Profile of Napoleon A. Chagnon.

Abstract

Nearly 20 years after leaving the Amazon for the last time, Napoleon Chagnon is retracing his first steps into the jungle. The University of Missouri anthropologist and sociobiologist is archiving and documenting three decades of fieldwork in the Amazonian rainforest for deposition in a University of Michigan data center. Preparing his notes and transcribing more than 250 hours of tape recordings, with the help of a postdoctoral scholar, have transported Chagnon back to the height of his work on alliance and conflict in a tribal society. Listening to the tapes has given Chagnon a renewed perspective on the scope of his scientific accomplishments. “I didn’t know I knew so much!” he says. Napoleon Chagnon. Image courtesy of Chris Chagnon. Chagnon with pioneers of post-Darwinian evolutionary theory in Evanston, IL, circa 1981. Left to right: William D. Hamilton, Richard D. Alexander, Napoleon A. Chagnon, Sewall Wright, and George C. Williams. Chagnon’s exhaustive empirical study of the Yanomamo tribe in the Amazon rainforest commenced 50 years ago. Chagnon, elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2012, also explored how kinship and violence unified and divided these societies. He wove principles of statistics, ecology, and evolutionary biology into cultural anthropology in an effort to define the effect of violence on generations of Yanomamo families and villages. Chagnon’s growing archive will preserve for other researchers his experiences living among a previously uncontacted Amazon tribe, an opportunity few anthropologists may ever have again. Born in 1938, Chagnon grew up in rural Michigan as the second of 12 children. An avid hunter, Chagnon honed wilderness skills in his teens that would later prove valuable in remote Amazon villages. The launch of Sputnik in 1957 inspired Chagnon, then a recent high school graduate, to study science to aid his country’s progress in the nascent Space Race. …