Talk:Yanomamö: The Fierce People

Reviews
@Cunard I've started this new article, but I am having trouble finding reviews of the book (just the one from AA). Anything else you can find? Given its bestseller status, I'd expect to find more... Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; reply here 09:01, 29 August 2023 (UTC)

Hi. Here are some sources about the book Yanomamö: The Fierce People:  The abstract notes: "Review of Chagnon, Napoleon A. Yanomamö: The Fierce People. Publisher: New York : Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1968." I do not have access to the article. Only the citation is available at https://www.proquest.com/docview/1301427425. I could not find a copy of the journal online. I recommend asking for a copy of the source at WikiProject Resource Exchange/Resource Request.  The article notes: "Over the course of some twenty-five years, Napoleon Chagnon's classic ethnography of an Amerindian rainforest society, Yanomamö: The fierce people, has been restyled to become Yanomamö: The last days of Eden. As ranchers, miners and missionaries have penetrated their territory, the Yanomamö have ceased to be a remote people. They are now a moral cause, and the ethnographer's task is not just to study them but to save them. Hence, the new version of Chagnon's book is thicker, slicker, glossier; the original text a mere sliver, sandwiched between foreword, preface, introduction and a new section on "acculturation", that is, the destruction of the Yanomamö as Chagnon has taught us to see them. The extra material and the weighted revisions will give joy to textualists, and are another nail in the coffin of any who still believe that the job of the anthropologist is simply to tell it like it is." The article further notes: "Chagnon has edited out infanticide and homosexuality. The bibliography has been excised. Wife-beating is still there (though in harness with "love"), and moral relativism no longer applies in the index, where normal Yanomamö married behaviour is sternly classed as "Women-physical abuse of". The picture of the ethnographer taking drugs has been sanitized away, as has his description of the experience. In comes a good deal of demography and information on disease, some tales of missionary nastiness that had previously been tactfully elided and pictures of the ethnographer being decorated and hugging his subjects. The value of Chagnon's original work was as a text for undergraduates that depicted a people for whom warfare and male aggression were part of assumed everyday experience.  The book notes on page 7: "Yanomamo: The Fierce People, which Chagnon first published in 1968, quickly became the all-time best-seller in anthropology. Four million students bought the book, which is both a riveting account of warfare among Stone Age people and a sobering assessment of what life may have been like." The book notes on page 8: "﻿The Fierce People made the Yanomami the most famous tribe in the world—a model for primitive man and a synonym for aggression. It made Napoleon Chagnon the best-known American anthropologist since Margaret Mead. ... Before going into the jungle, I had read and admired The Fierce People. So it was surprising to see that the Yanomami—so terrifying and "burly" in Chagnon's text—were, in fact, among the tiniest, scrawniest people in the world. Adults averaged four feet seven inches in height, and children had among the lowest weight-height ratios on the planet."  The article notes: "His film "The Feast" and the phenomenally successful ethnography Yanomamo: The Fierce People cemented this image of a society in a more or less perpetual state of warfare and raiding."  The article notes: "That was before the second edition of Yanomamo: The Fierce People. Time's piece triggered off angry responses from anthropologists and missionaries (see Time's Forum section of 31 May 1976:1), and probably overwhelmed Chagnon himself, judging by the considerable changes he made in the third edition, toning down or deleting statements that precipitated such embarrassing publicity. Tone down he did, but readers of the 1983 edition still find reason to agree with the Time article in saying that Chagnon is "chronicling a culture built around persistent aggression-browbeating, goading, ritual displays of ferocity, fighting and constant warfare." constant warfare." The third edition totally eliminated the discussion of what had been one of the main pillars of his argument for explaining aggressive behavior, that is, female infanticide, also picked up by Time: ... Throughout the years this vicious circle received decreasing attention in Chagnon's writings, starting with his doctoral dissertation in 1966, until it was dropped altogether in the latest edition of The Fierce People." The article further notes: "The latest edition of the Fierce People also presents clearer theoretical stances than was the case previously. Paying lip service to structuralism via an unconvincing presentation of a Yanomamo nature/culture dichotomy, Chagnon declares his allegiance to sociobiology, a trait already detectable in the first edition, but only implicitly so. Such a theoretical inclination is very consistent with his emphasis on aggression, demography, reproductive patterns, and territorial expansion. It is to Chagnon's credit that he succeeds so well in keeping an interest in the people, maintaining a constant relationship with their individuality, while working on such depersonalizing issues. At no time do Chagnon's Yanomamo men show themselves to be boring, faceless, mere objects of research. They are full of life, verve, and humor, or unbearable at times, making the ethnographer wish he were doing fieldwork with someone else, such as the neighboring Yekuana."  The article notes: "By far the most well known is Napoleon A. Chagnon, a professor emeritus at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). Chagnon began his fieldwork in 1964 and quickly became celebrated for his first book, published in 1968, Yanomamö: The Fierce People—"the greatest ethnography ever done," according to the anthropologist Mark Flinn of the University of Missouri, Columbia."  The article notes: "His groundbreaking 1968 work, Yanomamö: The Fierce People, sold one million copies, became a standard university text—and made him an outcast among anthropologists. ... Chagnon based his findings on copious research. He traveled to dozens of remote Yanomamö villages, cultivated informers and interviewed killers. ... Peers considered Chagnon’s conclusions to be racist and simplistic and his claims of brutality much exaggerated. Terence Turner, a Cornell University anthropologist and Amazon specialist, called Chagnon a “sociopath” whose “pronouncements about the intrinsic violence of the Yanomamö has actively hurt them.”" <li> The review notes: "The Feast, the first of a projected series of films on the Yanomamo of southern Venezuela provides a visual dimension to Chapter four of Chagnon's Yanomamo: The Fierce People (1968:105-113) reviewed by Crocker (1969). It represents the fruitful collaboration between a cultural anthropologist, Napoleon A. Chagnon, who is himself a sensitive photographer (e.g., the excellent pictures illustrating his publications on the Yanomamo) and an anthropologically trained film maker, Timothy Asch, who is currently the director of the Center for Documentary Anthropology at Brandeis University."</li> </ol>Cunard (talk) 08:18, 4 September 2023 (UTC)


 * @Cunard Thanks. Wonderful summary as usual, but... still, it seems that despite its bestseller status etc. there was zero attention by contemporary media (newspapers) until the controversy decades later... huh. A bit weird? <sub style="border:1px solid #228B22;padding:1px;">Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; reply here 08:23, 4 September 2023 (UTC)


 * , I cannot find any coverage of the book on Newspapers.com in this search (the only result is this 1995 advertisement), on NewspaperArchive in this search, or on British Newspaper Archive in this search. Either this book was not covered by newspapers at the time or these databases did not archive the newspapers that did cover the book. Cunard (talk) 08:37, 4 September 2023 (UTC)

DYK Hook
The hook currently on the main page reads "that the 1968 book Yanomamö: The Fierce People led to a major and decade-long controversy in the field of anthropology?" (emphasis added). Just reading the article, I'd think that should read decades-long, as in multiple decades. I couldn't find any discussion of changing the hook from the above proposals to what ended up on the main page, and not sure how to bringing to relevant editors' attention. CAVincent (talk) 01:18, 21 September 2023 (UTC)