They were here as part of the Anthropological Exchange Program. It’s a reciprocal arrangement, they explained. Whenever the United States sends an anthropologist to the Amazon basin to study tribal habits, a tribesman from that region must be assigned to study the foraging, mating, and culinary habits of the American family.
The exchange program had come about as a result of the furor created by the recent publication of Patrick Tierney’s book, Darkness in Eldorado: How Scientists and Journalists Devastated the Amazon, in which Tierney accuses the anthropologist Napoleon Chignon and the geneticist James Neel of absolutely fiendish treatment of the Yanomami, some of it worthy of Josef Mengele.
Over the last thirty years Neel and Chagnon have done their best to turn the Yanomami into the world’s largest private reserve, a 6,000 square mile research station and biosphere where they could perform their monstrous eugenic and neo-Darwinian experiments.
They are accused, among other things, of getting doctors from the Atomic Energy Commission to inject radioactive tracers into the tribesmen, provoking and staging artificial wars, colluding with gold-rush entrepreneurs to desecrate their habitat, conspiring to turn the area into a Survivor-type Primitive Tribe tourist resort, forcing them to break their taboo against speaking the names of the dead, and willfully injecting an obsolete and dangerous measles vaccine into members of the immunologically vulnerable Yanomamis resulting in a genocidal outbreak.
This last proved to be untrue—not because they didn’t inject the Yanomami with the vaccine—they did—but because no measles vaccine has ever caused an epidemic. If this sounds to you like the makings of a Hollywood movie with James Woods as Chagnon, Gene Hackman as Neel, and Jennifer Lopez as the investigative reporter, hang in there, it's in the works.
By painting the Yanomami, "the last major primitive tribe anywhere on earth," as the most violent people on the planet, this diabolical duo set out to prove that natural selection favored selfish, deceitful, and murderous behavior. But the selfish, deceitful, and murderous behavior turns out to be among the anthropologists themselves. There is no more ruthless and vicious group of academics to be found—internecine warfare being their customary state.
In recent years the once acclaimed anthropologists Margaret Mead and Colin Turnbull have been ritually slaughtered and ceremonially consumed at the annual tribal feasts of the American Anthropological Society. Just as Mead’s researches about Samoan sexual practices and child-rearing lead to policy changes in the U.S., Chagnon hoped to show that his violent Yanomami (one of Chagnon’s books about them is titled The Fierce People) proved that we’re just plain bad—violent, ruthless, and homicidal by nature—and no amount of legislation by bleeding heart liberals is ever going to change us.
Yanomami Bob and Waru William weren’t all that upset about being called stone-cold killers. They didn't mind a bit—in fact, they kinda liked the rep of being the baddest dudes in the wood. The thing that really pissed them off was Amazon.com.
"Why take our river name?" Waru Will wanted to know. "What Amazon river have to do with book?"
"River of shit!" said Yanomami Bob. "Fuck-pig cyber-sitter!"
I asked my guests what they thought of the brouhaha caused by the Tierney book.
"Ogpi fart in stream and chu-chu bird hear music of the spheres," said Waru Will. Of the two, he was the poet.
"Anthro war! Hoo-hoo-hoo!" yelped Yanomami Bob. "I fry their balls, eat them with a fine papaya wine."
We were approaching an unsavory topic. I felt it was time to change the subject. "Well," I said, "it's only right, isn't it, after all these years of us studying you, that you should get to study us. Now you get to be anthropologists in our country."
"Hey, Fart-in-the wind, who you calling anthro? Your mother sleep with anthro for American Airline nut pack."
"Anthro bad word in Yanomami," Waru Will explained. "In Yanomami it mean deeply disturbed subhuman idiot with clipboard."
"Huitaru!" Yanomami Bob shrieked. "The one who is shit."
"So, you’re here to...?"
"Do major field study. Correlate data." They found this hilarious.
"We make list, take big notes. We ask impudent questions, you have to answer. That anthro game, no?"
"Yes, I suppose that's one way of looking at the anthropological discipline," I said.
"Good, we start. Your woman, she caliente chica or gorda mama?"
"What?"
"Co-habit with hot babe slut who wears edible panties or big, fat married squaw wear size 10 bloomers?"
"These are the only two choices?"
"Everything in world either P or Not P, according to the honorable Eric," Waru Will explained. He referred me to Leach 1965A, Journal of Binary Obsessions. "You know, hot/cold, day/night, Republican/Democrat, straight/gay, cooked/raw, innies/outties...."
Ever since the structural anthropologist Claude Lévi-Srauss had visited the Yanomami in the early ’40s, they'd never got over the binary thing.
"So, Subject 4JF, how many times a week you make pok-pok with wife?"
"Now look here."
"Ah, forgive anxious curiosity of humble Yanomami Bob. This strictly for ethnographic data base." At this they laughed till they fell on the ground.
"Not to worry," Waru Will assured me. "Report only be seen in American Journal of Anthropology. Stupid book nobody read but post-graduate eunuch class."
"Okay, let us continue with statement of Subject 4JF. When last time make pok-pok?"
"Oh, c'mon, man, really."
"You ask us such things, we ask you, okay?"
"Oh, alright. Let's see, my son has guitar lessons on Thursday afternoons, so it would be February 8."
"Hippie subject 4FJ fuck only on night of full moon."
"Wait a minute, that's a bit of a rash assumption, isn't it?"
"Subjective response from subject. Dismiss entry." (More laughter).
"Oke-dokey, we move on to next research."
"Use Charmin or Scott 1000 Sheet Softest Ever to wipe bum?"
"Excuse me?"
"Maybe he use plantain leaf."
"I fail to see what my bathroom tissue has to do with research of any kind."
"Artifact selection crucial in determining the social hierarchy among non-exogamous populations."
"Ah, yes, I see the joke, fellahs." I was trying to get in the spirit of the thing.
"You are farmer man, yes, or hunter gatherer?"
"I know this type guy, type guy who sink ancestral turnip into great terrestrial vulva of cornfield," suggested Yanomami Bob.
"Not exactly."
"What do, then?"
"I’m a writer, actually."
"Aiieeeeeeee!" they howled in horror. "We in house of mad-dog anthro and don't know it."
They threw some white powder and chicken blood on my door post and ran down the hill in terror chanting "Shimmy, Shimmy, Cocoa Bop" till they were out of sight.
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