Although Darkness In El Dorado made Patrick Tierney look like an extremely adventurous but scholarly investigative reporter, in fact Tierney had no apparent training or employment history in anthropology or journalism. His first book, The Highest Altar, had purported to reveal ongoing human sacrifice in the Andes. No one in the scholarly world appeared to take that book all that seriously. But Darkness in El Dorado was a very different sort of book, absolutely crammed with impressive-looking footnotes—so many that the book looked like a masterwork of objective scholarship.
When she interviewed Tierney about Darkness in El Dorado in late 2000 for Chicago Public Radio, Victoria Lautman made specific mention of Tierney’s apparent documentation of his claims:
There are 60 pages just of footnotes supporting Tierney’s incendiary main point[s], namely that the Brazilian Yanomamö Indians were hideously exploited, that a lethal 1968 measles epidemic was spread by a dangerous vaccine, that the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission used the Yanomamö as a control group without their knowledge, and, most important, that all of these shocking abuses were perpetuated by two of the most famous and respected members of the anthropological community [sic].
As I looked back at all the positive media attention and praise the book got—it had even been named a finalist for a National Book Award—there could be no question this had resulted from readers assuming the footnotes were real. The truth was that plenty of them had simply not checked out. I knew this from reviewing the work of previous scholars who had looked, but I also was finding still more examples on my own.
For instance, as I went over the Darkness chapter on the 1968 epidemic, I came across this line: “The vaccinators were Napoleon Chagnon and a respected Venezuelan doctor named Marcel Roche.” Chagnon had told me repeatedly that he had not vaccinated anyone during the epidemic. This point mattered a lot to him, because Tierney’s New Yorker article included a story of a man whose child had allegedly died following a vaccination from Chagnon. Chagnon was understandably distraught at the implication that he had killed a Yanomamö child. So I looked at Tierney’s citation for the claim that Chagnon and Roche had been vaccinating and was rather stunned to see that Tierney seemed, by the citation, to be attributing this information to an article Chagnon had coauthored in 1970. How could Chagnon tell me he didn’t vaccinate anyone during the epidemic when his own coauthored article said that he did?
I wasn’t looking forward to having to confront the scarred and forceful Chagnon with that question, but I knew I had to. So I pulled the 1970 article and went to page 421, as Tierney’s citation indicated I should. Nowhere on the page did it name any vaccinator. Confused, I went through the rest of the article. Nowhere in the article was a single vaccinator named. Tierney’s citation was full of gas.
As I moved through what would become a year of research and about forty interviews for this project, a clear pattern of misrepresentation emerged. Even people who had been relatively aligned with Tierney were now admitting to me that he had played fast and loose with the truth. I called to interview Brian Ferguson, an anthropologist at Rutgers who had written Yanomami Warfare, a book highly critical of Chagnon. In the book, Ferguson argues that the introduction of large amounts of Western trade goods by researchers and missionaries contributed to Yanomamö conflict that Chagnon often blamed on sexual tensions. Ferguson told me that when the New Yorker fact checkers called him,
everything was fine except one passage where Tierney has me saying something to the effect of “missions could be disruptive but according to Ferguson they are less so than Chagnon was,” downplaying the impact of the missions. I said, no I didn’t say that, and I don’t believe that to be true. I think [the missions] were very disruptive in the period I’m talking about. . . . I said that’s not what I said. And I got a call from Patrick Tierney and he got quite angry about it and said that I was backing down and that I was making a political move here and that he had me on tape saying what he said I said. And I said you’d better get that tape ready, because that’s not what I said.
Another strike against Tierney came from a woman with whom he’d apparently had a close friendship in South America, a woman named Lêda Martins, now an anthropologist at Pitzer College in California. Before going into anthropology, Martins had been a journalist and human rights worker, and she had long shared Tierney’s concern for the indigenous peoples in Venezuela and Brazil. In the acknowledgments to Darkness, Tierney said he was “especially indebted” to Martins, adding, “Leda’s dossier on Napoleon Chagnon was an important resource for my research.” I knew this dossier to be very important—Chagnon was practically obsessed with it—because it contained many of the misrepresentations of Darkness yet predated the book by years. Indeed, the copy of the dossier that Chagnon had obtained and given to me read almost like a draft book proposal for Darkness in El Dorado. The dossier had been used in various ways, but mostly to try to get Chagnon’s research permits denied. It was probably largely responsible for forcing an unwanted end to his fieldwork.
So, in his book’s acknowledgment, Tierney basically was saying that Martins had established many of the most damning charges against Chagnon. Martins’s charges against Chagnon would then constitute the basis for what Tierney would have followed up. I pressed Martins for a copy of the dossier as she had it; I wanted to know if it was the same as the one Chagnon had gotten his hands on. Eventually, when I went to meet her in person while I was in Southern California, she handed me a copy. It turned out to match Chagnon’s copy. But at that time, she also confessed something key, something she later, at my request, confirmed in an e-mail. She was not the author of the dossier. In fact, Martins told me:
Patrick Tierney wrote the Chagnon dossier and I translated [it] to Portuguese. . . . I presented the dossier to Brazilian authorities (Funai employees) and human rights advocates who were looking for information on Chagnon who was seeking permission to go inside the Yanomami Territory in Brazil. I was the one who circulated the dossier in Brazil because people knew and trusted me. I trusted Patrick and did not check his references. (I can only hope whatever is left of my friendship with Patrick will survive the truth, but . . . he should not have said that.)
So the truth was that Tierney himself had written the charges he attributed to Martins, and Martins, presuming them to be true, had used them against Chagnon. This meant that Tierney had been working to spoil Chagnon’s reputation and his ability to do fieldwork in the Amazon many years before Darkness in El Dorado.
~~Galileo’s Middle Finger: Heretics, Activists, And The Search For Justice In Science -by- Alice Dreger
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