Ethos, Pathos, and Logos in the Great Yanomami Controversy
David Depew, Communication Studies and POROI, The University
of Iowa
David Depew is Professor of Communication Studies
and is appointed half time in POROI. With Bruce Weber, he is
author of Darwinism Evolving: Systems Dynamics and the Genealogy
of Natural Selection (MIT Press, l994). He and Weber currently
have in press a collection on Evolution and Learning: The
Baldwin Effect Revisited (MIT Press). With Marjorie Grene,
he has just finished writing a History of the Philosophy
of Biology for Cambridge University Press. His interests
also run to ancient biology, philosophy, and rhetoric. He and
Takis Poulakos have in press a collection on Isocrates' Civic
Education. (Texas University Press). Depew also publishes
rhetorical criticism on such topics as creationism and the new
genetic technology.
Paper Description: In the Fall 2000, W. W.
Norton published a book entitled Darkness in El Dorado: How
Scientists and Journalists Devastated the Amazon. Its author
was a journalist named Patrick Tierney. Tierney charged a famous
anthropologist, Napolean Chagnon,and his geneticist mentor, James
Neel, with exposing the Yanomami, a tribal population with only
recent contacts with Europeans, to life-threatening measles in
order to test a eugenic hypothesis. The book created a sensation.
Since then the charge has been shown to be false. While there
is no excuse for not getting the facts right, I find the upshot
of this controversy somewhat unsatisfactory. It has left those
who advocate a sociobiological approach to anthropology in an
advantagous position that I do not believe to be fully justified.
In this paper, I review theoretical aspects of the Yanomami controversy
with the aim of putting back on the table issues that were badly
managed by Tierney and his allies within the ranks of professional
anthropologists.
The paper is my belated contribution
to a POROI graduate seminar I conducted two years ago, in which
the seminar members used the then-raging Yanomami controversy
as a way of exploring "comparative
disciplinary rhetorics," the title of the course. My debts
to the members of that seminar for digging up the dirt (and the
texts) on this issue are very large.
This is a first, and somewhat hasty,
draft. I need advice from the Rhetoric Seminar of several sorts.
First, how to fix holes in the argument and defects in its
presentation. Second, a shorter version of the paper is to
be given in a panel on "ethos
in scientific controversies" at the upcoming meetings of
the National Communication Association. What should be kept in,
taken out, or substituted for that presentation? Finally, I would
like advice about a good place to publish the paper, and how
it should be changed to fit the profile of the target journal.
I thank you in advance for your help. —DD
[Thursday, October 10, 2002; 7:30-9:30
pm; 204 Jefferson Building]
