Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale (2018) 0, 0 1–16. © 2018 European Association of Social Anthropologists. doi:10.1111/1469-8676.12544 1 ALEXANDRE COELLO DE LA ROSA The ‘ierce people’ in the context of US foreign politics: a historical anthropol- ogy approach to Napoleon Chagnon’s interpretation of the Yanomami This essay aims to rethink the epistemological study of violence among the Yanomami’s Venezuelan and Brazilian world. In doing so, I reopen some of the discussions between Marshall Sahlins and Napoleon Chagnon/National Academy of Sciences (NAS) in the context of the much longer debate about ‘innate aggressiveness’ (as virtue or vice) as it came to be revived in the context of the Cold War, decolonisation and the protests against the Vietnam War. Key words Yanomami, violence, Sahlins, Chagnon, historical anthropology To Verena Stolcke, with deep admiration Introduction The Yanomami 1 are a tribe of roughly 20,000 indigenous people living in about 250 villages in the Amazon rainforest on the border between southern Venezuela and Brazil (Kopenawa and Albert 2015). Traditionally, they followed a mixed subsis- tence economy, primarily as foragers (hunters, gatherers and ishers) and secondarily as farmers (mainly horticulture). Through the lens of photographer Sebastião Salgado, the Yanomami, along with the Trobiand islanders, the Navajo and the Nuer, have become not only one of the best-known Indian groups in the world, but one of the symbols of exoticism and pure indigenous people (for good and for worse). Starting from anthropologist Napoleon Alphonseu Chagnon’s first portrait of Yanomami as the quintessence of endemic ‘tribal’ warfare (1968: 3), I want to rethink the epistemological study of violence in the Venezuelan and Brazilian ‘primitive world’ by updating some of the key debates of the last years. Were Yanomami aggressive by nature or rather as the result of Western creation? 2 To what extent were geneticist and physician James V. Neel’s biomedical actions among the vulnerable Yanomami a violation of the American Anthropological Association’s ethical injunction to do no harm to indigenous groups? Was Western 1 There is no broadly accepted indigenous term for the whole group. Those who refer to the group as Yanomamo generally support Napoleon Chagnon’s work, while those who prefer Yanomami or Yanoama tend to take a more neutral or anti-Chagnon stance (Borofsky 2005: 4). 2 See Corry (2013, 2017).