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In the Science Zone The Yanomami and the fight for representation

MICHAEL M.J. [This three-part essay will run in two issues. The three other fields. Citizen Action Panels (CAP) are involved in FISCHER parts are titled: 1. Three axes of difference 1960s-1990s; monitoring the clean-up of toxic sites under US Superfund Michael Fischer is Professor 2. Biology, anthropology & 21st-century sciences; 3. None legislation. International human rights law has a bearing of Anthropology and Science of the actors were saints, nor should we champion them as on the ethics of clinical trials with issues of informed con- and Technology Studies at the if they were. The present issue contains part 1 and part 2. sent, return of benefit to research subjects, dilemmas of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where from 1996- Part 3 will appear in the October issue. Editor] playing upon expectations where the understandings of 2000 he was Director of the scientists and subject populations are quite different (see, Program in Science, Janus, the double-faced god of time, is perhaps chuckling for example, the five-part series in The Washington Post, Technology, and Society. He at the paradoxes and dilemmas that bedevil anthropolo- December 2000, entitled ‘The body hunters’, on first- taught at Harvard University (1973-1981) and at Rice gists’ efforts to defend and critique their studies of the world-based medical research in China, Africa, and Latin University (1981-92), where he Yanomami. The bedevilment lies at least in part in the fact America). There are issues of informed consent by volun- served as Director of the that 1960s science and 1990s science are institutionally teers in defences against biological warfare (see Moreno Center for Cultural Studies (1986-92). He has been a quite different enterprises. They are different along at least 2000); negotiations over bioprospecting/piracy and patent Fulbright Lecturer in Brazil three axes: the ethics and institutional contexts of science; law between North and South (including the right under (1982). A contributor to the way in which actors of all sorts, including scientists, GATT/WTO rules for countries to declare medical emer- debates in anthropological become media players, complicating questions of who gency rights to produce generic HIV/AIDS or other drugs theory and cultural studies, as well as to Middle East studies, speaks for whom; and the palimpsest continuities and dif- if multinational companies refuse to sell at an affordable his current research focuses on ferences between the human biology research projects price); and in general various forums of deliberative modern science and (population genetics, sociobiology, human genome diver- democracy on policy issues. technology. Author (with George Marcus) of sity project, health and epidemiological transition) of the For the discipline of anthropology, such ethical assess- Anthropology as cultural 1960s and the 1990s. ment and limit-setting has a chequered history. The Ethics critique: An experimental All three axes require attention to the importance of Committee of the American Anthropological Association moment in the human sciences anthropology’s interface with history on the one hand, and was set up as a form of such institutional review, at least (2nd edn, 1999) and (with Mehdi Abedi) Debating biology on the other, and also to an ethics of defending the for cases where putting research populations’ lives at risk Muslims: Cultural dialogues in Yanomami, science and anthropology that depends on not has been alleged. The trigger for setting up the Ethics postmodernity and tradition turning the actors in any of these spheres into saints. The Committee came during the Vietnam War, when allega- (1990). His email is [email protected] differences between the 1960s and the 1990s also have to tions were made that research on villagers was being do with the increasing pressure for the participation of turned over to security forces and villages were targeted publics in decision-making about scientific research that for bombing (‘the Laos affair’). At the same time there affects their welfare: a pressure towards accountability, if were allegations that anthropological research was being not transparency. used for counter-insurgency interventions in Latin America (‘Project Camelot’). And slightly later there were I. Three axes of difference 1960s-1990s allegations that an anthropologist, by revealing ‘state secrets’ about population control in China, was politi- Ethics and representation of science cizing the discipline and endangering access to the field. The ethics of science – and the representations of science This third case was controversial, and since then it has in both the epistemological sense (accuracy, reference, proved increasingly difficult for the AAA to evaluate such completeness) and the political or stakeholders’ sense – allegations in politically charged fields in a discipline ded- are no longer marginal issues left up to the sensibility of icated to examining the social bases for moral positions the researcher or expert. Across the sciences these are rather than enforcing any particular such position. becoming matters for institutional review, efforts towards Napoleon Chagnon’s research among the Yanomami has transparency, and negotiations between publics and been a long-running case of charge and counter-charge researchers over the propriety of research that involves that has been hard for the Association to adjudicate people and publics. without mounting a full-scale investigation with full legal Napoleon Chagnon Nowhere is this more focused than in the medical sci- ramifications, something it has not been financially or ences, where in the US there are long-standing ‘morbidity institutionally set up to do. and mortality rounds’ for surgical and other disciplines That the Ethics Committee has always served to protect (routine collective reviews of adverse outcomes, instituted the Association rather than research subjects, as Steven to minimize unnecessary error); Institutional Review Nugent argues in the June issue of AT, may be true, even if Boards (IRBs) for research approval (established in the many of those who helped get it established, such as David aftermath of the Tuskegee syphilis experiment and the Schneider, did not have this in mind. IRBs also primarily I thank João Biehl, Joe Dumit, debate about human subjects research that began in the protect their institutions against liability claims, but in so Susan Lindee, Mariza 1960s); ethics rounds that bring together surgeons, emer- doing can also protect research subjects. The larger point is Peirano, Alcida Ramos, Jenny gency room teams, intensive care teams, anaesthesiolo- that in many arenas of medical sciences, experimentation Reardon and Ricardo Santos, as well as the anonymous AT gists, nurses, chaplains, and other disciplines, teams, and with human subjects, clinical trials, and so on, there is insti- referees, for comments and health care professionals to rethink cases where the inter- tutional development promoting both the defence of institu- suggestions on earlier ests of patients, doctors, and society are unclear (as in how tions and also accountability, and creating – explicitly in the versions of this essay. I thank the exhibition to deal with organ donation); and hospital ethics commit- case of hospital ethics committees – spaces for negotiation. Images from after the tees to mediate conflicts between patients’ rights to proce- Transparency and accountability are not necessarily hummingbird landed, held in dures (no matter how costly) and doctors’ rights to refuse easy to achieve. How to do so in a responsible manner that September 1996 at the World procedures when they feel futility and further suffering is does not overly polarize controversial issues into battle- Trade Center, New York, for the drawings by Yanomami all that would ensue. fields, but allows them to be negotiated and adjudicated children. Extending this institutional growth are developments in over time – how to do this is today a matter of political

ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY VOL 17 NO 4, AUGUST 2001 9 debate around the world in a way that was not the case disease (especially malaria), demography, and of more thirty years ago; it is something that is unlikely to go away. direct interventions. Alcida Ramos’ account of malaria and depredations by Research and the media miners is one such important temporally comparative A second axis of difference is that the media context of reflection, and the study by John Early and John Peters on ‘The humming bird landed’. doing research among populations around the world is the demography of eight villages since the 1930s is Drawing by Jair, a Yanomami quite different. The Vietnam War is widely understood to another; the latter also contains some balanced evaluations child. The humming bird is a have been the first televised war, and the effects of that of studies of particular groups vis-à-vis one another, reference to the Yanomami name for helicopter, which visual access in the 1960s have an important legacy for the including the studies of Chagnon, Ramos, and others. It is has brought both death and present, both in the increasing efforts by the military, gov- important for novice readers to have a good geographical help. ernments, corporations, lobby groups (including scientists) map of the territory at hand (good cartography on both and others to control information and public discourse, and sides of the border exists, and although Yanomami fre- in the counter-efforts by those who would provide counter- quently move their villages, ethnographers mark their loca- Biella, Peter, Chagnon, images and information. Since then, the world at large has tions on maps, and the history of movement can also be Napoleon and Seaman, become increasingly telemediatized: we see both increasing followed): this is a differentiated physical terrain that has Gary 1997. Yanomamo interactive: The axe fight. availablity of footage, images, and textual information, and been difficult to access, but it is not the ‘dark’ unknown ter- CD-ROM. Orlando: increasing attempts to channel general understandings. ritory of popular conception. Harcourt Brace. One of the tropes of writing anthropology, and of writing To these considerations Patrick Tierney, in Darkness in Cavalli Sforza, Luca 1994. History and geography of by journalists about anthropology, must therefore El Dorado, adds a very important question: the degree to human genes. Princeton: inevitably give way: that of discovery and first contact. which the international media have been gulled into Princeton University Press. There continue, no doubt, to be places that are relatively reporting periodic ‘first contact’ stories that gain wide- Center for Disease Control isolated, but it is no longer credible to discount the archive spread audiences for portraits of primitives exoticized 2000. Public Health Dispatch: Outbreak of of previous interactions of any locality with its larger either by being particularly diseased, or by being particu- poliomyelitis – Dominican geopolitical settings. The complaint about the lack of larly warlike. Republic and Haiti, 2000. detailed attention to the long historical record – even where Part of the burden of this media theme is the degree to CDC MMWR Weekly, 8 December, the trope is not first contact, but inter-ethnic friction after which such reports play into the legitimation of various poli- 2000/49(48);1094,1103. contact – is gradually coming to the fore in professional cies of national governments (e.g. in denying or delaying www.cdc.gov/mmmwr/;pre evaluations of the literature (see for instance Viveiros de long promised land rights protection), international lending view/mmwrhtlml/mm4948a Castro 1996). agencies, or NGOs (Alcida Ramos (1998) has an interesting 4.htm) Coimbra, Carlos E.A., One of the disconcerting things about the anthropological chapter on the ‘hyper-real Indian’, the Indian who has Flowers, Nancy M., writings about the Yanomami is how little attention is given learned to play a kind of role for international NGOs that Salzano, Francisco M., and to the long history (however poorly documented or under- allow funding flows to occur, and a rich chapter more gen- Santos, Ricardo V. 2001 stood) of contact with slavers, rubber tappers, miners, mis- erally on Indian agency in interethnic contexts). That (forthcoming). The Xavante in transition: sionaries, state officials, military operations, journalists, Indians should be sophisticated players in such games is Health, ecology and non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and others. neither surprising nor necessarily a bad thing. It does mean bioanthropology in Central Brian Ferguson’s 1995 compilation of what is known of that narratives that do not allow for such agency on the part Brazil. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan the history of this region is a very important start, but it too of Indians may well be suspect, and that one needs to look Press. is framed oddly in a parochial anthropological discussion for the coalitions and mediators who allow such agency to Collins, K.J. and Weiner, J.S. of 1960s theories of primitive warfare. An important and be expressed on the national and international stage. 1977. Human adaptability: enduring part of this latter discussion is the hypothesis of I think it is a general problem of anthropological writing A history and compendium of research in the the relationship between violence and location within that so much of it is written as if the archive of what is oth- International Biological trading networks, which is opposed to the relative merits of erwise known of these populations can be ignored, in Programme. London: the hypothesis that violence is mainly related either to favour of the personal experience of an individual investi- Taylor and Francis. competition over women (and reproductive or genetic suc- gator, as if we were still nineteenth- or early twentieth-cen- de Castro Lobos, Maria S. et al. n.d.: Report of the cess) or an ecological device of spacing to ensure access to tury explorers. Indeed, more twentieth-century than Medical Team of the protein. (See now Ferguson’s recent restatements in which nineteenth-century, for as Johannes Fabian has shown in a Federal University of Rio he brings in other factors as well, including, importantly, lovely meditation on exploration fever, early explorations de Janeiro on the accusations contained in social breakdown.) Reading Ferguson together with the depended upon large-scale caravan infrastructures and pre- Patrick Tierney’s Darkness first-person accounts by the fifteen or so ethnographers of existing trade and political networks: they were hardly the in El Dorado. Unpublished the Yanomami, plus accounts by missionaries, visitors and work of individuals. In the twentieth century, when colo- report. others, does begin to build up a mosaic of understanding, nial and national structures were more established and including most importantly the observations by those who travel was easier, it became easier for individuals to move have visited repeatedly over long periods of time and who about and imagine themselves as egoistic discoverers of Malaria parasite life cycle: have a comparative sense of cycles – including cycles of new terrain. The ways in which this has become packaged four stages (liver, blood, gametocyte, sporozoite) are as tourism or standardized as new versions of Wanderjahr the targets of current journeys (the hippie trail from Istanbul to Kathmandu in combination vaccines against the 1960s, for instance, and similar if less frequent self-dis- a 700-gene parasite that covery/self-testing journeys into the Amazon to live with evolves superb evasion strategies. In the 1980s Dr the Indians) has of course been the subject of a number of Manuel Patarroyo of anthropological (and other) accounts. Colombia produced a vaccine Accounts of the archival, infrastructural, and media con- targeted at the blood stage, attempting to block sexual texts have actually been sparse, despite the widespread differentiation of the parasite commentary on the Terence Turner and Leslie Sponsel and disrupt transmission. memo warning American Anthropological Association Today a viral vaccine based officers of the potential scandal that might erupt with the on a protein from the sporozoite's outer layer is publication of the Tierney book (summarizing the allega- being tested in an effort to tions in florid and sure-fire attention-grabbing fashion), boost cell-mediated responses and the astonishing extent to which the news media for in the liver against the parasite proliferation. months contented themselves with reporting hearsay opin- (Source: Wellcome Trust ions based on this email traffic. Newsletter, Issue 21, 1999.) More important are the questions raised by Hannah

10 ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY VOL 17 NO 4, AUGUST 2001 Arendt and others in the post-World War II period, about David Schneider, and the Chicago Islam and Social Change the structure of mediated circuits of communication, the project directed by Leonard Binder and Fazlur Rahman (in power of the mediated ‘lie’ for state and institutional pur- the last two of which I was involved). poses, and especially the power of telling the truth in ways Second, there were the originally primate-based field that ensure the truth will be treated as if it were not the studies of animal behaviour, out of which grew interdisci- case, the truth hidden in the open as in Edgar Allen Poe’s plinary projects on hunting and gathering societies that The Purloined Letter. In the case of the Yanomami, the were thought in evolutionary terms to represent a stage truth hidden in the open is that the Yanomami have been between primate societies and human societies, such as the and continue to be threatened by disease, miners and the Harvard Project on the !Kung or San Bushmen. state’s failure to live up to its promises of land rights. In genetics and human biological research, meanwhile, Providing solutions to these problems is rarely part of the there were efforts to investigate population genetics both media account, and was totally absent in coverage of the in order to trace historical migration patterns (Luca Tierney case. How one breaks through such complacency Cavelli-Sforza first in Italy on genetic drift, and then glob- should be a matter of political debate for the coming ally in his History and geography of human genes) and to Early, John and Peters, John decades. Escalating allegations of scandal are obviously understand demographic, disease, and genetic relatedness 2000. The Xilixama Yanomami of the Amazon. not the way, but neither is business as usual in the media structures (examples include James Neel in the Amazon Gainesville: University of world of failing to track historical legacies, interests, infra- and in Africa; the interesting 1972 volume edited by G. A. Florida Press. structures, and manoeuvres into the present. (It is an inter- Harrison and A.J. Boyce, which includes a contribution by Fabian, Johannes 2000. Out of our minds: Reason and esting side note that, like Salman Rushdie in The Satanic Chagnon and another by Francisco Salzano; and more madness in the exploration Verses describing what would befall him, so too Tierney in generally see Collins and Weiner [1977]). of Central Africa. Berkeley: Darkness in El Dorado describes the media campaigns Some of these projects today have a second life with University of California organized against Napoleon Chagnon’s enemies and some new technologies, and have a palimpsest quality. Among Press. Farmer, Paul 1999. Responding of the tactics of those campaigns. A few journalists like these is the Human Genome Diversity Project (HGDP), to outbreaks of multidrug- Charles Mann in Science, cited below, did track some of which, as the Brazilian anthropologist Ricardo Ventura resistant tuberculosis. In these media campaigns.) Santos points out, has an eerie quality in the Amazon. L.B. Reichman and E.S. Hershfield (eds) These questions – of media, infrastructure, and archives; Brazilians, Venezuelans, and others around the world Tuberculosis: A of who speaks for whom as both corporate activists and watched medical research in the sixties collect blood, comprehensive international NGO activists become sophisticated media players, as mucus, stool samples, etc., and now they see the collection approach, pp 447-469. New governments change policies, patronage networks, and repeated, but with DNA samples. Ironically, he points out, York: Marcel Dekker. Ferguson, Brian. 1995. leading players, as publishing and marketing become just as the US is divesting museums and repatriating for Yanomami warfare. Santa edited and mediated beyond author-message relations, and burial collections of Native American bones, it is at the Fe: School for American as groups of scientists themselves mount lobbying cam- same time building up new biological collections of DNA. Research. — 2001a. Materialist, cultural paigns to shape the public arena; and the questions of the Collections for whom? There is a vigorous organization and biological theories on power differentials between research communities in of Native North Americans, the Indigenous Peoples’ why Yanomami make war. Brazil, Venezuela, and the US – these are also questions Council on Biocolonialism, which is actively resisting the Anthropological Theory, about representation in its dual epistemological and stake- HGDP on the grounds that it may be science, but it is not 1(1): 99-116; — 2001b. 10,000 years of holder/political senses. As the world becomes more inte- science that is likely to have any benefits for them. The tribal warfare: History, grated and interactive, issues of how information is University of California sociologist Troy Duster is fond of science, ideology and ‘the collected, packaged and made available as part of social pointing out that we have medical tests for cystic fibrosis state of nature’. Journal of the International Institute, institutions of reflexive modernization (to use Ulrich among Caucasians, but none to test for it among Zuni 8(3): 1,22-23.] Beck’s terms) become more important and open to insis- populations where its incidence is the same as in other Geertz, Clifford 2001. Life tent questioning. populations. among the anthros. New Collections again move from the Amazon to North York Review of Books, 9 February. The new genetics and human biology America – to the University of Michigan and Penn State in Grandin, Greg 2000. Coming Finally, a third important axis of difference has to do with the 1960s, other repositories today – with the prospect of age in Venezuela. The the difference in our understandings of genetics and today of being used by multinational pharmaceutical firms Nation, 11 December. human biology between the 1960s and the 1990s, with the for profits that again may not bring any short-term benefits ways in which large-scale research projects are mounted, (except in the general terms of ‘benefit to mankind’) to the and the relative power differentials of research communi- populations from whom the DNA is taken. The Yanomani ties in different countries to set agendas. are now contemplating a lawsuit against the US govern- There are at least two or three sets of research projects ment, perhaps for reparations for the use of their blood that intersect here. First there were the multi-disciplinary, without informed consent, but at least to establish a legal multi-person, multi-year, multi-sited projects of social sci- requirement for a signed agreement before their DNA can ence. In anthropology there were quite a number of such be used further (www.proyanomami.org.br/voz.htm). regional research projects, including the Rhodes- Does a local population always have to benefit, or is Livingston Institute studies of the 1940s and 1950s, the there a place for presumed consent to collection of various comparative social anthropology projects of the sorts of data, which only after considerable processing can Malinowski, Radcliffe-Brown, Evans-Pritchard, Daryll be turned into knowledge and products? These questions

Mapping of the genome of the Forde seminars and their successors, and the moderniza- remain unanswered, but they are today central to public domestic cat (Felis catus), as tion studies from the U.S. in the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s. debate and political negotiation – from Iceland’s experi- pursued by the Cat Genome Examples of the latter include the MIT Indonesia project ment to allow deCode Corporation to link data banks of Project, located at the in which Clifford Geertz got his start, the Cornell Peru medical records, genealogies, and DNA samples, to the National Cancer Institute/Frederick Cancer project, the Harvard Chiapas project directed by Evon Vogt, Harvard-Millennium Pharmaceuticals project in China to Research and Development the Ge-Central Brazil Project directed by David Maybury- collect DNA samples from populations in Anhui Province Center, Laboratory of Lewis and Roberto Cardoso de Oliveira, the UNESCO- – and are not easily swept under the carpet as they were in Genomic Diversity, Frederick, MD. Domestic cats are funded project on race relations in Brazil involving the 1960s, and as some of the players of the 1960s insist subject to epidemics of two Brazilian and US sociologists and anthropologists, an inter- should still be the case. (Cavalli-Sforza, for instance, is viruses, FeLV and FIV, that ethnic friction project on relations between Indians and said to have refused suggestions by Robert Cook-Deegan cause immunodeficiencies and local non-Indian populations in Brazil, the Chicago- and others that the HGDP would run into problems if it did neoplasias, providing a powerful animal model for London Family Project in West Africa, the Caribbean and not include public participation avenues among those from leukaemia and AIDS. the US directed by Raymond Firth, Raymond Smith and whom it wished to take collections. The predicted trouble

ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY VOL 17 NO 4, AUGUST 2001 11 Left: Smallpox was the great decimator of indigenous Indians throughout Latin America. This illustration of Aztec smallpox victims in the sixteenth century is from Bernardino de Sahagún’s 16th-century Historia de las cosas de Nueva España, Volume 4, Book 12, Lam. cliii, pl. 114. Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University.

Right: A depiction of Edward Jenner vaccinating James Phipps, a boy of eight, against smallpox on 14 May 1796. has occurred, if not yet quite as serious as what happened to Monsanto Corporation with its Terminator seeds.) Again, these are questions of representation in both its Hardy, George et al. 1970. The senses, with the consent and participation of multiple pop- failure of a school ulations always at issue. immunization campaign to terminate an epidemic of measles. American Journal II. Biology, anthropology & 21st-century sciences of Epidemiology, 91(4): biomedical research which emerged during the 1990s. 286-93. The scientific generation gap Neel in 1968, of course, cannot be held to ethical codes Harrison, G.A. and Boyce, A.J. It strikes me that much of the bombast that erupts in the US that have only been more fully institutionalized in more (eds) 1972. The structure of human populations. every few years over Napoleon Chagnon’s portrayal of the recent years (of informed consent, which in principle goes Oxford: Clarendon Press. Yanomami as ‘fierce’ (not merely like all of us using back to the Nuremberg Code in 1947, or the Helsinki Kevles, Daniel 1985. In the ‘fierceness’ or waitheri to bluff our way along) has to do Declaration in 1964; of return of benefit to research sub- name of eugenics. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. with generational passing ships in the night – the 1960s jects that is part of the later revised Helsinki Declarations). Lindee, Susan 1994. Suffering ‘old timers’ asserting defensively that they did nothing However, a historical knowledge of what he and others did made real: American wrong, and the 1990s practitioners insisting – in order to and failed to do in 1968 remains part of an important science and the survivors at protect the very legitimacy of doing science – that what genealogy that still has legacies in the structure of prac- Hiroshima. University of Chicago Press. was done in the 1960s cannot be done today without con- tices, incentives, abuses, and politics of science today. For — 1999. The repatriation of sequences. As to whether Neel caused a measles epidemic instance, the donation of drugs near expiry by pharmaceu- atomic bomb victim body in 1968, everyone on all sides – including even Tierney tical companies to gain a tax write-off is not necessarily a parts to Japan. Osiris, 2nd series, 13: 376-409. now – seems to agree that this is not really plausible, bad thing, although it can lead to abuses if the drugs do not Mann, Charles C. 2001. although theoretically there is always the slim chance of a find timely and appropriate use. Anthropological warfare. mutation caused by using live viruses (as, under quite dif- In this case, the practice perhaps explains why Neel got Science, 19 January. ferent circumstance and without causing an epidemic, we doses of Edmonston B vaccine, rather than the newer Maybury-Lewis, David 1965. The savage and the recently saw with the polio vaccine in the Caribbean). (more attenuated) Schwartz vaccine that was being intro- innocent. Cleveland: World In other words, it would be more interesting, and more duced in the US and was adopted by the Venezuelan gov- Publishing Company. honest in terms of medical science, if we acknowledged ernment a few months later in 1968. In a letter to the — 1967. Akwe-Shavante society. Oxford: Clarendon the great challenges and uncertainties of vaccine develop- missionary Robert Shaylor dated 22 April 1968, Neel dis- Press. ment, and did so in ways that do not disrupt the use of cusses the use of a vaccine that is ‘a little old’, recom- Moreno, Jonathan 2000. properly conducted public health vaccination campaigns, mending the doubling of the standard dosage and ignoring Undue risk: Secret state but rather increase the robustness of informed consent and the label’s recommendation not to use gamma globulin, experiments on humans. New York: W.H. Freeman. legitimacy. and asking for feedback on how this dosage works (feed- Neel, James 1970. Lessons Tierney’s speculations along the way are perhaps some- back that would be useful for the pharmaceutical company from a ‘primitive people’: times a convolution of the 1960s realities, the1970s socio- and for Neel in obtaining more donations). Do recent data concerning South American Indians biology debates, and the intense popular scrutiny of Similarly, the fact that Neel talked to staff at the have relevance to problems National Communicable Disease Center in Atlanta about of highly civilized using the Edmonston B vaccine among a population that communities? Science, 170: was likely to be vulnerable to severe reactions to the vac- 815-822. —1980. On being headman. cine does not necessarily guarantee appropriate use: Perspectives in Biology and recently both the Center for Disease Control and the World Medicine, 23: 277-293. Health Organization insisted that the standard short-course — 1994. Physician to the gene pool. New York: J. Wiley. direct observation therapy (DOT) drug treatment was still — Papers. Archives of the recommended for multidrug-resistant tuberculosis in American Philosophical Russian prisons and elsewhere, despite the fact that it was Society, Philadelphia. clear that this could only exacerbate the problem (see — et al. 1970. Notes on the effect of measles and Farmer et al. 1994). measles vaccine in a virgin- Again, it would be more interesting and more honest to soil population of South admit and study the challenges and dilemmas, not deny American Indians. American Journal of them as the rush to defend Neel and Chagnon has tried to Epidemiology, 91(4): 418- do. It is worth noting, after all, that the same winter of 429. 1968 saw a measles epidemic in Chicago which the US’s Ramos, Alcida 1995. Sanuma new anti-epidemic procedures failed to stop (Hardy et al. memories. Madison: University of Wisconsin 1970). In other words, this is not a period of science Press. knowing what to do and doing it correctly and efficiently. It was a learning process. Neel and colleagues were quite James Van Gundia Neel aware that the high fevers and reactions that the (1915-2000). Edmonston strain of vaccine was likely to cause were

12 ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY VOL 17 NO 4, AUGUST 2001 ‘even more likely among measles-free peoples’, as a letter anthros’; Marshall Sahlins’ more combative ‘Guilty not as from team member William Centerwall on 9 January 1968 charged’; Greg Grandin’s more geopolitical ‘Coming of ‘To Whom It May Concern’ documents; Centerwall also age in Venezuela’; Charles C. Mann’s comprehensive asks that reports flow back comparing the reactions of vac- ‘Anthropological warfare’, including a full two-page box cines prepared in egg versus in canine kidney cultures, as ‘Preemptive strike sought to discredit book before it was part of the ongoing efforts towards experimental under- published’; and Terence Turner’s letter to the editor of The standing of these vaccines. New York Review of Books after reading James Neel’s fieldnotes. See now also the April 2001 issue of Current Sociobiology and beyond Anthropology, especially Fernando Coronil’s comments On the other hand, as anyone who reads his autobiography, on the protests in Venezuela against the Charles Brewer and relevant published papers, will acknowledge (see Neel Carias, Cecilia Matos, and Chagnon alliance which aimed 1994, 1970, 1980), it cannot be denied that Neel had an to create a privatized mining and biosphere project on interest in sociobiology during the 1970s and was inter- Yanomami land, and the failure of these protests to have ested in finding a ‘gene’ or an ‘index of innate ability’ for much impact on discussions in the US. ‘headmanship’ which had something to do with reproduc- The sense of déjà vu with regard to the sociobiology tive success and strengthened immune systems against dis- debates is however quite a separate issue from the need for eases in small populations. anthropology to engage with contemporary biology. The Some scholars may differ on how central this was to latter is proceeding quite robustly, although not via socio- Neel’s work, and whether it was, as Terence Turner biology which, at least in its imperialistic reductionism to Drawings by Yanomami remembers, already a focus in the 1960s, or only became a what today, in a postgenomics/proteomics age, is after all children: side interest with the rise of sociobiology in the 1970s. The a rather minor and relatively single-strand version of

Top: ‘The stranger general interest was clearly present early on, and the mix biology. Rather, the engagement of anthropology and transmitted measles’. By with violence as a key component may have been sharp- biology is proceeding through both medical anthropology Sebastião. ened under the influence of Napoleon Chagnon’s repre- and the synergy of anthropology and STS (science, tech- sentations. nology and society studies), where people trained in both Centre: ‘The measles epidemic overtook the Chagnon worked with Neel first as a graduate student biology and social science are bringing to the fore not only villager’. By Pedrinho. and then as a postdoctoral researcher; part of his job was to the corridor talk that scientists use to help form their fields prepare the Yanomami to give blood, stool and mucus of action, but also the corporate strategies for biotechnolo- Bottom: ‘Kamakasi, a cannibal spirit, has many samples, and genealogical information. He has been cham- gies that are shaping the directions science takes. dogs. They “eat” our teeth, pioned by such sociobiologists as E.O. Wilson and Irven white men say it is sugar and DeVore for his insistence on the connection between vio- Public participation and informed research salt that destroy them.’ By lence and reproductive success, and even more recently by A third strand, once much stronger, and, as Monsanto’s Joseca. evolutionary psychologists such as Steven Pinker, who Terminator Seed fiasco demonstrates, deserving of seems to know little anthropology and even less about the renewed attention from scientists as well as from corpora- Yanomami but manages to be quoted on these topics by tions, government and academics, is public participation The New York Times (8 October 2000) nonetheless. by an informed citizenry. This is necessary at the very least What seems to infuriate cultural anthropologists about to provide legitimacy and direction in terms of what sociobiologists is their insistence on extrapolating from society will countenance, but ideally to bring to the table quite interesting statistics of animal mating and patterns of not just laboratory sophistication but also ecological and investment in care of offspring, and the various predictive experiential entailments, interactions, and consequences. models that can be made of these patterns, to the Vietnam We need a robust insititutional vision that deals with War or the decisions of the Supreme Court. Many of us power, access, equity, and accountability. This need not remember an astonishing film the sociobiologists helped hamper science, and it is arrogant for some scientists to produce in the 1970s called Doing what comes naturally, think they can rule it out of court merely because it might. a film for high school students that opened with a shot of The investigation of the development of vaccines, of the young women’s rear ends in tight hot pants, primate human genome project, of strategies for both agricultural females presenting, and fighter jets taking off for Vietnam and medical biotechnologies (including the histories of bombing runs. Doing what comes naturally? When the human genetics in the Amazon) – these have an expanding film was shown to the anthropology department at place in American Anthropological Association meetings, Harvard, a few such as Irv DeVore had the grace to be and should form an important component of practical embarrassed, but E.O. Wilson and Robert Trivers were civics more generally. So if there is an exasperated air at unrepentant, the latter asserting that eventually even the having to counter the sociobiologists yet again, there are decisions of the Supreme Court would be reduced to also new dimensions to the discussion. genetic patterns. What is new is the gradual effort to move towards the If this be science, well then of course most scientists are twenty-first-century sciences in the following ways: not scientific. But much of sociobiology has this wild (a) remapping what we know of the Yanomami in com- extrapolating inferential structure, and no amount of asser- prehensive terms – putting the villages on maps along with tion that it is scientific (or accusations that its critics are their neighbours and those they interact with, laying out ‘anti-science’) will make it so. Indeed, given that science the historical horizons; not allowing one village or one changes quite rapidly (see for instance Cavalli Sforza 1994 period of a few months to represent all of Yanomami his- on how DNA collections are likely to revise some of the tory or culture, nor one ethnographer to be the only voice earlier work), the greatest legacies of sociobiology are heard, nor only one research team’s results; likely to be not scientific, but their popular culture adver- (b) acknowledging the relation between the means of tisements, which are in the end a fairly ethnocentric pack- gathering data and the kinds of accounts produced from aging of odds and ends from modern folk psychology such gathering; not allowing the backstage of science to be about men liking to sow their wild oats and women trying unavailable to view or evaluation. This includes the back- to protect family. stage of the remarkable Tim Asch films, which were not For these reasons the best of the first round commen- just Andy Warhol set-up-a-camera-and-let-it-roll cinéma taries on the Tierney affair are those which are couched in vérité affairs (something that was much debated in ethno- somewhat resigned historical terms: we have seen this graphic film circles at the time, even if the sociobiologists before. See particularly Clifford Geertz’s ‘Life among the deny the fact today). Tim Asch himself was explicit about

ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY VOL 17 NO 4, AUGUST 2001 13 Tim Asch (1932-94). this, including when he wanted to remove his films from the classroom at the request of Yanomami who asked that if these films were to be shown to American students, they be shown alongside other films that showed them as they are today and not as they ‘once were’); (c) acknowledging the political context in which we and the Yanomami live; not allowing them to represent the eternal primitive and we the Cartesian point of view; acknowledging the interests of the multinationals, the miners, the military in Brazil and Venezuela, the mission- aries, the local entrepreneurs, the journalists and the egos of individual anthropologists who wish to be seen as the only experts; (d) understanding the power (both cognitive and com- mercial) of contemporary genetics, molecular biology and pharmacogenomics in shaping research agendas; not allowing the categories and data of molecular biology to be confused with the categories and data of social usages (a good example is the somewhat contradictory – or better, — 1998. Indigenism: Ethnic imprecise – assertions that there is no such thing as ‘race’, politics in Brazil. Madison: while at the same time funding research for genes that University of Wisconsin affect particular groups who are defined in proxy terms for Press. Sahlins, Marshall 2000. Guilty socially defined races or ethnic groups); not as charged. Washington (e) and acknowledging the institutional structures eral lines of research on human biology in the Amazon Post, 10 December. through which science operates and which are increasingly since the 1960s, noting particularly the work on population Spielman, Richard et al. 1979. the subject of a struggle, on the one hand to be opened to genetics by Neel and Salzano, and the work on the epi- The evolutionary relationship of two public inspection, and on the other to be closed in the name demiology of infectious and parasitic diseases by Francis populations: A study of the of patent rights and proprietary interests that are said to be L. Black and Roberto G. Baruzzi. They place these tradi- Guyami and the Yanomami. (and in our current world are) the engines of innovation tions of research in the context of 1990s work on the epi- Current Anthropology 20(2): 377-388. and progress. demiological transition profile of the Xavante that makes Tierney, Patrick 2000. None of these acknowledgments lessens the power, them look today more like impoverished and malnour- Darkness in El Dorado. realism or objectivity of science, nor do they make the ished populations elsewhere, with the emergence of obe- New York: W.W. Norton world naively relativistic without standards of evaluation; sity, diabetes and hypertension as serious concerns even as Turner, Terence 2001. Letter to the editor. The New York on the contrary they are the very substance of a precision they are still plagued by infectious and parasitic diseases. Review of Books, 26 April, that allows for evaluation and scientific validity by Etenitepa is the community that social anthropologist p 69. acknowledging partiality, standpoint of knowledge, or rel- David Maybury-Lewis described in an important and rich Ventura Santos, Ricardo 1998. ‘Indigenous peoples, the ative relativism, and the inescapable double meaning of ethnography, Akwe-Shavante society, and in a memoir, atomic bomb and the representation in science as elsewhere. The savage and the innocent, based on fieldwork carried HGDP: Reflections on post- out in 1957-58. Neel and Francisco Salzano collected war human biology in/from Yanomami studies re-evaluated human biological data in 1962 with Maybury-Lewis’ help, Amazonia 1960-2000’. Working Paper, STS In a forthcoming book on the Xavante at Etenitepa, and correlated them with genealogies Maybury-Lewis Program, MIT. (A revised another group among whom James Neel collected infor- elicited. Flowers did more research in 1976-77 on demog- version is to be published in mation, we will be able to see features of a 1990s perspec- raphy and human ecology. In the 1980s a linguist, Laura late 2001 in Critique of Anthropology as tive that integrates and contextualizes the work of the Graham, worked on oratory and leadership, and from 1990 ‘Indigenous peoples, post- 1960s. The Xavante in transition: Health, ecology and to 1995 Coimbra, Santos and Flowers and their students colonial contexts, and bioanthropology in Central Brazil presents a diachronic, collected epidemiological and health data. genetic/genomic research in historical account of the Xavante, one that acknowledges One can thus track the reversal of population decline the late twentieth century: A view from Amazonia). the epidemics and armed conflicts of the eighteenth and and fears that Indians would disappear to recovery and Viveiros de Castro 1996. nineteenth centuries, and the Xavante response through growth of Indian populations in the 1980s, along with Images of nature and increased mobility and migration, and argues that there is changing patterns of health, nutrition, disease, marriage, society in Amazonia. Annual Review of ‘no way to regard the Xavante as a society until recently violence, and politics. In the context of the fierce debates Anthropology 25: 175-200. isolated from the political and economic processes that over Chagnon’s portrait of the Yanomami as somehow pri- Welsome, Eileen 1999. The have been taking place for centuries in Brazil and beyond’ mordially and sociobiologically ‘the fierce people’, the plutonium files: America’s even though the most recent and continuous contact began comments of these authors on the Xavante are interesting, secret medical experiments in the Cold War. New York: only in the 1940s. linking depopulation to both disease and violence associ- Dial Press. In the case of the Xavante, the authors can trace a his- ated with sorcery that targeted weaker factions, and had tory from conflicts with gold miners in Goias in the eigh- effects on marriage patterns. (Many have noted that in the teenth century, Indian raiding of towns, and efforts to settle 1960s the Yanomami did not show the highest levels of them in secular mission villages. In the nineteenth century violence among Amazonian groups.) they migrated westward across the Araguaia river, where In the 1960s, development projects initiated by the mil- they were able to maintain isolation and hostility until the itary government in Brazil – highways, hydroelectric 1940s. Village splits and moves can be traced since then, dams, mining, agricultural settlement – brought migration as well as gradually increasing links with outsiders. These into the Amazon, with severe consequences for many include a failed government project to mechanize rice native groups, including the Yanomami. The point is not growing on their land, and subsequent pursuit of resources that the time of troubles for the Xavante is over, but that beyond hunting, gathering, fishing, and planting in the changing historical contexts matter profoundly. In the forest. Recently they have allied with environmental debates over whether population collapse after epidemics groups to try to block the building of an inland waterway was due to a lack of genetic diversity in small, relatively that would negatively affect their fishing and other wild homogeneous populations, or whether social breakdown resources. was a more important cause, Neel seems to have taken the The authors also provide a historical sketch of the sev- latter side. z

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