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Man Called Bee: Studying the Yanomamo

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Man Called Bee: Studying the Yanomamo DOCUMENTARY EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES study guide A Man Called Bee: Studying the Yanomamo Forward: film, Dead Birds, which focused Taken from Timothy on warfare among the Dani of Irian Jaya. (It is not surpris- Asch’s Bias in Ethno- ing that Chagnon first took his graphic Reporting own film footage of the Yano- mamo to Gardner for evalu- In 1968, Napoleon Chagnon ation and advice.) By 1966, invited me to join a multi-disci- when Chagnon submitted his plinary expedition to study the Ph.D. dissertation, the United CONTENTS Yanomamo. As a result of this States was increasingly divided trip, we completed two films, over the Vietnam war-ghetto one an introduction to the dwellers would soon burn cit- Forward Yanomamo that included the p 1 ies and young men burn draft work of the population geneti- cards. The entire country was cists on the expedition, and the preoccupied with the subject other about a feast held be- of violence. And as is so often tween two villages to initiate an the case, anthropological in- Introduction alliance. Later, we received a p 6 terests were influenced by the joint grant to return for further concerns of the wider society, filming and in 1971 we shot particularly the campus com- footage that we subsequently munity. Transcript made into 36 films. These In the social and biologi- p 6 films represent a collaborative cal sciences there was a swing effort that benefited from each toward the exploration of the of our strengths. biological roots of behavior epitomized in the 1966 pub- Film Credits Political Climate During lications of On Aggression by p 15 Chagnon’s Initial Re- Konrad Lorenz and The Terri- search torial Imperative by Robert Ar- dry. Anthropologists, such as Chagnon began his research Sherwood Washburn and Irven Contact Information among the Yanomamo in 1964. Devore, were studying primate p 15 This was the same year that social behavior in order to see Robert Gardner completed his both how aggression was han- Yanomamo Film Series 1 GUIDE: A Man Called Bee DOCUMENTARY EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES study guide dled within different species and whether we at me and said, “It’s alright, I only have to could learn something about human social shoot one of them.” (Was that a joke?) That organization by looking for analogies in the really terrified me, for l thought, “Shoot one social organization of our closest biological of these Yanomamo and the others would cousins. make you into a pin cushion with their ar- Thus, when Chagnon ‘discovered’ the Ya- rows.” nomamo, an isolated society that still en- When I got to the center of the village, I gaged in frequent raiding and acts of hostil- dramatically struck my pose and then what ity, his work quickly came to the attention of seemed like hundreds of Yanomamo came other social scientists, winning him consider- running down upon us, all rattling their long able recognition. Chagnon first published bows and arrows, making a terrible, fearsome Yanomamo: The Fierce People in 1968. It clatter. Finally, we were individually taken has subsequently sold over one million copies to a hammock and there I was minutely - according to Chagnon, more than any other examined by a number of Yanomamo war- ethnography. In that same year Fried, Harris riors. “Look how white and peaked his skin and Murphy edited and published The Anthro- is. How on earth did such a skinny, weak pology of Armed Conflict and Aggression, which looking person manage to walk that great contained an article by Chagnon on the ef- distance? He looks like a monkey with all fects of war on Yanomamo social structure. that hair under his arms.” On the other The previous year, Natural History Magazine hand, when they went to inspect Chagnon, had published an article by Chagnon. His he passed muster very nicely with hardly a portrayal of the Yanomamo seemed to strike murmur. a sympathetic chord among both academic At the end of this long day, I was physically and general readers in America. and emotionally exhausted. When I tried to tie my hammock to a pole, I suddenly real- Collaboration Between Different ized that I had forgotten the knot that I had Personalities been taught to tie the night before. I tied it once and got into my hammock with great Working with Chagnon among the Ya- relief. But no sooner had I sat in the ham- nomamo wasn’t always easy. For example, mock, than it collapsed to the ground. I Chagnon and I accompanied about 15 Yano- got up and tied it again, but the same thing mamo men and women on a three-day jour- happened. I just couldn’t get up a third time. ney through the jungle to a proposed feast in Finally, Napoleon, who was reclining in his a distant village. We snuck up on the village hammock with his hand respectfully over his and only at the last moment announced, by face, turned to me and shouted in a hoarse shouting, that we were nearby. Napoleon whisper, “For God’s sake, get up and tie your and the headman who had guided us knelt at hammock, you’re embarrassing the entire the entrance to the village with his shotgun expedition!” over his knees. I was told to go into the cen- On the second day while walking in the ter of the village with the other visitors and jungle, I tripped. “He’s so harmless he strike the usual heroic pose. I borrowed a couldn’t hit a tapir with a bow and arrow at machete from somebody and nervously pre- 20 feet,” a headman told Chagnon shortly pared to do as was told. Napoleon looked up thereafter. Needless to say, my role was soon GUIDE: A Man Called Bee 2 Yanomamo Film Series DOCUMENTARY EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES study guide one of comic relief compared to Chagnon’s 30 hours of exposed film. He or she may macho male. Of course, Chagnon might be never use the remaining footage. In an effort justified in arguing that I could afford to play to make the best use of his Ju/wasi (!Kung) this role because I was under his protection. footage, the filmmaker John Marshall, de- But frequently, I have found it beneficial to veloped a new approach: the sequence film put myself under the protection of others- method. After I had worked with Marshall anthropologists or local people- and to admit on such sequence films as The Meat Fight and my cultural incompetence when I am new to An Argument About a Marriage, I was eager to a community. apply this approach to filming the Yano- Certainly, here is mamo. Thus, when- an example of how ever I turned on the personality can af- camera, I tried to fect the way in which film long sustained each of us behaves in shots of social in- another culture. The teraction that com- consequences of per- prised a sequence. sonality differences We produced these on data collection are sequences, each as compounded because an independent film, these differences and then we made usually influence our more general films choice of informants out of them, like A and influence a po- Man Called “Bee”: tential informant’s Studying the Yanoma- attraction to us. mo, which focuses on Chagnon’s fieldwork and research methodol- Filmmaking ogy. The contrast in these two kinds of films, as well as Chagnon’s and my biases, is well I lacked the confidence in my own ability illustrated by two films we made that use the to make a complex, narrative film about the same footage of a man and woman talking Yanomamo that would represent their cultur- and weaving a hammock (A Man and His Wife al perspective in any significant way. This, Weave Hammocks). combined with my ambition to demonstrate that ethnographic film could become a valu- Fieldwork able component in teaching anthropology, led me to take a sequence based approach to Fieldwork seems to me to have four quite our film project. different goals: to contribute to contempo- It is common in documentary filmmak- rary analyses and discourse on ethnography, ing to only make one general film out of to broaden and enrich the life of the field- the entire corpus of footage shot. In order worker, to record some of the lives and voices to tell a story, the filmmaker usually takes a of a group of people who might otherwise be few feet from here and a few feet from there silent, and to provide data for future scholars to make a one-hour film out of as much as to analyze, thus serving as an historical re- Yanomamo Film Series 3 GUIDE: A Man Called Bee DOCUMENTARY EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES study guide cord for members of the group studied. Yet, tural guides. If general ethnographies, such as I have pointed out, it is very difficult for as most of those in the Spindler Introduc- an ethnographer to attain all of these goals tory series, were to acknowledge this bias in a single, written ethnography. This is and to state openly that they primarily reflect because the interpretative nature of ethnog- the views of those in power, we would avoid raphy allows our biases to seep in. characterizing whole groups by the behavior I also believe that there are ways in which of their leaders. This would at least identify we can reduce the effect of our biases in our the nature of the descriptions and analyses work. In order to do this we should recog- presented in these texts, and it might encour- nize each of our biases individually.
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