Anthropologist fights to regain access to Venezuela Indians

             By BART JONES
             Associated Press

             CARACAS -- Napoleon Chagnon helped make the Yanomami Indians one of the
             most famous tribes on earth with a groundbreaking study that became a classic
             among anthropologists.

             But Venezuelan officials don't want him anywhere near the endangered Stone Age
             tribe. They claim his accounts of wife-beating, club fights and deadly raids on
             enemy villages are exaggerations, and that he is provoking conflicts within the tribe.

             Venezuelan authorities have banned him from Yanomami territory off and on since
             the mid-'70s. In August, they rebuffed his latest attempt to return after a five-year
             absence.

             Chagnon is fighting back, though, and getting support from prominent colleagues.

             The ban is ``outrageous,'' says Robin Fox, an anthropologist at Rutgers University
             in New Jersey. ``I consider him one of the truly great anthropologists of our time.''

             Chagnon says he is being punished because he has criticized a powerful group of
             Roman Catholic missionaries and angered left-wing anthropologists by
             contradicting the myth of primitive people as ``noble savages.''

             ``My views are absolutely politically incorrect,'' says Chagnon, an anthropologist at
             the University of California at Santa Barbara.

             Without a trace of modesty, he adds: ``I know more about the Yanomami and
             their numbers and their villages than anyone on earth.''

             His detractors scoff at that assertion.

             ``There's not a single Yanomami specialist who agrees with Chagnon's theories.
             He's completely wrong,'' says French anthropologist Jacques Lizot, one of a
             handful of experts on the tribe.

             Until a decade or so ago, the Yanomami were living in isolation in one of the least
             explored areas of South America.

             Today, some still go naked or wear loincloths, pierce their noses or lower lips with
             sticks, and live in communal thatched huts called shabonos.

             The tribe has about 23,000 members in Venezuela and neighboring Brazil. Some
             scientists say contact with illegal gold miners and Christian missionaries is
             threatening their traditions and their survival.

             Chagnon, now 60, moved into one village in Venezuela in 1964. Four years later
             he published Yanomamo: The Fierce People. The book sold 800,000 copies.

             In it he wrote that violence and warfare were common. His studies showed that
             one in four Yanomami men were axed, clubbed or shot to death with arrows.
             What's more, those who killed enemies got more wives and had more children
             than those who didn't kill.

             ``The Yanomami themselves call themselves fierce,'' he says.

             Critics were aghast.

             The Yanomami are ``a generally fun-loving and peaceful people,'' says a pamphlet
             published by London-based Survival International, an Indian rights group.
             Chagnon ``has greatly exaggerated Yanomami belligerence,'' it adds.

             Chagnon says he came up with the findings because he is the only anthropologist
             who has ever lived in a Yanomami village at war and collected statistics on violent
             deaths.