Darkness in El Dorado: How Scientists and Journalists Devastated the Amazon [Hardcover]

Patrick Tierney (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0393049221 | ISBN-13: 978-0393049220 | Publication Date: November 2000 | Edition: 1

A finalist for the 2000 National Book Award in non-fiction.

What Guns, Germs, and Steel did for colonial history, this book will do for present-day anthropology. Darkness in El Dorado is an explosive account of how ruthless journalists, self-serving anthropologists, and obsessed scientists placed one of the Amazon basin's oldest tribes on the cusp of extinction. First coming to prominence in the 1960s, the "savage" Yanomami Indians were the subject of anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon's multi-million-copy bestseller Yanomamo: The Fierce People and many award-winning films. These exemplars of human ferocity, however, did not arrive at such dispositions naturally. Patrick Tierney describes how the Yanomami's internecine warfare was triggered by repeated visits of leading anthropologists from around the world as well as by the Atomic Energy Commission, which wished to use Yanomami blood in radiation studies in the mid-1960s. This is an epic, compelling work, sure to shake the very foundations of American anthropology.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Since Napoleon Chagnon set foot in the Amazon in 1964, the Yanomami Indians have been an emblem of savage primitive man, as well as a staple of anthropology classes. Chagnon's Yanomami: The Fierce People is the all-time bestselling anthropology book, and his award-winning documentaries brought images of brutish, wife-stealing, naked Indians into classrooms around the world. Chagnon, however, has been dogged by criticism and controversy for years, and with the publication of Patrick Tierney's Darkness in El Dorado, the debate has erupted, forcing what may be the most tragic and shameful chapter of anthropological history into public view. Tierney's allegations, if true, are devastating. While Chagnon made the Yanomami synonymous with aggression, Tierney charges that Chagnon himself fomented wars through his tactics of creating false alliances, giving away machetes, and staging scenes in order to substantiate his own belief in male aggression. Even worse, Tierney believes that Chagnon and his mentor, the famous geneticist James Neel, actually started the measles epidemic that decimated up to 20 percent of the tribe's population by administering a contraindicated "dinosaur vaccine" to a highly vulnerable population. Tierney paints a horrific picture of Neel and his team of scientists rushing to get their samples of blood, urine, and saliva out of the tropical heat--and Chagnon choreographing his documentary--while the Yanomami fall like flies around them.

Tierney's research is meticulous and exhaustive (and includes the discovery of sound recording outtakes never before heard). He has penned a riveting story backed by a flood of facts that condemn Chagnon and his cohorts, and those who continue to abuse the Yanomami:

In the economics of exoticism the more remote and more isolated a tribal group is, the greater its market value. As the last intact aboriginal group, the Yanomami were in a class by themselves, poster people whose naked, photogenic appeal was matched by their unique genetic inheritance. Their blood was as coveted by scientists as their image was by photographers.

Anthropologists have been fearful of public reaction to the Chagnon scandal, and for good reason. As Yanomami spokesman Davi Kopenawa says, "For many years now anthropologists have been saying how exotic we Yanomami are. But when we finally tell our story the world will find out who is truly exotic." --Lesley Reed

From Publishers Weekly

This book, already nominated for a National Book Award, details the tragic encounter between an archaic Amazon people, the Yanomami, and what's depicted as a culturally toxic conglomeration of ruthless social scientists, rapacious financial interests, amoral governments and pop-culture journalists. Tierney (The Highest Altar) argues for an end to the arrogant exploitation of peoples outside of the classical Eurasian traditions. Copiously annotated and well documented, the work is the culmination of a decade-long study of what Tierney claims is false science; along the way, he exposes the dark side of some famous social-biologists. These self-promotors, he argues, cooked statistics and misrepresented behavior among the people they studied in order to support their presuppositions. Tierney explains how the Yanomami's desire for steel implements in their Paleolithic world of hunting, gathering, fishing and rudimentary farming led to exploitation by the observers, who wielded the promise of tools and modern gadgetry to manipulate the native population. Bribing the Indians enabled some scientists, with preconceived genetic theories of violence and dominance, to induce the Yanomami to act in ways antithetical to their own ancient customs. In the end, these flawed studies encouraged and justified mistreatment of this tribal people by Brazilian, Venezuelan and U.S. government agencies and the mining industry. Tierney's indictment exposes the worst depredations of modern cultural imperialism. Photographs and charts, not seen by PW. (Nov. 30)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 416 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company; 1 edition (November 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393049221
• ISBN-13: 978-0393049220
• Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 6.4 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (38 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,472,613 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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51 of 69 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars A shamefully dishonest book, November 15, 2000

By A Customer

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This review is from: Darkness in El Dorado: How Scientists and Journalists Devastated the Amazon (Hardcover)

This book alleges scandalous, hideous misdeeds on the part of distinguished scientists such as Napoleon Chagnon and James Neel. But all of the book's main accusations have been thoroughly refuted, and the only genuine scandal here is the way the author, Patrick Tierney, has fabricated and distorted reality in order to sell some books. The anthropological reputation of Chagnon remains intact, unlike those of anthropologists who have endorsed this dishonest, tabloid-calibre book. The book's egregious distortions and errors were first discovered in the manuscript, and I was expecting them to be corrected in the final version, but nope, they all appear to be there. How deeply disturbing that a book such as this could be published by a respectable publisher, endorsed by anthropologists, and even be nominated for a National Book Award.

If Tierney was just honestly presenting evidence of wrongdoing, that would be fine. Never mind that it would trash the reputations of the developers of the measles vaccine (Enders, Katz), the world's most important pioneering geneticist (Neel), and the world's greatest scientific anthropologist (Chagnon), and cause their friends and families to suffer. Such evidence would deserve an audience nonetheless. But this is not what Tierney does. He distorts his printed sources, omits evidence in these sources that refutes his accusations, and invents material that isn't actually there (there are currently many web sites which document this dishonesty in a point-by-point manner, although Amazon asks that reviewers not include URLs in their reviews). And that's just the sources that CAN be fact-checked - who knows the extent to which he misrepresents his uncheckable sources on which his accusations depend (mission records, interviews, audio tapes, etc.). In fact, several of Tierney's interviewees have already come forward and said that Tierney does not quote them faithfully.

On the positive side, Tierney's got a smooth narrative style, and the book might make a nice novel. So read it if you want - just consider it fiction.

38 of 51 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars American Anthropology Association: Darkness "deeply flawed", November 22, 2001

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An American Anthropologist - See all my reviews

This review is from: Darkness in El Dorado: How Scientists and Journalists Devastated the Amazon (Hardcover)

American Anthropology Association El Dorado Task Force Preliminary Report:

"We regard [Darkness in El Dorado] with profound ambivalence, finding the book deeply flawed, but nevertheless highlighting ethical issues that we must confront."

Visit the American Anthropology Association web site for the complete report.

102 of 140 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Dr. Kim Hill reviews Darkness in El Dorado, November 3, 2000

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UCSB Team (the University of New Mexico) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Darkness in El Dorado: How Scientists and Journalists Devastated the Amazon (Hardcover)

This review is by Dr. Kim Hill, one of the world's foremost authorities on Native tropical South Americans.

After reading the Tierney book I was concerned about a variety of issues, from the truth of specific allegations to the motives behind publishing the myriad of obviously false allegations, and from the ethics of specific fieldwork activities described to the overall impact the book would have on the health and welfare of indigenous peoples. The book is complex and brings up many important issues that have not been well discussed in anthropology. However, unfortunately, the book is also full of false and misleading information, half-truths and deception by omission. As such it constitutes unethical journalism. It does not honestly examine the true causes of the current precarious situation of the Yanomamo and other native South Americans. Specifically, while embellishing a longstanding vendetta and self righteous ideological witch hunt against two prominent anthropologists, Jim Neel and Napoleon Chagnon, and including many highly detailed accounts of their alleged misdeeds, it remains curiously silent on the roll of the Venezuelan/Brazilian governments in failing to provide healthcare assistance and territorial protection to the Yanomamo. The book also ignores entirely, the numerous easily revealed misdeeds of several missionaries and anthropologists who constitute its main source of information against its scientific targets thus rapidly revealing a blatant and powerful bias against only a few individuals in recent Yanomamo history. Finally, it attempts to confuse the reader into believing that some Yanomamo opinions which have been coached for years by bitter enemies of Chagnon and Neel are somehow now independent assessments and representative of the Yanomamo people as a whole.

I make the following observations:

First the book is blatantly anti-science, anti-sociobiology, and anti- a specific view of warfare: the theory that warfare is important in human history and is sometimes related to mate competition. However, the book goes beyond taking a position against certain ideas, it attempts to demonize any who would dare hold ideas contrary to those of the author and his collaborators (some of whom are unfortunately anthropologists who have dishonestly represented their activities in conjunction with this book). It suggests that those who engage in scientific research with native populations are generally evil and uncaring (unlike the engaged "activist" author and his collaborators), that any engagement in general scientific research (rather than pure help) is criminal (p.43), and that sociobiologists are the wickedest of all scientists uniquely capable of anything including sacrificing the lives of their study subjects to prove their theories (p.17). Tierney on the other hand, sees himself as the ally of certain "survival groups, missionaries, and Marxist anthropologists who had opted to help Indians rather than just study them" (p. XXIII). Here his agenda is laid bare. Scientists can't possibly both study and help Indians, therefore they are evil. Only survival groups, missionaries and left leaning anthropologists really care about Indians, all others should be denounced and be punished. Because Tierney knows that he will have a difficult time convincing many readers that dedicated scientists who work in Indian lands and often provide free medical care and a variety of other types of assistance, and who often research topics designed to advance the welfare of all humans on the planet, are instead evil and serve only some military-capitalist-industrial complex and seek to gain secret support for hidden Nazi-like eugenics theories, he engages in a massive exercise of embellishment and deceit-- that exercise is this book.

An overriding theme of the book is that anybody who believes that the Yanomamo engage frequently in coalitionary violence is an evil person (because the author engages in the naturalistic fallacy believing that anything which is factual in nature must therefore also be moral or acceptable, or "natural" and that certain scientific findings imply the inability to legislate away competition, p. 14). Even more evil still are those that accept that warfare was common AND entertain the idea that some violent conflicts may represent mate competition between males. The theory of sexual selection is ridiculed in this book (despite the fact that it is virtually accepted as a biological "fact" among modern biologists), and those who would believe that male traits associated with success in male-male competition are favored by natural selection are deemed equivalent to Nazis (never mind the fact that there is no other likely explanation, for example, about why Yanomamo men are larger than women in the first place). Chagnon and Neel are portrayed as genocidal maniacs because of their scientific positions on some of the above themes. The book goes beyond ideological persecution to pure academic McCarthyism (and ironically asserts that Chagnon must be a McCarthy sympathizer because he was raised in rural Michigan, p. 40).

Second, the book is full of false information. It incorrectly ascribes a measles epidemic to the vaccination program by Neel and Chagnon, and then speculates on how this epidemic was intentionally caused in order to test an incoherently presented theory that never was advocated by either Neel or Chagnon. The carelessness of this accusation and the ease with which it has been shown false since pre-publication copies of the book were released, quickly informs the reader about the malicious nature of this entire work. The book claims that certain film scenes were faked when in fact there is an overwhelming body of evidence that they were spontaneous and indeed not even fully understood by the filmmakers. It asserts that Chagnon caused high levels of conflict and warfare through his gift giving and alliance arranging activities, but bases this assertion on a bizarre theory of Yanomamo warfare which claims that steel tools are the ONLY cause of lethal conflict among the Yanomamo. That theory is so incongruent with what is known about primitive warfare worldwide that I refused to waste my time reviewing the book in which it was developed (Ferguson 1995) even after being given a free copy by a prominent anthropological journal....