Napoleon Chagnon

Napoleon Alphonseau Chagnon (27 August 1938 – 21 September 2019) was an American cultural anthropologist, professor of sociocultural anthropology at the University of Missouri in Columbia and member of the National Academy of Sciences.

Chagnon was known for his long-term ethnographic field work among the Yanomamö, a society of indigenous tribal Amazonians, in which he used an evolutionary approach to understand social behavior in terms of genetic relatedness.

His work centered on the analysis of violence among tribal peoples, and, using socio-biological analyses, he advanced the argument that violence among the Yanomami is fueled by an evolutionary process in which successful warriors have more offspring.

After enrolling at the Michigan College of Mining and Technology in 1957, he transferred to the University of Michigan after his first year and there received a bachelor's degree in 1961, an M.A. in 1963, and a PhD in 1966 under the tutelage of Leslie White.

Working primarily in the headwaters of the upper Siapa and upper Mavaca Rivers in Venezuela, he conducted fieldwork from the mid-1960s until the latter half of the 1990s.

According to Chagnon, when he arrived he realised that the theories he had been taught during his training had shortcomings, because contrary to what they predicted, raiding and fighting, often over women, was endemic.

His habit of constantly asking them questions earned Chagnon the Yanomamö nickname "pesky bee."

A major focus of his research was the collection of genealogies of the residents of the villages that he visited, and from these he would analyze patterns of relatedness, marriage patterns, cooperation, and settlement pattern histories.

The degree of kinship was seen by Chagnon as important for the forming of alliances in social interactions, including conflict.

Chagnon's methods of analysis are widely seen as having been influenced by sociobiology.

As Chagnon described it, Yanomamö society produced fierceness, because that behavior furthered male reproductive success.

The genealogies showed that men who killed had more wives and children than men who did not kill.

At the level of the villages, the war-like populations expanded at the expense of their neighbors.

Chagnon's positing of a link between reproductive success and violence cast doubt on the sociocultural perspective that cultures are constructed from human experience.

An enduring controversy over Chagnon's work has been described as a microcosm of the conflict between biological and sociocultural anthropology.

Based on seventeen months of fieldwork begun in 1964, Chagnon's thesis examined the relationship between kinship and the social organization of Yanomamö villages.

Chagnon was best known for his long-term ethnographic field work among the Yanomamö, indigenous Amazonians who live in the border area between Venezuela and Brazil.

His 1967 ethnography Yanomamö: The Fierce People became a bestseller and is frequently assigned in introductory anthropology courses.

Admirers described him as a pioneer of scientific anthropology.

Chagnon was called the "most controversial anthropologist" in the United States in a New York Times Magazine profile preceding the publication of Chagnon's most recent book, Noble Savages: My Life Among Two Dangerous Tribes—the Yanomamö and the Anthropologists, a memoir.

Chagnon was born in Port Austin, Michigan, and was the second of twelve children.

Chagnon's ethnography, Yanomamö: The Fierce People, was published in 1968 and ran to several editions, selling nearly a million copies,.

It is commonly used as a text in university-level introductory anthropology classes, making it one of the bestselling anthropological texts of all time.

Chagnon was also a pioneer in the field of visual anthropology.

He collaborated with ethnographic filmmaker Tim Asch and produced a series of more than twenty ethnographic films documenting Yanomamö life.

The ethnographic film The Ax Fight, showing a fight among two Yanomami groups and analyzing it as it relates to kinship networks, is considered a classic in ethnographic film making.

In 2000, Patrick Tierney, in his book Darkness in El Dorado, accused Chagnon and his colleague James V. Neel of unethical behavior, such as, among other things, manipulating data, and of exacerbating a measles epidemic among the Yanomamö people.

Most of the allegations made in Darkness in El Dorado were publicly rejected by the Provost's office of the University of Michigan in November 2000.

For example, the interviews upon which the book was based all came from members of the Salesians of Don Bosco, a congregation of the Catholic Church, which Chagnon had criticized and angered.

The American Anthropological Association convened a task force in February 2001 to investigate some of the allegations made in Tierney's book.

Their report, which was issued by the AAA in May 2002, held that Chagnon had both represented the Yanomamö in harmful ways and failed in some instances to obtain proper consent from both the government and the groups he studied.

However, the Task Force stated that there was no support to the claim that Chagnon and Neel began a measles epidemic.

In June 2005, however, the AAA voted over two-to-one to rescind the acceptance of the 2002 report.

Alice Dreger, an historian of medicine and science, concluded after a year's research that Tierney's claims were false and the American Anthropological Association was complicit and irresponsible in helping spread these falsehoods and not protecting "scholars from baseless and sensationalistic charges".

The controversy is covered in the 2005 book Yanomami: The Fierce Controversy and What We Can Learn from It by anthropologist Robert Borofsky.

Chagnon's work with the Yanomamö was widely criticized by other anthropologists.

Anthropologists critiqued both aspects of his research methods as well as the theoretical approach, and the interpretations and conclusions he drew from his data.

In 2012 he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences.

Marshall Sahlins, who was a major critic of Chagnon, resigned from the academy, citing Chagnon's induction as one of the reasons he quit.

On 21 September 2019, Chagnon died at the age of 81.