What Is Right about Controversies Such as This?

continued . . .

First, controversies such as this provide a basis for conversations across the specialized research worlds anthropologists now participate in. They enable people grounded in different regions and absorbed by different problems to talk about issues that interest—and in this case affect—them all. In Victor Turner's phrasing, controversies such as this offer a temporary "communitas," a temporary moment of community that transcends the structural boundaries that traditionally separate anthropologists from one another. Turner suggests that such "antistructural" moments allow people to perceive the problematic nature of the structures that shape their everyday lives. We see that here. The Yanomami controversy allows us to reflect on the discipline's dynamics in a special way.

Second, controversies such as this are essential for building a cumulative discipline. There has been a sea change in the way anthropologists think about their research since Napoleon Chagnon began his Yanomamö fieldwork in 1964. At that time, there was a general disciplinary sense that anthropologists—in seeking to be scientific—were concerned with "just the facts," as Detective Joe Friday famously put it in the 1950s television program Dragnet. Anthropologists saw their job as collecting facts and letting the facts speak for themselves.

Today, there is a greater appreciation that gathering "just the facts" is not a simple process. During the past two decades, the discipline has worked its way through what has been termed "a crisis of representation," an "uncertainty about adequate means of describing social reality" (Marcus and Fischer 1986:8). "No longer is it credible," Fischer asserts, "for a single author to pose as an omniscient source on complex cultural settings" (in Barfield 1997:370). While this perspective has been warmly embraced by a substantial portion of the discipline, it has mostly involved—at the case-study level—authors challenging their own authority in ways that, at times, might be perceived as self-serving.

In examining opposing viewpoints as we do in this controversy, readers have a chance to move beyond such accounts to a deeper, fuller sense of how anthropologists, in fact, construct ethnographies. There are, no doubt, self-serving elements in Chagnon's and Tierney's accounts. But we can ferret many of these out by comparing one account with another and comparing both with other accounts written by different anthropologists who have also worked among the Yanomami.

What is now increasingly evident to most members of the profession—and perhaps should have been in the 1960s—is that anthropology needs different accounts of the same subject to gain greater objectivity, to gain a better sense of the social processes described by anthropologists. Multiple accounts allow us to step behind the screen of anthropological authority—something like seeing the Wizard of Oz in person rather than from behind a screen—and perceive the underlying dynamics at work.

In the search for objectivity, we cannot put our faith in a single account, regardless of the status of the person who produced it. There is always the problem of self-serving rhetoric. Objectivity does not lie in the assertions of authorities. It lies in the open, public analysis of divergent perspectives.

What is essential to developing cumulative knowledge—rather than continually increasing the amount of uncertain knowledge, as frequently occurs today—is that anthropological results be publicly called into question. The results must be challenged, the researchers involved must respond, and the broader community must work its way toward consensus on the issue. The problem, of course, is that as long as the material remains obscure—known only by this or that expert—there can never be a real collective resolution of differences.

The hope held out, in chapter 6 and part 2 of the Yanomami book, is that we can collectively listen to the arguments and counterarguments of experts as they debate. And as in a trial where the jury does not know all the relevant details beforehand but learns them as various experts with opposing views present them, we can come to a set of shared conclusions.