Timothy Mason : Anthropologist's Magician - Chagnon, Malinowski & the shaman

The period of the classic ethnography runs from 1922, with the publication of Malinowski's 'Argonauts of the Western Pacific' to 1968, when the first edition of Napoleon Chagnon's 'Yanomamo ; The Fierce People' appeared. Malinowski and Chagnon were perhaps the most well-known male anthropologists of the twentieth century.

Two ethnologists. Two medicine men. In a well-known photo of Malinowski we see him sitting at the entrance to his tent which, pitched inside the inner forbidden area of the village, next to the chief's dwelling, marked him out as of special character¹. In this, he was similar to many of those that modern and post-modern ethnologists have labeled shamans, for they too often live in marked domains - either on the inside or the outside of the encampment to which they are attached. The healer, the magician, is often a liminal being even in his living arrangements. Malinowski, in his tent, received visitors and dispensed the white man's pharmacopeia.

Chagnon also. At the very beginning of his stay among the Yanomamo he became involved in an effort to inoculate this isolated - and therefore vulnerable - people against measles. As is often the case when a healer appears, the effect of his intervention upon the subjects of his attentions was ambiguous; the vaccine produced symptoms which were interpreted as the work of witchcraft, and the anthropologist found himself treated with some suspicion thereafter. But then, as he himself recorded, he was treated with suspicion from the very beginning.

But if the two men worked some form of magic upon the peoples that were the subjects of their ethnographies, they also worked magic upon the places and peoples from which they themselves had come. Malinowski and Chagnon were both myth-weavers; however the stuff of their myths was not so much the primitive or the savage, but the anthropologist himself. Malinowski made of himself the founding father of ethnographical field-work, and the story that he constructed around the time he spent in Melanesia became the measuring stick against which subsequent workers would be tallied. From the very beginning, he laced the scientific presentation of his work with nods to a more primitive vision of the world :

... in my first piece of Ethnographic research on the South coast, it was not until I was alone in the district that I began to make some headway ; and at any rate I found out where lay the secret of effective field-work. What is, then, this ethnographer's magic, by which he is able to evoke the real spirit of the natives, the true picture of tribal life?

Chagnon willingly picked up the magician's gown, shook the dust off it and added new ornaments to the old. As we shall see, he was brought face to face with the magician from his very first meeting with the Yanomamo, and was, in one of those acts of desperate courage which characterize his ethnographic style, to shamanize on his own account.

But if Malinowski invoked a white magic, a fertility potion with which to encourage the growth of professional field-work and thus to place the discipline of anthropology on a firm footing, Chagnon - Set to Malinowski's Osiris - recognized the darker side of the shaman's art. If Malinowski was to assist in the birth of modern anthropology, Chagnon was to do his best to bring about its dissolution and death. (He is today professor of sociobiology, a discipline which is anathematical to many anthropologists - and in particular to the followers of Boaz who would have presided over the young man's early tuition)

Modern anthropology is - at least in the United States, and perhaps to a lesser extent in the UK - centred upon the conception of field-work as a rite of initiation. No-one can feel that they have been fully admitted to the inner circle of the trade until they have been out in the field. And even having been in the field will not suffice; stories circulate as to how X never really got on with the Bongo-bongo, and, really one shouldn't fully trust what he says about them. Much of this is rooted in Malinowski's own work; in the foreword and chapter one of 'The Argonauts of the Western Pacific', he gave a picture of the relationship between himself and the Trobrianders that set the highest standards for empathy and understanding. Yes, he said, you will find it difficult, you will suffer, but in the end, you will - you must - be accepted by them. Thus he writes :

Soon after I had established myself in Omarakana ... I began to take part, in a way, in the village life, to look forward to the important or festive events, to take personal interest in the gossip and the developments of the small village occurrences ; to wake up every morning to a day, presenting itself to me more or less as it does to the native. (p. 7, Argonauts)

Also, over and over again, I committed breaches of etiquette, which the natives, familiar enough with me, were not slow in pointing out. I had to learn how to behave, and to a certain extent, I acquired 'the feeling' for native good and bad manners. With this and with the capacity of enjoying their company and sharing some of their games and amusements, I began to feel that I was indeed in touch with the natives, and this is certainly the preliminary condition of being able to carry on successful field work.

This chapter was to become the charter for subsequent anthropological field-work. (Malinowski reinforced the message in 'The Sexual Life of Savages', where he wrote that it was imperative for the ethnologist to cultivate 'personal friendships which encourage spontaneous confidences and the repetition of intimate gossip'). The young men and women who followed his call to turn away from the study and get out into the field expected to be able to emulate his example. For although not all might succeed as he had done, all might, by following his advice, partake of the 'ethnographer's magic' :

... in this type of work, it is good for the Ethnographer sometimes to put aside camera, note book and pencil, and to join in himself in what is going on. He can take part in the natives' games, he can follow them on their visits and walks, sit down and listen and share in their conversations. I am not certain if this is equally easy for everyone - perhaps a Slavonic nature is more plastic and more naturally savage than that of Western Europeans - but though the degree of success varies, the attempt is possible for everyone.

And indeed, anyone could make the attempt². But what if you failed? What if the savage rejected your offer of friendship, what if he - and she - turned away when you attempted to converse upon an equal footing? Would this not reveal some fatal flaw in your character (a lack of Slavonic savagery, perhaps, too thick a veneering of civilization to allow you to unbend sufficiently) - and would you not be marked as unworthy of the calling to which you had answered so enthusiastically? Which is perhaps why, beneath the swagger, one hears a terrible note of panic in the following account of one young man's first meeting with the people that he was to study :

In just a few moments I was to meet ... my first primitive man. What would he be like? I had visions of entering the village and seeing 125 social facts running about altruistically calling each other kinship terms and sharing food, each waiting and anxious to have me collect his genealogy. ... Would they like me? This was important to me; I wanted them to be so fond of me that they would adopt me into their kinship system and way of life. ... I looked up and gasped when I saw a dozen burly, naked, sweaty, hideous men staring at us down the shafts of their drawn arrows! Immense wads of green tobacco were stuck between their lower teeth and lips making them look even more hideous, and strands of dark-green slime dripped or hung from their nostrils. ... I just stood there holding my notebook, helpless and pathetic. . . . What sort of a welcome was this for the person who came here to live with you and learn your way of life, to become friends with you?

It is likely that you will have recognized this passage, for it is one of the most regularly quoted paragraphs in ethnology. It is, of course, the account that Chagnon gave of his first encounter with the Yanomamo. And the pain, the fear, are well-founded; Chagnon's enemies within the profession - and he has many of them - are always ready to raise what they may well see as being the foulest skeleton in his cupboard; he never, they will tell you, could get on with the Yanomamo.

But, wonders the outsider, how many among them have not echoed at some time that young man's cry : 'What sort of a welcome is this for the person who came here to become friends with you!'? As Malinowski's diary revealed, the relationship between anthropologist and subject is often strained, and ever to be renegotiated. The price he or she pays for the power that the myth affords is to live forever in a state of liminality, to be always something of a magician.

Living the myth has, as living a myth always will, its dangers. We may catch some idea of these by listening to Roberte Hamayon, one of the foremost specialists in Shamanic studies. With some distaste, she makes it clear that she will have no truck with those who - like Carlos Casteneda or Michael Harner - have surrendered to the sirens :

Certains anthropologues préfèrent rendre consciente leur subjectivité propre, et l'insérer dans les réseaux de subjectivités locales ; j'ai préféré le choix contraire, pensant pouvoir ne pas interposer le filtre d'un écran personnel, et espérant pouvoir respecter, dans son alterité, la croyance de l'Autre : m'aurait-il crue si j'avais voulu jouer le jeu de ses croyances, moi qui n'ai pas les mêmes ancêtres que lui? ... "Chacun ses dieux" répondaient jadis les Bouriates aux divers propagateurs de vérités universelles qui les visitaient.³

But one might protest that this forefronting of the anthropologist's subjectivity is given by the very nature of the undertaking. On reading Malinowski, one is struck by the extent to which he himself appears in his own texts. To some, this may appear unwarranted, a personal and rather tasteless foible. However, there is more to it than that, even if Malinowski could be uncomfortably self-regarding. It can be argued that the discipline of Anthropology found itself confronted with the shortcomings of modernism almost from its inception, and that the interaction between scientist and subject - and the scientist's subjectivity - were understood as being of central importance. To some extent, the problem was elided by sleight of hand : Spencer and Gillen, for example, always took great care to include in their publications only those photographs that showed the Arunta naked, although the men and women with whom Gillen had everyday intercourse would as often have been clothed as not - much of the time, presumably, in Gillen's own cast-offs. Malinowski, however, took the bull by the horns ; it was by placing himself within his narrative that he could best neutralize his constant presence. It allows him to assure the reader that, by taking part in the day-to-day life of the village, he was able to meld in so successfully that he was no longer an alien presence.

Chagnon also places himself within his ethnography - but whereas Malinowski's presence is that of the cool and friendly observer, even when he is - as he often is - deliberately setting out to provoke a response, Chagnon's is comic, perturbing, a flurried series of eruptions, gesticulations and pantomime by which he attempts to thrust himself upon the group and wring the answers to his questions from them. He reports, with rueful satisfaction, that the Yanomamo gave him the name 'Irritating, buzzy Bee'⁴. He Makes little pretense of having had no effect ; on the contrary, he clearly intervenes, distributing not only medication, but also steel blades - a gift which, to a people who were still using stone axes, was calculated to make a difference⁵.

Chagnon's depiction of field-work can be read, then, as a negative of Malinowski's. There are indices that he knew exactly what he was doing, and that his account was a deliberate challenge to orthodox anthropology as he saw it. Subsequently his anthropological colleagues were apt to report that he was overly aggressive in his social relationships, and that he had been too well socialized by the Yanomamo⁶. It seems clear that whatever else may have happened in the Amazon jungle during the time of his first foray, he certainly lost any great affection for cultural anthropology.

But if Chagnon rails against the myth and against those who propagate it, he does so, it would seem, from within. He is a satirist rather than a revolutionary - at least in the early work. It is not surprising that this should be so, for the myth itself is bindingly full of resonance, particularly in its USAnian version. We now need to look at this more closely.

Since those high imperial times when the anthropologist first pitched his tent alongside those of the heathen, he or she has been seen as particularly prone to that worst of crimes against his race - 'going native'. Within the discipline of anthropology as it has developed in both the United States and in England and its former colonies, such as Australia, the danger is ever-present, for the practitioner, to be fully recognized by his or her peers must, at some time, have spent a considerable period participating as fully as possible in the lives of the ethnological Other. This period is seen by the profession itself as initiatory, and the American anthropologist sees his sojourn among strangers as being an equivalent to the Plains Indian's 'Vision Quest', during which the young man ventures out alone into the wilds, starving himself into a state of receptivity during which he will encounter his guardian spirit. Mandelbaum reports of the Plains Cree that a boy who chose to seek visions (it was not an obligation among the Cree, but many did so) would be taken into the wilds by his father, who, after smoking a pipe with him, would leave him to his business.

For several days and nights thereafter, the boy wept and prayed and fasted, continually concentrating upon his desire for supernatural visitation. He might take it upon himself to stand all through the day, or to look into the sun, or to perform any other feats which would hasten the vision, for the spirit powers came to a person because they knew of his suffering and pitied him. Therefore, the greater tortures a boy underwent, the more certain was he of attaining his purpose.

The young man who returns from his solitary initiation brings with him magical powers. These vary both in kind and in power :

While the boy slept, he might see a person coming toward him. It was the power that was to be his spirit helper. The visitor identified himself, often by momentarily changing into the guise of its namesake. The boy was led to an assemblage of spirit powers, all in human form, who sat around a great tipi. There the youth was told the gifts that had been granted 1 him. Very often he was informed that he would be able to cure the sick. The procedure he must follow and the song to be used were then revealed. Some youths had conferred upon them the right to perform a certain ceremony, perhaps the Sun dance. Others obtained the ability to construct a buffalo pound. A much desired blessing enabled a man to lead a war party⁷.

Like Malinowski's field-worker, the young Cree male was encouraged in his seeking for spirit helpers by the relatively open and democratic nature of spirit possession. Although not all those who sought visions would be granted them, anyone who so desired could make the attempt. A successful vision quest would, in later life, be the basis upon which some measure of personal distinction would be constructed. Similarly, the anthropologist would hope to found an honourable career upon adequate completion of his first stretch in the field.

But, as we have seen, in order to effect that field-work, the young man or woman was expected to enter into full and warm relationships with those he was to study. To be accepted by a savage people, the anthropologist would have to adopt a recognizable role ; in many small-scale societies, this involves initiation. We have an early and interesting example of this from the work of Spencer and Gillen among the Arrernte of Alice Springs. Both men were identified as initiated members of the group, with names that indicated that they were the avatars of one or another of the heroes of the Dreamtime. Thus it is that we find Frank Gillen writing in his field-notes :

In the afternoon we witnessed Quabara Udnirringita of Unthurqua ... I am especially interested in (this ceremony) because the performer represented Urangara, my ancestor of the Alcheringa or dream times, and the ceremony is in reality my property: I am supposed to be the reincarnation of a celebrated Alcheringa man who is famous for his skill as a great magician, the old men of the tribe had to account in some way for the remarkable interest I took in their manners and customs⁸ and the quite unusual sympathy I showed for their beliefs so they talked the matter over and persuaded themselves that I was the reincarnation of the great Urangara whose name must not be mentioned in the presence of women or the uninitiated.⁹

If the natives take the anthropologist at all seriously - and it would seem that the Arrernte did take Spencer and Gillen seriously - then they are likely to bestow upon them an identity of some power. Malinowski was, argues Stocking, very probably seen as a member of the local aristocracy among the hierarchically organized Trobrianders. But the Arrernte were hunters and gatherers living at the very edge of subsistence, and among such peoples, who produce little or no surplus, social relationships are, as among the Cree, less solidly stratified. It is, I think, of great significance that the role which Gillen was offered by the subjects¹⁰ of his inquiries was that of magician ; the magician, medicine man, or shaman was, among the Australian Aborigines - as he was among the Cree or other American First Peoples - a liminal being, a personage who navigated between one world and another, between the world of men and of spirits¹¹.

For the anthropologist himself there is much advantage to be drawn from such a designation. Recognized as a man of power, and as an equal by those most likely to have privileged knowledge of the ceremonies and beliefs which are meat and drink to members of his trade, he has good reason to encourage his identification as a magician. But while to Gillen it was all something of a lark, for his successors in the field, less solidly established in their roles than was the 'virtual administrator of central Australia¹², to be able to claim to have been initiated into their tribe as a shaman would be a mark of singular success. The resonances for the trainee field-worker of the Research as Vision Quest Myth are considerable.

As we can see, the anthropologist is confronted in a particularly acute fashion with a problem that lies at the heart of all the social sciences ; the relationship between observer and observed. This question has been faced up to, with greater or lesser success, since Anthropology first became an academic discipline, but it is arguable that, as the twentieth century progressed, so the recognition of the difficulties posed by intersubjectivity became sharper and sharper. In the early years, relations between researcher and the populations studied, while not without problems for both sides - see Malinowski's diary for striking evidence of this - were pursued in a context in which the sources and possibilities of power were clear. Sometimes the anthropologist might be an officer of the colonial government, as Evans-Pritchard was in the Sudan, or as a number of the American researchers among the First Peoples of their newly subjugated land were. But even where this was not the case, it would rarely have been in the interests of the peoples living in small-scale societies to express overt hostility to the white man. However, as the century wore on, field-work was to become more difficult to effect, until by the mid-seventies the profession as a whole encountered a full-scale crisis¹³.

North American anthropologists tend to discuss this problem by invoking the twin concepts of emic and etic. These terms were first proposed in 1954, and were derived from the linguist's distinction between phonemic and phonetic. Intended as a clarification of methodological issues, the twin concepts have had a troubled history ; in so far as it is possible to sum up the meanings that have clustered around them - meanings not necessarily given in Pike's original formulation - one can say that the emic perspective seeks to construct a model of a culture based upon the meanings and values of its members, while the etic perspective uses analytic tools drawn from *outside* the culture, and which are intended to facilitate the construction of cross-cultural comparisons¹⁴.

Obviously, in some sense one would expect a scientific account of culture to make use of both perspectives - and most anthropologists would probably pay at least lip-service to such a conception. However, although some manage to move reasonably gracefully from one position to the other, for many the tightrope which stretches from etic to emic and back again is so perilous that they find freedom of movement difficult. So we find some brands of the discipline which are sternly etic, and others which plunge, with but a rare glance over the shoulder, into the emic.

As might be expected, the study of magic in general, and of the shaman in particular, challenge the dichotomy in interesting ways ; an emic approach calls upon the anthropologist to leave to one side some of the very values and norms upon which the discipline was originally founded, and which remain even today at its core ; a belief in the efficacy of a spirit world contiguous to our own does not chime well with the tenets of modern science.

Which is one of the reasons why the history of the relationship between the anthropologist and the shaman is long and complex. Narby and Huxley write a Whig version in which we move from outright incomprehension to a sympathetic understanding. Hamayon, restricting her remarks to the Siberian shaman sees three broad periods - Devilization, Medicalization and Idealization - all of which are characterized by a debilitating ethnocentrism. She would, indeed, almost certainly see Narby and Huxley's presentation of the phenomena as a clear exemplar of Idealization.

And indeed, their collection 'Shamans Through Time', subtitled '500 Years on the Path to Knowledge' is something of a hymn to New Age approaches to spirituality. They cite Edith Turner, who is something of a heroine within the discipline, and who has embraced a mystical spiritualism which owes much to her work among the Ndembe :

In the past in anthropology, if a researcher "went native," it doomed him academically. My husband, Victor Turner, and I had this dictum at the back of our minds when we spent two and a half years among the Ndembu of Zambia in the fifties.

All right, "our" people believed in spirits, but that was a matter of their different world, not ours. Their ideas were strange and a little disturbing. Yet somehow we were on the safe side of the White divide and were free merely to study the beliefs. This is how we thought. Little knowing it, we denied the people's equality with ours, their "coevalness," their common humanity as that humanity extended itself into the spirit world.

... the Africans were right. There is spirit stuff. There is spirit affliction; it is not a matter of metaphor and symbol, or even psychology. And I began to see how anthropologists have perpetuated an endless series of put downs about the many spirit events in which they participated-"participated" in a kindly pretense. They might have obtained valuable material, but they have been operating with the wrong paradigm, that of the positivists' denial.

To reach a peak experience in a ritual, sinking oneself fully in it really is necessary. Thus for me, "going native" achieved a breakthrough to an altogether different world view, foreign to academia, by means of which certain material was chronicled that could have been gathered in no other way¹⁶.

Even psychology. Turner finds herself fully implicated in the belief-system which she set out to study ; traveling from the etic to the emic, she sees no reason to remount the tight-rope (although, as her earlier work testifies, she and her husband had made the trip back and forth on several occasions), and make her way back to an externally given theoretical system. However, others who reach that point in the journey where Turner is content to repose, rather than returning to social theory, go *through* the stopping point, as it were, rather as Alice goes through the mirror. When they do so, they tend to adopt mentalistic options, as Feleppa notes. Shamanism, on this kind of reading, taps into latent powers that are built into the human mind ; it is a practical psychology, and - much as the ethno-herbalist may study the uses of medicinal plants by primitives and, by using scientific techniques, isolate and synthesize the active agents, so the specialist in shamanism may strip what Eliade has called the 'techniques of ecstasy' down to their bare bones.

Several examples of this approach are to be found in the Huxley and Narby's collection ; of particular interest are the extracts from Michael Harner's work. Harner, unlike Castenada, has been consistently honoured by his profession. He has held academic posts at several institutions, and was at one time chairman of the Department of Anthropology at the New School for Social Research in New York. He was also at one time co-chairman of the Anthropology Section of the New York Academy of Sciences. He now heads The Foundation for Shamanic Studies. On their web-site, one may read the following :

Now you can join more than 5,000 people each year who take our rigorous training in core shamanism, the near universal methods of shamanism without a specific cultural perspective. 200-plus training programs are given each year in North America, Europe, Latin America, Japan, Australia and New Zealand.

Founded by internationally renowned anthropologist Michael Harner with a three-fold mission to study, to teach, and to preserve shamanism, the Foundation for Shamanic Studies has built a reputation of consistency and dependability by providing reliable training in core shamanism to interested learners worldwide.

Harner has been recognized as a pioneer in the field of anthropology and shamanism since the early 70's when he chose to immerse himself in tribal spiritual traditions rather than restrict his study to more traditional academic techniques.

Harner, in his book for popular consumption, 'The Way of the Shaman', describes how he came to his initiation, while doing field-work among the Canobos and Jivaros of the Upper Amazon in 1960-1, thus :

J'ai vécu la plus grande partie d'une année dans un village conibo auprès d'un lac d'un affluent du Rio Ucayali. Mes recherches anthropologiques sur la culture des Conibos s'étaient révélées satisfaisantes, mais mes tentatives pour découvrir des informations sur leur religion ne rencontraient que peu de succès. Les gens étaient amicaux, mais hésitaient à parler du surnaturel. Finalement ils me dirent que si je voulais vraiment apprendre, je devais boire la boisson sacré des chamanes, une potion à base d'ayahuasca, "la plante de l'âme". J'acceptai avec curiosité et excitation, car ils m'avaeint averti que l'expérience pouvait être effrayant.¹⁷

Harner conforms to the image of the good field-worker ; his research has been satisfying, and his relations with the indians are friendly. However, he has not yet penetrated to the inner mysteries, and may do so only at a price - his reaction to the thought of paying that price, although he is warned that it may be terrible, is fully positive. Harner will face the sun.

After this first experience with the drug, during which he met strange subterranean monsters, whose identity he leaves in some mystery - are they tribal gods, dark angels from the Book of Revelations, or visitors from outer space? - he returned to the United States. However, he was now determined to delve more deeply into the question of shamanism. In 1964, he returned to live among the Jivaro, intending to acquire the techniques employed by their medicine men to penetrate the world of spirits.

This time, his spiritual guide leads him deep within the forest. At one point, he finds himself abandoned, and it is only with great difficulty that he catches up with the old shaman. After several tests of his endurance, he once again takes a hallucinogenic drug. This time, his voyage begins with a nightmare, and it is of some interest :

Enfin ce fut l'heure. Akachu me donna la calebasse. Je la soulevai et en avalai le contenu. Le goût en était quelque peu désagréable, un peu semblable à celui des tomates vertes. J'éprouvé une sensation d'engourdissement. Je pensai à cet autre breuvage qui, trois ans auparavant ches les Conibos, m'avait conduit ici. Ma quête chamanique, valait-elle le risque?

Rapidement, cependant, la logique de mes pensées s'évanouit à mesure qu'une inexprimable terreur m'envahissait tout entier.. Mes compagnons allaient me tuer! Je devais m'enfuire! J'essayai de bondir, mais instantanément ils furent sur moi. Trois, quatre, une infinité de sauvages luttaient contre moi, me maintenaient à terre. Leurs visages étaient au-dessus de moi, crispés par des sourires sournois. Puis ce fut l'obscurité.

Harner persevered. His investigations and his reading lead to his identifying a number of basic, universal techniques which he calls 'core shamanism'.

By not imitating any specific cultural tradition, but" rather by training in underlying cross-cultural principles, core shamanism is especially suited for utilization by Westerner who desire a relatively culture-free system that they can adopt and integrate into their contemporary lives. Today core shamanism is the dominant mode of practice of shamanism in most of the West¹⁸.

Harner contributes to a process which the sociologist Anthony Giddens refers to as 'dismebedding' ; in this process, symbols and relationships are lifted up and out of the specific contexts in which they emerged, and are codified and made open to inspection. Giddens sees this process as leading to the production of symbolic tokens - he gives 'money' as a prime example of this - and of expert systems. Harner's 'core shamanism' shares some of the characteristics of expert systems - but not all of them. For the expert systems 'take care of you' ; you are expected to trust them - to 'have faith', as Giddens puts it. Harner's success, however, stems from the increasing lack of trust that people have in the expert systems that deal with their health - whether spiritual or organic. One of the attractions is that, like field-work or the vision quest, anyone can, if they so desire, access the fundamental techniques. They can even do so, Harner assures us, by reading 'The Way of the Shaman' which is basically a teach-yourself manual.

Or at least, this is what he tells us in the book itself. On the web-site, we find, however, that in the case of core shamanism, as with so many of the New Age cognitive playthings that swept out of California through the sixties and seventies, the only full route to knowledge is by way of personal implication :

A small introduction to some of the principles and practices of core shamanism may be found in my book: The Way of the Shaman. However, the most important practical teaching in both core and indigenous shamanism is not to be found in published literature. Rather, it is the result of person- to- person experientially based instruction, by example, by direct communication from the spirits, and through personal experimentation and practice. Furthermore, much of this experiential learning is ineffable and thus has not been communicable to non-participating Western observers and interviewers¹⁹.

Harner is not alone ; as Huxley and Narby's volume demonstrates, a number of anthropologists have come to see in shamanism something other than a cultural practice to be studies, analyzed and understood.

Most field-workers do not, of course, surrender to the temptation in quite so spectacular a way as Harner, or as Barbara Myerhoff. But that the temptation exists is clear, and even the most scientifically minded can, on occasion, cede to it. I.M. Lewis argues that

There must be few anthropologists who have not had a brush with the supernatural in the course of their field-work in the 'high-spirited, exotic communities which they customarily study ... Even very skeptical anthropologists have had daunting experiences. Illnesses or misadventures after slighting or quarreling with a local witch-doctor or medicine man are frequently reported. Certainly there are few of us who could cross our hearts and honestly say that we had not felt discomfort, qualms about what might happen, when threatened with cursing - or the evil eye²⁰

Maintaining good relations with the witch-doctor - or shaman - has always been something of a priority, as we have seen. But if you cannot do so, then it is perhaps even more effective to become a shaman oneself. Let us return to Chagnon.

You will recall his description of the men who were his 'first savages' ; He mentions that 'dark green slime was hanging from their nostrils. This, we learn, was because they had been breathing in a powerful hallucinogenic drug, in order to come in contact with the spirits. Among the Yanomamo, as among the Cree, any male who wishes may become a shaman. However, they must pay for the privilege, as is often the case, by fasting and by abstaining from sexual intercourse for long periods. Chagnon is by no means troubled by those considerations that keep the emically minded anthropologist from holding on to external structurations ; he is keen to adopt a view of human-kind that is as common-sensical as was Malinowski's, and offers an explanation of this behaviour that reduces it to basic principles :

One must, however, train to be a shaman. This entails a long period of fasting, a year or more, during which the novice loses an enormous amount of weight. He // literally looks like skin and bones at the end.

... I sometimes suspect that the older men have put one over the younger men by insisting that it is good to be a shaman and that all of them should try it - and then insisting that they have to forsake women for effective periods of time. It is an effective way to reduce sexual jealousy in the village, one of the chronic sources of social disruption, and to allow more mating opportunities among the older men²¹.

Holding to this view, Chagnon might be expected to resist any temptation to shamanise on his own account. However, according to his arch-enemy, Patrick Tierney, he did do so, and the memory of that moment remains engraved in Yanomami memories :

This depiction of Chagnon was supported by many of the Yanomami with whom I spoke. In 1996, in the village of Momaribowei-teri, a man named Pablo Mejia told me that when he was twelve he had witnessed Chagnon's arrival in his village: "He had his bird feathers adorning his arms. He had red-dye paint all over his body. He wore a loincloth like the Yanomami. He sang with the chant of his shamanism and took yopo"-a powerful hallucinogen used by Yanomami shamans to make contact with spirits. "He took a lot of yopo. I was terrified of him. He always fired off his pistol when he entered the village, to prove that he was fiercer than the Yanomami. Everybody was afraid of him because nobody had seen a nabah"-white man acting as a shaman²².

According to Chagnon himself, he played the shaman on only one occasion, in an effort to wean them away from what he saw as the pernicious influence of the Salesian missionaries. He was, by his own account, doing his best to maintain the Yanomamo culture in its pristine state²³ ; struggle as he might against the anthropological community, he remains within the fold. For without the primitive, what can the anthropologist find to do? Little, it seems, but to come back home and dispense the secrets of the tribes' lost wisdom - Harner's solution. Chagnon, the last heroic descendent of the line founded by Malinowski, strained, with all his might to hold the hands of the world's clock at one minute to midnight.

1See 'The Ethnographer's Magic and Other Essays', George W. Stocking, Jr, University of Wisconsin Press, 1992, p. 47. Stocking notes that, after spending several nights in the men's house in Mailu, he found that 'total immersion was not easy for him'. On another occasion he had put up in palm leaf tent sixty meters from the village, and found that easier on his soul. Stocking comments : "The ethnographer's tent - fragile canvas artefact of civilized Europe - embodied (...) ambivalence. Pulling its flaps behind him, Malinowski could to some extent shut out the native world and retire to his novels when the strain of the very intensive study of a very limited area became too great." (p. 44)

2The belief that 'anyone can do it' seems to be so firmly rooted within the field that the actualities of fieldwork are taken for granted. Stocking ('The Ethnographer's Magic', p. 13, notes that "... although ethnographic fieldwork is virtually a sine qua non for full status as an anthropologist, the same cannot be said of formal fieldwork training. This, despite the fact that since 1960 fieldwork has become in many respects problematic ". He adds : "Certainly there is a pervasive belief that there is something ultimately ineffable about fieldwork; an epistemological ideology of cultural immersion justifies a methodological practice that at some point becomes a matter of sink or swim." (ibid p. 14)

3Roberte Hamayon, La chasse à l'âme : Esquisse d'une théorie du chamanisme sibérien,

Société d'ethnologie, Nanterre 1990, p. 745

4For an insider's account of Chagnon in the field, see Ana Mariella Bacigalupo's ' The Yanomamo' at http://icarus.ubetc.buffalo.edu/users/apy106/cultures/yanomamo.html . She notes the fact that his book 'The Fierce People' was 'sometimes so perversely funny'.

5On this question, see Brian Ferguson's 'Yanomami Warfare; A Political History' (Sar Press, 1995). Ferguson argues that by the time Chagnon arrived, the Yanomamo were already implicated in a trading network that brought them into the modern world. When Chagnon offered them machetes, they knew what they were getting - but, if Ferguson is right, the gift was often poisoned, for the violence which Chagnon observed was, he argues, in part sparked off by the anthropologist's largesse.

7'The Plains Cree; an ethnographic, historical and comparative study, by David G. Mandelbaum, 1979, on line at : http://www.schoolnet.ca/aboriginal/Plains_Cree/index-e.html

8Chagnon's equivalent interest, as we have seen, lead to the Yanoamamo's giving him a far less honourable name. Gillen had the great advantage of *not* being a professional anthropologist.

9'My Dear Spencer; The Letters of F.J. Gillen to Baldwin Spencer', Mulvaney, John, Howard Morphy and Alison Petch, Hyland House, 1997, p. 335

10In Gillen's case, the term subject is doubly apt. As the local Protector of Aborigines, and as the person in charge of the the Alice Springs telegraph bureau, he was a figure of some power in the lives of the Arrernte.

11Amongst Melanesian and other Pacific peoples, the European is often seen as coming from the world of spirits. One of the tenets of Cargo Cults is that white men are the returning ancestral spirits, bearing gifts.

13Not all anthropologists study small-scale societies, and some of the more solidly anchored host communities might simply swallow up the eager young field worker with considerable indifference, amused contempt or that mild degree of benign interest that one may bestow upon the stranger in a strange land.

14This is extremely rough and ready. For fuller definitions and some discussion of the difficulties raised by this distinction, see Harris, Marvin, 'The Rise of Anthropological Theory; A History of Theories of Culture', Altamira Press, 2001, pp. 568-604, and Feleppa, Robert, 'Emics, Etics, and Social Objectivity' in Current Anthropology, v. 27, No.3, 1986, pp. 243-255.

18Quote from 'Science, Spirits and Core Shamanism at http://www.shamanicstudies.com/articles/1027871950.htm

20from 'The Anthropologist's Encounter with the Supernatural', in Lehmann & Myers (eds) 'Magic, Witchcraft and Religion ; An Anthropological Study of the Supernatural', 3 edition, p. 18

23At one stage, Chagnon was involved in an attempt to turn a large tract of the Amazonian Basin into a sort of theme park in which the Yanomamo could continue to live according to their traditions.