Alice Dreger: Napoleon Chagnon Is Dead https://www.chronicle.com/interactives/20191023-dreger-chagnon?key=mi0Bff1vaLHL09_no2Emg5PWXO__JoamjKQr2Gq1TY9HA2L6VXvdoh4Rvoh8qT3jdHhUVUhoODlYamhvVlh6UU9CV3lfUzl2cjZPaV81b3ZjSzhuRmttZlBrYw: "Consider the recent blog post published by science journalist John Horgan at Scientific American’s website, in which, in light of Nap’s death, he revisits his review of Darkness in El Dorado for the New York Times Book Review. Horgan now confesses that, warned by Chagnon’s most prominent allies not to support Tierney’s falsehoods, he doubled down in his influential review: 'I ended up making my review of Darkness more positive. I wanted Darkness to get a hearing'. He apologizes now not for amplifying a work full of lies, but only for understating the subtleties in Chagnon’s work. In his 2000 review of Darkness for the Washington Post, the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins also endorsed Tierney’s bullshit. In that review, speaking of things he knew nothing about, Sahlins seconded Tierney’s sharp criticism of Chagnon for pressing the Yanomamö for information about their dead: 'As for the dead', Sahlins wrote, 'they are completely excluded from Yanomami society, ritually as well as verbally, as a necessary condition of the continued existence of the living'. 'It’s a goddamned lie', Hames told me when we talked soon after Nap died. 'You walk into any Yanomamö village on any evening, and you will hear people mourning their beloved deceased family members. You will hear the sobbing. They never forget.' The Yanomamö dead, Ray told me, 'are not forgotten and obliterated from memory. They’re kept alive by the people who love them'. After we hung up, I thought about why Ray was harping on this particular factual error. Then it came to me. The people who became like kin to Chagnon never expected the people who considered themselves journalists and scholars to love Nap. They did, however, expect that journalists and scholars would feel as Nap did—that we ought to always be aiming for the earthly truth. Because that is how we can begin to take care of each other...
#noted #2019-12-26
