Remembering Francis Bossuyt

The evening before his 31st birthday, biologist Francis Bossuyt went for his daily swim in the lake at Cocha Cashu Biological Station in Manu Park, Peru, and was never seen again. After weeks of fruitless searching by scientist colleagues, park guards, the Peruvian authorities and his Belgian family, he was presumed to be the victim of some mishap on the lake. This loss represented a double tragedy for his family, since his own father had died four years earlier in the mysterious explosion of a TWA flight off Long Island in July of 1996, which had interrupted Francis's very first month of fieldwork at Cocha Cashu. 

Francis with a titi monkey
(Photo source: Myriam Bossuyt)

Just a few days before Francis disappeared on April 27, 2000, I received a letter from him that was written from Cocha Cashu before Christmas and postmarked from Miami on April 13. 

In the letter, Francis describes his preliminary observations about the use of apparent medicinal plants by a group of dusky titi monkeys he was studying for a doctoral thesis at U.C. Davis. He was interested in comparing this information with my own work on plants used by the nearby Matsigenka indigenous people. We had begun to correspond about beginning a comparative study.

Today, on what would have been Francis's 44th birthday and the 13th anniversary of his disappearance, I reproduce this letter with its novel observations about the use of aromatic plant species by dusky titi monkeys:

In the days and weeks following his disappearance, I was reminded of Matsigenka stories about special individuals -- shamans, herbalists, orphaned children -- who use their knowledge of esoteric plants to join the immortal beings residing in the Milky Way: they vanish without leaving a physical trace in the world below.

As his mother Myriam wrote in a memorial posting last January, celebrating renovations at Cocha Cashu being carried out by the San Diego Zoo, "For us, [Cocha Cashu] will always be a special place where Francis’s spirit roams, and we hope it will remain a sanctuary for the many creatures who live and work there, who love and die there." 

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An Ax to Grind: Napoleon Chagnon, the Yanomami and the anthropology tribe

I felt like I had walked right into one of the Napoleon Chagnon/Timothy Asch Yanomami films. At one end of the circular village enclosure, a shouting match had erupted between two Yanomami women. As the argument continued, a crowd began to gather divided among two opposing groups, one around each woman: a sketch-picture, like one of Chagnon's genealogy diagrams, of the social tensions and kinship alliances in the village. Towards the other end of the village enclosure (known as shabono in Yanomami) more people watched from a distance, whether waiting to take sides or just spectating, I couldn't tell. There was an electric crackle of tension in the air, so different from the calm rhythm of village life that had reigned up to that moment.

Weapon and art: Decorating an arrow point, Marari, 2004

I am admittedly no Yanomami expert; on the contrary, this was my first, and so far only visit to the group. But having read Chagnon's once-popular textbook ethnography, The Yanomamö (originally subtitled, "The Fierce People") and having seen and taught his film, "The Ax Fight," several times, I was struck with a remarkable sense of déja-vu: that film also involves a verbal duel between women that escalates into full-fledged physical combat between two men. As I watched the unfolding drama in the shabono, the shouting continued and a few men towards the back of the opposing groups peeled away from the crowd and returned to stand at attention, gripping long, sturdy tree saplings: the same style of dueling clubs seen in the film made 30 years prior.

It was April of 2004 and I was taking part in a large Brazilian scientific expedition to the Yanomami village at Marari, inside the vast binational Yanomami indigenous reserve just across the Venezuelan border from the region where Napoleon Chagnon had worked decades earlier. In fact, Venezuelan Yanomami from the group "Shaki" (Chagnon's Yanomami name) once studied had recently visited Marari. The controversy surrounding Patrick Tierney's book, Darkness in El Dorado, published in 2000, accusing Chagnon and other scientists of misconduct and even genocide, was still roiling the anthropological and indigenous rights communities in the U.S. and South America, although the Yanomami at Marari had no idea about the international scandal that was unfolding in their name.

Ricardo, a Brazilian Protestant missionary who was assisting the scientific team and who has worked with the Yanomami for over 25 years -- apparently becoming in the process more Yanomami than the Yanomami have become Christian -- told me to run and get my camera.

"There's going to be a fight," he said. Then he turned to leave.

"Aren't you going to stay?" I asked.

"Nah, happens all the time. You stay, you're an anthropologist, should be interesting. Call me if anyone gets hurt."

But no one got hurt. Instead, the shouting subsided, the momentary tension dissipated together with the crowd, the men discreetly put away their clubs and the village returned to normal: the public spectacle of a Yanomami duel is as much about containing violence as engaging in it.

What no one remembers about "The Ax Fight" is that there is no ax fight in "The Ax Fight." The sharp edge of the ax, though raised in the climax of the film, is quickly turned around to the blunt side and never deployed, defusing what could have been a lethal turn to the explosive but highly ritualized stick-duel that Timothy Asch captured on film. I guess "The Stick Fight" doesn't have quite the same ring.

Another thing to remember about "The Ax Fight" is that exactly one month after it was filmed in late February of 1971, Second Lieutenant William Calley of the U.S. Army was found guilty for his participation in the massacre of some 500 unarmed Vietnamese civilians at My Lai three years prior. U.S. casualties in Vietnam up to 1971 surpassed 45,000 (three times the current Yanomami population) and total Vietnamese casualties of that war will never be known, though the number is likely over 5 million.

So much for "The Fierce People."

Preemptive Anthropology: FAQs

Remembering the 10th anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, here is a bit of dark humor written as the bombs rained over Baghdad:

Anthropological ethics must evolve in response to undeniable world realities.  Recent events have unmasked the fallacy of cultural relativism while reliable intelligence has demonstrated its connection to a global Praxis of Evil.  The current Code of Ethics entangles us in fruitless obligations toward foreign nationals to the detriment of American interests and security.  With resolve, we, members of the Guild of Outmoded Phrenology, have drawn up a Code of Anthropological Ethics for the New American Century, reviving cultural evolutionism and its foreign policy imperative, imperial expansion, while restoring the comfort and moral clarity of ignoring history.  The full document, “Ethics, Freedom, Democracy, American Interests and the New World Order, not Necessarily in that Order” is available at www.notinthatorder.ord.   Here are responses to some frequently asked questions:

1.  What should I do in the event that the clan, tribe, religious sect or rogue state where I am conducting research is attacked by United States Armed Forces?

Because the American Anthropological Association does not issue a uniform, anthropologists dress in local costume and may be considered unlawful enemy combatants, subject to indefinite detainment, interrogation, and sentencing without legal council (note: “gone native” defense strategies are not admissible).  We urge anthropologists to maintain frequent contact with their Embassy while engaged in fieldwork, and suggest changing regions every few years to avoid perilous linguistic competence and cultural identification.  In the event of a sudden U.S. attack, we advise field anthropologists to demonstrate their peaceful intentions by removing all clothing and, if time permits, shaving head and facial hair before strapping themselves with duct tape to a gurney.

2.  Are there provisions in the new defense budget for anthropological research?

We are excited about new funding modalities emerging from the Doctrine of Preemptive Anthropology.  Security and intelligence agencies will fund studies of local conditions, social networks and military targets in strategic regions before they become a security threat.  Because of the broad definition of the preemptive doctrine, grants will be open for all geographic regions, but research is subject to certain restrictions and conditions. 

3.  Will urban anthropology also receive support? 

Yes.  The new Department of Homeland Anthropology will promote studies of patriotic moral values illustrated in popular culture.  An analysis of the epic film Star Wars, for example, reveals an archetypal story of the battle between good and evil that is instructive during this moment of crisis.  A mighty, technologically advanced Empire amasses a vast war apparatus that it plans to test, thereby cowing galactic resistance, by destroying a remote planet harboring a primitively-armed rebel group believed to maintain ties with a robed, bearded religious guru who lives on a war-ravaged desert planet in a cave, has an unusual six-syllable name beginning with “O,” yet who is connected by disquieting family and pedagogic ties to the Empire’s cowboy-booted usurper...

4.  I am carrying out ethnomycological research with South Korean matsutake mushroom gatherers, and my informants are concerned about U.S. military contingency plans that include nuclear strikes against North Korea.  Would such an attack constitute the use of “weapons of mass destruction?”
 
No.  By definition, all weapons used in the defense of freedom, liberty, and American interests constitute constructive purposes, and hence are not weapons of mass destruction (WMD).  The correct term for such arms deployment is “Wherewithal to Motivate Democracy,” also WMD, but the similarity is merely coincidental. 

5.  Could the same logic apply to other nations’ use of military force against enemies or in the name of national interests?

Yes and no.  It all depends on which nations, whose enemies, and in what national interest.  This is called strategic relativism.  Note the advantages over cultural relativism, where all people are valued equally.

6.  Could anthropologists contribute to the search for Iraqi WMDs?

Certainly.  Anthropologists have pioneered studies of mythology, folklore and urban legend, and are unrivaled except by certain National Security advisers at maintaining unwavering ideological stances in the complete absence of empirical evidence. 

7.  Given the broad surveillance powers ceded by the U.S. Patriot Act, are there any anthropology textbooks or courses that should best be avoided?

Avoid  books, articles and courses whose titles include the words hegemony, history, Islam, Sumer, domination, resistance, gender, colonialism, or post-anything, as well as those having colons, hyphens, quotation marks, parentheses, and other unpatriotic punctuation.  Anything published after 1968 might be considered suspect, especially titles by French authors, those with Arabic last names, and works by Noam Chomsky, Susan Sontag, …//doha. bbrother.aphage/cdua.exe//line 81 match detect//Content-type: multipart; boundary=S_31568_12728 <<Anthrophage software is connecting to Central Database on Unpatriotic Academics>>…

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First published in the "To Wit" back-page humor column of Anthropology News 45(2): 56 (Feb. 2004)

Three Cheers for Periwinkle: Ethnobotany, histiocytosis and Rare Disease Day

Just over seven years ago, my youngest son, then eighteen months old, woke up one morning with a lump exactly the size and shape of an olive behind his ear. An X-ray revealed a quarter-sized hole in his skull and a mass of dense tissue. The initial diagnosis -- malignant tumor of the cranium -- left everyone in the family reeling, incredulous and praying for a miracle. Within a few days and thanks to the incredible staff at the Boldrini Children's Hospital in Campinas, Brazil (if I ever become a millionaire I will leave my fortune to them), this diagnosis was rejected in lieu of something far stranger: Langerhans cell histiocytosis, also known as eosinophilic granuloma or histiocytosis-X (due its mysterious etiology), a childhood disease that is a hundred times rarer than leukemia and thus often misdiagnosed.

You know you are desperate when a doctor tells you your child has an extremely rare immune system condition of unknown origin that punches Swiss-cheese-like holes in the bones and especially the skull, fatal in about 15% of the cases and usually treated through experimental drug protocols, and you feel relieved.

Periwinkle: Our little miracle

His initial treatment included small doses of vinblastine, a drug derived from the caustic sap of the rosy periwinkle, Catharanthus roseus (or Vinca rosea), native to Madagascar. In a matter of days, the olive-sized lump looked more like a caper, and within six weeks the tumor was no longer visible to the eye. The treatment regime continued for another two years with a cocktail of drugs similar to those used for leukemia but in far smaller doses. 

I am very relieved to say that he is now fully recovered and suffered no side-effects from more than two years of low-dose chemotherapy. Miracles really do happen.

Rainforest Wraith: Reading David Foster Wallace in the Amazon

David Foster Wallace is probably not the best literary companion for fieldwork in the Amazon. And I’m not just talking about the brick-like girth and serious heft of Infinite Jest. I checked it out of a public library before purchasing and decided I’d be better off, given exotic travel considerations, with the eBook, which I bought and downloaded to my iPod for an expedition among the Kayapó of southern Pará in the Brazilian Amazon. 

Even on the tiny illuminated screen of this wafer-thin device, totaling 7780 bite-sized pages turbocharged for efficiency with searchable text and hyperlinks among wormhole-like footnotes-within-footnotes, Infinite Jest makes for heavy reading. 

It is especially incongruous bedtime fare after a day of tropical heat and colorful festivities in a native village. On the one hand, indigenous societies like the Kayapó, with their powerful sense of group identity and collective purpose reinforced through spectacular public ceremonies, would appear immune to -- even an antidote to -- the kind of mental, electronic and pharmaceutical "cages" that are central to Infinite Jest. And yet as the Kayapó and other indigenous peoples become increasingly connected to global society and dependent on Western technology, one wonders how far off the addictions of modernity really are. 

During several passages of the book I felt physically ill and had to put the device away: the claustrophobic screen and jarring cultural dislocation only intensified my queasy response to the manically unspooling language. But I got hooked on the double binds and dizzying plot spirals, the tragicomic pathos of Wallace’s characters and a tantalizing if mercilessly denied promise of narrative resolution. I just had to find out whether the wheelchair-bound Canadian terrorists succeed in weaponizing a fatally addictive "Entertainment" cartridge, and how bad a DMZ trip Hal is in for. (Spoiler alert: Oh well...)

And so on the last day of March, I dismissed myself from the nocturnal orations of Kayapó chiefs and immersed myself in the tent for an hours-long slog. I finally collapsed in frustrated exhaustion only to be visited, Scrooge-like, by my tormentor’s ghost: 

"Last night certainly less than princess-level sleeping conditions contributed to a spectacular suite of dreams not to mention the fact that I slept nearly 12 hrs. In the first part I ran into some professors, maybe Nancy S. or Beth C. or David A. I saw them talking w/ a shadowy personage they called ‘Dave’ who kept reappearing throughout the dream just out of my reach. I couldn’t figure out whether this was Dave Eggers or whether it was the ghost of David F. Wallace. When the profs told me they had been speaking w/Dave, I said, ‘Why didn’t you tell me? He’s one of my favorite writers!’

"But I discovered that he had left behind a singular kind of basket or bag, triangular in shape w/ a very narrow opening [and according to the sketch in my journal, a loop-like double handle], at first it didn’t seem to open at all. The womb-like format was not lost on me even in the dream state. Inside were scraps of paper on which Dave had outlined a new novel or rather a revolutionary new novelistic technique which included a chorus-like precocious annunciation of themes that allowed the author to assert an authorial voice without losing himself in mirror-like self-reflection. There were further plot details that now escape. The name for this revolutionary new DFW/DE technique was, of all things, menire, which means ‘girls’ in Kayapó!” 

After jotting down these hasty notes the next morning I realized it was April Fools’: I guess the Jest was on me. 

  ---

In Memoriam:

 February 21st, 2013 would have been David Foster Wallace's 51st birthday.


Previous post, January 27, 2013:
"The Sound of No Salinger" 
Remembering J.D. Salinger three years after his death

The Sound of No Salinger

I looked up from the book, saw the Fat Lady, and found Enlightenment.

I was sitting in a warm café near Lincoln Park over bagels and coffee, bracing myself for the blizzard outside. It was January in Chicago and I was spending the month at the Field Museum to identify a batch of plant specimens from the Peruvian Amazon. No tropical flower could have suffered as much from the contrast in climate as I did. The Museum opened at 9 and closed at 6 and I had plenty of time to kill. For no particular reason, I decided to read all of J.D. Salinger’s books in roughly the order they were written. It doesn’t take long: he published remarkably little.

Isolated, focused, almost monastic, I spent those weeks moving between the luminous vault of the herbarium, the urban tundra of Chicago’s lakefront, and the dense world of Salinger’s fiction. That morning in the café I had just finished Franny and Zooey. In the final pages, Zooey Glass is on the phone with his sister Franny, remembering a conversation with their brilliant deceased brother, Seymour. 

In their youth, Zooey had complained about having to shine his shoes before performing with Seymour for a radio audience of “morons” he couldn’t even see, to which Seymour replied, “Shine them anyway…for the Fat Lady.” Zooey concludes his long, cathartic conversation with Franny, “Don’t you know who that Fat Lady really is?...Ah, buddy. Ah, buddy. It’s Christ Himself,” and Franny goes into a state of ecstasy. 

And, so—when I closed the book and looked up to find myself facing the Fat Lady—did I. 

She was sitting at the next table with manic hair, her bulk magnified by layers of dank clothes and surrounded by shopping bags full, not of purchases, but possessions: in short, a “bag lady.” And yet her sparkling eyes and bright smile gave her the air of a fairy godmother who had fallen on hard times in this disenchanted modern world. She had asked me a question, but absorbed in my reading I hadn’t heard. Surprised by the curious coincidence, and moved by a swell of compassion in the afterglow of Salinger’s art, I went to her table and struck up a long conversation and eventually paid for her coffee, though she didn’t ask me to.

Finally she was gone, and as I walked through the icy streets on my way to the museum, hardly feeling the sting of the wind, I was overcome by an indescribable feeling of grace and warmth and fulfillment that lasted most of the day. It was as if some key had turned in a lock deep in my soul. I felt whole, enveloped in truth and mystery: At One. The saint-like apparition of the Fat Lady had sparked the experience, but it was the intense, cloistered reading of Salinger that had primed me.

In the weeks that followed, I read more about Salinger's life and work searching for clues as to what quality of his art had inspired such a profound reaction in me. His avid involvement with Zen Buddhism and other religions is mentioned by most critics. Gerald Rosen, in Zen in the Art of J.D. Salinger[1], reads Franny and Zooey as a modern Zen tale. But I was disappointed to find that most commentators writing at the time, and even more so since his death, have focused less on his unique literary style and more on his reclusive life, cantankerous privacy lawsuits and a trail of broken relationships. In a culture obsessed with fame, Salinger was a finger in the eye of the literary establishment, and his silence was taken as a snub.

What I find most striking in Salinger’s writing is precisely his use of silence, or 'negative space'. He signals this aesthetic in the epigraph to the Nine Stories, a Zen koan about the sound of one hand clapping.[2] In most of these stories and subsequent work, the central events or characters are egregiously absent from the pages: Seymour’s suicide, only alluded to in “A Perfect Day for Bananafish”; Seymour himself, always just beyond the frame of the Glass family novellas; the unspeakable wartime experiences left unspoken in the epistolic conclusion to “For Esmé—With Love and Squalor”; Ramona’s invisible friend Jimmy Jimmerino in “Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut” and the parallel phantom of her mother’s lost wartime love; and the scandalously elliptical conclusion to the ninth story, "Teddy," in which a precocious, perhaps divinely gifted child may fall to his death as he himself appears to predict earlier in the story.

Much like the unmentioned abortion that lies at the center of Hemingway's “Hills Like White Elephants” (Salinger admired Hemingway and arranged to meet him while serving in Europe in WWII), Salinger’s characters obsessively skirt around the central facts of their lives, leaving a gaping chasm whose edges are sketched in but whose essence remains elusive, perhaps unknowable, and yet all the more powerful. Salinger’s ultimate application of this art to his own life was his complete withdrawal from the public eye between 1965, when his final published story appeared, and his death in 2010.

A prominent example of negative space in the visual arts is the optical illusion known as Rubin’s vase. The white vase is surrounded by a black background that suddenly morphs into a pair of black faces silhouetted against a white background where the vase used to be. The visual confusion caused by such 'figure-ground reversal' creates a disturbing oscillation as the eye alternately accepts and rejects two contradictory possibilities, forcing the viewer to step outside seeing and consider the paradox of sight itself.

Alan Watts describes a similar cognitive effect of Zen meditation: “The method of Zen is to baffle, excite puzzle and exhaust the intellect.”[3] In Salinger’s writing, a similar method is at work, a constant tension between the narrative 'field' and the unseen, unmentioned 'ground' that nonetheless impinges: the sound of one hand clapping.

I believe that this "baffling, exciting, exhausting" oscillation between seen and unseen, field and ground, presence and absence—which resolved itself in the cathartic finale to Franny and Zooey and in my own chance encounter in Chicago—took me briefly outside the bounded limits of self and opened me to a deeply fulfilling moment of aesthetic rapture.

I can’t claim to have attained lasting Enlightenment, but the singular experience of grace that pulsed through my being on that day remains precious in my memory fifteen years later.

In his last published novella, Seymour: An Introduction, Salinger writes, "All we do our whole lives is go from one little piece of Holy Ground to the next." Today, on the third anniversary of Jerome David Salinger’s death, I reflect on his unique body of work and express my gratitude for one little piece of Holy Ground that he and the Fat Lady gave me. 

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[1] Rosen, Gerald (1977) Zen in the Art of J.D. Salinger. Berkeley: Creative Arts Book Co.
[2] One of the more ridiculous interpretations of this koan is related by Ron Rosenbaum, who in his pouting, indignant 1997 non-profile for Esquire claims to have stood at Salinger's driveway in New Hampshire waving one hand in front of his face—like Muriel drying her nails in the story "...Bananafish"—as the elusive author drove past.
[3] Watts, Alan (1960) The Spirit of Zen. New York: Grove Press, p. 19.

Photos sources:  Esquire, The New Yorker, Wikipedia.

Shipwrecked: The sorry state of development in the lower Urubamba

The shipwrecked hospital boat at the mouth of the Camisea River is an apt metaphor for the sorry state of social development in indigenous communities of the lower Urubamba impacted by the Camisea Gas project in southern Peru.  

A $150,000 hospital boat shipwrecked at the mouth of the Camisea River.

Donated at a  cost of $150,000 by PetroBras as part of its negotiations with native communities, the boat was supposed to serve as a fully equipped aquatic hospital and ambulance.  Instead, due to poor coordination between the company, the Peruvian Health Ministry and the community, the boat lies on its side filled with silt like a beached whale: an expensive eyesore, a dangerous jungle-gym for native children playing by the river, and a reminder of where good intentions can lead.

The Camisea region is home to a great diversity of indigenous peoples including the Matsigenka, Piro, Ashaninka, Nahua, Nanti and perhaps others, some of whom remain in isolation to this day.  With 25 years of experience working among the Matsigenka and other native groups in the region, I was called on to take part in an independent advisory panel set up by the Import-Export Bank of the United States as a condition of their loan to Hunt Oil for building a pipeline that brings Camisea gas to the Pacific coast of Peru for export. My preliminary analysis of the situation of social development in the Lower Urubamba has now been published in the most recent report of the South Peru Panel.  The report also includes analysis by other panel members of Peru's energy matrix, environmental impact assessments and community-based monitoring of mining and hydrocarbon projects. 

In this posting I summarize the results of my contribution to the report based on field research in ten indigenous communities in the lower Urubamba.  During the two-week visit, carried out in November-December of 2011, I interviewed community members and leaders about their perceptions of the changes brought about Camisea Gas development.  One indigenous federation leader summed up the situation in this way:

What is happening in the lower Urubamba isn’t development.  It’s confusion.  Everyone has their chain saw, their boat motor, their zinc roof… The rivers are contaminated, the young people who have jobs don’t plant crops… People have money but malnutrition and illiteracy are on the rise.  There is no food, just cans of tuna.  When there’s no tuna, there’s always beer.

Between the Cross and the Pleiades: Missionaries, museums and a Baniwa shaman's heritage

"Right there in that deep pool," she pointed a weathered brown hand across the sand towards a bend in the river.  "That's where she told him to dump it."  She counted the items out on her fingers, "Virola snuff, a snake's head, a jaguar tooth, an earth-spirit crystal, yopo snuff.  All of his shaman's instruments.  Sophie made him do it."

Baniwa shamans use crystals and other magical materials to enter the spirit world and transform into various beings.

Ana, a septuagenarian Cubeo woman from Colombia now living among the Baniwa people in Brazil, describes how an American Protestant missionary named Sophie Muller convinced her uncle (now long deceased) to throw his shamanistic paraphernalia into the river and convert to Christianity in the 1950s.  Shamans of the northwest Amazon use hallucinogenic snuffs and other psychoactive plants to enter the spirit world, employing various minerals, animal parts and other magical materials during trance to transform into different animals and spirit beings[1].

"And he regretted it, too.  Says he wished he had thrown his instruments in the woods, so he could go back and get them later.  But at the bottom of the river!  He was finished.  He was the last one."

"All of his shaman's instruments. Sophie made him do it...  At the bottom of the river! He was finished."

I met Ana on a recent trip to the Içana and Ayari Rivers, tributaries of the Upper Rio Negro in the northwest Brazilian Amazon.  Concluding a three-year long project of exchange between the Goeldi Museum and several indigenous peoples, I traveled to the Upper Rio Negro carrying digital photographs of ethnographic objects collected in the region over a hundred years ago and deposited in museums in Brazil and Europe by German anthropologist Theodor Koch-Grünberg[2].
  

Putting the Reich back in Reichel-Dolmatoff: Nazi past of legendary Colombian anthropologist revealed

While delving into Colombia's rich indigenous heritage, the acclaimed Austrian-born anthropologist Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff may also have been hiding his own Nazi past. 
 

A tireless fieldworker and scholar, Reichel-Dolmatoff carried out research throughout Colombia's diverse geographical and cultural regions. He founded Colombia's first department of anthropology and made contributions in all fields of the discipline, including archeology.  His ground-breaking research and prolific writings spanning nearly six decades inspired multiple generations of anthropologists in Colombia and throughout the world, including myself.

In the Spring of 1986, archeologist Anna Roosevelt, then at the Bronx Museum of the American Indian, lent me her copy of Reichel-Dolmatoff's Amazonian Cosmos[1] and changed my life.  At the time I was a a pre-med student at college but found myself increasingly drawn to foreign languages, folk medicine and ethnobotany.  After reading Reichel-Dolmatoff's brilliant study of mythology and shamanism among the Tukano people of the Vaupes river I became set on working in the Amazon.

Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff, born Erasmus Gerhard Reichel in Austria in 1912, emigrated in 1939 to Colombia where he pursued anthropological research on diverse indigenous groups including the Guahibo, Kogi, Kuna and Tukano.  His work in the Sierra Nevada of Santa Marta resulted in the classic ethnography on the Kogi people[2] as well as important archeological discoveries[3].  He was best known for his work on Tukano shamanism, pointing out the role of ecological concepts in indigenous cosmology[4] and highlighting the significance of the hallucinogenic vine yagé (ayahuasca)[5].  He also made pioneering contributions to the archeology of the Amazonian lowlands[6].

Considered the "father of Colombian anthroplogy," Reichel-Dolmatoff published 33 books and hundreds of scientific articles, crowning his career with prestigious visiting positions at Cambridge and UCLA beginning in the 1970s.  In 1975, he received the Thomas H. Huxley medal from the British Royal Anthropological Institute.

He was admired by students and colleagues as much for his erudition and meticulous scholarship as for his generosity and humanism.  He died in 1994 at the age of 82.  In 2012, the Colombian anthropological community was prepared to celebrate his centennial with accolades.

At an anthropological conference in Vienna this July, however, Colombian anthropologist Augusto Oyuela-Caycedo presented disturbing evidence concerning Reichel-Dolmatoff's Nazi past.  According to documents he uncovered in German federal archives, Erasmus Gerhard Reichel was a member of the SS, participated in Hitler's murderous "Night of Long Knives" in 1934 and served as a guard in the notorious Dachau concentration camp in 1935.

A Nazi party notice seeking Erasmus Gerhard Reichel in 1937 after he had left Germany. 
(Image source: Bogotá Blog)

Rainforest Crunch: Origins of the Brazil nut in ancient Amazonia (Bertholletia excelsa)

If you still miss "Rainforest Crunch" ice cream, you can finally rest assured that Amazonian Indians really were behind all those Brazil nuts in the recipe, only not in quite the way that Ben & Jerry's had advertised.

The stately Brazil nut tree appears to have been managed
and perhaps cultivated by ancient Amazonian peoples.

Recent scientific studies show that Brazil nut groves have been managed, facilitated and probably spread throughout the Amazon by indigenous peoples since before European conquest. As highlighted in this month's issue of the Brazilian science news magazine, Revista FAPESP, "the human factor" has played an important role in shaping this emblematic rainforest landscape.