Mad Dog Anthropologists: A Scientific Crime

"In re: Scandal about to be caused by publication of book by Patrick Tierney (Darkness in El Dorado, New York, Norton?)

"We write to inform you of an impending scandal that will affect the American Anthropological profession as a whole in the eyes of the public, and arouse intense indignation and calls for action among members of the Association. In its scale, ramifications, and sheer criminality and corruption it is unparalleled in the history of Anthropology."

Get that last sentence? "In... sheer criminality and corruption it is unparalleled in the history of Anthropology." It's true. The man, James Neel, a geneticist, primarily accused of these crimes died last February. Tierney's Darkness in El Dorado alleges that Neel and his associate anthropologist, Napoleon Chagnon (still with us), worked for a covert program of the Atomic Energy Commission to study the effects of radiation on human subjects and to see how human groups behaved under conditions of extreme stress. Under secret contract to the AEC, Neel had studied the effects of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs on the survivors, and performed the same mission after the A and H bomb tests in the Marshall Islands had destroyed native cultures there and left a legacy of deadly radiation. Neel was part of a group sponsored by the AEC that administered injections of plutonium to human subjects, often without their knowledge.

One of Neel's colleagues, a Venezuelan called Marcel Roche, worked with Neel at his AEC-funded Dept. of Human Genetics at Ann Arbor, then went back to Venezuela and traveled to the territory of the Yanomami, a large Indian group in the northwestern Amazon. Here he allegedly administered the Indians doses of a radioactive isotope of iodine and pulled blood samples as part of a genetic survey. It was seemingly on Roche's recommendation that Neel began his lethal excursions to the unfortunate Yanomami. Neel had mad übermensch notions about the genetics of "leadership" and differential rates of reproduction among dominant and subdominant males in a genetically "isolated" human population. The AEC was happy to pick up the tab, eager to find out how any survivor group of carefully selected Americans secluded in caves during nuclear Armageddon would survive and breed in the aftermath.

"Tierney presents convincing evidence," write the aghast anthropologists Turner and Sponsel, that "Neel and Chagnon, on their trip to the Yanomami in 1968, greatly exacerbated, and probably started, the epidemic of measles that killed 'hundreds, perhaps thousands' (Tierney's language?the exact figure will never be known) of Yanomami." It seems that the epidemic was "caused, or at least worsened and more widely spread, by a campaign of vaccination carried out by the research team, which used a virulent vaccine (Edmonson B) that had been counter-indicated by medical experts for use on isolated populations with no prior exposure to measles (exactly the Yanomami situation).

"Even among populations with prior contact and consequent partial genetic immunity to measles, the vaccine was supposed to be used only with supportive injections of gamma globulin. It was known to produce effects virtually indistinguishable from the disease of measles itself." Thus, Tierney claims, Neel secretly supervised a program of potentially lethal injections. Then members of his research team were instructed to refuse to provide any medical assistance to the sick and dying Yanomami, on explicit orders from Neel who said that as men of science they should not intervene.

Neel believed that before the rise of mass societies, first in agricultural communities and then in cities, small, genetically isolated groups would produce leaders with dominant genes who would then appropriate a big share of the available women with whom they would breed, thus constantly upgrading the genetic stock of the tribe. But his theory faced a big problem, namely the vulnerability of such small groups to exogenous disease and consequent epidemics, which the large groups in modern mass society could more easily absorb. Hence Neel's terrible experiments on the Yanomami. He wanted to disprove the vulnerability of small, isolated groups to epidemics, seeking to show that though a disease such as measles might wreak awful havoc, his alpha-dominated males would be better adapted to evolving genetic immunity to these "contact" diseases. Many might die, but the survivors would be of ever more superior stock.

In their letter to the head of the Anthropological Association, Turner and Sponsel write carefully that "Tierney's well-documented account, in its entirety, strongly supports the conclusion that the epidemic was in all probability deliberately caused as an experiment designed to produce scientific support for Neel's eugenic theory. This remains only an inference in the present state of our knowledge: there is no 'smoking gun' in the form of a written text or recorded speech by Neel. It is nevertheless the only explanation that makes sense of a number of otherwise inexplicable facts."

It's not surprising that Neel should have approved of the work of Napoleon Chagnon and welcomed him as an associate. For decades Chagnon has been promoting a version of Yanomami society in which aggressive alpha males appropriate all desirable women and slaughter the weak, to the great delight of sociobiologists, who reveled in Chagnon's fictions as proof of their own gloomy views of the human condition. Tierney devotes much of the book to a critique of Chagnon's work (and actions), charging that Chagnon has cooked his research, not least by repeatedly fomenting the internecine wars he invokes as evidence of the ultimately healthful genetic purging by which the Yanomami survive. In his film work, Tierney charges, Chagnon induced Yanomami to enact fights and aggressive behavior for a colleague's camera, "sometimes building whole artificial villages as 'sets' for the purpose, which were presented as spontaneous slices of Yanomami life unaffected by the presence of the anthropologists." Amid this stage-management, Tierney alleges, Yanomami were maimed and killed, and whole communities were disrupted to the point of fission and flight.

The French anthropologist Jacques Lizot also gets a chapter in Tierney's book, even though he has been a fierce critic of Neel and Chagnon. Lizot's breach of academic ethics (an eternal oxymoron) allegedly takes the form of a harem of Yanomami boys, with doleful resort to young girls when boys were unavailable. "On the sexual front," Turner and Sponsel write, "there are also passing references to Chagnon himself demanding that villagers bring him girls for sex."

Neel and Chagnon also colluded, Tierney claims, with Venezuelan politicians attempting to gain control of Yanomami lands for illegal gold mining concessions. "They provided 'cover' for the illegal mine developer as a 'naturalist' collaborating with the anthropological researchers, in exchange for the politician's guaranteeing continuing access to the Indians for the anthropologists."

If all this is true, there'd be nothing that separates Neel and his team from the Nazi doctors, and ghastly though the whole story is, there's nothing that should excessively surprise anyone who has looked at the practical functions of anthropology as a handservant of Empire. In fact, Donald MacCrae in his 196l volume Ideology and Society briskly commended British social anthropology as "useful to colonial administration and dangerous to no domestic prejudice." E. Evans-Pritchard, whose study of the African Nuer tribe is regarded as a classic of social anthropology, interrupted a lyrical account of Nuer life to note without comment or reproof the punitive raids of British colonial authorities "including bombing and machine-gunning of camps." Nor did he regard this rending of Nuer society by the British as a topic worthy of inclusion in his description of the Nuer world.

Again, this should not surprise us. Alfred Kroeber, who founded academic anthropology in California, and who wrote Handbook of the Indians of California, spent many hours interviewing the Yurok tribe whose territory is on the coast of northern California, just south of the Oregon line, 100 miles north of where I live. Kroeber eventually distilled these conversations into a volume called Yurok Narratives, in which he mediated on the supposed "character" of this Indian group. The Yurok, he wrote on one occasion, were "an inwardly fearful people... [T]he men often seemed to me withdrawn." He mused that "for some reason the culture had gone hypochondriac." Kroeber never got around to mentioning that between 1848, the start of the gold rush, and 1910, the Yurok population in the region was reduced from about 2500 people to 610. Disease, starvation and murder had wiped out about 75 percent of the group. It is as though an anthropologist studying the inward fears of Polish Jews after 1945 never mentioned Auschwitz. (Inward fears of Poles, too. The Nazis killed about five million of them, though this isn't often remembered or discussed.)

Like Neel, Kroeber had a theory about Indians, patched together out of some nonsense put up by Freud, with whom he corresponded, about "oral" and "anal" types. He liked thinking about Indian traits in the abstract. He didn't care for the grim reality of Indian life in White Man's time. Asked once why he hadn't paid any attention to recent Yurok history, Kroeber replied that he "couldn't stand all the tears" that these topics elicited from his Yurok informants.

Will Tierney's book provoke the uproar that Turner and Sponsel predict? Will anthropology be placed in the dock? I doubt it. For years native groups across the world have recounted their stories of the depredations of anthropologists, and have been eager to tell them to anyone interested. If Tierney's claims are true, Chagnon may end up in some judicial venue, facing charges of crimes against humanity. But I doubt that, too. The can of worms is way too full.