The Chronicle of Higher Education
http://chronicle.com/daily/2009/04/16671n.htm
Today's News
Friday, April 24, 2009
Research Subjects Sue Jared Diamond, the Author and Professor, for
$10-Million
By DAVID GLENN
“While acting on vengeful feelings clearly needs to be discouraged,
acknowledging them should be not merely permitted but encouraged,” wrote
Jared M. Diamond in an essay in The New Yorker last April.
Now two of the subjects of that essay are acknowledging their own
vengeful feelings. This week a lawyer filed a $10-million defamation
claim in a New York court on behalf of two Papua New Guinea men whom Mr.
Diamond described as active participants in clan warfare during the 1990s.
Mr. Diamond, a professor of geography at the University of California at
Los Angeles and the author of the best-selling Guns, Germs and Steel:
The Fates of Human Societies (W.W. Norton, 1997), and Collapse: How
Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (Viking, 2004), based the essay
almost entirely on accounts given to him by Hup Daniel Wemp, an
oil-field technician who served as Mr. Diamond’s driver during a 2001-2
visit to New Guinea. (The full text of the essay is open only to New
Yorker subscribers, but a long summary is available here.
Mr. Wemp is now one of the lawsuit’s two plaintiffs; the other is Henep
Isum Mandingo, a man who, according to Mr. Diamond’s article, was
attacked and paralyzed on orders from Mr. Wemp.
For nearly a year, Mr. Diamond’s article has been scrutinized by Rhonda
Roland Shearer, director of the Art Science Research Laboratory, a
multifaceted New York organization with a sideline in media criticism.
Ms. Shearer, a sculptor and writer, is the widow of Stephen Jay Gould,
who preceded Mr. Diamond as a widely esteemed public interpreter of science.
Ms. Shearer has collaborated with three indigenous scholars and
journalists in New Guinea—Michael Kigl, Kritoe Keleba, and Jeffrey
Elapa—in an attempt to verify and reconstruct Mr. Diamond’s accounts. In
a new report, the four writers argue that Mr. Diamond botched the
history of the conflict he described, and they say that his errors may
have placed Mr. Wemp in danger.
They also present evidence that Mr. Diamond misleadingly presented his
quotations from Mr. Wemp as if they were spoken during their car rides
together in 2001 and 2002, when in fact they were all gathered during a
single interview in Mr. Wemp’s office in 2006. And regardless of when
they were spoken, the quotations are so polished that they were almost
certainly not Mr. Wemp’s verbatim words, according to an analysis given
to Ms. Shearer by Douglas Biber, a professor of applied linguistics at
Northern Arizona University.
In a post on Wednesday at Savage Minds, an anthropology blog, Alex
Golub, an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of
Hawaii-Manoa who does field work in New Guinea, suggested that this
affair was emblematic of “a fundamental ethical issue that
anthropologists will have to face for decades to come.” The rise of the
Internet means that whatever scholars write about their field
informants—no matter how remote those people might seem—will inevitably
be read by the communities they have described.
“While this should always have been important to us,” Mr. Golub wrote,
“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.’”
Mr. Diamond has not replied to a request for comment from The Chronicle.
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