Marshall Sahlins' Latest Stand — Kelly E. Hayes
In late February 2013, University of Chicago professor emeritus Marshall Sahlins formally resigned from the National Academy of Science (NAS) in protest over that body’s election of Napolean Chagnon as a member and its sponsoring of research to improve combat performance for the US military
By April 18, 2013
In late February 2013, University of Chicago professor emeritus Marshall Sahlins formally resigned from the National Academy of Science (NAS) in protest over that body’s election of Napolean Chagnon as a member and its sponsoring of research to improve combat performance for the US military. Behind the scenes, students and colleagues organized a petition drive and have gathered over 1,400 signatures in support of Sahlins. However, much of the public discussion has focused on the polarizing figure of Chagnon, a subject apparently more disquieting to many commentators than the military-anthropological complex that Sahlins has long opposed.
Certainly Chagnon, dubbed America’s “most controversial anthropologist” in a recent New York Timesprofile, makes a compelling story. A cantankerous bad boy at pains to present himself as both daring swashbuckler and sober scientist speaking truth to power, Chagnon is a provocative figure. He has been accused of the worst kinds of anthropological malfeasance, from faking his data to spreading disease to arming his informants. Although Chagnon’s first book Yanomamö: The Fierce People, is one of the best selling ethnographic texts of all times, his depiction of the Yanomami as a primitive people proved controversial, as did his claim that Yanomami society revolved around chronic warfare among men over access to nubile women. Perhaps his worst offense, in the judgment of many, has been his failure to conform to basic ethical and methodological standards. In electing Chagnon to the U.S.’s most prestigious scientific academy, NAS members committed “a large moral and intellectual blunder,” Sahlins wrote, that made his continued membership an “embarrassment.”
The timing of Sahlins’s resignation, which came in the midst of the media blitz surrounding the release of Chagnon’s latest book Noble Savages, also ensured that attention focused on Chagnon. In the book, a memoir chronicling the author’s life amongst “two dangerous tribes, the Yanomamö and the anthropologists,” Chagnon describes the challenges of his fieldwork among the Yanomami, an Amazonian people living in the border region between Venezuela and Brazil, and the hostility towards his theories about the genetic basis of male violence that he encountered from fellow scholars.
Such disputes are hardly unusual in academia, including the academic study of religion, and seldom attract much notice beyond the particular factions involved. But in 2000 Chagnon came to the attention of a larger public when the writer Patrick Tierney accused him of various crimes against the Yanomami including exacerbating a measles epidemic and escalating internecine violence by distributing weapons and other desirable first world goods to favored tribesmen. The American Anthropological Association subsequently issued a report highly critical of Chagnon but, after revelations about serious falsehoods in Tierney’s account, rescinded it.
Since then, a burgeoning cottage industry of intellectual production has parsed the various controversies that Chagnon and his work have provoked. Today, the majority consensus seems to be that while Chagnon was not guilty of the worst offenses of which he was accused, at minimum he was unscrupulous in his data collection methods and unscientific in his conclusions. Chagnon’s detractors point out that many of his theoretical claims are unsubstantiated by his data and his conduct in the field was questionable at best and harmful to the Yanomami at worst. Some, including Sahlins, have gone further to argue that Chagnon’s various ethical shortcomings as a researcher and scholar have harmed not only the Yanomami but the discipline of anthropology itself.
Sahlins described Chagnon’s use of manipulation, bellicosity, and subterfuge in pursuit of his research goals as a form of “research and destroy” akin to America’s military strategy in Vietnam. Such a comparison highlights disturbing similarities between Chagnon’s brand of neocolonial anthropology in which the ends justify the means and America’s neoimperialist foreign policy. From this perspective, the NAS’s militarization of anthropological research and its election of Chagnon should give scholars everywhere pause. Sahlins’s act of protest reminds us of the need to continuously question both the ends and the means of our own scholarship, including the scholarship of religion, and to rigorously observe moral standards in our methods, our relationships with those we study, and the uses we make—and allow others to make—of our research.
But don’t look for the New York Times to profile Sahlins any time soon. At least one of the morals of this story is the hoary old truism that bad behavior and controversy get far more attention than acts of principle. Sahlins, however, is sanguine. The effect of his resignation has been much greater than he expected, he told me, citing the overwhelming support he has received from around the world.
American Anthropological Association, Referendum to Rescind The El Dorado Task Force Report, 2005.
Napoleon Chagnon, Yanomamö: The Fierce People. New York: Holt McDougal, 1968.
Emily Eakin, “How Napoleon Chagnon Became Our Most Controversial Anthropologist,” New York Times, Feburary 13, 2013.
Serena Golden, “A Protest Resignation,” Inside Higher Education, February 25, 2013.
David Price, “The Destruction of Conscience in the National Academy of Science: An Interview with Marshall Sahlins,” Counterpunch,February 26, 2013.
Marshall Sahlins, “Jungle Fever” (review of Darkness in El Dorado by Patrick Tierney), The Washington Post, December 10, 2000.
Patrick Tierney, Darkness in El Dorado: How Scientists and Journalists Devastated the Amazon. New York: W.W. Norton, 2000.