The Laughing Ethnographer

I interpreted Juan Downey's The Laughing Alligator as a relatively straight-forward critique of ethnography and of the history of anthropological practice around the Yanomami. Downey seemed to be telling two parallel narratives--one concerning the Yanomami themselves, and the interactions between outsiders; the other his own history, the history of a white South American and his relationship to the Others that have informed his acculturation. I appreciated many aspects of this short film, particularly the way Downey de-scientizes his portrait of the Yanomami, using what were at the time, "experimental" video techniques. Downey positions his camera as a weapon, going so far as to stage a shoot-out between himself with his camera, and his Yanomami guides holding a spear and shotgun. This simple but symbolic positioning is an excellent antidote to the view of Yanomami as violent. Might the camera's (i.e. institutionalized ethnography's) intrusion into Yanomami culture be as violent as a war between villages? In another bit, we see Downey dressed as a Yanomami--or at least donning the garb of an imagined Indian--and some Yanomami holding and looking through the lenses of cameras. Downey's willingness to exchange roles strikes me as uniquely gutsy, if not radical. When, in A Man Called Bee, we see Chagnon don Yanomami gear and strike a pose, we interpreted it as mockery. I felt that Downey chose instead to mock himself, his need to discover the mythological, to be free "physically as well as psychologically." When Downey presents his information wearing a suit, with a microphone, he seems to be asking, "In the role of incorporated ethnographer, why would be seek freedom in the experiences of a people ultimately relegated to the periphery?"

Overall, I enjoyed this work because of it's highly ambiguous nature, the merging of the anthropolgical and the autobiographical. It seems to contain many of the same themes as Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gomez Pena's work in Couple in the Cage.