"Getting involved with Charles Brewer Carías is probably the worst mistake of Chagnon's anthropological career," says anthropologist Kim Hill of the University of New Mexico, a Chagnon defender who is also quoted in Tierney's book. Like others, Hill surmises that Chagnon hooked up with the disreputable adventurer out of desperation, when political storms and a relentless campaign of what Hill describes as "academic repression" induced the government of Venezuela to revoke Chagnon's permits to visit his beloved Yanomami. "Chagnon flipped out when they cut off access," says Hill.

Chagnon's ill-advised attempt to create what Tierney calls a "private jungle kingdom" outraged many Yanomami and their "bleeding heart" advocates. Tierney quotes Nelly Arvelo Jiménez, an American-educated Venezuelan anthropologist, who wondered how Chagnon could have "dared" to associate himself with "environmental predators and economic gangsters" like Brewer.

Over the years the Yanomami reputation for savagery, which Chagnon had elevated and celebrated, has clearly and directly encouraged violence against them -- including a horrific massacre by a gang of Brazilian gold miners in July 1993 -- as well as unjust treatment at the hands of their governments, which have made direct use of Chagnon's research as justification for isolating and partitioning Yanomami homelands.

If Chagnon's material, films and data paint honest pictures of the Yanomami, it would be totally unfair to blame him for the ugly uses that have been made of his work. Nevertheless, it seems the Yanomami themselves do blame him, and when Chagnon turned to corrupt wheeler-dealer Brewer for political help in maintaining access to his research subjects, he infuriated them and accelerated their determination to keep him out of their country.

Chagnon's supposed crimes will be formally investigated by the American Anthropological Association, starting at the group's annual meeting in November, and the organization's president assured the anthropological community, in another widely circulated open letter, that it would consider Chagnon's case fairly. But the AAA, one of Chagnon's friends told me, is "a joke." Another wrote to me in e-mail, "It is worth pointing out that the last time the American Anthropological Association was asked to engage in special pleading on behalf of a totemic matter was when there was a resolution actually passed against the work of Derek Freeman, who exposed Margaret Mead's work for the shabby confabulation it actually is."

The conjuring up of Mead is interesting under the circumstances. Some feel that the cultural potency of her classic -- and now discredited -- "Coming of Age in Samoa" was only surpassed by Chagnon's "The Fierce People." Mead made her major ethnographic blunders under the influence of the educational theories of her mentor Franz Boas and her own wish to see an idyllic native culture free of sexual taboo. She saw what she wanted to see, and the natives cooperated, telling her what she wanted to hear. Mead's error was in pressing her ethnography into the service of her politics and her preconceptions, a danger that most honest anthropologists acknowledge is ever present in all fieldwork, and that Tierney hints is the major reason Chagnon's science so conveniently coincided with his mentor's theories and his own romantic vision of manhood.

Tierney bought into that vision himself, originally. In the beginning, he says, he very much admired the audacious, Indiana Jones-style anthropologist. "He seemed preternaturally resourceful to me, a veritable hero -- as he was to many other undergraduate males in the late sixties and early seventies." But like so many other of Chagnon's friends and collaborators over the years, Tierney became disillusioned.

The most intriguing defection was that of filmmaker Timothy Asch, who first became upset with Chagnon over "Magical Death," a documentary Chagnon made on his own in 1971, which showed Yanomami men in a bizarre ceremony of visiting symbolic death on the children of their enemies and a ritualistic "eating of babies' souls." Asch considered that film especially prejudicial to the Yanomami, but he also had his doubts about his own films, feeling that they were biased and incomplete.

Tierney quotes from an interview Asch gave to a film magazine: "'Chagnon was so stuck in simple theories that, right away ["The Ax Fight"] became a real joke,' Asch said. 'It is funny with its simplistic, straight-jacketed, one-sided explanation ... I was feeling, you know, halfway into making the film, this great suspicion of the whole field beginning to fall apart before my eyes.'" In 1992 Asch also admitted that while editing "The Ax Fight" in a Massachusetts studio, it was he who created the awful thunking sound that became so emblematic of Yanomami violence -- by striking a watermelon.

Maya Angelou reads from "The Heart of a Woman"