Massenzio - 2001 - An Interview With Claude Lévi‐Strauss

An Interview with Claude LviStraussAuthor(s): Marcello MassenzioReviewed work(s):Source: Current Anthropology, Vol. 42, No. 3 (June 2001), pp. 419-425Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of Wenner-Gren Foundation for AnthropologicalResearchStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/320481 .Accessed: 06/03/2012 11:05

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Reports

Claude Levi-Strauss with Marcello Massenzio.(Photo Mario Nutile)

An Interview with Claude Levi-Strauss1

marcello massenziovia Mirandola 30(G/20), 00182 Rome, Italy.14 xii 00

MM: Lets start with The Elementary Structures of Kin-ship [1969(1949)], if you dont mind. Ive been struck byits completely new way of conceiving the nature-cultureopposition. The prohibition of incest, you say, is the pro-cess by which nature transcends itself. Would you mindexplaining your point of view on this?

CLS: Listen, youre tackling a very hot issue here. Thenature-culture opposition is the subject of very passion-ate debate among anthropologists today, and most of thereproaches Im subject to are precisely for my use of thisopposition, which the postmodernists consider a crea-tion of our own civilization and completely foreign tothe character of the peoples that ethnologists study.

MM: But the idea of natures transcending itself is, inmy opinion, an extraordinary conception.

CLS: I dont see anything extraordinary about it at all.Basically, the paradox of the human sciences is that ourobject of study is humankind, but we mustnt forget thatthis term is inseparable first from life and then from thewhole range of phenomena that make up the world andthe universe. Humankind, then, is at once nature andsomething morenature, in a sense, and more than na-ture, in another sense.

MM: Yes, yes, and this is what I find striking. Now Iwould like to touch on Tristes tropiques [1967(1955)] forjust a moment, particularly on your remark about theethnographer as a symbol of expiation. It seems to methat this represents the establishment of ethnology as afully mature discipline. Would you mind saying a wordabout expiation, culpability, attempts at redemption?

CLS: You know, this is a perspective that probably would

1. This interview was conducted by the Multimedia Encyclopaediaof the Philosophical Sciences, created by Renato Parascandolo forRAI Radiotelevisione Italiana (RAI Educational) under the patron-age of UNESCO, the scientific coordination of the Istituto Italianoper gli Studi Filosofici, and the editorial board of the Istituto dellaEnciclopedia Italiana. It was translated from the French by MelanieCanard.

not be adopted by every anthropologist and on my partresults from the fact that I am an Americanist and Amer-icanists are constantly confronted with the observationthat we have destroyed our own object of study or, inany event, reduced its proportions. Thus we constantlyapproach the South American Indian with both the at-titude of the scientific researcher, trying to be objective,and the consciousness of being part of a civilization thathas committed a kind of unpardonable sinin my opin-ion the greatest sin ever committed in the history ofhumanity, which is to have destroyed or attempted todestroy half of the richness of humankind.

MM: I entirely agree. Lets move on to Structural An-thropology [1963(1958)]. It is hard to imagine anothertext that has evoked such deep reverberations in the hu-man sciences. I would like to invite you to reconsidersome of its main issues, beginning with the method andespecially with the analysis of the conditions that yousee as underlying the convergence of linguistics andanthropology.

CLS: I believe that what you are calling the reverbera-tions of Structural Anthropology were essentially theproduct of historical circumstances. Basically, structuralthought was very little known in France, probably evenamong philosophers themselves, and it was simplychance that made me the vehicle for bringing the struc-turalism of its masters Trubetskoi and Jakobson home

420 F current anthropology

to France. For my colleagues, my contemporaries, it wasobviously something new, but my role in that was almosta passive one.

MM: No, no, I disagree! The chapters devoted to magicand religion seem to me to have opened new horizons,and the one on symbolic efficacy raised, among others,a fundamental issue. The world of symbolism, you said,is infinitely various in its content but always limited byits laws. Could you clarify your speculative itinerary inthis regard?

CLS: I have been gifted with a very poor memory, andold age is not going to improve it, so reconstructing anitinerary is extremely difficult for me. I would say thatit arose from contacts that I had when I was veryyoungstill in high schoolwith psychoanalysis. It sohappened that the father of one of my high-school friendswas one of the first psychoanalysts, and he encouragedme to read psychoanalysis even though I was only in myfirst year of high school. I was fascinated by what to meis Freuds fundamental contributionthe possibility ofrationally understanding things that are entirely irra-tionalbut at the same time uncomfortable with thecontent of psychoanalysis, since I have come to conceiveof the unconscious activity of the mind less as an activitybased on memories from before or after birth than asessential rules of functioningwhich was what linguis-tics has taught me. Thus what you are talking about, Ithink, comes from an intersection between what psy-choanalysisor, more exactly, the reading of Freudbrought me and what I learned from structurallinguistics.

MM: Structural Anthropology gave rise to a great debateabout the line of demarcation between ethnology andhistory. People objected that this delimitation of rolesseemed to preclude any integration of ethnology and his-tory. How did you respond to this criticism?

CLS: I answered that there was a misunderstanding basedon dates. The article in question was first published in1949 and dealt with the state of traditional history beforethe advent of the Annales school, and so it tried to es-tablish a kind of contrast but at the same time a com-plementarity. Even in that article I said, if I remembercorrectly, that neither history nor ethnology can do any-thing without the other, but in any event I showed thattraditional history and ethnology adopted different andcomplementary points of view. But, of course, since thattime a lot of things have changed: historians have be-come interested in ethnological work that they used todespise. We mustnt forget that even Durkheim, in hisearly years, mistrusted ethnologists (and they made himtheir target). Now I would say that history and ethnologyare the same thing, with the slight difference that westudy societies spread out in space whereas history stud-ies societies spread out in time. Our work is entirelycomparable and mutually fertilizing.

MM: Yes, yes. Now lets talk about The Savage Mind[1966(1962)], which is in my opinion the richest in ideasof all your works. In contrast with evolutionism, youmaintain that so-called primitive thought is thought inthe full sense of the word because it is based on the samerequirement of order that is at the root of all thoughtand it is in terms of that requirement that one evaluatesthe function of the sacred and of ritual. Would you mindillustrating your position in this regard?

CLS: The Savage Mind is actually inseparable from an-other, smaller book entitled Totemism [1963(1962)]; forpractical reasons we had to separate them. Those twoworks represent a turning point in my thought. Up tillthen I had been almost exclusively concerned with prob-lems of marriage and kinship, and when I became partof the Religious Sciences Department of the Ecole desHautes Etudes I began to be interested in mythology.Thus I had undergone a kind of conversion, and my ob-jective in The Savage Mind was, on the one hand, as youjust said, to place the thought of people without writingand that of so-called civilized people in some sort ofequality, on the same plane, but at the same time toresolve a contradiction that had obsessed me from child-hoodthe opposition traced by European philosophicalthought between the perceptible and the intelligible. Forme, with my extremely changeable tastes, passionatelyfond of art, objects, plants, and animals, and receiving aCartesian education in philosophy class, this was an op-position that was hard to resolve. I tried to resolve it byturning to a kind of thought that seemed to me both ofthe same quality and on the same level as ours but forwhich this opposition did not exist, having been resolvedwithout any difficulty, because it built intelligible sys-tems on its sense perceptions. This was in a sense apreface to my work on myths.

MM: Yes, yes. In The Savage Mind you present magicalthought not as a beginning but as a well-articulated sys-tem, and thus the opposition set up by evolutionismbetween magic and science loses its importance.

CLS: No, I dont want to exaggerate, I dont want todistort my thought: I have, after all, great respect for anda deep belief in scientific thought.

MM: But at the same time you have great respect formagical thought . . .

CLS: Yes, yes, but I have to admit that scientific thoughtworks and magical thought doesnt, that it was an at-temptactually, I am wrong in placing it in the past,because magic still exists and all of us are magical inone way or another. But the idea that humankind, whichis part of nature (we were talking about that few minutesago), could at the same time, by its actions and its words,behave like nature was not an absurd idea. It was an ideathat made sense to me.

MM: Yes, and a very innovative one, it has to be added.

Volume 42, Number 3, June 2001 F 421

In the chapter devoted to the logic of totemic classifi-cation, you say that theoretical knowledge is not incom-patible with feeling, and you add that taxonomy andfriendship tend to meet in primitive thought. This is afascinating subject. Would you mind talking about it alittle more?

CLS: You know, for a long time we thought that prim-itive languages were inferior in their structure and modeof expression to ours, but in this we were ignoring ordisregarding the attention they paid to concrete realities.Did you know that Inuktitut, the language of the peopleonce called Eskimos and now called Inuit, contains 60different words for different states of snow? Well, this issomething that is also found in all our technical andprofessional languages. And at the same time we wereoverlooking the fact that these languages are capable ofabstraction just as ours are. For example, certain Amer-ican languages from the Northwest Coast use abstractterms where we would use concrete ones. For example,instead of saying, The woman puts a huge quantity ofleaves into a small basket, they say, The woman putsa huge quantity of leaves into the smallness of a basket,and so on. These are languages, then, that can distinguishand classify, on the one hand, and on the other hand donot, for all that, make an abstraction of the link betweenhumankind and natural realities. And if one gathers afood plant, one has a word to refer to it, but this doesnot prevent one from making an offering to its spirit tobe forgiven for having taken it.

MM: Let me say a word about the famous quarrel youhad with Sartre: it seems to me that over the years thisquarrel has assumed paradigmatic significance. It seemsto me to embody the contrast between a system ofthoughtyoursthat is capable of understanding andappraising diversity and another system, ultimately eth-nocentric, that is not. Do you agree?

CLS: I do not want to appear to be among those whoconsider Sartre passe. I respect and admire him; I con-sider him a genius for his abilitywhich unfortunatelyI lack completelyto express himself in various ways,through philosophy, fiction, theater, and so on. Thatseems to me admirable. However, you speak of a quarrel:there was no real quarrel. Sartre was not much interestedin what I said in The Savage Mind, and he thoughthesaid so two or three timesthat I did not understand hisCritique de la raison dialectique [Sartre 1960]. It wascompletely coincidental that Sartres book, in which heattacked anthropology and was contemptuous of exoticpeoples, appeared while I was writing The Savage Mind,and as an anthropologist I had a duty to respond to it. Iwas giving a seminar on the book at the Ecole des HautesEtudes, and the two things collided.

MM: The Savage Mind is a kind of prelude to the seriesentitled Mythologiques. I am thinking, for example,about your definition of mythical thought as intellectual

bricolage. Do you mind if we talk about The Raw andthe Cooked [1969(1964)]?

CLS: Its my pleasure.

MM: Ill begin with a personal reflection about the wholetetralogy [Mythologiques] and also The Jealous Potter[1988(1985)], The Story of Lynx [1995(1991)], and others.Thanks to the depth of your analysis, we have replacedthe very vague idea of myth with the notion of mythicalthought, the properties of which are well defined. Thisfirst essential and lasting result is one that transcendsall the criticism and controversy aroused by the noveltyof your analysis. Do you agree?

CLS: Ill answer that indirectly. When you came to seeme for the first time the day before yesterday, youbrought me a book that you had just written, and I im-mersed myself in it. Your own analysis in that bookseems fascinatingI leave that asideand in additionyou present a synthesis of the Italian masters thoughton the history of religion. I knew them a little, and fromreading you I can see better why they were hard for meto understand: it is because they talk about myths andthe sacred but do not push their reflection far enoughabout what these things are. They take them for granted.And what I tried to do is to begin, before speculatingabout mythology or religion or about a particular my-thology in one part of the world, by asking what a mythreally is, what it is made of. In other words, before askingwhat role my watch might play in my emotionallifemaking me very impatient when an appointmentis late, eager when the woman I love is about to arriveIwould open the watch, take it apart, and see how itsinsides work. Here I tried to take myths seriously andtell myself that they were objects and objects that re-quired long and very patient analysis.

MM: Yes, I entirely agree! Then, mythology and music:we can start with your very beautiful dedication to mu-sicyou remember, music the mother of memories,the nourisher of dreamsmusic, you say, and my-thology are both time-canceling machines. This idea isvery exciting, and I ask you to develop it.

CLS: I would say that it is almost a consequence of thelinks I was trying to create between them. But in speak-ing of a time-canceling machine I wasnt trying to sayanything profound or important. I only wanted to saythat what is important for understanding a myth is notfollowing the progress of the story but recognizing thatit is made up of superposed slices like the parts of a scoreand therefore has to be grasped outside the linear timethat we are accustomed to, just as when we have reallylistened to a piece of music our memory reassembles thephrases we have heard into a whole. I dont think thereis any philosophical message here!

MM: But I think its a very beautiful formulation!


CLS: Yes, but its a purely technical remark.

MM: Technical but nonetheless fascinating! The struc-tural analysis of myths offers a possibility that is of con-siderable speculative interest, that of gaining access toa dimension in which the mind is, in a way, reduced tomimicking itself as an objectan object among objects.Do you want to talk about this important subject?

CLS: Well, I would say that it is part of the program Iseem to have followednot something I planned butsomething that just happened. In fact I began to studyingthe rules of marriage and of kinship systems, that is,creations, of course, of the mind but subject to practicaland experiential constraintssince there are men andwomen in different proportions and of different ages andall this produces constraints. And when I turned to thestudy of myths it was, in a way, to test the theoreticalideas I had developed earlier by saying that if we are ina domain where empirical constraints are relatively un-importantwhere the mind is apparently completelyfree, so free that we usually consider the plots of mythsabsurd, unbelievable, and impossible and it is as if themind were given free rein and no longer under any kindof controlthen if I find constraints in that domain,where they are not supposed to be, it means that theyreally exist. It was Tylor, one of our great predecessorsor even founding fathers, who said that if there are lawsanywhere they must be everywhere.

MM: The Finale of The Naked Man [1981(1971)] fas-cinated me very much. This book concludes your te-tralogy, and looking back at the huge work you haveproduced you write a very articulate assessment of it.This final reflection has to do with the primordial op-position between being and nothingness that is thesource of all the other oppositions contained in myths.It is a famous oppositionthe to be or not to be pro-nounced by Hamletand you add, Between being andnothingness it is not humankinds place to choose.Would you mind explicating your point of view?

CLS: Here Im going to respond directly: no! Because atthe end of that work I allowed myself a kind of daydream,and I would be at a loss to comment on it. Like the mindin myths I gave myself free rein, and I wrote some sen-tences that probably arent worth very much and dontmean much either, except that at the end of this enter-prise I had a sense of its vacuitya sense that reducingthousands of myths to a sort of common form was alittle bit, on an infinitesimal scale, reducing the story ofhumankind itself, with its many different cultures andcivilizations, which, in apparently irreducible forms allmeant the same thing and which, like the myths, willone day disappear without a tracea kind of pessimisticreaction at the end of a very long effort that I realizedprobably had no real justification except the one I hadalways given myself, of never being bored!

MM: This time I disagree! I think that the end of The

Naked Man is the most beautiful part of your tetralogy.This time the author is not the best judge of his work.

CLS: The author is never the best judge, in my opinion.

MM: Well, now we can move on to Anthropologie struc-turale deux [1973], which, once again, gives a generalpicture of your system of thought and your method. Theessay devoted to Rousseau, Jean-Jacques Rousseau fon-dateur des sciences de lhomme, is in my opinionandI am not alone in thisone of your most important texts.Saussure and Rousseau are your privileged references.Would you mind talking about your discovery of the phi-losophy of Rousseau, the most ethnographer of philos-ophers, as you call him?

CLS: You know, the text you are talking about is a speechI gave in Geneva on the occasion of Rousseaus 250thanniversary. I feel a little uncomfortable about it, how-ever, because my position on Rousseau has evolved overthe years. As an adolescent I was essentially interestedin Rousseaus writing stylethe way he expressed him-self was always extremely attractive to me because ofhis ability to say very concisely what today we can ex-press only with very complicated circumlocutions. Be-sides, his ethnographic work and field experience amongthe people and in the countryside were very important.We mustnt forget that Rousseau was a field man, andthis seems decisive for the birth of the human sciences.We are always being told that for Rousseau humankindwas naturally good, that humankind in the state of na-ture had been perverted by civilization, and so on, butthis is completely wrong. When one reads Rousseau care-fully it is clear that this is not what he wanted to say atall. He distinguishes first a state of nature in which hu-mankind was neither good nor bad, judgments and cri-teria of morality not having yet arisen. This was hu-manity in a zero state. Then came the first state ofsociety, the one that today we identify with the Neolithic(although these categories did not exist in Rousseaustime), which, for him, because it was reduced to essen-tials, was really the best. Then, because of demographicexpansion and the invention of the mechanical arts andcivilization, there was a second state of society, and thisone corrupted humankind compared with the previousone. And all of this was expressed in Rousseau, naturallyin a language that is no longer ours and with some con-jectures that we could criticize today, but this viewseems to me, for his time, the most profound that hadyet been suggested and veritably establishes Rousseau asthe founder of the human sciences.

Now, let me explain what made me move away fromRousseau later. It was his political thought, which gaverise to the French Revolution and, in a way, atomizedthe individual in relation to the sovereign principle, thatis, the community. And I became increasingly aware ofthe importance for a well-balanced societyand thisbrings me closer to the tradition of Montesquieu ratherthan Rousseauof the existence of intermediary bodiesthat create a succession of screens, of moderating buffers,


between public power and individuals. Thus my admi-ration for Rousseau is in many respects intact, but hispolitical thought proper does not seem to me as . . .

Of course, I could say that what appeals to me aboutLe contrat social is the difficulty of the text, which con-stantly forces one to think about what exactly Rousseauhad in mind and wanted to say. And actually, it is onlya fragment of a book he never wrote, isnt it?

MM: Beyond the reference to Rousseau, it seems to methat your work is deeply rooted in French culture buttranscends it. In the field of anthropology Marcel Maussrepresents for you a very significant reference point.Would you mind talking about your relationship withMauss and especially about the link between the Essaisur le don [1954] and The Elementary Structures ofKinship?

CLS: Marcel Mauss is someone I didnt know very well.I never took a course from him, because my program wasentirely philosophical and it was only after entering intoprofessional life that I turned to ethnology. And when Ihad the opportunity to go to Brazil, Dr. [Paul] Rivet, whowas the founder of the Museum of Man and for whomI was to gather specimens for its collection, sent me tomeet Mauss, who welcomed me kindly, but I only sawhim a few times. It was less his person than his workthat was decisive for me. My reading of the Essai sur ledon was a kind of revelation. I wrote that sometimes inreading it I had the same feeling that Malebranche musthave had in reading Descartes for the first time, and therewere two main reasons for this. The first was his abilityto assemble facts from entirely different times and placesand compare them not with the old comparative method,which is content with only superficial resemblances, butby bringing them together for analysis in depth. And thatwas a methodological idea, and therefore, I supposeIdidnt know this at the timeone of the essential basesof structuralist thought, although Mauss was certainlynot consciously a structuralist. And then this foundationthat Mauss established about social relations andexchange and reciprocity was illuminating for me be-cause he was doing scientific research aimed primarilyat social relations. And this study of invariants, whichI probably owe in large part to Mauss, as well as to Saus-sure and Jakobson, is the basis of my thought.

MM: You dedicated Anthropologie structurale deux toEmile Durkheim on the centenary of his birth. In yourvery beautiful dedication, you declared yourself an in-constant disciple of the founder of lAnnee sociologique.What did you mean by that?

CLS: You have to understand that when I was studyingat the Sorbonne, where naturally I heard a lot aboutDurkheim, my bachelors degree was in ethics and so-ciology. At the time, I have to admit, I was not at allinterested in ethnology. My interest in it developed whenI started reading English and American authors and peo-ple who had direct experience of fieldwork, and it is

thanks to them that I really came to understand whatethnology was. And so at the time I felt hostile to Durk-heim, and then, subsequently, precisely by reading withgreat pleasure the works based on fieldwork, I realizedthat Durkheim had understood everything, or nearly ev-erything, about Australian societies even before field-work had confirmed what, in a way, he had intuitivelyguessed from the first field studies. But my Australiancolleagues are the first to pay homage to Durkheim todayby saying, He understood long before us many thingsthat we have since rediscovered. And so I wanted tomake up for my youthful infidelity to Durkheimsthought by joining his ranks again.

MM: In the essay entitled Ce que lethnologie doit a`Durkheim you underline the fundamental importanceof Les formes elementaires de la vie religieuse [Durk-heim 1912], the work that was in a way the origin ofethnology as a discipline. If I am not mistaken, this workdoes not seem to be considered a classic. What do youthink about that?

CLS: The Formes elementaires has two aspects: a re-flection, as I have just said, on Australian societies andtheir beliefsand here, as Ive told you, the most modernAustralianists pay homage to Durkheimand a muchlarger project of reconstructing how religious belief mayhave arisen. Now, obviously, one can no longer agree!

MM: Lets move on to The View from Afar [1985(1983)].I will limit myself for the moment to the last part. Theunifying thread in the various essays is the relation be-tween constraint and freedom. You say that there is noopposition between the two, that instead they supporteach other. Can you explain?

CLS: I have the feeling that to have sense and contentfreedom cannot exist in a vacuumthat it is always amatter of having experienced an obstacle of some kindand managed to overcome it. And nothing could be moreapt than the words of my colleague and friend RolandBarthes in his inaugural lecture at the Colle`ge de France:Language is fascist. Why? Because language has lawsand constraints. And it is because language has laws andconstraints that we can have such beautiful poetry,which consists precisely in using those constraints andknowing how to overcome them in every domain. TheView from Afar has a little more polemic, perhaps be-cause it is more directed at the contemporary world.Some of my contemporaries have a tendency to say thatwe need freedom everywhere, that a child needs to ex-press himself exactly as he wants and all constraints, allobstacles are harmful. I wanted to react against all ofthat and say that painting is fighting against brushes,tubes of paint, and canvas and intellectual or philosoph-ical work is a kind of fight against wrong ideas or biasin the minds of ones contemporaries.

MM: I want to ask you just one last question, because Idont want to impose on your kindness! I read Race et


culture [1983(1971)] with interest. Would you mindcomparing it with your famous essay Race and History[1952]?

CLS: Well, those are two separate texts, I believe, witha distance of 20 years between them, but they have some-thing in common because they were both commissionedby UNESCO. Race and History was for a collection oflittle books about the race question, and in it I tried toexplain why the notion of race was unacceptable. It be-came almost a little catechism against racism. It istaught in schools, and every year high-school studentscall me and say, We have to write an essay about Raceand History and we dont understand it. Can you explainit? Reading it like that, however, involves only half ofit, because while I was trying to explain why the notionof race was unacceptable I was also trying to show thedangers that are associated with a standardization thatcould lead to antiracist bias, and that hasnt been seenat all! Then, 20 years later, UNESCO asked me to do aconference to inaugurate an International Year AgainstRacism, probably thinking that I would repeat the samecatechism that they remembered from the first book. Idont like to repeat myself, and in addition a lot hadhappened in the preceding 20 yearsnotably the emer-gence and development of population genetics, whichmade collaboration between anthropologists and biolo-gists possible once again. It was impossible in the timeof the old physical anthropology, which involved mea-suring skulls and imagining that civilization was basedon differences between lengths and widths of skulls. Andso I tried, on the one hand, to accentuate what had notbeen seen in Race and History and, on the other hand,to take into account the progress that had been madewith regard to this possible collaboration. This was ex-traordinarily poorly received by UNESCO, which had thefeeling that I was completely betraying myself comparedwith what I had said before. LHumanite, the newspaperof the Communist party, quoted a passage to show howLevi-Strauss has changed, but this passage was word forword in Race and History!

MM: So, the people at UNESCO tried to prevent youfrom speaking?

CLS: Not exactly, but they managed to preface my in-tervention with another speech that was so long that Ihad to shorten mine considerably!

MM: Thats a very terrible kind of censorship! But youdid manage to speak?

CLS: I managed to speak, and UNESCO finally publishedthe speech.

MM: Really! So it was a real success after all! Now toconclude, Paroles donnees [1984], a text I really like, atext that documents your teaching activities: I wouldlike to conclude this interview by thinking about thefinal part of your last course at the Colle`ge de France.

You take your leave by underlining the efficacy of a prin-ciple that is the leitmotiv of your work: in your opinionthe principal mission of ethnology is to see to it that wehave irreplaceable testimonies to the richness and di-versity of humankind, and so I ask you to devote yourlast response to the fundamental value of this richnessand diversity.

CLS: It is always perilous for someone very old to expresshimself pessimistically about the present. This vice wasdenounced a long time ago by Horace and continues tobe so today, but a very long life has made me nearlycoincide with my century, and when because of that peo-ple ask me, What is for you the event of the century?I can only give one answer: at the beginning of the cen-tury humanity was a billion and a half people, when Istarted my active life nearby 1930 it was two billion,today it is six billion, and even if demographic expansionslows down, as we are promised it will, or perhaps com-pletely stops, it will be even more in 20, 30, or 40 years.And this is, for me, the major event, the absolute catas-trophe that has befallen humanity in an epoch I havehad, from this point of view, the misfortune to experi-ence. And what attracts me to ethnology, what has madeit my lifes work, is precisely that it confronts the rich-ness and diversity of which the weak effective force ofhumankind was perhaps a sort of prerequisite. A pastextending back centuries and millennia and hundreds ofmillennia to the time when humankind began has pre-sented us with small societies that were to become verynumerous, each of which gave rise to original ways oflife, irreplaceable beliefs, forms of oral or pictorial orsculptural expression constituting something unique inhuman experience, and my role as an ethnographer was,to the extent that these have survived until the past oneor two centuries and we can approach them through textsand objects and direct experience in fieldwork, to pre-serve something of this richness and diversity so thathumankind in other forms, forms absolutely differentfrom those that existed in the past, will be acquaintedwith them.

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religieuse. Paris: Alcan.m a u s s , m a r c e l . 1954. The gift. Translated by Ian Cunnison.

Glencoe: Free Press.l e v i - s t r a u s s , c l a u d e . 1958. Race and history. Paris:

UNESCO.. 1963 (1962). Totemism. Translated by Rodney Needham.

Boston: Beacon Press.. 1963 (1958). Structural anthropology. Translated by

Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf. Chicago: Uni-versity of Chicago Press.

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. 1969 (1954). The raw and the cooked. Translated by Johnand Doreen Weightman. New York: Harper and Row.

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Neugroschel and Phoebe Hoss. New York: Basic Books.. 1988 (1985). The jealous potter. Translated by Benedicte

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The Epidemiology of InfectiousDiseases among South AmericanIndians: A Call for Guidelines forEthical Research

magdalena hurtado, kim hill ,hillard kaplan, and jane lancasterDepartment of Anthropology, University of NewMexico, Albuquerque, N.M. 87131, U.S.A.([email protected]). 2 ii 01

With alarming frequency, the native peoples of SouthAmerica continue to become victims of neglect andabuse. Such incidents rarely come to public attention,and in the few instances in which we learn about themremedial action is rarely taken. Who is to blame for thisand what can be done to prevent the extinction of in-digenous groups during the 21st century are simple ques-tions for some social criticsnotably Patrick Tierney,author of the recent and much publicized book Darknessin El Dorado (2000). Unfortunately, Tierneys journal-istic enthusiasm for sensational allegations directed at afew individuals trivializes the complex causes of theplight of the regions native peoples (Hurtado 1990) anddraws attention away from the kind of analysis that canproduce lasting solutions.

One of Tierneys most serious charges is that medicalscientists and anthropologists caused epidemics amongthe Yanomamo of Venezuela over 30 years ago. Journal-ists are not trained to decide such things; epidemiologistsare, and they are unlikely to claim to know what causedan epidemic many years after it took place. They find itdifficult enough to do so in the midst of an epidemic.The work is very time-consuming and costly and re-

2001 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Re-search. All rights reserved 0011-3204/2001/4203-0005$1.00

quires experts from multiple public health disciplineswith a great deal of experience in collecting and analyz-ing valid and accurate quantitative data. We may neverknow the who, when, and how of the origins of the mea-sles and malaria epidemics of the mid-1960s in Yano-mamo communities, just as we may never know why ameasles epidemic broke out among Angaite communi-ties in the Paraguayan Chaco in January of this year (Ul-tima Hora, January 15, 2001). What we do know is thatthe vast majority of epidemics occur when medical sci-entists and anthropologists are absent from thesecommunities.

Tierneys charges could have disastrous consequences.They may give policy makers the false impression thatthe causes of the poor health of the Yanomamo and otherindigenous people are easy for journalists and others toidentify. Policy makers so deceived are likely to proposeand implement policies that deny South American In-dians the right to epidemiological and medical researchand intervention. Without adequate knowledge nativepeoples will not receive the medical care they so des-perately need, and without medical care their health willcontinue to deteriorate, their economic productivity willcontinue to decline, and their health will deteriorate fur-ther (Psacharopoulos and Patrinos 1994).

What policy makers need to be made aware of is themany reasons for the poor health of indigenous peoplethroughout South America. Among the most importantinsults to indigenous well-being are the complacent andracist attitudes of government officials who approvemeager budget allocations for indigenous public healthprograms, fail to punish rampant embezzlement ofscanty funds, and promote proposals that violate nativeland rights (Centeno 1997). Such complacency intensi-fies the negative effects on native health of biologicalhost factors such as low genetic diversity and poor im-mune-responsiveness to infectious agents. Even thougha great deal has been published about these and otherbiological insights since the 1970s (CIBA Foundation1979), they are generally overlooked by those who planpublic health programs or draft guidelines for field re-search. Consequently, most South American native com-munities today have not benefited from the scientificresearch that has been done among them. If indigenousgroups have become increasingly hostile to scientists, itis not because medical scientists and anthropologistscause health problems but because these professionalsare not helping enough to prevent new problems or toremedy existing ones.

Anthropologists and medical scientists need to beaware of the complex causes of poor health among SouthAmerican natives in order to make a difference over thelong term. Similar biological and social factors influenceindigenous health regardless of the number of years thatnative peoples have lived in close interaction with out-siders, but they do so in different ways depending on thelevel of acculturation. We will discuss these factors andprovide examples of their effects on indigenous healthduring contact and thereafter. We will go on to arguethat this knowledge needs to become part of the process


of developing guidelines for field research. Field scien-tists who provide little if any medical help are now atrisk of being accused of exploiting South American In-dians as research subjectsadvancing their careers with-out any concern for their subjects well-being. This in-terpretation may be correct in some circumstances butnot in others, and at present we lack ways to make thisimportant distinction. This is partly because there areno internationally sanctioned guidelines that clearlyspecify what constitutes an ethical response to localhealth problems. Without such standards, anyone whowishes to can easily damage the work of others by ac-cusing them of failing to abide by rules of behavior thatthey unilaterally decide to be ethical. At the same time,anyone who chooses to be apathetically negligent can doso at will. We will suggest six specific areas of field re-search that require immediate attention by the AmericanAnthropological Association (AAA). The current guide-lines for fieldwork developed by the AAA Committee onEthics require only doing no harm to the study popula-tion, but this is no longer sufficient with native popu-lations. It is time to be specific about what constitutessufficient concern and action.

Because we are citizens of the United States and teachat a public university in the United States, we addressour remarks to our national anthropological organiza-tion, the American Anthropological Association. We rec-ognize that similar debates are taking place in other na-tional anthropological and academic organizations in theUnited States, government agencies in Latin Americancountries (El Nacional, November 24, 2000), and variousorganizations in other continents.

epidemiology of infectious disease

The epidemiological profiles of South American indig-enous groups vary in complex ways across time andspace. This diversity has to be viewed against the back-ground of the host factors that their members have incommon. Ironically, James Neel, a scientist accused byTierney of genocide among the Yanomamo, is one of themain contributors to our current understanding of dis-ease susceptibility in these populations (Neel 1971, 1974,1977). Among other factors, susceptibility appears to beinfluenced by low genetic diversity (Black 1990, 1994)and macroparasite-induced immune defense (Sousa et al.1997).

Lack of genetic diversity is sometimes associated withhigher rates of susceptibility to all sorts of illnesses (Car-rington et al. 1999, McNicholl et al. 2000, Turner et al.2000, Zlotogora 1997). On average, indigenous peopleshave much less heterogeneity in the highly polymorphicloci that control the immune system, the Class I and IIhistocompatibility antigens (MHC) and the immuno-globulin allotype genes (Black 1994).

The negative effects of homozygosity on native healthmay be intensified by parasite loads on immune defenseagainst bacteria, mycobacteria, and viruses. Most indig-enous groups of South America tend to be chronicallyinfested with macroparasites such as Necator ameri-

canus and Ascaris lumbricoides (Salzano 1988, Hurtadoet al. 1997), and they also tend to produce immunoglob-ulin IgE at some of the highest levels ever reported forindividuals who do not suffer from extremely serious andsometimes lethal anaphylaxis (Hurtado et al. 1999). In-digenous persons with abnormally high levels of IgE arehealthy and active members of their groups. IgE-drivendefense against parasites competes with defense againstinfectious diseases such as malaria and tuberculosis be-cause some pathways of immune defense against para-sites and against bacteria and viruses tend to be mutuallyexclusive (Beyers et al. 1998, Hurtado et al. 2001). Thesehigh levels of IgE production are only in part related toparasitic infestation, since nonindigenous populationsthat are equally parasitized show much lower IgE levels.

For the most part, enormous deficiencies in the publichealth systems of South American countries create con-ditions that further exacerbate the effects of suscepti-bility to infectious diseases. Most of these countries in-vest much smaller percentages of the gross nationalproduct in health than developed countries (Pan Amer-ican Health Organization 1994). Very small fractions ofthis investment are devoted to the health of indigenouspeople, and even these limited funds are often embezzledby government officials (ABC Color, July 15, 2000).

At the same time, international efforts to control dis-ease are hampered by local problems of distribution andsurveillance. For example, Paraguay is notorious for thevery high rates of tuberculosis its indigenous commu-nities suffer. Unfortunately, the sources of this infor-mation are rural and missionary nurses as opposed to thegovernment-mandated national surveillance officialswho are responsible for tracking these epidemics (Hur-tado et al. 2001). Cases are rarely treated or are treatedin ways that promote drug-resistant tuberculosis (Frie-den et al. 1993, Farmer et al. 2000). When ParaguaysNational Commission of Tuberculosis Control receivesa shipment of tuberculosis medications, it generallykeeps them in the capital city or, when it makes themavailable to rural and indigenous communities, does sowithout the kind of direct observed treatment programthat ensures completion of drug regimens (AmericanThoracic Society et al. 1992). For these and other reasonsprophylactic and prompt curative treatment of tuber-culosis is not an option for most Indians in Paraguay. Tobe treated, they have to wait until they develop activetuberculosisthat is, until they have contaminated fam-ily and friends with the airborne bacilli produced bychronic cough.

When scientists bring such disheartening observationsto the attention of local officials, they often respond thattheir (inadequate) surveillance systems show no suchpattern and claim that in fact infectious disease rates arelow among indigenous communities.1 Most officials ei-ther fail to realize or are unwilling to admit that, whilemany sectors of society benefit from the epidemiological

1. We base these conclusions on the fieldwork experiences of threeof us (Hurtado, Hill, Kaplan) in Paraguay, Peru, and Venezuela overthe past 20 years.


surveillance systems mandated to generate informationthat is used to justify public health expenditures, indig-enous communities are almost entirely excluded fromthese systems because of their remote location and cul-tural barriers. As a consequence, the knowledge that sci-entists wish to share with officials about disease ratesand disease prevention is infrequently if ever used toinform policy.

Thus, it appears that host factors such as homozygos-ity and high IgE production, among others, in combi-nation with social factors such as lack of epidemiologicalsurveillance and limited if any access to well-timed vac-cinations, sanitation, and medical treatment, cause highrates of infectious diseases among South American in-digenous groups. These factors influence the epidemio-logical profiles of indigenous groups with little if anyadmixture regardless of the number of years that theyhave lived in close proximity to non-Indians.

the devastating epidemiological effects ofcontact

Tierney is correct in stating that the past 500 years ofcontact between Native Americans and people of Eu-ropean descent have had disastrous consequences for theformer. Epidemics have killed millions. Typically, firstface-to-face contacts result in the death of between one-third and half of the native population within the firstfive years of contact (Hill and Hurtado 1996, CIBA Foun-dation 1979). The majority of South American Indiangroups were exterminated in this way during the firsttwo centuries after European arrival in the Americas(Hemming 1978). Unfortunately, the lessons of half amillennium have not resulted in any significant im-provement. If a group of native South Americans thathad been living in isolation for some time were to makecontact today, the result would probably be equallycatastrophic.

In Brazil alone, there are still some 3050 groups livingisolated from face-to-face contact with people of Euro-pean or African descent (the National Indian Foundation[FUNAI] estimated 55 uncontacted tribes two years ago[Veja, June 10, 1998]). Others exist in Peru and Boliviaand perhaps in Venezuela, Ecuador, and Colombia. Asglobal economic, social, and population forces drive peo-ple into remote areas for the purposes of colonizationand resource exploitation, contact is inevitable, but thereis no contingency planning for managing its medical,economic, and social consequences.

Remote peoples in South America face three majorthreats. First, woodcutters, miners, colonists, mission-aries, and even representatives of government-sponsoredorganizations are entering their traditional ranges in in-creasing numbers. Face-to-face contacts with somemembers of remote groups will occur as a result of theseincursions. Eventually one or more of those contacts willresult in the transfer of disease organisms to individualswith little resistance to them. Epidemics will ensue,even among people who never actually come into con-tact with people of European descent, since the natural

response to disease among mobile peoples is to flee toneighboring villages or camps. Second, the habitats ofremote peoples are shrinking rapidly. As more areas arecolonized, the available habitat to support subsistenceis increasingly circumscribed and may eventually be in-sufficient to support the nutritional needs of the group.In the short run, resource pressure can lead to nutritionalstress, disease, and both inter- and intragroup conflict.In the long run, it may result in loss of access to tradi-tional territories as colonists and others establish defacto or legal ownership of them. Third, many localgroups have become isolated from other members oftheir larger ethnic groups because of incursions into theirterritory. These isolated groups may be so small that theydo not constitute viable mating populations (Baruzzi etal. 1979). As a result, small demographic shocks can leadto their physical extinction even without epidemics.

Many anthropologists and indigenous-rights activistsbelieve that uncontacted Indians should be left alone.These people are well-meaning, but they are wrong be-cause they base their position on three incorrect as-sumptions. First, they assume that the Indians have cho-sen to remain isolated. They have not. What they havechosen is to avoid those they believe would kill, enslave,and abuse them. There is little doubt that most wouldimmediately opt for contact if they expected trade, af-fection, help, and support. Humans are a social speciesand enjoy productive interactions with neighboringgroups. Most isolated tribes have difficult lives (Hill andHurtado 1996). All the Indians that we have ever spokento gladly accept improvements in their physical condi-tions and health situation if offered by true friends. Noneare content with the typical 3050% child mortalityrates that they experience without Western medicine.As soon as it becomes clear to isolated natives that thoseattempting to contact them are peaceful and friendly andcan provide them with technology to ease some of theburdens of their lives, they virtually always initiate acontact.

Those who oppose contact also assume that the In-dians will inevitably be decimated by virgin-soil epidem-ics. This is not true. Two of us, Hill and Kaplan, havebeen present at contact sites within days of first contact.If competent medical care is available and consistentlypresent during the first five years following contact, fewcontact-related deaths need occur. The last band ofNorthern Ache foragers in Paraguay was contacted inApril 1978, and Hill began medical care of that group incollaboration with two missionary organizations withindays of contact. Only two small children out of a groupof 22 died within the first five years, and both had beenin poor health at contact. In 1979 another band of Achecontacted a missionary family that subsequently livedwith them in their traditional home range down to thepresent. Only one child from a group of 37 died withinthe first five years after contact. The key to survival aftercontact for these two groups was competent medical care24 hours a day, 365 days a year for several years.

Finally, opponents of contact assume that isolated na-tive groups will survive if not contacted. Population ge-


netics and demographic models clearly show that this isnot true. Most isolated populations of less than severalhundred are destined to become extinct through acci-dental population fluctuations. This process is muchmore rapid in small groups and in situations where tra-ditional territories have recently decreased in size. Al-most certainly many isolated groups became extinct inthe 20th century without ever making contact. In somecases one or two final survivors may be rescued at theend of such a decline.

Although we now have a body of scientific literatureon virgin-soil epidemics among native peoples, the rec-ord of years of missionary and governmental experience,and articles providing specific advice on contact situa-tions (e.g., Hill and Kaplan 1989), individuals and organ-izations making contact with isolated native groupsseem as uninformed as those 100 years earlier. Even well-meaning groups and individuals continue to ignore thisaccumulated knowledge. For example, the planned FU-NAI contact with the Korubo of Brazil in October 1996included 26 individuals who were not screened or quar-antined, including 8 journalists and their assistants, butno physicians. When outsiders suggested that the orig-inal team might have infected the Korubo, governmentofficials returned to the contact site for a few hours butwithout qualified medical personnel (see http://www.nationalgeographic.com/features/96/contact/index.html).

There is now sufficient documentation of the conse-quences of first contacts that we can no longer pleadignorance. The remaining isolated peoples in SouthAmerica should not suffer the same fate as those of theprevious 500 years. The American Anthropological As-sociation and other anthropological organizations shouldform a panel of experts now to develop policy on thisissue and advise pertinent government and missionaryorganizations. The enormous number of deaths that willresult from failure to act are preventable.

disease after contact

Contact is only the beginning of the problems that SouthAmerican Indians face. Sedentism, poverty, and poor ac-cess to health care, in addition to biological influenceson disease susceptibility, lead in many cases to deteri-oration of health status (Psacharopoulos and Patrinos1994). Conditions do not always improve immediatelyafter the initial period of contact. Among the Ache ofeastern Paraguay, in the first ten years after contact theinfant mortality rate was higher than prior to contact,and it has returned to precontact levels only recently(Hurtado and Hill 1996). In addition, the effects of novelinfectious pathogens such as Mycobacterium spp., Plas-modium spp., and numerous intestinal parasites haveinteracted in ways that have undermined the Aches pre-contact robustness. Since contact, the Ache have expe-rienced two malaria epidemics during which manyadults were unable to provide for their dependents. Theirdiet has changed dramatically as well, from one basedon plentiful animal protein to a nutrient-poor manioc-based diet. In fewer than five years tuberculosis became

a major source of health problems, and by 1994, only adecade after contact, the lifetime prevalence of activecases of tuberculosis among Northern Ache had in-creased from less than 1% to 18%. In addition, 50% ofindividuals over 15 years of age now test positive fortuberculosis infection (Hurtado 2000). Other hunter-gatherers have fared equally poorly. Among the Hiwi ofVenezuela, who made contact in 1957 and continue todepend on hunting and gathering for their subsistence,leprosy and violence (massacres and murders) have beensome of the main causes of morbidity and mortality sincethe 1960s.

Tuberculosis outcomes are an excellent example of theimportance of susceptibility to infectious diseases incombination with social factors many years after initialcontact. The Native American case is well-documented(Rieder 1989). By 1900, tuberculosis was the most serioushealth problem among North American Indians. Eventhough mortality, morbidity, and risk of infection havesharply decreased, the incidence rate among natives isstill 4.4 times higher than the rate of Americans of Eu-ropean descent (Centers for Disease Control 1987). In theSouth American countries with the highest prevalenceof tuberculosis, such as Bolivia and Peru, indigenous pop-ulations have been the hardest hit by this disease. Datafrom other countries suggest that many communitieswill be devastated by tuberculosis over the next decade.By 1992, the prevalence rates of tuberculosis exceeded1% among the Cuna of Panama, and most of those in-fected were not receiving any treatment (Caminero Luna1995). Even higher prevalence rates have been reportedfor indigenous groups of the Paraguayan Chaco over thepast decade (Galeano Jimenez 1995), and the rates ofcompliance with treatment are dismal, particularlyamong hunter-gatherers (Meincke-Giesbrecht, Floto, andHettwer 1993). Lastly, prevalence rates of tuberculosisinfection among the Shuar of Ecuador are comparablewith those of the Ache and are lowest in the commu-nities farthest from nonindigenous villages (Kroeger andBarbira-Freedman 1982).

The way in which indigenous populations mount im-mune defenses against bacterial pathogens is one ofmany host factors that may help explain high rates ofinfectious disease mortality not only at contact butmany years afterward. Sousa et al. (1997) studied Yano-mamo communities of Brazil that made contact in the1960s and found that the Yanomamo develop immunedefenses to tuberculosis infection different from those ofother populations. First, the prevalence rate here of 6.4%active cases of tuberculosis is considerably higher thanone would expect for a population exposed to the diseasefor fewer than 15 years, although it is still considerablylower than that observed among the Ache (Hurtado etal. 2001). Second, compared with their Brazilian neigh-bors the Yanomamo had higher titers of antibodiesagainst M. tuberculosis glycolipid antigens (14% versus1 70%). Thus, relative to other populations with expo-sure to tuberculosis, the Yanomamo mount unusuallyhigh antibody responses at the expense of the more ef-fective cell-mediated immune responses that are typi-


cally observed in nonindigenous people. Third, the ratesof tuberculosis infection as measured by tuberculin testsshow positive responses at much lower rates than onewould expect in a group with as high a prevalence ofactive cases27%, in contrast to the 90% reported forEskimos in the 1950s and only slightly lower than therate for the Ache (32%, all ages). In nonindigenous pop-ulations, lower than expected rates of positive tuberculintests tend to occur only in immunosuppressed individ-uals such as HIV patients. Thus, if left unchecked, tu-berculosis epidemics among the Yanomamo could havelong-term consequences as devastating as those of themeasles epidemics in the 1960s, particularly if activecases are left untreated or drug-resistant tuberculosis isallowed to emerge as a consequence of intermittenttreatment. In at least one case in South America, tuber-culosis has already exacted a huge toll. Six hundred ofthe 800 Surui who were alive at contact in 1980 had diedby 1986 from concurrent tuberculosis and other epidem-ics (Fleming-Moran, Santos, and Coimbra 1991).

Data on indigenous groups that are considerably moreacculturated than some of those just mentioned showthat the future of South American Indian populationsmany years after contact is bleak indeed. Recent studiesusing large samples indicate that indigenous people areoften less healthy than their rural peasant neighbors (Psa-charopoulos and Patrinos 1994). In South America, in-digenous people make up about 27% of the rural, andpoorest, population (Jazairy, Alamgir, and Panuccio1992). Moreover, indigenous infants and children havemuch higher mortality rates than their nonindigenouscounterparts in every country where these rates havebeen measured (Psacharopoulos and Patrinos 1994). InBolivia, monolingual urban indigenous peoples are twoto four times as likely to have been sick or injured inthe past 30 days, to have been kept from work for morethan a week, to have received no medical help if sick,and to have missed yellow-fever vaccination campaigns(p. 68). Child mortality rates here are three times as highamong monolingual indigenous mothers living in pov-erty as among nonindigenous mothers (p. 89). In Peru,indigenous people are less likely to have been vaccinatedagainst BCG, polio, and measles and more likely to havehad diarrhea in the past 15 days than the nonindigenouspoor (p. 166).

These are only a few examples of the devastating con-sequences of pathogens many years after contact. Thus,guidelines that specify the ways in which indigenouspeople should be protected from the ravages of diseaseneed to address both the contact and the postcontactperiod.

a call for action

The intent of international and national guidelines forresearch among native peoples should be to use funda-mental scientific understanding of infectious disease ep-idemiology to serve humanitarian ends (Eades and Read1999). Science can and should help indigenous peoplejust as it has helped the rest of the world. Recognizing

that it took 100 years for antituberculosis campaigns toreduce death rates from 2 to 0.001 per thousand personsin the United States (Hopewell 1999) and that this isonly one of innumerable examples of how science hasmanaged to reverse ills for all humanity, it is difficult tofathom why mortality rates among some South Ameri-can Indians can be as high today as they were 100 yearsago.

In spite of the enormous potential benefit to indige-nous communities, many have become increasingly un-willing to participate in scientific projects. In fact, manyIndians are suspicious that scientists intend not to helpbut to exploit them. One of the most important reasonsfor this rejection and suspicion is that for decades sci-entists have not adhered to fieldwork ethics that nativescan clearly identify as positive for their communities.This means that we need to reexamine fieldwork ethicsand develop stronger guidelines in several key areas.

Current guidelines for fieldwork developed by theAAA Committee on Ethics require only that the an-thropologist do no harm to the study population, leavingconsiderable room for interpretation as to what sorts ofconduct are indeed harmless. We suggest that ethicalbehavior goes beyond simply not harming to more proac-tive behavior. Six areas of field research that require care-ful consideration in expanding on current guidelines areas follows:2

1. Conduct and disease prevention during contact sit-uations. Tierney suggests that anthropologists and med-ical scientists should have taken preventive health mea-sures to avoid excess contact-related mortality inYanomamo communities. He does not specify what mea-sures, nor is he able to cite internationally sanctionedguidelines that do so. Something needs to be done soonby the AAA and other national and international an-thropological organizations to correct this problem. First,a commission must be established to evaluate the statusof existing isolated peoples. There is a great deal of in-formation already available through reports from privateindividuals and government officials who have visitedor live in remote areas. This information needs to beanalyzed and the status of each group evaluated. Whichgroups are under immediate threat of contact? What arethe likely sources of contact (miners, woodcutters, col-onists?) Which groups face probable extinction becauseof small population size in isolation? Such a commissionshould include experts in anthropology, physicians andpublic health administrators, and government officialswho are responsible for policy development with regard

2. Several of these recommendations, reviewed in an early draft ofthis manuscript, were incorporated into a motion passed by theExecutive Board at its meeting on November 16, 2000, during theAAA Annual Meeting. The motion charged the AAA Committeeon Ethics to consider developing draft guidelines to be included inthe Code of Ethics and/or to develop other materials regarding an-thropologists responsibility to provide assistance during healthemergencies, the fairness of remuneration and the impact of ma-terial assistance, the potential negative impact of factual data, andthe issue of informed consent. The motion was disseminated tothe AAA membership through electronic mail and published in theAnthropology Newsletter.


to native peoples. Second, policies on contact need to bedeveloped. Which groups can be protected from contact?Which groups should be approached and offered contactbecause they are likely to become extinct in the im-mediate future? How should contacts be managed inboth the long and the short term? Third, medical pro-tocols must be developed and financed. Rapid vaccina-tion and outreach medicine could bring contact-relatedmortality to less than 23% in the first year (Hill andHurtado 1996, Baruzzi et al. 1979). Since newly con-tacted peoples have no experience with health posts andWestern medicines, a nontraditional medical programmust be developed. Medical treatment must be deliveredwhenever and wherever it is required without relying onthe people themselves to seek it. Since isolated peoplesremain highly susceptible to foreign antigens for decades,such programs need to be permanently sustained.

2. Medical relief during health emergencies. Tierneycriticizes scientists and journalists for not spending moretime and resources fighting the Yanomamo measles ep-idemic and not getting more involved in alleviating ob-served health problems while doing fieldwork. The samecharge could be leveled at him and all other observers(e.g., journalists, tourists, missionaries, those who be-come informed through secondary accounts) who en-counter suffering but do not take sufficient action toalleviate it. Many anthropologists do provide health carefor study populations and other forms of economic as-sistance, sometimes at great cost to themselves. Otheranthropologists are uncomfortable with the notion thatthey are responsible for providing services that shouldbe the job of other organizations supposedly dedicatedto such things (e.g., governments, missionaries, andhealth and human rights organizations). Some sincerelyfeel that it is their job to observe and not to interfere inevents, and some simply lack the training to providehealth assistance to study populations. If anthropologistsare expected to provide health assistance, who will pro-vide the funds for medicines, medical training, and trans-portation and pay for lost work time? Should anthro-pologists lobby major funding agencies such as theNational Science Foundation and the National Institutesof Health to provide each research project with fundsthat can be diverted into such assistance? The AAA andother anthropological organizations need to consider thisissue. There are no clear answers, and every anthropol-ogist who has ever done fieldwork has been forced tomake difficult choices in this area.

3. Fairness of renumeration for research cooperation.Tierney suggests that Chagnon did little to help the Yan-omamo during his 25 years of research with them andthat the organization he created, the Yanomamo SurvivalFund, was intended to help only by providing data thatmight be useful to other groups assisting the Yanomamo.The lack of direct assistance to the Yanomamo com-munity appears to be a complaint voiced by many Yan-omamo critics of Chagnon. Again, the same criticismcould be aimed at nonanthropologists who make in-comes from native peoples (e.g., journalists, missionar-ies, staff members of indigenous rights organizations).

Many anthropologists base their entire careers on workdone on populations that are paid only direct informantfees during a fieldwork period. Because the lifetime earn-ings of a professional anthropologist (including salary,book and film royalties, etc.) are more substantial thaninformant fees, this opens anthropologists up to a chargeof exploitation of native peoples. This charge is rein-forced by the commonly held anthropological belief thatthe value of specific research results to the target pop-ulation is payment enough for the access and cooperationit provides. Most traditional populations, in contrast, seelittle practical value to the research results produced byanthropologists and medical scientists. The AAA andother anthropological organizations have never specifi-cally provided guidelines on the level of remuneration(beyond informant fees) that is appropriate and how thatremuneration should be linked to the earnings of re-searchers that result from their focus on a particularpopulation.

4. The impact of material assistance. Tierney accusesChagnon of fomenting violence by giving gifts to someYanomamo communities. Given that it is impossible togive equal material support to all communities or allindividuals at any field site, should anthropologists beheld responsible for jealousies and competition over re-sources that they distribute or the acts committed byindividuals who gain advantage through their materialrewards? This is a general dilemma faced by all organi-zations and agencies who provide material assistance togroups, including national governments. The implica-tion of Tierneys charge is that anthropologists shouldavoid conflict by giving no gifts at all. Most study pop-ulations would find that suggestion cruel and self-serv-ing, and the refusal to pay for services rendered wouldbe considered unethical behavior by many. But all re-searchers who do fieldwork need to consider the poten-tial impacts of their gifts on study populations, and theAAA and other anthropological organizations have noclear guidelines here.

5. The impact of factual data about a study popula-tion. Tierney criticizes Chagnon for publishing infor-mation and viewpoints about Yanomamo warfare thatdamage the reputation of the Yanomamo and can be usedby their enemies to justify denying them certain rightsand privileges. Chagnon counters that he is simply pub-lishing factual data and it would be deceitful and sci-entifically unethical to conceal or change them. TheAAA and other anthropological organizations have notadequately addressed this dilemma, and as a result thereare several other similar controversies in anthropology(e.g., reports of prehistoric cannibalism in the U.S.Southwest).

6. Informed consent. Tierney accuses a variety of re-searchers of collecting data without adequate informedconsent. A similar charge has recently been leveled atother anthropological researchers using native DNA(New Scientist 2000). Some scientists believe that in-formed consent consists only of an explanation of themethodology, the procedures used on study subjects, andthe potential dangers of those procedures. As long as this


information is provided and study subjects are notharmed or disenfranchised in any way, the consent islegitimate. Cultural anthropologists often obtain no in-formed consent for their studies but assume that if thecommunity tolerates their presence informed consent isimplied. At the other end of the spectrum, some peoplebelieve that informed consent includes not only an ex-planation of data collection methods but a detailed ex-planation of the research topics that will be examinedwith the data collected. If this view were taken literally,many studies could never be carried out (because in-forming subjects would change the character of the datagathered), and no post facto analysis of any field datacould ever be done (since subjects would not have beeninformed at the time that a particular use of the datawas contemplated). This version of informed consentwould probably eliminate behavioral research entirely(since the behavior of study subjects would always beaffected by knowing why they were being observed) andpreclude a huge number of useful scientific studies doneusing data initially collected for a different purpose. Fi-nally, no scientifically sophisticated study could ever bedone on a relatively uneducated population because itsmembers would not be able to give true informed con-sent (implying that they understood the purpose of theresearch). For example, no DNA studies could be doneon any population that did not know what DNA was orunderstand the basics of modern genetics. Both extremesof the informed-consent debate seem unfair or unreal-istic, but the AAA and other anthropological organiza-tions should provide some guidelines on what exactlyconstitutes valid informed consent in anthropologicalstudies. The same standards that apply to material datacollection (blood, DNA, etc.) should apply to the collec-tion of any information about a study group.

The success of the development of policies and guide-lines will depend in large part on the composition of theteams that are brought together to implement them.Members of indigenous communities, governmental andnongovernmental Indian-affairs organizations from var-ious continents, the World Health Organization, andother major health organizations should be active par-ticipants in this process along with large funding agen-cies, ethics committees, and anthropological associa-tions. These efforts should be motivated by therealization that it is no longer tolerable for researcherswho rely on First World know-how, technology, and re-sources to offer little if any help in implementing so-lutions to indigenous health problems (Farmer 2000).

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Risk Sensitivity and Value amongAndean Pastoralists: Measures,Models, and Empirical Tests1

lawrence a. kuznarDepartment of Sociology-Anthropology, IndianaUniversity, Purdue University at Fort Wayne, 2101 E.Coliseum Blvd., Fort Wayne, Ind. 46805, U.S.A.([email protected]). 9 i 01

Risk sensitivity has intrigued anthropologists because ofthe role it can reasonably be expected to play in decisionmaking given the uncertainties of food supply andweather patterns and the hazards that surround us (Win-terhalder, Lu, and Tucker 1999, Douglas and Wildavsky1982, Vayda and McKay 1975). Using data from Andeanherders, I will operationalize a definition of risk sensi-tivity and demonstrate how risk sensitivity varies withenvironmental and social variables. The potential ben-efits of incorporating risk into models of economic be-havior are obvious in the Andes. Andean mountain en-vironments are cold, unpredictable, and limiting (Molinaand Little 1981:11516; Orlove and Guillet 1985:5; Brow-man 1984:314; 1987; Goland 1993:318). Frequentdroughts, snows, and generally dry environments con-strain the subsistence choices of Andean peoples, leadingethnographers and archaeologists to assert that Andeanpeople will be risk-averse (Custred 1977; Gade 1975:94;Browman 1984, 1987; Brush 1982; McCorkle 1987; 1990:10; Guillet 1986:210; Goland 1993; Winterhalder 1994;Isbell 1978; Hesse 1982; Aldenderfer 1998). The patternsof risk sensitivity I present are consistent with researchin economics (Friedman and Savage 1948, Kahneman andTversky 1979, Bosch-Dome`nech and Silvestre 1999, But-ler 2000, Morrison 2000), agricultural economics (Dillonand Scandizzo 1978, Elamin and Rogers 1992, Zuhair,Taylor, and Kramer 1992), biology (Real 1991, Stephens1990), and human behavioral ecology (Winterhalder, Lu,and Tucker 1999).

risk sensitivity in anthropology

Anthropologists have not overlooked the importance ofmodeling decision making under uncertainty and risk(Cancian 1972, 1980, 1989; Quinn 1978; Ortiz 1980,

2001 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Re-search. All rights reserved 0011-3204/2001/4203-0006$1.00

1. I am indebted to Alan Sandstrom, Rick Sutter, and Robert Jeskefor their comments on earlier drafts of this manuscript. Four anon-ymous reviewers provided invaluable and constructive criticisms.The term probability premium is borrowed from one reviewer.Also, my gratitude goes to Malcom Dow and Roger Myerson forexposing me to the mathematical foundations of economic theory.The field research would not have been possible without supportfrom Mark Aldenderfer and the Southern Peru Copper Company.I thank the Aymara awatiri among whom I lived and worked. Ofcourse, I am solely responsible for the content of this paper.


Fig. 1. The sigmoid utility curve. Risk-preferring deci-sion makers are represented by the convex portion ofthe curve (origin to inflection point), where a gambleon winning or losing p is accepted because the poten-tial gain a is greater than the potential loss b. Risk-averse decision makers are represented by the con-cave portion of the curve (inflection point to end),where a gamble on winning or losing p is rejected be-cause the potential gain d is less than the potentialloss c.

1983; Gladwin 1975, 1989; Orlove 1986; de Garine andHarrison 1988; Halstead and OShea 1989; Cashdan 1990;Winterhalder 1986a, b, 1990; Goland 1993; Fratkin 1991;Smith 1991; Kuznar 1991a, b, 2000). One of the mostdetailed studies is Frank Cancians (1972:14456; 1980:171; 1989) pioneering work on the influence of status onrisk taking among Mexican peasants. He points out thatvery wealthy peasants are more likely to take chancesbecause their level of wealth is well above crucial thresh-olds. Lower-middle-class peasants will also engage inrisky behavior because the prospect of entering a higherwealth status is so near. Very poor and moderatelywealthy peasants will be averse to riskthe moderatelywealthy because they have too much to lose and the verypoor because they cannot afford to lose. Cancian (1989:151) finds risk aversion to be widespread among mod-erately wealthy peasants and rural farmers in India, Pak-istan, Kenya, the Philippines, and the United States.

Winterhalder, Lu, and Tucker (1999) review recent op-timal-foraging applications that incorporate risk and pro-pose that much risk-sensitive behavior can be under-stood by employing a sigmoid utility curve to modelpeoples preferences. Utility is a measure of a personssatisfaction with a good or some decision. As far backas 1738, the mathematician Daniel Bernoulli (1954[1738]) noted that utility does not necessarily vary 1:1with quantities of actual goods. Milton Friedman andLeonard Savage (1948) recognized that peoples utilityfunctions for some good (for example, wealth) tend to besigmoid, or S-shaped.

In the sigmoid curve (fig. 1), the first part of the curveis convex and the last part concave. Convex utilitycurves correspond to a preference for risky prospects. Forinstance, individuals of wealth status w, offered an evenchance of either increasing or decreasing their wealth byp, will take the gamble because if they win their wealthstatus will increase by a, a greater gain than the loss b.In contrast, risk-averse individuals at wealth status x,offered the same gamble, will reject it because the mostthey can gain is d, which is less than the potential lossc. Friedman and Savage saw the sigmoid utility curve asa reasonable description of how peoples risk sensitivitychanges with wealth. People with convex utility func-tions aspire to the next-highest class and therefore arewilling to take a chance at a perceived higher increasein utility from a gamble. In contrast, people in a com-fortable wealth class are reluctant to risk what they havefor a comparatively small increase in utility.

Winterhalder (1986a, b, 1990) and Goland (1993) em-ploy an approximation to a sigmoid utility curve in theirZ-score model of risk-sensitive decision making. Win-terhalder (1986a:374) begins by defining risk as theprobability of falling below a fixed minimum require-ment (m). This might be starvation or some less cata-strophic but significant cost to fitness or adaptation.The model is so named because minimum requirementsare standardized with the common Z-score. In this modelpeople will make decisions to exploit a set of resourcesso that they minimize the probability of falling belowthe minimum requirement (measured as some standard

deviation below the mean). Goland (1993) conducted anempirical test of the Z-score model in two Peruvian agro-pastoral communities and found that peasants dispersedtheir fields to reduce variance in yield because stochasticshocks that reduce yield (frosts, hail, droughts, theft) areunevenly distributed across the landscape.

While yielding important insights, anthropological ex-plorations of risk sensitivity do not all agree, and theygenerally fail to consider the subjective component ofdecision making. Optimal-foraging theory applicationsare consistent with research in biology: some species ofanimals, including people, close to a starvation incometend to take chances in order to obtain enough food (Win-terhalder, Lu, and Tucker 1999:317, 332, 334). In con-trast, Cancians statements on class and risk sensitivitycan be translated into the sigmoid utility curve in figure2, where poor peasants are risk-averse (have a concaveutility function) while upper-class peasants prefer risk(have a convex ut

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