"The Camera is our Weapon": Kayapó video warriors featured in new exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History in New York

The Kayapó (Mebengôkrê) people of Brazil are living proof of the resistance and adaptability of Indigenous cultures. A new exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History in New York highlights the dynamism and creativity of this warrior tribe, and their historical struggle to preserve their lands and culture. Originally inhabiting the dry savannahs of central Brazil, the Kayapó were pushed farther north and west by Portuguese invaders, ultimately moving into the Amazon basin hundreds of miles from their ancestral homelands. In order to survive in this new environment, the Kayapó had to conquer, capture and appropriate new lands, technologies and knowledge from their enemies and retool them for their own ends. The Kayapó people maintain this warrior heritage through the present day, as they have seized on video cameras, international media visibility and even "Kaya-pop music" to broadcast their voices and defend their culture.

Self-portrait of video warrior Bepunu Kayapó, July 2020.

The exhibit is centered on a striking self-portrait of Kayapó warrior Bepunu in full ritual regalia gazing back at the spectator armed with a video camera. This image creates a dialog with an existing exhibit case in the American Museum's Hall of South American Indians that contains a mannequin depicting a Kayapó warrior brandishing a traditional war club. During the course of creating the exhibit, I was able to locate Kubei, a Kayapó activist who had visited the American Museum in 1990 in the company of anthropologist Terence Turner. Kayapó film maker Pat-I recorded an interview with Kubei in March of 2020, especially for this exhibit, in which he reflects on his visit to New York 30 years ago, describes his reaction to meeting his Kayapó "friend" (his name for the mannequin) and responds to how Kayapó culture was displayed at the museum. 

Above: Kayapó activists Kubei and Tapiet visited the American Museum in 1990 and gifted their Kayapó "friend" with a feather headdress and other body ornaments that remain in the exhibit case to this day (photo: American Museum library). Below: the Kayapó warrior mannequin at the American Museum (photo: David Harvey). 

The exhibit was designed by a group of graduate students at Columbia University's Museum Anthropology program in collaboration with American Museum curator Laurel Kendall, exhibit designer David Harvey and other American Museum staff as part of an annual practical course that invites outside specialists like myself to help develop a new exhibit case every Spring. Because of the COVID pandemic, installation of the physical case was postponed, and instead we prepared an online version that includes a 3D virtual reality visualization of the actual exhibit case containing various Kayapó cultural objects. 

Virtual reality 3D visualization of the exhibit case

The online exhibit includes a series of short films made by Kayapó film makers, an activity booklet for children as well as information and donation links regarding the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on the Kayapó and other indigenous peoples of the Amazon. Playable audio files present the pronunciation of key Kayapó language terms and provide an example of the lively rhythms of "Kaya-pop" music. The exhibit also features images by photojournalist Dado Galdieri. A Portuguese translation of the exhibit website was prepared in a co-launch with the Goeldi Museum in Brazil:

The Camera is Our Weapon: Kayapó Video Warriors in the Amazon

A Câmera é nossa Arma: Video-Guerreiros Kayapó na Amazônia

Read our recent paper on Kayapó film-making in Current Anthropology 

Related stories from this blog: 

Might at the Museum: Indigenous groups revisit their heritage at the Goeldi Museum

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

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Special thanks to Laura Zanotti, Janet Chernela, Pat-I Kayapó and Bepunu Kayapó for their invaluable contributions to this exhibit.  

This is your brain on Li-Lo: Ayahuasca in the Twenty-First Century

The genie is out of the bottle, tweeting about the next shamanic bodywork leadership seminar, and the bottle; well, check and see if it isn’t in the back of your fridge by the vegan TV dinner. 

"The genie is out of the bottle" [Photo: Pinterest]

Who would have ever imagined that ayahuasca, the enigmatic jungle potion William S. Burroughs once referred to as “the secret”[1] and whose very botanical identity was a matter of debate through the mid-twentieth century[2] would, within a matter decades, become a household (or at least, yoga-mat) word; the subject of hundreds of scientific, anthropological, and medical studies; a magnet for international tourism; the motor behind a global religious diaspora, and the victorious plaintiff in absentia of an historic Supreme Court case?

The rhyme “herbal brew”/“bamboo” in Paul Simon’s 1990 ayahuasca-inspired song “Spirit Voices” already rings of kitsch, but there is still something, if not fresh, then at least compelling about Sting in his biography Broken Music,[3] revealing that “ayahuasca has brought me close to something, something fearful and profound and deadly serious.” But by the time Lindsay Lohan confides to a reality TV host in April of 2015 that ayahuasca helped her “let go of past things… it was intense,”[4] Burroughs’s “final fix” has finally entered the realm of cliché.

How did this happen? What is the special appeal of this bitter Amazonian brew in the post-post-modern global village toolbox of self-realization? How has it fared in the bustling marketplace of New Age spiritual entrepreneurism and on the battleground of the War on Drugs? And what does it all mean for the multiple, religiously and socially diverse communities and individuals who consume ayahuasca, as well as various ayahuasca-like analogs, around the world?

We can think of the global ayahuasca expansion of the past two decades as a kind of second wave to the psychedelic revolution, following upon that other, “fantastic universal… inevitable… high and beautiful wave,” Hunter S. Thompson describes as cresting in the mid-1960s only to crash so quickly, and so disappointingly:

So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back[5]…

"Wave of the Future"

… Will the “re-traditionalization” of global neo-ayahuasca ceremonies provide adequate social controls and ideological coherence to ensure that this “second wave” psychedelic revolution doesn’t crash and dissipate somewhere between the headwaters of the Amazon and the Great Barrier Reef? Will the contradictions of the modern self and the temptations of capitalism undercut the radical vision of individual and planetary healing that some neo-ayahuasca enthusiasts prophecy? Will ayahuasca become another battlefield casualty in the global War on Drugs, or will legislation evolve to protect ayahuasca as a religious sacrament, as a medicine, as a tool of experiential freedom? We don’t yet have all the answers to these questions, but the authors of this book are on the crest of the wave, and if anyone can see ahead to the far shore, it is they. 

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Excerpted from: "Ayahuasca in the Twenty-First Century: Having it Both Ways"[6], in:

The World Ayahuasca Diaspora: Reinventions and Controversies

edited by Beatriz Caiuby Labate, Clancy Cavnar & Alex. K. Gearin

 Related links from this blog:
Agony and ecstasy in the Amazon
Return of the secret shaman
Dream tobacco
The cheerful pessimist
 Chronicle of a death foreclosed 
Between the cross and the Pleiades
  

References:
[1] Burroughs, W. S., & Ginsberg, A. (2006 [1963]). The yage letters: Redux. San Francisco: City Lights Books
[2] Schultes, R. E. (1957). The identity of the malphigaceous narcotics of South America. Botanical Museum Leaflets, Harvard University, 18, 1–56.
[3] Sting. (2005). Broken Music: A Memoir. New York, NY: Dell, p. 18.
[4] Morris, B. (2014) Ayahuasca: A strong cup of tea. The New York Times, June 13, p.  ST1.
[5] Thompson, H. S. (1998 [1971]). Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. New York, NY: Random House/Vintage Books, p.  68.
[6] Shepard, G.H. Jr. (2017). Ayahuasca in the Twenty-First Century: Having it both ways. In: B.C. Labate, C. Cavnar & A.K. Gearin (eds.), The World Ayahuasca Diaspora: Reinventions and Controversies. New York: Routledge.



Ceci N’est Pas un Contact: the Fetishization of Isolated Indigenous People [Excerpt]

Words matter. Peruvian legislation recognizes two categories of indigenous peoples with little or no interaction with outsiders and the state: “peoples in voluntary isolation” and “peoples in initial contact.” And yet there is no term, process or protocol to describe that moment of transition from one category to another: the process we refer to, for lack of a better term as “contact,” which evokes cinematic images of encounters with alien civilizations.1

Throughout 2014, groups of "uncontacted"(?!) Mashco-Piro regularly approached tourism and transport boats along the banks of the upper Madre de Dios river asking for food, clothing and metal implements.

I visited Peru in March of 2015 in the company of retired FUNAI agent José Carlos Meirelles and Brazilian physician Douglas Rodrigues, both with decades of experience among such peoples. My visit was an attempt to help the Peruvian Culture Ministry better address the precarious situation of isolated indigenous peoples along the Peru-Brazil border. It took years for the Peruvian government to even recognize the fact that isolated indigenous groups still exist in some parts of the Peruvian Amazon. Once such peoples were officially recognized in Peru about a decade ago, the official state policy, promoted by indigenous federations such as the Federacion Nativa de Madre de Dios (FENAMAD), has been “no contact.” Whereas in past years, religious and other organizations have sought to initiate contact with such isolated indigenous peoples, typically resulting in their decimation and cultural assimilation, this more enlightened, recent policy has recognized isolation as a form of cultural self-determination that should be respected and enforced.

Mashco-Piro women on the banks of the Madre Dios river. Photo: Charlie Hamilton James, National Geographic, June 2016.

I first coined the term “voluntary isolation” in an open letter to Mobil Prospecting Peru protesting this company’s seismic exploration in the Rio Piedras known to be inhabited by Mashco-Piro and perhaps other poorly known indigenous groups, referred to at that time with inaccurate and pejorative terms such as “uncontacted,” “Stone Age,” “primitive,” “uncivilized,” or “naked.” The point of the term “voluntary isolation” is to recognize this situation, not as an accident of nature or history — a human group lost in the backwaters of human evolution — but rather as a conscious choice of these indigenous peoples to isolate themselves from outsiders, often due to disastrous prior experiences, as a mode of survival and self-determination.2 The term seemed to catch on, initially through the activism of FENAMAD and the International Working Group on Indigenous Affairs in Peru, and ultimately spread to neighboring Amazonian countries like Brazil, Colombia and Paraguay.

What do we do when a group of isolated people, such as the Mashco-Piro along the upper Madre de Dios River, who had previously rejected all attempts at “contact” by missionaries, scientists, government agents and nearby indigenous brethren, have suddenly emerged along river banks, calling to tourist boats and loggers asking for food, clothes, and metal implements? Mashco-Piro bowmen have raided legally recognized native communities to take food and trade goods, sometimes wounding and even killing apparently inoffensive indigenous “brethren” with their arrows.

Faced with such difficult challenges, one Peruvian Culture Ministry representative asked the Brazilian specialists, “Don’t we need a new category to refer to these people? ‘People in sporadic contact’ perhaps?” This person, and others we met during this visit of exchange between Peru and Brazil, seemed to be contorting the language to find ways of respecting the inviolable principle of “no contact.” Meirelles responded in his characteristically sardonic manner: “Can a person be considered ‘sporadically pregnant’? No. Either they are, or they aren’t.” 

An evangelical missionary communicates with a group of Mashco-Piro through a local Piro interpreter, 2014.

Viewing numerous photographs of Mashco-Piro individuals approaching boats, receiving clothes, metal implements, food, even a Coca Cola bottle, Meirelles commented: “Contact has already happened. You people are in denial.”

…

The official Peruvian policy of “no-contact” is reinforced by vehement, idealistic media campaigns by indigenous rights organizations and concerned individuals who post on social media networks — “leave them alone!” While their intentions are of course noble, such a simplistic view of the complex and quickly changing situation tends to romanticize and fetishize the condition of “isolation” as a pristine, natural, unadulterated state of the last autonomous, free peoples of the planet beyond the clutches of capitalism, organized religion and the state. People forget that the very state of “isolation” is most often a historical product, a conscious choice by certain groups of people, in certain moments, to defend themselves from moments of violence and territorial invasion, notably during the Rubber Boom at the turn of the 20th century. For this very reason I have resisted the idea that such peoples should be referred to as “uncontacted.” 

Mashco-Piro children remove clothing and food from a tourism boat. Photo: Jaime Corisepa/FENAMAD

…

As Felipe Milanez has written, “Contact is a myth: it is a colonial myth.” It is a myth that fetishizes as a primordial condition — “uncontacted,” autonomous, free, beyond the state — what is in fact a historically contingent response.  The response of isolated peoples is evolving, in some cases rapidly, in a rapidly changing world impacted not only by roads, mining, logging, gas pipelines, and colonization, but also by global warming, environmental change, and changing social relationships with neighboring peoples.3 It is only by looking beyond these myths and the idealistic, sometimes naïve notions they evoke, that scholars and supporters of indigenous rights and the relevant government institutions can develop policies that defend the long-term rights of survival, territory and self-determination of indigenous peoples, rather than blindly defending their own fantasies about them.

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Excerpt: Full text at Tipiti 14(1): 135-137 (article 8)

Read more from the special forum on isolated peoples at Tipiti 14(1), with articles by Felipe Milanez & yrs truly, Lucas Bessire, John Hemming, Minna Opas, and Warren Thompson & Obed Garcia

Read more on isolated indigenous peoples from this blog:

Mashco-Piros on the verge 
Too-close encounters 
Quiet war in the Amazon
Forget colonial myths
 

References:

1. Shepard, G.H. 2002. “Prólogo.” In: Huertas, B., Los Pueblos Indígenas en Aislamiento: Su lucha por la sobrevivencia y la libertad. Lima: IWGIA, 11-14.

2. Shepard, G.H. et al. 2010. “Trouble in Paradise: Indigenous populations, anthropological policies, and     biodiversity conservation in Manu National Park, Peru.” Journal of Sustainable Forestry     29(2): 252-301.

3. Walker, R. S., and Hill, K. 2015. “Protecting isolated tribes,” Science 5 June 2015: 1061.
 

Los mashco-piro al borde: Misioneros, safaris humanos, el juego de pelota y una historia de dos contactos

English version

1. Misioneros y safaris humanos inician contacto en el Perú

Se siente como un déjà vu: jóvenes desnudos de un grupo indígena aislado se abren paso con cautela a través de aguas poco profundas y se acercan a extraños. Envalentonados por la curiosidad, o el hambre tal vez, aceptan ropa colorida y comida de regalo, sin saber que pueden estar llevando una bomba epidemiológica a su pueblo en el bosque. Y sin embargo, las aparentes buenas intenciones de estos extranjeros amistosos pueden estar motivados por una agenda oculta: proselitismo religioso o el control territorial. Por otra parte, iniciar el contacto con los pueblos indígenas aislados es una violación de las regulaciones peruanas. 

El 6 de setiembre, turistas y una mujer indígena afiliada a un grupo misionero fueron fotografiados entregando ropa y alimento a niños Mashco-Piro en una playa en Madre de Dios (Foto: Jaime Corisepa/FENAMAD).

La escena es muy similar a los recientes dramáticos acontecimientos en una región cercana a lo largo de la frontera de Brasil con Perú. El 27 de junio, un grupo de jóvenes guerreros Xatanawa, hasta entonces aislados, establecieron contacto con una comunidad Ashaninka en la parte alta del río Envira.

Sin embargo, hay diferencias importantes en estos dos episodios superficialmente similares: el contacto Xatanawa fue iniciado por su propia voluntad, caminando varios kilómetros para pedir ayuda a la población indígena vecina después de aparentemente haber sido atacados por madereros o tal vez (según las primeras investigaciones en Brasil) narcotraficantes con sede en Perú. Por otra parte, los Ashaninka llamaron inmediatamente a un experimentado equipo de la Fundación Nacional del Índio, la FUNAI, para ayudar a mediar en el contacto, proporcionar atención médica para la inevitable gripe que afectó  a los intrépidos jóvenes, y desarrollar una estrategia a largo plazo para proteger al grupo. El contacto con los Mashco-Piro había ocurrido de manera informal, irresponsablemente, y en contra de las normas oficiales, por grupos de turistas y población local sin la autoridad o capacidad para manejar las consecuencias potencialmente genocidas de tal situación.

La organización indígena FENAMAD, junto con Survival International, han publicado recientemente fotografías en su página de FaceBook tomadas el 6 de septiembre donde se muestra un grupo de niños Mashco-Piro recibiendo  ropa y regalos de una mujer indígena local de la Comunidad Nativa de Diamante quien está afiliada a una organización misionera evangélica que ha intentado ponerse en contacto con los Mashco-Piro desde hace algún tiempo. La gente de Diamante en el río Madre de Dios son Piro, y su lengua es muy parecida a la de los Mashco-Piro para permitir una comunicación mutua. Algunos habitantes de Diamante han estado tratando de ponerse en contacto con los Mashco-Piro desde hace casi 25 años, pero sólo en el último año los Mashco-Piro respondió a tales esfuerzos con nada menos que hostilidad: varios pobladores locales han sido heridos por flechas Mashco-Piro, y un hombre fue asesinado en 2011.

Too-Close Encounters: The Mashco-Piro and the dilemmas of isolation and contact

In late August a Peruvian indigenous federation circulated remarkable video footage showing about a hundred isolated (so-called “uncontacted”) Mashco-Piro Indians just across the river from a Piro indigenous village along the Rio de las Piedras in Peru. They  appeared to be asking for food and trade goods like rope and metal tools. The Piro and Mashco-Piro languages are close enough to allow communication. Hoping to avoid direct contact and the possibility of disease contagion, forest rangers at Monte Salvado floated a canoe laden with bananas across the river. 

Mascho-Piro in grainy footage released by FENAMAD in August
Image source: BBC

After a tense three-day standoff, the Mashco-Piro eventually disappeared back into the forest. No one is quite sure why the Mashco-Piro — who have so steadfastly avoided such contact until recently — suddenly showed up. Many suspect that illegal loggers active throughout the region have disrupted their usual migration routes.

In late 2011, a different group of Mashco-Piro living near the border of Manu National Park shot and killed Shaco Flores, an old Matsigenka friend of mine, with an arrow. Having lived among the Piro for many years and learned the Piro language, Shaco had been patiently communicating and trading with the Mashco-Piro for over twenty years, always maintaing a safe distance but slowly drawing them closer with his gifts, food and conversation. But something happened on that fateful day in late November: perhaps the Mashco-Piro were spooked by Shaco’s appearance with several relatives at the manioc garden on a small river island where he had been allowing the Mashco-Piro to harvest his crops; perhaps there was internal disagreement among the Mashco-Piro whether or not to accept Shaco’s long-standing offer to bring them into permanent contact. We may never know.



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.

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.

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

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 on the last day of February in 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 (one and a half 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.

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)