Argentines: The People Who Wait In Lines

An excerpt from “Argentines: The People Waiting In Lines,” by Natalie Kuhl:

On the 15th of August I returned from six months of fieldwork in Cordoba, Argentina. During my stay in my encampment, I was forced to adjust to numerous cultural factors, many of which conflicted with the mores and codes with which I’d been raised! (OMG! Can you believe that??) For example, it was not advisable to throw used toilet tissue into the commode; the trash receptacle located just to the side of the toilet was a better bet, unless you are fond of dealing with wastewater. As a child, I would watch excitedly from the window as my mother lied to Jehovah’s Witnesses on the doorstep, “No, sorry, we’re Jewish!” and shut the door in their faces. So the unannounced friend on the doorstep in Argentina always took me by surprise; didn’t they know I was enjoying alone time?
Despite these challenges to my cultural norms, the reader will be happy to know that, in the end, the natives of Argentina turned out to be a jovial and welcoming bunch! Even though I came from another place, the Argentines were quick to show me their ways and even invited me to participate in ritual inebriation on many occasions. Towards the middle of my stay, the village stylist, called a “hairdresser,” adorned me with the traditional Argentine female hair decoration, known commonly in North America as the “mullet.” After this transformative ceremony, most of my informants barely recognized me as the Yankee anthropologist of before; now I was “Nati,” a quasi-Argentine and capable of “passing” in their society. Success!

It’s true that my months in Argentina were not spent doing anthropological fieldwork. Or with indigenous peoples. Or in the Amazonian jungle. Or recording genealogical data on the ancestors of my informant-friends.
However, it occurred to me while reading the first chapter to Chagnon’s Yanomamo: The Fierce People, that you don’t need to be a trained anthropologist to know things ain’t gonna be the same way there as they are here, wherever that “here” and “there” might be. Chagnon’s naiveté, writing “I had visions of entering the village and seeing 125 social facts running about calling each other kinship terms and sharing food, each waiting and anxious to have me collect his genealogy,” is imbecilic, and frankly made me concerned for anthropology as a discipline (10). Chagnon is famous and considered an expert in his field; if this is the field workers’ attitude, then we have far larger things to worry about than whether or not Chagnon is getting to eat his honey and saltines in peace.
To be fair, we must contextualize Chagnon and Fierce People. Chagnon was one of the first to write on the Yanomamo, and his ethnography comes well enough before many of the influential anti-oppression movements of the late 60’s and 70’s that changed our cultural standpoint on difference. But I don’t want to cut him too much slack; by 1968, it was post-colonial world, and we can expect more from someone in such a privileged, academic location than musings on the disappoints of “discovering that primitive man is not always as noble as you originally thought” (8).
I don’t doubt that Chagnon learned much about the Yanomamo, and it’s likely that anyone who sustained so many years of research on a single subject would come to have a great passion, appreciation, and respect for the subject (i.e. people) he studied. [It would be interesting to hear Chagnon speak or read more of his work.] But this first chapter is a terrific overview of the many problematics of the anthropological project in general. We learn that even the expert, who spends the time and talks the talk, can still be (or at least come off as) an ethnocentric buffoon.
What concerns me is the qualification of further anthropological study; the other approaches. Jacques Lizot’s work with the Yanomamo is supposedly more objective and his voice is not central to the accounts. On the other hand, Lizot was accused of giving goods in exchange for sexual favors from Yanomamo boys in John Tierney’s book Darkness in El Dorado . So we reach this pivotal, critical question: Is it really at all possible to be an anthropologist not implicated in some way of objectifying those you are studying?
Maybe we can explore this question through ethnographic film, through visual anthropology. Or maybe we can just admit that no, it’s not at all possible to make an objective portrait of a culture or people that is not one’s own, and more forward with this knowledge. I look forward to viewing more examples of specifically ethnographic film that I feel more positive about; that make me believe film makers have a good intention at heart when they expose a subject to a large viewing audience. One example I can think of that could be considered “ethnographic” is Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady’s 2006 documentary about black youth in inner-city Baltimore, “The Boys of Baraka.” I felt sympathetic to the kids featured in this movie. Check it out: http://www.pbs.org/pov/pov2006/boysofbaraka/