First off, power scares and sickens me. I don't associate myself with people who relish and strive for it. Power-trippers make my blood boil and turn me into a confrontational savage.
I was a victim of departmental politics years ago, and it was an experience I would not wish on the worst of my enemies. It was the first time I got disillusioned with anthropology as my chosen career. Anthropology, from studying to publishing, is a matter of numbers like politics, where the powerful majority reigns. If most of the peer-reviewers of a journal don't like what one writes because of his theoretical leaning, ideological tendency, different method that goes against the prevailing grains, and intellectual honesty that critiques the revered and all-mighty.
I first read about Chagnon from a British paper a week ago. It was posted by a friend on Facebook. I wondered why his works were never introduced to us in college. I guess Rosaldo's was enough a material on the culture of warfare, fierceness, and status symbol in our Political Anthropology class. Maybe our ex-nun professor found the anthropology of killing and headhunting too much for our fresh minds and for her Christian belief. For sure, I learned a lot about political advocacy in that class.
I don't question Chagnon's works and those of his critics. I'm neutral. My recent experience in the field has influenced my understanding of the issue involving objectivity and advocacy. I spent six months in Southern Philippines after receiving a grant from a food manufacturing company to study the food culture of the major indigenous group in that region. I thought it was a good opportunity to try out my long-held belief that the best ones to study a culture are those who belong to that culture.
I went to the field with the intent to train and teach some of the locals about anthropology, ethnography, data-gathering, cross-checking, recording, and writing. I liked how it turned out. I was able to make three local "anthropologists" in just a month. If I am intellectually dishonest, I can praise myself or my experiment a success.
What happened really was that I only extended the friction prevalent among professional anthropologists to the locals I thought would produce a different result because of the different method used.
One of my trainees did not want to write about the dirty foods they eat such as papaitan, a goat stew with goat shit. Well, it was not really a shit yet because they used the digested food still inside the goat's intestine. It smelled like shit though. It was obvious to me that he did not want his people to be called shit-eaters.
Another trainee did not want to write about their local sources of protein: snakes, monkeys, and rice field rats. He was too proud of his "culture," where spaghetti, chicken macaroni salad, and leche flan were also served during special occasions. He did not want outsiders to think they were still savages.
The last one thought and processed things freely and without pride-induced paranoia. He linked honesty to objectivity. Science to him was what he saw again and again. He wrote everything he knew and saw. I found out from him that different kinds of worms were local delicacies his group still craved. I did not expect him to be silenced and ostracized.
The first two trainees reported the intellectually honest one to their chieftain. They reasoned that people like him proved what the Christians, the Mining company operating in the area, the outsiders had been saying that they needed to be educated and their culture changed.
Before the guy quit, he told his community that to record their vanishing culture for the sake of posterity, they had to write everything good or bad about their ways. The most profound was when he asked, "How will our people in the future know who and what we really are?" I think he made sense.
What I experienced in that field was just a microcosm of what is happening in the field of anthropology-- objectivity is selective and honesty is relative. Because the South American governments use Chagnon's works to support their exploitative development projects and policies, does it mean he is a bad anthropologist? Should anthropologists become advocates of the people they study?
The advocacy of his critics is commendable, but I don't agree with the idea that advocating includes denying the truth and questioning scientific methods. I still think objectivity is possible in advocacy. For that reason alone, I cannot consider the criticism on Chagnon a total nuisance.
If you go to the village of Illongots, you will find many who will question the veracity of Rosaldo's works. They are those who don't romanticize headhunting and the savagery of their culture. They are those who are paranoid of what outsiders will say about them. Some will find the idea of "noble savages" an intellectual tokenism. Others will express in a crisp English their Anglican belief in the Commandments.
I think intellectual honesty that has no tinge of paranoia and self-interest plus objective advocacy that does not take sides but offers an avenue for a compromise, if linked together, will produce a sound, relevant anthropology.
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