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The American Anthropological Association's investigation of the charges in Darkness in El Dorado (Tierney 2000) found that the late James Neel and Napoleon Chagnon harmed the Yanomami in the course of their research in Venezuela and Brazil, and that Chagnon had violated the ethics code of the association. The association's inquiry contravened its own policy prohibiting ethics adjudications and was structured not by the standards of an objective investigation but by aspects of contemporary anthropology. Moralized approaches to information and postmodern rejection of objectivity mark the language and methods of the inquiry. The investigating task force did not observe reasonable standards of evidence, the targets of the investigation were not represented, and task force members were compromised by conflicts of interest. The investigation and its collateral activities reflect a culture of accusation and an anthropology uncertain of its ethical or scientific stature.
[Keywords: ethics, theory, postmodernism, American Anthropological Association, Yanomami]
IN MAY 2002, the American Anthropological Association (hereafter, AAA; 2002a, 2002b) issued a formal report, El Dorado Task Force Papers: Submitted to the Executive Board as a Final Report (2 vols.; hereafter, Report), on its investigation of the charges associated with Patrick Tierney's book, Darkness in El Dorado (2000). Tierney, and others who amplified his claims, charged James Neel and Napoleon Chagnon with professional misconduct during fieldwork in the 1960s among the Yanomami Indians of Venezuela and Brazil-including accusations that Neel and Chagnon had started a measles epidemic, falsified data, and incited the villagers to make war.1 The allegations made international headlines and precipitated investigations by other academic societies. The AAA report represented a major investment of resources. A specially commissioned task force, with a budget of $25,000 (AAA 2001a), spent more than a year on the project, traveled to Venezuela and Brazil to interview the Yanomami, and eventually published a two-volume report in May of 2002.
The Report was a watershed event in the history of U.S. anthropology, with implications for the discipline and the conduct of fieldwork. It was, in its authors' words, "unprecedented" (AAA 2002a:8-9). Our examination of the investigation is an effort to understand what happened and to situate it within the context of contemporary anthropology. We argue that the investigation emerged from a long tradition of moral concern...