This book’s final chapters were drafted in surroundings that could hardly be more different from the world familiar to the Awajún. Framed by the window was a portrait of New England winter: trees stripped by October’s leaf drop, drifts sculpted by January’s winds, ornamental grasses desiccated and askew. Only the occasional chatter of chickadees or the squeak of boots on dry snow broke the boreal silence. In reflective moments, I have wondered why someone from such an austere place should be among those fated to document moments in the life of the Awajún, an exuberant people in an exuberant natural setting. Only chance brought us together. No planning involved.
The impromptu quality of the encounter would be unlikely today. Anyone attempting to do similar work would face ethical vetting by the institutional review board of his or her home institution. This would be followed by months of negotiation with host-nation authorities and the indigenous community’s own gatekeeping organization. Only when these obstacles were overcome could real work begin. It is not an undertaking for the impatient or the improvisationally inclined.
Another challenge is the impact of globalization on even the remotest locations. Migration to plantations, urban worksites, and jobs abroad complicates the question of what constitutes “home.” Migrants commonly share new ideas and experiences, thus transforming notions of how the culture of home fits into the larger world. Anyone studying the Awajún today might feel obliged to follow them into the cities where some of their young people are pursuing advanced education and their leaders have established offices close to the ministries and NGOs whose activities influence life in the hinterlands. If research funds sufficed, it would be useful to accompany Awajún leaders to global forums in Lima and occasionally as far afield as Geneva, Paris, or Washington, where they make their opinions known through speeches and press conferences. Likewise the journeys of Awajún evangelicals to Christian training centers, where they deepen their understanding of biblical teachings and strategies for attracting converts. All of these sites and situations shed light on what it means to be Awajún now.1
History would have to be attended to. Since the 1980s anthropologists have recognized that societies cannot be adequately understood by examining them only in the present. Their current practices may reflect not an ancient cultural orientation but a survival strategy dating back only a few decades. A fieldworker now might feel obliged to spend as much time working in archives as studying everyday life in face-to-face communities.
Despite its virtues, immersion is rarely the steady march toward complete understanding that ethnographies from earlier eras made it out to be. I have described crises that remained unresolved, suspicions that were allayed only provisionally, vengeance that was postponed until later or perhaps forever. All ethnography harbors zones of uncertainty. I witnessed only one adult funeral, for instance, and not even all of that. I might just as easily have witnessed none. I had ready access to a single shaman, whose approach to healing was regarded by his clients as somewhat idiosyncratic. I lived in or visited eight Awajún communities, but these are only a small fraction of the more than 200 that have now secured official recognition. In one memorable interview, a man shared a childhood memory of his family’s behavior during a major earthquake. He recalled that his parents and other adults spent hours dancing naked out of a conviction that this would save their lives and prevent the earthquake from recurring. The recollection stretched credulity in light of Awajún prudishness regarding women’s bodies. The story’s accuracy was impossible for me to verify and may always remain so.2
More perplexing than these challenges is a wave of disciplinary self-doubt that has still not crested. My encounter with an opinionated European colleague as I departed from the field in 1978 was a portent. Anthropology’s critics portray the discipline as an expression of the need to inventory, classify, and ultimately manage the human resources that the West had drawn into its sphere of influence. They argue further that the colonial project and its Enlightenment foundations consigned non-Western peoples to another category of humanity that could serve as counterimage to the West’s own utopian fantasies.3
These charges have produced tension between those who see the discipline’s primary mission as scientific and others who insist that anthropologists have an overriding ethical obligation to struggle against inequality. For the latter, devoting time to the study of unfamiliar customs and beliefs such as those I have described here is akin to documenting wallpaper patterns inside a burning house.4
Unfortunately, denunciation has a powerful tendency to colonize the imagination at the expense of nuance. I have no quarrel with the proposition that injustice merits sustained attention and, when possible, energetic efforts to set things right. The difficulty comes in drawing lines, making distinctions. Denunciatory accounts lean toward a blunt-force vocabulary, with “ethnocide” and “cultural genocide” being the preferred terms of art. Sometimes this strong language is warranted. Amazonian oil-drilling and gold-mining operations that wantonly poison the environment deserve condemnation. Other situations are marked by greater ambiguity. Proselytizing by missionaries, for instance, is routinely condemned as ethnocidal. Strictly speaking, this is accurate: the goal of most missionary work is to kill certain indigenous beliefs and replace them with others. It is indisputable that missionaries have sometimes resorted to manipulative practices to win converts. But there are many contemporary cases in which conversion appears voluntary and indigenous peoples are energetically pursuing their own evangelization efforts. From what position can an anthropologist assert that converts are deluded in their choices?
Another problem of politically engaged research is that its rhetoric needs victims and heroes, or better yet, heroic victims. This requirement may lead to frustratingly thin accounts. Telling details are ignored in favor of portraits of Amazonian peoples as rainforest-worshipping, feather-wearing, tropical Dalai Lamas. A tendency to oversimplify morally complex situations, which may be a legacy of polarized Cold War intellectual debates, continues to be something against which fieldworkers struggle with varying degrees of success.5
To their credit, the Awajún have mostly resisted the siren call of Noble Savage rhetoric. Many realize that their reputation as a combative people would be difficult to conceal. If anything, they celebrate and embellish it. In the past decade they have proven militant enough for their aggressive profile to remain credible.
Stepping back from the specific circumstances of an embattled people, one faces questions from the shadowy territory lying between ethics and epistemology. Who granted anthropologists the authority to study societies of which we are not members? Reframed in more disputatious language, the question becomes, by what right does an academic from the developed world, implicitly representing a powerful nation and a hegemonic scientific tradition, presume to speak for a tribal people who never invited this attention and who may have only a limited understanding of what it means for their collective welfare?
Such questions have preoccupied the discipline for decades. Anthropology’s classical period, defined by the work of such foundational thinkers as E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Bronislaw Malinowski, Ruth Benedict, and Mary Douglas, was marked by a self-confidence that today registers as arrogance. The anthropologist, as Malinowski announced in the introduction to his masterwork, Argonauts of the Western Pacific, introduces “law and order into what seemed chaotic and freakish.” Malinowski and his peers held that only trained anthropologists possess the skills needed to tease out the structure of everyday life in exotic places, an order inaccessible to the subjects themselves. This robust certainty sheared open like a seismic fault in the late twentieth century, to be replaced by radical doubt—doubt about anthropology’s claim to unique understanding of other people’s experience.6
In Malinowski’s time, an anthropologist could reasonably assume that research subjects were unlikely to encounter the publications that emerged from fieldwork. Global circuits are tighter today. Many indigenous people are literate and multilingual; an increasing number are university educated. They read our work, criticize it, sometimes even appropriate it for their own purposes. This hall-of-mirrors effect gives rise to unanticipated conflicts. Anthropologists once were likely to say that indigenous peoples lived in exquisite balance with their environment. Subsequent research has made that assertion harder to defend even if there remains little doubt that traditional subsistence systems are far less destructive of the environment than are industrial ones. Yet the rhetoric of perfect harmony with nature, often coupled with claims that amity and democracy reign supreme in Amazonian societies, has become a tool that indigenous leaders use to make a case that their rights should be respected. The anthropologist with evidence to the contrary may be in an uncomfortable position.7
One response to this dilemma is to reimagine ethnography as part of a long conversation in which the anthropologist represents a single voice among many. A fair number of anthropologists find it liberating to abandon the notion that their assessment of something as complex as another culture should be treated as definitive. This leaves them freer to try new approaches to research and writing, seek innovative ways of collaborating with the communities they study, and contribute to more rewarding intercultural exchanges. I am confident that in the near future Awajún anthropologists—perhaps Wilson Atamain, the anthropology student whom I interviewed in 2012, or someone like him—will become part of the conversation.8
At the most elementary level, the work of anthropologists has brought greater global visibility to peoples whose continued existence Amazonian nation-states were inclined to disregard. The demographic collapse of indigenous societies brought about by the introduction of Western diseases and the abuses of the rubber boom made it easy to miss the recovery that many of these groups experienced in the twentieth century. Whether Amazonian societies were represented sympathetically or with adequate subtlety by every anthropologist may be less important than was accumulating evidence that the region sustains tens of thousands of people who still speak their own languages and live according to customs distinct from those of the majority population.
Often ignored is the value that anthropologists’ accounts have acquired for indigenous peoples themselves. Years ago I invited a young, Ivy League–trained Mohawk political scientist to speak to students in a class. He mentioned that people in his community were trying to reconstruct Mohawk worship as it had existed before the rise of the Longhouse Religion, an early nineteenth-century adaptation of Iroquoian religious practices to the rising influence of Christianity. “How do you know what worship was like so long ago?” a student asked. “We use oral histories, missionary diaries, and anthropological studies,” he replied.
There is another virtue of ethnography that bears consideration. I refer to the effect that long-term immersion in an alien social world has on ethnographers themselves and, via their books, articles, and classroom lectures, on others. The painful process of retraining mind and body is humbling. “In any hard discipline, whether it be gardening, structural engineering, or Russian,” Matthew Crawford observes in Shop Class as Soulcraft, “one submits to the things that have their own intractable ways.”9
For me, dealing with a new language was the hardest part. I had to wrestle with agglutinative verbs that stretched longer and longer as new morphemes muscled their way in. Interrogative words, the anthropologist’s best friend, seemed to have mutated, like Darwin’s finches, into an infinite number of variations. I desperately sought ways to make the learning process endurable. A dozen times a day, small children would look through the slats of my house wall and ask, “Yatsujú, pujámek?” The question is conventionally translated as “Brother, are you there?” although its literal meaning is “Do you exist?” This is an example of what linguists call phatic communication, semantically empty exchanges that establish interpersonal connection. Out of sheer perversity, I would sometimes reply in the negative, “No, I don’t exist.” My interlocutors would pause to ponder this strange news. “You lie!” was a common response, although children accustomed to the game would one-up me by replying, “Well, what happened to you?” or “Where did you go?” That inspired increasingly surreal exchanges about travel to the moon or disappearance into the bowels of a hungry anaconda. Speaking to dignified adults was another matter. The struggle to formulate sophisticated sentences continued throughout my time there—and with it the recognition that I had taken on an assignment for which I had only modest aptitude.
I also had to learn to use a machete, properly fold palm leaves destined for a house roof, identify plants previously unknown to me, dance in the approved manner, and walk in the forest without making too much noise. The point is not that I could become as good at these activities as my Awajún teachers, an unlikely prospect. It is that submission to a disciplined apprenticeship and the experience of repeated failure create new habits of mind. What are these habits? The primary one is willed suspension of interpretive judgment, a radical form of self-distancing. You are obliged to abandon prior understandings of how the world works and, to steal a phrase from Gregory Bateson, recalibrate your understanding of the differences that make a difference. Another is humility. Much of what you already know will be of little value. You have no choice but to start over: with language, rules of deportment, expectations about how bodies are held, used, adorned, fed. Allied with that painful self-reinvention is the obligation to listen, which challenges a core value of scholars, whose vocation celebrates the ability to speak with authority. The process enlists the ethnographer’s hosts as well. The very awkwardness of the encounter may change their understanding of what they do and why. It may nudge the more analytically inclined to seek a rationale for practices that normally require no explanation.10
When it goes well, the ethnographic encounter is uniquely productive, leading to insights and standards of verification that take it beyond the forms of journalism or travel writing to which it bears a passing resemblance. Even then, how do you know whether you know enough? In a manner reminiscent of Zeno’s Paradox, the closer one gets, the more elusive complete comprehension becomes. Although it might appear that this problem will be solved when the Awajún have produced their own anthropologists, it is not necessarily so. An Awajún ethnographer will have an easier time with the language than an outsider, but he or she will still have to struggle to achieve the self-distancing required for the most acute observation. This is by no means impossible for an insider, but it is challenging.
To praise the virtues of ethnography is not to claim that anthropology holds a monopoly on truth. But in a world drawn to absolutist ideologies and addicted to nonstop multimediated chatter, a discipline that gives first priority to attentive listening and close observation of others has much to recommend it. That we sometimes fail to meet the highest standards of the profession says more about human frailty than it does about some profound flaw in the mission itself.
Beyond the search for a deeper understanding of cultural diversity is the simple matter of bearing witness: chronicling a people’s aspirations, virtues, shortcomings, and troubles when few others are in a position to do so. Thinking about this, I am reminded of an upriver trip I made with two Awajún families decades ago. A rare cold front had blown in from somewhere. The outboard motor on the dugout canoe died and then defied all efforts to restart it. A journey that normally took three hours would most likely take six or eight, perhaps more. Bone-chilling rain swept the river. Sliding toward self-pity, I noticed a tiny girl standing ahead of me in the dugout. Waiflike, covered only by the thinnest of cotton dresses, she shivered as rain poured off her body. She bore the discomfort with stoic grace. A few minutes later, one of the men poling the canoe cracked a joke that made everyone laugh, a cheerful mood sustained for the rest of the wearisome trip.
A small thing, a fleeting moment, that exemplified the grit and tenacity of the Awajún people. They have survived more than a century of steadily intensifying contact with outsiders, advancing against currents that have overwhelmed less resilient and inventive indigenous societies. Their difficult journey continues. I count myself fortunate to have witnessed part of it.