A disagreement with similar contours is afoot today. The latest skirmish in the Jared Diamond wars deals not only with issues of scholarly accuracy, but also the cultural/personal motivation of the protagonists as well as the social effects of their arguments. The main protagonists are the authors of Questioning Collapse, an edited volume in which expert scholars take issue with Jared Diamond’s reading of their specialty topics: the Rapa Nui (Easter Island) specialist discusses Diamond’s use of the Rapa Nui data, the Incan specialist discusses Diamond on Pizzaro and Atahualpa, and so forth. The book is critical of Diamond, who has responded with a review in Nature that is none too friendly itself.

The Usual Denunciations are already issuing from Stinky Journalism.org, which mostly focus on how unethical it was for Diamond to write a review of a book that criticized his book without explicitly telling readers the book he was criticizing criticized him. You can check it out if you want, but I think its much more interesting to see how the back and forth between Questioning Collapse and Diamond exemplified some of the issues that played out twenty years earlier in the Sahlins/Harris debate. How do we tack between the social effects of our work and its accuracy? How can we address the cultural underpinnings that motivate an author’s writing without falling back into ad hominem attacks? How well does Collapse stand up to scholarly scrutiny? And how good a job does Questioning Collapse do of reaching out to Diamond’s popular audience? These questions are worth asking — even if you are a little burned out on the Jared Diamond wars.

In this piece I want to review Questioning Collapse through the lens of these issues. I’ll start by working backwards from Diamond’s review in Nature to the book itself. In the end, I find Questioning Collapse’s critique of Diamond extremely compelling, particularly for the way it highlights the theoretical difficulties of Diamond’s position. That said, however, Questioning Collapse’s (henceforth ‘QC’) authors often don’t do the readers any favors — as a piece of public anthropology I feel it has a long way to go.

Diamond’s piece is actually a review of two books, Questioning Collapse and The Cambridge Companion to the Aegean Bronze Age. In the event, however, only about 400 of its 1300 words focus on the later volume. In the review, Diamond pulls a classic Sahlins maneuver, arguing that the authors are driven by a tendentious preference for a “positive message about human behavior” is “laudable” but, unfortunately, does not mesh well with the facts. The result is a “naively optimistic redefinition” of the data which “inevitably forces one to distort history and to avoid trying to explain what really happened.” Indeed, Diamond even claims that although they take issue with his work the authors of QC “do not offer a substitute thesis” for facts which “cry out for explanation, even if one relabels them as something other than collapse”. Political correctness, it seems, blinds Questioning Collapse to The Facts. Or, as the subtitle of the review puts it, ‘realism’ (i.e. Diamond) must trump ‘positivity’ (i.e. QC).

In fact there are four themes in Questioning Collapse: that of resilience (as opposed to collage), of colonialism (‘empire expansion’), of the similarity of current environmental issues to the past, and that of what constitutes an adequate popular anthropology. Diamond deals mostly with the first two topics in his review, and I will skip the third here but I’ll address the rest as well as make a few points about the factual errors each side accuses the other of having.

Resilience versus collapse, or, seven million Mayans can’t be wrong

Is Diamond correct when he says QC’s feel-good agenda prevents it from seeing the truth about collapse? On this first major claim, I think Diamond and QC are talking past one another. At the broadest level, QC takes issue with the three key words in Collapse’s title: ‘collapse’, ’success’, and ‘choose’. What, specifically, counts as collapse? The authors of QC argue that there is more to societal continuity than Diamond’s focus on population size and social complexity. There are, they point out, millions of Mayan people alive today — how then can we say that Mayan culture has disappeared? They also point out that it is hard to tell where one society starts and another begins. Is agriculture in the Netherlands an example of ecological success once we think about the effects their importation of fodder has on countries like Brazil from which they import it? And ‘success’: how long does a society have to be around before it is officially considered to be one? In his excellent article in the QC McNeill points out that Diamond plays fast and loose with dates — the Greenland Norse, for instance, survived longer than all of the modern societies that Diamond lists as successes. And ‘choice’: many of the authors of the volume point out that societies are not people — different parts of them make different decisions for different reasons. Often times ‘choices’ are the emergent property of many individual decisions. And in a world where actions have unintended consequences, even selfish choices might end up being sustainable ones, and vice versa. It is for this reason that the authors tend to focus on ‘resilience’ rather than ‘collapse’ — on the way that populations change over time, but tend overall to endure.

In sum, QC argues that Diamond’s notion of collapse is too simple. Societies are not externally bounded and internally homogeneous. They do not make decisions like humans do. They change through time, making it difficult to identify when they change beyond recognition. Long-term trends are, they argue, mostly for continuity, which is why they use the term ‘resilience’ rather than collapse. Mayans are still around. Easter Islanders are still around — in fact, QC has little boxed-in sections highlighting contemporary descendants of supposedly-collapsed societies.

Diamond is not having any of it. He responds that “It makes no sense to me to redefine as heart-warmingly resilient a society in which everyone ends up dead, or in which most of the population vanishes, or that loses writing, state government and great art for centuries… Even when many people do survive and eventually reestablish a populous complex society, the initial decline is sufficiently important to warrant being honestly called a collapse and studied further.” Diamond’s model of collapse is that familiar to us from the video game Civilization by Sid Meier: civilizations all grow in one direction towards more and more complexity with bigger and bigger cities, and if they go down in size, you lose. The authors of QC have a more anthropological understanding of societies, insisting that they not internally homogeneous or externally bounded, that they persist in time, and that we must understand their ups and downs.

At heart, then, the resilience/collapse debate is a discussion of interpretation, not facts. Many readers will probably find Diamond’s civilization-or-bust definition of collapse compelling, and agree with him that ‘positivity’ leads QC’s authors to a tendentious interpretation of the facts. This is a pity since I think QC takes a principled and satisfying theoretical position on collapse. Still, one can see why popular readers might not be swayed.

It’s the Colonialism, Stupid

Diamond does remarkably less well when it comes to ‘empire expansion’. One of the most egregious howlers from Diamond’s review is his claim that “although the authors of Questioning Collapse may wish it were otherwise, students and laypersons alike know that Europeans did conquer the world” and that “the authors seem uncomfortable with the glaring fact that it is Europeans, not Native Australians or Americans or Africans, who have expanded over the globe in the past 500 years.” The kindest thing one can say about Diamond’s position here is that it is unintelligible, because the alternative options are that a) Diamond’s personal animus against the authors was so intense he could not understand the content of the book or b) he simply did not read the book he is reviewing.

As far as I can tell, Diamond believes the book argues the exact opposite of what it actually says. He appears to think that the authors of QC are arguing that the hand of European rule lay lightly on the colonized world, which never suffered population loss. QC doesn’t admit that there is such a thing as ‘empire expansion’? How about the ending of Michael Wilcox’s essay in the volume (one of my favorites):

Diamond’s tidy explanation of conquest and global poverty is not only factually incorrect; it gives us the sense that its origins lie somewhere out there, beyond the agency of the reader. The implication is that if conquests were situated long ago, somewhere else, then we are powerless over their contemporary manifestations. Conquests are never instantaneous, transformative, or all encompassing. They are enacted, reenacted, and rewritten for each succeeding generation. In this sense Diamond’s narrative of disappearance and marginalization is one of conquest’s most potent instruments. (p 138)

Does this sound like someone who didn’t get the memo that “Europeans did conquer the world”?

Diamond accuses QC of down-playing the role of colonialism in human history, and not offering an alternate explanation for the collapse of indigenous society, when in fact colonialism is their alternate explanation for the collapse of nonwestern societies. Wilcox writes “a more appropriate troika of destruction [than guns, germs, and steel] would be ‘lawyers, god, and money’”. Terry Hunt and Carl Lipo write that “ancient deforestation was not the cause of population collapse. If we are to apply a modern term to the tragedy of Rapa Nui, it is not ecocide but genocide.”

In sum, QC attempts to take the moral high-ground out from underneath Diamond when it comes to colonialism, arguing that he underplays the horrors of colonialism because his cultural blinkers prevent him from seeing the truth. Indeed, one of the major arguments of the book is that Diamond (and other social scientists) aid and abet on-going oppression of indigenous people. The proper response from Diamond — had he noticed — would have been to cast the authors of QC as a bunch of lefty radicals who have given up on Scientific Accuracy in the name of advocacy. Except of course he didn’t notice.

Some readers may find Wilcox’s invective overheated, and find the anti-colonial agenda of QC too ‘pc’ in their denunciation of the book’s social effects. That is why it is so gratifying that the volume also takes up the issue of accuracy and never lets go: Diamond is not just tendentious, he is also wrong. The fact that Diamond simply missed this major part of their argument really detracts from his credibility.

Fact Checking

Beyond these overarching themes there are a number of particular factual disputes between Diamond and the authors of QC. In his review, Diamond argues that the Yali he met and the Yali that Gewertz and Errington’s volume is about are different people; he argues against Wilcox that Chaco canyon was deforested; he argued against Berglund that the Greenland Norse died out, rather than emigrating; he argues against Taylor that ecology was a factor in the Rwandan genocide; and he argues against what he calls David Cahill’s “absurd rewriting” of the Spanish conquest of the Inca.

None of Diamond’s factual claims are very convincing. Which Yali was which does not matter, because Gewertz and Errington’s merely use the conversation with Yali as a set piece to raise a series of other claims about colonialism in Papua New Guinea, none of which Diamond addresses. Diamond offers as evidence that overpopulation was a factors for genocide in Rwanda a school teacher’s assertion that “The people whose children had to walk barefoot to school killed the people who could buy shoes for theirs.” Which seems to me to be an argument about inequality rather than population pressure — if it is not just a statement about shoes. Wilcox provides two citations to back up his claim that Chaco canyon was forested, while Diamond never cites his sources in the review or in Collapse, and so it is impossible to verify his claims. This also makes his claim that there is archaeological evidence of the death of the Greenland Norse impossible to verify. His claim that David Cahill’s paper is an “absurd rewriting” of Incan-Spanish relations seems to miss Cahill’s careful and, as far as I can tell, uncontroversial point that conquerors often keep local systems of social stratification intact and install themselves on top of them.

Now, it is surely unfair to ask a 1300 word review to exhaustively respond to all of the criticisms made in a 375 page book. Still, one can’t help but notice that the authors of QC make serious claims that throw Diamond’s entire reading of societal collapse into question, and Diamond’s response is to ignore the forest and call out a few trees. When people like Terry Hunt and Carl Lipo argue that Diamond’s claims about Rapa Nui are fundamentally mistaken, you expect such big-issue claims to merit a response.

Of course, Questioning Collapse was not perfect either

That said, the authors of QC do not always make it easy for readers to be swayed to their point of view. The editors claim that “participants committed themselves to setting aside abstruse academic prose and cumbersome in-text references in favor of a more user-friendly text.” Really? Can we blame Diamond for not lingering carefully over, for instance, Cahill’s prose when it contains sentences like this:

It encoded all the familiar generic facts of colonial conquests as seen by Europeans: the mutual incomprehension and marveling at the mirror-image alterities; the chasm between New World and Old World epistemologies, “true” rational knowledge against heathen superstition; clever Castilian against dullard Inca; true believers versus the unevangelized barbarians, at best seen as promising neophytes; asymmetrical technologies manifest in the flash of steel and the thrust of lance against bronze close-combat weapons, slingshot, cotton armor and buckler; European initiative against the kind of unquestioning obeisance associated with “oriental despotism.”

I am guessing the average reader will quit long before they get to the part of the sentence where they miss the Wittfogel reference. While several of the authors write clearly and passionately, on the whole Diamond still wins the contest for clear prose. In fact, many of the essays employ all the apparatus of scholarly prevarication: introductory sections reflecting on what it means to write for a popular audience, wider theoretical issues of contextualization, and so forth. You must wade through all this to get to the point where they actually talk about why they think Diamond is wrong.

Or you may not. One of the strangest things about this otherwise very ballsy collection is that many — maybe even most — of the articles do not actually quote Jared Diamond. Sometimes I think the authors are so immersed in the topic that they forget to leave signposts to the reader about what they are doing. Joel Berglund’s piece, for instance, appears to be a valuable detailed commentary on Diamond’s chapters on Norse Greenland, but only if you put the two books next to one another. For many readers it will seem like a tour of various facts about Norse Greenland which mentions Diamond at the start. Cahill’s paper often takes aim at “standard colonial tropes” of “indegnous dullards who ‘didn’t know what hit them’” or views in which “Andean civilization… becomes a kind of ‘unenlightened’ primitive polity”. The positions he put in scare quotes are certainly worth criticizing — but are they Diamonds? A close reading — and actual citation — of Diamond’s argument would have made the essay stronger, especially since Cahill’s data so obviously gainsays the claims Diamond actually does make. The best pieces — Hunt and Lipo’s and Wilcox’s, McNeil’s, and so forth — are very strong (disclosure: I share a department with Hunt) and other pieces could have profited by being as tightly written.

Above all, a central argument of QC is that the world is ‘complex’ and it would be better if popular audiences did not need to have it ’simplified’. As Thomas Hylland Eriksen reminds us, however, this simply will not fly. Public anthropology is, I’ve argued, the bar at the conference — when people tell you straight up and without hedging what they think is really going on in their papers. It is in the nature of the game to “dare to be reductive”. I think QC would have done better to explore how to reduce effectively, rather than lament the fact that such a move was necessary — or attempt to avoid making it at all.

Taking the fight to the streets?

Regardless of what you think about the particulars of Questioning Collapse, it establishes once and for all that mainstream academic authors consider Diamond’s work to be problematic. Coming from a major major press (Cambridge) with a roster of quality specialists, Questioning Collapse is undoubtedly Ivory Tower. If anything, it could have let down its hair a bit more. If only there were some way to reach a popular audience… to take the fight to the streets… in like… say… a blog…? Luckily, they have one, although it has not been updated regularly.

It seems to me QC’s blog could serve two purposes. First, it would also be an excellent place to begin a long and exceedingly detailed analysis of some of the particular factual claims Diamond makes — particularly those in the Nature review. This is the sort of intellectual spadework that publishers are not keen on, which should be made available to the public, and works well in small sub-essay size units which can be clearly written and do not take forever to read. Blog posts, in other words.

Second, Questioning Collapse is relatively expensive (US$30) and formally written — not ideal for spreading the word. The website could become a great location for remixed versions of the articles: piece available for download as teaching resources, or for the casual reader, where the authors cut right to the chase, free and open access, for anyone who is interested in reading them.

Conclusion

In sum, QC excels in empirical accuracy, not public outreach. While I find their arguments persuasive — in most cases, completely persuasive — I think they could have done a better job reaching a broader audience. There is a danger that their accounts of the social effects of Diamond’s work, and his personal/cultural motivations for writing could turn into ad hominem, which would be a shame. Because Diamond is a public figure, the proper course would be to be even more scrupulous in adhering to standards of professionalism and impartiality than a scholar normally would, even though the impulse is (I imagine) to go in rather the other dimension. From my point of view, the central issue has got to be the empirical adequacy of his claims.

As for Diamond, the impression I get of him is of a scholar who increasingly refuses to adhere to the best practices of the university, and who can get away with it because of the power and influence that comes from being in the public eye. Of course, there is nothing wrong with going AWOL from the academy if one wants to become a free-floating intellectual. But Diamond is not Carlos Castaneda, and his audience gives him credence because of his situation within the academy and his role as a translator of technical discourse. It is easy to become complacent when you’re, you know, an ultra-rich Pulitzer Prize-winning author (or so I imagine!). But one must resist the temptation to relax one’s standards. Both lay readers and his colleagues deserve better work than we see in Nature review.

In the seventies, Sahlins and Harris didn’t have the Internet to fall back on. Today, we are blessed with a means of communication that allow incensed scholars to argue endlessly in front of the entire planet! Now that the book is published, I look forward to seeing the authors of Questioning Collapse – and perhaps even Diamond himself? — move these issues forward.

This leads me to, second, an announcement, because I (and others) are leaving for the summer for research and we find ourselves unable to keep up with posting essays of, what has turned out to be, more contributors than anticipated. StinkyJournalism.org will continue the series with the same editors. I’ll comment from Papua New Guinea as time allows.

Third, a quick roundup of various links to the Diamond/Wemp affair. Some links from around the blogosphere — Clay Spinuzzi (an extremely excellent activity-theorist type who Bonnie Nardi turned me on to) has a nice right-up of the Diamond/Wemp affair entitled Participants Can Respond. Uh-oh. It nicely boils down the underlying dynamic of the debate:

Although institutional research boards have historically been conceived as a way to protect participants from researchers’ representations, social media mean that the danger is now bidirectional – participants can represent the researcher in damaging ways as well, and those representations could easily circulate more broadly than the researcher’s.

Bidrectionality: There you have it, folks.

In a very ‘university of blogaria’ vein (this reference will probably make sense to noone but me), Millicent and Carla Fran have a nice entry on Jared Diamond’s Creative (Non)Fiction and Nostalgic Anthropology and a response which is classy and thoughtful.

Stinky Journalism also has another piece in their series up by Glenn Peterson on matrilineal clans and the containment of violence in Micronesia which further fortifies the claim that ’stateless’ socities have structures which shape — and sometimes prevent — violence. They are not ’states of nature’ in which vengeance runs amok. I have the impression that Glenn is not well-known out of Oceanist circles, but I hope I’m wrong in this because he is a very, very intelligent guy and I am very junior to him in the small world of anthropology in Oceania.

Finally, the main link of the day — Science Magazine is running a story ‘Vengeance’ Bites Back At Jared Diamond, which represents the most thoroughly research coverage of the case so far. I was interviewed for the piece and, more importantly, so was Jared Diamond and staff at the New Yorker, making it the first time they have commented on record on the case.

What Diamond has to say is not that actually that interesting — he is only quoted as saying “the case has no merit at all”. But what is interesting about the piece is that it describes, at least a little bit, the production of the New Yorker article. In comments on one of our postings on Diamond, I mentioned that I thought we had an excellent record of what happened in Nipa, and how various people say it was or wasn’t represented accurately, but that we had no way of telling what happened between the time Wemp told Diamond his story and the New Yorker published it. Now, with the Science article, we have a relatively detailed sense of the chain of transmission from Nipa to Wemp to Diamond to the New Yorker to us. Very interesting. Of course it is behind a pay wall, but I’d encourage everyone, if possible, to check it out.

Art Science Research Laboratory’s StinkyJournalism.org and SavageMinds.org is simultaneously cross-publishing on both web sites, a series of essays on the controversy surrounding Jared Diamond’s New Yorker article, “Annals of Anthropology: Vengeance is Ours.” The essay series titled,The Pig in a Garden: Jared Diamond and The New Yorker, is written by ethics scholars in the fields of anthropology and communications, as well as journalists, environmental scientists, archaeologists, anthropologists and linguists et al., and edited by Rhonda Roland Shearer, Alan Bisbort and Sam Eifling. Each contributor’s mission was simple: To examine Jared Diamond’s article, and The New Yorker’s decision to publish it, through the lens of their own discipline. We think you will agree that these issues will not soon be put to rest. As Nancy Sullivan writes in her contribution, part of the reason for this series is to reclaim some of the ground among general readers lost to “experts” like Jared Diamond. With this series, StinkyJournalism.org and SavageMinds.org seek to capture that wider general audience for writings about anthropology.

This article is by Carolyn Fluehr-Lobban, PhD. Fluehr-Lobban is a Professor of Anthropology at Rhode Island College where she teaches courses in Anthropology, Islamic, and African and Afro-American Studies. She received her Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees from Temple University and her PhD in Anthropology and African Studies from Northwestern University in 1973.  At Rhode Island College she has received both the Award for Distinguished Teaching in 1990 and the Award for Distinguished Scholar in 1998. She is the author or editor of eleven books and the editor of Ethics and the Profession of Anthropology: Dialogue for a New Era (1990; second edition 2003). Fluehr-Lobban’s essay is third in the series.

Introduction

The following is a commentary based upon my reading of the article by Jared Diamond in The New Yorker under the heading “Annals of Anthropology: Vengeance Is Ours: What can tribal societies tell us about our need to get even?” and private emails between Rhonda Shearer’s team of researchers Jeffrey Elapa and Michael Kigl and Daniel Wemp that she shared with me.

My comments focus on the blurring of disciplinary boundaries and the apparent lack of informed consent in the relationship between the two non-equals, as well as the possible use of deception by Diamond in his publication of details of events shared with him in confidence by Daniel Wemp. Comparison with another case also originally published in 2000 in The New Yorker—that of Patrick Tierney and anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon and geneticist James  Neel—is discussed for the insights it provides.

Blurring of Professional Boundaries between Anthropology and Journalism
There is a difference in kind between the research a wildlife biologist carries out with species occupying a given habitat and the humans in that environment. Researchers working with flora and fauna do not obtain the informed consent of their subjects, and the subjects do not read and critique the writing of the scholar.

Anthropologists studying humans develop long-term relationships of trust through the primary method of participant observation during lengthy stays in a culture where over time they learn its language, beliefs, and practices. Even seemingly abstract cultural artifacts, such as language or ancient material culture, have relevance to living humans whose heritage they actively seek to shape and protect.

In relationships between researcher and researched where the conditions of the study are openly discussed and negotiated, boundaries and lines naturally emerge. Part of the steep learning curve of gaining knowledge of and intimacy in a community is learning what knowledge and facts can be shared outside the confidence of the relationship and those which cannot or should not be revealed.

Anthropologists voluntarily maintain many confidences they either promise or intuit from extended fieldwork which they never reveal or publish.  They do this because they have gained an understanding of cultural sensitivities and the likely consequences of making them public. If they are intending to publish such details, they weigh the costs and benefits of revealing sensitive information, thinking perhaps of some ‘greater good,’ they may discuss with their ‘informants’ their wishes regarding disclosure of facts and their own preference regarding anonymity or identity.

In the shift from academic research with humans to journalism, the rules of engagement change. Ethical journalists reveal their identity and the nature of their interest in a person’s story to the person.

For them long-term academic research and the pursuit of knowledge is not the goal, but getting a good story for one’s publisher is the end.

From the extant description of facts in this case, it seems that Diamond was neither the fish of the anthropologist nor the fowl of a journalist in his dealings with Daniel Wemp. Daniel was a World Wildlife Fund (WWF) employee in PNG from1999 to 2002. The context in which information was shared with Diamond was not a clear research setting, but two casual conversations shared on the road sometime in 2001-2002, among trips to and from the airport as Daniel discharged his duties to drive Diamond when he occasionally visited PNG. Diamond is a WWF (US) trustee, since 1993.

With no formal training in either field, Diamond may have engaged in some professional code-switching from the context of wildlife research in Papua/New Guinea to investigative journalist cum anthropologist.
The World is Not the Same ‘out there’

The old order of unregulated and laissez-faire research has passed away, and some anthropologists were the last to notice.

In another crisis of conscience prompted by another essay in The New Yorker (“The Fierce Anthropologist” by Patrick Tierney appeared October 9, 2000) just prior to the release of  the book Darkness in El Dorado in which a serious accusation that the vaccine brought by geneticist James Neel and administered through Napoleon Chagnon’s broker role caused a devastating measles epidemic was changed as a result of pre-publication vetting of the article.

Questions were raised in the pre-publication vetting of the article and book that rendered other facts in the book suspect in the eyes of many whose subtitle was “How scientists and journalists devastated the Amazon.”

The publisher W.W. Norton’s change of published text from the original galleys that had been circulated to scholars and the last minute re-writing of The New Yorker article is a story that has yet to fully be told, and ethical questions for the publishing industry may yet be raised. Tierney spent several years locating a publisher and Norton admits having the book “lawyered”  before its release for dealing with the most serious allegations of scientific misconduct. (Fluehr-Lobban 2003a).

Besides the legalistic matters involving allegations of a failure by the scientists to intervene and treat a measles epidemic, questions were also raised about the representation by Chagnon of the Yanomami as a “fierce people” (1968), and how this fed into a dehumanization of a people whose primitive violent culture could be profitably objectified in anthropology’s most used ethnographic case.

The cultural violence of the indigenous peoples of the Papua New Guinea highlands have likewise been objectified in ethnographic films such as the classic “Dead Birds,” and now most recently in Diamond’s reinforcing of this stereotype.

For its part a Task Force of the American Anthropological Association (AAA) investigating the conduct of anthropologists– most notably Chagnon but others who had worked among the Yanomami as well including an alleged pedafile–the Final Report made no significant finding of violations of ethical standards by Chagnon or any other American anthropologist, but faulted Tierney for violating journalistic ethics.

Indeed, a resolution fronted by Chagnon supporters condemning such maligning of the reputation of anthropologists was passed by the general membership of the AAA that effectively withdrew any criticism of ethical misconduct.

From this immediate past lesson it may be that Diamond is safe for the time being, for powerful Western scientists are still protected, or this time the outcome might favor the less powerful “subject” of research.  At any rate, more “blowback” can be expected from the global peripheries that scientists and journalists explore and sometimes exploit.

Jared Diamond’s telling of Daniel Wemp’s sensitive story may gave been justified for its insights into individual and collective vengeance in human conflict. However, his research and subsequent publication in a popular magazine would have been more ethically sound, as well as more scientifically interesting, had he practiced the basics of informed consent in ethnographic research

Obtaining informed consent that has been a prominent and well known recommendation in all research since the Nuremberg  Code of 1947 and the Helsinki Declaration following it in 1964 which states:

“The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential. This means that the person involved should have legal capacity to give consent; ….should have sufficient knowledge and comprehension of the elements of the subject matter involved as to enable him to make an understanding and enlightened decision. This latter element requires that before the acceptance of an affirmative decision by the experimental subject there should be made known to him the nature, duration, and purpose of the experiment; the method and means by which it is to be conducted; all inconveniences and hazards reasonably to be expected; and the effects upon his health or person which may possibly come from his participation in the experiment. The duty and responsibility for ascertaining the quality of the consent rests upon each individual who initiates, directs or engages in the experiment. It is a personal duty and responsibility which may not be delegated to another with impunity.”

Informed consent as adapted by anthropologists and ratified in the code of ethics of the AAA only in 1998 outlines a dynamic process between researcher and researched whereby the above is discussed and negotiated and agreement is obtained generally without the use of informed consent forms that have been deemed inappropriate to the nature of anthropological research and the relationships it engenders.

There is also the issue of work with non-literate indigenous populations; however, their numbers have declined so precipitously that this is more myth than reality. Daniel Wemp is a literate, informed, and connected injured party, NOT an ethnographic object or factoid.

Avoiding the Use of Deception in Research and dealing with ‘Informants’

Together with informed consent as a guiding principle in research is the assumption that the ethical researcher discusses the nature and intent of the research with the person(s) studied in advance of the research, noting to the best of her/ his ability any risks or possible harm that might result.  A cost-benefit ratio or analysis may be used to recruit participants, or to explain the study from its methodological beginnings to analysis and dissemination.

In the past, disguising a researcher’s identity was not discouraged and was even advocated as a useful technique to get the desired data (for example, in a study of the sub-culture of white supremacists). Lying about the intent of research was justified for the ‘greater good,’  and lying could be rationalized in terms of the end justifying the means.

Today, as the world presents itself less in literal or figurative simple black and white terms than in the past, deception is not advised as tangled webs of human relations and ethical ambiguity can so easily result.

This appears to be the case for the Diamond-Wemp relationship where assumptions of trust and confidence between non-equals were apparently made on both sides.

Diamond’s ‘greater good’ message to the broader Western world about violence and revenge nonetheless lost track of the harm he was doing to his ‘subject’ and his circle of relations in the periphery.
Collaboration results in better ethics and better outcomes

Wemp was Diamond’s driver and administrative assistant for the Papua New Guinea affiliate of the World Wildlife Fund. He was not a stranger, research participant, or ‘informant’ engaged by Diamond.

They were not collaborators, although they might have been in a more ethically conscious approach to their relationship. Informed consent or reciprocal consent between them was apparently not discussed. “Collaborative Anthropology,” as well as collaborative journalism or wildlife biology, provides a better model for twenty-first century anthropology, journalism, and other scientific-publishing relationships between more powerful Western researchers and less powerful research participants (cf. Fluehr-Lobban, 2008).
Had there been collaboration, publication of the details of Daniel Wemp’s story might have proceeded through the use of pseudonyms or change in locale of the events described. Were disguising the names or places impossible—due to unique and known or knowable details—the story could have remained as it was delivered, in private and confidence. Moreover, it appears that individual and ‘tribal’ names were reported accurately, while details of the events were less accurate.

Having not collaborated, the result was that sensitive and potentially harmful was disclosed without the knowledge or consent of those most directly affected by their publication violating not only standards of informed consent but also the ‘do no harm’ gold standard in all professional ethics.

References:

Chagnon, Napoleon A. 1983. Yanomamö The Firece People. 3rd ed. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, first edition, 1968.

Fluehr-Lobban, Carolyn. 2008. “Collaborative Anthropology as Twenty-First Century Anthropology,” Collaborative Anthropology, vol. 1 (1).

Fluehr-Lobban, Carolyn, ed. 2003. Ethics and the Profession of Anthropology: Dialogue for Ethically Conscious Research. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Books.

Fluehr-Lobban, Carolyn.  2003a. “Darkness in El Dorado: Research Ethics Then and Now” in Ethics and the Profession  of Anthropology: Dialogue for Ethically Conscious Research. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Books.

Fluehr-Lobban, Carolyn. 1994. “Informed Consent in Anthropology: We are not Exempt”. Human Organization, vol. 53 (1):  1-10.

Chagnon, Napoleon A.  1983.    Yanomamö The Firece People. 3rd ed. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.; first edition, 1968.

Preface for El Dorado Task Force Papers, 2002. [ http://www.nku.edu/~humed1/darkness_in_el_dorado/documents/0535.htm ]

Tierney, Patrick.  2000. Darkness in El Dorado: How Scientists and Journalists Devastated the Amazon. New York: W.W. Norton.

Tierney, Patrick. “The Fierce Anthropologist,” The New Yorker, October 9, 2000.

“Art Science Research Laboratory’s StinkyJournalism.org”:http://www.stinkyjournalism.org/latest-journalism-news-updates-153.php and SavageMinds.org are simultaneously cross-publishing on both web sites, a series of essays on the controversy surrounding Jared Diamond’s New Yorker article, ‘Annals of Anthropology: Vengeance is Ours.’ The essay series titled, The Pig in a Garden: Jared Diamond and The New Yorker, is written by ethics scholars in the fields of anthropology and communications, as well as journalists, environmental scientists, archaeologists, anthropologists and linguists et al., and edited by Rhonda Roland Shearer, Alan Bisbort, and Sam Eifling. Each contributor’s mission was simple: To examine Jared Diamond’s article, and The New Yorker’s decision to publish it, through the lens of their own discipline. We think you will agree that these issues will not soon be put to rest. As Nancy Sullivan writes in her contribution, part of the reason for this series is to reclaim some of the ground among general readers lost to ‘experts’ like Jared Diamond. With this series, StinkyJournalism.org and SavageMinds.org seek to capture that wider general audience for writings about anthropology.

This essay is by Andrew Mack, the first William and Ingrid Rea Conservation Biologist, a position endowed by the Heinz Endowments at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History. He lived in Papua New Guinea most of the past 20 years studying and teaching ecology, and mentoring conservation research by Papua New Guinean students. Although he has published widely and had two species (a frog and a mahogany) named in his honor, he is most proud of the students he mentored who have gone on to earn postgraduate degrees in top universities. Many of them have formed a national organization dedicated to training younger students and providing national leadership in conservation.  He now lives on a farm in western Pennsylvania and oversees research, conservation and education at the 2200 acre Powdermill Reserve. He is writing a book based on his experiences in Papua New Guinea. This essay is number two in the series.

The issue is not “what we can learn from primitive societies” but rather “what do we show of ourselves when we call a culture ‘primitive’.”

A Papua New Guinean colleague recently complained to me via e-mail that “some people/researchers from other countries think PNG is a living museum.”

When I lived in PNG, people would often ask me, “What church are you with?”, thinking I must be a missionary. Once disavowed of this assumption, a surprising number of these same people then asked, “What tribe do you study?”, thinking I must be an anthropologist. Why would so many assume that I, clearly a foreigner to PNG, was either a missionary or anthropologist?  Perhaps because these  two professions are typically associated with primitive cultures. Primitive people need to be taught the word of the Lord, or to be studied because doing so reveals something absent or obscured in “more advanced” societies. A quick scan of advertisements for tourist packages to PNG shows most are replete with phrases like “discover a different world,” “see primitive tribal people,” or “step back in time.”  PNGeans are accustomed to visitors coming from overseas to proselytize or to study or experience “primitive” people.

PNG, and probably many other developing nations, is still commonly perceived as being profoundly different from our world. The media promulgate this perception by focusing on sensational “primitive” things such as tribal wars and penis gourds.

Tribal wars are actually not that common across the nation. PNG is home to more than 600 language groups and thousands of clans, the vast majority of whom are not warring. Try sampling 600 language groups from other nations and count how many are warring. Right now, the United States is warring with people of many tribes and languages in Iraq and Afghanistan. Could the perception of widespread warring in PNG be merely an artifact of there being so many different cultures and languages packed in one small country? Do other geographic areas with as much cultural diversity have less strife?

PNG groups rarely fight with anyone other than their neighbors. Unlike the United States, most PNG tribes have little ability to project hostilities beyond their immediate borders. Yet often the only thing “primitive” about these tribal fights is the lack of sophisticated weaponry. Give the fighting tribes grenade launchers, uniforms and tanks, and they will barely differ from our fighting men, with one major exception: PNG warring is done out of a sense of honor, familial/tribal pride, and land disputes. Tribal fighters are not paid as a professional soldier class. Weaponry and military spending are not huge segments of the PNG economy as they are in the United States. What enables Western media to sensationalize PNG’s tribal fighting is that the fighters are part of that perceived “living museum”, one that offers reflections of a primitive past that we have left behind.

This perception – that PNG is primitive and a throwback to our own ancestral history – is widespread and insidious. It warps the perception of visitors and the outside world in ways that are subconscious, extremely subtle, and damaging both to PNG and ourselves. Thinking of one culture as primitive and ours as advanced often subtly translates into a bias of our own superiority, which subconsciously affects how we relate to these supposedly primitive cultures.

“Culturism,” not racism, per se

I am deliberately avoiding the word “racism” because that has different, more conspicuous connotations. This is not about something as obvious as skin color. It is more about assumptions we in the developed world, and especially in the United States, make about other cultures. I do not know a word for it; perhaps “culturism” fits.

I am not pointing fingers. My understanding of this arises from what I have first seen in myself, and then only after years as an expatriate in PNG. This is not something I think most scientists and visitors come to appreciate easily when making relatively short visits to the country, even if fairly frequent and spread over decades. I do not mean to single out Dr. Diamond’s observations of PNG culture. To the contrary, my concern is that if commentators as intelligent and well-educated as Dr. Diamond, and intellectual media such as The New Yorker can exhibit these subtle double standards and biases, then these issues are no doubt widespread in the general population.

Before I look at Dr. Diamond’s essay, I will briefly discuss how this bias crept into my consciousness while living in PNG. It is a more profound and transformational experience to identify faults in oneself than to see them in others. Though I always paid lip service to a concept of equality among all people, it took me quite some time to  realize that I carried biases I likely would have criticized in others. I think only after viscerally appreciating a bias within oneself can one really begin to expel it.

My cultural bias showed

In 1989 Debra Wright and I walked 10 hours into a wilderness from a mission landing strip surrounded by pristine forest. There we worked with a team of local men of the Pawaiia language group to build a research station by hand. We lived there the next four and a half years, emerging only three or four times a year to purchase supplies that were then packed in on strong Pawaiian backs. Working with these men, I developed a profound admiration for their strength. They carried loads that would stagger me, swung axes all day to split wood, and even dragged me out of raging rapids if I botched a river crossing.

One day, Simbai (not his real name) came to our house with a bad gash in his hand from a misplaced swing of the bush knife (what we call a machete) while cutting firewood. Deb was patching him up – washing the wound and applying a dressing – when Simbai passed out. He had fainted at the sight of his wound. At the moment I was struck with a tremendous surprise.  These guys were super tough; I never imagined they would faint like that! I felt stupid that we had not thought to have him lie down while we dressed the wound.

The epiphany came when I realized I shouldn’t have been so surprised. Simbai was just like me. As I braced him and Deb finished the bandaging, I felt a truer connection to him than I had in years of living and working with him. I realized how subtle my misperceptions were, that I should think he could stand for bandaging, and then be surprised at his fainting.

Big Conservation Organizations

The more dramatic revelations and expunging of my cultural biases began when I started teaching University of PNG students. Every year for more than a decade, we took classes of 23 to 30 undergraduates into remote rainforests. It was a month of true field biology experience for these students, doing exactly the sorts of things Dr. Diamond has done on many expeditions to PNG.

For decades big conservation organizations have operated by sending foreign experts in and out of countries to guide conservation. Poor infrastructure, inadequate budgets and undertrained instructors all conspire to keep students in countries like PNG from ever reaching the expertise of foreigners like myself or Dr. Diamond.

On our courses, as we laid out our transects and plots, set traps and nets, and collected voucher specimens, I began to see firsthand that there was actually no boundary to prevent these kids from developing the expertise that I had. I began to realize that I was doing them, their nation, and conservation a disservice by residing there as an expert who advised nationals rather than teaching my expertise to nationals.

In the mid-nineties we began shifting away from pure research and toward teaching research methods. Many who were higher in the conservation echelons saw this as a radical shift. Why? I think because of the subtle bias in those echelons. They don’t quite believe, as I do, that those nationals are equally capable of doing what we foreign “experts” do. Or some think the conservation threats are so immediate that there isn’t time to train national experts and coalitions to execute their own conservation agenda. Of course, if we fully embraced the belief of full intellectual equality and worked to correct the educational shortcomings that create the apparent contrasts, Big Conservation would soon have little need for foreign experts like myself. And foreign countries would then have little need for Big Conservation.  These organizations are built and are sustained upon the assumption that  they need to send in experts like myself or Dr. Diamond to guide conservation among more “primitive” societies.

How The New Yorker article demonstrates the larger problem

So how does this relate to an article about vengeance by Dr. Diamond in The New Yorker? First, my complaints are not directed to Dr. Diamond, whom I greatly respect as an ecologist and physiologist. My complaints are directed at Big Conservation and how it operates in places such as PNG. As I did for many years, Dr. Diamond is merely working for a broken machine. The article does suffer from ethical problems. But the ultimate causes of those problems are among the root causes for the failure of Big Conservation in countries like PNG – i.e., a subtle cultural bias that lower reporting standards that are acceptable for “primitive” societies than for our own society.

Had Dr. Diamond been writing about the vengeance wreaked by a Los Angeles gang member, he would surely have changed the subject’s name to protect him from retribution. Writing about a PNG informant, Dr. Diamond did not think this standard journalistic protection was necessary. His decision might seem to just be a lapse in  journalism, but more importantly, I think it reflects a subtle cultural boundary.

Having lived in PNG, it is easy for me to see how Dr. Diamond could have done this. I myself might once have thought, “He’s a guy in a very far off and remote world; an article in the The New Yorker would never affect him.”  It took me years of contact with a wide cross-section of the PNG populace to really appreciate that, no, his world shares much with the world of The New Yorker. It took me far too long to realize I should not treat an injured PNG woodcutter differently than I would an American, physically stronger or not. I wonder if, without the benefit of that experience, New Yorker writers and editors might think it acceptable to apply a different standard than they would for say, the story of a New York chauffer. Possibly the editors do not think it is as important to check facts and protect identities for primitive, tribal “them” as for sophisticated “us.”

It appears to me that Dr. Diamond widely paraphrased in his own words those attributed to Mr. Wemp as quotations. Perhaps the actual words spoken by Mr. Wemp would not sound as convincing, or tell the story as elegantly as Dr. Diamond presented it? Mr. Wemp probably speaks several languages, and English is most likely not his first, as the case with majority of PNG people. In most situations in PNG, people speak tok pisin, a Creole of around a thousand words with no verb tenses. Tok pisin syntax often shapes its speakers’ less-used English, making the latter sound simple and ungrammatical. Possibly it seemed “touching up” Wemp’s narrative a bit would not be misplaced since Daniel had not benefited from a good education.

Was it just poor journalism? I think not. Dr. Diamond is a prize-winning author. I do not think he would have rephrased quotations from a conversation with a Manhattan chauffeur who bragged about murders he committed as a youth. Diamond would let that man’s words speak for themselves, and speak for themselves anonymously to protect the chauffeur.

How could a writer of Diamond’s stature and an iconic magazine like The New Yorker publish a story so heedless of the consequences to the subject? I think what is at issue here is more than an example of poor journalism and even sloppier editing and fact checking. I believe the story stems from a subtle bias many of us have against a strongly tribal nation such as PNG. We equate tribal with primitive.

As a conservation biologist I am troubled at how the biases that lead to different standards of journalism can also affect important policies. Conservation organizations based in New York or Washington, D.C., much like magazines based there, develop their policies on the subtle assumption of superiority.

The editors and fact checkers probably know relatively little about the country, other than travel magazine photographs of men wearing penis gourds and colorful feathers in their hair. Removed from the real individuals mentioned in the article, their subtle biases and misconceptions clouded their judgment. I have witnessed similar situations with more far-reaching consequences as a conservationist, where major decisions are made and policies are set in the United States by people who have never been to New Guinea. And just as the people involved in this article might protest they have done nothing wrong, so might the conservation leaders who set policies for far-off peoples and cultures they’ve never encountered.

What does it mean to be a living museum?

All of  this underscores the statement of my friend that many foreigners see PNG as a living museum.

One the most appealing aspects of museums is that the exhibits found in them are different from the people viewing them on the other side of the glass. If both sides of the display case were identical, the museum would have no purpose.

Acknowledging one’s cultural biases can be difficult – even painful. When those biases apply to cultures made up of people from different racial origin, they mimic racism, but are not quite the same. It isn’t because the people of PNG are brown-skinned that many outsiders look upon them differently; it is because they are tribal and, thus, perceived to be primitive. I believe with honest introspection, and perhaps a few epiphanies (such as when supermen faint at the sight of their own blood), that it is possible to eliminate the subtle cultural biases that make us feel we are different from other people and subtly superior to them.

If we  can recognize the hallmarks of cultural bias within us, we can take the proper steps to correct it. Conservation might actually begin to happen when the big organizations invest in making their United States-based experts, and themselves, redundant by building expertise among the “primitive”. Writers would apply the same ethics and standards as they would for American subjects. Editors and fact-checkers would not cut corners on stories about voiceless “museum pieces.”

No culture can view another without some form of bias. It affects how scientists treat people of other cultures and how journalists and editors treat them as well. Unintentionally, the tainted writing perpetuates the biases. This is not just about sloppy journalism or editing; it is about what caused the sloppiness, and there will remain a bit of it in all of us until we acknowledge our biases and actively strive to eliminate them.

As a political anthropologist, my reading of the Diamond piece was focused mainly on criticizing the way that Diamond described the southern highlands as being ’stateless’, when in fact the fight he described took place in and was conditioned by the modern nation state of Papua New Guinea. Nancy’s piece, on the other hand, makes a point that might come from psychological anthropology — that our emotions are always culturally mediated. Diamond’s piece seems to be arguing that vengeance is a ‘natural’ emotion that all people at all times and in all places feel everywhere, but that the way it is satisfied or repressed varies depending on the cultural and social structures people find themselves in (which are in turn, I imagine he’d say, a result of their geography and a few other factors).

This is yet another example of the way in which Jared Diamond is ‘unanthropological’ — anthropologists would argue that human emotions are always shaped by culture, and that in different times and places you will get different patternings of emotions. Nancy (and other anthropologists) would insist that there is something culturally distinct about the way that needs for vengeance, reparation, satisafaction, or what have you, are met and formulated. Wemp and Diamond’s father-in-law had different experiences, understood them differently, and wanted different sorts of satisfaction. This does not mean that that cases are incommensurable, but rather that the concept of culture must be used in order to understand and compare them.

An insistence on the cultural mediation of emotion is a different thing from saying that Papua New Guineans are peaceful, do not fight, or so forth. It is perfectly possible to argue that warfare in Papua New Guinea was in the past (and might still be today) extremely gruesome, angry, violent, nasty, and also culturally mediated. In the United States we imagine human nature to be a cake, and ‘culture’ to be the thin layer of icing on top — the surface decoration which obscures a more fundamental similarity all human being share. I think this reflects as certain complex historical genealogy of protestant issues of human nature, as well as a consumerist culture in which no one bakes and there is very little connoisseurship of pastries and sweets. It is a theory of human nature from the people who invented the twinky. In their own image. Anyway. To quote Jonathan Marks, for anthropologists culture is not the icing, it is the eggs. People do not stop having culture when their experiences become visceral, or when their actions become violent.

One particularly astute commentor on Nancy’s post then asked how we might understand Daniel Wemp’s lawsuit as following a certain Melanesian logic. I haven’t talked to Wemp, but I must say that I was struck by the way that Kuwimb’s letter to the New Yorker read much like the letters and memos from landowners that fill my own research — written very specifically to Western standards of high bureaucratic formality but informed by a distinctive non-Western cultural logic. In Papua New Guinea, sometimes you take people to court as part of the process of dispute resolution, and I suspect that Kuwimb’s statment that “Mr Mandingo and Mr Wemp were hoping for an apology and a cash settlement” indicates not opprtunism on their part, but a different sense of what counts as closure (or at least the next step in the ongoing relationship) than we in the states might have. Of course in the states, as on Ipili man once told me, “law is how whitemen fight” and the court case now means that neither Diamond nor Wemp are likely to speak publically about a matter under litigation, at least if they take their lawyers’ advice. Its unfortunate, and it has a chilling effect on debate about the debate.

Uh, I have something to say about ‘restorative justice’ as well but I’ll leave it out for now because my head is now spinning with the idea of writing a piece about culinary structures underlying layer cake metaphors…

StinkyJournalism.org and SavageMinds.org are simultaneously cross-publishing on both web sites, a series of essays on the controversy surrounding Jared Diamond’s New Yorker article, “Annals of Anthropology: Vengeance is Ours.” The essay series titled,The Pig in a Garden: Jared Diamond and The New Yorker, is written by ethics scholars in the fields of anthropology and communications, as well as journalists, environmental scientists, archaeologists, anthropologists and linguists et al., and edited by Rhonda Roland Shearer, Alan Bisbort and Sam Eifling. Each contributor’s mission was simple: To examine Jared Diamond’s article, and The New Yorker’s decision to publish it, through the lens of their own discipline. We think you will agree that these issues will not soon be put to rest. As Nancy Sullivan writes in her contribution, part of the reason for this series is to reclaim some of the ground among general readers lost to “experts” like Jared Diamond. With this series, StinkyJournalism.org and SavageMinds.org seek to capture that wider general audience for writings about anthropology.

This piece is by Nancy Sullivan, Director, Nancy Sullivan and Associates, Ltd. She does anthropological consulting, qualitative research, survey design, report writing, training and workshop design for a range of private and public entities. The field teams consist of DWU graduates from the Department of PNG Studies (former students of ethnographic research methods]. In 2009, she served as Team Leader, Karawari Cave Arts Expedition, The National Geographic Society Magazine, March 2-28, covering the cave art project National Sullivan & Associates have been conducting since 2007 with National Geographic and Guggenheim support.

I am an anthropologist who has lived in Papua New Guinea (PNG) for more than twenty years, most of these in the highlands. In 2002 I also taught a course in PNG war and peace, so the concept of Melanesian vengeance is not unfamiliar to me, either personally or academically. My understanding of Jared Diamond’s point in the piece “Vengeance is Ours” is that revenge is natural. It’s a Hobbesian message for the twenty-first century: humans are hardwired for revenge and require a social contract to prevent madness and mayhem. Savages are rational, because they also have rules to obey and urges to forfeit for the greater peace. But because tribes are such small units, Diamond seems to say, their rules lie closer to the human impulse.

Apparently the Melanesian social contract is somewhat thinner than the European one, superficially veiling the urge for revenge and permitting its satisfaction in controlled acts of  “payback.” People like Daniel Wemp, for example, live but a step away from the pre-Leviathan Eden, where all men were islands and under no social constraints. Diamond invites us to see the difference between Wemp’s smug vendetta and the lifelong frustrations of Diamond’s father-in-law, who could never experience revenge for his family’s murder during the Holocaust. The modern state fully thwarts our urge, whereas tribal edicts do not — presumably even tribal societies within the state of Papua New Guinea. In an interesting anti-sentimental twist, Diamond also tells us that tribal people are ultimately happy to submit to a state apparatus, if only to be freed at last from the cycle of violence and payback.

If indeed Papua New Guineans are so eager to throw off the shackles of tribalism and finally live in peace, Daniel Wemp can now thank Diamond and The New Yorker for alerting the state apparatus of his crimes.

No one will ever find ‘Daniel Wemp’

I want to make three points here. First, that Diamond has seriously endangered this subject, whom he identifies by real first and last name, by claiming his responsibility for a series of murders. Beyond the Nipa tribe and the Southern Highlands Province is a thoroughly modern state of Papua New Guinea for which these acts constitute murder.

The second point follows from the first. The field of anthropology has a code of ethics that includes “informed consent” — a not-incidental notion that if you use people for research purposes, they must know the risk involved, the nature of the project, how the data will be used, and how it will be publicized. In short, they should have the choice to remain anonymous. In a pinch, when these conditions cannot be met, you have to mask the subject’s identity.

But we know that Diamond’s piece does not actually come from the “annals of anthropology,” or at least not professional anthropology. That field has a distinct method, something called the ethnographic method, coined by Brownislaw Malinowski in New Guinea ninety years ago to prod the discipline out of the armchair and into the field for a minimally required period of time.

Informed consent has been an important topic to anthropology since Margaret Mead sat down for a chat with young women in Samoa (and Derek Freeman told us she got it wrong). But none of us would be discussing this now if it hadn’t been for Mead’s savvy decision to publish her first book with William Morrow, for a general audience, and thus bring cultural relativism into living rooms across the English-speaking world. Americans were especially blessed by her Redbook columns, where we learned that childhood, adolescence and even gender roles are not, as had been imagined, biologically determined. It was Mead who first taught the wider public about the tenaciousness of culture.

But it is our fault as anthropologists that no one has picked up the ball Mead dropped, and produced enough popular cultural anthropology in recent years. Jared Diamond is just filling the vacuum we left. No one seems to realize anymore that the field is not about making generalizations about humankind, but about describing the defining differences between cultures. It is not about expanding biological knowledge, nor defining the line between culture and biology, but about understanding the diversities of what is manmade, what is not natural after all. Anthropology teaches us about the power of world views.

Diamond has been fantastically successful at bypassing particulars for the single European worldview of history, a worldview that professes to treat all societies with equal respect, but which, in fact, takes a remarkably Victorian approach to culture. Much like armchair anthropology, Diamond’s anecdotal evidence of other peoples is used to support an evolutionary view of culture, where social progress and moral growth bring us to a somewhat imperfect (but more advanced) present. We miss the idyll of a tribal past, but we are too sophisticated now to ever return.

Though we might wonder how Daniel’s society came to revel in killing, ethnographic studies of traditional human societies lying largely outside the control of state government have shown that war, murder, and demonetization of neighbors have been the norm. Modern state societies rate as exceptional by the standards of human history, because we instead grow up learning a universal code of morality that is constantly hammered into us: promulgated every week in our churches and codified in our laws. But the differences between the norms of states and of Handa clan society are not actually so sharp. In times of war, even modern state societies quickly turn the enemy into a dehumanized figure of hatred, only to enjoin us to stop hating again as soon as a peace treaty is signed.

There are whiffs of L. Ron Hubbard, Joseph Campbell, and even Jeffrey Sachs to this logic. Great masters of the sonorous single narrative, by which all manner of irritating complexities are put to rest. In the end, dear readers, it’s a small world after all.

Excess and restraint

This brings me to my third point. Diamond gets it wrong. Any thesis based on Melanesian justice as being retributive in the Western sense is absolutely wrong. It is solipsistic simplification.

Anthropologists most frequently define groups and their borders by whom they fight. There has been a long history of anthropologists studying conflict in Melanesia as a means of describing group identity, governance, and the social contract that is community. C.H. Wedgewood made the first stab at synthesizing this material in 1930, arguing that warfare in Oceania serves to integrate and knit together a community by defining the enemy – the Other. But the watershed years for studies of warfare in Papua New Guinea (PNG) really were the 1970s, when a cadre of anthropologists produced seminal ethnographies on the causes, forms and function of violence, especially across the highlands (see Barth 1975, Berndt 1971, Brown 1978, Hallpike 1977, Koch 1974, Meggitt 1977; Scaglion 1979, Schieffelin 1979, Sillitoe 1978, Strathern 1977, Vayda 1976, e.g.).

The triggers and causes of inter-tribal conflicts are never the same. Any pretext can initiate a fight, but this may be only a superficial altercation. It is the older, submerged reasons that make the blood boil and really sustain a war. Only the most assiduous research can tease these out of the gossip, bragging, historicizing and campaigning that surround warfare everywhere. Ronald Berndt’s 1962 classic of highlands warfare, Excess and Restraint, is more about excess than it is about restraint, seeming to imply that there are far more fights than strategies for keeping peace. Similarly, Ryan’s 1959 work on the Mendi (near Daniel Wemp’s region) calls inter-clan fighting volatile and chronic (1959: 268), and Glasse (1959) says the nearby Huli are hell-bent on continuous war. It can all look pretty rogue and bloodthirsty from the outside – like Homo sapiens in some pre-modern state of self-interest. But none of these writers would suggest that this is the whole story.

In the words of one Melanesian expert:

“[N]o worthwhile comment can be made on the cause of a particular [inter-clan] clash without inside knowledge of the longterm relationship between the contesting parties, or about the bearing group memories have on the conflict. Empirical accounts of the formal procedures, frequency, weaponry, and strategy of war, what is more, have only partial value in explaining conflict if little can be said about consciousness and underlying beliefs. There is no better introduction to this cognitive side to the matter than through analyzing notions of revenge. Killing was not carried out for the sheer love of it; it was virtually always an act to repay or satisfy some material grievance. But vengeance against enemies, in particular, was almost invariably backed up by appeals to legitimacy. Whether taken at the socially acceptable moment or not, it was normally sanctioned by those helping, perhaps paying the killed, or by those sharing the drive to assuage the sense of loss in ongoing ‘revenge warfare’ (Trompf 1994: 28-9).”

Even when war attracts hotheads and loose cannons (and Diamond tells us “The New Guinea Highlands are full of aggressive men seeking revenge for their own reasons”), and even when warriors seek unsanctioned revenge, there is still the distinction between legal and illegal bloodshed. Violence must have social legitimacy greater than one’s own personal ambitions. It is hard to glean whether Diamond knows this or not from comments like the following:

Daniel was proud both of the aggressiveness displayed by all the warring clans of his Nipa tribe and of their faultless recall of debts and grievances. He likened Nipa people to “light elephants”: As Diamond quotes him in his New Yorker article, “They remember what happened thirty years ago, and their words continue to float in the air. The way that we come to understand things in life is by telling stories, like the stories I am telling you now, and like all the stories that grandfathers tell their grandchildren about their relatives who must be avenged. We also come to understand things in life by fighting on the battlefield along with our fellow-clansmen and allies.”

Berndt also recounts some of the most fantastic and improbable boasts of war (see Knauft 1999: 118).

If Diamond would have us understand that a revenge culture in highlands PNG is also rule-bound and rational, closer to a Babylonian law or the Torah than a modern state, we must also assume that it cultivates a system of punishment intended to end a conflict. This is consistent with an evolutionary view of culture in general, where an eye for an eye emerged in response to the endless personal vendettas posing a threat to the social fabric. In the earliest forms of statehood, defining tit for tat was a means of finishing warfare rather than perpetuating it. But again, listen to the highlands experts. Glasse says of the Huli that they have no idea of lex talionis. A man tries to inflict a greater injury than that which he has suffered. Moreover, the people who suffer as a result of vengeance do not accept their injuries as just or appropriate; they too seek counter-vengeance, and the conflict is unending (1968: 68).

This is precisely why there are so any young highlands men willing to do battle. As Glasse tells us, “nearly every [Huli] man nurses a grievance that can precipitate war” (Ibid: 88).

Revenge in the Western sense simply does not exist in the highlands of New Guinea. Outsiders are constantly left dumbfounded by the open-endedness of the system. But the Melanesian worldview is no simple subject to tackle, even for battle-hardened anthropologists. Payback killings and apparently indiscriminate acts of revenge are as common as prodigious (even self-destructive) acts of generosity, gifts without promise of comparable return, and infinite strategies of deflecting blame. None of these conundrums is separable in a Melanesian worldview.

Behind the Melanesian pidgin term “bekim” (payback) lies the presumption that life, punctuated by dangerous feuding and competitions, colored by the excitement of reciprocities and trade, is to be apprehended as a continuous interweaving of gains and losses, giving and taking, wealth and destitution, joy and sorrow, vitality and death (Trompf op cit:1).

Smoke in the Hills, Gunfire in the Valley

Rosita Henry has a particularly apt 2005 Oceania article  (Henry 2005) by this title about the Nebilyer fight in the Western Highlands that broke out in 1990 and ran for almost a decade. It also serves to illustrate Trompf’s point above, about the inevitability of violence as part of – not a rent in – the social fabric. Outsiders know the Nebilyer war from Connolly and Anderson’s third film in the First Contact trilogy of films, Black Harvest, which was shot while the couple lived  on Joe Leahy’s plantation and bore witness to the opening salvos of the fight. I would assume Diamond himself is familiar with the film. Henry deals explicitly with peacemaking strategies and the complexities of negotiating compensation throughout a conflict, and she walks us through some of the event analyzes provided by participants themselves. That is, she cites the explanations they give for paying certain parties, and not paying others, and for electing certain causes of the conflict while ignoring others.

It’s an excellent paper that rings true to me because I was living in Mt. Hagen with one of the participant clans, the Penambe, at the time; I am familiar with some of the folks’ quotes; and I was a business partner to the person whose song lyrics form part of the title. Maggie Leahy Wilson’s plaintive song says: “There’s smoke in the hills / Gunfire in the valley / A woman is wailing / A loved one is killed / My heart is aching / My Heart is aching.” It’s about heartache, Henry reminds us, which always makes highlands violence regrettable, especially to women, even if we concede that it is integral to the warp and woof of highlands life. She goes on the demonstrate how, like it or not, peace compensation strategies during and after warfare are as important to the community as traditional exchange ceremonies. Along with Rumsey, Merlan, and M. Strathern, Henry argues that warfare is not a mark of social degeneration (sensu Hobbes) but a structural component of highlands society, even as it is bemoaned and avoided by most highlanders.

Alan Rumsey (Rumsey 1999), Francesca Merlan (Merlan and Rumsey 1991) and Marilyn Strathern (M. Strathern 1972) all have written about peace negotiations in the Western Highlands as highly social events, as layered and important as moka exchanges, funerary feasts and bride price ceremonies. But moka wealth exchange partners are never the same people you oppose in battle, so the relations defined there are very different. In battle, for example, direct and primary enemies never compensate each other; they compensate their allies and their minor enemies who may have lost lives and property. In some cases this seems counter-intuitive (to people like Diamond), but it is part of a strategy to ensure future alliances, and not to seal an absolute peace. Special transactions can secure longer-lasting peace, however, and help settle a matter more conclusively. These transactions require lengthy discussion, in which every trigger event, and then every secondary cause, is re-examined for latent significance and hidden motives. First the key causes are revealed to the communities and left to percolate in gossip for awhile, to accumulate variant recollections and memories of past causes. It’s what we call “planting the seed” in tok bokis or euphemistic tok pisin: a proposition is placed on the table for a while, and public conjecture accumulates around it. Finally, the best orators from all sides will reap the fruit of this and present it in a formal debate, literally redefining the terms of the fight as they do so. Their eloquence can weave insinuation into clever parables that may, if successful, satisfy all parties while leaving acceptable loopholes for the future. Consensus, and definitely not emotions, seals the conclusion of these peace negotiations. People like Daniel Wemp might walk away with one interpretation, and his enemy may take away another, but neither view shakes the tree of consensus.

In the Nebilyer fight, for example, one of the trigger events was a mistake. A Ganiga man shot dead his clansman, a security guard, after a theft on Joe Leahy’s coffee plantation. Initially, the Ganiga assumed a Kulka had shot the guard, and they retaliated against the Kulkas. But they actually chopped up a Kulka ally, a Poi Penambe man, and this elicited a fierce alliance between Kulkas and Poi Penambe. In turn, the Ganiga brought in the Ulka as their allies, re-activating a series of debts and obligations between these sometimes-allies. Ultimately, the internal compensations were labyrinthine: Ulkas paying each other, Ganigas paying Ulkas, Poi Penambe paying Kulkas, and Ulka Kundulge paying the Ganigas (because it turns out the man who shot the security guard was not Ganiga but Ulka Kundulge after all).

In the midst of all of this, Henry cites the Poi Penambe man who was chopped up by the Ganigas and survived. His complaint is clearly made in the hope of eliciting sympathy from the listener, fully aware that his problem is “unjust” at some level, but knowing that the social contract, and not his personal emotions, will prevail.

The Kulkas are putting the pressure on me and my tribe you see, because I was axed. I was axed and the fight started. Probably about 30 or 40 men were killed, Kulkas. And the pressure is on me now, May father and my small tribe, Poi Penambe, you know. They’ve been given pigs and money and all that thing, and they’re still putting pressure on us today…They want cash now. I have to initiate that by putting in a couple of grand, which I haven’t got. They [Kulka] sort of feel that because they [Ganiga (Ulka)] chopped you and we supported you and we lost our men in the fight and then you’re still alive, we should be compensated by you for our men (Henry 2005: 438).

This is “restorative” justice, or what Alan Rumsey prefers to call transformative justice (Rumsey 2003) – and it has nothing to do with either personal or collective revenge. It is about finding a way forward, as painful as that may be. Indeed, I imagine the Poi Penambe man still harbors resentments from that period.

In addition (and this has to do with the Daniel Wemp case) these analyses are made all the more complicated by new factors of the cash economy: a cash crop income (coffee, in this case) and the resentments over whose land is used for cash crops, and the obvious jealousies of an emergent class system. Some people are vastly wealthy in the Western Highlands today, while others are modern peasants. Any substantive discussion of Wemp’s story, and his gloss of events,  must take these factors into consideration. Like the Western Highlands, the Southern Highlands context involves the segmentary politics of clans, and the new hierarchies of cash.

Swallowing half-truths

The problem is that Papua New Guineans are more and more likely to describe warfare in ways that Europeans prefer to understand it.

When hostilities break out between two sides, the outsider is apt to regard the situation as arising de novo. And when Melanesians are asked today why given fights have occurred, they themselves are prone to give deceptively simple answers, to do with land-grabbing, for example, theft of pigs, rape or perhaps sorcery. Rarer reasons are known to have been voiced: such as women stealing, elopement, jilting a marriage suitor, threats to a trade specialty, or even insults directed at gardens by a visiting tribal leader. Perhaps the most common type of response, though still simplistic as it remains, is to give a narrative account, an informant telling how A was angered by the actions of B and led a raiding party to kill B or one of his associates (and did so in a way worth telling), the deeper or long-term reasons behind the act of revenge being barely touched. After years of interaction between “subject” and “ruling” peoples, these replies to outside researchers have taken on a stereotypical quality…[and] such replies have been absorbed into pre-existing explanatory frameworks to vulgarize the already dissolving subtleties and complexities of traditional perspectives. When it is blithely accepted, however, that Melanesians view human conflict in terms of disconnected, separate episodes, with acts that require revenge, followed by acts of vengeance (or satisfaction), supposedly forming a self-contained unit of affairs, only a half-truth has been swallowed. (Ibid: 32) (emphasis added)

Traditional justice in New Guinea is not based on the Western model of retribution, but on that of restoration. Restorative justice is far from the eye-for-eye, tooth-for-tooth blood-lust Diamond attributes to Wemp and would wish for his father-in-law; it has more to do with repairing the social fabric. Restorative justice as the tribal dispute logic is also being increasingly formalized in PNG’s statutory law. In village courts it has always been the leading form of jurisprudence: Whatever custom makes the best peace is the best option. But even the greater legal apparatus of PNG has more and more customary law folded into it these days.

For women in particular, it continues to be a very unsatisfying form of peace. As traditional clanswomen were subject (rather like Sharia law) to their husband’s whims, and more likely to be thrown in as part of a compensation payment than avenged for injury, they are beginning to seek more equable status in the courts these days. None of this has been easy (see Garap 2000), and some of it has been remarkably successful in recent conflict resolution cases (see Rumsey 2000, 2003). But it continues to resist the Judeo-Christian concept of a bounded and autonomous individual before the courts – someone wholly responsible for his or her action – because that product of Western civilization simply does not exist in Melanesia.

Women are struggling with this across the developing world, and anyone familiar with non-Western worldviews would be able to appreciate the steeper uphill battle of feminism outside the Western world. Not long ago, for example, a young woman from the Southern Highlands of PNG, not far from Daniel Wemp’s home, took her own father to court to establish her jural individualism (and won): It was determined that she could stay at university in the capital and not, as her father and clan had determined, be part of a compensation package to an enemy clan.

Restorative justice

Let me try to explain restorative justice with a personal example from the Western Highlands. In 1993, I was kidnapped in Mt. Hagen (which is about 60 km from Nipa) by a gang of young men who were members of my hosts’ enemy clan. I was living with the Elti Penambe, and these were Kopi clansmen living just next to Penambe clan boundaries on Kuta Ridge, outside of Mt. Hagen town. The gang held up a car carrying me and two tourists on our way to town, as we passed through their customary land. We were really just caught up in traditional Penambe-Kopi tensions made more fraught by the nearby Nebilyer fight. Our kidnappers did not target us per se, but as accessories to the Penambe cause. The tourists were an Australian father and son visiting from Port Moresby, and I was a familiar Penambe resident at the time. In the course of the day we walked through the bush, were held at gun and knife point, and finally, after threat of a gang rape, fought the captors, after which I ran away and was molested by one of them

During the year of court proceedings that followed the incident, clansmen and friends did what they could to dissuade me from pursuing the case, not so much because they couldn’t understand my anger, but because they said it would jeopardize the inter-clan peace. How could I be so selfish? Even when the enemy tried to substitute one young man for the culprit (someone who could do the jail time because he wasn’t in school), I was (for some reason) dogged in my need for retribution. The kid who put a knife to my neck was going to be the kid who paid the price, I insisted.

As my clansmen hammered out their own precarious peace, including an exchange of pigs and money that never involved me, I went back and forth from the courthouse in town with sympathetic cops from the lowlands who openly despised Hagen people and made no bones about roughing up the young man in his cell.

Eventually, a public prosecutor helped me apply a new restorative justice law when the young man was convicted: In exchange for the detention time he had served, I would accept a collection of kina compensation from the clan. This new restorative clause seemed fair to me, because the kid had spent a year in detention anyway, and I was in fact angry at the clan for harboring the gang and not assisting us to bring it in.

By the time a conviction was made, I was thoroughly disgusted with my “host” clan as well as these neighbors, and entirely on the grounds of Western “fairness” I had deeply internalized. At one point, while still living in the village, we’d put out word that there was a reward for some of the cargo stolen from the tourists, in particular their video camera. When the gear came back, at the hands of one of the culprits himself, I snickered and told them I’d lied, there was no reward – and my hosts were furious with me for the deceit.

They had not been angry in my behalf at the lies we were continually told by the clan representatives (that they had no idea who these kids were and no notion of where they might be hiding). And they were not appeased in the least when we found the gang had left in the camera a home video that, when played, revealed the clan representative to be part of the gang and pledging, in local language, that the next time they kidnapped me they’d kill me after all.

During this period, as a bushfire in the enemy land grew out of control and threatened to cook our gardens, I was told to leave the clan land for fear, with the fire, of starting a renewed war. Joe Leahy (himself deeply embroiled in the Nebilyer fight) offered me safe haven in one of his town flats.

I distinctly remember two offenses I took very personally during this period, even as I knew better than to do so. At one point, the enemy clan leader was accompanied by a Peace Corps volunteer, a very nice young man working in the region, when he came to visit one night and plead for me to drop the case. I had by now seen him in a home video (and still keeping this fact secret), so when I grew impatient and accused him of lying, the Peace Corps volunteer quite disingenuously came to his defense, asking, “Don’t you think you’re being little culturally insensitive, Nancy?”

At another time, my business partner and host, with whom I had written several grant proposals for women’s projects, told me I was aggravating clan tensions and putting the poor accused lad’s family in great distress by not dropping the case. So much for female solidarity, I snarled.

Finally, when the young man was convicted and returned with the clan counselor on the designated day, with the agreed-upon fine, there was no one to receive him at court, and the two walked back to the village, never to be pursued again. I took churlish satisfaction to find the young man repeatedly re-offended afterwards, and was pleased to hear he was caught for robbery and thrown into jail sometime later.

But every time I passed the rest of the gang on the streets of Hagen, for years afterwards, they would wave and shout friendly hellos to me like we were old pals. And I’ll never forget one afternoon when I waited in the courthouse for our hearing and the young man was led past me in handcuffs. “Hey Nance, yu orait?” he said, or some such unaffected greeting. I stood there for a long time trying to understand how he could be so friendly, so impersonal about his arrest.

In the end, it was this depersonalization that got me through the ordeal, because every Hagen woman I might have commiserated with preferred to say “Get over it,” and “What makes you special?” I was a cipher in a group war, and nothing, not even the assault, was a personal gesture.
The fact that I was a woman only further diffused my “rights.”

It hit home one day, several months into the trial, when the lowlands policeman assigned to my case came to pick me up for the proceedings. He had the case file on the seat beside him, under his holstered gun, and I took a quick look out of curiosity. He was a nice guy; I liked him, even though he had been among those who relished bashing the kid when he was first picked up. (The most disturbing instance I saw came when they pulled him out of the cell, for my benefit, and stood him before a low desk, where they lay his penis and gave it several boot whacks – certainly not to be confused with an expression of feminist solidarity.) When I opened the case file I noticed that the charge against this kid was “theft,” and nowhere did it mention the attempted rape. “What?” I must have asked. The cop told me yeah, he’d forgotten, and they’d tack that on afterwards when they got a conviction.

Ultimately, I learned what the Poi Penambe man interviewed by Rosita Henry knew too well. I could cry forever about my personal wounds, but I’d evoke no sympathy until I worked for a larger social reparation.

Patterns of aggression

In conclusion, I would say that anthropologists are not the only elephants who remember past injuries. Conservationists and development workers in PNG have similar memories. In 1992, for example, World Wildlife Fund US, on whose board Diamond sits, sponsored an eco-forestry project in the Kikori Delta region of PNG. Chevron was then drilling for oil in the region and had become concerned about publicity surrounding its environmental effects, so they enlisted the help of the WWF to green up their image.

Internal Chevron documents at the time suggested that “WWF will act as a buffer for the joint venture against environmentally damaging activities in the region, and against international environmental criticism.” The eco-forestry project would be an alternative to the industrial logging made possible by laying Chevron’s oil pipeline, and would be additionally supported by the MacArthur Foundation, the U.S. State Department and the World Bank’s International Finance Corporation.

The problem was, however, they did not source their timber from the logs felled by Chevron, but instead from a local company that was known to be harvesting mangrove forests. Unfortunately, harvesting mangroves is illegal in PNG, for conservation reasons. When the sawdust hit the fan, though, WWF US proved unrepentant. Apparently (in a remarkable foreshadowing of this debate) the state of Papua New Guinea did not mean much to the project sponsors.

As the Sydney Morning Herald reported, “Jared Diamond, a WWFUS board member and Pulitzer Prize winner … says that what is happening at Kikori is ‘sustainable logging of mangroves.’ Diamond adds that, regardless of whether it is illegal ‘if it can be done on a sustainable basis then by all means do it’” (Rowell 2001).

Enough said.

REFERENCES:

Banks, C., 2000. “Contextualizing sexual violence: rape and carnal knowledge in Papua New
Guinea,” in Reflections on Violence in Melanesia, ed. S. Dinnen and A. Ley, Annandale, NSW: Hawkins Press, pp 83-104.

Barth, F. 1975. Ritual and Knowledge among the Baktaman of New Guinea. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Berndt, R.M., 1962. Excess and Restraint. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Doherty, T. and S. Garap, 1995. Women and customary law in PNG, Documents from the IWDA’s 1995 (pre-Beijing conference) Beneath Paradise Collections (unpublished).

Feil, D. 1987. The Evolution of Highland Papua New Guinea Societies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Frankel, S. 1986. The Huli Response to Illness. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Garap, S. 2000. “Struggles of Women and Girls—Simbu Province, Papua New Guinea,” in Reflections on Violence in Melanesia, ed. S. Dinnen and A. Ley, Annandale, NSW: Hawkins Press, pp. 159-171.

Glasse, R.M. 1959. “Revenge and Redress among the Huli,” Oceania 5:273ff.
1968. The Huli of Papua: a cognatic descent system. Cahiers de l’homme NS, 8, Paris.

Goldman, L.R. 1981. “Compensation and Disputes in Huli,” in R. Scaglion (ed), Homicide Compensation in Papua New Guinea. Law Reform Commission of PNG Monograph 1, Port Moresby, pp. 56ff.

Goddard, M. 1996. “The snake bone case: Law, custom, and justice in a Papua New Guinea village court.” Oceania.

Hallpike, C.R. 1977. Bloodshed and Vengeance in the Papuan Mountains. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Henry, R. 2005. ‘Smoke in the Hills, Gunfire in the Valley’: War and Peace in Western Highlands, Papua New Guinea. Oceania 75 (4): 431+.

Knauft, B.M. 1985. Good Company and Violence: sorcery and social action in a lowland New Guinea society. Berkeley: University of California Press.

—–1990. “Melanesian Warfare: a theoretical history,” Oceania 60(4): 250ff.

—–1999. From Primitive to Postcolonial in Melanesian Anthropology. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Koch, K-F. 1974. War and Peace in Jalemo: The Management of Conflict in Highland New Guinea. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Lederman, R. 1986. What Gifts Engender. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Meggitt, M.J. 1977. Blood is Their Argument. Explorations in World Anthropology. Palo Alto: Stamford University Press.

Merlan, F. and A. Rumsey, 1991. Ku Want: Language and Segmentary Politics in the Western Nebilyer Valley, Papua New Guinea. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Ploeg, A. 1969. “Government in Wanggulam.” Verhandekingen van het Koninklijk Institut voor Taal-, Land –en Volkenkunde 57, The Hague.

Rappaport, R.A. 1967. Pigs for the Ancestors. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Reay, M. 1959. The Kuma. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press.

Rowell, A. 2001. “No way to save trees.” Sydney Morning Herald, 02/03/2001.

Rumsey, A. 1999. “Social segmentation, voting, and violence in Papua New Guinea.” The Contemporary Pacific 11(2):305-333.

—–2000. “Women as peacemakers–A case from the Nebilyer Valley, Western Highlands, Papua New Guinea.” In S. Dinnen and A. Ley (eds), Reflections on Violence in Melanesia. Leichhardt, NSW: The Federation Press, pp. 139-155.

—–2003. “Tribal Warfare and Transformative Justice in the New Guinea Highlands.” In Sinclair Dinnen, Anita Jowett and Tess Newton (eds.) A Kind of Mending: Restorative Justice in the Pacific Islands, Canberra: Pandanus Press, pp. 79-93.

Scaglion, R. 1979. “Formal and Informal Operations of a Village Court in Maprik.” Melanesian Law Journal 7(1): 116-29.

Schieffelin, E. L. 1976. The Sorrow of the Lonely and the Burning of the Dancers. New York: St. Martin’s Press.

Strathern, A. 1977. “Contemporary Warfare in the New Guinea Highlands: Breakdown or Revival?” Yagl-Ambu 4 (3): 135-46.

Strathern, M. 1972. Women in Between: Female Roles in a Male World: Mount Hagen, New Guinea. London: Seminar Press.

Trompf, G.W. 1994. Payback: The Logic of Retribution in Melanesian Religions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Wedgewood, C.H. 1930. “Some Aspects of Warfare in Melanesia.” Oceania 1:1ff.

One uninteresting question to me is the issue of institutional license. There is clearly a sliding scale of institutional license from paradigmatic anthropologists (Ph.D.s in anthropology in tenured positions of anthropology training more Ph.D.s in anthropology, conducting anthropological work and publishing in scholarly anthropological journals) to people who ‘think anthropologically’ but might not have a degree in anthropology. I suppose some people would take issue with Diamond’s representation of himself (or more accurately, the press’s representation of him) as an anthropologist because he lack the appropriate institutional licensing.

But what truly bothers me about the fact that Diamond’s ‘vengeance’ piece ran under the banner ‘annals of anthropology’ is not that Diamond doesn’t have Official Certification in our field. Rather, what bothers me is that this piece and the affair it provoked sends an off-brand message to our audience.

I think of anthropology as a discipline in the broadest sense of the word — a way of thinking about the world, a disposition about how to study it, a certain set of texts which provide a genealogy and another which provide a taken-for-granted reservoir of examples about how different societies have organized themselves. This discipline is clearly connected to academic anthropology, but at the same time it also attaches to a variety of other institutional sites that include, yes, even the History Channel.

I don’t mind when people without degrees do anthropology — the more the merrier, in fact. But I do mind when our consumers get the wrong message about our brand.

For instance, I think consumers learn from Diamond’s work that anthropologists study ancient/primitive people. As a result, I have had people ask me if I, as an anthropologist, get upset when non-anthropologists study Papua New Guinea (presumably because it is ‘primitive’). What’s more, I have had _other anthropologists_ chastise me, a Melanesianist, for perpetuating this message. It puts me in a double bind.

In contrast, I want to send non-anthropologists the message that anthropologists study culture and the power if has in shaping human social life. Saying that anthropologists are only allowed to study ‘primitives’ is like saying linguists are only allowed to study French, biologists are only allowed to study mammals, and chemists are only allowed to study tungsten. It is to mistake the topic for an approach. The fact that Diamond prefers biological and geographical explanations almost to the exclusion of cultural explanations doesn’t help.

Consumers learn from the Wemp affair that anthropologists are unethical and lousy at getting the facts right. In contrast, I want to send them the message that anthropologists are responsible stewards of the information that people share with us, and that we get the facts right.

Consumers learn from the Wemp affair that anthropologists like Diamond can be unethical and inaccurate because they are powerful white people who study powerless brown people. This imagination of the anthropological field situation leads to the assumption that anthropologists either help powerless brown people or harm them, and each of these options can be negatively or positively morally charged: help them (positive: collaboration and empowerment, negative: colonial paternalism), hurt them (positive: exterminate/educate the brutes in the name of civilization, negative: colonial predation).

In contrast, I want people to recognize that there is no _necessary_ connection between race and power in anthropological fieldwork: powerful brown people could be studying helpless white people, powerless brown people could be studying powerful white people, etc. (you can make a chart to get all the permutations if you want and I bet I can find examples of every combination in the ethnographic record, even if some are much rarer than others). Just as anthropologist study all sorts of people, the dynamics of that study in the field are also varied.

Of course, not everyone may agree with me in my sense of what the discipline of anthropology is and some may have thicker or thinner senses of how exhaustive our disciplinary commitments will be. There may be different standards for different sorts of scholarly and nonscholarly genres, and of course I’m sure there are some anthropologists who behave so badly that they have done a much more effective job of trashing our brand than Diamond. But this is just to say that good work is good work, bad work is bad work, and people will always quibble about the details.

Beyond issue of institutional licensing or theological disputes about what what, theoretically, counts as ‘anthropology’ what worries me about coverage of the Daniel Wemp affair is what our audience will think of us. When I got off the plane in Papua New Guinea later this month, will people be unwilling to talk to me because they’ve heard about the Jared Diamond affair? Will they spend their time explaining to me that they are not ‘primitive’? While scholarly and legal issues will be raised in the course of the Wemp affair, I think it also behooves anthropologists to think about the fallout this event will have for how we are perceived, and the sort of messages we want to send about ourselves to our audience. Using the idiom of brand, as I have somewhat jokingly used it here, helps us realize that an important part of this debate is associations and experiences that people have of us.

What I think is truly important about this case – beyond the obvious fact that Wemp deserves justice – is that it represents the fundamental ethical issue that anthropologists will have to face for decades to come. Anthropological collaboration with the army may directly impact more human lives, but collaboration is an old problem that we have talked about for a long time. The great ethical debate prior to HTS was the ‘Yanomami Scandal’ stirred up by Patrick Tierney, a debate that centered on anthropologists (and others) behaving badly in the field, and not being held to account by the powers that be in the metropole. Some people like Rob Borofsky want to fetishize this debate as _the_ issue in anthropological ethics, since it involves what they imagine must be the paradigmatic anthropological situation: powerful white outsiders, (relatively) supine brown people.

I admit that _L’affaire Shearer_ does have a whiff of that dynamic. But overall it is about a relatively new issue which will I think will become increasingly central to anthropological ethics in the future: the radical answerability that researchers increasingly have to the people they depict. While this should always have been important to us, it is a topic we can no longer ignore in a world where their ‘informants’ are more connected than ever before to the flows of media and communication in which ‘we’ depict ‘them’. If the Yanomami controversy was about anthropologists suddenly being held responsible in the metropole for what they did in the field, the Jared Diamond case is about an author suddenly being held responsible in the field for what they did in the metropole.

Shearer’s report is long and detailed and I will not attempt to do more than summarize it here. Basically, Jared Diamond wrote an article in the New Yorker in which he told the story of Daniel Wemp, a man he met in Papua New Guinea who described a tribal fight he had been in which allegedly involved killing dozens of people and paralyzing his enemy in a quest to seek revenge for the death of his uncle. What did Diamond do wrong, according to Shearer? We can summarize as follows:

*Poor research and inaccurate facts*
Shearer conducted punishingly scrupulous research on Diamond’s story, which included contacting Wemp and having researchers in Papua New Guinea investigate Diamond’s story. It looks like the New Yorker article is a hodge-podge of Diamond’s recollections of the stories Wemp told Diamond when Wemp drove him around the Southern Highlands. The actual history of fighting in the area Wemp describes is quite different — for instance, the man that Diamond says was paralyzed in a wheelchair is photographed standing and walking in Shearer’s piece. Diamond presents what appear to be verbatim quotations from Wemp which are probably Diamond’s reconstruction of the conversation, and so forth. So both the facts and their presentation are problematic.

*Poor ethical standards*
Separate from the fact that Diamond appears to have gotten the story wrong is the fact that he followed few of the ethical standards which anthropologists (and journalists, apparently) follow in writing about their research subjects. Calling someone a murderer in a venue like the New Yorker is a serious claim indeed. Add to this the fact that Diamond used Wemp’s real name in the story, and that Wemp had no idea that his stories would ever be published, and you have serious ethical problems. There was, in other words, no informed consent and no attempt to provide anonymity for informants.

Shearer’s points here are largely factual and perhaps in the future there will be more delving into the minutiae of this case — as someone who lived in the province just north of Southern Highland and who has visited this area I am extremely impressed with the quality of her research, the experts she has contacted, and her collaboration with Papua New Guinean journalists. But for non specialists the issues of what did or did not happen in 1992 will probably be less important than some of the wider issues raised by this piece:

*Let’s hope this doesn’t turn into The Great Counterattack*
Many anthropologists dislike Jared Diamond because he has done what they fantasize of doing — writing readable nonfiction for a general audience. One possible outcome of this case is that it turns into The Great Counterattack in which every possible error in Diamond’s reporting is used to trash him by people who care less about Papua New Guinea, geography, steel, collapse, etc. and more about getting the taste of sour grapes out of their mouths. To the extent this becomes a witchhunt, it will get more and more boring and, of course, more and more cruel.

*Questions about scholarly competency and institutional licensing*
Diamond is like some sort of great Victorian polymath — geographer, ornithologist, anthropologist, historian… in his books it appears there is nothing he can’t do, and to experts in each of these fields it appears that he can’t do any of them. While popular audiences love Diamond’s work, the scholarly consensus on it has been pretty firmly established: much of what the public thinks is Diamond’s original ideas are cribbed from other authors, often with the bare minimum of acknowledgments performed in footnotes to stave off accusations of plagiarism. Overall, what Diamond gets right, he gets from others. What he gets wrong tends to be the stuff he has made up himself.

It is one thing to have Diamond’s book show up on the shelves of airport bookstores, but quite another for it to be described as ‘anthropology’ in the subheading of a story in the New Yorker. Now that Diamond has tried his hand at some ethnographic ‘research’ in a public forum, I think we are beginning to see the differences between avocational anthropology and the real thing. So what _is_ an anthropologist? Is it someone who follows the best practices of our discipline, or do we really feel there must be some sort of institutional licensing in the form of a departmental appointment of degree in order for someone to take up this mantle? Its an interesting question that Diamond’s piece raises.

*Could anyone sustain this level of scrutiny?*
Shearer takes Diamond to task for not meeting anthropological (and journalistic) standards of evidence, methodology, and ethics. Yet I have to wonder if Diamond is the only person who would be snared in a net as tightly woven as Shearers. After all, anthropologists have a long history of failing to meet their own evidentiary standards. Those of us who work in PNG can think of several authors whose work is not widely taught because we ‘all know’ about the quality of their fieldwork. It is important to hold Diamond to professional standards if he is going to act like a professional. At the same time, we must recognize that he is taking his place in a field where those who have come before him have often failed to distinguish themselves.

*Shearer is not reporting the story, Shearer _is_ the story*
Anthropologists understand that social life is a constant process of narration and renarration — and I’ve always felt this is particularly true of highlands PNG, somehow. I am not Melanesian (obviously) but looking at this case through a Melanesian lens it seems to me that there is something complex and fascinating about the way Shearer’s report has elicited a whole series of responses from people in PNG and is yet another step in the ongoing reentextualization of events that happened a decade ago in Southern Highlands as it twists and turns into various forms of compensation/litigation.

As I said at the beginning of this piece, the central and most important point of this debate is that it is about what we write at ‘home’ circulating back to the ‘field’. But this is just another way of saying that the line between these two is increasingly porous (as Gupta and Ferguson noted some time ago). Diamond’s case is a cautionary tale for all anthropologists who write in the comfort of their homes imagining their fieldsite is far away. It is answerability that is at stake here — Diamond’s and our own. Answerability is something that journalists have been struggling with longer than anthropologists and I think what they have to teach Diamond offers lessons we ourselves will have to learn in the future (if we haven’t already): get your facts straight, report them fairly, and let people know that you are doing so. It is not only the right thing to do, but in a world where ‘they read what we right’, your audience is also your informants.

To be honest I’ve never gotten very far into _Collapse_ — it isn’t as lucid as _Guns, Germs, and Steel_ and doesn’t feature New Guinea (my area of research) nearly as prominently. Tainter’s analysis of the book, though, seems to jive more or less with what the emerging scholarly consensus on GG&S: as a popularization of other people’s work it is quite good, the bits that are Diamond’s own contribution are flawed and wrong, and Diamond does as much as possible (short of straight up plagiarism) to take credit for the work of other scholars who he popularizes.

I don’t have the strong emotional reaction to Diamond’s work that other people do, so it is refreshing to see an article which can point out the flaws of Diamond’s work in a relatively disinterested way. I highly recommend the article to others — I imagine it is ‘teachable’ as well.