Tag Archives: South America

The End is Nigh. Start blogging.

Savage Minds welcomes guest blogger Clare A. Sammells.

My thanks to the editors of Savage Minds for allowing me to guest blog this month. Hopefully I will not be among the last of Savage Mind’s guests, given that the End of the World is nigh.

You hadn’t heard? On or around Dec 21, 2012, the Maya Long Count will mark the end of a 5125 year cycle. Will this be a mere a calendrical turn, no more inherently eventful that the transition from Dec 31, 2012 to Jan 1, 2013? Will this be a moment of astronomical alignments, fiery conflagrations, and social upheavals? Or will there be a shift in human consciousness, an opportunity for the prepared to improve their lives and achieve enlightenment? Continue reading →

Anthropologist Bites Dog

I recently had an opportunity to watch José Padilha’s “Secrets of the Tribe” which purports to put “the field of anthropology… under the magnifying glass in [a] fiery investigation of the seminal research on Yanomamö Indians.” This film has been a big success at festivals, screening at Sundance, Hotdocs, etc. and has also been shown on HBO and the BBC, making it one of the most successful recent films about anthropology, yet it seems to have gotten scant attention from anthropologists.

What attention it has gotten has largely been positive, such as this glowing review in CounterPunch, or this blog post by Louis Proyect. A review in VAR was slightly more critical, but not by much. Still, the following comment from Stephen Broomer’s review gets to the heart of the matter:

Padilha’s contribution to this debate is confined within the limits of documentary form. Secrets of the Tribe is a narrative-driven documentary, and as such it privileges dramatic contrast over the reinforcement of facts or proof.

Indeed, I would go much further. The film struck me as little more than tabloid journalism, reveling in salacious scandals, academic cat fights, and conspiracy theories in the name of discussing research ethics and scientific methodology. It reminded me of one of those local news stories where a reporter exclaims how shocked he is to discover that there is prostitution in his city while the camera indulges in digitally blurred closeups of exposed female flesh.

In comparing this film to tabloid journalism I don’t mean to impute Padilha’s motives. Padilha is clearly someone who cares deeply about Brazil’s indigenous population. He also deserves credit for actually interviewing Yanomami for the film. But Padilha is not an anthropologist. As one review put it: “A student of math and physics, Padilha turned to filmmaking after a brief, unsatisfying career in banking.” (He is most famous for “Bus 174” about a hijacked bus in Rio.) For this reason he seems unable to meaningfully engage with contemporary debates about fieldwork practices or the nature of anthropological research.

I don’t really know which bothered me more: the lumping together of pedophilia accusations against Jacques Lizot and Kenneth Good with Patrick Tierney’s accusations against James Neel and Napoleon Chagnon, the fact that the film completely ignored Tim Asch even as it relies extensively on his footage, or the way it presented anthropological epistemology as a simplistic choice between the hard-science of sociobiology on the one hand and mushy-headed cultural relativism on the other.

What really upsets me is that these are serious issues, which warrant serious discussion. By simplifying the scientific debates and lumping them together with pedophilia accusations, the film missed a unique opportunity to make an important contribution to the popular understanding of anthropology. Too bad.

The myth of the “untouched” Amazon

Whether we read the racist rants of Rush Limbaugh, or the concerned exhortations of Survival International, we get the impression (intentionally or not) of “uncontacted tribes” as a kind of living museum of our collective human past.

This view is based on a very nineteenth century vision of unilinear social evolution, in which human beings gradually progress from the most primitive state of hunter-gatherers, up through simple agricultural societies, on to early kingdoms, and cumulate in the wonder that is modern Western democracy.

The problem with this view is that it overlooks important exceptions in the archaeological record. There we find a different story, where complex societies can occasionally move in the other direction. I don’t know the current state of research which first made a splash in 2003, but then there was a spate of news coverage about the “Lost cities of the Amazon” discovered by Michael Heckenberger of the University of Florida and his colleagues:

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J.I. Staley Prize Winner Announced

Charles L. Briggs and Clara Mantini-Briggs are the winners of this year’s J.I. Staley Prize, for their book Stories in the Time of Cholera: Racial Profiling During a Medical Nightmare.

The book recounts the 1992-1993 cholera outbreak that killed some 500 people, mostly indigenous, in eastern Venezuela’s Orinoco River Delta. The disease had been absent from Latin American for nearly a century. Cholera can kill healthy adults in as little as 12 hours and can make a 15-year-old appear geriatric, Briggs and Mantini-Briggs note in the book, but is prevented easily by the provision of uncontaminated food and water and is easily treated.

… The book draws from hundreds of interviews conducted from 1992-1999 with people from a cross-section of ages, occupations, social positions and degrees of bilingualism in the delta region, and the Venezuelan capital of Caracas. The authors recorded the stories of medical personnel, journalists, families of those killed by cholera, disease survivors, community leaders and government officials, traditional healers, missionaries, and others.

… In November 2006, [Charles] Briggs won the Edward Sapir Book Prize, the highest award in linguistic anthropology for co-authoring [with Richard Bauman], Voices of Modernity: Language Ideologies and the Politics of Inequality…

The Latin American Left Today

Claudio Lomnitz, a professor of anthropology at Columbia University, has an excellent article in the Boston Review which explores the similarities and differences in the various new leftist governments in Latin America.

Today, the Latin American left is riddled by contradictions: it is a form of democratic politics that challenges some of the core precepts of liberal democracy; it is a rebellion against unbridled globalization that constantly risks falling back on nationalism and the developmental state; it seeks to strengthen state intervention and regulation but must rely on “flexible” forms of redistribution that it shares with neo-liberal parties; it seeks to produce alternative models of reality and development but is insufficiently invested in science, technology, and environmentalism.

I particularly liked his discussion of the various moments in historical memory which each of the new leaders has drawn upon as their moment of inspiration. The list of time periods alone gives a sense of these differences:

Bolivia, Venezuela, Mexico, Uruguay, Argentina, Brazil, Chile: 500 years, 200 years, 90 years, 80 years, 60 years, 40 years, 30 years.

Read the whole thing.

Cognitive science, meet the angel of history

The New York Times is running “an article”:http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/27/science/27side.html?r=2&oref=slogin&oref=slogin on a “recent article in _Cognitive Science“:http://www.leaonline.com/doi/abs/10.1207/s15516709cog0000_62 by Nunez and Sweetser which demonstrates that Aymara speakers imagine the past to be in front of them and the future behind them — reversed, in other words, from the spatial metaphors we use in English. The Times article notes “If they are right, this is bigger than anything the 60’s tossed up. Is it possible that human concepts of time can vary this much because of language and culture? And what would it be like to think this way? Do I have the rest of my life behind me? And how can I let bygones be bygones if they’re right in front of me?” Nunez and Sweetser also makes a to-do about the rarity of this pattern, since, it claims that “so far all documented languages appear to share a spatial metaphor mapping future events onto spatial locations in front of Ego and past events onto locations behind Ego.”

Cognitive Science produce attention-grabbing headlines much more frequently than anthropologists, and this article is a prime example of how they manage to do so: ignorance.

Have Nunez and Sweetser actually conducted some sort of exhaustive examination of ‘all documented languages’? No. In fact their citations reveal that they have examined a grand total of seven: English, Wolof, Chagga, Chinese, Japanese, Turkish, and American Sign Language (to be fair one of the articles they site has ‘more cross cultural data’).

If Nunez and Sweetser had looked a little bit further — for example to the Pacific — they would have found that these sorts of metaphors are quite common. Consider:

It is interesting to note that in Hawaiian, the past is referred to as ka wa mamua, or “the time in front or before.” Whereas the future, when thought of at all, is Ka wa mahope, or “the time which comes after or behind.” It is as if the Hawaiian stands firmly in the present, with his back to the future, and his eyes fixed upon the past, seeking historical answers for present-day dilemmas. Such an orientation is to the Hawaiian an eminently practical one, for the future is always unknown, whereas the past is rich in glory and knowledge. – Lilikala Kame’eleihiwa, Native Land, Foreign Desires, p. 22-23

Or this one:

Ka wa mamua and ka wa mahope are the Hawaiian terms for the past and future, respectively. But note that ka wa mamua (past) means the time before, in front, or forward. Ka wa mahope (future) means the time after or behind. These terms do not merely describe time, but the Hawaiians’ orientation to it. We face the past, confidently interpreting the present, cautiously backing into the future, guided by what our ancestors knew and did. -Jon Osorio, Dismembering Lahui p.7

which resonate wonderfully with:

This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe that keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress. -Walter Benjamin

Thus Hawai’ians, like Benjamin’s Angel of History, also imagine the future behind them and the past ahead of them. A friend who studies Babylonian reports something similar. And of course the English term “before” when used spatially does actually mean ‘in front of’ — how many stagings of MacBeth have you seen in which he asks “is this a dagger I see before me, the handle towards my ass?” Timelines typically run from left to right, where the movement from distal to proximal time is analogized to the direction of the motion of the act of writing (in English).

So it would be interesting to see how wide-spread various spatial metaphors of time are both within and across cultures, and I wouldn’t be surprised if — once someone actualy gathered some EVIDENCE — future:past::front:back is a primary and widespread way connecting these dots.

But this article and the coverage of it epitomizes everything that is wrong with cognitive science as a discipline (although, to be fair, there is certainly a lot right with it as well) and how it is received by the press and public. It confirms our popular prejudices by rediscovering Standard Average European cultural categories as ‘universal’ and relegating other cultures to ‘exotic’ and ‘unusual’ status — a move that requires an incredible forgetfulness of human cultural diversity.

Neoliberalism in Anthropology

Rex’s recent post on “neoliberalism” sparked some good discussion, but much of it was focused on trying to define the term rather than understanding the phenomenon. In a comment Rex tried to refocus the discussion:

Let me try rephrasing: is this conjunction of stuff indicative of a moment (perhaps passed) in anthropology? And if so, why are these two well-known authors thinking about it now, given that (as many of the comments on this channel have indicated) ‘neoliberalism’ has probably been around for decades?

One way of examining the question is to use the excellent database provided by AnthroSource. While somewhat limited in scope, it should be able to reveal broad trends in the discipline. Accordingly, I searched for all articles (in the past 100 years) that used “neoliberalism” in the title. The total number of results was 25 articles, of which over half were published in the past three years! Eleven were published in just the past year and a half. I’d say that’s a trend! The oldest article dates to 1996. [NOTE: Some of these are book reviews, I didn’t see any reason to treat them separately. The full list is below the fold.]

In my own comments on Rex’s thread I suggested that one of the reasons for this trend might be a rethinking of “globalization” and “transnationalism” in which scholars are moving away from issues of consumption and trying to focus on the impact of the organizations responsible for global governance, such as the IMF and WTO.

Of particular importance is the so-called “Washington Consensus“, defined by Wikipedia as:

a set of policies promulgated by many neoliberal economists as a formula for promoting economic growth in many parts of Latin America and other parts of the world. The Washington Consensus policies propose to introduce various free market oriented economic reforms which are theoretically designed to make the target economy more like that of First World countries such as the United States.

The Washington Consensus is the target of sharp criticism by both individuals and groups, who claim that it is a way to funnel economic productivity from less developed Latin American countries to large multinational companies and their wealthy owners in advanced First World economies. As of 2005, several Latin American countries are led by socialist governments that openly oppose the Washington Consensus, and many more are ambivalent. Critics frequently cite the Argentine economic crisis of 1999-2002 as the case in point of why the Washington Consensus policies are flawed, as Argentina had previously implemented most of the Washington Consensus policies as directed.

I don’t think it is a coincidence that over half of the articles using the term have followed in the wake of the Argentina crisis and the rise of left-leaning governments in Latin America. Although some of them date from all the way back in the 1990s, over half of the list of AnthroSource articles are related to Latin America.
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Anthropologists Demand Coca-Cola Boycott

A lot of people are upset about Coca-Cola’s purported involvement in the violent suppression of trade unions at its Columbian bottling plants. You can, for instance, visit KillerCoke.org, CokeWatch.org, the Students Against Sweatshops Coke Campaign, or the Spanish language site run by Colombian Food and Beverage Workers. Most recently, anthropologists have joined the fray: the Association for Feminist Anthropology, the Anthropology and Environment Section, the Society for the Anthropology of North America, the Society for Latin American Anthropology, the Society of Lesbian and Gay Anthropologists, and the Society for the Anthropology of Work have all adopted a resolution demanding a boycott of Coca-Cola until these issues are adequately addressed.

The catalyst for this action seems to be Lesley Gill’s recent essay in Transforming Anthropology, “Labor and Humanrights: ‘The Real Thing’ in Colombia” (PDF download). It is worth reading the first few paragraphs in full:
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What now?

Or, Anthropology for Old People.

So, with the AAAs in the air and most young anthropologists’ thoughts turning to interviews and how to sum up their thesis research in a boffo mini-paragraph, this might not be the most apropos time to discuss What Lies Beyond. But we here at SM shrink from no grim task.

A question likely to echo down the hotel hallways next week, and certain to rustle among the leaves of the groves of academe during next spring’s campus interviews, is what today’s tesista (this word should exist in English but unfortunately “thesist” sounds religious, “thesiser” sounds like a made-up title for a minor nobleman in a fantasy fiction novel, and “writer-upper” is plainly hopeless) plans to do as her Next Project.

One option that comes up often enough to perhaps warrant being considered a pattern is the young anthro — returned from a doctoral project carried out at a field site accessible only by ice ax, dugout canoe, or 20 mule team equipped with propeller hats — who suddenly evinces a serious interest in the same themes as those of the original research — say, exchange rituals — but in a rather more comfortable setting — say, upscale organic grocery stores located in periurban North America. Sometimes in a tone of mild moral umbrage about giving exoticism a poke in the eye.

I for one always felt certain I’d have none of that. No, I’d stay in the South American heartland, polishing my hard-won though still pretty pathetic Guarani language skills and ultimately dying, slowly, of Chagas’ disease as befits any Chaco dweller worth his salt. Neither bug bites nor saddle sores nor sulfurous ground water would stand in my way.

But that was me talking the talk. This fall, walking the Next Project walk (with a visit to my old field site along the way), I’ve discovered the Paraguayan Chaco (my previous work was in the Bolivian Chaco). A good portion of the Paraguayan Chaco has been settled by Mennonites and is, astonishingly, a Chaco with grocery stores, a Chaco with air conditioning, a Chaco with swimming pools (well, one anyway). My anti-colonialist spirit tells me it is wrong wrong wrong for me to want to take a swimsuit next time, while my sensualist flesh says it is oh so RIGHT.

So, I’m wondering (in a self-exculpatory sort of way) — am I just succumbing to the inevitable? Apart from all the condemnations of exoticist exploitation that are heaped upon old-fashioned, out-in-the-impoverished-Otherish-boonies fieldwork, how much of a role does the fact that anthropology is no longer a young upstart discipline, but one with lots of comfy established practitioners, play in the shift of what kind of ethnography “counts” for our collective purposes?

Autoethnographic Text

Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala’s 1615 document, Primer nueva coronica y buen gobierno (The First New Chronicle and Good Government) is a fascinating document, written by “an ethnic Andean who addressed his 1,200-page work, of which nearly 400 were pen-and-ink drawings of Inca and colonial life, to King Philip II of Spain” with the hope of reforming colonial rule. It was discovered in 1908, sitting forgotten in a library in Copenhagen, and was first published in 1936. Now it is online, thanks to Rolena Adorno at Yale University.

I discovered the site via this post by Language Hat, which points to several excellent essays in English about the history and importance of the document. This one, by Rolena Adorno, offers a good overview:

Guaman Poma’s activities as an investigator and writer are those which hold greatest interest for us today. His reliance on Andean languages and the accounts of the elders who either had survived the Spanish conquest, or had known those who had, gives his accounts of pre-Columbian Andean society an authority found in few other places. His time spent working with colonial church inspectors and civil officers gave him the experience from which to construct an unusually complex view of colonial administration, including its goals at the highest levels and its practices and abuses at the level of the local community. His self-taught knowledge of the European historiographic, juridical and rhetorical traditions reveals the type of Spanish literary and intellectual culture that was available to the native elite.

Language Hat also highlights this article by Mary Louise Pratt which coins the term “autoethnographic text” to refer to “a text in which people undertake to describe themselves in ways that engage with representations others have made of them.”

Autoethnographic texts are not, then, what are usually thought of as autochthonous forms of expression or self-representation (as the Andean quipus were). Rather they involve a selective collaboration with and appropriation of idioms of the metropolis or the conqueror. These are merged or infiltrated to varying degrees with indigenous idioms to create self-representations intended to intervene in metropolitan modes of understanding. Autoethnographic works are often addressed to both metropolitan audiences and the speakers own community. Their reception is thus highly indeterminate. Such texts often constitute a marginalized groups point of entry into the dominant circuits of print culture. It is interesting to think, for example, of American slave autobiography in its autoethnographic dimensions, which in some respects distinguish it from Euramerican autobiographical tradition. The concept might help explain why some of the earliest published writing by Chicanas took the form of folkloric manners and customs sketches written in English and published in English-language newspapers or folklore magazines (see Treviño). Autoethnographic representation often involves concrete collaborations between people, as between literate ex-slaves and abolitionist intellectuals, or between Guaman Poma and the Inca elders who were his informants. Often, as in Guaman Poma, it involves more than one language. In recent decades autoethnography, critique, and resistance have reconnected with writing in a contemporary creation of the contact zone, the testimonio.

Pratt’s essay analyses the ways in which Guaman Poma appropriates and adapts “pieces of the representational repertoire of the invaders” to form his critique of colonial practices.

Pratt’s discussion of the illustrations is also quite interesting:

The genre of the four hundred line drawings is European–there seems to have been no tradition of representational drawing among the Incas–but in their execution they deploy specifically Andean systems of spatial symbolism that express Andean values and aspirations.

The caption for this image reads: “The Inka asks what the Spaniard eats. The Spaniard replies: ‘Gold.'”

eatgold

Yanomami Referendum

Oops. I’d been thinking for several days that it seemed odd that the results of the referendum on rescinding the report of the El Dorado Task Force had not come out. I kept checking the AAA website — where, to my knowledge, they don’t appear in any obvious way — and finally decided to google search “yanomami referendum”.

Well, this is probably not news to many of you, but

“Members of the American Anthropological Association, weighing in on a dispute that has divided their discipline, voted 846 to 338 to rescind a controversial 2002 report on allegations of research misconduct by scholars studying the Yanomami people.”

This is from Inside Higher Ed.

I do belong to the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America but feelings about this have been so sore that there seems to be a collective decision not to discuss the issue at all on the listserv, thus I didn’t get the results from any flurry of discussion over there.

This outcome, while not surprising, is pretty saddening. First, doesn’t the AAA have something like 11,000 members? What a tiny turnout. And it’s not at all heartening that the association president herself — even now that the voting is over — refuses to say how she voted on it. Of course it’s her perfect right to keep her vote private, and I can imagine an argument for her not publicly stating her position before the vote. But why maintain silence even now?

I fear that the outcome recapitulates a contemporary disciplinary tendency: an incredible willingness to stake positions at an exalted, empyrean level and an utter refusal to say anything at all on small, messy, immediate issues except to ignore and/or dismiss them. For the record, I voted absolutely against the movement to rescind the report. The whole obfuscatory process that culminated in the effort to rescind reminded me of certain trends in U.S. public life — say, the discrediting of that 60 Minutes report about Bush’s national guard service on the basis of challenging the particular authenticity of certain documents rather than the substance of the report itself — and made me want to puke.

The only thing that makes me feel slightly cheered-up is the thought that with referendums like this one, a highly mobilized base can hijack the outcome. I hope this is what happened: that most people got what Rex has called “Yanomami fatigue”, stopped paying attention, and just sort of felt nonplussed by the time they got the ballot question (which was posed, in classic tricky-referendum form, as a double negative). Still, this vote is now a part of our disciplinary history, to our grave collective discredit.

Look on the bright side of life?

I haven’t followed the case so I don’t know its outcome — perhaps some UK commentators can update us? — but an anthropological essay I find I have on the brain a lot these days is one written in 1999 by British anthropologist Alison Spedding. The full reference is at the end of this post; it was in Anthropology Today and I am not sure how to provide a universally accessible link.

At any rate, Spedding was writing from a Bolivian prison where she had been incarcerated (for 6 months at that point) on drug charges. Somehow under the conditions she managed to produce an amazingly thoughtful piece on the peculiarities of fieldwork. She writes of the “screen personality” we tend to adopt in the field — eating lamb flaps we don’t like, going to religious services we don’t believe in, nodding sympathetically to accounts of gender relations we’d condemn if they came from friends back home — and how impossible it was for her to maintain such a screen while in prison.

From there, she goes on to discuss the standard modality of ethnographic explanation: that “the apparent superstition is a reasonable way to understand the world, that what seems irrational is in fact entirely rational when one comprehends its context”. At the time of her writing, this mode wasn’t really working for her — when her fellow prisoners spent money on llama sacrifices and the like to influence the outcomes of their trials instead of using whatever funds they possessed to hire lawyers, she couldn’t help feeling it was basically counter-productive. And when women prisoners eagerly participated in the gender regimes of the prison routine she couldn’t help finding it, well, upsetting. The article ends on a rather despairing note (understandably). I can’t recreate its whole arc in this space but I highly recommend it.

So anyway — I thought about this article occasionally when I was writing my thesis, especially the bits on witchcraft. For all the structural rationales I could tease out about witchcraft discourse in the Bolivian community in which I carried out fieldwork, part of what motivated it seemed to be a kind of malicious glee. But mostly I ended up in the standard anthropological mode of explaining its relationship to social structure and so forth. Whatever, right? In the end I didn’t live in Isoso and neither I nor my loved ones would ever face witchcraft accusation.

However, living in the States the past few years I’ve started to get a bit of that ol’ Bolivian prison feeling. Of course my existence is quite cushy. But I mean in terms of hearing and being forced to live with rhetorics, discourses, regimes, practices — the lot — that I don’t want merely to understand/explain/analytically dissect. I don’t have a “screen personality” here — I’m me, and a lot of what is around me looks like flat-out meanness and stupidity. Are anthropologists allowed to say that? and having said it, then what?

article ref: Dreams of Leaving: Life in the Feminine Penitentiary Centre, Miraflores, La Paz, Bolivia, by A. L. Spedding
Anthropology Today (1999)

Yanomami Fatigue

I am stepping from the shadows. I will be silent no longer. Today I stand tall, hold my head high, and speak the truth to the tenured powers-that-be: I’m just not that interested in talking about the Yanomami anymore.

The debate is well-known. Patrick Tierney wrote “Darkness In El Dorado”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0393049221/102-6229466-0987309?v=glance, a book documenting the misconduct of various outsiders who visited the Yanomami in their hyperbolically ‘last unknown’ Amazonian rainforest home. He was particularly critical of James Neel (a geneticist) and Napoleon Chagnon and Jacques Lizot (anthropologists). The initial draft of the book circulated widely and drew a lot of criticism. By the time the book appeared in print Chagnon had been down-graded from a pathologically evil criminal to just a bad person who was a mediocre anthropologist guilty of ethical violations. There were great cries of condemnation, resulting in an inquiry undertaken by the AAA. There was the roundtable on the report. There was the draft report. There was “the final report”:http://www.aaanet.org/edtf/index.htm. There were the “many”:http://members.aol.com/archaeodog/darkness_in_el_dorado/index.htm “many”:http://www.tamu.edu/anthropology/Neel.html websites. There was “the book about the controversy”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0520244044/ref=pd_sim_b_5/102-6229466-0987309?%5Fencoding=UTF8&v=glance. Then there was “the website about the book about the controversy”:http://www.publicanthropology.org/yanomami/main.php?module=root&page=login. Then some people didn’t like the report, so they wanted to have a referendum. So then there were the commentaries on the referendum. Then there was the “website on the commentaries to the referendum”:http://www.publicanthropology.org/forum/. And now, as Inside Higher Ed reports, “we finally had the vote on the referendum”:http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2005/05/23/anthro.

Is the Yanomami incident an important part of anthropology’s history that needs to be understood? Yes. Are there valuable lessons on research methods and ethics to learn from it? Absolutely. Am I looking forward to the commentaries on the referendum on the report from the recommendations from the committee on the allegations in the book? No.

It’s not that I don’t think it’s important. It’s just that I’ve got Yanomami fatigue.

But it is also more than that. Here are some reasons why I am not (even though I admit I ought to be) interested in talking even more about the Yanomami:

First, I’ve never read Napoleon Chagnon’s book about the Yanomami. I think I’m the only anthropologist who hasn’t. I think all of my teachers had figured out it wasn’t very good even before all the hullabaloo. Frankly, I had no idea he was American until the book came out. I thought he was a minor student of Louis Dumont. My bad.

Second, ‘recently contacted’ people are my stock in trade. I work in highlands Papua New Guinea with a group that was first contacted by the ‘outside world’ (as the Australian Government liked to style itself) in 1938-1939 and where there was no permanent government presence until the mid-1960s. I’ve talked with guys who can remember the first time they saw metal. I have an Amazonianist on my committee, and I’ve always been interesed in comparison between the two areas because of the similarities in their culture and history, but the Yanomami have never stood for ‘the last stone age people’ for me.

But thirdly and most importantly, the Yanomami controversy doesn’t speak to the issues that matter to me the most. At its root, it raises ethical questions about a world in which the people who anthropologists write about are not the people who read their books. On this side of the millennium, anthropologists have to deal with a situation in which they are answerable to their informants. Informed consent and scrupulous, fair research is still important of course. But my issues — and, I suspect, the issues of other graduate students entering the discipline these days — focus on what it means to take one’s research subjects as genuine interlocutors. We are increasingly faced with the demands for answerability that journalists, for instance, have had to grapple with for years. This is more than ‘collaborative research’ in one’s fieldsite — it is a question about relationships at all level. How do I, as a Jewish intellectual from California, teach ethnographies about ‘their own culture’ to my Native Hawaiian students? What are the appropriate “decolonizing methodologies”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1856496244/qid=1116905553/sr=2-1/ref=pd_bbs_b_2_1/102-6229466-0987309? Why should they be interested in anything that anthropologists have anything to say anyway? What if (gasp!) there are people from your fieldsite who have a Ph.D. in anthropology? How much of anthropology’s authority is based on the fact that for decades and decades we were had a monopoly on writing about certain areas of the world? “Who owns native culture”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0674011716/qid=1116906069/sr=2-1/ref=pd_bbs_b_2_1/102-6229466-0987309?

I’m interested in these questions because I’m very optimistic about what anthropology can do and what it can teach people — I am not interested in ‘destabilizing’ anything (well, ok, sometimes — and then mostly just for kicks). I’m interested in critically examining the bases of my discipline to make sure that we as anthropologists put forward our best possible face when we stand up in public and speak with authority and mean it.

The Yanomami debate is important. It is interesting. It is relevant. But I have trouble mustering much enthusiasm anymore — at some level, I think the Yanomami controversy is one of the most important ethical debates of the last century, not the coming one.