Profile of Napoleon A. Chagnon.
نویسنده
چکیده
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. Chagnon’s exhaustive empirical study of the Yanomamö 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 Yanomamö 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.
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عنوان ژورنال:
- Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
دوره 111 47 شماره
صفحات -
تاریخ انتشار 2014