Pardee Periodical Publishes Interview With Klinger
Julie Klinger, Assistant Professor of International Relations at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, was recently interviewed for an article in the Pardee Periodical, the graduate student academic journal at the Pardee School, on her research with Yanomami communities and the importance of indigenous voices in the Amazon.
The article, the latter half of a two-part interview, was published on March 21, 2018 and was written by Pardee School M.A. Candidate in International Relations and Environmental Policy Philip Horowitz. You can read the first half of the interview here.
From the text of the article:
Horowitz: There are some claims that date back to the 1960’s by anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon that have given popular discourse many misconceptions of the Yanomami and their culture. How do you think these misconceptions should be addressed in a positive way?
Klinger: So the interesting thing about the Chagnon controversy is how well known it is among the Yanomami people. Napoleon Chagnon’s book sold millions of copies and was reprinted dozens of times. By painting the Yanomami as a fierce people who are cannibals, whose entire economy was based on war and mistreating women – it then fed into the Brazilian military dictatorship’s perception that indigenous people needed to be exterminated or assimilated. That may not have been Chagnon’s intention, but that was the outcome. Rather than work to rectify the damage done by his work or to engage in a productive dialogue with the community, he has instead chosen to do nothing and none of the proceeds from his book went back to any of the communities; they went into building things like vacation homes.
The Yanomami are aware of this, and they’re angry about it. But they have a particular relationship to the state and European-descended society such that this was just one of many instances of abuse that they’ve experienced. The important thing in dispelling negative stereotypes that were unleashed, propagated, or reinforced by Napoleon Chagnon’s work is not to romanticize the Yanomami or any indigenous society. Already, based on my limited experience working with them, it has become clear to me that their society has a lot of the problems and a lot of the power struggles that our society has – particularly when it comes to questions of equality, gendered violence, and many other things.
These issues in some Yanomami communities are familiar for those of us who live in urban America. So the way to address this is the same way we’d go about addressing social injustice just about anywhere. We can start here at home, by addressing injustices among ourselves as well as dispelling the misconceptions held about other people – and that is just as good as working collaboratively with a community on the other side of the world.
Julie Klinger specializes in development, environment, and security politics in Latin America and China in comparative and global perspective. She is currently completing a book project on the global geography of rare earth prospecting and mining, with a special emphasis on the development and geopolitics of resource frontiers in Brazil, China, and Outer Space.