Dialogue. The Yanomamo and Other Causes: The Ethics of Concern

Transcription

1 Dialogue The Yanomamo and Other Causes: The Ethics of Concern Erve Chambers Univ. of South Florida It is my luxury in life to spend most of my time thinking about why people do the things they do, rather than thinking too much about what they actually do. Therefore, what I have to say has more to do with our presence here than it does with the Yanomamo or the numerous other indigenous peoples who are facing the steady erosion and eventual destruction of their traditional ways of life. This approach implies some kind of equity. It means that there is a significance to our being here that is equivalent to the Yanomamo being there. We have our reasons. I cannot speak to all of them, but I can at least address the way some of our motives and intentions begin to infiltrate both the faraway forests of Brazil and the room we are now occupying. Distant causes, reforms and salvations are as much a part of our traditions as the feast is a part of the traditions of the Yanomamo. Today, if only in our imaginations, both traditions are linked. But we need to be aware that these traditions are joined in part by their distinctiveness. A significant measure of our reason for being here is because the Yanomamo are so different from us. Essentially, my argument is that our good will on behalf of the Yanomamo is a form of exploitation an expression of humanistic and spiritual exploitation which, once stripped of the realities and illusions of self-sacrifice, is not that different from the actions of diamond miners, missionaries, highway engineers, third world bureaucrats, and the heads of multinational corporations. Exploitation means using something or someone for your own purposes, primarily to satisfy your needs. You might be tempted to react negatively to my use of this word. But I ask you to accept the idea of exploitation as a neutral concept, at least until I have had an opportunity to speak my mind which is basically that the large scale exploitation of human resources, which can lead to both desirable and undesirable consequences, is an inevitable consequence of the kind of society we live. I will mention three kinds of exploitation this evening. The first two have to do with the exploitation of images we have concerning people like the Yanomamo. The third has to do with the exploitation of the people themselves, in this case through the vehicle of concern and empathy. Every society, I believe, strives for ideals of behavior and creates an imagery about itself which compensates for the fact that social reality seldom conforms to social expectations. A society can live through this imagery as profoundly as it struggles through its reality. But societies differ in the way they relate to their images. One difference has to do with how different people see and value their histories. Many traditional, "primitive" peoples, for example, seem to see their past as being cyclical and rather strictly replicated in their present and future. Their images remain intact, though the actors of their particular human dramas might change over time. Many modern, complex societies tend to view their histories in linear, dynamic terms in terms in which their investment in a particular imagery might actually be at risk. Thus, in modern societies, the breaks between image and reality are often phrased in historical terms whether these breaks are expressed positively as a faith in progress, or negatively as a kind of longing for "the good old days," often seems to be nothing more than a matter of taste and personal ideology. I am going to suggest to you that the Yanamamo are a part of the imagery some of us use to heal the breaks in our world of reality. Part of this imagery has to do with our desire and longing for what I call a sense of integrity a wholeness in the collective being of a people. This kind of integrity can be associated with peoples who do not experience a great distance between the needs of society and those of the individual. The integrity of wholeness is something, at least in our imagery of things, which a people like the Yanomamo are struggling to maintain. I think it is difficult for most of us to really understand this sense of integrity because we have never known more than the edge of it somewhere at the borderline where image and reality meet. For us, the word integrity is generally associated with the individual and is symptomatic of our alienation from each other a reminder of our compartmentalized and fractured lives. When, for example, we elect a President, we seek a person with integrity, rather than a representation of the collective integrity of our nation. And if that President falls from our favor, as is often the case, it is as a result of his being too much like ourselves yielding the amorphous "greater good" of our nation to personal ambition. We experience the other kind of integrity the collective wholeness of a people largely in its absence. Some of our fascination with people such as the Yanomamo derives from our longing to wit- JUNE-SEPTEMBER

2 ness, if not achieve, that very human condition. Our desire to try to preserve that kind of integrity somewhere in the world is not altogether altruistic but is as much for our own peace of mind as it might be for people like the Yanomamo (who may or may not have had, and probably have already lost much of what we seek to capture through them). There is nothing wrong with this kind of exploitation, so long as we recognize what we are doing. There is something else which attracts us to the Yanomamo and similar causes, and that is their seeming wildness or rather, the image we have of their wildness. Even their name encourages our imaginations, like something out of Edgar Rice Burroughs. Yanomamo. Buggo Buggo. It is like something out of our own distorted list of modern savagery. Yanomamo. Yamamoto. The Fierce Yanomamo are on their way to becoming the image of a primitive people for our generation, not entirely unlike the Wild Man of Borneo inherited from another generation. Anthropologists, in their concern for the objective and fair study of man, have done their best to dampen our urges to find wild men and women among the primitive peoples of the world. In so doing, they have contributed to the health and survival of those peoples. But perhaps they have also done us a disservice. There once was another discipline concerned with the study of primitive people which has been swallowed up in the ripples left by modern anthropology. That is the discipline of agriology from the Greek root agrios, which means wild. Agriology is the study of wild men and women. Sometimes I think I would like to help revive this discipline. Not in the total manner of thinking from which the word agriology originates, which includes thinking of primitive wildness as a kind of badness, or fall from grace, or simple mindedness but in the sense in which human wildness provides us with an idea of freedom. In its turn, agrios derives from the Greek word agros, which denotes an open field. Human freedom is an idea we need from time to time, and our society has traditionally selected the artist, the bohemian, the desperado and the primitive to help provide it. Ideas of freedom are important because they can be freedom-producing. Even the comparatively stodgy study of modern anthropology has been known to help liberate the imaginations of a few students. As much as we might, in our sophistication, fail to admit it it is still comforting to imagine that there are people moving around a forest somewhere wearing little or no clothing, laughing a lot, wrestling around in the dirt. Of course, the Yanamamo are not entirely free. Their customs limit them as ours limit us. But they do seem to goof off more than we do. I suspect they do not take life as seriously as we do, or at least not in the same worrisome way we take it. Even the understanding that there exists in this world a people who simply do not take seriously the same things that worry us somehow helps us liberate ourselves. So we have agrios, a sense of wildness, and I think part of our interest in the Yanomamo derives from this longing for the freedom of wildness. There is nothing wrong with that, so long as we realize what we are doing. Now we have two reasons for interest in the Yanomamo. They are sentimental and exploitative, but I don't think we need to apologize for them on either of these counts. I have one other reason to suggest, and that is the reason of concern. The reasons and imagery of concern are especially difficult. As much as our own traditions promote our ability and desire to emphathize with other people, they also contain the clues for withholding our concern. Somewhere along the line of pursuing a cause like the Yanomamo, you will be asked why don't you leave the Brazilians alone and let them look after their own affairs. Someone will suggest that you look at the way your own country treated the indigenous peoples of this nation. Or why don't you direct your concern to problems that are closer to home? But you aren't responsible for your ancestors. And the Yanomamo don't belong to the Brazilians. Two wrongs don't make a right. Injustice does not have a national boundary. In the Roots of Heaven, the novelist Romain Gary develops a story around a man who takes up arms to protect the wild elephants of Africa. When asked why elephants, and not some other suffering species, or even fellow humans, the protagonist explains that when he was a prisoner in a concentration camp he survived from day to day by thinking of huge herds of elephants stampeding wildly across an African plain. His motive for protecting the elephants was that he wanted that image to survive beyond his own imagination. Elephants are elephants and the Yanomamo are a people. And they are an image. An image some of you have chosen. You have every right to choose the image that suits you. Still, sometimes being someone else's image can get in the way of being a people. We have to be aware of that and remain sensitive and alert to the possibility that even our best intentions could ultimately cause more harm than good. It's happened before and there is no magic formula to predict when it will happen again. The Commission to establish a national park for the Yanomamo is as much an encroachment on the 26 ANTHROPOLOGY AND HUMANISM QUARTERLY

3 terrain of the Yanomamo as is a trans-national highway. Your motives are probably as mysterious to the Yanomamo as are the motives of the highway engineer. The effect of your concern, however remote and scattered, will reverberate throughout a million acres of forest. I trust that you already realize that the Yanomamo Park will not insure the survival of the Yanomamo people at least not the survival of integrity and freedom that I have alluded to. At best, the Park will provide the Yanomamo with a minimum warranty from which they might begin to come to terms with the rest of the world a position of strength that is relative only to their present vulnerability. At worst, the Park could actually serve as a convenient staging ground for an even more efficient and clearly destructive exploitation of the Yanomamo and their resources as happened in the development of the Indian reservation system of the American West. The establishment of a national park, if that is your image, should be only the beginning of your concern and involvement. If your efforts are to amount to more than just one more garden party, we must accept the notion that this concern is practically without end and will be concluded only if and when the Yanomamo themselves say it is over and invite you to "bug off", such an invitation being a part of the natural history of successful reform. Let me conclude. In the Yanomamo we see ourselves, or at least vestiges of ourselves. Hopefully, the results of our vision are as beneficent for the Yanomamo as they can be for our own peace of mind. At any rate, I suspect our ability to empathize beyond our immediate conditions, to pick up a newspaper and share a genuine feeling of concern for a people half a world away, is not something we can entirely will or not. Neither is this concern, as some will suggest, simply a superficial salve to the conscience of the exploiter. This concern is a natural condition of a society whose members drive to work with petroleum imported from another half a world's distance, who drink coffee they have never seen grown, wear clothing assembled in factories by people who speak a language they cannot understand, and collect baskets made in a country which has a politics we can barely imagine. I sincerely believe that we are as dependent on this sense of concern, in its many expressions, as we are so obviously dependent on the world economy or, for that matter, on the continued rotation of our planet in this little space of universe we occupy. It seems as true as it is embarrassing to admit without the ability to see and feel beyond ourselves, we are doomed. So I suggest we stop apologizing for our images and for our sentimental nature. I suggest we inform our impulses for reform with a practical understanding of the possible consequences of our actions so that we do not make the mistake of believing that, in seeing ourselves in our causes, then our causes must be the same as us. They are not, and understanding the difference is very important. And then I suggest we try to stretch our hearts as far as hearts can be stretched. Errata The editor regrets that two lines were dropped from Nancy J. Schmidt's, "The Nature of Ethnographic Fiction: A Further Inquiry" which appeared in the March 1981 issue of the Anthropology and Humanism Quarterly (Vol. 6: no. 1). (1) Page 11, column 2, lines 54 and 55 should read: "However, exactly the opposite is the case, for Coon (1979) has said that The Riffian is largely his own creation, whereas Flesh of the Wild Ox is a retelling of a family tradition. Furthermore, in The Riffian Coon has ascribed..." (2) Page 14, column 2, lines 20 and 21 should read; "Although the Wood theoretical approaches utilize anthropological dates, they frequently are not written by anthropologists. In To Double Business Bound..." JUNE-SEPTEMBER

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