Anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon, who died this week aged 81, was in the last generation of that profession who could claim to have studied an indigenous culture more or less unsullied by contact with modernity. And he was among the first of his generation to experience personal attacks from the ascendant cultural left in full flight; subject to deplatforming, character assassination, professional ostracism and all the other tools by which conformity to the canons of identity politics is enforced.