What follows is an experiment. I found in my archives the draft of a magazine story I wrote in 2000 which still seems relevant and fun. It is about savage treachery in the rain forest and in academia. I have edited it and broken the result into chunks to be published on successive days. Enjoy:
Bisaasi-teri and Konabuma-teri were two Yanomamö villages, several days walk from each other in the forests around the unmapped headwaters of Orinoco river. In 1950 an unspecified disease had killed several children in Bisaasi-teri so the villages went to war. It started with a simple axe murder.
. The Yanomamö believe that disease is caused by evil spirits cast from other villages and the shamans of Bisaasi-teri concluded that the disease in their village had been cast from the purportedly friendly village of Konumba-teri. So when a visitor arrived from Konabuma-teri he was greeted in the normal way: the men of the Bisaasi-teri came out with their weapons to yell at him until he had stood calmly for long enough to prove himself fearless. Then he was invited into the village — a single, circular, communal roof covering family houses arranged around an open space — and given a gourd of soup to drink in front of the headman’s house.
As he squatted on his haunches, drinking the soup, he was approached from behind by Mamikininiwä, “a mature man of about forty, whose decisions few would challenge”, in the phrase of the anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon. Mamikininiwä carried a treasure: an axe whose worn steel head had been traded through many hands in from the coast. He smashed it into the visitor’s head, and the man died almost at once.
In due course the Konumba-teri retaliated by arranging for mutual allies to hold a feast for the people of Bisaasi-teri and once their guests were comfortably immbolised by the hammocks they were offered to rest in, attacked them with clubs and bowstaves, before pursuing the survivors with a flight of arrows. Around a dozen men were killed in this massacre1.
This story comes from Professor Chagnon’s classic work on the Yanomamö, in which he traced the shifting alliances, the migrations, and the killings that continued for thirty years after the first murders.
The war within the American Anthropological Association probably started in 1994, with a shouting match between Professor Chagnon and Professor Terry Turner, of Cornell University, who called him “a sociopath”. It’s difficult to be more precise about the date because Chagnon and Turner had been enemies for years before then. But the axe blow came in the summer of 2000 AD, with the release of an email, signed by Turner, and Professor Les Sponsel, of Hawaii University, in which they accused Chagnon of participation in “crimes beyond the imagination of Joseph Conrad, though not, perhaps, of Josef Mengele.” In particular, he was supposed to have taken part in an experiment which started a deadly measles epidemic among the Yanomamö in 1968, killing thousands and refusing medical treatment to those they had infected with a vaccine known to be potentially lethal.
Both Turner and Sponsel are full professors, who have held high office in the AAA, “mature men, whose decisions few would question.” The effect of their email was devastating. Had the charges been true, they would have finished Chagnon’s reputation as surely as an axe to the back of his head would have ended his life. But what is truly extraordinary about the story is that the charges set out in Turner and Sponsel’s email, are not only untrue; they could not possibly not be have been true.
All this emerged in front of an enthralled crowd of four or five thousand anthropologists crammed into a ballroom at the Hilton Hotel in San Francisco last month — yet despite this, a sizeable minority of the profession clearly wish that one of their colleagues was guilty of genocide, and feel his moral guilt is established whatever the scientific and historical facts may be.
(continued tomorrow)
It’s difficult to be more precise because Chagnon learned of it only thirty years later and in any case, the Yanomamö counting system runs one, two, more-than-two.
I am hungry for the next installment!