Colin Brace wrote:
Louis Proyect wrote:
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/324/5929/872
Coincidentally, it was written by Michael Balter
Unfortunately, that article is behind a subscriber-only wall.
FWIW, the author has excerpted a few grafs on his blog:
http://michael-balter.blogspot.com/2009/05/vengeance-bites-back-at-jared-diamond.html
I didn't realize this since I accessed the article at work through
Columbia's university-wide subscription.
Here's the whole thing:
Science and the Media:
‘Vengeance’ Bites Back At Jared Diamond
Michael Balter
In April 2008, well-known biologist and author Jared Diamond penned a
dramatic story in The New Yorker magazine, a violent tale of revenge and
warfare in Papua New Guinea (PNG). Titled "Vengeance is Ours" and
published under the banner "Annals of Anthropology," the 8000-word
article tells the story of a clan war organized by a young Papua New
Guinean named Daniel Wemp to avenge the death of Wemp's uncle, Soll. In
Diamond's telling, the war started in the 1990s over a pig digging up
someone's garden, went on for 3 years, and resulted in the deaths of 29
people. In the end, Diamond wrote, Wemp won: His primary target, a man
Diamond referred to as "Isum," had his spine cut by an arrow and was
confined to a wheelchair. Diamond juxtaposed Wemp's story with that of
his own father-in-law, a Holocaust survivor who never exacted
retribution for the loss of his family, to draw an overall lesson about
the human need for vengeance.
In recent weeks, Diamond's article itself seems to have come back with a
vengeance. On 20 April, Diamond, 71, was sued in the Supreme Court of
the State of New York for allegedly defaming both Daniel Wemp and Isum
Mandingo, the alleged target of Wemp's revenge war. The lawsuit, which
also names as a defendant Advance Publications Inc., the owner of The
New Yorker, demands at least $10 million in damages. It follows a
yearlong investigation led by Rhonda Roland Shearer, an artist and the
widow of evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould. Shearer directs the
Art Science Research Laboratory, a nonprofit organization based in New
York City that she and Gould founded before Gould's death in 2002. Among
its activities is a journalism ethics program and a Web site called
Stinkyjournalism.org, which published the Shearer team's 10,000-word
report, "Jared Diamond's Factual Collapse," the day after the lawsuit
was filed.
In the report, Shearer and her colleagues, who included three
researchers in PNG, claim that Diamond and The New Yorker got many
important facts wrong in the original article, including the contentions
that Wemp had personally organized the warfare, that Soll was his uncle,
and that Mandingo had been paralyzed by an arrow. Indeed, the
Stinkyjournalism.org report includes a recent photograph said to be of
Mandingo standing and looking strong and healthy. The report maintains
that neither Wemp, Mandingo, nor any other of several New Guineans named
in The New Yorker were told about the article beforehand. It also claims
that Wemp's life is now in danger from other clans that might want to
avenge Mandingo's alleged injuries, or even from members of his own clan
for portraying them as ruthless killers.
Diamond stands by his story, arguing that it was based on detailed notes
that he took during a 2006 interview with Wemp as well as earlier
conversations the two men had in 2001 when Wemp served as his driver in
PNG. "The complaint has no merit at all," Diamond told Science in an
interview in his office at the University of California, Los Angeles,
where he is a professor of geography. Diamond adds that he still
considers Wemp's original account to be the most reliable source for
what happened. David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker, also defends the
magazine's story: "It appears that The New Yorker and Jared Diamond are
the subject of an unfair and, frankly, mystifying barrage of accusations."
The affair has raised concerns among anthropologists familiar with PNG,
who worry that The New Yorker's "Annals of Anthropology" banner has
tarnished the field's reputation. Anthropologist Pauline Wiessner of the
University of Utah in Salt Lake City, a leading expert on tribal warfare
in PNG, thinks Diamond was naïve if he accepted Wemp's stories at face
value, because young men in PNG often exaggerate their tribal warfare
exploits or make them up entirely. "I could have told him immediately
that it was a tall tale, an embellished story. I hear lots of them but
don't publish them because they are not true."
Different worlds
Three worlds collide in this case. First is the world of science,
specifically anthropology, which uses fieldwork and scientific
methodology to study human cultures. Next is the craft of journalism,
with its own set of ethics and practices aimed at reaching the general
public. Finally, there is Papua New Guinea, a young nation still
struggling to integrate many hundreds of tribes and clans into a modern
state. For many years, Diamond, a physiologist by training, has worked
in all three domains: He is a member of the U.S. National Academy of
Sciences and a winner of the National Medal of Science, as well as a
highly successful writer. In 1998, he won a Pulitzer Prize for his
bestseller Guns, Germs, and Steel, on the geographic factors that made
some societies rich and some poor. His most recent book, Collapse, about
the environmental forces that brought some societies down, has also sold
well. And he has regularly visited PNG for nearly 50 years, although
primarily to study the island's birds rather than its people.
Although Diamond's frequent merging of these worlds has brought him both
success and some criticism, this time it may have landed him in legal
trouble. When Diamond's article appeared in The New Yorker, it drew the
attention of Shearer, a fierce media critic who in recent years has gone
after numerous reporters for alleged transgressions of journalistic
ethics. (One of her most celebrated campaigns was against journalist
William Langewiesche, who asserted in a book that firefighters had
looted blue jeans from stores in the World Trade Center after the 9/11
attacks.) Shearer says that after reading Diamond's article, which
appeared in the 21 April 2008 issue of The New Yorker, she immediately
was "very skeptical" at the suggestion that Mandingo could have
continued to live in the remote, rugged PNG Highlands while conf ined to
a wheelchair and perhaps needing special medical care. She e-mailed
Diamond and The New Yorker asking if they had verified this and other
details; Shearer says that she received no response from Diamond and
that the magazine's initial reaction was to say that it stood by its story.
Shearer already had contacts in PNG from an earlier investigation during
which she chased down rumors that a Komodo dragon was running amok in
the country. (It turned out to be a hoax.) She asked her contacts to try
to find Wemp. One, biologist Michael Kigl of the PNG Institute of
Biological Research in Goroka, explained to Science that he was able to
contact one of his own relatives in Wemp's province, who in turn managed
to help locate one of Wemp's relatives. Thus Kigl found Wemp in his
Highlands village in July 2008 and tape recorded an interview with him.
According to Shearer and the 10,000-word report, Wemp denied organizing
the revenge warfare attributed to him in Diamond's story. The report
says that Wemp expressed surprise at The New Yorker article and claimed
that Diamond had never told him about it. (Wemp's attorneys in New York
City and PNG declined to make him available for an interview for this
story, saying that their clients preferred to tell their stories in
court and not in the press.) According to the report, the following
month Kigl also located Isum Mandingo and took several photographs of
him standing and walking.
At least one other Papua New Guinean supports the account of Shearer's
team. "Diamond's article is a confused story that names real places and
persons but mixes up false, wrong, and defamatory allegations that bring
into disrepute the good name of the named clans and their members," said
Mako Kuwimb, a member of Wemp's Handa clan and a PNG attorney now doing
graduate work at James Cook University in Queensland, Australia. In an
e-mail to Science, Kuwimb added that PNG Highlanders are accustomed to
having anthropologists among them, "and we know what [they] do and how
they gather information." Diamond, Kuwimb says, "converted a simple,
casual conversation [with Wemp] into an article that looks and sounds
like an anthropological piece" but "never followed [anthropological]
procedures and protocols." On 21 April of this year, Kuwimb sent The New
Yorker's publisher, Lisa Hughes, a detailed, 30-page refutation of the
Diamond article. Among Diamond's biggest errors, Kuwimb told Hughes,
were his statements that the war he described had begun with the "pig in
the garden" episode and had lasted 3 years. Kuwimb contends that the war
was sparked by a gambling dispute and lasted only a few months.
Some anthropologists have their own concerns with Diamond's article. For
starters, many think that the "Annals of Anthropology" banner was
misleading. "The New Yorker was wrong to imply that Diamond was an
anthropologist or that what he wrote was anthropology," says Dan
Jorgensen of the University of Western Ontario in London, Canada, who
has worked in PNG since the 1970s. Cultural anthropologist Alex Golub of
the University of Hawaii, Manoa, who says The New Yorker fact checker
spoke with him for about 10 minutes while the story was being prepared,
agrees. "This affects our discipline's brand management," he wrote on an
anthropology blog he participates in called Savage Minds. "It's
important for people to know that if they meet an anthropologist, they
are not going to be written up in The New Yorker without being told
about it." Savage Minds has now teamed up with Stinkyjournalism.org to
produce a series of invited essays on the case.
A number of researchers say that Diamond should not have used the names
of real people and real clans; cultural anthropologists often use
pseudonyms for the people they write up and follow strict ethical
guidelines for informed consent when they do name people. Wiessner
thinks Diamond should have refrained from naming even the tribes
involved. "That was a very big mistake," she says.
Journalism versus science
But both Diamond and Remnick insist that such anthropological criticisms
are irrelevant, because Diamond was working as a journalist for a
popular magazine, not as an anthropologist writing a scholarly article.
Although Diamond says he did not find out about the "Annals of
Anthropology" line until shortly before publication and now regrets it,
Remnick points out that the magazine routinely uses the "Annals" logo
for stories not written by trained experts in the field at hand. Says
Diamond, "Everyone knows that The New Yorker is not a scientific
publication; it's journalism." That's why he used the names Wemp gave
him, he says. "In journalism, you do name names so that people can check
out what you write." Remnick agrees: "Journalistic practice differs from
scientific practice in a number of ways," he says, "and this seems to be
one of them. Using real names is the default practice in journalism."
Diamond insists that he followed good journalistic practice and that his
article was based on detailed notes he took of the stories that Wemp
told him. In 2001, Diamond says, Wemp drove him and Australia-based
ornithologist David Bishop around the oil fields of Highland PNG as they
conducted a survey of local birds. During several long drives, Diamond
says, Wemp told them stories about the Highlands war that had supposedly
begun when a man from Mandingo's clan, the Ombal, found that a pig had
ruined his garden and blamed a Handa man for the damage. The ensuing
warfare eventually killed Soll, whom Diamond says Wemp identified as his
uncle, and it fell to Wemp to take responsibility for organizing a war
for retribution.
Diamond says that he made a few notes of these conversations when back
in his room but did nothing with the story until another trip to PNG in
May 2006. By then he had begun work on a new book about tribal societies
and contacted Wemp to get a more detailed account of the war Wemp had
described 5 years earlier. Diamond says that in 2006, he told Wemp
explicitly that the story would go into the book. But he was unable to
find Wemp again in 2007 when he decided to excerpt one of the book's
chapters for The New Yorker; Wemp had left his job without leaving
contact information, Diamond says.
In 2006, "I said to Daniel, ‘Would you be willing to tell the whole
story in one piece and I will take notes?’" Diamond says. He pulled out
a large, red notebook and took "sentence by sentence" shorthand notes of
the conversation, Diamond says, adding that Wemp spelled out the names
of the warriors and other individuals who would later be named in The
New Yorker piece. (Both Diamond and Shearer agree that Bishop was
present during some of the May 2006 conversation; reached by telephone,
Bishop declined to comment.) The Shearer account agrees that Diamond
took notes in shorthand in a red notebook but differs markedly about
what Wemp said.
Diamond says that although Wemp clearly understood that he would be
named in the book, he did not try to get permission from Mandingo and
the others: "I trusted Daniel's judgment about what was appropriate to
discuss." Diamond says he did double-check Wemp's story with some
younger members of his tribe, who confirmed that some of the people Wemp
named had been involved in a tribal war. Diamond also told Science that
he heard conflicting accounts about how serious Mandingo's injuries were
and that Mandingo now may have recovered from his wounds. In regard to
The New Yorker's fact checking, Remnick says that the fact checker was
unable to find Wemp before the story was published. After Shearer's team
found Wemp, however, the fact checker did speak with him by telephone,
on 21 August 2008. Soon afterward, Shearer, who had kept in regular
touch with the magazine, scored her first victory: In a 12 September
2008 letter to a London attorney, The New Yorker general counsel Lynn
Oberlander agreed, "as a sign of good will," that the magazine would
remove Diamond's article from the freely accessible part of its Web
site, although it is still available online to registered subscribers.
Remnick nevertheless defends the magazine's efforts to verify Diamond's
story. He says that this particular fact checker "is one of the best I
have ever had the privilege of working with." And he adds that "we had
Jared Diamond's meticulous, detailed notes from the 2006 interview with
Daniel Wemp, ... and we consulted with people with expertise in the
Southern Highlands, who confirmed that Daniel Wemp's description of the
revenge battle was consistent with known practice." Remnick also insists
that in the August 2008 conversation between Wemp and the fact
checker—which was tape recorded by mutual consent—Wemp raised only
relatively minor factual objections to Diamond's account and asserted
that the stories were basically true. In Diamond's view, the case is
really about scientists coming under fire for popular writing.
Whether or not Diamond got the facts of Wemp's case right, it is true
that the tribes of PNG do practice revenge warfare, says Wiessner, who
has studied war in PNG's Enga Province, just north of the region where
Wemp and Mandingo live. In Enga, more than 300 tribal wars have taken
the lives of nearly 4000 people since 1991. That's one reason Wiessner,
who is active in local efforts to bring peace to PNG clans, is worried
about the outcome of the case if it results in a large monetary award:
She fears that the money could eventually go to buy weapons that would
make the wars even more deadly. "When these wars first started, they
were fought with bows and arrows, but now they have M-16s," she says.
And although Wiessner faults Diamond for apparently taking Wemp's
stories at face value, she also believes Wemp himself violated clan
ethics by telling them in the first place. "For him to have given the
names of tribes and implicate[d] other people than himself," as Diamond
reported, "that was wrong," she says. "He should have sought approval of
the clan elders beforehand."
In Wiessner's view, The New Yorker article gave a one-sided view of
tribal warfare. Although the death toll often seems high, she says
Highlanders are expert practitioners of what anthropologists call
"restorative justice": the mediation of disputes in which aggrieved
parties receive compensation from those who have wronged them, thus
avoiding warfare. "Diamond did not put it into that context," Wiessner
says. She thinks that Diamond should travel to PNG and engage in some
restorative justice of his own. "Diamond has been wonderfully respectful
of PNG and has done so much to raise the image of the country in the
world, until that story," Wiessner says. "He should be taken to a
village court; he should apologize; he should say that he was told this
story and he should have checked it; and in compensation, he should give
some money to each tribe, for their schools, a health center, or some
community project."
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