New Yorker article: http://www.li.suu.edu/library/circulation/Dean/anth1010edTiernyFierceAnthropologistFall08.pdf
Review of documentary by anthropologist at UCSC: http://www.counterpunch.org/johnston03192010.html
EXCERPT: I was also frustrated, as I suppose many involved in this enterprise will be, as there was such minimal attention to what I saw to be the central question: why was the Atomic Energy Commission funding this sort of research in the Amazon?
The answers to this question lie in the very large and very alarming record of human radiation experimentation conducted by the United States. Declassified after the Clinton-era Advisory Commission on Human Radiation Experimentation, this record was available on the web between 1997-2001 when the Bush Administration began to remove key documents and, in 2003, shut down the website on the grounds that such information constituted a threat to security. (Hard copies of this record are still available at George Washington University's National Security Archive). The Atomic Energy Commission and other US agencies and departments funded numerous Cold War-era human population research projects with indigenous communities serving as human subjects in experiments involving the administration of radioisotopes with research goals that included, among other things, how the human body functioned at different altitudes, adjusted to intense cold, and what role was played by thyroid in this process (the thyroid being especially vulnerable to injury from the uptake of radioiodine present in the nuclear weapons fallout that was then blanketing the globe). These and other research questions -- such as how radioisotopes move through the environment, food chain, and human body, and to what effect -- led to US-funded research using biologically-discrete populations who largely live off the land: Indigenous groups living in the Amazon, Andes, Arctic, Pacific and the American Southwest.
Ah, but this is the stuff of a bigger story that perhaps may be told in some future film. Clearly, Padilha had more than enough on his plate with the consequences and controversies surrounding the 1968 Yanomami expedition.
http://www.documentary.org/magazine/anthropologists-behaving-badly-jose-padilhas-secrets-tribe-does-some-digging-its-own
Pieces of Jean-Pierre Marchand's collaboration with Jacques Lizot, Les indiens Yanomami (1968), stands in for Lizot, who declined Padilha's request for an interview. (He is now sought by French police on an unrelated molestation charge and is thought to be in Morocco.) "The film is very candid on Lizot, yet I did not touch the surface of what he did," says Padilha. "The French injected the Yanomami with radioactive isotopes. The French side is much uglier than it looks in the film."
The French arm of ARTE is one of the co-production partners on Secrets of the Tribe and, it turns out, protective of Jacques Lizot and the Collège de France, where Lizot's mentor Claude Lévi-Strauss was chair of social anthropology. ARTE asked Padilha to put Lizot's pederasty in context. "Many of these [commissioning] editors come from liberal arts, anthropology backgrounds," says the filmmaker. "No one thinks about the kids." For his part, he sent the filmed testimony to Interpol in Brazil, which sent it on to France. "Lizot can be active somewhere right now," he notes. "When I showed [the footage] to the French, they didn't even consider this. If Lizot had molested French boys? Yanomami kids are far away. They intellectualize it as somehow excusable."
Anthropologists behaving badly is nothing new. Franz Boas, the father of American anthropology, asked Arctic explorer Robert Peary to bring him back "a middle-aged Eskimo, preferably from Greenland," for the American Museum of Natural History's live dioramas. Within eight months, four of the six Inuits Peary delivered had died of tuberculosis. Congolese pygmy Ota Benga lived at the museum and later at New York's Bronx Zoo before killing himself. Ishi, the last of the California Yahi Indians, lived at the University of California's Museum of Anthropology, and some of his remains were shipped off to the Smithsonian. Robert Flaherty--whose Nanook of the North unleashed a controversy in ethnographic filmmaking that continues today--fathered an Inuit son he later refused to acknowledge, or help. Even the ethically meticulous Margaret Mead admitted to having considered a sexual affair with one of the Samoans she was studying.
Today, anthropology is going through another round of soul-searching. Barbara Rose Johnston, who saw Secrets when it premiered at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival, invited Padilha and his film to the American Anthropological Association's annual meeting, held in November in New Orleans. "I think it is a trap," Padilha joked back in April. "Maybe they will try to kill me." The film, minus its director, became part of a panel exploring the ethics of the discipline and, in a move that cannot be coincidental, the AAA decided to drop the word "science" from its statement on long-range plans. "The thing is, I think that biology has a lot to do with behavior," Padilha says." But the science is clumsy. Chagnon is an embarrassment to sociobiology. This film will help that."
No matter how anthropology decides to settle its debates, it is clear from the film that the Yanomami reached a verdict long ago. "Look here, they are taking my picture again," one man points at Padilha's camera. "You should be ignorant of us."
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