NOTE: Free essay sample provided on this page should be used for references or sample purposes only. The sample essay is available to anyone, so any direct quoting without mentioning the source will be considered plagiarism by schools, colleges and universities that use plagiarism detection software. To get a completely brand-new, plagiarism-free essay, please use our essay writing service.
One click instant price quote
Anthropology I looked up and gasped when I saw a dozen burly, naked, filthy, hideous men staring at us down the shafts of their drawn arrows! Immense wads of green tobacco were stuck between their lower teeth and lips making them look even more hideous, and strands of dark- green slime dripped or hung from their noses, that is how Napoleon A. Chagnon described his first encounter with the Yanomamo people, one of the most primitive tribes on the planet. Yanomamo were practically unknown to the outside world before the 1960 s, when Chagnon traveled to the wild lands of Brazil and Venezuela to live among Yanomamo people. His writings on that experience, plus films based on numerous visits, made the Yanomamo famous throughout the world.
Chagnon described an exotic culture of this tribe who wore almost no clothing, fought wars over women, and ate the ashes of their dead. Napoleon A. Chagnon is the most important cultural anthropologist of his time. Cultural Anthropology is a term that is used in our everyday lives.
When we think of anthropology we think of the study of old remnants commonly referred to as archaeology. However, this is not the only form of anthropology. There are four types of anthropology and they are archaeology, biological anthropology, cultural anthropology, and linguistic anthropology. Cultural anthropologists study people of all walks of life. One can find a topic and find some type of study that an anthropologist has conducted on the matter. Chagnon had conducted research with the Yanomamo in the sixties and seventies.
An anthropologist in the field assumed the roles of participant and observer to an extent, he must involve himself in his subject's activities. He is dependent on the people whom he researches, both for information and for assistance in living in such a foreign and, hence, hostile environment. To repay subjects for their time, assistance, and information and to ease social ingratiation, the anthropologist in the field relies on trade goods, whether cigarettes, shovels, foreign food, or, in Chagnon's case, axes and machetes. These were the items for which the Yanomamo were willing to break their strongest taboo, the sharing of ancestors genealogical information. The thing that impressed Chagnon most was the importance of aggression in Yanomamo culture and way of life. Chagnon's interpretation of Yanomamo society has been criticized as oversimplification.
Anthropologists claim it to be outright misrepresentation of what hunter-gatherer societies are. In his works, Chagnon had proposed a male-based model of early human evolution filled with his own data from the Yanomamo. Males would compete for access to nubile females through warfare the losers would be removed from the gene pool unmercifully. Chagnon wrote that Yanomamo live in patrilineal culture, which is male oriented and very sexist. For some reason they believe that, they are superior to women. Yanomamo marriages are much different from that of American marriages.
Yanomamo women are treated as materialistic objects and promised by their father or brother to a Yanomamo man in return for reciprocity. The reciprocity could be another Yanomamo women or political alliances. The trades are often practiced in the Yanomamo culture. Polygamy is also a part of the Yanomamo culture. Yanomamo women are kept in the males possession.
The Yanomamo man tries to collect as many wives as he possibly can in order to demonstrate his power and masculinity. Besides, polygamy, the practice of infanticide plays a role in the lack of women in their society. Yanomamo prefer to parent a male child rather than a female child, so in case a female is born she is killed at birth. This again proved their sexist beliefs that women are inferior.
Many Yanomamo women fearing their husbands kill a female infant to avoid disappointing their so-called better half. When an acceptable child is born into a Yanomamo family the mother breast-feeds him for a relatively long time. Children are nursed until they reach the age of at most, three or four. As long as the mother breast-feeds she is less likely to be fertile. This is a natural contraceptive. But if a new infant is born it will starve to death, because the older sibling would drink most of the milk, especially if it is a female infant.
Male children grow up to be hunters and worrier's. Female children although inferior (according to the Yanomamo) are valuable objects of trade and political alliances. A confusing aspect of the Yanomamo marriages is, even though polygamy is freely practiced so is monogamy but only for the women. Adultery, just like in American culture, is inexcusable to the Yanomamo. In this topic similarities make a breakthrough in both cultures. If relationship between an American woman and an American man goes putrescent and the woman becomes promiscuous violence is only expected by the man.
The problem is assault and battery charges can get you into a lot of trouble, not to mention how much you would have to pay a lawyer. But Yanomamo mean get away with their violent retaliation for being disrespected because again there are no laws protecting Yanomamo women not that American women are always protected by the law, its just a myth. The Yanomamo warfare is commonly motivated by revenge. Because the lack of women many villagers raid on another village abducting as many womens they possibly can. While abducting women they try and kill as many enemies as they can. When the village that was victimized has had some atonement and are prepared they seek out for revenge on the village that attacked them, sometimes procuring the women who were initially from their village.
In Anthropological Theory: An introductory History there are two contrasting examples of the roles men and women play in different cultures. Following this introduction the thesis is given that the roles will never be clearly defined as long as examples from other cultures are used in the argument. Articles from section Postmodernism and Its Critics site examples about how men are the dominant sex because they are the hunters and provide the resources. Several examples of tribes are given to support his hypothesis that as long as men provide the resources than they will have the upper hand and in this context the best example is Yanomamo tribe. Moreover, in Anthropological Theory: An introductory History it is possible to find lots of information that opposes Chagnon's understanding of Yanomamo culture together with information that discredits Chagnon's professionalism in his field of work. The authors of the articles believe that women continue to gain positions in roles that allow them to provide the resources than they will be able to make demands to change the sex roles.
Controversy has surrounded Chagnon for years. Much of it is driven by pettiness: less successful anthropologists envy the influence Chagnon wields. They are offended, too, by the hard-headed, scientific approach he takes into the field, and they harbor ideological resentments for the way Chagnon has described the Yanomamo. Friedl makes the argument that to understand society and its sex roles one must not use example from the worlds cultures as Chagnon did. Friedl states that the differences, biologically speaking, can be clarified by looking at known examples of the earliest forms of human society and examining the relationship between social organization and social roles.
The anthropologist believes that the factors in a society that cause male dominance need to be researched because once these factors are understood than one can apply this knowledge to the constant changes in the sex roles due to the modern society. Patrick Tierney describes Chagnon as a fraud, and worse: a murderer who deliberately spread a measles epidemic among the Yanomamo tribe. Chagnon, according to Tierney and his allies, consciously destroyed thousands of lives. The charges are astonishing, and they have been reported virtually everywhere, often without skepticism.
Chagnon is the target of one of the greatest smear campaigns ever waged against a scholar. One of Tierney's more startling revelations is that the whole Yanomamo project was an outgrowth and continuation of the Atomic Energy Commissions secret program of experiments on human subjects. James Neel, the originator and director of the project, was part of the medical and genetic research team attached to the Atomic Energy Commission since the days of the Manhattan Project. He was a member of the small group of researchers responsible for studying the effects of radiation on human subjects. Tierney presents convincing evidence that Neel and Chagnon, on their trip to the Yanomamo in 1968, greatly exacerbated, and probably started, the epidemic of measles that killed many Yanomamo men and women. The epidemic appears to have been caused, or at least worsened and more widely spread, by a campaign of vaccination carried out by the research team, which used a virulent vaccine (Edmonson B) that had been counter-indicated by medical experts for use on isolated populations with no prior exposure to measles.
It was known to produce effects virtually indistinguishable from the disease of measles itself. Medical experts, when informed that Neel and his group used the vaccine in question on the Yanomamo, typically refuse to believe it at first, and then say that it is incredible that they could have done it, and are at a loss to explain why they would have chosen such an inappropriate and dangerous vaccine. There is no record that Neel and Chagnon sought any medical advice before applying the vaccine. He never informed the appropriate organs of the Venezuelan government that his group was planning to carry out a vaccination campaign, as he was legally required to do. Neither he nor any other member of the expedition, including Chagnon and the other anthropologists, has ever explained why that vaccine was used, despite the evidence that it actually caused or at a minimum greatly exacerbated the fatal epidemic. In one survey, Chagnon estimated that a quarter of adult Yanomamo men die at the hands of other Yanomamo.
He also reported data showing that Yanomamo men who kill produce more offspring than those who do not. In other words, killers have greater reproductive success than non-killers. For sociobiologists like Chagnon who believe human behavior and culture are the result of natural selection it is a very important discovery. For many anthropologists, however, sociobiology's genes-to-culture pipeline is a gentrified form of racism, and Chagnon is their enemy. Chagnon's greatest opponent may not be Tierney, but Terence Turner, a Cornell University anthropologist who has also studied Amazonian's. Turner Believed that sociobiology is an unable and logically indefensible reductionism.
Furthermore, according to Tierney, Chagnon's pronouncements about the intrinsic violence of the Yanomamo have actively hurt them. Turner believes that politicians and businessmen who want to exploit the Yanomamo homelands for their rich gold deposits use Chagnon's work to demonize the tribe for standing in their way. Chagnon will continue to be a controversial figure, only because he is a sociobiologist. If the Yanomamo are an authentic glimpse at what human prehistory might have looked like, of course, Tierney's theory is dead wrong and Chagnon's empirical observations provide evidence for it. While cultural anthropologists had been willing to excuse Neel's work from the early seventies because he was not one of thema geneticist dabbling far a field Chagnons work struck long after the lines in the sociobiology debate had been drawn. Chagnon, so far as most anthropologists were concerned, had come out on the wrong side, espousing a genetic determinism at odds with postmodern notions of the primacy of culture and environment.
Attitudes in anthropology have changed significantly, since the late sixties, but Chagnon has not changed with them, while anthropologists were concerned with native peoples rights, Marxist analysis, and other nontraditional approaches blaming Chagnon for his beliefs. Chagnon was a throwback to an earlier area and, with his popularity, a black eye on the new, sensitive face of the discipline. Bibliography: Jon R. McGee and Richard L. Warms. Anthropological theory: An introductory history, 2 nd Ed.
Mountain View: Mayfield Press. Angeloni, Elvio. Annual Editions, 25 th Edition. Elvio Angeloni Ed. McGraw Hill, 2002
Free research essays on topics related to: men and women, cultural anthropologists, atomic energy, medical experts, cultural anthropology
Research essay sample on Men And Women Cultural Anthropologists
