Boffins behaving badly By Peter Monaghan
The Australian, June 30, 2010
ANTHROPOLOGY'S two most bitter punch-ups of the past 30 years have undergone a genetic mutation.
AN attempt to debunk a famous researcher's work sparked each dispute: in one case, Margaret Mead; in the other, Amazon specialist Napoleon Chagnon, the discipline's leading proponent of innate human aggressiveness.
Through all the dust, each to-do reduces to the age-old stand-off over the merits of cultural anthropology and sociobiology, two branches of the discipline that have made large claims on explaining why humans do what they do.
The tangle is about nurture and nature, and it is as old as the social sciences. Its core question is: to what degree are human behaviours the outcomes of two broad categories: biology - genetics, hormones, lately neurobiology - and culture? What percentage is genetic, what percentage cultural? In the Mead and Chagnon disputes, endless charge and countercharge has been heaped on that reductive opposition.
A little history: beginning in 1983 in Margaret Mead and Samoa: The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth, and in additional instalments over the next 20 years, Australian National University anthropologist Derek Freeman disparaged the early, pivotal research of Mead.
Her bold thesis, set out in her 1928 Coming of Age in Samoa: A Psychological Investigation of Primitive Youth for Western Civilisation, was that teenage life in Samoa demonstrated the huge influence of culture in human behaviour.
She noted that while puberty is a human universal, Samoans do not experience it the way, say, Americans do. She asked: what other than culture could explain that difference?
Her claim that Samoan teenagers delayed marriage in favour of guilt-free sex greatly contributed to her academic stature and later celebrity. It also was credited with loosening the sexual uptightness of middle America.
Freeman, a Samoa-fieldwork veteran, claimed that Mead had misconstrued Samoan adolescence; that she was so ideologically driven a cultural determinist, she absolutely denied biological influences on human behaviour; and her legacy was fraudulent. Among cultural anthropologists, uproar followed.
Freeman fanned the flames in the 1990s, then in The Fateful Hoaxing of Margaret Mead claimed he had proof that two key Samoan informants had conned Mead by telling her tall tales about their sex lives to repay her for being nosy.
For this claim, Freeman depended on filmed testimony by an elderly Samoan woman, Fa'apua'a Fa'amu. But now, in The Trashing of Margaret Mead: Anatomy of an Anthropological Controversy, a veteran participant-observer of the Mead encounter, University of Colorado anthropologist Paul Shankman, establishes that Freeman painstakingly directed and distorted Fa'apua'a's testimony.
Worse, Shankman claims Freeman hid Fa'apua'a's confusions and contradictions from other scholars and deceived himself by ignoring his own doubts about her denials of night-time trysts and premarital births. Far from being a smoking gun, the Fa'apua'a interviews were smoke and mirrors, Shankman says. "Even now," he exclaims, "when I reread Freeman on Mead, he is so convincing that I find myself revisiting original sources once again to appreciate how cleverly he assembled his argument."
Shankman believes Freeman misrepresented the provocative, often grandiose Mead in part to exaggerate his own importance in Samoa studies and anthropology, and in part to agitate in both the nature-nurture debates that raged in the US from the 1960s, and the later, larger culture wars in which conservatives decried American permissiveness.
Shankman notes that Freeman came to fancy himself as an all-in-one messiah, heretic, and dragonslayer who had, in his own words, "staggered the establishment". He wore a St George Medal around his neck, and when Margaret Mead and Samoa appeared, boasted in his diary: "Now the matchless deed's achieved: determined, dared, and done."
Now Freeman is dead, Shankman can voice the rumours that surrounded Freeman in anthropological circles: he was delusional.
Shankman pieces together an account of Freeman's 1961 conversion-like crisis in Borneo, where he imagined that an American researcher and his Soviet-subversive wife were controlling him with faked tribal carvings fitted with pornographic uber-phalluses.
After psychiatric treatment, Freeman rationalised his breakdown as a cognitive abreaction to cultural anthropology.
But, at first, that did not lead him to embrace sociobiology and evolutionary psychology, which he mocked as ludicrous and void. Only when their advocates jumped on board his Mead-bashing bandwagon did he climb aboard theirs.
Egotistically, he laid claim to pioneering "interactionism", a study of the interplay of culture and biology that, writes Shankman, "seems so reasonable that it is hard to imagine why anthropologists did not think of it before Freeman. In fact, they did; it has been one of the cornerstones of American anthropology since its inception."
Ironically, Shankman shows, Mead was not only no absolute cultural determinist, as Freeman claimed, but in the 70s she was much more tolerant of sociobiology than he.
That, Shankman notes, makes perfect sense because, despite Freeman's agitation, no cultural anthropologist would disagree that sociobiology has its uses, if wielded with greater subtlety and moderation than Freeman could command.
Here the Freeman-Mead business draws near anthropology's other no-holds-barred bout, which began with claims that Chagnon, the dean of studies of the Yanomamo people of the Amazon basin, distorted his subjects in his famous portrayal of them as "the fierce people".
That was the subtitle of his pioneering 1968 study of the remote, highland-jungle tribe of about 22,500 people, their numbers dwindling with increased contact with outsiders. Chagnon found them as locked into blood revenge as certain families in Sicily, or Melbourne. Egged on by their hallucinogen-fuelled shamans, tribesmen fulfilled their gods' mandate to kill.
But Chagnon ascribed their actions to an innate hostility that also explained why men who killed most neighbours won most women and had more children. Thus, he reasoned, natural selection rewarded killing.
Many anthropologists branded Chagnon a neo-Darwinian who was bent, like Freeman, on seeing nothing but the biological through the sociobiological kaleidoscope. He howled at perceived enemies: missionaries, fellow ethnographers, government officials who at times barred him from Yanomamo land, tribal representatives whose bona fides he rubbished.
The dispute has two phases: pre and post-Tierney. Journalist Patrick Tierney's Darkness in El Dorado: How Scientists and Journalists Devastated the Amazon disparaged Chagnon and levelled charges of professional misconduct against him. When the book appeared, sparking rancour, it became easy to forget the dispute was, until then, about the same thing as the Freeman wrangle: how to apply responsibly sociobiology and kindred approaches.
After frequently visiting the tribe, Chagnon asserted what he wished to believe: that the Yanomamo were somehow so close to man's natural state (whatever the natural state of an evolving animal like man might be) that their bloodletting practices revealed universal biological imperatives.
The American anthropologist, as hubristic as Freeman, decried any criticism as a smear campaign and stood behind his accomplishments as "a real hard-nosed empirical scientist".
Colleagues contested his estimate of how many Yanomamo kill (44 per cent), saying he had greatly overestimated it by conflating the two meanings of a key Yanomamo term, unokai: those who have killed and those believed to have caused deaths by witchcraft.
Uncannily echoing Freeman, Chagnon branded his critics leftists infatuated with romantic ideals of gentle, noble savages, and who have an investment in the argument that human beings are no more or no less than a product of culture. The response in the US, where cultural anthropology flourished, was that Chagnon was exploiting the Yanomamo tragedy of imminent extinction for self-aggrandisement.
Things were ugly enough, then, even before 2000, when Tierney published Darkness in El Dorado. It accused Chagnon and another prominent ethnographer of fomenting disease and warfare among the Yanomamo. A string of panels asked, over a decade: did an early colleague of Chagnon's test a eugenicist theory by injecting tribespeople with a defective measles vaccine? Did Chagnon and others escalate violence among Yanomamo by trading modern goods, including weapons, for blood samples? Did Chagnon get tribesmen to stage fights, so he could film their fierceness to suit his sociobiological biases?
The National Academy of Sciences and the American Society of Human Genetics soon cleared Chagnon and his colleague, as did committees at their home institutions. Less decisively, a succession of American Anthropological Association panels have, over the last 10 years, differed over whether any of the charges are justified. Much of the disagreement, however, has seemed designed to protect the discipline.
Late last year, at the annual convention of the American Anthropological Association, one self-appointed judge of the Chagnon affair, Alice Domurat Dreger, a bioethicist who is writing a book about the dispute, sure to be breathless and indignant, drew plaudits and rebuttals by declaring that Tierney's book was ill-researched and the AAA investigations shoddy.
Tierney's gravest charges have come to appear overreaching, regardless of how much some Amazon researchers had long bandied them about. But by now the feuding has so soured Amazon research that scholars commonly refrain from discussing the Yanomamo controversy at conferences.
Another outcome of all the internecine bloodletting and chest-thumping has been that they have lost sight of the core scholarly issue, which remains: did Chagnon, like Derek Freeman, slide from a general, relatively obvious observation about the inextricable matrix of social and biological factors in animal behaviour to an aggressive, overreaching thesis? Did he indulge, in his writing as around research sites, the aggression that he claimed epitomised human behaviour and characterised the Yanomamo?
In the past two months, two codas have been attached to the whole sorry saga.
First, Brazilian documentary-maker Jose Padilha's Secrets of the Tribe has been doing film-festival rounds, presenting Amazon researchers' behaviour from the viewpoint of the Yanomamo. No prize for guessing who comes off looking ludicrous.
The film repeats Tierney's claims, even the excessive ones, as well as some scathing additional ones against a French ethnography (sexual improprieties involving trading for sex with young men).
Second, in April a Harvard biologist, E. O. Wilson, the leading light of sociobiology, published his first novel, a revealing one.
In Anthill, he tells of a young man, quite like himself, who grows up transfixed by ants and environmentalism, although he becomes not a biologist but an eco-friendly lawyer. In the middle of this human tale, Wilson inserts a riveting novella that portrays from ant-eye level the battles of colonies storming and savaging rival nests. Wilson has points to make: "This swarm attack, in which a crowd of fighters rush a formidable opponent simultaneously, was the same as used by wolves circling a moose, or infantrymen attacking an enemy firebase."
Repeatedly, he likens ants to humans. One recalls, then, that his landmark Sociobiology (1975) and On Human Nature (1978) analysed human behaviour from an evolutionary perspective. And that his many detractors branded as grossly reductionist such claims as that "genes hold culture on a leash".
In an interview, Wilson says he certainly intended in Anthill to liken ants to humans: "Their advanced social behaviour, their constant competition, group against group, has parallels in human behaviour. I did not distort the ant story or the human story in a way to get a deliberate and obvious match, but it emerged."
Some reviewers have pointed out that placing sociobiological comparisons like that in fictional settings can lay bare their weaknesses, their overreaching.
For instance, in the novella, a chance genetic mutation leads a colony of ants to form an unbridled supercolony that Wilson likens to humans ravaging ecosystems. In his fiction, he dispenses with the ant problem with a powerful blast of pesticide. New York Times reviewer Verlyn Klinkenborg asked what that meant: "That the human supercolony is the result of a chance genetic mutation? That we should be gassed?"
There are numerous similar unresolved issues of novel construction in Anthill. The book, writes Klinkenborg, "sets up an open-ended correlation between ant and human societies . . . that spins out of control".
Wilson has been found out by literary analysis. If Freeman and Chagnon had written novels, their limits as theorists would have been more obvious, too.
Peter Monaghan is an Australian higher education writer based in the US.
