Anthropology-as-Translation- Adina Nistor

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Uniwersytet Warszawski
Ośrodek Studiów Amerykańskich
Adina-Loredana Nistor
Nr. albumu: 309788
ANTHROPOLOGY AS TRANSLATION.
THE WRITTEN AND VISUAL ETHNOGRAPHY OF NAPOLEON CHAGNON
AND TIMOTHY ASCH
Praca magisterska
na kierunku kulturoznawstwo
w zakresie studia amerykanistycznyczne – kulturoznawstwo USA
Praca wykonana pod kierunkiem
Dr. Tomasza Basiuka
Ośrodek Studiów Amerykańskich
Warszawa, Grudzień 2013

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Oświadczenie kierującego pracą
Oświadczam, że niniejsza praca została przygotowana pod moim kierunkiem i stwierdzam,
że spełnia ona warunki do przedstawienia jej w postępowaniu o nadanie tytułu zawodowego.
Data Podpis kierującego pracą
Oświadczenie autora (autorów) pracy
Świadom odpowiedzialności prawnej oświadczam, że niniejsza praca dyplomowa została napisana
przeze mnie samodzielnie i nie zawiera treści uzyskanych w sposób niezgodny
z obowiązującymi przepisami.
Oświadczam również, że przedstawiona praca nie była wcześniej przedmiotem procedur związanych
z uzyskaniem tytułu zawodowego w wyższej uczelni.
Oświadczam ponadto, że niniejsza wersja pracy jest identyczna z załączoną wersją
elektroniczną.
Data Podpis autora (autorów) pracy

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Streszczenie
„Antropologia jako przekład. Zapisana i wizualna etnografia Napoleona Chagnona i
Timothy’ego Ascha.”
Niniejsza praca magisterska opiera się na założeniu, że w antropologii stosuje się podobne
sposoby interpretowania informacji do tych używanych przy tłumaczeniu tekstu. Etnograf nie
jest jedynie obserwatorem różnych aspektów danej kultury, opisującym je takimi, jakie są, ale
jest również osobą, która interpretuje te aspekty czytelnikowi. Antropologia oferuje spojrzenie
na rzeczywistość przepuszczoną przez żywy filtr. Rezultatem jest suma różnych znaczeń, z
których niektóre zostają utracone, a inne zachowane lub też dodane. Aby to udowodnić, poddaję
analizie najbardziej znaną pracę Napoleona Chagnona, Yąnomamö: The Fierce People, oraz
niektóre z wielu filmów, jakie nakręcił we współpracy z Timothy’m Aschem. Zdecydowałam się
skupić na ich pracach, ponieważ są oni jednym z niewielu zespołów, których współpraca była
tak owocna. Chciałam również przyjrzeć się temu, w jaki sposób środek zastosowany do
opisania danej kultury wpływa na sposób, w jaki ta kultura jest przedstawiana. Zarówno
Chagnon, jak i Asch opisywali tę samą społeczność, Yanomamö. Jednakże rezultaty ich badań są
czasem zupełnie różne. W niniejszej pracy przedstawiam te podobieństwa i różnice oraz
wykazuję, że kiedy przedmiotem badań jest kultura danego społeczeństwa, obiektywizm jest
właściwie nieosiągalny.
Słowa kluczowe
Antropologia, Ash, badanie, Chagnon, etnografia, kultura, przekład, Napoleon, Tomothy,
Yąnomamö.
Dziedzina pracy (kody wg programu Sokrates-Erasmus)
08900, inne humanistyczne

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Table of Contents
Introduction ……………………………………………………………………………….….. 5
Chapter One. Researcher and subject: a co-dependent relationship……………………...…... 9
Intermediating meaning …………………………………..……………..…….. 9
Writing and translating in ethnography. Napoleon Chagnon ………...….….…16
Chapter Two. Visual representations ……………………….…………….………….…..……36
The role of ethnographic film in anthropology …………...…………….….……36
Timothy Asch and Napoleon Chagnon’s collaboration ………………………... 42
a) The Ax Fight ………………………………………………….…..… 44
b) The Feast ……………………………………………………..……. 51
c) The Magical Death and Children’s magical Death……………..….. 57
Chapter Three. Darkness in anthropology ……………………………………………………. 62
Conclusions …………………………………………….………………………...................... 67
Bibliography …………………………………………………………………..…………….... 69

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Introduction
When one thinks of anthropology, certain things come to mind: exotic peoples, different
cultures, religions and ways of living, but also or mostly a reflection of us, of our interactions
with all these concepts. Anthropology has always functioned as a mirror that helped people to
take a closer look at who and how they are, even when, or precisely when they were looking at
“the others”. Many studies were carried with the purpose of determining human traits that are
specific to all people, regardless of the society they live in, or to find models of functioning in
societies that could be applied at a universal level. Margaret Mead for example did not only
study the Samoans, but her works aimed at producing a change in her country of origin - the
United States. Through her research, she found not only a way to make one culture influence
another, but also to revolutionize aspects such as children’s education or challenge taboos about
sexuality. Thus anthropology has played an important role in shaping the American way of
thinking about different aspects of culture and life in general.
The beginnings of anthropology can be traced back to ancient Greece, as the birth of
civilization meant an increased curiosity towards human nature. At the time, historians were
analyzing not only their own culture, but that of others as well, relying mostly on comparative
work, and this practice continued for decades. At the end of the 19th
century, with the works of
Johann Gottfried Herder and Wilhelm Dilthey, the concept of “culture” emerged – a notion
which is at the core of the field of anthropology. What also happened was that during
colonization, the conquering nations discovered not only new soil, but also new peoples to
dominate and to study. Defining a culture had much to do with the historical context and as we
will see in this paper, anthropology changed and continues to be transformed in accordance with
everything else around it. This particular field is created by history, biology, archeology,
medicine, but also the mentality and the ethical codes of the time, and even though is divided
accordingly into many subfields, they are all very much interrelated.
In the early 20th
century, it was a common practice that the anthropologists would display in
“human zoos” certain people brought from different corners of the world. Labeled as “savages”,
the people exhibited would be shown as a concrete confirmation of the already existing theories
of scientific racism. Although since then there have been major changes not only in the field, but

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also in what is considered acceptable or politically correct and people are more reluctant in using
words like “primitive” when talking about different peoples, the “savage in the cage” still makes
an entrance sometimes, although this display takes a different form, like in books such as those
written by anthropologists Napoleon Chagnon or Jared Diamond. Admired and approved by
some, blamed by many others, these authors are heroes and villains at the same time. And they
are in a way representative for the turmoil that anthropology is in at present days, when it’s
redefining itself faster than ever.
In November 2010, the American Anthropological Association made a seemingly minor
change in its Long Range Plan description. One of its paragraphs no longer reads “the purposes
of the Association shall be to advance anthropology as the science that studies humankind in all
its aspects” but “the purposes of the Association shall be to advance scholarly understanding of
humankind in all its aspects.”1
The word “science” has been replaced by “scholarly” and this
move has been regarded by many as a mistake. This is seen by many scientific anthropologists as
an offense and a proof of the fact that cultural anthropologists and activists are taking over the
field and pushing the scientists and sociologists to the side.2
Serious clashes can take place simply because one word was used instead of another and in
this paper I will show that the anthropologists’ speech, the translation of a “primitive” language
and the interpretation of data are very delicate tasks that involve a high degree of subjectivity, in
spite of the fact that they aim for objectivity. I will focus on Napoleon Chagnon, whose choice
to title his book Yąnomamö: the fierce people (my underline) gave rise to a series of accusations
that were published in Patrick Tierney’s book Darkness in El Dorado: How scientists and
Journalists Devastated the Amazon published in 2010. Chagnon’s response to it was another
lengthy book published in February 2013, called Noble Savages: My life among two dangerous
tribes – the Yąnomamö and the Anthropologists.
When I started working on this thesis, which concerns the work of anthropologist Napoleon
Chagnon and film-maker Timothy Asch, things were different, especially regarding Chagnon. As
my analysis progressed, so did the controversy surrounding the researcher whose ethnographic
text I was analyzing. Therefore, although my initial intention was not to make too much
1
Nicholas Wade, “Anthropology a Science? Statement Deepens a Rift”, New York Times, 12 November 2010,
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/10/science/10anthropology.html (accessed October 2013).
2
Ibid.

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reference to the accusations brought to him, I cannot ignore them, nor his most recent book
published a few months ago, and I will, however briefly, bring these aspects into discussion.
My paper focuses mainly on the co-dependence that is created between the researcher and
his/her subjects, in this case between anthropologist and film-worker on the one hand and the
Yąnomamö people on the other. The thesis also looks at the marks of subjectivity that creep into
the scientific work of Chagnon and Asch. I do not try to prove that objectivity does not exist, but
that it is an ideal that can be reached only to a limited extent.
I also focus on the fact that when doing research in a non-empirical way about a different
culture, but by reading the observations of the researchers who were on the field, the relationship
created is between reader and writer, or an ethnographic film watcher and its creators, rather than
between reader/viewer and a different culture. To prove this point, I take a close look at the
written text of Chagnon’s book Yąnomamö: The fierce people and look at the words or phrases
that reveal the anthropologist’s personal opinions, provide information about his background,
and depict the effect produced by the contact of two different cultures. I also analyze a few of the
most prominent ethnographic films that he made in collaboration with Timothy Asch.
Anthropological work is not about studying another culture, but about the contact between
two or more cultures and how this “meeting” alters irremediably both researcher and his or her
subjects. I will not go too much into the moral or ethical aspects of this interaction as this is
another large and debatable subject in itself. I will focus mainly on language and the way in
which words are charged with cultural, complex meaning. The first part of Chapter One aims at
determining what type of relation is formed between the researcher and his subjects, the reader
and the researcher, the reader and the text. My intention is to prove that meaning is created in a
system that relies on mutuality and co-dependence and the way in which many factors shape the
final result. Language is what separates culture from the wilderness, but when two languages
meet, the translation of one into the other is rather a representation of their contact than a simple
conversion. I contend that this chapter is necessary in analyzing Napoleon Chagnon’s
ethnographic books and the way in which anthropological work can be compared to translating.
In the second part of Chapter One, I analyze Napoleon Chagnon’s most famous book
Yąnomamö: the fierce people and draw conclusions about the implications of some of the
statements made by the researcher in regard to the people he studies and interacts with.

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Chapter Two presents the role of ethnographic film in anthropology. This part offers a
general view of the history of the two fields: anthropology and cinematography, the way they are
connected, but also what are the problems in bringing them together and creating a hybrid: the
ethnographic film. I will analyze three most prominent films of Napoleon Chagnon and Timothy
Asch and will include excerpts from the transcripts of the films, but I will also make reference to
how each of them viewed this collaboration.
Chapter Three deals with the controversies that surround the work of the two ethnographers,
especially Napoleon Chagnon. Some of the accusations brought to the anthropologist have to do
with the subjectivity or the biased approach of the researcher and it is important to take a look at
them in order to find possible remedies to problems that keep emerging in the field of
anthropology.
In my conclusions, I show how American Cultural Studies are, especially for the non-
American student, similar to the field of anthropology and how they mediate our understanding
of the United States.
Notes:
*Subchapter “The role of ethnographic film in anthropology” of the second chapter of this paper
is partially reproduced in my paper “Representing Reality in Ethnographic Film. Before and in
the 60s. Nanook of the North and Dead Birds” which has been presented at the Intensive
Program (summer school) on the Transatlantic 1960s in Berlin in September 2011 and published
online at www.amerikanistik.uni-muenchen.de/forschung/.../hoenisch-nistor.pdf
*In this paper I use terms like “primitive men”, “primitive societies” or “savages”, but also
“civilized”, “modern men” or “modern societies”. These particular notions are depicted from
Napoleon Chagnon’s books and movies or from the works of other authors, but they do not
reflect my views on the people they refer to. Therefore in my paper they always appear with
quotation marks.

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Chapter One
Researcher and subject: a co-dependent relationship
1. Intermediating meaning
Meaning derives from a social system, not lexica; and reading, to
be accurate, must employ culturally appropriate scenarios from
that system.3
Language is such an important aspect of our lives that philosophers like Hans-Georg
Gadamer describe human beings as beings in language: “it is through language that the world is
opened up for us. We learn how to know the world by learning to master the language. Hence,
we cannot really understand ourselves unless we understand ourselves as situated in a
linguistically mediated, historical culture. Language is our second nature.”4
One of the marvels
of language is that through it, we can transmit information from one generation to another, create
history and leave behind ideas in a concrete, written form.
The history of language and of writing doesn’t represent a progress from the spoken word
to the creation of an alphabet, but a series of adaptations. Language transforms according to new
structures created to fit the society’s needs. At the same time, the fact that written words stand
not only for specific objects, but are also used for abstract representations, has been considered
an “unanticipated outcome” of language.5
In this paper, I will look at the way in which the
language of the Yąnomamö is transformed through contact with missionaries, anthropologists
and other outsiders. I will also point to how they adopt foreign words and how their language
changes from an oral to a written one. One of the clearest examples of how the presence of the
anthropologist modified their society is that after his departure, a Yąnomamö village was formed
and took on the name Shąki (the Yąnomamö name for Chagnon).
Language evolution does not mean a transformation from simple to complex, either,
because the modes of representations were from the beginning complicated and imbued with
3
Jerome H. Neyrey, Lost in Translation: Did It Matter if Christians ‘Thanked’ God or
‘Gave God Glory’?, 5, http://www3.nd.edu/~jneyrey1/lost-translation.pdf (access October 2013).
4
Edward N. Zalta, “Hermeneutics”, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy,
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hermeneutics/ (accessed October 2013).
5
David R. Olson, The History of Writing, 7, http://www.sagepub.com/upm-data/27267_5276_Beard_Ch01.pdf
(accessed October 2013).

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social meaning and over time. This aspect has not changed, on the contrary. Some were tempted
to believe, like the first evolutionary anthropologists did, that la pensee savage, a term coined by
Levi-Strauss, in its creative, unaltered (by civilization, according to Rousseau) state produced a
not too complicated language which reflected “primitive” reality. It was also believed that in
time, through advancements that took place in all fields of life, the language systems advanced,
too. But this theory doesn’t stand and two well-known examples have shown us why: the Mayan
writing system, or the Egyptian hieroglyphs were not correctly read until the middle of the 19th
century and on a closer inspection proved to be more complex than was initially thought of
them.6
A better approach would imply understanding that:
The bridge between our world and that of our subjects (extinct, opaque, or merely
tattered) lies not in personal confrontation – which, so far as it occurs, corrupts both them
and us. It lies in a kind of experimental mind reading. (…) One understands the thought
of savages neither by mere introspection nor by mere observation, but by attempting to
think as they think and with their materials. What one needs, aside from obsessively
detailed ethnography, is a neolithic intelligence.7
To “think as they think and with their materials” might have been exactly what Chagnon
succeeded by the end of his stay among the Yąnomamö, but nowadays there are many voices
that object to this approach. In understanding any language, the meanings it transmits and the
way in which it shapes reality, an important role is played by the form in which words or
meanings present themselves: oral or written. The oral stories that are kept in the present through
repetition not only transmit information, but also rely on the transmitter, whose memories can
produce an entirely new content. This is obvious when we analyze the stories told by the
Yąnomamö people to Napoleon Chagnon and Timothy Asch, especially the ones that are
recorded on tape, where one can see clearly how the same tale becomes different with each
member that tells it. A lot of what is said is recreated by body-language, sounds, facial
expressions and also through the humor, passion and the talent of the story-teller. At the same
time, storytelling makes use of mimesis, which in turn transforms into eternity:
the story-teller embodied that situation of statis and movement in which the far-away was
brought to here-and-now, archetypically that place where the returned traveler finally
rejoined those who had stayed at home. It was from this encounter that the story gathered
its existence and power, just as it is in this encounter that we discern the splitting of the
6
David R. Olson, The History of Writing, 10
7
Jean-Jaque Rousseau quoted in Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, Inc.,
Publishers, 1973), 357.

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self, of being self and Other, as achieved by sentience, taking one out of oneself-to
become something else as well.8
We will see that as Chagnon becomes a storyteller himself, he enters a process of
mimesis and alterity; he learns how to become “the Other” by copying behavior, at first through
a process of mirroring, but later by going through a fundamental change of the self. After
spending some time among the Yąnomamö, he will admit that “the Yąnomamö appreciate my
interest in their hekura spirits, and want to help me to learn the truth, to understand the secrets of
the spirits, and to become a Yąnomamö. Participant observation leads to an intimate
understanding of another culture.”9
Napoleon Chagnon not only understood this different culture, but he also altered it. The
researcher enriched the Yąnomamö vocabulary with English words and expressions and may
have provoked warfare through his involvement in their political life (as a white male, an
outsider who carried weapons, but dressed himself in Yąnomamö “clothes” and had his body
painted like them - in this way being both an insider and an outsider). Understanding “primitive
stories” and their cultural references is a challenging task not only because, as we mentioned,
they tend to change in the oral tradition with each transmitter, but because these tales are imbued
with metaphors. Some researchers, finding it difficult to grasp the meaning of these metaphors
concluded that the “savage man’s” way of thinking does not follow the same logic as the one of
the westerner. But like Levi-Bruhl said, this mode of thinking is not illogical, or irrational, but
follows a different pattern and understanding of things. Levi-Strauss took matters further
affirming that in order to get to the real understanding of a certain reality, one needs to see the
bigger picture, the complex system of language as culture, and all the connections that need to be
made between various elements that define it.10
This process is one that requires a lot of
commitment and as we will see from the writings of Chagnon, it takes a lot of time, energy and
certain openness to new things.
Much of the ethnographic work means that the researcher has to take notes about what he
or she observed during field-work. It is extremely necessary to keep track of events, make the
8
Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity. A Particular History of the Senses (New York: Routledge, Chapman and
Hall, Inc., 1993), 40-41.
9
A man called Bee: Studying the Yanomamö, dir. by Timothy Asch and Napoleon Chagnon (1974; DER
Documentary).
10
Robert Deliege, Introducere în Antropologia Structurală. Levi-Strauss astăzi (Chișinău: Cartier, 2008), 110-111.

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right connections and as I mentioned before, to be able to see the bigger picture. Many times, the
ethnographer goes back to his or her notes and revises them, especially when realizing that there
have been some misunderstandings or that an earlier witnessed event became clear only later.
According to Geertz “the ethnographer “inscribes” social discourse; he writes it down. In so
doing, the researcher turns it from a passing event, which exists only in its own moment of
occurrence, into an account, which exists in its inscriptions and can be reconsulted.”11
Even when the anthropologist tries to recall the events as objectively as possible, it’s
almost impossible to escape the fact that what will be described to the reader will take the form
of a certain code that mediates meaning. As the language scholar David R. Olson puts it, “words,
theories, models, and equations represent metaphorically; they are conveniences for thinking
about the things they represent, little more than conventions”12
The author further gives the
example of the French artist Magritte who “drew a picture of a pipe, smoke drifting from the
barrel, which then he mischievously labeled “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” – “This is not a pipe.”
Even though it is playful, one can see the “troubled relation between the thing and the
representation of a thing. This is not a pipe but rather a picture of a pipe.”13
What anthropologists
show us does not represent reality, nor the tribes, their customs and life-style, but rather
representations of them. These projections, no matter how objective they are meant to be, always
have a touch of their artist in them. In other words, the reader gets “the meaning of the speech
event, not the event as event.”14
In the following chapter we will see that the codes used by
Chagnon in order to create these representations of the Yąnomamö have the role of establishing a
relationship with the reader, with whom she shares a cultural complicity. They speak the same
language, not only in a literal way, but also in the sense that they have a similar back-ground and
this aspect makes certain references more understandable. It is also obvious that the written text
is not intended to be read by the people he describes, although, in the last few years, this
assumption has been changing and Chagnon started to be confronted about it.
To a large extent, the researcher’s writing is not about other people, but about his contact
with them. We can see the same relation here as the one described by social anthropologist Sir
James George Frazer who wrote about magic that “things which have once been in contact with
11
Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, Inc., Publishers, 1973), 16.
12
David R. Olson, The History of Writing, 7.
13
Ibid., 8.
14
Paul Ricoeur quoted in Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, Inc., Publishers,
1973), 19.

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each other continue to act on each other at a distance after the physical contact has been severed.
The former principle may be called the Law of Similarity, the latter the Law of contact or
Contagion”.15
This statement is also true about any other significant contact between human beings.
From the moment the researcher appears among the subjects he or she wants to study, reality is
altered as it molds around the presence of the “intruder”, the foreigner. The “savage mind” is
more complicated than some were quick to assume and it is interesting that with the written word
the concept of a history also appeared. What belongs to the unwritten is considered to be
prehistory.
But what fascinated Napoleon Chagnon about the Yąnomamö language was that it
contains, or used to contain, more daily used words than the language of the language of
“civilized” people. The written baggage of information of a “civilized” man is vast and some
languages have dictionaries which are amazing pieces of work continuously developing.
Nevertheless, out of the enormous quantity of existing words in a language, how much does the
average person use? Not all of them for sure, but a mere fragment. This fragment is surprisingly
smaller than the one used by a “primitive society” that doesn’t have written texts, but relies on
memory.16
This richness in regard to the vocabulary proved to be a challenge for the
ethnographer who created a dictionary for his personal use among the Yąnomamö. Translating
into English or Spanish was a delicate task because some words or expressions carried several
meanings and only the experienced social actor knew how to differentiate between them
according to context. We will see more about the type of misunderstandings that can arise in
such circumstances especially when analyzing the film The Ax Fight. In this thirty minutes
movie, we are told that Chagnon initially believed that the conflict caught on camera was started
by an offence brought by incest. Only later, after he had several interviews with the locals, the
anthropologist discovered that the fight actually started from a quarrel between a visitor and a
local woman towards whom the guest was disrespectful. One may wonder how this happened
and the answer is simple: the term that defines an inappropriate relation with a female next of kin
can mean disrespect but also incest, but unless one knows the relations between people and the
context, the outsider won’t be able to assess the meaning correctly.
15
Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity. A Particular History of the Senses, 47.
16
Napoleon A. Chagnon, Yąnomamö. The Fierce People, 3rd edition (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston,
1983), 35.

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There are actually plenty of examples to prove the complications that are created in
works of translation. In Bible Translation and Anthropology: the Superiority of a Dynamic
Equivalence Method of Translation, author Kathryn Hedrick draws attention to an important
aspect of translations of any kind, by referring to one of the most interpreted and debated texts in
human history: the bible. She compares the work of ethnographers to that of missionaries and
points to the fact that the same fieldwork that is necessary in the first case should be mandatory
in the second as well, because both types of work address aspects of culture and their role in
translation.
In order to transmit certain cultural meanings and to properly convey the message of the
biblical text, a certain degree of interpretation is vital. The currently used methods range from
very literal to improperly free translations, with many variations between the two extremes.
Literal translations, like the King James Version or the Reina Valera in Spanish, use the
grammatical structure of the original language, which reads awkwardly in the contemporary
context. The literal translation of the King James Version, for example, is as grammatically
correct as odd sounding for the “modern people”. On the other hand, free translations take too
many liberties in interpretation and fail to communicate the original message. Kathryn Hedrick
considers that cultural meaning can be transmitted by means of interpretation. This process
implies a degree of involvement into the culture one addresses, but also a dose of subjectivity.17
I use this example as a way of explaining the challenges encountered in translation, as I
have also encountered similar problems when reading Napoleon Chagnon’s translations of
certain Yąnomamö dialogues. Although in some cases one can sense the effort put into making
the speech flow in a natural way, many passages sound highly unnatural. This made me aware
that I am mainly assisting at a conversation as a foreigner, who does not understand the language
itself, but who is also unsure of the accuracy of the words being translated. As I will later
explain, there were passages where I found myself wondering if the order of the words used in a
sentence is the one that naturally occurs in the Yąnomamö language and it just sounds unusual
for an outsider, if this order is used as a means of emphasis by the natives, or only by Chagnon.
Many aspects come into play when one interprets another language and chooses one
meaning or definition over another. At the same time, reading a text is not entirely an individual
17
Kathryn Hedrick, Bible Translation and Anthropology: The Superiority of a Dynamic Equivalence Method of
Translation, 9, http://digitalcommons.liberty.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1249&context=honors (accessed
December 2013).

15
process, as the person interprets words according to some pre-established norms that exist in a
certain society.18
To be literate means to belong to a certain system, to behave according to
certain conventions and “the spread of writing and literacy, the so-called ’democratization’ of
writing plays an important part in the general social change. Going back to antiquity, one such
change was the association between writing and power. It is written had a finality that many
found irresistible.”19
Nowadays, when ethnographers still write sometimes on behalf of the people they are
studying, we see that this relation persists. Therefore, we cannot talk of a universal abolition of
the power implications that stem from writing and ascribing meaning to something or even
someone. Also, “with the growth of literacy, there is an increasing acknowledgement that the
written is always simply the expression of some writer who is more or less like the reader.”20
This is why ethnographic texts, even though they tell us stories about other people, do not put us
in connection with them. We are to a certain degree witnesses to their life, but the process is
mediated and the relationship which is created is the one between ourselves and the writer, no
matter how much he or she tries not to leave a very personal imprint on the research. When as
readers, we get involved in a text about different people, we may feel empathic towards them.
Even though we might think that we identify with these characters, it is actually the writer’s view
on them that we identify with. According to philosopher Walter Benjamin, “the gift of seeing
resemblance is nothing other than a rudiment of the powerful compulsion in former times to
become and behave like something else.”21
And it is precisely this compulsion that many times
sends ethnographers on the field to study different cultures, when in fact they search for traces of
what might have represented their own culture in a different time and/or context.
18
David Olson, History of Writing, 14.
19
Ibid.
20
Ibid.
21
Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity, 33.

16
2. Writing and translating in ethnography. Napoleon Chagnon
We pranced together and communed with the spirits and shared something
between us that was as undefinable as it was fundamentally human, a
freedom to create with our own minds the mystical universe that began
with the beginning of time, something that seemed to be lodged in the back
of imagination, something hidden and remote from consciousness.
(Napoleon Chagnon)22
In this part of the paper I will try to analyze the book that brought both recognition and a
lot of negative criticism to the anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon: Yąnomamö. The Fierce
people.
First of all, we have to define what is ethnographic writing and its goal. According to
Clifford Geertz, there are three main characteristics that define the ethnographic text: “it is
interpretative; what it is interpretive of is the flow of social discourse; and the interpreting
involved consists in trying to rescue the “said” of such discourse from its perishing occasions
and fix it in perusable terms.” The author also states that “there is in addition, a fourth
characteristic of such description (…) it is microscopic.23
The subjects are therefore put under a
loupe and analyzed from the outside and from the inside, because the ethnographic work is not
only a research on human facts and behavior, but is also a journey into people’s souls. As Levi-
Strauss puts it, although the researcher approaches a new culture with the intention of learning
more about customs, genealogy, beliefs and institutions, the history of anthropology is as “only
apparently” about these aspects, as “fundamentally it is the study of thought.”24
And precisely
this is why one has to rely on intuition and empathy, and the work is quite delicate.
The author’s manner of writing and of getting across ideas about “primitive societies”
and understanding how they function represents a mixture of personal journal and scientific
analysis. The author is not hidden in the text; on the contrary, the reader gets to know a lot about
the ethnographer’s personal impressions and fears. Chagnon’s writing is appealing perhaps due
to the sincere way in which he seems to put his observations and emotions on paper:
Chagnon's writing is engaging, easy to understand, and conveys clearly the
anthropologist's culture shock at living with the true Other, untempered by discussions of
theory, philosophy, or other graduate-level concerns. The Fierce People is, as many have
22
Napoleon A. Chagnon, Yąnomamö. The Fierce People, 209.
23
Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures, 20.
24
Ibid., 352.

17
remarked, Indiana Jones-style anthropology--exciting and not altogether unscholarly.
Hence its popularity as an introductory text.25
The third edition of Yąnomamö. The Fierce people is different from the first two because
as it is written in the introduction, it incorporates extra data that was collected after several more
trips to the Yąnomamö villages.26
This actually points to the fact that anthropological research on
a specific topic develops and changes over time and that it can be considered a never ending
work. Many, if not all anthropologists had to face the fact that after a certain period of time their
work and conclusions were profoundly challenged by the following generations of
anthropologists and even their contemporaries. Also, after the fourth edition, the title of the book
dropped the subtitle The Fierce people and we will discuss the reason why in the next chapters.
Napoleon Chagnon underlines in his book that one can never reach exhaustive knowledge
of the people and phenomena he is studying. As time passes and things progress or are
transformed, some other aspects are discovered or old data becomes obsolete. This is also due to
the fact that the more one gets to know about what he or she studies, the more things are brought
to the surface or clarified, and in some cases the anthropologist is forced to rethink some of the
statements that were made in the past because he or she does not deal with separated facts, but
with a history which:
cannot, as the Hegelians had been arguing, be conceptualized, once and for all, by
speculative philosophy. Understanding history is an ongoing activity. This, however,
does not make it superfluous as a science. In our effort to understand history, historical
life is brought to consciousness about itself. Doing historical work means actively
participating in the cultural tradition that is being investigated; it means being historical
in the most emphatic way.27
This does not mean that previous statements were false, but that these conclusions were
conditioned by the circumstances of that specific period of time and the amount of knowledge
and experience the ethnographer had gathered at that point. As Chagnon states, when he started
learning the language of the tribe he was studying, he was told about an event that took place
fifteen years prior to his arrival among them. He later understood its significance, as it shed some
light on the patterns that the Yąnomamö followed in developing political relations between their
25
Andrew Grossman, Napoleon Chagnon's Waterloo: Anthropology on Trial,
http://anthroniche.com/darkness_documents/0371.htm (accessed October 2013).
26
Napoleon A. Chagnon, Yąnomamö. The Fierce People, ix
27
Edward N. Zalta, “Hermeneutics”.

18
villages and the way in which alliances or wars were being conducted. Chagnon also admits that
for a long time, not being aware of these past events, he had to begin his research “in
ignorance.”28
For the researcher and for the field of anthropology as well, this served as a lesson
because it proved that in some cases it is extremely difficult, if not impossible “to understand a
society’s “social organization” by studying only one or a few villages, for each community
responds to the political ties that connects it to neighboring groups and to the obligations and
pressures these ties impose on them.”29
Therefore it becomes obvious that in order to understand
the present, one needs to know the past, a fundamental aspect in understanding human relations.
As these human relations develop, in many cases the researcher and his or her subjects grow
fond of each other. Edward Zalta describes philosopher Giambattista Vico’s view on this type of
relationship:
The historian does not encounter a field of idealized and putatively subject-independent
objects, but investigates a world that is, fundamentally, her own. There is no clear
distinction between the scientist and the object of her studies. Understanding and self-
understanding cannot be kept apart. Self-understanding does not culminate in law-like
propositions. Appealing to tact and common sense, it is oriented towards who we are,
living, as we do, within a given historical context of practice and understanding. 30
As I previously stated, anthropological research says not so much about the people that are
being researched, but about the contact with them. This implies an exchange of information and
a transformation of all the parties involved in the process. Chagnon admits “I spent 41 months
with the Yąnomamö, during which time I acquired some proficiency in their language and, up to
a point, submerged myself in their culture and way of life.”31
But submerging in this new reality and way of life requires time and effort. And we are
invited to discover what it must have felt like to go through this process. First of all, we find out
that on the first day on the field, Chagnon experienced what is known as the “cultural shock.” He
was tired and his clothes were dirty from the long trip to get to the Bisaasi-teri village. We read
about what thoughts were rushing through his head and get the feeling that we are about to have
this first encounter ourselves. A few pages before we were presented with a few generalities
about these “foot people”, about their villages scattered over the Tropical Forest, at the border
28
29
Ibid.
30
31

19
between Venezuela and Brazil, about the fact that they do not write, but that their language is
quite complex, about how they dress, hunt, cook, about their customs of trading, marrying and
having alliances and about the fact that they are waiteri (fierce). Before we get into the process
of collecting data and the first meeting with the Yąnomamö, we are presented with the general
facts that have been in fact obtained after years of living among them, of taking notes and
assembling them in a comprehensible form. Therefore, as it has been already stated before, the
ethnographic work is one of recollections that produce a better understanding of a foreign culture
by an outsider. It is not a spontaneous work. As Clifford Geertz points out:
Although culture exists in the trading post, the hill forth, or the sheep run, anthropology
exists in the book, the article, the lecture, the museum display, or, sometimes nowadays,
the film. To become aware of it is to realize that the line between the mode of
representation and substantive content is as undrawable in cultural analysis as it is in
painting; and that fact in turn seems to threaten the objective status of anthropological
knowledge by suggesting that its source is not social reality but scholarly artifice.32
Therefore, understanding a culture is a never-ending process, so available because it
exists in many different forms and at the same time so complicated precisely because of this. It is
the same as the process of understanding a written text whose meaning, according to Gadamer
“is not something we can grasp once and for all. It is something that exists in the complex
dialogical interplay between past and present.”33
There are more layers to a text that unfolds its
meanings to the reader. First of all, we find out about the culture of the tribes, the one which
exists in the unwritten text. Even though the Yąnomamö have no written language, according to
Chagnon they do have a very rich oral language. The researcher learned the words, along with
the rules according to which they operate and also their sociological meanings, the context in
which they developed and function. Then there is the text that the ethnographer produced for his
readers, the “civilized men”. And this work is also open for interpretation, according to the
background of the reader. Of course, the interpretations are not unlimited, but different and
multiple ones do exist and as a proof of this, Chagnon was praised by some but also hated by
others because of what he wrote. The contradicting opinions on the same texts show that
meaning is a fluid concept that can embrace many forms, even in works of science. But, as
philosopher Emilio Betti asserts, there has to be a concept of validation that makes one
32
Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of cultures (New York: Basic Books, Inc., Publishers, 1973),16.
33

20
interpretation more plausible than another. Betti goes even further and claims that knowledge
and objectivity would otherwise be impossible to obtain in the field of hermeneutics and
American critic E.D. Hirsch adds that knowledge and objectivity are more based on interpreting,
rather than explaining things.34
The interpretation that we get from Napoleon Chagnon is therefore the ethnographer’s
way of understanding a new culture, very different from his own. In dealing with a culture that
has no written history, but relies on oral tradition, one can see how past events tend to transform
into myths and how hard it is to distinguish real facts from fiction. At the same time, it can be
stated that modern written history is the re-written past as it was perceived after some time and
which also represents an interpretation of reality and not pure facts.
As readers of Chagnon’s text, we also get a glimpse of the future since many things that
have already happened in real time are only anticipated and hinted at in the book and they are
revealed to us gradually. Therefore, the reader gets a sense of what might be called a temporary
and illusionary future within the text. In the introduction we get clues about what the book will
be about and the mood is set. Only afterwards we get the reconstruction of the events as they
(more or less) happened. The idea that the Yąnomamö are fierce and that we should perceive
them as such is reinforced with each chapter, as this word appears in the subtitle of the book, in
its introduction but is also mentioned several times, even before we get a chance to “see” how
the first contact between the researcher and his subjects took place. Therefore, in the subchapter
about collecting data in the field we are told that:
The thing that impressed me the most was the impression of aggression in their culture. I
had the opportunity to witness a good many incidents that expressed individual
vindictiveness on the one hand and the collective bellicosity on the other hand. These
ranged in seriousness from the ordinary incidents of wife beating and chest pounding to
dueling and organized raids by parties that set out with the intention of ambushing and
killing men from enemy villages. One of the villages discussed in the chapters that follow
was raided approximately twenty-five times during my first 15 months of fieldwork – six
times by the group among whom I was living. The fact that Yąnomamö live in a chronic
state of warfare is reflected in their mythology, ceremonies, settlement pattern, political
behavior and marriage practices.35
Also, as I have previously mentioned, getting knowledge about others implies also
getting knowledge about oneself. We are being told about the provocations that the
34
35
Napoleon A. Chagnon, Yąnomamö. The Fierce People, 7-8.

21
anthropologist had to face starting with basic things like eating, sleeping, the lack of privacy, the
loneliness and even “discovering that primitive man is not always as noble as you originally
thought – or you yourself not as culturally or emotionally “flexible” as you assumed.”36
It is a
lesson of humility and of testing human physical and psychological resistance; it also means
putting oneself in dangerous positions and even risking death.
Chagnon is also careful to mention that his experience is not universal and each
anthropologist and each case has its particularities. Nevertheless, there are some aspects of the
fieldwork that may very well experienced by ethnographer. Also, Chagnon gives the example of
another tribe where he conducted limited research and who was “very pleasant and charming, all
of them anxious to help me and bound to show any visitor the numerous courtesies of their
system of etiquette.”37
Nevertheless, the fact that his research among these people was limited
may mean that his conclusions on their pleasantness may have not been accurate.
The first day on the field bears the name of the longest one, hence we get the distinct
feeling that unpleasant things are about to happen. This description creates a certain type of
expectations and it marks the fact that there is a certain code through which different meanings
can be implied and understood by a certain type of reader. As we proceed to find out why this
day was the longest, we read about the deplorable state of the anthropologist on his first
encounter with the “primitive men” and what was the reaction of the two parties. Very soon the
question that forms in our mind about the Yąnomamö typical man appears in the text as well as
Chagnon asks “What would he be like?”38
And as his thoughts progress, we can sense the
curiosity and also the naiveté stemming from the expectations the researcher had about this
meeting. Chagnon was expecting a group of 125 people, clearly organized, calling each other in
kinship terms, all anxious to meet him too and share all about their culture with him. Because by
now we already read the introduction and we anticipate more or less what we are about to read,
we cannot help but have a knowing smile and a feeling of empathy for the young, inexperienced
anthropologist. He also expresses one of the most basic and yet intimate human wishes, that of
wanting to be liked by others. Chagnon even hoped to be adopted by his new family and be truly
36
Napoleon A. Chagnon, Yąnomamö. The Fierce People , 7-8.
37
Ibid., 8-9.
38
Ibid., 10.

22
accepted as a member of their culture. He wasn’t prepared for what he saw: “a dozen burly,
naked, sweaty, hideous men staring at us down the shafts of their drawn arrows.”39
Moreover, the ethnographer got to meet the Yąnomamö when they were indulging in
hallucinogenic drugs, and one of the side effects of this intoxication meant having runny noses.
Mucus mixed with green powder was pouring down to their chests. On top of this, a group of
hungry dogs jumped at Chagnon’s feet with the intention of biting him. As the researcher says, in
these circumstances he was just standing there “holding my notebook, helpless and pathetic.”40
It
was not quite the first meeting he was expecting. As time passed by, the ethnographer realized
that a serious fight had taken place earlier, and that this was the reason why the men in the
village were edgy and afraid that the new people who came to visit them (among whom was
Chagnon) might be their enemies.
Facing such a welcoming, the anthropologist admits to having questioned his intention of
spending the next year and a half among the Yąnomamö, especially since he hadn’t met them
before and was uncertain of what exactly to expect from this contact. As Chagnon honestly puts
it, “I am not ashamed to admit that had there been a diplomatic way out, I would have ended my
fieldwork then and there.”41
The anthropologist got so depressed that he even started questioning
other life-choices that he made, such as switching from physics and engineering to anthropology.
It may be funny for us to find out this, because by now we know that Napoleon Chagnon is one
of the most important figures in this field and probably the most famous American
anthropologist at the time.
When the ethnographer met the Yąnomamö and was inspected by them, Chagnon noticed
that the people had very dirty hands. He was quick to ask his interpreter to tell them not to touch
him anymore. This comment was answered by the Yąnomamö in an unexpected way: “they
would “clean” their hands by spitting a quantity of slimy tobacco juice into them, rub them
together, grin, and then proceed with the examination.”42
The fact that the word “clean” is used
between brackets suggests an implied cultural understanding between the writer and the reader.
As anthropologist Mary Douglas explains in her book Purity and Danger, each culture has its
own understanding of what is clean and what is dirty, of what is sacred and what is profane and
39
40
Ibid.
41
Ibid., 11.
42
Ibid., 12.

23
that to this understanding one does not get in a natural or instinctual way, but through the process
of learning. Being “clean” is definitely perceived differently through the cultural standards of
Chagnon than through the ones of the Yąnomamö. The reader shares the complicity with the
author who assumes that he is addressing people who have the same understanding of such
aspects. Therefore, we can correctly read this sign of punctuation due to the fact that we have
been educated to do so. And this education continues throughout all of our life, depending on the
circumstances we have to face. In Chagnon’s case, the transformation was quite significant and
he admits that in time his own “habits of personal cleanliness declined to such a level that I
didn’t even mind being examined by the Yąnomamö, as I was not much cleaner than they were
after I adjusted to the circumstances.”43
As we understand, he started to become native, not only
as a necessary step in understanding the people he was living among, but as a process that
implies human flexibility of readapting, relearning and even questioning the set of rules inherited
from his own cultural background. In this case we have a clear example of what Douglas calls
relativism of terms, as Chagnon becomes more flexible about what he used to characterize as
“clean” or as “dirty”.
The researcher later explains that “it is difficult to blow your nose gracefully when you
are stark naked and the invention of handkerchiefs is millennia away.”44
Therefore we get a
historical placement of this group of people. Similar assessments have also been made by
evolutionist anthropologists who consider “primitive men” to be a reflection of ourselves from
hundreds or thousands of years ago. After this very first long day, life in the jungle is
characterized by the words “oatmeal, peanut butter and bugs”45
The association of terms is funny
for the reader as the first two terms designated something to eat and the last one … also
something to eat? As we later find out, yes, bugs were on the ethnographer’s menu because he
found it almost impossible to store his oatmeal and other foods and also protect them from the
intrusion of bugs. This was not the only intrusion though. Yąnomamö seemed not to have the
same sense of privacy as Chagnon and were close by at all times observing how the researcher
was conducting his daily activities. Apparently, the anthropologist got a taste of his own
medicine when he got to learn that he was not there just to observe, but to be observed as well.
We are told that as Chagnon tried, especially in the beginning, to go on with his life-style as he
43
Napoleon A. Chagnon, Yąnomamö. The Fierce People ,12.
44
Ibid.
45
Ibid.

24
would have done in the US, he was very clumsy at it in the new environment. As a result of this,
the Yąnomamö who were observing his frustration “quickly learned the English phrase “Oh,
Shit!” … and, once they discovered that the phrase offended and irritated the missionaries, they
used it as often as they could in their presence.”46
Thus, the Yąnomamö culture was already
altering under the eyes of its observer and because of his presence in the villages.
As Chagnon soon got to understand that trying to keep his daily routine as if he were at
home and not in a tropical forest was near to impossible, or that it was doable only at the cost of
the time he could have spent doing research, he had to reconsider his position and adjust. The
ethnographer cooked less complicated meals that required fewer dishes that he washed only
when necessary and the same rule applied to his clothes. As he started to redefine his life-style
and also define the people he was living among, knowing them and understanding their culture,
the Yąnomamö were doing the same thing with regard to him. One of the first and most
noticeable aspects was the way in which the people renamed Chagnon, a process that involves
the appropriation of something or of someone. The anthropologist was called by the Yąnomamö
by the name of Shąnti, in part because they couldn’t pronounce his name, but also because it
“sounded to them like their name of a pesky bee, shąki, and that is what they called me: pesky,
noisome bee.” It does not seem a coincidence that the new visitor’s name resembled the one of
an annoying insect as Chagnon was in fact intruding in their lives. There is an interesting aspect
to this, in which communication is understood as power, like David Olson suggested. One of the
ways in which Chagnon tried to control things or to keep his position among the Yąnomamö was
to take advantage of their lack of knowledge in order to deceive them. For example, the
researcher encouraged them to think that peanut butter was baby or cattle feces and did not
explain to them what canned food was (something that the Yąnomamö found very mysterious as
they didn’t understand how the animals got into the machete skins)47
in order to make sure that
he would be left alone during lunch time and that he wouldn’t have to share (too much of) his
food.
An important aspect related to the food sharing is something that sociologist Marcel
Mauss identified as kula, or the gift exchange, which represents an essential part of the social life
of the “primitive man”. Therefore, we learn that if a Yąnomamö offered something “freely” to
46
47
Ibid., 13.

25
Chagnon, reciprocity was expected. He used the word freely between quotation marks with the
meaning that in our understanding of the custom, it was not quite for free, even though it seemed
so at a first glance. He had to grow aware of the fact that whatever was received needed to be
returned in one form or another, not necessarily immediately. Nevertheless, the act would be
remembered and not to respect this trade would be a sign of bad manners. And deceit was also
something that the researcher had to be vigilant about as he admitted that “many years after
beginning my fieldwork I was approached by one of the prominent men who demanded a
machete for a piece of meat he claimed he had given me five or six years earlier.”48
The demands of the Yąnomamö also implied teasing the ethnographer and Chagnon
describes an episode when he was eating honey, a very valuable product in the tribes’ cuisine
and was approached by a Yąnomamö who casually asked him: “Shąki! What kind of animal
semen are you pouring onto your food and eating?”49
As expected, this question put an end to the
anthropologist’s appetite. It also revealed an interesting aspect: that this type of food taboo
translated in the same way from one culture to the other. As we may see later in Chagnon’s book
book, we encounter many of Levi-Strauss’s theories about food. The French anthropologist
divided food in two categories: crude and cooked or belonging to the nature and belonging to the
culture. Related to the this idea, it could be also mentioned that the Yąnomamö make clear
distinctions between what is “savage” or belongs to the nature/the jungle and what is
domesticated, culture, part of the village. Hence they have pets that they do not eat and this
different meanings than the ones found in our culture. We later find out from Chagnon that the
missionaries in the village could not introduce domesticated animals such as chicken or cattle to
the Yąnomamö, because they would refuse to eat them. The Yąnomamö believe that since these
animals are raised in the village, they became pets, more human and thus it would be almost
cannibalistic to consume them. They did not have the same views in regard to the eggs of the
chicken that they gladly ate. Hence, they had certain and clear ideas about what was right or
wrong to eat.
Other discoveries made by Chagnon were connected to the relationships he started to
develop in the village. Being separated from his family, the researcher sought the company of the
people among whom he was living and got repeatedly disappointed every time he learned that he
48
49
Ibid., 15.

26
was simply used as “a source of desirable items” or that he was considered “something
subhuman, a non-Yąnomamö.” 50
To a certain extent, this was the way in which the ethnographer
was regarding his hosts as well, so it can be said that while he was inscribing certain categories
on them, he was getting the same treatment in return.
Contrast is often used as a way of pointing out the differences between cultures, but also
to get some reassurance, a technique employed in this case by both parties. Therefore, Chagnon
would say that “privacy is one of our culture’s most satisfying achievements, one you never
think about until you suddenly have none. It is like not appreciating how good your left thumb
feels until someone hits it with a hammer.”51
In order to “survive” in this tiresome environment,
the anthropologist had to become one of them: “somewhat sly, aggressive, intimidating and
pushy”52
– not exactly the type of characterization a “civilized man” would take pride in. But we
have to keep in mind that all these notions have a certain meaning in our culture and not
necessarily the same in theirs. Chagnon shows the Yąnomamö to us on our own terms,
interpreting their behavior according to our norms and defining these people as if they were us.
To his surprise, the ethnographer later found out that the villagers were also picking on
him because he was shy and mohode (“stupid”).53
By now, the reader also notices how the
unwritten language of the Yąnomamö becomes written as words from its vocabulary become
more frequently used by the researcher. Chagnon also makes suggestions on how these words
should be pronounced and expresses his discontent about the way in which later anthropologists
have misused them:
The word Yąnomamö is nasalized through its entire length, indicated by this diacritical
mark ‘ ’ When this mark appears on a Yąnomamö word, the whole word is nasalized. He
vowel ‘ö’ represents a sound that does not occur in the English language. It is similar to
the umlaut ‘o’ in the German language or the ‘oe’ equivalent in German, as in the poet
Goethe’s name. Unfortunately, many presses and typesetters simply eliminate diacritical
marks, and this leads to multiple spellings of the word Yąnomamö and multiple
mispronunciations. Some anthropologists have chosen to introduce a slightly different
spelling to the word Yąnomamö since my work began appearing in print, such as
Yąnomami*, leading to additional misspellings as diacriticals are eliminated by some
presses, and to the incorrect pronunciation “Yanomameee.” Words with a vowel
50
51
Ibid.
52
Ibid., 16.
53
Ibid., 18.

27
indicated as ‘ä’ are pronounced as the ‘uh’ sound in the word ‘duck’. Thus, the name
Kąobawä would be pronounced “cow-ba-wuh,” but entirely nasalized.54
Thus, Chagnon establishes himself as a linguist who puts the Yąnomamö language into
writing and also offers instructions on how to use it, insisting that his way is the correct one. This
is of course debatable. The anthropologist may be accurate, but on the other hand, the fact that
other versions exist may mean that things are not necessarily how he presents them to be. Also,
his note draws attention on a more important aspect: that the anthropologists are the one who
create this language and transform oral tradition into a written one. With the missionaries
teaching them Spanish and converting them to Catholicism or Protestantism, one becomes aware
of the profound changes that take place because of the interaction between the “primitive” and
the “civilized man” and also about the power dynamics that take place in such contexts. The
Yąnomamö may have called the anthropologist a shąnti, or regarded him as mohode, they may
have played tricks on him, but ultimately it was Chagnon who altered their culture in an
irreversible way.
The author also made statements through which he tried to explain on our terms what the
real meaning of some of the things he observed was:
babies do not have a good chance of survival, but die frequently for a host of reasons that
we, with our technical medical knowledge, could diagnose and describe in precise,
mechanical biomedical terms. But the Yąnomamö do not have such knowledge, and to
them, babies die because someone sent harmful spirits – hekura – to steal their soul, or
someone blew magical charms at them from a great distance, charms that caused them to
sicken and die.55
What we have here is a similar approach to that of the philosopher Levi-Bruhl, according
to whom the mentality of the salvage is “prelogic”, because he has a mystical view on the
universe. Levi-Bruhl was preoccupied with the dichotomy between the “primitive men’s” way of
thinking and ours, which he considered to be a rational one. Therefore, things that we notice and
know remain inaccessible to the “primitives” and in return they see many things that remain
unseen to us. Chagnon “knew” that the diseases were not caused by spirits, but by viruses that all
children can be vulnerable to. The researcher got to this conclusion because he lived for most of
his life in a “civilized society”. The baggage of information that defines the ethnographer doesn’t
54
55
Ibid, 2.

28
permit him to be truly objective or to exclude himself and his own judgment from the research he
is conducting. We, as readers, don’t get just the facts, causes and effects, but the “real” reasons
that are perceived by Chagnon and not by the people that he studies. His manner of explaining
things shows that the text is intended for his students and anthropological colleagues first of all
and he clearly states this and assumes that his book will not be read by the Yąnomamö – a fair
assumption too, since they do not read or at least they couldn’t at the time Chagnon published his
books. But I cannot help but wonder how his research would have been written if the Yąnomamö
had been able to see for themselves how they were perceived by the person that in the end
became their friend. It is not my purpose to accuse Chagnon of being insensitive, but to point to
the fact that the way in which ethnographic work was done in this case relied heavily on the fact
that the subjects of the study were mostly unaware of what was really happening. As
ethnographic filmmaker David MacDougal states in his book about transcultural cinema, the
success of many ethnographic films relied on the fact that the natives did not know what a
camera was or how it worked. The human presence is similar to the presence of a video camera
as it also functions as a recording machine, with eyes that captures images and ears that capture
sound. But while the camera just shows what it registers, the human recorder processes it
through his or her consciousness. It can be said that this book was published due to the fact that
the Yąnomamö could not ask to see the texts and approve of them. We can only imagine how
they would have been presented, perhaps more like Flaherty’s Nanook of the North who screened
the film to his subjects and collaborated with them on making it. And yet, Nanook of the North is
one of the most well-known, but also among the most inaccurate ethnographic films. The
accusations that are being brought to it is that it presents false elements and this collaboration in
itself is suspicious because it may portray not the way in which the Eskimos were in reality, but
how they wanted to be portrayed.
On the other hand, the way in which the Yąnomamö are being shown to us has of course
an important consequence for the way in which they are perceived by us. Taking a Straussian
approach of “la pensee sauvage”, one may choose to interpret the piece of information about the
infant mortality rate in the sense that the world of the “savage” is ruled not by needs and instinct,
but by a different intellect. It may not be easy to do so, especially by a reader who knows and
makes use of penicillin and who, like Chagnon, might be skeptical to attribute disease and the
way in which it could be cured to the interference of the spirits, because he or she, like any other

29
“civilized” person, has overcome this way of thinking. Still, there are many “modern societies”
in which the spiritual beliefs are as entangled in everyday life in almost if not in the exact same
way as in the case of the Yąnomamö. But even so, these beliefs are regarded as superstitions
which belong to remote villages, or other forms of more isolated and small societies. According
to Levi-Strauss, the “savage” mind attempts to find order in the universe and each thing needs to
be in place. Therefore, for the Yąnomamö the logical explanation if someone in their village gets
sick is that a curse has been sent by an enemy to kill that person through this disease. Especially
in the case of the babies, who are known for having “weak souls”, life can escape their bodies at
any time, especially when these children cry. What can be observed in one of the films by
Timothy Asch is the fact that if a sick person does not receive the treatment given by the
shaman, this person dies, even with the medicine given by the anthropologist. An explanation for
this might be the fact that the ill person believes so strongly in shamanism, that without receiving
magical treatment, he or she doesn’t recover.
To continue in the frame of thought of Levi-Strauss, the “savage’s” way of thinking uses
only the things that are at its disposal. In the same way in which a craftsman uses what surrounds
him, so the “primitive mind” is constrained to use bits and pieces that nevertheless don’t stop it
from achieving brilliant results.56
His science is different from the one of the “modern man”, but
a science nevertheless. In this context, the function of the myth serves to elaborate structural
modes, using what it has at its disposal. Also, the allegorical language serves to hide underneath
an abstract and profound idea: the myth builds an ensemble.
In Chagnon’s book there are a few other references similar to the one I just mentioned.
This is also what makes the text so enticing and might explain the popularity of the book. The
thoughts of young Chagnon who had contact with these wonderful and fierce people as he
describes them could be the thoughts of any of us. If something seems to transpire from this
account, it is the sincerity through which he exposes himself.
The researcher seems to be aware of the fact that he cannot just break away from the
cultural system that has formed him previous to this encounter with the Yąnomamö. He also
admits that along the way he made “stupid errors”57
due to the lack of experience but also to the
fact that he had stepped into the unknown, a territory that the researcher had to decipher and also
56
Robert Deliege, Introducere în Antropologia Structurală. Levi-Strauss astăzi, 113.
57

30
to describe it to others in an intelligible and objective way. This process was for sure more
difficult than he had anticipated, but one event in particular is perhaps the most important to
note, if not among the most important. Chagnon’s purpose among the Yąnomamö was to collect
data about their “genealogy, reproduction, marriage practices, kinship, settlement pattern,
migrations, and politics.”58
This was a very challenging task because his subjects had very strong
taboos related to names, especially to those belonging to their dead, which the Yąnomamö did
not mention at all. When burying a deceased person, a part of their language would die as well
since the name of the deceased would never be mention again. This problem was solved by the
fact that the Yąnomamö used names that represented “specific and minute parts of things, such
as “toenail of sloth,” “whisker of howler monkey,” and so on”, thus being able to keep the words
as separate verbal parts, but avoiding the use of the whole expression.59
This is actually a point
that David R. Olson makes in his article about the history of writing where he states that names
have a privileged status in many cultures and that they are prone to be part of their taboo system.
This applies to our societies as well since it is peculiar to give someone a name that would
contain just some digits, which is something that we feel is more appropriate in the case of robots
or other animated things.60
For the Yąnomamö, the name taboo is also attributed to the living, especially among men
who are known to be more competitive than women in this respect. Therefore, a boy becomes an
adult when other people do not call him directly by his name, but by a kinship term or in
reference to someone else like “brother of Himotoma.”61
Establishing the exact nature of certain
relationships between different people was a difficult task because the Yąnomamö language
makes use of some terms that hold multiple meanings: “they call both their actual father and their
father’s brother by a single term, whereas we call one “father” and the other “uncle.”62
Hence the
translation from their language into ours requires a lot of precision and without the necessary
background it is fairly easy to misinterpret and misrepresent things. As we will later see when
discussing one of the films made in collaboration with Timothy Asch, kinship relations are very
important in the Yąnomamö society and without having a good understanding of them, other
aspects cannot be understood, as for example who fights with whom in an altercation, who gets
58
59
Ibid.
60
David Olson, History of Writing, 15.
61
62
Ibid., 19.

31
involved and why, and whom one is allowed to marry. Another aspect that should be taken into
consideration is what anthropologist and linguist Edward Sapir defines as the shaping of the
reality through language: therefore, when one calls more people as his brothers or sisters, this
also implies the fact that he treats them in the same way, as family.63
In fact, Chagnon was also
called hekamaya, meaning a nephew (sister’s son) by Kobawa, the headman and aiwa, meaning
older brother by another Yąnomamö close friend, Rerebawa.64
But while deciphering the genealogies in an environment where names were connected to
strong taboos another trait of the Yąnomamö people came to light. They have a strong sense of
humor and take great pleasure in playing elaborate pranks. The result was that after five months
of happily collecting data and feeling confident, or better said smug about the fact that he
“cracked the system”65
, Chagnon found out by pure coincidence (visiting another village and
casually mentioning a name that he had learned from his “informants”) that he had been
deceived by the Yąnomamö. He would discover that the whole joke had quite lengthy
proportions because they did not only provide him with vulgar names such as “hairy cunt” or
“eagle shit”66
whose translation he didn’t know at the time, but they had also “fabricated
devilishly improbable genealogical relationships, such as someone being married to his mother,
or worse yet, to his mother-in-law, a grotesque and horrifying prospect to the Yąnomamö.”67
All
this was amplified by the fact that the whole village corroborated in this scheme since the
researcher had checked the given names with various informants that he considered reliable.
Leaving aside the funny aspect of this story, we become aware of the frustrations that can appear
in an anthropologist’s work. He or she is many times sent on a wild goose chase that makes an
entire research that takes several months of work useless. One can only imagine what would
have happened if a pleased Chagnon would have ended his work after these five moths among
the Yąnomamö, confidently assuming that he got all the facts that he needed, only to discover
years later from another anthropologist that he was completely wrong. Such a hypothesis brings
to my mind the case of Margaret Mead who spent only a few months among Samoans and
concluded her time there with the book Coming of Age in Samoa. She proved that adolescence in
this society was not at all experienced as a traumatic or challenging phase, but that this process
63
Robert Deliege, O Istorie a Antropologiei. Şcoli. Autori. Teorii, trans. Biță, T. Ioan (Chișinău: Cartier, 2006), 130.
64
65
Ibid., 19.
66
Ibid., 19-20.
67
Ibid.,19.

32
went smoothly and almost unnoticed. Moreover, puberty was regarded as the most banal thing.
Mead claimed that the girls were sexually emancipated and had many lovers by the time they
were married and that Samoan life in general was an idyllic paradise. These theories were very
enticing for the American society and had some positive effects especially in the women’s
movement liberation of the time (the 20s). She became very well known and established herself
as first lady of anthropology. Things were about to be shaken to the ground when in 1983, Derek
Freeman published a book in which he roughly criticized the superficiality of her work.
According to him, Mead completely underestimated the complexity of the Samoan culture and
society. She didn’t speak their language, based her research on discussions with 25 girls that
might as well have lied to her. This idea is reinforced in the documentary made recently about
her life, in which there are shown some of the informants with whom Mead met during her work
and who candidly admit to the camera that they deceived her by giving false information because
they thought it was funny. Moreover, Freeman does not agree with the peaceful way in which the
anthropologist portrayed Samoans and describes them as very fierce and having a hot temper.68
Freeman didn’t present a society that was the complete opposite of what Mead had
presented, but he underlined the fact that certain aspects were far more complex than she had
portrayed them and that the truth was somewhere in the middle: Samoan life was not so idyllic,
but also not infernal.69
To this controversy was added the fact that Mead’s second husband, Reo
Fortune accompanied her during some of the fieldwork and later claimed that her assumptions on
the three tribes she had studied in the New Guinea were not accurate.70
Margaret Mead
continues, in spite of these accusations, to be considered one of the most prominent figures in the
anthropology as her work revolutionized many aspects of the field and “modern society” in
general. She was also among the first, if not the very first anthropologist to make use of
photography and video recording and to emphasize the importance of visual anthropology.71
Fortunately for Chagnon, he realized the deceit on time (although he wasted five months of work
on “nonsense”72
as he mildly puts it) and he approached the matter in a completely different
manner and eventually got on the right track. One might be tempted to assume that as the
68
Robert Deliege, O Istorie a Antropologiei. Şcoli. Autori. Teorii, p. 149
69
Ibid.,150.
70
Ibid., 145.
71
David MacDougal, Transcultural Cinema. Edited and with an Introduction by Lucien Taylor (New Jersey:
Princeton University Press, 1998), 26.
72

33
researcher became more proficient in their language, he also acquired better skills at
understanding the Yąnomamö, but the result was the opposite: his informants actually became
better at deceiving him. One of them in particular is portrayed as a real actor who went out of his
way to seem sincere when he was blatantly lying to the anthropologist. Like previously, Chagnon
realized through a coincidence that he was being misinformed. This again puts into perspective
the difficulty of operating with a different system of culture and of translating accurately, when
the source of the original text is deceiving. Also, in order to grasp the full meaning of the words
used in a foreign language represents a strenuous job that requires an understanding of the whole
picture. This can be achieved by growing native and thus increasing the possibility of becoming
more subjective, since the people analyzed by the ethnographer become close friends, making
the notion of full disclosure on them a moral issue.
Because he befriended some if not most of his subjects, Chagnon managed to gather data
and revise them. Therefore the Yąnomamö were the ones who deceived the researcher in the first
months of field-work, but they also helped him sort through the “numerous lies and
falsifications”73
that got mixed with real, valuable information. The researcher developed close
relations with many Yąnomamö, but meeting one of them in particular is classified as “the single
most important event” in his first year and a half of field research. The man in question is no
other than Kąobawä, the Upper Bisaasi-terri’s headman. With his help Chagnon probably found
out more about his adoptive culture than in any other way as Kąobawä provided the
ethnographer with “a wealth of accurate information on the political history” of his village and
“genealogical information, and hundreds of valuable insights into the Yąnomamö way of life.”74
This was possible mostly due to the fact that the headman was “enthusiastic about making sure I
learned the truth, and he encouraged me, indeed, demanded that I learn all details I might
otherwise have ignored.”75
Therefore, after nearly a year of working on the genealogies,
Chagnon could really comprehend the Yąnomamö social relations, including the formation of
kinship groups, the rules for exchanging women through marriage, the breaking of villages into
smaller ones, and other political and even economic aspects. Looking at the big, complete picture
the ethnographer was able to see the patterns that reappeared here and there and to understand
73
74
Ibid., 24.
75
Ibid.

34
the past, the present and even be capable of predicting some future behavior.76
What this new
knowledge offered, like in the many cases, was the possibility of asking new questions fit to this
context. As one can assume, getting to know more and more in a certain domain doesn’t imply
necessarily having answers, but just a more complex view.
The anthropologist explains that he chose to deal with this subject because he found it
particularly fascinating and incompletely dealt with before him. The violence of the Yąnomamö
people represents the main focus in Chagnon’s book. We find out right away that “the
Yąnomamö are still conducting intervillage warfare, a phenomenon that affects all aspects of
their social organization, settlement pattern, and daily routines. It is not simply “ritualistic” war:
at least one-fourth of all adult males die violently.”77
Also “peacemaking often requires the threat
or actual use of force, and most headmen have an acquired reputation for being waiteri: fierce.”78
Nevertheless, the researcher makes sure that we understand that their actions are not irrational
and governed by instinct:
their conflicts are not blind, uncontrolled violence. They have a series of graded forms of
violence that ranges from chest-pounding and club-fighting duels to out-and-out shooting
to kill. This gives them a good deal of flexibility in settling disputes without immediate
resort to killing. In addition, they have developed patterns of alliance and friendship that
serve to limit violence – trading and feasting with others in order to become friends.79
Also, through the whole book the reader gets to know many aspects of the Yąnomamö
culture, their myths and rich spiritual life, their strong sense of humor, their love and their
passions and quite a lot about the life of their women, their sexual practices, about the games
children play and their funerals. We get to see portraits of complete people. Other researchers
focus on different aspects of the Yąnomamö life and this shows that humanistic research has a lot
to do with personal choices. Even though Chagnon tries to clarify why he focused on certain
particularities, why others were left to the film and others are shown through the pictures that
accompany the pages of the books, different ways of receiving and understanding his work
emerge.
We also get to understand anthropology as a sum of experiences that go both ways and
that transform the researcher in the same way in which it alters what is researched. More
76
77
Ibid., 5.
78
Ibid., 6.
79
Ibid., 7.

35
importantly, we see that getting to know someone or something - the Other - relies on a basic
human desire: that of being liked and understood. It teaches one about friendship and about love.
I read the passage that scandalized some anthropologists because it presents Chagnon becoming
“native” and using drugs with the Yąnomamö in order to get in touch with their hekura spirits
and I believe it was grossly misinterpreted and taken out of context. His behavior was a response
to the actions of one priest who was being very determined to Christianize the people and who
would come to their village every time he heard they are using drugs in order to get in touch with
their spirits and scare them into believing that they would be punished by Dios (God in Spanish)
and that they would burn in hell for doing so, as the hekura were evil. Chagnon tried not to
interfere for a long time, but when two of his close Yąnomamö friends came to him, frightened,
asking if Dios would indeed punish them, he replied “No.” And he did so as he considered, and
still does, that many of the priests were destroying the Indians’ religion by scaring them and
insulting their beliefs, but also by taking advantage of their naiveté and showing them paintings
of damnation – paintings that they knew that the Yąnomamö do not clearly distinguish from real
photographs.
What he did in fact was to show to his host his friendship, solidarity and support. The
headman of the Yąnomamö village had never used drugs since Chagnon started living with them,
but started doing so after the missionaries began pestering them about their traditions, in order to
show his people that he approves of what they are doing and that he defends their culture. It also
seems somehow natural for Chagnon to do this because he grew accustomed with the natives’
rituals and had been describing them as seen from the outside, but now he felt prepared to
experience them first-hand, not necessarily as a religious experience, but as a way of being a
real, integral part of society. Because beyond the dancing and singing and the haziness caused by
the powders that he inhaled, there was something else that worked at a deeper level. I started this
part of the paper with a quote about the time when Chagnon got in touch with his hekura and I
would like to end with another from the same episode, as I believe it transmits something
essential about their interaction:
But the freedom to give complete reign to the imagination was the most startling and
pleasurable part, to shed my cultural shackles and fetters, to cease being a North
American animal up to a point and be Yąnomamö or the part of me that I and all the
others have in common with the Yąnomamö.80
80

36
Chapter 2
Visual representations
1. The role of ethnographic film in anthropology
Ethnographic film is not easy to define, although in the most basic way, it can be
considered to represent the field of ethnography translated into film.81
As we will try to establish
what is true and what is false in ethnographic film and documentaries in general and determine if
attaining the first is in fact possible and to what extent, we need to know how to differentiate
documentaries from fiction films. In his book Innovation in Ethnographic film. From innocence
to self-consciousness. 1955-1985, Peter Loizos brings into discussion an article by Brian
Winston, entitled “Documentary: I think we are in trouble”. Winston states that both fiction and
documentary movies “are created by editing and selection. Both, wittingly or unwittingly
embody a viewpoint”.82
But, while fiction films relate to the world in a metaphorical way,
documentaries show “things which happened in front of the camera, and within range of the
microphone” and “at the heart of the documentary is less a story and its imaginary world than an
argument about the historical world.”83
An ethnographic film is undeniably a documentary, but not all documentary films can be
considered ethnographic works. There are certain criteria to be taken into consideration and they
are more or less the same ones that have been established by Jay Ruby in 1975. Therefore, an
ethnographic film must be “about whole cultures, or delineable portions of cultures; informed by
explicit or implicit theories of culture; explicit about the research and filming methods they had
employed; and using a distinctively anthropological lexicon.”84
Timothy Asch et al. (1973) believe that the aim of ethnographic film is “to preserve, in
the mind of the viewer, the structure of the events it is recording as interpreted by the
participants”. They define three categories of ethnographic filmmaking: objective recording, in
which the structure is “imposed by the action”; Hollywood influenced scripted filming, where
the structure is “imposed by the filmmaker”; and, lastly, reportage, which is “best able to
81
Karl G. Heider, Ethnographic Film, (Austin: University of Texas Press) 2006, 7.
82
Peter Loizos, Innovation in Ethnographic film. From Innocence to Self-consciousness. 1955-1985, (Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press), 1993, 6.
83
Ibid., 6-7.
84
Ibid., 7.

37
preserve the indigenous structure of an event as the footage goes through the restructuring
process”. 85
Having so many criteria that may or may not apply to ethnographic film, it is obvious
why it is very easy to find flaws in films that should be ethnographic, but do not succeed entirely.
They are either made by ethnographers who happened to have a camera at their disposal when
doing their research, or filmmakers who found themselves in the midst of a new culture and took
the opportunity to record some events that drew their attention. The problem with such films is
that they are documentaries, but haven’t followed the guidelines necessary to make them
ethnographic.86
The task of making ethnographic films is quite demanding because it is not enough for a
filmmaker to attend anthropology classes, or for an anthropologist to study film. As Karl Heider
explains, an ethnographic film doesn’t mean simply putting the two elements together, but it is
an effort of “thinking cinematically about ethnography or thinking ethnographically through
film.”87
Both of them require a certain way of perceiving the world and ethnographic film must
provide a representative view on both. Moreover, the ambiguous and double role of visual
anthropology - that of belonging to the field of science and the one of cinematography at the
same time - adds to the fact that anthropology itself has been shaken to its core a few times and
had to change direction.88
Both film and anthropology came into being more or less at the same time and were from
the start interconnected. The first films made in the 1880’s had the aim of “documenting human
and animal motion and anatomy”, whilst in the same period anthropologists just began gathering
information in regard to the material culture of distant places.89
The problem with joining the two
in an efficient way is that it sounds easy in theory, but is quite difficult in practice. Even though
ethnographic film tries to “interpret the behavior of people of one culture to persons of another
culture by using shots of people doing precisely what they would have been doing if the camera
85
Eric C. Cotenas, EthnographicFilm: Proposing an Alternate Critical Framework (Sacramento:California
University, 2003), 31,
http://csusdspace.calstate.edu/bitstream/handle/10211.9/823/ETHNOGRAPHIC%20FILM%20revised.pdf?sequence
=1 (accessed October 2013).
86
Karl G. Heider, Ethnographic Film, 7.
87
Ibid.
88
Julie Linn Milling, The Other Way: Where Are Directions of Representation In Ethnographic Film Going?, 1,
www.somelikeitreal.com/...files/DirectionsinVisAn.pdf (accessed May 2011)
89
Ibid.

38
were not present”90
, this type of approach to visual anthropology can have its downsides since it
may result in creating “filmmakers who know a little anthropology, and anthropologists who
know a little about how to make films, but will not contribute much to the development of
problems, whose solution can be integrated into a scientific theory of culture.” 91
According to Jay Ruby (1975), one result of this approach is that the majority of
anthropologists do not judge if a film is ethnographic or not in the same way in which they
decide if written work is truly ethnographic; expectations are different. Ruby further states that
the “difficulties most anthropologists have had when trying to make ethnographic films revolve
around our cultural ideas that film is either an aesthetic conveyer of emotions or a neutral
observer which has the capacity to record reality.” 92
These difficulties and the attempts to
overcome them reflect that “ethnographic film has not even passed through its experimental
stages yet, and that, while anthropologists have a fabulous tool at their disposal, they do not
know how to use it properly.”93
This phrase was said in 1997, but things haven’t changed
dramatically since.
This type of film offers to its viewers glimpses of the exotic: the characters and events
depicted are unusual or different simply because they represent the unknown, the other. That’s
why ethnographic film is perceived more as a cinematic experience than a documentary work.94
In 1895, when Felix-Louis Regnault filmed a Wolof woman making pottery and proved that
ethnographic work could be made by using a new medium, his short movie was considered a
sample of a different culture, but at the same time a proof of cinematography as the art of
representation95
.
Three years later, Alfred Cort Haddon and his team of scientists started the Torres Straits
expedition, which is now considered the starting point of modern anthropology. Haddon believed
that the invention of the Lumiere brothers (Cinematographe) was “an indispensable piece of
anthropological apparatus”96
that he used in order to record dances and social activities in which
people were involved. Therefore “anthropology and the medium of film were born as Siamese
90
Eric C. Cotenas, EthnographicFilm: Proposing an Alternate Critical Framework (Sacramento: California
University, 2003), 13.
91
Sol Worth quoted in Eric C. Cotenas, EthnographicFilm: Proposing an Alternate Critical Framework, 14.
92
Ibid.
93
Eric. C. Cotenas, EthnographicFilm: Proposing an Alternate Critical Framework, 14-15.
94
Ibid., 11.
95
Ibid.
96
Ibid.

39
twins under the name of scientific inquiry, and it is therefore important to bear in mind that
ethnographic film is inevitably and forever embedded in the birth of cinema”97
Film and
anthropology began at the same time and because they blended so well, a further analysis on the
way in which the film can be a medium of “representing others” was not undertaken. Actually
“the subjects of the early so-called ‘cinema of attraction’ were often the same ‘Exotic Other’ as
anthropologists were examining in lengthy scientific rapports.”98
But there are clear differences between ethnography and ethnographic film and this
aspect makes matters even more complicated. First of all, there is the obvious “words versus
image difference.”99
Second of all, unlike writing, cinematography takes irreversible steps from
the beginning. What is filmed cannot be changed. It may be edited, shortened, manipulated, but
the existing footage is the one to work with and it cannot be modified. On the other hand, the
ethnographer takes notes, observes, writes and rewrites. Once he leaves the field of study and
returns home, alterations can occur in his work. The researcher can reexamine and rewrite
everything in a different light. He doesn’t cut paragraphs from his notebook and reassemble them
in what order he likes, but he can modify the entire thing, it is always an open process.100
When
analyzing this process, American anthropologist Karl Heider points to another important aspect
that sets the written text and the ethnographic film apart:
the basic difference in the way in which understanding enters the process is dramatically
illustrated by the fact that when the footage has been shot, someone other than the
photographer can (and usually does) edit it into the finished film, but it would be almost
impossible to write an ethnography from someone else’s field notes.101
Perhaps one of the most important aspects to take into consideration when dealing with
ethnography and documentary or ethnographic films is to define what it means to represent the
truth. In the artistic domain, reality is manipulated “through a series of falsehoods in order to
create a higher truth.”102
In the field of science, the final result does not justify the manipulation
of data, sometimes anthropologists use a different set of rules when it comes to finding out where
97
Julie Linn Milling, The Other Way: Where are Directions of Representation in Ethnographic Film Going? at
www.somelikeitreal.com/...files/DirectionsinVisAn.pdf, 2.
98
Ibid.
99
Karl G. Heider, Ethnographic Film, 8.
100
Ibid., 9.
101
Ibid.
102
Ibid.

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