Yanomami: The Fierce Controversy and What We Can Learn from It

Yanomami: The Fierce Controversy and What We Can Learn from It. Robert Borofsky. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. 372 pp.

The contribution of this book is both political and pedagogical. It is over 30 years since the Yanomamo of Napoleon Chagnon's ethnography became controversial within the academy: Combatants are immediately recognizable from their spelling of the name. Five years ago, the imminent publication of journalist Patrick Tierney's Darkness in El Dorado: How Scientists and Journalists Devastated the Amazon (2000) led concerned members of the American Anthropological Association to request that the actions of two of its members, Chagnon and medical anthropologist James Neel, be reviewed by the association's Ethics Committee.

Robert Borofsky's Yanomami is really two books in one. The political takes the form of an inflammatory response to matters raised in Darkness in El Dorado and the well-intentioned but misguided interventions of the AAA's Committee on Ethics. This is part of a programmed effort to expose the abuse of "the Yanamamo" among whom Chagnon and Neel worked and to mobilize professional intervention. The pedagogical is an impassioned book about widening discourse on the imbalances of power between anthropologists and the people among whom they work. The...