Napoleon Chagnon a contesté l'idée du "noble sauvage". Il est devenu l'anthropologue le plus contesté aux États-Unis.
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Among the hazards Napoleon Chagnon encountered in the Venezuelan jungle were a jaguar that would have mauled him had it not become confused by his mosquito net and a 15-foot anaconda that lunged from a stream over which he bent to drink. There were also hairy black spiders, rats that clambered up and down his hammock ropes and a trio of Yanomami tribesmen who tried to smash his skull with an ax while he slept. (The men abandoned their plan when they realized that Chagnon, a light sleeper, kept a loaded shotgun within arm’s reach.) These are impressive adversaries — “Indiana Jones had nothing on me,” is how Chagnon puts it —but by far his most tenacious foes have been members of his own profession.
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Aussi:
Steven Malanga
Welcome to the Jungle
Napoleon Chagnon’s study of human nature in the Amazon—and the academy
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The publication of Noble Savages, which Chagnon was writing and, apparently, rewriting for some 14 years, has further enhanced the author’s standing after his long battle to restore his reputation. But it has also opened old wounds and raised new worries about the decline of objectivity and the abandonment of truth-seeking in the social sciences. Chagnon concludes by citing the prediction of biologist Paul Gross (co-author of Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science) that “the barefoot anthropologists, the activists, will be teaching your children.” They’re teaching them now, Chagnon assures us.
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