Yanomamo: The Fierce People

Napoleon Chagnon (1938–2019) was a renowned and controversial American cultural anthropologist. He was born in Michigan as the second of 12 children and began studying physics in 1957 at the Michigan College of Mining and Technology in 1957. He transferred to Anthropology at the University of Michigan. He earned his bachelor’s degree in 1961 and his doctorate in 1966. His thesis focused on the kinship and the social organization of the Yanomami, based on fieldwork begun in 1964. The research that he began at this point would later be used in his most famous work, Yanomamö: The Fierce People, which became a best-selling and widely used anthropological text. His career included teaching at the University of Michigan, Penn State University, Northwestern University, University of California Santa Barbara, and the University of Missouri.

He is most well-known for his ethnographic fieldwork among the Yanomami. He worked with them in Venezuela from the 1960s to the 1990s, and his research involved collecting genealogies and studying marriage patterns, cooperation, and settlement history. Chagnon believed that there was a connection between male reproductive success and the amount of violence present in Yanomami society; he therefore applied a sociobiological approach to his research. He also collaborated with ethnographic filmmaker Tim Asch to produce films documenting Yanomami life.