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'New Yorker' Ponders Anthropologists' Data
By Patrick Tierney, The New Yorker, October 9, 2000, p. 50
A recent New Yorker article discussed whether a well-respected anthropologist's data about a South American tribal system were accurate and whether anthropologists who studied the tribes harmed the people they were studying.
The article analyzed the the research of anthropologist Napolean Chagnon, who for over three decades studied the Yanomami, a diverse tribe who inhabit southern Venezuela and northwest Brazil. Chagnon's textbook, Yanomamo: The Fierce People became an anthropological classic. Between 1964 and 1993 Chagnon led twenty expeditions into Yanomami territory and collected an immense amount of data about the Yanomami tribal system which he presented in two books and more then thirty articles.
As with many similar New Yorker articles, the reader ends up not knowing who to believe -- the anthropologist being scrutinized, the anthropologist's supporters, the anthropologist's critics, the anthropologist's data, the Yanomami themselves, the missionaries who minister to the Yanomami, Brazilian and Venezuelan "authorities," the article's author, or "none of the above."
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Comments: dqemail@aol.com (2000-10-08)