Alice Goffman's TED Talk (VIDEO)

Last night I was rummaging through my stacks and stacks of books --- the overflow of books I own, of which I have no shelf space --- looking for Herbert Gutman's, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750-1925. I actually did find the book, which somehow had found a spot on my bookcases downstairs (the stacks of books upstairs in my bedroom are piled high in the corners next to the bookshelves I have up there). 

While this was happening, I confused Herbert Gutman for Irving Goffman, the father of Alice Goffman, who is the author of the bombshell book, On the Run:On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City. The book's controversial, actually. The New York Times had a huge write-up on her in the Sunday magazine: "The Trials of Alice Goffman: Her first book, ‘On the Run' — about the lives of young black men in West Philadelphia — has fueled a fight within sociology over who gets to speak for whom."

Anyway, that's how I ran across Ms. Alice's TED Talk, which is mentioned at her Wikipedia page. The video of her talk posted at the TED website has been viewed over 2 million times, and the YouTube video below almost 280,000 times. 

She's gets very emotional, with her voice cracking and her nearly coming to tears as she gets further and further along in her talk --- it's quite compelling. 

In any case, now you know the story of how I came across this video.

Watch:

She was denied tenure at the University of Wisconsin (obviously mostly as a result of the book controversy), and she's now a Visiting Assistant Professor at Pomona College, where "unnamed activists calling for her offer to be rescinded due to unsupported and unsubstantiated claims of racism in her work and research methods."

Naturally. *Sigh.*

In any case, enjoy the show!

Edmund Wilson, Apologies to the Iroquois

*BUMPED.*

I picked up a used copy.

And the book's available at Amazon, Edmund Wilson, Apologies to the Iroquois: With a Study of the Mohawks in High Steel, by Joseph Mitchell.

Also at the New Yorker, "APOLOGIES TO THE IROQUOIS (OCTOBER 17, 1959 ISSUE)."

Wilson was a very interesting fellow. He published To the Finland Station, a study on "the course of European socialism," in 1940 (and much more).

Eduardo Kohn, How Forests Think

Put this one on the gift lists for your tree-hugging, vision-quest enviro-leftist family members.

From Eduardo Kohn, How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human.

How Napoleon Chagnon Became Our Most Controversial Anthropologist

I read Chagnon's work in college, his research on the Yąnomamö.

At the New York Times:

Among the hazards Napoleon Chagnon encountered in the Venezuelan jungle were a jaguar that would have mauled him had it not become confused by his mosquito net and a 15-foot anaconda that lunged from a stream over which he bent to drink. There were also hairy black spiders, rats that clambered up and down his hammock ropes and a trio of Yanomami tribesmen who tried to smash his skull with an ax while he slept. (The men abandoned their plan when they realized that Chagnon, a light sleeper, kept a loaded shotgun within arm’s reach.) These are impressive adversaries — “Indiana Jones had nothing on me,” is how Chagnon puts it — but by far his most tenacious foes have been members of his own profession.

At 74, Chagnon may be this country’s best-known living anthropologist; he is certainly its most maligned. His monograph, “Yanomamö: The Fierce People,” which has sold nearly a million copies since it was first published in 1968, established him as a serious scientist in the swashbuckling mode — “I looked up and gasped when I saw a dozen burly, naked, filthy, hideous men staring at us down the shafts of their drawn arrows!” — but it also embroiled him in controversy.

In turning the Yanomami into the world’s most famous “unacculturated” tribe, Chagnon also turned the romantic image of the “noble savage” on its head. Far from living in harmony with one another, the tribe engaged in frequent chest-pounding duels and deadly inter-village raids; violence or threat of violence dominated social life. The Yanomami, he declared, “live in a state of chronic warfare.”

The phrase may be the most contested in the history of anthropology. Colleagues accused him of exaggerating the violence, even of imagining it — a projection of his aggressive personality. As Chagnon’s fame grew — his book became a standard text in college courses — so did the complaints. No detail was too small to be debated, including the transliteration of the tribe’s name. As one commentator wrote: “Those who refer to the group as Yanomamö generally tend to be supporters of Chagnon’s work. Those who prefer Yanomami or Yanomama tend to take a more neutral or anti-Chagnon stance.”

In 2000, the simmering criticisms erupted in public with the release of “Darkness in El Dorado,” by the journalist Patrick Tierney. A true-life jungle horror story redolent with allusions to Conrad, the book charged Chagnon with grave misdeeds: not just fomenting violence but also fabricating data, staging documentary films and, most sensational, participating in a biomedical expedition that may have caused or worsened a measles epidemic that resulted in hundreds of Yanomami deaths. Advance word of the book was enough to plunge anthropology into a global public-relations crisis — a typical headline: “Scientist ‘Killed Amazon Indians to Test Race Theory.’ ” But even today, after thousands of pages of discussion, including a lengthy investigation by the American Anthropological Association (A.A.A.), there is no consensus about what, if anything, Chagnon did wrong.

Shut out of the jungle because he was so polarizing, he took early retirement from the University of California at Santa Barbara in 1999. “The whole point of my existence as a human being and as an anthropologist was to do more and more research before this primitive world disappeared,” he told me bitterly. He spent much of the past decade working on a memoir instead, “Noble Savages: My Life Among Two Dangerous Tribes — the Yanomamö and the Anthropologists,” which comes out this month. It is less likely to settle the score than to reignite debate. “The subtitle is typical Chagnon,” says Leslie Sponsel, an anthropologist at the University of Hawaii and a longtime critic of Chagnon. “Some will interpret it as an insult to the Yanomami and to anthropology in general.” Sponsel despaired that what is known as “the fierce controversy” would ever be satisfactorily resolved. “It’s quicksand, a Pandora’s box,” he said. “It’s also to some degree a microcosm of anthropology.”

He retired from UCSB the same year that I received my Ph.D. I never met him, however. I'm not that cross-disciplinary.

More at that top link. And note that Chagnon isn't a idiot radical leftist anthropologist, which explains a lot of the controversies surrounding him. As the piece points out:

Chagnon sensed that his access to the Yanomami was ending. Anthropology was changing, too. For more than a decade, the discipline had been engaged in a sweeping self-critique. In 1983, the New Zealand anthropologist Derek Freeman delivered a major blow when he published “Margaret Mead and Samoa,” charging that Mead had been duped by informants in her pioneering ethnography, “Coming of Age in Samoa.” Postmodern theory precipitated a crisis. Under the influence of Derrida and Foucault, cultural anthropologists turned their gaze on their own “texts” and were alarmed by what they saw. Ethnographies were not dispassionate records of cultural facts but rather unstable “fictions,” shot through with ideology and observer bias.

This postmodern turn coincided with the disappearance of anthropology’s traditional subjects — indigenous peoples. Even the Yanomami were becoming assimilated, going to mission schools, appearing on television in Caracas and flying to the United States to speak at academic conferences. Traditional fieldwork opportunities may have been drying up, but there was still plenty of work to do exposing anthropologists’ complicity in oppressing “the other.” As one scholar in the journal Current Anthropology put it, “Isn’t it odd that the true enemy of society turns out to be that guy in the office down the hall?”

One way to confront the field’s ethical dilemmas was to redefine the ethnographer’s role. A new generation of anthropologists came to see activism on their subjects’ behalf as a principal part of the job. Chagnon did not; to him, the Yanomami were invaluable data sets, not a human rights cause — at least not primarily. In 1988, he published a provocative article in Science. Drawing on his genealogies, he showed that Yanomami men who were killers had more wives and children than men who were not. Was the men’s aggression the main reason for their greater reproductive success? Chagnon suggested that the question deserved serious consideration. “Violence,” he speculated, “may be the principal driving force behind the evolution of culture.”