freeman succeeded in part because he followed what I had learned is the number-one rule in making shit up: Make it so unbelievable that people have to believe it.
CHAPTER 6
HUMAN NATURES
ALTHOUGH DARKNESS IN EL Dorado made Patrick Tierney look like an extremely adventurous but scholarly investigative reporter, in fact Tierney had no apparent training or employment history in anthropology or journalism. His first book, The Highest Altar, had purported to reveal ongoing human sacrifice in the Andes. No one in the scholarly world appeared to take that book all that seriously. But Darkness in El Dorado was a very different sort of book, absolutely crammed with impressive-looking footnotes—so many that the book looked like a masterwork of objective scholarship.
When she interviewed Tierney about Darkness in El Dorado in late 2000 for Chicago Public Radio, Victoria Lautman made specific mention of Tierney’s apparent documentation of his claims:
There are 60 pages just of footnotes supporting Tierney’s incendiary main point[s], namely that the Brazilian Yanomamö Indians were hideously exploited, that a lethal 1968 measles epidemic was spread by a dangerous vaccine, that the U.S. Atomic En
ergy Commission used the Yanomamö as a control group without their knowledge, and, most important, that all of these shocking abuses were perpetuated by two of the most famous and respected members of the anthropological community [sic].
As I looked back at all the positive media attention and praise the book got—it had even been named a finalist for a National Book Award—there could be no question this had resulted from readers assuming the footnotes were real. The truth was that plenty of them had simply not checked out. I knew this from reviewing the work of previous scholars who had looked, but I also was finding still more examples on my own.
For instance, as I went over the Darkness chapter on the 1968 epidemic, I came across this line: “The vaccinators were Napoleon Chagnon and a respected Venezuelan doctor named Marcel Roche.” Chagnon had told me repeatedly that he had not vaccinated anyone during the epidemic. This point mattered a lot to him, because Tierney’s New Yorker article included a story of a man whose child had allegedly died following a vaccination from Chagnon. Chagnon was understandably distraught at the implication that he had killed a Yanomamö child. So I looked at Tierney’s citation for the claim that Chagnon and Roche had been vaccinating and was rather stunned to see that Tierney seemed, by the citation, to be attributing this information to an article Chagnon had coauthored in 1970. How could Chagnon tell me he didn’t vaccinate anyone during the epidemic when his own coauthored article said that he did?