[I realize the irony of prominently citing American Anthropologist during the Open Access debates--I do end with a call to support Rex's proposal to read and talk about HAU]

–Andre Gingrich, Transitions: Notes on Sociocultural Anthropology’s Present and Its Transnational Potential, December 2010:555

–Karen Brodkin, Sandra Morgen and Janis Hutchinson, Anthropology as White Public Space?, December 2011:545

I am hoping in these guest posts to examine episodes of how anthropology gets taken–starting with a follow-up to Kerim’s archive on Jared Diamond, and then tackling the Anthropologie Store, the TV series Community, and other instances where anthropology either gives stuff away or gets hijacked. But I’d also like to write about taking anthropology back, in alliance with what Rex proposes around Hau or Matt suggests about the AAA.

As an introduction, I would like to use the two articles above, from the December 2010 and December 2011 issues of American Anthropologist, to assess anthropology’s current position, to evaluate resources and risks.

Andre Gingrich’s article hit the press just as the AAA science and mission statement issue really earned anthropology some great NY Times coverage. If anyone is working on a “careful and balanced history” of the autocritique, please let me know–in the wake of old wounds and new emotions about science, such accountings became nearly impossible. Bad feelings and suspicion persist, and for those in adjacent disciplines, anthropology can now always be dismissed with some lines about how it is “at war with itself” and “got rid of science.” This only exacerbated the way the autocritique had been misused, as Giovanni Da Col and David Graeber argue in the inaugural issue of HAU:

The anthropological auto-critique of the 1980s was made to serve a purpose for which it was never intended. In fact, anthropology has been since its inception a battle-ground between imperialists and anti-imperialists, just as it remains today. For outsiders, though, it provided a convenient set of simplified tag lines through which it was possible to simply dismiss all anthropological knowledge as inherently Eurocentric and racist, and therefore, as not real knowledge at all. (2011:xi)

This debate also proved how much the tag line postmodernism still serves as a convenient device to lump all opponents. Such lumping ignores how accusations of postmodernism tend to conceal more than they reveal about actual positions, and that there were legitimate critiques of normative science from Marxism and feminism long before–and that did not depend upon–this so-called postmodern critique.

Andre Gingrich could also have hardly known of all the other minor and major assaults in the works for anthropology in 2011, including the backlash from the “F— You Republicans” e-mail as a minor ambush and then the Florida Governor’s declaration of a no-anthropology-needed zone, which together with the heightened threats to educational funding and continued use of “economic crisis” to discipline and informalize academic labor, amounted to a major assault. However, Gingrich did have pertinent and rather prophetic words of advice for navigating these episodes:

Opponents will not remain inactive. In times of crisis, it is not difficult to predict that some forces will emerge that will argue either for an intensification of anthropology’s applied subordination and instrumentalization at the service of other needs and fields or for anthropology’s radical downsizing–or for both, as one step toward its dissolution. (2010:558-559)

Nevertheless, as of December 2011 there were good reasons to be hopeful. In contrast to the December 2010 science-in-anthropology incident, the AAA swiftly responded to Florida Governor Scott; anthropology bloggers like Daniel Lende and students like Charlotte Noble provided round-the-clock coverage and response, coalescing in what seemed to be anthropology’s first-ever rapid action team.

Meanwhile, the Occupy movement dramatically re-framed issues of plutocracy, wealth, and power, with anthropologist David Graeber playing a critical role. As a record number of attendees headed to the AAA annual meetings in Montreal, there were certainly reasons for optimism.

It is in this context that the December 2011 article “Anthropology as White Public Space?” was a particularly painful reminder of incongruities and what anthropology has been unable to accomplish. Anthropology as an academic discipline has generally been more willing to engage in autocritique and to take this further than other disciplines even begin to ponder. Anthropology also claims an anti-racist heritage and position. But though the authors found “some improvement” the overall tenor is that “many of the same exclusionary ideological and structural elements that the Committee on Minorities and Anthropology encountered [in 1973] are still prevalent in many anthropology departments” (2011:546).

This is a must-read article for anthropology. As the 2012 U.S. election season unfolds, vitriol and vicious denials of any kind of bias or structuring along lines of race, class, and gender will undoubtedly intensify. This is no time for anthropology to turn away from these issues.

Can a beleagured discipline simultaneously go through a transition to transnationalism and at the same time “take seriously the points of view of those who are internal others” (Brodkin et al. 2011:555)? I believe these issues can and must be linked and tackled together. But it requires awareness and political will.

Of most immediate relevance, and since I have the honor and privilege of blogging on the most distinguished of anthropology blogs, is how those of us who write and read anthropology blogs might contribute to this realignment. Anthropology blogs could potentially be a transnational hub and a place to embrace anthropologists of color, but I don’t think we are there yet.

Rex’s proposal to read and talk about HAU has real potential to address the kinds of “minimum consensus about transnational quality standards” Andre Gingrich discusses: “I would have great difficulties envisioning future postdocs in anthropology who have never done any fieldwork whatsoever, who speak no other language than their own, and who have never heard or read anything about Franz Boas, Bronislaw Malinowski, or Marcel Mauss” (2010:557). HAU precisely asks us to consider ethnographic insights, prominently includes translated works, and brings classic authors and basic texts to our attention.

At the same time, I want to highlight the insights from Karen Brodkin, Sandra Morgen, and Janis Hutchinson:

The heart of our conclusion is embarrassingly obvious. It is this: the defamiliarizing insights and analyses generated from vantage points developed by anthropologists of color are better tools for diversifying departmental organization and culture (among other things) than hegemonic ones, and anthropology departments should embrace them instead of marginalizing them. Alternatively put, anthropology has made its mark on understanding cultures by taking seriously the points of view of those it studies. We suggest it needs to take seriously the points of view of those who are internal others to better understand and diversify itself as well as enhance its theoretical robustness. (2011:555)

And in the last week, a relatively new blog in anthropology — Savage Minds — has set off a huge debate over the book. Two of the eight people who lead Savage Minds posted their objections to the book, and things have taken off from there, with several prominent blogs in the social sciences picking up the debate, and adding to it. Hundreds of scholars are posting and cross-posting in an unusually intense and broad debate for a book that has been out for eight years.

A collection of links related to the discussion was posted here on Savage Minds as well. But the discussion did not end there. It is for that reason that I thought it might be a good time to highlight how the discussion continued after 2005. Although it got less attention, we subsequently had Deborah Gewertz and Frederick Errington as our very first guest bloggers (establishing a long running tradition on this blog). They drew from their book Yali’s Question to write a series of posts bringing significant expertise and nuance to the questions which had been raised about Diamond’s book. They were later interviewed for a NY Times piece about Diamond’s new book, Collapse.In 2006 we had a few posts on Collapse, but not anything significant. My own posts on Collapse largely consisted of relaying emails others had sent me, while Rex linked to this review article. In 2010, however, Rex returned to Collapse with an in-depth blog post about the edited volume Questioning Collapse.

Diamond’s 2008 New Yorker piece, “Vengeance Is Ours: What Can Tribal Societies Tell Us About Our Need To Get Even” led to a number of Savage Minds posts. It started off with this post by Rex:

At root, the problem — and it is not a fatal flaw, just a problem — with Diamond’s article is that it teaches us that Other Ways Of Life Have Something To Offer Us, but the only way it can do so is by making Papua New Guineans appear more Other to us than they really are.

[Apologies for the awful formatting on some of these older posts, we used to use a Markdown syntax plugin on our site, but we removed it when it became apparent it was slowing down the site. As a result, many of Rex's older posts are now unformatted.]

Then came Rhonda Shearer’s piece “Jared Diamond’s Factual Collapse:
New Yorker Mag’s Papua New Guinea Revenge Tale Untrue, Tribal Members Angry, Want Justice” which Rex wrote about here, and a letter from Mako John Kuwimb, one of the people named in the lawsuit. Rex later complained that the problem with Diamond was that “his piece ran under the banner ‘annals of anthropology’” thus sending an “off-brand message to our audience.” Then, in conjunction with Stinky Journalism (now iMedia Ethics), a series of posts were published on Diamond’s “vengeance” article and the Daniel Wemp affair: Nancy Sullivan, Rex, Andrew Mack, Carolyn Fluehr-Lobban, Rex again, and yet again. The last post links to this article which Rex says is “the lengthiest, most competent, and most incisive account of the short-comings of Diamond’s article.”

In looking back on all of this, I feel that the NY Times article on Collapse got to the heart of the problem anthropologists have talking to those outside of the discipline:

For the anthropologists, the exceptions were more important than the rules. Instead of seeking overarching laws, the call was to “contextualize,” “complexify,” “relativize,” “particularize” and even “problematize,” a word that in their dialect was given an oddly positive spin.

So it is interesting that the very last blogger on Savage Minds to discuss Jared Diamond was David Graeber, who asked “Can We Still Write Big Question Sorts of Books?” Unfortunately, he then became a media darling for having done just that, and never had time to follow up on his initial post.

So there you have it. If nothing else, Jared Diamond has given us all a lot to talk about.

1. Composing a Life by Mary Catherine Bateson

2. The Third Chimpanzee by Jared Diamond

3. 1491 by Charles Mann

4. Food of the Gods by Terence McKenna

Bateson’s was the only book I saw that was written by an actual anthropologist.  How it is that only one anthropologist happens to be in the anthropology section is beyond me.  This was a particularly skewed sample, I’ll admit–usually there’s at least a Wade Davis, Margaret Mead, or even Sir James Frazier in the mix.  Not this time.  The rest of the section was incredibly eclectic, and included everything from books by Drew Pinsky to one by Maira Kalman (which does look pretty cool, though not what I would define as anthropology).  Some of this eclectic-ness had to be due to some restocking malfunctions, undoubtedly, but overall the section on anthropology was, as is often the case, a strange and somewhat askew reflection of the discipline.  Yes, that is an opinion.  And now, it’s time for some questions:

1. What’s the situation in your anthropological neck of the woods?  Do I have bad data here, or is this a consistent trend in bookstores?  Is your local anthro section pretty good, or is it stuck somewhere between 1890 and, well, the History Channel?

2. If you could choose five books that best represent contemporary anthropology, what would they be?  What five books would you be proud to see gracing the shelves of your local independent and/or mega-bookstore?

3. Who cares?  What do the contents of local bookstores *really* tell us about public understanding of and access to contemporary anthropology anyway?  In these days of e-books and Kindles, is this all just a red herring?  When it comes to discussions about “public anthropology”, should we be looking in different directions (and places) altogether?  What counts as “the public” anyway?

It is highly possible that using a bookstore as a gauge for measuring public anthropology is hopelessly outdated.  It might make more sense to start tracking Google, Bing, and Amazon.com searches instead.  Or maybe we should think about the public in a completely different way–less about access to popular or mass culture and more about communication with certain pockets, segments, and key components of society.  Still, even if less and less people are going to bookstores these days, this residual evidence has to mean something.  If anthropology isn’t even well represented all that well in the old paradigm (print-based), what does this mean for newer modes of dissemination (e-books and so on)?

Harry Wolcott, in his book The Art of Fieldwork, recounts the words of publisher Mitch Allen: “The writers of qualitative research are also the buyers of qualitative research.  It is a closed system” (2005: 134).  Does this statement still ring true?  Anthropologists produce a massive amount of information each year.  So where does it all go?  Where should it go?  More importantly, if anthropological information dissemination is caught in a closed loop, why is this the case?  Is it because everyone is simply too busy–and stressed out–to worry about these kinds of issues?  Is it because the structural powers that be completely determine the situation?  Do the demands and regulations of tenure limit how and where anthropologists publish?  Is that the main issue?

Maybe, in the end, engaging with wider audiences isn’t worth the risk and effort in the current political economy of academia.  Maybe it’s impossible to rework the system at this point.  Or maybe it’s just not a priority.  But if there’s one thing that I have learned from anthropology, it’s this: social systems, even the most apparently entrenched, are anything but immune to change.  And the direction of that change may be heavily influenced by wider “structural conditions,” but the actions, decisions, and choices of the actors themselves can, in the end, play a crucial role in shaping the systems in which we participate.  Right?  Or is that just a bunch of nonsense that we all promulgate in lectures and seminars but don’t really buy into on a day to day basis?

About a year ago, I gave my old friend Keith Hart a draft of my new book, Debt: The First 5000 Years, and asked him what he thought of it. “It’s quite remarkable,” he ultimately replied. “I don’t think anyone has written a book like this in a hundred years.”

The reason I’m not embarrassed to recount the incident is because I’m still not sure it was meant as a compliment. If you think of most books of the sort people used to write a hundred years ago but no longer do—Frazer’s Golden Bough, Spengler’s Decline of the West, let alone, say, Gobineau’s Inequality of the Human Races—there’s usually an excellent reason why they don’t.

But in a way, Keith had it exactly right. The aim of the book was, indeed, to write the sort of book people don’t write any more: a big book, asking big questions, meant to be read widely and spark public debate, but at the same time, without any sacrifice of scholarly rigor. History will judge whether it’s still possible to pull this sort of thing off (let alone whether I’m the person who will be able to do it.) But it struck me that if there was ever a time, the credit crisis —and near collapse of the global economy in 2008—afforded the perfect opportunity. In the wake of the disaster, it was as if suddenly, everyone wanted to start asking big questions again. Even The Economist, that bastion of neoliberal orthodoxy, was running cover headlines like “Capitalism: Was It A Good Idea?” It seemed like it would suddenly be possible to have a real conversation, to start asking not just “what on earth is a credit default swap?” but “What is money, anyway? Debt? Society? The market? Are debts different from other sorts of promises? Why do we treat them as if they were? Are existing economic arrangements really, as we’ve been told for so long, the only possible ones?”

That lasted about three weeks and then governments put a 13-trillion dollar band-aid over the problem and started the usual chant of “move along, move along, there’s nothing to see here.”

Still, it strikes me this is likely to be only a temporary hiatus. Just as the true crisis shows every sign of having been merely postponed, so has the conversation been put on hold. Someone has got to try to start it up again, and who better than anthropologists—those scholars whose appointed role, at least in the past, has been to remind everyone that social possibilities are far more rich and wide-ranging than we normally imagine—to try to kick it off?

Given Savage Minds’ dedication to “increasing the public face of anthropology” I thought this might be an interesting place to discuss the issue—and the editors agreed. They suggested, however, that rather than writing one long screed, I write a series of shorter posts, which are easier to digest and tend to spark more focused discussion.

So I will start by talking about some of the issues I grappled with when trying to put together the debt book, hopefully, to compare notes with others out there who have doing, or thinking about doing, something along the same lines.

In the past, I have mainly written either for academic audiences, political/activist audiences, or occasionally both. This one was to be different. I was writing for a commercial press (Melville House) with a much larger, popular audience, in mind—potentially, given the subject-matter, one including popular economics buffs (a sizeable population in the US) and followers of current political affairs.

So: what was to be the model for a big questions sort of book, and how to write a book that would still be scholarly, but not academic?

This is what I came up with:

Of all the models I considered, the most amenable turned out to be the approach adopted by Marcel Mauss. This might seem odd. especially because Mauss never actually wrote a book; he’s mainly famous for a series of essays. Yet many of these essays—not just the Gift, but his essay on the person, techniques of the body (where he coins the term “habitus”), sacrifice and magic—really have had a profound effect both on all subsequent scholarship, and, to differing degrees, political and social debates ever since. Mauss had an uncanny ability to ask the right questions—often, questions he was the first to pose, and which have become mainstays of theoretical debate ever since. His was also an appealing model because Mauss was both a serious, committed activist (he was especially active in the French cooperative movement), and a scholar of remarkable erudition. His problem—and this, I suspect, is why he never did write a proper book, despite numerous attempts—was that he was also almost unimaginably disorganized, and therefore, terrible at exposition. I suspect if alive today he would have been quickly diagnosed with severe ADD.

Still, this basic organizational structure struck me as still viable. Basically, what Mauss would do would be to first frame his question—“what is it that makes the market seem so morally hollow?” or “how did we end up coming to attach such significance to the individual?”—and then both bring a wide range of ethnographic examples to bear, but also, to frame his question in the grandest possible scale of world history. Obviously, nowadays, one would not frame one’s history in quite the same way. There was always a certain evolutionist strain in Mauss’ writing. But if you read his arguments carefully, evolutionist assumptions are always in tension with an equally powerful insistence that almost all social possibilities—democracy and monarchy, individualism and communism, gifts and money—are simultaneously present in any social context, and always have been, and that all that really varies from age to age is how they come together, and which tend to be seized on and promoted over the others as the truly defining features of society or human nature. It struck me that if one develops this strain, and makes it explicit, the larger structure still works: and this is precisely how I organized the debt book. First I set out the principles that one can assume will always be at play. Examples of these are: the three moral logics that can be appealed to in economic transactions—which I labeled as “communism” (after Mauss), “exchange,” and “hierarchy”—or the dual nature of money (after Keith Hart), as simultaneously commodity and social relation (or more specifically, virtual credit system.) Then I moved from ethnographic comparison to constructing a grand historical narrative, though in my case, demonstrating more that history seems to follow a pattern of alternating cycles dominated by virtual credit money, and bullion money, than that it’s going in any particular overall direction.

But what about the style? How to write the sort of book one wishes Mauss would have written, rather than the sort of difficult, convoluted, frequently disorganized essays he actually did?

At least in the English-speaking world, there have been two dominant approaches taken by scholars trying to reach a broader audience. One might be deemed the Pop Mode, familiar from people who most anthropologists dislike, like say Jared Diamond, or Evolutionary Psychologists, or in the area of money, perhaps Jack Weatherford. In Pop Mode, one affects an accessible and breezy style, much easier to understand than ordinary academic prose, but, rather than seriously challenging one’s audiences’ assumptions, essentially provides them with reasons they never would have thought of to continue to believe what they already assume to be true. (By the way, I didn’t make up this definition of pop scholarship, but now I can’t remember where I got it from.) The alternative is the exact opposite. I’ll dub it the Delphic or Oracular mode (this term I am making up on the spot, but I think it kind of works.) This is the approach of, say, Deleuze or  Baudrillard, or actually, almost any of the trendy French, German, or Italian theorists who gain followers outside of academia, usually in bohemia or among those working in the culture industry. Here the aim is usually to challenge as many common-sense assumptions as possible, but also, to do it in a style even more obscure than ordinary academic writing—so obscure, in fact, that its very obscurity generates a kind of charismatic authority, as devotees spend untold hours of their lives arguing with one another about what their favorite Great Thinker might have actually been on about.

Neither seemed particularly appealing, and anyway, the second isn’t really an option for an Anglophone scholar—we are generally only allowed to be secondary interpreters, or at best, perhaps, like Michael Hardt, Batman-and-Robin-style faithful sidekick, to some Continental oracle. What then the alternative?

Well, the book is my answer. An accessible work, written in plain English, that actually does try to systematically challenge common sense assumptions. The problem is that merely trying to write accessibly isn’t enough. I had to confront any number of other issues both about style and content, and some of the results are worth contemplating – or at least passing on. Here are three things I think I learned:

• jokes and little stories, often off-set like quotes, are helpful. Zizek pioneered this but I think it works out (though some of his own are getting a bit repetitive at this point). Mainstream editors don’t seem to like Bourdieu-style alternating between different fonts or styles of print, but if they can be prevailed upon, readers actually seem to like it.
• Mainstream audiences don’t care what other scholar is wrong. This cannot be emphasized enough. The difference between an academic work and a scholarly-but-not-academic work mainly comes down to this. Nobody wants to hear why your approach to the Oedipus myth is better than Levi-Strauss, let alone, what flawed assumptions caused Levi-Strauss to get it so terribly wrong, and how Rene Girard does rather better but is still not as right as me because he overlooked… whatever. No. Resist! Just tell them something interesting and new about Oedipus and why this take might actually be true. Obviously, if you are critiquing things that actually are common wisdom (Adam Smith’s theory of the origin of money, in my case…) that’s different. But if it’s an in-house quarrel, keep it for in-house publications. Or the footnotes.
• About those footnotes: back up your statements with extensive, detailed references that actually do say what you think they say. Good scholarship is more appreciated by popular audiences than academic ones. This is a bit scandalous but I have found it to be true. I have about 100 pages of notes and bibliography in the book and non-academics commenting on the book rarely fail to note, approvingly, that I don’t ask anyone to take my word for what I say, but back up all my claims with numerous references. Some show signs of actually having checked a few to make sure I was on the level. It’s an interesting comment on academia that we almost never do this. To the contrary: I’ve noticed whole small academic literatures based on footnotes in Mauss where clearly no one ever bothered to look up the cited sources (since they don’t say anything like he claims they did.) I’ve seen two reviews of my own work, published in very prestigious academic journals, where veritably no statement made about the contents of the book was accurate—I mean, with statements that were just over-the-top false, or obviously dishonest, like taking quotes from the book and removing the word “not” from them—and apparently, despite the fact that they were also hatchet jobs, the editor just waved them ahead unchecked. Ironically, no such a review could ever have been published in a magazine like Harpers or The Nation, where there are battalions of fact-checkers who literally test every statement a writer submits for factual accuracy.

So that’s a start: be an even more conscientious scholar, don’t waste time arguing with other academics unless there’s a reason to, and entertaining digressions are okay, especially, if clearly marked as such. Let me leave with that and come back and throw out something about the actual content next week.

Human Nature: It’s Not What You Think

I like this motto because it, like a forty pack of pudding cups from the pak-n-save, be broken out into separate containers which can be sold separately:

Anthropology: We Own Human Nature

Anthropology is a four-field discipline, and the main reason it needs to stay that way is to keep what we know about human nature from being forgotten. Other congeries of disciplines have their own take on human nature, often derived from models of how they imagine people work, or people in highly artificial lab-based experiments. We need to emphasize that our models are reality-based: empirical, from a wide sample of places and times, and based on naturalistic human behavior. Lab work is great for some things but in the final instance actual human behavior should be used to explain actual human behavior: this is a central Boasian lesson. I personally work far away from the seam where biology meets culture (or rather, where those two terms are no longer analytically useful because they collapse into one another). But I, like all anthropologists, need to attend to that boundary and have a basic idea what goes on there. We started out as human nature experts and we need to stay that way.

Masters of the Unexpected

The fundamental insight of anthropology is that most people mistake convention for necessity and that our intuitions about what humanity as a whole are like come out of day-to-day experiences which are quite parochial. This should make us masters of the unexpected, purveyors of surprises and strange twists on common sense: the very stuff of headlines. Too often, however, we use our awareness of cultural relativism as a cudgel, telling people how ‘limited’ and ‘blinded’ they are by their culture. How much press is there in that?

This is a bit like Greg’s idea of ‘making discoveries’ but I really think we need to embrace — without fear of exoticism — the idea that people can find our work interesting without us becoming bad people. On this point I’m in agreement with Greg: we need to get over knee-jerk fears of exoticism even as we take seriously realistic critiques of the colonial and colonizing origins/impulses of our discipline.

The Everything-Studiers

Greg emphasizes that we need to embrace fieldwork as distinctive. However for me what is amazing about anthropology is not that we go places to study people — it’s where we go and who we study. Anthropologists know we study everything from Polynesian outliers in Micronesia to investment bankers in wall street to sky divers to people who eat their dead relatives to hip hop in Brazil. We love our freewheeling ability to take absolutely anything seriously. We need to play not only the “I’ve Been To Burma!” card (to quote an Eric Overmeyer line) but also that we study things that people didn’t think you could study because they are so close to home: Walmart. Guitar Hero experts. Graffiti. Corgie fanciers. Close-up magic. Pro-anorexia websites. We think of it as a committed comparativism, but it is a short step (often, the walk between the lecture hall and the local pub) from comparativism to this-is-to-cool-to-not-study. Anthropological careers have been launched with the sudden insight “I didn’t even know you could study that” and I bet public interest would be as well.

Science? Yes. But more than science, too.

For most reasonable, un-shirty definitions of science, cultural anthropology is a science. The other three fields are even easier to brand as science. Greg is right that incredibly subtle discussion about the status of Reality and Truth need to take a back seat to public professions that we actually know what we are talking about since we do (or at least we should). At the same time, what makes anthropology unique is that we go further than just facts and theories — the type of knowledge we offer is further, deeper, different. This “bonus insight” is not an alternative or criticism of ‘science’ (I am all for criticisms of shirty definitions of science) but an addition: the extra mile we go to that makes what we do even richer and more valuable than a ‘just the facts’ lab-coatism.

People are not stupid. Unfortunately, most science education takes the form of teaching students that people in lab coats know The Truth and that they should shut up and not ask any questions because they wouldn’t be able to understand the answers anyway. And by and large people do do so. But we all know that we learn with our hearts, that our knowledge of the world is enriched by time and experience, that key events in our lives broaden our perspectives, that there is something you get out of a great work of fiction that should be counted as insight.

Anthropologists should be honest with the public and admit what we ourselves have known all along: that fieldwork provides both data and personal transformation, that cultivation and knowledge are broader than just an analysis of cultural systems. Of all the social sciences anthropology (and perhaps certain of the more outré versions of symbolic interactionism) is willing to recognize different and broader forms of knowledge. And even, at times, provide them.

Call it the Carlos Castaneda pathway to fame and fortune, but I think we need to grasp the nettle on this one and point out that beyond science there is an additional kind of insight we provide — one which people might more intuitively recognize as similar to a kind of understanding they are pursuing. And let’s be honest — the great ethnographies provide us with this bonus insight without having to fabricate shamanic visions or choke down jimson weed smoothies.

* * *

Greg focuses on activism as a hallmark of anthropology, which just doesn’t spring to mind for me. I believe that activism — like diversity — has a special history in anthropology and needs to be protected as a main part of our big-tent tradition of inclusion. But I think you can be an anthropologist without being an activist. I don’t know I could be wrong. I think I just came up with four bullet points and then pooped out. In the end I think that Greg is right about one particularly important point: we need to ‘do anthropology’ in public, whether that is fieldwork or just presenting arguments from the ethnographic record so that people can watch us doing anthropology, rather than just describing what goes on behind closed doors. Speaking of which, I have to get back to my book manuscript…

In 2010 we offered an anthropological spin on the United States’ ongoing wars. There was the Concerned Anthropologists’ letter to Washington over the Human Terrain System. HTS was criticized as bad social science compounded with poor battlefield tactics. The value and authority of WikiLeaks’ documents was debated. We considered how Afghani people and their culture is represented in the mainstream media in the U.S. and the visibility of war in U.S. popular culture. Connections were drawn between the wars and domestic conflicts as predicated on a willful ignorance of Islam, something anthropology seems well positioned to ameliorate.

American politics and celebrity pundits were also a topic of conversation at SM. David Brooks was taken to task after the Haiti earthquake for pinning that country’s underdevelopment on cultural lack. The future of right/left politics in the contemporary global capitalist scene was considered via “neosocialism,” even the Conservative Wahoo made an appearance on the comments board. Arizona’a anti-immigrant laws were re-contextualized in terms of whiteness and a general sense of pervasive xenophobia in the U.S. The never ending story of science vs. religion took a new turn as atheists used hair dryers to de-baptize each other. And lovable scamp, Glenn Beck, took a stab at amateur archaeology.

Of course what would an academic blog be without a little Ivory Tower naval-gazing and in-fighting? Ckelty blogged about conflict between departments and administration in UC Berkeley, scientific misconduct and the case of Marc Hauser, and the implosion of Rice University Press. Rex suggested that being an alum from a top program was not a silver bullet to professional success and reviewed The Trashing of Margaret Mead: Anatomy of an Anthropological Controversy by Paul Shankman. ‘Round conference time some advice was offered for making the most of the AAA’s (the topic of leaving drunken emails after carousing with colleagues was curiously left untouched). As a former employee of xkcd’s alma mater it was fun to see this cartoon on university websites make an appearance.

SM also a ran a few posts on navigating the trials of grad school and professional anthropology. Kerim reflected on shifting his research away from a focus on Taiwan, despite the fact that he had taken a job in Taiwan in order to do research there. Then there was a two-part series on good work practices. The first bit of advice, an article a day, offered a deceptively ambitious way to add depth and breadth to your repertoire. This he generalized in the second piece as work smarter, not harder and develop a daily routine. To get through your dissertation “Don’t break the chain” and be consistent, doing a little bit of work every day. The value of Qualitative Data Analysis software was held up to scrutiny too.

The year 2010 was one marked by disciplinary soul-searching: What is anthropology, What do anthropologists do? Where are we going and why are we in this handbasket? Meanwhile here at SM, we opened debate on what unresolved questions might anthropologists seek to pursue. We probed the nature of culture’s compulsion as something “you can’t choose.” Things were put in perspective with a time line history of anthropology. Kerim wrestled with theory as a force that gives us meaning (his hip was wrenched and he limped for days), while Rex related a true story of theory as a source of stress. And December would have been a dull month without #AAAfail. Rex championed anthropology as true, even if not a science, (the #3 most read post of the year) and suggested ethnography as a remedy to finding the place of science in the discipline.

You haven’t lived until you’ve seen David Harvey speak on the contemporary global economic crisis while his ideas are illustrated on a whiteboard! Also on the subject of political economy, a handy link and extended quote on the anthropology of money. And more here on American consumerism and masculinity.

Being that we lived through the science fiction sounding year of 2010 without making contact with an alien obelisk it is still worth nothing the extent to which digital technology, social media, blogging, and teh Interwebs made their ways into our posts. Adam republished a Twitter conversation as Remix Culture is a Myth and quoted Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, as comparing Facebook to a potlatch. The iPad was reviewed and the possibility of revolutionary changes to the publishing industry were considered. It already seems that PDF’s are to dead tree publications what MP3′s have become to recorded music. Savage Minds got props in American Anthropologist, which pinned us as a kind of public anthropology. SM needed a new assistant editor and, indeed, it turned out to me, the guy who writes the “weekly” Around the Web column which appears once a month or so. Some folks paid $10 to hear Ckelty deliver his thoughts on blogging, but SM readers got the same stuff for free. So everyone please be sure to Paypal him, okay?

Somewhere between blogging and public anthropology lies journalism. SM offered two takes on this: what’s wrong with anthropology that there is no journalism about it, and, there’s so much wrong with journalism why would anthropology want to go there. At least we don’t have to worry about being fair and balanced crap now that we’re all in for complicity with our subjects.

SM brought its readers some compelling personalities too. There was a review of the anti-Jared Diamond book Questioning Collapse. Adam did a series on corporate anthropology including this interview with a self-proclaimed entrepreneur theorist and another interview, with IBM’s in-house anthropologist.

In 2010 some of the best posts on Savage Minds were original, ethnographic works or reports from the field: whether its calling on the SM community for help in interpreting ‘Life at the Googleplex’ or connecting classic anthropological theories like food taboos with problems of modern life like food allergies. Michael Powell wrote on consumerism and the movements of shoppers as they navigate contrived retail spaces. Guest blogger, Ashley Mears, discussed her work in the modeling and fashion industries (the #2 post on the year).

In the year’s most widely read post, archaeologist Bradley Garrett spoke with Adam on urban exploration and Place Hacking.

Thanks to all our readers for a great year of conversation. If you’ve never left a comment on a post, make it your New Year’s resolution. Our community is richer for your contribution.

The piece is co-written by Paul Sillitoe and Mako John Kuwimb. Paul is recognized pretty much worldwide as the expert on the area where the events in Diamond’s story take place. More than that, however, he has a reputation for scrupulous, scrupulous ethnographic work. I heard him once say that he was an “ethnographic determinist” — meaning that he believed in “putting facts on record”. He has not only produced decades of publications, but all of his work shows an exactitude and rigor which is astonishing and, frankly, a little intimidating. Famously, his book on Wola agriculture includes descriptions of Wola attitudes to worms, that is how complete the guy is (in fact, if you are looking for a good ethnographic description of pre-contact highlands PNG for an intro class, I’d recommend his Grass-clearing Man. But be warned — you are going to learn a lot about giving pigs away). I’ve never met Mako John Kuwimb, but his bio — which includes time working for the well-known Australian legal firm Warner-Shand — is impressive and, best of all, he is a Papua New Guinean from Southern Highlands talking about his own people and his own experiences.

In sum, the piece is by 1) the top expert the area and an anthropologist renowned for his empirical rigor and 2) a highly-educated Papua New Guinean from the area under discussion. It’s no surprise, then, that the piece is so thoroughly put together. It is, in essence, an account of what actually happened in the conflict that Diamond described, complete with timeline, pictures, and a detailed description of events. Interspersed throughout is a wider account of how people manage conflict and reciprocity in areas without much governmental presence. Thus the article is a double repudiation of Diamond’s piece — it not only sets the facts straight, it points out the flaws in his theoretical account of ‘vengeance’ in ‘primitive societies’ as well. As someone who lived not too far from this area not too long after the events recorded in the story, this account rings very very true to me.

There are, of course, things one could quibble about in the article. A major thrust of the piece is that Papua New Guineans live freer lives than people in highly-governed first world countries. This is something I hear frequently when I visit the highlands: that Papua New Guinea is a “free country” where you can “eat free and run free” without external government forces or the induced poverty that a cash economy creates. At the same time, however, I know many Papua New Guineans who long to be free of the web of obligations and reciprocity that goes along with life in the highlands, and to live without the sometimes-crushing anxiety and concern for status that drives people to participate in exchange in order to not be seen as rubbish men. Perhaps the piece invites us to think more carefully about what justice and liberty really are, rather than simply accept that the correct answer to this question is an inversion of the one Diamond gives.

Overall, however, the biggest impression one gets after reading is this piece is: this is ethnography (or perhaps, ‘this is journalism’?). We have often talked on this blog about how Diamond’s work uneasily spans several genres. With Kuwimb and Sillitoe’s piece, we finally get to see what the situation in Papua New Guinea really  is, what high-quality work looks like, and what the public really deserves from their experts.

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.

But one thing I don’t hear people say is that we need more “Anthropology Journalism.” I mean that primarily on analogy with (or as a subset of) science journalism. It is a very rare experience to open up the Tuesday NY Times and see an article about recent research in anthropology–to say nothing of rags like scientific american, Wired, Discover or the New Scientist. Of all the “news alerts” I get, or the RSS feeds I browse from journalistic outlets, few to none ever report new findings, controversies, or questions coming out of the discipline. And I get more news alerts and RSS feeds than I could possibly read in ten lifetimes.

Two qualifiers: first, I mean linguistic and cultural anthropology specifically. Archaeology gets some love, though usually only when the findings are narrativized in a story of human origins or change, or when something truly rare is discovered. Biological anthropology gets perhaps a bit less love than archaeology, though certainly more than cultural or linguistic, and only when it is clearly identified with another discipline (evolutionary psychology, behavioral ecology, evolutionary theory, etc). Jared Diamond, it appears, gets the rest of the attention.

Second, it’s not a total lack. A few weeks back the NY Times magazine ran a story about the Americanization of global mental illness. That article had everything good and bad about science journalism going for it: it reported on recent research, digested it and used to to paint a compelling picture, but it also took liberties with the subtlety of the claims to make an overly broad argument in order to be provocative, and to sell more copies of the journalist’s book. A few years back, Dan Everett got a full profile in the New Yorker. Tracy Kidder recently devoted a whole book to Paul Farmer (though interestingly the publicity only refers to him as a doctor, not an anthropologist). And speaking of Haiti, I’ve heard more anthropologists interviewed in the last two weeks than in the whole of 2009. But basically there is no anthropology journalism to speak of. Why not?

There are a few arguments that are always used to explain why there may be science journalism but no anthropology journalism. The harshest of these is that there is simply no interesting (or objective, or reliable, or novel) anthropology to report on. The argument has a Glenn Beck feel to it, suggesting as it does the decline of western civilization and values and the destruction of all that is Good and Right by the scourge of French philosophy, postmodernism and dissolute tenured radicals. Whatever.

Slightly less annoying is the frequent argument that our writing is inaccessible, jargon-laden, pretentious, or needlessly over-written. This argument fails on the simple grounds that most scientific papers are totally inaccessible to a general audience. Science journalism by journalists trained in science is absolutely essential to communicating what the vast majority of things scientists and engineers are up to today. I won’t defend the wealth of bad writing in anthropology, but nor will I defend it in psychology or chemistry or engineering. Have you read a conference paper in computer science lately? Not only is it likely to be totally inscrutable to you non-computer scientists, but it is also very likely to be extremely poorly written, badly punctuated, and generally abusive of the English language–though very prettily formatted using LaTeX

So let me propose three reasons that people don’t usually seem to offer for why there is no anthropology journalism:

1) because there isn’t as much anthropology as there is science to report on.

This strikes me as a basic difference. The simple volume of papers and reports published in most natural science and engineering disciplines absolutely dwarfs the number in anthropology. Each year at the annual neuroscience conference in san diego there are over 20,000 posters and papers. There are less than 8K anthropologists in the AAA total. It seems entirely likely to me that anthropology is being swamped by other information. However, the proportion in science reporting doesn’t seem to mirror the distribution of disciplines in universities, nor the number of students working on PhDs. Certainly it reflects the relative wealth and prestige of some sciences over others. And compared against the humanities generally, instead of the sciences, the argument makes somewhat less sense. There isn’t much “humanities” journalism (Chronicle of Higher Ed notwithstanding) either, but the amount of reporting on the arts, history, literature or music that draws on scholarly work also dwarfs the reporting that draws on anthropology to explain culture.

2) because journalists already do what anthropologists do, only better.

How many of us have not had the experience of reading a really quality piece of investigative journalism in which the journalist has done her homework, traveled to the right places, talked to the right people, and basically explained a phenomenon in terms that suggest there is nothing much more to say? All kinds of things that graduate applicants write in their statements of purpose are likely to appear the following month or year in a magazine or newspaper, artfully done and reaching a far larger audience. Kudos to the journalists who pull this off. But that’s never the end of the story. Three weeks later, anthropologists are still puzzling over the significance of the phenomena reported on, and 5 years later are publishing articles that I think generally do a better job of explaining, rather than reporting, the causes, effects and long historical twists and turns of cultural phenomena. Journalists tend to move on. The temporality of anthropological research far from matches that of journalists, just as it is far slower than many of our colleagues in the natural sciences and engineering. Changing that temporality might require a different approach.. and this, I think, is the third reason for a lack of anthropology journalism:

3) because anthropologists do not report on their research.

Cultural anthropologists have no tradition of publishing articles that simply describe their ongoing or recent research in brief but detailed, relatively standardized forms. Instead, the journal article in cultural anthropology is a mini-book, replete with complex forms of argument and narrative, rich, detailed description and a complete list of references in the literature. Whereas many scientists write a synthetic review article of research in their field once every couple of years, sub-fields of anthropology get one per decade, if that. Whereas a brief article reporting some results in science looks like “findings,” a brief article by an anthropologist describing a bit or recent fieldwork looks paltry and insubstantial.

One result of this is that I honestly have no idea what the vast majority of my colleagues in anthropology are working on until well after they are done doing it, and this is a real failure when it comes to making anthropological research appear fresh. If I were king, or Bill Davis, I would require every researching anthropologist to publish a paragraph describing ongoing research in a AAA publication at least once a year. Such a resource, if done correctly and made freely available would of its own accord change the dynamics of attention to the discipline by outsiders.

3a) because anthropologists’ scholarly societies do not report on their research

A corollary to this reason is that the AAA leadership, editors of journals, and staff of the AAA have done little to innovate these forms of scholarly communication in the last 100 years, to say nothing of the last 10, when they have done nothing more than resist such innovation, sometimes on principle (preserving a tradition of scholarly production focused on monographs, books and critical distance, I suppose), sometimes out of fear and anxiety about the very sustainability of the scholarly enterprise. Contrast this with the aggressive (and to be sure, questionable) shift in the sciences towards models of open access, publicity hounding, interaction with journalists, and repackaging of research in a range of scholarly forms (think Freakonomics). Perhaps in the long run, the traditionalism of the AAA will defend us against the craven onslaught of pecuniary interest and cozy complicity with neo-liberal capitalism. But it will be a lonely 21st century.

The most poignant part of the lack of an anthropology journalism for me is that there are lots of things anthropologists know and understand about the world that few others know. I never feel like I understand what’s happening in the world when I listen to NPR, however good their reporting. Sometimes I feel a bit more informed by a New Yorker or Atlantic article. But I always walk away from quality anthropology with a sense that my brain has been rewired and that I now know better why things are happening the way they are… surely journalism can amplify that effect rather than dampen it?

More Organ Traffic News: The Associated Press is reporting that Israeli officials admitted that military doctors harvested organs of both Israeli soldiers and Palestinians with something less than knowledge and consent of patients’ families. According to the admission, harvesting practices ended in 2000, but have come to light after accusations by the Swedish government and the release of an interview Nancy Scheper-Hughes conducted with Israeli officials.

Anthropologist, Heal Thy (Dry-Skinned) Self: In a press release, cosmopolitan cosmetic line AnthroSpa Logic announced its arrival on the scene with a number of new products: “a combination of exotic, natural ingredients used for centuries by native peoples both medicinally and in beauty treatments to care for their skin.” File it under, ‘what to get for that hard-to-shop-for anthropologist’? Ok, I tried. Here is the website.

For an edition on “Moral Dilemmas and Ethical Controversies,” Stuart Kirsch’s guest editorial in Anthropology Today reflects upon Jared Diamond’s description of his experience in PNG and the blogosphere’s reactions to them (pdf here). Kirsch questions the conditions for an ethical critique to turn into a sustained effort for reform. Kirsch also informed me that this edition of Anthropology Today will be open access for six months.

As Languages Lay Dying: Paul Bignell at The Independent (UK) wrote a piece on University of Cambridge scholars who are busy salvaging the endangered languages of the world. While we may remain skeptical about the urgency of saving whole world view’s from the malevolent hands of language death, the article is lovely for its earnestness and has a pretty cool map.

Archaeology Videos: Thanks to anthropology.net, I came across the Archaeology channel, which has free streams of videos detailing the material record, conservation projects and cultural patrimony from archaeological sites from around the world. But my favorite archaeological video this week comes from the Onion. Forgive me if you’ve already seen it (as I have) reposted a couple times. It’s pretty fantastic.

Internet Archaeologists Find Ruins Of ‘Friendster’ Civilization

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.