Studying indigenous groups

1
Studying indigenous groups

• 9.2.2006

2
Readings

• Chagnon (1983) Yanomamö Warfare. (in Yanomamö
  The Fierce People)
• Tierney (2000) Napoleonic Wars. (in Darkness in
  El Dorado How Scientists and Journalists
  Devastated the Amazon)

3
Discussion topics

• Presentation
• Chagnon 1968. Yanomamö The Fierce People. (
  Tierney)
• Context
• Ethography (Yanomamö studies)
• Theory (Violence and culture)
• Methodology and ethics (Tierneys accusations)
• Video Yanomami homecoming

4
Anthropology wars

• Robert Redfield vs Oscar Lewis
• Tepoztlán
• Margaret Mead vs Derek Freeman
• Samoa
• Marshall Sahlins vs Gananath Obeyesekere
• Captain Cook and Hawaii
• Napoleon Chagnon vs Patrick Tierney
• the Yanomamö

5
Yanomamö studies

• Lizot (1985) Tales of the Yanomami daily life
  in the Venezuelan forest
• Milliken (1991) Yanomami A Forest People
• Good (1994) Into the Heart One Mans Pursuit of
  Love and Knowledge Among the Yanomami
• Ferguson (1995) Yanomami warfare a political
  history

6

• "I looked up and gasped when I saw a dozen burly,
  naked, sweaty, hideous men staring at us down the
  shafts of their drawn arrows! Immense wads of
  green tobacco were stuck between their lower
  teeth and lips making them look even more
  hideous, and strands of dark green slime dripped
  or hung from their nostrils--strands so long that
  they clung to their (chests) or drizzled down
  their chins."
• "My next discovery was that there were a dozen or
  so vicious, underfed dogs snapping at my legs,
  circling me as if I were their next meal. I just
  stood there holding my notebook, helpless and
  pathetic. Then the stench of the decaying
  vegetation and filth hit me and I almost got
  sick. I was horrified. What kind of welcome was
  this for the person who had come to live with you
  and learn your way of life, to be friends with
  you?"

7
Franz Boas

• 15 months on Baffin Island
• 500 pages of letters never sent to Marie
  Krackowizer
• December 16, north of Pangnirtung.
• My dear sweetheart Do you know how I pass these
  long evenings? I have a copy of Kant with me,
  which I am studying, so that I shall not be so
  completely uneducated when I return. Life here
  really makes one dull and stupid. I have to
  blush when I remember that during our meal
  tonight I thought how good a pudding with plum
  sauce would taste. But you have no idea what an
  effect privations and hunger, real hunger, have
  on a person. Maybe Mr. Kant is a good antidote!
  The contrast is almost unbelievable when I
  remember that a year ago I was in a society and
  observed all the rules of good taste, and tonight
  I sit in this snow hut with Wilhelm and an Eskimo
  eating a piece of raw, frozen seal meat which had
  first to be hacked up with an axe, and greedily
  gulping my coffee. Is that not as great a
  contradiction as one can think of? (Cole 1983
  29).

8
Bronislaw Malinowski

• Trobriand Islands (1914-18)
• A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term (1967)
• Tuesday, 4.24.
• Last night and this morning looked in vain for
  fellows for my boat. This drives me to a state of
  white rage and hatred for bronze-colored skin,
  combined with depression, a desire to sit down
  and cry, and a furious longing to get out of
  this. For all that, I decide to resist and work
  today - business as usual, despite everything.
  (Malinowski 1967 261)

9
Anthropologists and drugs

• Chagnon Yanomamö The Fierce People
• ebene snuff
• Michael Harner The Way of the Shaman (1980)
• ayahuasca
• Michael Taussig Shamanism, Colonialism, and the
  Wild Man A Study in Terror and Healing (1987)
• yage

10
Causes of violence

• Female infanticide gt shortage of women gt warfare
• "Life Histories, Blood Revenge, and Warfare in a
  Tribal Population" (Science, 1988)
• Men who had killed vs nonkillers
• gt twice as many wives
• gt three times as many offspring
• Violence gt genetic fitness
• Praised by sociobiologists
• Edward Wilson, Richard Dawkins
• Dawkins
• The Selfish Gene (1990)
• males will do almost anything to pass on the
  greatest number of genes

11
Causes of violence

• Cultural materialism
• Harris, Divale, Rappaport etc
• Harris Protein thesis
• Social behaviour determined by maximization of
  proteins in diet
• Cannibalism and the Aztec
• Sacred cow in India
• Warfare among the Yanomamös

12
Causes of violence

• Marvin Harris
• Cows, pigs, wars and witches the riddles of
  culture (1974)
• "A Cultural Materialist Theory of Band and
  Village Warfare The Yanomamo Test (1984)
• Animal capture and Yanomamö warfare retrospect
  and new evidence(1984)
• The Yanomamö and the Causes of War in Band and
  Village Societies (1979)
• Chagnon
• Protein abundance not shortage
• Critique of monocausal explanations

13
Violence

• an innate property of humans / social
  relations
• Sociobiology
• Lorentz, Morris, Eibl-Eibesfeldt, Konner
• Psychology
• Freud, Bettelheim
• Sociology / Political science
• Hobbes, Marx, Simmel

14
Violence

• an innate property of humans and/or social
  relations
• culturally universal
• Anthropology (1950s -)
• Political anthropology
• Gluckman and the Manchester School
• Against static functionalist approaches
• Conflict as an integral/norma part of social
  relations
• gt Anthropological interest in aggression and
  violence
• Storr (1968) Human Aggression
• Gunn (1973) Violence in Human Society

15
Violence

• not an innate property of humans and/or social
  relations
• "anthropology of peace and non-violence
• Co-operation as an integral part of social
  relations (1970s - )
• peace
• a rational and active construction of
  co-operating human beings
• not a residual and passive category
• Montagu (1976)
• The Nature of Human Aggression
• Howell and Willis (1989)
• Societies at peace anthropological perspectives
• Sponsel and Gregor (1994)
• The anthropology of peace and non-violence

16
Violence and culture

• Ethnographic evidence
• Emphasis on violence
• Wallace and Hoebel 1952 the Comanche
• Bohannan 1967 the Tiv
• Chagnon 1968 - the Yanomamö
• Heald 1989 the Gisu
• Emphasis on non-violence
• Turnbull (1961) - the Ituri
• Thomas (1958) - the Kalahari Bushmen
• Robarchek (1989) - the Semai
• Briggs (1970) - the Inuit
• Paddock (1975) Nader (1977, 1990) Fry (1992)
  the Zapotec

17
Methodology and ethics

• Earlier criticism
• Brian Ferguson, Terence Turner Leslie Sponsel
• Tierney (2000) Darkness in El Dorado How
  Scientists and Journalists Devastated the Amazon)
• against Chagnon, James Neel, Timothy Asch
• 1) 1968 measles epidemic
• 2) Chagnons arguments about violence
• 3) Impact on the Yanomamö
• --------------------------------------------------
  ----
• 4) Impact on anthropology as a discipline

18
1968 measles epidemic

• Accusations against James Neel
• Vaccines as cause of epidemic?
• Unethical experiements and tests
• Diamond Guns, Germs, and Steel The Fates of
  Human Societies (1999)

19
Arguments about violence

• Exaggerated
• Fabricated
• Initiated
• by upsetting power relations
• by handing out machetes
• by collecting genealogies

20
Impact on the Yanomamö

• Fierceness as the second name of the Yanomamö
• Time Magazine review of Chagnon's work
• "Beastly or Manly?" (1976)
• Abused for political/economic purposes
• Brazil's local governments
• Developers of rain forests

21
Impact on anthropology

• Clashes within academia
• Chagnon vs South American anthropologists
• Chagnon vs Terence Turner Leslie Sponsel
• AAA in San Francisco in 2000
• The image of anthropology
• Is Anthropology Evil?
• Macho anthropology
• Anthropology on Trial

22
Video Yanomami Homecoming

• The story of Yarima and Kenneth Good
• by National Geographic (1994)
• Kenneth Good (1975-87)
• Into the Heart One Mans Pursuit of Love and
  Knowledge Among the Yanomami (1994)
• Yarima
• Noble savage
• Cinderela Rebelde
• The Stone Age bride who had exchanged her
  paradise in New Jersey for the rain forest.
  (Times)