Sociobiology Vs. Culture

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1 The controversy surrounding Chagnon involves his actions while studying the Yanomami. He was accused of provoking the conflicts documented in the book by pitting different groups of the Yanomamo against each other to create genealogies. Not only that, but Chagnon allegedly gives the Yanomamo Machetes to encourage them to act violently. Not only that, but he also spread measles amongst the Yanomamo, resulting in large scale death. He also rewarded informants by giving them Western tools thus provoking the violence he documented in his book. This brings up a question about ethics in Anthropology and raises the question of what is ethical and what is not ethical when conducting fieldwork.
2: This controversy connects to ethics in anthropology …show more content…

Sociobiology vs Culture is the idea that you can explain human behavior based off biology and not based off of culture. Knowing if something is sociobiological or cultural can help anthropologists understand human behavior. I would say that this is an unethical approach because adopting a specific mindset while viewing a culture can make someone view a culture differently and thus get different data. Cultural Materialism is the idea that people have material needs and cultures are organized around meeting people’s needs. Not only that but as a population grows resources also need to change and technology must also change to meet the basic needs of the civilization. This school of thought is rooted by objectivity, which makes it ethical seeing that there the data is less bias since there is no bias associated with this school of thought. Viewing a culture objectively ,which means without bias is important. This kind of research is the most ethical because this approach gives us raw data without any bias or personal believes added to the data. Subjectivity, which allows the ethnographer to use personal feelings in his or her data, is very unethical. Having a subjective approach can change the data significantly. Also, we can assume that the more subjective a person is, the more …show more content…

Since we now know how different approaches effect the data anthropologists collect, we can start to filter out the approaches that are deemed unethical and or have a strong bias associated with it. For example, a subjective approach is biased because it allows personal feelings to influence the data the anthropologists collect. Since we know this now, we can stop the use of that approach so we can avoid unethical behaviors in the field. On the contrary, an objective approach is fine since there is no bias and no chance of the data being manipulated. Since we know this, we can now conclude that this approach is ethical and encourages anthropologists to further use this approach in their studies. Reflexivity, which is self-reflection, can be biased depending on whether the person keeps an open mind and judges himself in a fair way. Also, Sociobiology is a school of thought that can be considered bias because the fact that you believe in a school of thought before you study a culture can cause you to see things differently and thus get different results. So this can be considered unethical. An example of this is shown in the article “ the most controversial anthropologist” Eakin states “ At the same time, Chagnon’s portrayal of Yanomami aggression was meeting with increasing

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