Interesting, but what the heck was this quote all about??
> When Napoleon Chagnon told his Marxist colleagues that the Yanomamö made war over women, the Marxists faced a choice: Either revise the whole foundation of what they thought they knew about humanity. Or declare that Chagnon must have gotten something wrong. They chose the latter.
This is hyperbolic, no? Most anthropologists are not Marxists, surely. So why is the author weakening his point by using such loaded language inaccurately?
I have been away from academic anthropology for a couple of decades, but it wouldn't be too ridiculous to say that the social sciences tend to oscillate back and forth between materialist theoretical frameworks (like Marxism) and idealistic ones (which give culture / social practice more weight in explaining how people live, other than competition over resources). With occasional syntheses of the two. So in the context of Chagnon's career it was that he was annoying his mostly-Marxist colleagues (at the time) with his sociobiological explanations.
> When Napoleon Chagnon told his Marxist colleagues that the Yanomamö made war over women, the Marxists faced a choice: Either revise the whole foundation of what they thought they knew about humanity. Or declare that Chagnon must have gotten something wrong. They chose the latter.
This is hyperbolic, no? Most anthropologists are not Marxists, surely. So why is the author weakening his point by using such loaded language inaccurately?