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 ho 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.
