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Darkness in the Heart of Knowledge

(Current Anthropology, forthcoming)

Fernando Coronil

Departments of Anthropology and History

University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48019

Darkness in El Dorado. How Scientists and Journalists Devastated the Amazon. By Patrick
Tierney. W.W. Norton & Company, 2000. 417 pp. $27.95

Given the heated debates preceding its publication, the reception of Patrick Tierney's Darkness in
El Dorado risks becoming entangled in sterile academic battles about turfs and personalities. This
would be unfortunate, for the book offers a controversial account of the impact of Western
research on an indigenous population that should urge us to think hard about our work. Even
before its publication, Darkness in El Dorado became a Janus-like text that in calling attention to
methodological and ethical shortcomings of scientific research in the Amazon also brought
attention to faults in its own production. This should not obscure its contribution or make us
forget that the central issue in this drama, after all, should be the Yanomani. Far from worrying
about the possible discredit this book may bring to anthropology, we ought to welcome the
chance it offers to broaden its concern with the ethics and politics of knowledge production in the
West.

Under what conditions does one produce knowledge? Toward what ends does one produce
knowledge? How can one produce meaningful knowledge? I draw these questions from Susan
Sontag's reflections on her play Alice in Bed labout the life of Alice James. Alice, Sontag says,
finds it difficult to meet life's demands. How to respond to a beggar? "You can walk on, knowing
you can't change a beggar's life by giving him money. Or you can give everything you have. Or
you can give one warm coin. All three ways of acting seem wrong. Alice is constantly thinking
about the question, the great question: How does one live? How ought one to live? How can one
live better."

Tierney's harrowing account forces us to ask how personal and professional ethical questions are
defined and connected. His merit is to have brought together a vast amount of information about
Western anthropological and medical practices carried out among the Yanomani and to have
situated these practices within the network of institutional connections that made them possible
and the ideologies of science and history that have rendered them so popular. At the book's heart
is a two-stranded argument concerning the work among the Yanomami by the anthropologist
Napoleon Chagnon and the geneticist James Neel. One strand follows their involvement in a
complex set of medical practices centering on the collection of blood samples and a measles
vaccination campaign. The other traces Chagnon's spectacular career as the creator of the
Yanomami as anthropology's well known "fierce people." While Tierney's focus is on individuals,
his book places them in context: the Cold War and the Viet Nam War, during which currents of
evolutionary genetics, sociobiology and cultural anthropology claiming that aggression plays a
positive role in human evolution found broad support; and the Venezuelan petrostate culture of
clientelism, which fostered a network of corrupt politicians and businessmen with interests in the
Yanomami and their territory for reasons of profit and power. His discussion of these two strands
explains why the work of these and other scientists brought the Yanomami neither empowerment
or well being but fragmentation and destruction.

The first strand, which occupies less that one tenth of Tierney's text but which has received the
most public attention, argues that Neel and Chagnon collected blood samples for the Atomic
Energy Commission to compare mutation rates in populations contaminated by radiation with
those in one uncontaminated by it, and at the same time carried out an experiment about immunity
formation among an isolated population involving a measles vaccination program. According to
Tierney, although a safer and cheaper vaccine was already available, Neel chose the Edmonston B
vaccine because it produces antibodies that would allow for comparison of European and
Yanomami immune systems and prove the latter's ability to generate levels of antibodies similar
to those of populations previously exposed to the disease. Tierney's most controversial and
damaging charge is that these activities may have led to a deadly outbreak of measles. While
medical experts agreed that no vaccine could have caused an epidemic, it is still not sufficiently
clear why this outdated vaccine was chosen or what measures were taken to care for those
affected by its known reaction.

The book's second and more significant strand centers on Chagnon's anthropological work.
Tierney argues that Chagnon created the myth the Yanomami as the "fierce people" through his
own personal brand of physical and symbolic violence against them. On the basis of extensive
research, Tierney claims that Chagnon used his power and material resources to obtain
information, often through bribes and coercion, about personal names and genealogies (which are
taboo to reveal), created divisions by distributing valuable goods among different factions,
promoted warfare for film performances, and misrepresented the Yanomami as an extraordinarily
violent people. In numerous publications respected scholars (including Albert, da Cunha,
Ferguson, Good, Jiménez and Ramos) have long criticized Chagnon's practices, data, and
essentialist and ahistorical arguments about such issues as Yanamomi violence and its
reproductive value. Scholars and activists in Venezuela and Brazil have argued that while
Chagnon is entitled to have his views and is not responsible for the use others make of them, he is
accountable for not having spoken against those who use his images to legitimize protecting "the
Yanomami against themselves" by taking their territories and undermining their autonomy.
Tierney reports that after Chagnon was barred from Yanomami territory by Venezuelan
authorities he sought access to the this region through an unholy alliance with two high-profile
Venezuelans: Cecilia Matos, the mistress of then President, Carlos Andrés Pérez, who was
impeached for corruption, and Charles Brewer Carías, an ex-Minister of Youth turned mining
entrepreneur. Had there not been a massive public uproar in Venezuela protesting their plan, they
might have been able to establish a private biosphere in Yanomami territory, a sort of scientific
hacienda where they would have had control over people and resources. This rejection by
academic and political authorities in Venezuela had limited impact on the reception of Chagnon's
work in the United States.

While the market value of Tierney's book undoubtedly comes from the sensational marriage of
these two strands, its intellectual value has already suffered from their unfortunate union. As with
marriages, one may speculate whether its partners were brought together by bonds of conviction
or of convenience. One may also wonder about the discrepancy between the rush to judgement
that made possible the book's most marketable claim about the measles epidemic and the much
more carefully supported discussion about Chagnon's work. The book's scholarly value may also
be undermined by Tierney's propensity to explain social effects in terms of personal intentions
and to personalize structural relations. This has already provoked defensive reactions that risk
turning substantive discussions into proclamations about the intentions or integrity of individual
scientists. A flurry of statements from prestigious institutions about Neel's personal and scholarly
integrity has already served to cast a protective shadow over Chagnon and his work. The simple
fact that even an outdated vaccine cannot cause a measles epidemic has led some to dismiss the
rather complex issues raised by the rest of the book. In the debate in the U.S., so focused on the
technical aspects of the epidemic, the concerns and information of scholars from Brazil and
Venezuela about Chagnon's work are fundamentally absent.

The controversy surrounding this book makes evident that in matters of knowledge, as in real
estate, location is decisive. Most of the information Tierney presents has long been public
knowledge in Venezuela and Brazil, and has circulated within U.S. academic circles. Yet
Tierney's book, by bringing this information together and by presenting it in the U.S. through a
major commercial press, has shaken academic circles in this country and public opinion in
Venezuela and Brazil. In Venezuela the government has already decided to create a high level
investigative commission whose work may have more than ornamental effects, given President
Chavez's mandate to combat past corruption. There are also signs that in the U.S. this debate may
evolve into a serious engagement with the politics of knowledge that acknowledges the special
responsibility of those who work in a center of power that has profound impact on the rest of the
world.

Like Sontag's Alice, we are constantly confronted with social suffering. When Jesús Cardozo, a
Venezuelan anthropology student doing fieldwork in a Yanomami village under the direction of
Chagnon, asked his adviser to bring medical help to an acutely ill Yanomami girl, Chagnon
reportedly replied that Cardozo would never be a scientist. "A scientist doesn't think of such
things. A scientist just thinks of studying the people...We didn't come to save the Indians. We
came to study them" (quoted by Tierney, 184). Though Chagnon refused this aid, he offered
goods in exchange for information in the pursuit of science. As scholars, even as we may aid in
particular situations, our privilege is to be able to respond to social suffering by producing
knowledge that shows that isolated acts of assistance cannot undo the structures of domination
that produce it. Our gift, our responsibility, is to work to produce forms of understanding that
make intolerable the conditions that maintain injustice in any form, including our use of the
privilege of science itself.

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