Noble SavagesNapoleon Chagnon 2013 Napoleon Chagnon was an anthropology PhD student at University of Michigan looking for a research

subject for his thesis. While most people in his position were pursuing an approach that involved studying one village of a relatively easily accessible group, he decided to attempt to study a culture that had not been polluted by contact with advanced societies. As you might expect even in the mid-1960s this would represent a difficult challenge. He settled on the Yamomom tribe of about 20,000 people living along the BrazilVenezuela border highland headwaters of the Amazon basin. This was a stone-age culture of 250 independent villages spread along the border, mostly on the Venezuela side. They were quite untainted with only the beginnings of edge contact with missionaries and government medical services on an irregular basis. He cast about for grant money to finance his travel and other small expenses for trade goods, food, tools, etc. Securing that he left his wife and two small children to begin a 17 month first visit which he estimated would be sufficient to satisfy his thesis data requirements. He was to spend much more time than that over future decades. This book Noble SavagesMy Life among two dangerous tribes-the Yamomom and the Anthropologists is aptly named. It is obvious why he chose the title. The Yamomom were a dangerous tribe. He found far more warfare among them than the standard anthropological views based on Rousseaus romantic view that in their natural state tribes would not practice warfare unless faced with the shortage of important resources. His experience told him very early in his research that that view was deeply flawed as are so many of the beliefs of held by our academics in other fields as well. That is, for example, the romantic notions from Rousseau that Dewey and other progressives became enamored have been demonstrated to not work in the real world of education.

To quote the book The first [problem with conventional anthropological wisdom] was that warfare was common among the Yamomom and that it was apparently not caused by capitalist exploitation, nor was it a reaction to oppression by Western colonial powers. This raised the possibility that warfare was, in a sense, a natural or predictable condition among tribesmen who had not been exposed to or corrupted by capitalistic, industrialized, and/or colonial cultures. The second possibility my research raised was that lethal conflicts between groups might not be explicable by citing shortages of scarce strategic material resources, considered by anthropologists and other social scientists to be the only legitimate scientific reason for human conflict and warfare. Anthropologists who collect the traditional kinds of data among tribesmen now find themselves in the peculiar position of being censured simply for reporting their observations in academic journals because these data will offend some group that believes in the concept of the Noble Savage. Never mind that this concept is inconsistent with ethnographic facts. This virtual Noble Savage is a construct based on faith: in that respect anthropology has become more like a religionwhere major truths are established by faith not facts. My purpose is not to summarize Chagnons book but to entice you to read it. It is fascinating both in what he learned during his decades of study but also the many adventures and hardships he endured during the process.

Paul Richardson, 2013