Napoleon Chagnon

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Napoleon A. Chagnon (born 1938) is an American anthropologist and professor emeritus at the University of California at Santa Barbara.

Born in Port Austin, Michigan, he worked with ethnographic filmmaker, Tim Asch, in studying the Yanomamo people. Chagnon is the author of a well known ethnography, Yanomamö (Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1968), which is an account of his time in the 1960s living among and studying the Yanomami, an Indian people indigenous to the Amazonas region that spans the border of Venezuela and Brazil.

An image from the Yanomamo Series

Chagnon has done field work in their villages since the mid-1960s. One focus of his field work has been the genealogies of the members of the villages he has visited or lived in, which he used to understand both migration patterns and kinship and marriage rules.

Chagnon was also one of the early pioneers in the field of human behavioral ecology.

In 2000, journalist Patrick Tierney published a controversial book titled Darkness in El Dorado, which included interviews that called into question the ethics of significant aspects of Chagnon's field work (as well as Asch's work) and questioned the accuracy of his publications based on that work.

Most of the allegations made in Darkness in El Dorado were publicly refuted by the Provost's office of the University of Michigan in November 2000 [1].

The American Anthropological Association convened a task force in February 2001 to investigate some of the allegations made in Tierney's book. That report was issued by the AAA in May 2002. [2] In June 2005, however, the AAA voted over two-to-one to rescind the acceptance of the 2002 report [3], noting that "Although the Executive Board’s action will not, in all likelihood, end debate on ethical standards for anthropologists, it does seek to repair damage done to the integrity of the discipline in the El Dorado case."

[edit] Books

Yanomamö: The Fierce People, 1968
Yanomamo - The Last Days Of Eden, 1992
Adaptation and Human Behavior: An Anthropological Perspective (with Lee Cronk and William Irons), 2002

[edit] Filmography

The Yanomamo Series, in collaboration with Tim Asch, includes 22 separate films on the Yanomamo Culture, such as The Ax Fight (1975), Children's Magical Death (1974), Magical Death (1988), A Man Called Bee: A Study of the Yanomamo (1974), Yanomamo Of the Orinoco (1987).