Title |
Darkness’s Descent on the American Anthropological Association
|
---|---|
Published in |
Human Nature, February 2011
|
DOI | 10.1007/s12110-011-9103-y |
Pubmed ID | |
Authors |
Alice Dreger |
Abstract |
In September 2000, the self-styled “anthropological journalist” Patrick Tierney began to make public his work claiming that the Yanomamö people of South America had been actively—indeed brutally—harmed by the sociobiological anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon and the geneticist-physician James Neel. Following a florid summary of Tierney’s claims by the anthropologists Terence Turner and Leslie Sponsel, the American Anthropological Association (AAA) saw fit to take Tierney’s claims seriously by conducting a major investigation into the matter. This paper focuses on the AAA’s problematic actions in this case but also provides previously unpublished information on Tierney’s falsehoods. The work presented is based on a year of research by a historian of medicine and science. The author intends the work to function as a cautionary tale to scholarly associations, which have the challenging duty of protecting scholarship and scholars from baseless and sensationalistic charges in the era of the Internet and twenty-four-hour news cycles. |
X Demographics
Geographical breakdown
Country | Count | As % |
---|---|---|
United States | 46 | 22% |
United Kingdom | 17 | 8% |
Canada | 9 | 4% |
Germany | 6 | 3% |
Australia | 5 | 2% |
Spain | 3 | 1% |
Brazil | 3 | 1% |
Finland | 3 | 1% |
India | 3 | 1% |
Other | 11 | 5% |
Unknown | 101 | 49% |
Demographic breakdown
Type | Count | As % |
---|---|---|
Members of the public | 167 | 81% |
Scientists | 29 | 14% |
Science communicators (journalists, bloggers, editors) | 8 | 4% |
Practitioners (doctors, other healthcare professionals) | 3 | 1% |
Mendeley readers
Geographical breakdown
Country | Count | As % |
---|---|---|
United States | 4 | 5% |
Canada | 2 | 2% |
Norway | 1 | 1% |
New Zealand | 1 | 1% |
Unknown | 75 | 90% |
Demographic breakdown
Readers by professional status | Count | As % |
---|---|---|
Student > Ph. D. Student | 18 | 22% |
Student > Master | 16 | 19% |
Researcher | 10 | 12% |
Other | 7 | 8% |
Professor > Associate Professor | 6 | 7% |
Other | 16 | 19% |
Unknown | 10 | 12% |
Readers by discipline | Count | As % |
---|---|---|
Social Sciences | 24 | 29% |
Agricultural and Biological Sciences | 10 | 12% |
Arts and Humanities | 9 | 11% |
Medicine and Dentistry | 8 | 10% |
Psychology | 8 | 10% |
Other | 12 | 14% |
Unknown | 12 | 14% |