Throughout world history, representation has come to play a crucial role in determining the nature and significance of a people in the ever-evolving field of anthropology. Anthropology can adequately reflect the value and significance of a social group in the best of cases or detract and distort meaning in the worst case scenarios. In this paper, I will demonstrate how indigenous peoples, in this case the Yanomami people, have been consistently negatively represented by anthropologists. As Erickson and Murphy noted (34), anthropological representations that tended to value Western standards have come into direct confrontation with more objective and nuanced anthropological representative forms. For example, in 2002 Patrick Tierney unveiled to what extent the Yanomami people, a culturally rich indigenous people of the United States, have been chastised and denigrated by prominent anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon who penned The Yanomamo: The Fierce People which has become a university schoolbook of reference. By consistently representing the Yanomami people in a negative light and representing them as brutal savages, Chagnon and his team violated anthropological ethics by falsely representing an indigenous people, by instilling false notions and by subtly conveying a sense of grandeur and optimism to Western values.
Sadly, the Chagnon case is not unique in its use of false representations. In their article “Anthropology and the Politics of Representation”, Rodrigues and Game highlight the dangers of trying to adequately represent the indigenous peoples. Consistently oppressed by colonizing forces, the indigenous peoples have come under the scrutiny of Christian missionaries, teams of politicized western anthropologists and post-colonial nation-states (Rodrigues and Game, 2709). As a result, numerous controversies have surrounded ethno-centric representations that came to yield prominence to the West, which have prompted public outcries and scandals in the long run. In short, anthropology students would do well to beware of culturally-insensitive remarks and ethnocentric bias in any scholarly work. Erickson and Murphy concur. “One could say that whatever their specific concerns, this is what all contemporary projects of ethnographic research in social and cultural anthropology are mapping and exploring: the web of their own conditions of producing knowledge about specific others” (Erickson and Murphy, 34).
- Erickson, P. and Murphy, L. Readings for a History of Anthropological Theory. North York: University of Toronto Press, 2013. Print.
- Rodrigues, E. and Game, J. “Anthropology and the Politics of Representation.” Economic and Political Weekly 33 (1998): 2709-2714. Web.
