Once again, while perusing through face book posts,
I stumbled across another story that was shared by the “Aboriginal and Tribal
Nation News” face book page, and once again it was a blog post from the “White
Wolf Pack blog.” As I read through the post, it reminded me of Vizenor’s theory
of the ruins of representation in the absence of the tribal real. The article
recounts the work of an anthropologist, Napoleon Chagon, who published a book
in 1968 entitled Yanomamo: The Firece
People. The blog posts reports that the book was controversial in that it depicted
the Yanomamo, an ancient Amazonian tribe of Venezuela and Brazil, as a war-like
people who were prone to violence and constantly at war amongst themselves. The
blog reveals that his analysis of the people was criticized by other scholars “as
a reductive presentation of human behavior.” The author of the blog then
reveals that Chagon has a new book out, and get this, it’s called Noble Savages! How perfect…
In it he not only defends his earlier work and his
thesis that the Yanomamo are essentially a people prone to violence and war, he
also attacks his critics and criticizes them for abandoning the scientific
aspect of pure research in favor of civil rights activism on behalf of their
subjects. However, those who criticize him are not simply civil rights
activists, as the blog reveals: “a group of prominent anthropologists who have
worked with the Yanomamo issued a joint statement,” against Chagon and his
work. The statement reads as follows: “We absolutely disagree with Napoleon
Chagnon’s pulic characterization of the Yanomamo as fierce, violent and archaic
people. We also deplore how Chagnon’s work has been used throughout the years—and
could still be used—by governments to
deny the Yanomamo their land and cultural rights.”
Another critic, a professor from Rhode Island
College who spent decades studying the Yanomamo, replied that she was not only
dismayed by the news that Chagnon had written another book, but that she “lived
in Yanomamo villages and had never needed a weapon.” The blog post also
displays the words of Survival International, a human rights organization that campaigns
on behalf of indigenous peoples: Chagnon’s work is frequently used by writers…
who want to portray tribal peoples as ‘brutal savages.’” The group even
published a written testimonial from a spokesperson of the tribe: “For us, we
Yanomamo who live in the forest, the anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon is not our
friend. He does not say good things, he doesn’t transmit good words. He talks
about the Yanomamo but his words are only hostile.”
Chagnon, though declining to be interviewed directly
responded: “Thos departments of anthropology whose members adhere to the
scientific method will endure and again come to be the ‘standard approach’ to
the study of Homo Sapiens, while those that are non-scientific will become less
and less numerous or eventually be absorbed into disciplines that are
non-anthropoloical, like comparative literature, gender studies, philosophy and
others.”
To be honest, at first I was shocked that such
blatant misrepresentations are still published today, but then on second
thought, I realized that of course that kind of false representation still
exists. But what makes this story and the absence of the tribal real in Chagnon’s
books so controversial and troubling to me is that he is not just some guy who
published some controversial book, he is a professor of anthropology at the
University of Missouri and he retired professor emeritus from the University of
California, Santa Barbara. The ruins of his representation hold wait.
Here is the link to the blog post: http://www.whitewolfpack.com/2013/03/amazon-rainforest-tribe-at-centre-of.html
No comments:
Post a Comment