http://savageminds.org/2009/04/22/vengeance-is-hers-rhonda-shearer-on-jared-diamonds-factual-collapse
Vengeance is Hers: Rhonda Shearer on Jared Diamond’s ‘Factual Collapse’
by Rex on April 22nd, 2009
Rhonda Shearer, a cofounder of the Arts Science Research Lab and widow
of Stephen Jay Gould recently released a long report on ASRL’s website
Stinky Journalism.org entitled Jared Diamond’s Factual Collapse: New
Yorker Mag’s Papua New Guinea Revenge Tale Untrue… Tribal Members Angry,
Want Justice. I have more than a passing interest in this case because I
served as a fact-checker for the New Yorker on the piece, have written
my own response to the piece, and have been in contact with Shearer as
she has been working on her response. But this story is far more that
just something I am personally interested in—it has already been
reported on by the Huffington Post and Forbes shows. Most news coverage
will focus on the more spectacular aspects of the case: Diamond
publishes a piece in the New Yorker depicting a tribal fight in Papua
New Guinea, Shearer produces documentation that his accounts are untrue,
and the Papua New Guineans involve sue Diamond for US$10 million.
What I think is truly important about this case – beyond the obvious
fact that Wemp deserves justice – is that it represents the fundamental
ethical issue that anthropologists will have to face for decades to
come. Anthropological collaboration with the army may directly impact
more human lives, but collaboration is an old problem that we have
talked about for a long time. The great ethical debate prior to HTS was
the ‘Yanomami Scandal’ stirred up by Patrick Tierney, a debate that
centered on anthropologists (and others) behaving badly in the field,
and not being held to account by the powers that be in the metropole.
Some people like Rob Borofsky want to fetishize this debate as the issue
in anthropological ethics, since it involves what they imagine must be
the paradigmatic anthropological situation: powerful white outsiders,
(relatively) supine brown people.
I admit that L’affaire Shearer does have a whiff of that dynamic. But
overall it is about a relatively new issue which will I think will
become increasingly central to anthropological ethics in the future: the
radical answerability that researchers increasingly have to the people
they depict. While this should always have been important to us, it is a
topic we can no longer ignore in a world where their ‘informants’ are
more connected than ever before to the flows of media and communication
in which ‘we’ depict ‘them’. If the Yanomami controversy was about
anthropologists suddenly being held responsible in the metropole for
what they did in the field, the Jared Diamond case is about an author
suddenly being held responsible in the field for what they did in the
metropole.
Shearer’s report is long and detailed and I will not attempt to do more
than summarize it here. Basically, Jared Diamond wrote an article in the
New Yorker in which he told the story of Daniel Wemp, a man he met in
Papua New Guinea who described a tribal fight he had been in which
allegedly involved killing dozens of people and paralyzing his enemy in
a quest to seek revenge for the death of his uncle. What did Diamond do
wrong, according to Shearer? We can summarize as follows:
Poor research and inaccurate facts
Shearer conducted punishingly scrupulous research on Diamond’s story,
which included contacting Wemp and having researchers in Papua New
Guinea investigate Diamond’s story. It looks like the New Yorker article
is a hodge-podge of Diamond’s recollections of the stories Wemp told
Diamond when Wemp drove him around the Southern Highlands. The actual
history of fighting in the area Wemp describes is quite different—for
instance, the man that Diamond says was paralyzed in a wheelchair is
photographed standing and walking in Shearer’s piece. Diamond presents
what appear to be verbatim quotations from Wemp which are probably
Diamond’s reconstruction of the conversation, and so forth. So both the
facts and their presentation are problematic.
Poor ethical standards
Separate from the fact that Diamond appears to have gotten the story
wrong is the fact that he followed few of the ethical standards which
anthropologists (and journalists, apparently) follow in writing about
their research subjects. Calling someone a murderer in a venue like the
New Yorker is a serious claim indeed. Add to this the fact that Diamond
used Wemp’s real name in the story, and that Wemp had no idea that his
stories would ever be published, and you have serious ethical problems.
There was, in other words, no informed consent and no attempt to provide
anonymity for informants.
Shearer’s points here are largely factual and perhaps in the future
there will be more delving into the minutiae of this case—as someone who
lived in the province just north of Southern Highland and who has
visited this area I am extremely impressed with the quality of her
research, the experts she has contacted, and her collaboration with
Papua New Guinean journalists. But for non specialists the issues of
what did or did not happen in 1992 will probably be less important than
some of the wider issues raised by this piece:
Let’s hope this doesn’t turn into The Great Counterattack
Many anthropologists dislike Jared Diamond because he has done what they
fantasize of doing—writing readable nonfiction for a general audience.
One possible outcome of this case is that it turns into The Great
Counterattack in which every possible error in Diamond’s reporting is
used to trash him by people who care less about Papua New Guinea,
geography, steel, collapse, etc. and more about getting the taste of
sour grapes out of their mouths. To the extent this becomes a witchhunt,
it will get more and more boring and, of course, more and more cruel.
Questions about scholarly competency and institutional licensing
Diamond is like some sort of great Victorian polymath—geographer,
ornithologist, anthropologist, historian… in his books it appears there
is nothing he can’t do, and to experts in each of these fields it
appears that he can’t do any of them. While popular audiences love
Diamond’s work, the scholarly consensus on it has been pretty firmly
established: much of what the public thinks is Diamond’s original ideas
are cribbed from other authors, often with the bare minimum of
acknowledgments performed in footnotes to stave off accusations of
plagiarism. Overall, what Diamond gets right, he gets from others. What
he gets wrong tends to be the stuff he has made up himself.
It is one thing to have Diamond’s book show up on the shelves of airport
bookstores, but quite another for it to be described as ‘anthropology’
in the subheading of a story in the New Yorker. Now that Diamond has
tried his hand at some ethnographic ‘research’ in a public forum, I
think we are beginning to see the differences between avocational
anthropology and the real thing. So what is an anthropologist? Is it
someone who follows the best practices of our discipline, or do we
really feel there must be some sort of institutional licensing in the
form of a departmental appointment of degree in order for someone to
take up this mantle? Its an interesting question that Diamond’s piece
raises.
Could anyone sustain this level of scrutiny?
Shearer takes Diamond to task for not meeting anthropological (and
journalistic) standards of evidence, methodology, and ethics. Yet I have
to wonder if Diamond is the only person who would be snared in a net as
tightly woven as Shearers. After all, anthropologists have a long
history of failing to meet their own evidentiary standards. Those of us
who work in PNG can think of several authors whose work is not widely
taught because we ‘all know’ about the quality of their fieldwork. It is
important to hold Diamond to professional standards if he is going to
act like a professional. At the same time, we must recognize that he is
taking his place in a field where those who have come before him have
often failed to distinguish themselves.
Shearer is not reporting the story, Shearer is the story
Anthropologists understand that social life is a constant process of
narration and renarration—and I’ve always felt this is particularly true
of highlands PNG, somehow. I am not Melanesian (obviously) but looking
at this case through a Melanesian lens it seems to me that there is
something complex and fascinating about the way Shearer’s report has
elicited a whole series of responses from people in PNG and is yet
another step in the ongoing reentextualization of events that happened a
decade ago in Southern Highlands as it twists and turns into various
forms of compensation/litigation.
As I said at the beginning of this piece, the central and most important
point of this debate is that it is about what we write at ‘home’
circulating back to the ‘field’. But this is just another way of saying
that the line between these two is increasingly porous (as Gupta and
Ferguson noted some time ago). Diamond’s case is a cautionary tale for
all anthropologists who write in the comfort of their homes imagining
their fieldsite is far away. It is answerability that is at stake
here—Diamond’s and our own. Answerability is something that journalists
have been struggling with longer than anthropologists and I think what
they have to teach Diamond offers lessons we ourselves will have to
learn in the future (if we haven’t already): get your facts straight,
report them fairly, and let people know that you are doing so. It is not
only the right thing to do, but in a world where ‘they read what we
right’, your audience is also your informants.
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