Galileo's Middle Finger (20 page)

The next day, in the dull dark of the winter Michigan morning, we started again, Chagnon offering me only black coffee, Carlene still in bed, their hunting dog Darwin, a German shorthaired pointer, lying on the floor next to us, alternately farting and snoring. I started to walk Chagnon through what I really wanted to know—what wasn’t already in the record. What had it been like, surviving this controversy? What moments came back to him when he thought about living through it? He told me he remembered, particularly vividly, how much it had meant to him when he got the call from Danny Gross telling him of the successful vote among the AAA membership to rescind acceptance of the AAA’s El Dorado Task Force Report. He told me of his colleagues at UCSB—
Ed Hagen, Michael Price, and John Tooby
in particular—fighting back by showing Tierney’s twisted use of sources and quotations. And he told me of how his friend Ed (E. O.) Wilson at Harvard, the founder of sociobiology, had called him every week to make sure he knew he was not alone.

Decades before, Chagnon had been the one defending Wilson. The most vivid instance had to be the time in 1978
when Wilson was presenting
about sociobiology at a special session of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington, D.C. Wilson had broken his leg recently, so he was in a cast that stretched almost from his ankle to his hip. As he tried to speak, several members of the self-proclaimed “International Committee Against Racism” had rushed the stage, declared Wilson all wet, and dumped a pitcher of water over his head. Chagnon had been at the back of the auditorium, but he rushed up to try to knock heads together as necessary. Probably best for all, the ensuing pandemonium blocked Chagnon’s path. But Chagnon had been more effectual in various other venues at defending Wilson, particularly against what Wilson felt were misrepresentations by Richard Lewontin and Stephen Jay Gould, who were also at Harvard and who claimed to speak for the oppressed.

When the El Dorado storm hit, Wilson made sure to call Chagnon often to remind him of what mattered and give him some sympathy. As he told me of the colleagues who had moved to help him, Chagnon started to choke up. Naturally, I started to lose it too, as I always do in such situations, but I just let the tears dribble down my cheeks without making a noise. I typed as quietly as I could. Then Chagnon stood up suddenly and announced to me and Darwin, “I have to go to the
men’s
room.” He climbed around Darwin and made his way out of his home office to the hallway bathroom.

When he returned a few minutes later, he started in on a completely different story, confusing me thoroughly. It was a story about driving around Washington, D.C., with Margaret Mead. I knew from what Chagnon and others had told me that he and Mead had had a long and probably somewhat contentious scholarly relationship, given their very different portraits of human sexuality. In her popular 1928 book,
Coming of Age in Samoa
, Mead had presented Samoan culture as one that, without much fuss or fear, allowed many adolescents to sexually experiment—to fool around in ways that in the 1920s would have shocked the average American. This was a very different story of “primitive” human sexuality from Chagnon’s, which told of Yanomamö males regularly engaging in fierce fighting over women. By Chagnon’s account, human sexual relations tended to be tense affairs, involving violent abductions and even homicide. By Mead’s, human sexual relations meant making love, not war. Moreover, Chagnon had leaned toward biological explanations for what he saw as commonalities in human behavior, whereas Mead was more inclined to notice cross-cultural
differences
and explain them via social structures.

Whatever their dissimilarities in worldview, however, Mead had always been a mensch for science—for free inquiry and free speech—and Chagnon appreciated that. He hastened to tell me of the time he and his best friend, the anthropologist Bill Irons, had tried to hold the first session on sociobiology in anthropology at a
AAA meeting in the 1970s
. A motion had been put forth to cancel the session because of the supposed dangers of sociobiology. Mead stood up and said the attempted ban was akin to book burning. Her words turned the vote in Chagnon and Irons’s favor, saving the session just moments before Ed Wilson arrived to participate.

Now, back from his temporary retreat to “the men’s room,” Chagnon wanted to tell me another story of Mead as mensch. When the politicking against him in South America got so bad that Chagnon was being denied access to the field, Mead offered to go with him to the Venezuelan embassy in Washington, D.C., to try to fix the situation. Driving the two of them to the embassy, Chagnon became hopelessly lost in the diagonal-and-circular maze of Washington streets. He recalled to me, with his face downcast, that Mead had harrumphed at him: “You would think this famous anthropologist who can find his way all around the jungle could find his way around a city in the U.S.!”

Chagnon paused and looked up at me. “You would think this mean, nasty anthropologist could hold it together when being interviewed.”

I stopped typing and said to him, in as manly a fashion as I muster, that this shit was hard on a person, and it was understandable someone might get a little emotional.

He seemed at that moment a strikingly ordinary old man—wizened, mortal, spent.

 • • • 

M
ARGARET MEAD DIDN’T
LIVE
to see the ruining of her professional reputation. The New Zealand anthropologist Derek Freeman didn’t publish his book
Margaret Mead and Samoa
: The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth
until 1983, five years after Mead’s death. After that highly publicized work from Harvard University Press, Freeman’s misleading claims about Mead went through even better publicized iterations, and with each pass, they had more successfully damned Mead’s scientific reputation. By 1999, with the publication of
The Fateful Hoaxing of Margaret Mead
, Freeman had refined and simplified the story, marketing it perfectly for the sound-bite world: Determined by her personal political agenda to paint a sex-positive view of Samoan adolescence, Mead had allowed herself to be duped by two young Samoan women who had simply been joshing her with sexual fish tales of licentious adolescence. Mead had completely misrepresented human sexuality to the world because she’d been stupid enough to buy the joke these two young women were playing on her. Just an ideologically blinded dupe, according to Freeman, Mead turned out to be a dangerous spoiler of the scientific record on the nature of sex. In Freeman’s words, “Never can giggly fibs have had such far-reaching consequences
in the groves of Academe
.”

To pull off the
fiction he had spun as nonfiction
, Freeman had employed a rather brilliant methodology. First, he made sure his work appeared on the surface to be pure scholarship—just one expert anthropologist using good data to dismantle the supposedly shoddy data collection of a predecessor. Although it was riddled with misrepresentations of Mead, Freeman’s “scholarship” looked real enough to pass (at least until good scholars came along to check it).

Alongside his dishonest rewriting of Mead’s data, Freeman also rewrote Mead’s worldview, making her out to be an absolute cultural determinist hostile to any biological or evolutionary explanations of human nature. By portraying her erroneously as so scientifically simple-minded and so obviously outdated, Freeman was able to persuade people to write Mead off—and not only folks at the biological-determinist (sociobiological) extreme of the nature-nurture controversy, but also people in the theoretical middle. After all, what kind of idiot thinks we’re all nurture and no nature!

In reality, Mead, like most twentieth-century scientists, had a reasonably complex view of human behavior, assuming and seeing contributions from both biology and culture. That was one reason she was sympathetic to the work Chagnon was doing; he, too, saw both biology and culture as important. But Freeman needed Mead to be an extremist as well as a dupe, a kind of groovy 1960s antiscience anthropological tourist in a big straw hat.

This image then allowed Freeman to deploy the last bit of his clever methodology—to swoop in to play, in his own grandiose words, “The Heretic” to the supposed Cultural Church of Margaret Mead, to make it a battle between two “greats,” thus making himself as great as Mead. By boldly reducing Mead to a big-name ideological hack, Freeman could play Galileo, saving science from mere dogma. Freeman appeared to be not only a brilliant scholar, but a hero, as well.

Freeman was well into his relentless assault on Mead’s reputation when a number of cultural anthropologists tried to step in to right the factual wrongs. In his 1996 book,
Not Even Wrong: Margaret Mead, Derek Freeman, and the Samoans
, the anthropologist Martin Orans used Mead’s own field notes to show “that such humorous fibbing could not be the basis of Mead’s understanding. Freeman asks us to imagine that the joking of two women, pinching each other as they put Mead on about their sexuality and that of adolescents, was of more significance than the detailed information she had
collected throughout her fieldwork
.” Freeman had thoroughly misrepresented Mead’s work, creating such a fantastical account that it was “not even wrong” because it was essentially fiction.

Finding himself as appalled as Orans had been by Freeman’s defamation of Mead, the anthropologist Paul Shankman of the University of Colorado–Boulder decided to devote a sizable chunk of his professional energies trying “to extricate Mead’s reputation
from the quicksand of controversy
.” Performing expert historical analysis, Shankman showed that what Mead
really
drew on for her conclusions was data “collected on 25 adolescent girls of whom
over 40% were sexually active
” and from interviews with Samoan men and women. In his 2009 book,
The Trashing of Margaret Mead: Anatomy of an Anthropological Controversy
, Shankman readily acknowledged that Mead saw herself as “a citizen-scientist. Not content with being a bookish academic, she wanted to be a public intellectual and activist, using ethnographic data to
address important public issues
.” In other words, yes, she had a political agenda. In writing up her populist gospel of sexual permissiveness (a gospel she lived in her personal life), Mead certainly had oversimplified Samoan society, downplaying violent rape and the fact that women were discouraged from reporting, and downplaying, too, the beatings delivered upon those who violated sexual norms. But following Orans, Shankman was able to use Freeman’s
own records
to show that he
knew
Mead’s work to be substantially more sophisticated and rigorous than his negative portrait of it. In Shankman’s words, “Freeman was able to advance his argument only by very selective use of information, including the creative use of partial quotations and the strategic omission of relevant data at
crucial junctures in his argument
.”

Curiously, when he died in 2001, Freeman intentionally left behind in archives the documentation that would ultimately undo him. Perhaps he had so completely bought into the tale he had spun that it never occurred to him to fear leaving this self-defeating evidentiary trail. As Shankman discovered, the stash includes a key interview with one of the two “joshing” informants, showing that the interview was set up to
get the informant to turn on Mead
. Eerily reminiscent of the twisted facts in the Bailey controversy, in his analysis of the Freeman-Mead controversy, Shankman also found that “there is no information on sex from
these two women in Mead’s field notes
.” In other words, Freeman misrepresented not only the role of Mead, but also that of the two supposed “joshing informants.”

But why? Shankman’s digging suggests that not only was Freeman interested in pushing a particular biology-heavy view of human nature (for which he needed a naive Mead as foil), but he also suffered from a weird obsession with Mead, whom he saw as a threat to anthropology, to Samoans, and
even to himself
. He appeared to genuinely believe it was his duty to be the big man who would take Mead down. Freeman had no patience for those who might get in his way and sometimes
threatened those who did
. Perhaps even more disturbing, Freeman seems to have shown signs of delusion—
deep
delusion. Shankman tells of Freeman’s 1961 trip to Sarawak, where he viewed sexually graphic tribal statues at a local museum: “Freeman was convinced that the erotic statues [there] not only were a perversion of authentic tribal culture but were also exerting a form of mind control over Freeman through their hypnotic power, a power that he was determined to break. Freeman also believed that the statues were being used by [a colleague] and the Soviet Union to subvert the local government. Indeed, Freeman thought [the colleague’s wife]
was a Soviet agent
.” Freeman then proceeded to destroy one of the statues. Concerned by his bizarre behavior, authorities eventually banned Freeman from further research in Sarawak. One of his colleagues told Shankman, “We all know he’s crazy,
but we can’t say it
!”

So as it turns out, it was not Margaret Mead or her supposedly joking informants but the strange Derek Freeman who managed to “hoax” the world. Freeman succeeded in part because he followed what I had learned is the number-one rule in making shit up: Make it so unbelievable that people have to believe it.

A
LTHOUGH
D
ARKNESS IN
E
L
Dorado
made Patrick Tierney look like an extremely adventurous but scholarly investigative reporter, in fact Tierney had no apparent training or employment history
in anthropology or journalism
. His first book,
The Highest Altar
, had purported to reveal ongoing human sacrifice in the Andes. No one in the scholarly world appeared to take that book all that seriously. But
Darkness in El Dorado
was a very different sort of book, absolutely crammed with impressive-looking footnotes—so many that the book looked like a masterwork of objective scholarship.

When she interviewed Tierney about
Darkness in El Dorado
in late 2000 for
Chicago Public Radio
, Victoria Lautman made specific mention of Tierney’s apparent documentation of his claims:

There are 60 pages just of footnotes supporting Tierney’s incendiary main point[s], namely that the Brazilian Yanomamö Indians were hideously exploited, that a lethal 1968 measles epidemic was spread by a dangerous vaccine, that the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission used the Yanomamö as a control group without their knowledge, and, most important, that all of these shocking abuses were perpetuated by two of the most famous and respected members of the anthropological community [
sic
].

As I looked back at all the positive media attention and praise the book got—it had even been named a finalist for a National Book Award—there could be no question this had resulted from readers assuming the footnotes were real. The truth was that plenty of them had simply not checked out. I knew this from reviewing the work of
previous scholars who had looked
, but I also was finding still more examples on my own.

For instance, as I went over the
Darkness
chapter on the 1968 epidemic, I came across this line: “The vaccinators were Napoleon Chagnon and a respected Venezuelan doctor
named Marcel Roche
.” Chagnon had told me repeatedly that he had not vaccinated anyone during the epidemic. This point mattered a lot to him, because Tierney’s
New Yorker
article
included a story of a man whose child had allegedly died following a vaccination from Chagnon. Chagnon was understandably distraught at the implication that he had killed a Yanomamö child. So I looked at Tierney’s citation for the claim that Chagnon and Roche had been vaccinating and was rather stunned to see that Tierney seemed, by the citation, to be attributing this information to an
article Chagnon had coauthored
in 1970. How could Chagnon tell me he didn’t vaccinate anyone during the epidemic when his own coauthored article said that he did?

I wasn’t looking forward to having to confront the scarred and forceful Chagnon with that question, but I knew I had to. So I pulled the 1970 article and went to page 421, as Tierney’s citation indicated I should. Nowhere on the page did it name any vaccinator. Confused, I went through the rest of the article.
Nowhere in the article was a single vaccinator named.
Tierney’s citation was full of gas.

As I moved through what would become a year of research and about forty interviews for this project, a clear pattern of misrepresentation emerged. Even people who had been relatively aligned with Tierney were now admitting to me that he had played fast and loose with the truth. I called to interview Brian Ferguson, an anthropologist at Rutgers who had written
Yanomami Warfare
,
a book highly critical of Chagnon. In the book, Ferguson argues that the introduction of large amounts of Western trade goods by researchers and missionaries contributed to Yanomamö conflict that Chagnon often blamed on sexual tensions.
Ferguson told me
that when the
New Yorker
fact checkers called him,

everything was fine except one passage where Tierney has me saying something to the effect of “missions could be disruptive but according to Ferguson they are less so than Chagnon was,” downplaying the impact of the missions. I said, no I didn’t say that, and I don’t believe that to be true. I think [the missions] were very disruptive in the period I’m talking about. . . . I said that’s not what I said. And I got a call from Patrick Tierney and he got quite angry about it and said that I was backing down and that I was making a political move here and that he had me on tape saying what he said I said. And I said you’d better get that tape ready, because that’s not what I said.

Another strike against Tierney came from a woman with whom he’d apparently had a close friendship in South America, a woman named Lêda Martins, now an anthropologist at Pitzer College in California. Before going into anthropology, Martins had been a journalist and human rights worker, and she had long shared Tierney’s concern for the indigenous peoples in Venezuela and Brazil. In the acknowledgments to
Darkness,
Tierney said he was “especially indebted” to Martins, adding, “Leda’s dossier on Napoleon Chagnon was an
important resource for my research
.” I knew this dossier to be very important—Chagnon was practically obsessed with it—because it contained many of the misrepresentations of
Darkness
yet predated the book by years. Indeed, the copy of the dossier that Chagnon had obtained and given to me read almost like a draft book proposal for
Darkness in El Dorado
. The dossier had been used in various ways, but mostly to try to get Chagnon’s research permits denied. It was probably largely responsible for forcing an unwanted end to his fieldwork.

So, in his book’s acknowledgment, Tierney basically was saying that Martins had established many of the most damning charges against Chagnon. Martins’s charges against Chagnon would then constitute the basis for what Tierney would have followed up. I pressed Martins for a copy of the dossier as she had it; I wanted to know if it was the same as the one Chagnon had gotten his hands on. Eventually, when I went to meet her in person while I was in Southern California, she handed me a copy. It turned out to match Chagnon’s copy. But at that time, she also confessed something key, something she later, at my request,
confirmed in an e-mail
. She was not the author of the dossier. In fact, Martins told me:

Patrick Tierney wrote the Chagnon dossier and I translated [it] to Portuguese. . . . I presented the dossier to Brazilian authorities (Funai employees) and human rights advocates who were looking for information on Chagnon who was seeking permission to go inside the Yanomami Territory in Brazil. I was the one who circulated the dossier in Brazil because people knew and trusted me. I trusted Patrick and did not check his references. (I can only hope whatever is left of my friendship with Patrick will survive the truth, but . . . he should not have said that.)

So the truth was that Tierney himself had written the charges he attributed to Martins, and Martins, presuming them to be true, had used them against Chagnon. This meant that Tierney had been working to spoil Chagnon’s reputation and his ability to do fieldwork in the Amazon many years before
Darkness in El Dorado
.

Chagnon had long suspected that the dossier charges originated with Patrick Tierney and that he had long been near the center of Chagnon’s troubles, even though in
Darkness
Tierney looked like an objective reporter, not a human rights activist. After I interviewed Chagnon’s longtime collaborator Raymond Hames of the University of Nebraska, Hames dug up for me a remarkable e-mail that he’d received from Chagnon on November 6, 1995, five years before the publication of
Darkness in El Dorado
.
Chagnon had written to Hames
:

I finally made, with the help of a Brazilian friend, a translation of the “Dossier” on me that is circulating in Brazil and was used in September to try to have FUNAI rescind my [anthropological research] permit. It is so hysterical and preposterous that it is funny, but there will be lots of people who will believe the[se] claims. . . . Footnote #21 leads me to suspect that the primary author of this is one Patrick Tierney, who actually showed up in my office just after I returned from Brazil. I pointedly asked him if he were aware of this “dossier” and he denied any knowledge of it. I think he is a liar.

It sure seemed that Chagnon was right to be deeply suspicious of Tierney. When I started my research on all this, I thought perhaps Tierney had just been sloppy here and there, that perhaps he had committed wishful thinking in various places and accidentally misordered events. But so much of what he put forth turned out to be inaccurate. I found myself mulling the strong claim made in 2001 by a group of Chagnon’s colleagues at UCSB who had looked into the matter: “The major allegations against Napoleon Chagnon and James Neel presented in
Darkness in El Dorado
by Patrick Tierney
appear to be
deliberately
fraudulent
.”

The Bailey history had impressed on me the importance of understanding the backstory of a controversial book, particularly the relationships behind the text. So I knew I needed to try to understand the prepublication relationships of those involved in the
Darkness in El Dorado
controversy. Deploying what Aron liked to call the historian’s secret weapon—um, a timeline—I was able to see that right around the time Chagnon had been e-mailing his colleague about his suspicion that Tierney had authored the dossier—right around the time that Chagnon had been guessing Tierney was “a liar”—Patrick Tierney had been introducing Lêda Martins to Terence Turner, Chagnon’s longtime nemesis, at the Pittsburgh airport.

Why were these three—the writer Patrick Tierney, the activist-journalist Lêda Martins, and the anthropologist Terence Turner—meeting at the Pittsburgh airport? In the mid-1990s, back in the pre-9/11 days when people without tickets could hang out with you at the gate,
Turner was regularly making flight connections
there, commuting from where he worked (Chicago) to where his wife worked (Ithaca, New York). Martins had found herself in Pittsburgh on a Fulbright to learn English. And Tierney’s family was based in Pittsburgh; his father was a professor at the University of Pittsburgh.
Turner acknowledged to me
that the three of them had met at the Pittsburgh airport several times. And around the time of these meetings came the fieldwork-ending dossier, after them came
Darkness
, and then Martins decided to go on to get a PhD in anthropology . . . and earned it under Terence Turner. She used that PhD
in part to go after Chagnon
.

The trio of Turner, Tierney, and Martins had been quite effective in clouding Chagnon’s reputation. In 2001, for example, when she was supporting the AAA-centered prosecution of Chagnon,
Martins had publicly taken Chagnon to task
for what he had said to a popular Brazilian magazine regarding the Yanomamö. To the magazine reporter, Chagnon had observed, “Real Indians sweat, they smell bad, they take hallucinogenic drugs, they belch after they eat, they covet and at times steal their neighbor’s wife, they fornicate, and they make war.” Martins used this quotation to try to show that Chagnon dehumanized the Yanomamö and so allegedly threatened their well-being. However, when she reproduced this passage, she didn’t mention how Chagnon concluded his statement to the magazine: “They are normal human beings. This is reason enough for them to deserve care and attention.”

Among these three—Martins, Tierney, and Turner—Turner certainly could boast the oldest and most persistent pursuit of Chagnon in the name of ethics.
Why
, Chagnon kept asking me,
why
had Turner had this unrelenting obsession with him that lasted for so many years and that seemed to sweep others in? Why did he seem to sic every dog on Chagnon? I didn’t know and couldn’t know. Besides, the most interesting question to me was not that one but rather how Turner had managed to push the AAA to do what it did to Chagnon and Neel, against the example of every other scholarly organization involved. The more I dug, the more the answer to my question seemed to be Tierney’s objective-looking book,
Darkness in El Dorado
. Most outsiders would know nothing of the complicated, sometimes (as in the case of the dossier authorship) actively obscured relationships among Tierney, Turner, and Martins. Outsiders wouldn’t know that Tierney’s source use looked much more real than it actually was.
Darkness
looked to most readers like an objective, scholarly confirmation of apparent strangers’ long-running suspicions that Chagnon and Neel had committed deeply unethical acts.

Of course, the AAA might have done what the other groups did and scrutinize Tierney first, discovering the inaccuracies and maybe also the complicated relationships. But goaded by Turner and Sponsel and their concerns about egregious human rights violations, they instead trundled on, “giving voice” to what turned out to be baseless accusations allegedly made on behalf of oppressed indigenous peoples. And so the AAA bolstered Tierney’s work, helping it grow legs it never could have otherwise.

Chagnon understood Turner’s hands to have been stained in this, but he was also convinced that the Catholic Church had a lot to do with it all, specifically the
Salesian missionaries, with whom he had come to blows
. Chagnon had published work arguing that the Salesian missions could be damaging to the Yanomamö, and so they’d been fighting for years. During our interviews, Chagnon told me repeatedly that, in the early 1990s, someone had started distributing anonymous packets condemning him for various alleged offenses against the Yanomamö. These had been mailed to Chagnon’s colleagues around the country and even mysteriously showed up in stacks
on handout tables at an AAA conference
. In my digging, I came upon an article providing evidence that Chagnon’s suspicion was right: These had been
distributed by the Salesians
.

Even after finding that evidence, I thought a story prominently featuring a kind of Catholic persecution of Chagnon couldn’t be true—it seemed to match too conveniently the story of Galileo. But the more I looked into Tierney, the more it seemed Chagnon might be on to something. Tierney certainly didn’t come across to me as a fervent Catholic in
Darkness in El Dorado
. But then on a tip from an anthropologist and with the help of good librarians, I got my hands on a copy of an unpublished book by Tierney that showed him in a completely different light. This was meant to be Tierney’s second book. It was supposed to have been published by Viking sometime around 1994 under the title “
Last Tribes of El Dorado
: The Gold Wars in the Amazon Rain Forest
.
” For some reason, it never appeared, and Tierney’s second published book turned out to be
Darkness in El Dorado
.