Napoleon A. Chagnon > Quotes

“Break the wrist, walk away.”
― Napoleon A. Chagnon

“Many Yanomamo women bear horrible scars from injuries inflicted on them by their husbands... In one [incident] that was particularly revolting a man bludgeoned his philandering wife with a piece of heavy firewood, delivering many sickening blows to her head and face. Even after she was lying unconscious on the ground with blood streaming from her ears, nose, and scalp, he continued to bash her with potentially fatal blows while all in the village ignored the scene. Her head bounced off the ground with each ruthless blow, as if he were pounding a soccer ball with a baseball bat. The head-man and I intervened at that point-he was killing her. I later sewed up her wounds after getting permission to do so from her still violently angry husband”
― Napoleon A. Chagnon, Noble Savages: My Life Among Two Dangerous Tribes - the Yanomamo and the Anthropologists

“It is appalling how complicated it can be to make oatmeal in the jungle. First, I had to make two trips to the river to haul the water, Next, I had to prime my kerosene stove with alcohol to get it burning, a tricky procedure when you are trying to mix powdered milk and fill a coffee pot at the same time. The alcohol prime always burned out before I could turn the kerosene on, and I would have to start all over. Or, I would turn the kerosene on, optimistically hoping that the Coleman element was still hot enough to vaporize the fuel, and start a small fire in my palm-thatched hut as the liquid kerosene squirted all over the table and walls and then ignited. Many amused Yanomamo onlookers quickly learned the English phrase “Oh, shit!” and, once they discovered that the phrase offended and irritated the missionaries, they used it as often as they could in their presence.”
― Napoleon A. Chagnon, The Yanomamö

“The tokens of wealth that we civilized people covet are largely irrelevant to success and survival in the tribal world and were irrelevant during most of human history. But women have always been the most valuable single resource that men fight for and defend.”
― Napoleon A. Chagnon, Noble Savages: My Life Among Two Dangerous Tribes - the Yanomamo and the Anthropologists

“[There is a] widespread biophobia built into cultural anthropological theory, which results in deep suspicion and contempt for biological ideas. This peculiar contradiction has been characteristic of anthropology for over a century. For example, many undergraduate textbooks in introductory cultural anthropology go to considerable lengths in their discussions of kinship to emphasize the "nonbiological" dimensions of it”
― Napoleon A. Chagnon, Noble Savages: My Life Among Two Dangerous Tribes - the Yanomamo and the Anthropologists

“[R]ecent emphasis in the social sciences on wealth and control of scarce, strategic material resources in the political evolution of Homo sapiens applies only to the most recent era of human history, perhaps only the last eight thousand or so years. Indeed, the whole purpose and design of the social structures of tribesmen seems to have revolved around effectively controlling sexual access by males to nubile, reproductive-age females: the purpose or function of 'social organization' among tribesmen (and many nonhuman animals) seems to have been the efficient regulation of sexual access to females by males and the role that male coalitions play in this process.”
― Napoleon A. Chagnon, Noble Savages: My Life Among Two Dangerous Tribes - the Yanomamo and the Anthropologists

“Marxist social science... dominated most departments of anthropology in the 1960s, especially those departments that were considered to be "scientific." For reasons I've never understood, "science" and "Marxism" were linked together. One implied the other because, I suppose, both were materialistic and involved a logic of cause and effect, which I understood and accepted. What I didn't accept was the subtle "Marxist" message that academics who found cause-and-effect important in science also had to actively advocate a social agenda of egalitarianism or socialism.”
― Napoleon A. Chagnon, Noble Savages: My Life Among Two Dangerous Tribes - the Yanomamo and the Anthropologists

“The students were fascinated. After my lecture Diomond thanked me for my presentation in front of her class. But, as we walked back to the Anthropology Department, she cautioned me: "You shouldn't say things like that. People will get the wrong impression." When I asked her what she meant, she added: 'About warfare. We shouldn't say that native people have warfare and kill each other. People will get the wrong impression.”
― Napoleon A. Chagnon, Noble Savages: My Life Among Two Dangerous Tribes - the Yanomamo and the Anthropologists

“[A]nthropology is more like a religion. Indeed, the organizational and intellectual structure of a large fraction of cultural anthropology is best understood if viewed as an academic fraternity that intimidates and suppresses dissent, usually by declaring that the dissenter is guilty of conduct that is unethical, immoral-or Darwinian... Many cultural anthropologists today are afraid to make even timid challenges to this authority and are very careful to describe their findings in cautiously chosen words”
― Napoleon A. Chagnon, Noble Savages: My Life Among Two Dangerous Tribes - the Yanomamo and the Anthropologists

“The archaeological record reveals abundant evidence that fighting and warfare were common prior to the origin of the political state and, in much of the Americas, prior to the coming of Europeans. Females appear to have been prized booty in those cases where large numbers of skeletons-victims of massacres-have been found together.”
― Napoleon A. Chagnon, Noble Savages: My Life Among Two Dangerous Tribes - the Yanomamo and the Anthropologists

“Many men acquire a reputation for being waiteri, fierce. But someone who is unokai has demonstrated his willingness to inflict lethal harm on an opponent and to actually behave in an ultimately fierce manner. Publicly and socially, such men can be extremely placid and calm in their outward demeanor, and even very pleasant and charming. By contrast, many men who are not unokais seem to be compelled to behave in such a way as to imply that they are killers of men. Such men can be very obnoxious and unpleasant in their public lives-ordering people around, intimidating them, threatening to hit them with their machetes or axes, even threatening to kill them. But if an unokai threatens to strike or to kill someone, he usually means what he says.”
― Napoleon A. Chagnon, Noble Savages: My Life Among Two Dangerous Tribes - the Yanomamo and the Anthropologists

“[W]ith increasing conflict and population growth, smaller communities were forced to amalgamate into fewer but larger communities for self-defense, a process that eventually culminated in the appearance of yet larger complex societies called chiefdoms, characterized by formal chiefs, hereditary rank, the appearance of specialized artisans, social classes, and the beginning of public works like temples and irrigation systems. Eventually one of the chiefdoms dominated the others by military conquest. Valley-wide political integration then took place: all outlying villages within the valley were now subordinate components in a larger political entity: the state was born.”
― Napoleon A. Chagnon, Noble Savages: My Life Among Two Dangerous Tribes - the Yanomamo and the Anthropologists

“I believe that patrilineal descent is far more common than matrilineal descent in the ethnographic record because warfare and intergroup conflict have been a chronic political condition in human history... [T]he more important advantage that patriliny confers on groups of males who are closely related... is that they tend to be able to cooperate more effectively and reliably in times of conflict... If anthropologists have learned anything from 150 years of studying tribesmen it is that closeness of kinship is a good predictor of social solidarity, cooperation, and amity.”
― Napoleon A. Chagnon, Noble Savages: My Life Among Two Dangerous Tribes - the Yanomamo and the Anthropologists

“The very notion that the external world had an existence independent of its observer was challenged. Moreover, the scientific view was usually said to be exploitative and designed to keep the poor, the disenfranchised, ethnic minorities, and women in subordinate social positions... Increasingly numbers of American cultural anthropologists-and many academics in other disciplines-began to view their role in the academy as one of advocacy of various causes”
― Napoleon A. Chagnon, Noble Savages: My Life Among Two Dangerous Tribes - the Yanomamo and the Anthropologists

“A small fraction of abducted women are taken by raiders who are at war. This is usually an unexpected 'bonus': the raiders go to kill male enemies and retreat for home before the victim's body, riddled with arrows, is even discovered. On their retreat the raiders sometimes come across a group of women... and if the risks seem low they will take one or more of them. Women abducted this way are usually gang-raped by the raiders en route home, and once reaching the home village, gang-raped by any and all willing males there, sometimes by visiting men from allied villages if any are present. The raping can go on for many days... Men from larger, more powerful villages-a group of hunters for example-will occasionally find a man and his wife in the jungle and, while some of them restrain the husband, the others rape her.”
― Napoleon A. Chagnon, Noble Savages: My Life Among Two Dangerous Tribes - the Yanomamo and the Anthropologists

“In a word, the schism in cultural anthropology is between those who do science and those whose exclusive goal is to speak on behalf of native peoples, an activity that they define as being incompatible with science. This latter view is not only wrong, it borders on irresponsibility.”
― Napoleon A. Chagnon, Noble Savages: My Life Among Two Dangerous Tribes - the Yanomamo and the Anthropologists

“Acquiring additional females of reproductive age has probably always been the most prized outcome of intergroup conflict in the long history of our species... Polygyny was relatively inexpensive for most of that history because acquiring the material ability to support extra wives or mates depended less on first obtaining wealth itself and more on the ability to manipulate male alliances that effectively deployed lethal violence and the threat of lethal violence to this end. Perhaps if we viewed the human ability to harness, control, and prudently deploy violence for reproductive advantage, we could consider this skill the most important of all strategic resources.”
― Napoleon A. Chagnon, Noble Savages: My Life Among Two Dangerous Tribes - the Yanomamo and the Anthropologists

“Many people are surprised to learn that some Yanomamo men often mistreat their wives-they beat them with pieces of firewood, shoot them with barbed arrows in a nonfatal part of their bodies, chop their arms and upper bodies with axes and machetes, press burning chunks of firewood against their bodies, and do other things that most of us would find revolting and vile... Yanomamo men are intensely jealous of their wives and always seem to be tracking them... The men seem to have the fatalistic view that an unguarded woman will invariably be seduced by some huya [young man] if left unattended for very long, and therefore the men assume the worst if their wives are out of sight and not with groups of other women.”
― Napoleon A. Chagnon, Noble Savages: My Life Among Two Dangerous Tribes - the Yanomamo and the Anthropologists

“The last bastions of resistance to evolutionary theory are organized religion and cultural anthropology.”
― Napoleon Chagnon