Noble savages revisited

[Valin]

Power Line

Scott Johnson

2/2013

 

At my number one daughter’s primary school in the 1990′s, study of the Yanamamo bushmen permeated the curriculum. By the time my daughter moved on from the school to seventh grade, I believe she “knew” (I think much of what she was taught isn’t true) more about the Yanamamo than she did about American history.

 

I should have been paying more attention, of course, but I had other battles to fight with the school. It turns out that the story behind the Yanamamo is fascinating and controversial. Napoleon Chagnon is the anthropologist who lived with the Yanamamo and popularized them in his 1968 study, Yanamamo: The Fierce People. Chagnon’s findings regarding the Yanamamo were of the politically incorrect variety, the foremost of which had to do with “the primacy of reproductive conflict,” as Charles Mann calls it in his compelling Wall Street Journal essay/review on Chagnon’s memoir, Noble Savages (which I have not read).

 

 

(Snip)

 

Elizabeth Povinelli is a professor of anthropology and gender studies at Columbia University. She is the author, most recently, of *Economies of Abandonment: Social Belonging and Endurance in Late Liberalism. She is the therefore the perfect vessel to provide the au courant takedown that Chagnon obviously requires. Povinielli’s review in this past Sunday’s New York Times Book Review provides a good sample of the seething hostility that Chagnon has aroused within the profession. By contrast, Nicholas Wade’s assessment of Chagnon’s lifework in the Science section of the Times yesterday is a model of sobriety and well worth reading.

 

 

 

* I think I'll wait for the Charlie Sheen Lady Gaga Movie.

[Pepper]

@Valin

"Elizabeth Povinelli is a professor of anthropology and gender studies"

 

When there were only 2 genders we didn't need much help, now we need professors to help us wade through the alphabet

[Valin]

@Valin

"Elizabeth Povinelli is a professor of anthropology and gender studies"

 

When there were only 2 genders we didn't need much help, now we need professors to help us wade through the alphabet

 

 

 

 

[Valin]

Napoleon Chagnon: Noble Savages

 

Listen to John J. Miller interview Napoleon Chagnon, author of Noble Savages: My Life Among Two Dangerous Tribes — the Yanomamo and the Anthropologists.