Reviews

Brian Hioe
Editor at New Bloom, where this review first appeared.

Yang Chun-Kai’s “Path of Destiny” (不得不上路) would be a deft evocation of the challenges facing preservation of indigenous tradition in Taiwan. Namely, even in those rare cases in which young people actively aim to participate in traditions which may soon be lost, the trend may be irreversible. And given inescapable social tensions between modernity and tradition, adherence to tradition demands great personal sacrifice.

The main focus of “Path of Destiny” is Panay Mulu, the youngest member of a group of Sikaway mediums who carry out ceremonies throughout the year to heal sickness and call upon the gods. The other members of this group are elderly, the much younger Panay having originally joined the group as part of scholarly research into Sikawasay tradition, and subsequently stayed with the group for over twenty years. Seeing as the group of Sikawasay the film focuses upon has already lost many of its members to age over the course of the twenty years Panay has been with the group, it is suggested in the film that Panay may ultimately be the last of this group of Sikawasay.

The challenges of preserving tradition, then, are many. It is not merely lack of interest from young people which leads to difficulties in carrying on Sikawasay traditions. Namely, the religious rites of the Sikawasay are highly demanding, requiring fasting, avoidance of certain foods and avoiding contact with members of the opposite sex during certain parts of the year. As Panay points out, it is very difficult to preserve such traditions in contemporary society, seeing as Sikawasay rites require Panay to spend significant time away from work and few outsiders understand such traditions. Accordingly, although Panay has gone out of her way to document Sikawasay song and religious rites, it seems that there are few who take interest in such matters to as in-depth a manner as Panay, who whose original interest in preserving Sikaway tradition has required a great deal of self-sacrifice.

Panay herself has to balance her teaching duties along with her responsibilities. And although Sikawasay were a quintessential part of traditional Amis religious practices, carrying out rites yearly, and performing ceremonies to heal the sick, Sikawasay rites are stigmatized by Amis who have converted to Christianity, referring to practitioners of Sikawasay rites as “witches.” Panay herself occupies a precarious position with members of her Christian family, who fear that Panay may suffer damnation through adherence to a non-Christian religious practices deemed to be witchcraft. Indeed, this would be a common phenomenon among indigenous young people that become interested in their cultural heritage, seeing as they may face being ostracized from parents who have converted to Christianity, as well as that indigenous who converted to Christianity have in some cases gone out of their way to destroy traces of indigenous tradition and religious practices as idolatry.

Likewise, apart from facing many of the practitioners of Sikaway are in poor health, something which may be exacerbated by their continuing to practice Sikawasay. Despite their age, healing the sick brings them into frequent contact with disease, and some of the religious ceremonies of the Sikawasay are highly physical taxing, particularly for the elderly. Sikawasay rites also require drinking large amounts of rice wine as a way to come into contact with the gods, and such frequent drinking no doubt wears at their health. The members of the Sikawasay group that Panay is part of all freely acknowledge that they have considered giving up Sikawasay many times, but have ultimately stuck with it for decades. Panay herself mentions that she has thought about giving up in order to lead a less physically taxing life. Nevertheless, it is clear from the film, that this shared struggle has also built strong ties between Panay and her fellow Sikawasay practitioners, despite the age difference. And many indigenous, both young and old, cite the importance of Sikawasay to the Amis and the need to support such traditions and ensure that they are not lost.

“Path of Destiny,” then, is able to skillfully balance the many-sided nature of what may otherwise seem like the simple and positive good of attempting to preserve tradition before it is lost. For while it may be the series of historical tragedies wrought by Han colonialism in Taiwan which led to the destruction of many indigenous traditions, it may demand further sacrifice in the present to preserve these traditions. And there is ultimately no easy answers to such quandaries facing those who seek to preserve tradition before it is lost.

Watch the trailer for Path of Destiny.

In his 1983 novel Crystal Boys 《孽子》Pai Hsien-Yong 白先勇 described Taipei’s New Park as “our hidden kingdom in darkness” 「我們黑暗王國」— at night, with the gates shut, this real space behind walls somehow became a fantasy land of imagined freedoms that could not be entertained, let alone realized, in daylight. Claire Simon’s The Woods Dreams are Made of explores a year in the life of what Simon calls an “accessible form of Paradise Lost,” an urban woods in which various dreams and life projects can take root. As in Pai’s work, the film provides an occasion for us to consider the relationship between space and urban subjectivity.

Simon depicts the Bois de Vincennes as a magnanimous and surprising character, whose changes throughout the seasons and ability to befriend nearly every urban denizen in need of respite give the woods a universal character. Within the woods, we will find tired nannies resting their feet, one eye still on the stroller, as well as tireless cyclists racing about a track (not to mention the exhibitionists itching to flash the cyclists as they pass). The woods will play host to everyone who comes here. A grandmother–you might call her homeless, but it’s not so clear cut–explains how she arranges her life to remain in her tent hidden within the woods, evading intervention of welfare agencies. She prepares for a visit from her grandchildren, who will see her soon, if her encampment is not discovered and removed by park wardens. If she comes to the woods for freedom, others see it as a place of challenge and work. Sex workers wait in the woods for clients. Sport fishermen show off the catch before releasing it. Some who come here celebrate. Others rest. For everyone, the Bois de Vincennes exists within the city, but somehow persists outside. Even as a place of trade, it traffics in dreams. It is both part of the normally expected urban infrastructure and radically other. Like other heterotopias, the woods present us with a paradox. They are a place to escape urban life but also recreate it, both in the diverse texture of park visitors (not to mention those who might not visit), and in the sense that the park functions to maintain urban spatial and class distinctions: Paradise Planned? Does the park ever really deliver on its promise for escape? Let our questions fall silent among the snow covered pathways. Spring will return soon, the cyclists and the exhibitionists await its promise.

The Bois de Vincennes appears as character in the film. Yet Simon is also a skillful interviewer, who allows visitors to the park to describe their relationship to the woods, telling us how their visits connect to the wider fabric of their lives. Although the film never takes us away from the park, we get a sense of the worlds to which the visitors return, some refreshed, others with anxiety. The film also gives us a sense of the woods’ history and fragility. The Bois de Vincennes became a public resource as the result of historical coincidences, they have housed several facilities including a university, and they require a great deal of work to maintain. What is at stake in public investment in this communal escape from the city?

In asking these questions, Simon gives us space to think about urban space more broadly. Those of us old enough to remember that the 2/28 Peace Park was once New Park may also recall Pai Hsien-Yong’s “kingdom in darkness.” Today a light show fountain plays nearby the lotus pond. From the 1960s until the late 1990s, this space was a hidden–but widely known–rendezvous for gay men. Removal of park walls and the creation of the 2/28 Memorial provided public goods. Nonetheless, we might ask what possibilities and histories have been lost as the park changed designations. If places are not just given, but practiced, we could also ask, along with a man cruising the woods in Simon’s film, what kinds of relationships–to other people, nature, and place–are lost when chat and hookup apps displace the practices of ambling, watching, and waiting that once defined a park. Should there be some indication of New Park’s former life? Does a Taiwan which now congratulates itself on its progressive approach to LGBTQ rights still want to remember this hidden kingdom? Do Taiwanese LGBTQ people themselves?

The Woods Dreams are Made of provokes us to discuss the history of urban green spaces, some of which housed communities that have since been demolished and forgotten. The history of the Bois de Vincennes–from royal hunting preserve and palace lands, to military training ground, and finally public park–differs greatly from Taipei’s parks. However, after viewing Simon’s film we might wish to come to terms with the ways that Taipei’s parks have required urban spaces to be “repurposed” or “redeveloped.” What kinds of practices of urban planning, consumption, real estate, and recreation have produced the Taipei we see today? Is there still space in this Taipei for the kind of freedom Simon’s film suggests? Is this freedom purchased with the marginalization of communities that once lived on the grounds of Da An Forest Park and other urban oases? To ask these questions is not to doubt the value of urban green spaces. Rather, Simon’s film encourages us to understand more clearly how we might adjudicate among competing values as we attempt to build a more open and verdant city.

More than posing questions, Simon’s poetic and multivocal film is an invitation to dream along with the woods. Replete with humour and a sense for the varied coincidences that enrich urban life, The Woods Dreams are Made of will encourage those who watch it to be curious about the lives of those they see running the track around Da An Forest Park and to appreciate the work needed to maintain such fragile urban green spaces. Yet–and most importantly–we might dream along with the Bois de Vincennes about a city whose arms are large enough to house all of us.

Watch the trailer for The Woods Dreams Are Made Of.

Dr. Teri J. Silvio
Institute of Ethnology Academia Sinica

“When I’m here, I miss there; when I’m there I miss here.”

The Third Shore is a fascinating film in which the relationships among culture, history, and personal identity are explored. Concrete objects take on layers of significance, and the answer to each question reveals a deeper mystery. It deals directly with the issue of relations between indigenous peoples and settlers in the Amazon, but the characters’ alienation and moments of connection probably resonate with culturally displaced viewers everywhere.

The film gives us glimpses into two men who cross between settler and indigenous cultures from opposite directions. Director Fabian Remy is first fascinated when he comes across the story of João da Luz, the child of one of the first settler families in the region who was captured in 1945, at the age of 10, in a raid by a group of Kayapó. He was taken back to the Kayapó village, where he was adopted into a chief’s family, given a new name, Kramura, and taught Kayapó language and customs. Then, when he was 18, the Villas-Bȏas brothers found him during one of their reconnaissance trips up the Xingu River, and returned him to his biological sister and brother-in-law in the settler community. When Remy tried to find João/Kramura to interview him in 2005, he was too late – João/Kramura had died just a few months before Remy located his relatives. Years later, Remy is still captivated by this story, and sets off again to trace the history of João/Kramura, this time with a companion, his friend Thini-á. Thini-á is a member of the Fulni-ȏ tribe, but left his village at the age of 15, and has lived mostly in large cities ever since.

“The more you discover things, the more you know, the more you suffer.”

As Remy and Thini-á interview João/Kramura’s two sets of remaining kin, the life that we glimpse is rarely a happy one. His Kayapó family takes them to João’s grave and recall his initiation ceremony. His settler family removed his lip plug, but say that he never really learned Portuguese, that he always missed the Kayapó. His Kayapó friends would travel hundreds of kilometers to visit him, and he would leave with them for weeks.

Remy and Thini-á’s last stop is the frontier town of Sao José, a city that grew up on the border of the Xingu reservation area and the white settlements, where João/Kramura spent much of his later life. The people there remember him, he would come and work on the ferry until he had enough money to buy tobacco and other goods, and then go back to the Kayapó for a while. Before they leave, Remy and Thini-á are able to locate his Brazilian ID, acquired late in life, and we see João’s face for the first time. But the formal ID reveals very little about the man, except for the dates of his birth and death.

If João remains mysterious because he is dead and his story can only be approached through the memories of others, Thini-á remains mysterious too. The emotional trajectory of João/Kramura’s story is revealed largely through the point of view of Thini-á (the director does not appear in the film, and the narrative he provides in voice-overs is primarily factual). Thini-á is a taciturn man, but when he speaks he is insightful, and his silences are eloquent themselves. His life is full of contradictions. He works teaching about indigenous culture in schools in Rio, yet he has not been back to his village to participate in the Ouricuri ritual for ten years. His uncles were killed by Portuguese ranchers, yet he sings Portuguese folk songs about the trials of being a rancher with feeling. He says he saw emotional closeness in the crowded urban apartment buildings of Brasilia; he sees sadness in the faces at a dance party. When questioned about these contradictions, he simply says, “My path is not your path.”

The film ends with the image of Thini-á on the ferry across the Xingu, the same route on which João/Kramura worked, which Remy sees as an obvious symbol for the lives of both men, shuttling between indigenous and settler cultures. Thini-á has decided to go back to his village to participate in the Ouricuri ritual for the first time in over ten years. Remy asks if he can film it, Thini-á says no.

The indigenous people of the Amazon have long been an object of study by anthropologists, and they have been particularly important in the recent “ontological turn” in anthropology. This film is particularly interesting because it offers both an exploration and a critique of the idea that the worlds of indigenous people and settlers are incommensurable. On the one hand, we see that for many indigenous people today, it is impossible to live in a purely indigenous world. Border-crossing is not only possible but often necessary, both practically and emotionally. On the other hand, it is clear that much of the suffering that both João/Kramura and Thini-á feel comes from their experience of incommensurability. The Third Shore does not try, as many ethnographic films do, to approach indigenous worldviews through the recording of ritual, or, as other ethnographic films do, to focus on the conflict between indigenous and settler worlds in terms of the political struggles of indigenous communities. It does not really spend much time on the content of Kayapó or Fulni-ȏ beliefs. Rather, it tries to show us the emotional and epistemological consequences of living between different worlds. Thini-á’s final refusal may not only be a demand that the sacred and secret nature of the ritual be respected. It may also be a demand that we acknowledge that the world constructed through ritual, and the part of himself that lives in that world, may not be graspable through the mediation of ethnographic film.

Watch the trailer for The Third Shore.

Gabriele de Seta

Faber Navalis is a movie about the embodied craftiness of boat-making. In the mobile camera-eye of Maurizio Borriello, the film-maker is also the faber navalis or ‘maker of ships’, at the same time director and directed, both silent artisan and self-aware documentarist. Condensed in thirty minutes of carefully spliced shots and intimate sounds is a compressed timeline of manual labor, wood and image treated as raw materials with symmetrical care. Just like each of the poetically framed scenes composing this documentary, an individual plank of wood is measured, marked, cut, contoured, sanded, polished, bent, transported and fixed into place. After half an hour of entrancing woodwork, as the creaking plank is being hammered into its matching gap on a side of the ship, one can imagine Borriello’s parallel work on the multitrack interface of a video-editing software, each audio and video track a painstakingly but instinctively shaped plank composing the waterproof hull of this documentary.

Trained as an anthropologist and working on a marine ethnography in post-Tsunami Indonesia, Maurizio Borriello resorted to learn the art of boatbuilding in order to understand the transmission of the non-verbal repertoires of knowledge involved in this artisanal practice. Years later, while working on the restoration of a Norwegian wooden ship recognized as historical maritime treasure, Borriello decides to add one more tool to his practice: a video camera. This camera follows the story of a single wooden plank, from the dismantling of a old and rotten ship hull to the gradual assembling of a new vessel. The director-artisan orchestrates his documentary performance through fixed lens angles, sometimes perched on the corners of his deserted workshop, other times mounted on moving cranes, trolley carts, circular saws or even the plank itself, challenging the roles of objects and subjects, and distributing agency through embodied perspectives. What is it like to be a piece of wood on its journey from tree to boat?

Sound is integral to the experience of Faber Navalis, and offers a counterpoint to the visual movement between detailed close-ups, dynamic perspectival shots and wider angles. Borriello chooses to mix his audio according to a crisp and focused directional aesthetic – while the artisan-director is alone and doesn’t say a word throughout the movie, everything sounds: the wood itself, human hands, tools and machinery, the workshop rooms through reverb and resonances. While the camera is manipulated as nothing more than another woodworking tool, microphones are used to capture the peaks of rhythmic hammering, the textures of sandpaper friction, the echo trails of sawing blades. Sound here is not merely diegetic ambience, but an unapologetically material aural structure that buttresses the fleeting passage of images. For Maurizio Borriello, documentaries are vessels, and Faber Navalis floats effortlessly over its own running time, compressing the practical knowledge of artisanal practice into a personal and affecting example of sensory ethnography.

Watch the trailer for Faber Navalis.

Anthropology Beyond the Pale : Reviewing Secrets of the Tribe

清大魏捷茲老師

Watching the Jose Padilha directed film Secrets of the Tribe (2010) is deeply troubling. Secrets of the Tribe is about professional anthropological misconduct and its consequences for the Yanomami (also called Ya̧nomamö or Yanomama). Although extent professional association and university investigations have so far passed no final judgment on wrongdoing on the part of the anthropologists, Secrets of the Tribe suggests the Yanomami engagement with anthropology has not been in the best interests of the Yanomami. The way the film makes its point is to show how the Yanomami talk about the anthropologists, how the anthropologists talk about the Yanomami, and how anthropologists talk about anthropologists. (Sadly, the film does not show how the Yanomami talk with Yanomami about anthropologists.) Viewing the film suggests to me that the anthropology discipline’s own culture of language use contributed to the abuses the film seeks to expose and that abuse will be piled upon abuse unless anthropologists learn how to talk with each other.

It is common knowledge that the Yanomami are dispersed in small settlements along the Orinoco and Amazon river basins in southern Venezuela and the extreme north of Brazil and have a population of somewhere between 15,000 to 30,000 people. Classification of the language remains uncertain. Traditional livelihood is through hunting, fishing, and horticulture. The small Yanomami settlements are located in rough terrain remote from major urban areas and intensive contact between the Yanomami and outsiders came relatively late and long remained sporadic. In the last half of the Twentieth Century, intensifying outside contact took four main forms: gold prospectors, missionaries, anthropologists, and non-governmental agencies. Although not entirely absent, the government presence has often been weak and policies concerning assimilation versus preservation have fluctuated.

The last half-century of contact between the Yanomami and the outside world has not gone peacefully. First, as documented in Jan Rocha’s Murder in the Rain Forest: the Yamomami, the Gold Miners and the Rain Forest (1999), a gold rush that began in the late 1970s eventually resulted in serious environmental destruction, armed conflict between gold miners and the Yanomami, and the introduction of disease. Second, as described in Patrick Tierney’s Darkness in El Dorado: How Scientists and Journalists Devastated the Amazon (2000), the renowned anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon and the geneticist James V. Neel became central figures in a high profile case of alleged professional ethical misconduct. Chagnon was author of the undergraduate classic ethnography Yanomano: The Fierce People (1968), and collaborated with the deceased Timothy Ash for the equally influential ethnographic film The Axe Fight (1975). James V. Neel, also now deceased, was geneticist who played a leading role in the establishment of that field in the United States in the 1950s and collaborated with Chagnon in collection of blood samples and inoculation of some Yanomami against a measles outbreak where it was unclear at the time whether they unwittingly helped to spread the disease and are thus culpable in the deaths of Yanomami participants in their research.

All of this and much more were first recounted in-depth in Patrick Tierney’s monograph Darkness in El Dorado. Response to the volume began even before its publication. After reading the galley proofs, Amazonia specialists Terence Turner (Cornell University) and Leslie Sponsel (University of Hawaii) wrote a famous “confidential” email to representatives at the American Anthropological Association. That email warned officials of the American Anthropological Association of the impending publication of Patrick Tierney’s book and its possible ramifications to anthropology. Surprising only to its authors, the email immediately circled the globe.

A task force appointed by the American Anthropological Association investigated allegations made against anthropologists discussed in Tierney’s monograph and the Executive Board initially accepted the judgments against certain anthropologists and their field research practices (AAA 2002). Eventually, however, the executive board rescinded acceptance of the El Dorado Task Force Report after a vote to do was passed by the membership of the American Anthropological Association (2005). Inquiries into possible unethical conduct were conducted elsewhere, such as of James V. Neel at the University of Michigan (Cantor 2000).

In sum, it is important to note that all allegations by all professional organizations and universities have reported no professional misconduct by any of the allegations of impropriety in the book Darkness in El Dorado. Furthermore, Darkness in El Dorado author Patrick Tierney was cited in many of these reports with a degree of shoddy and biased research methods that likewise calls his own ethnical standards into question. The film Secrets of the Tribe both covers much of the same ground as the book Darkness in El Diablo, yet passes lightly over the questions raised about the allegations raised about the book itself. Nonetheless, the film still substantiates and extends certain allegations of anthropological wrongdoing originally raised in the Patrick Tierney book.

Public discussion of Secrets of the Tribe and its subject has already been extensive, both in and out of the discipline of anthropology. After watching this film, even sympathetic views of what anthropologists did in the name of anthropology will be hard put to defend all of what happened. Probably the most damning account in the film is that of the French linguist Jacques Lizot. First hand accounts are given in the film charging that Jacques Lizot exchanged gifts for sex with young boys. He is now sought on “an unrelated molestation charge” by the French police and is believed to be hiding out in Morocco (Shari Kizirian 2011). There is no point in quibbling over whether at least some anthropologists violated professional ethics in Yanomami research.

Still, as depicted in Secrets of the Tribe, even unsympathetic commentators on anthropological ethics used in Yanomami research can themselves be condemned for their own unethical professional conduct. The makers of the film are acutely aware of this irony. The famous jazz song played in the background at the end of the film—Louis Armstrong’s “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off”—well captures this irony. It is songs about a couple that, through disagreement over the proper pronunciation of the word “tomato,” decide to call off their wedding. The lesson seems to be that maybe anthropologists have similar problems with communication with each other.

The film Secrets of the Tribe provides a venue for those Yanomami who appeared in the film to give voice to Yanomami suffering and bitterness as a result of misconduct by anthropologists. Although it is impossible to judge how representative these Yanomami spokespeople are of the Yanomami experience of anthropology as a whole and, as mentioned, we miss what the Yanomami say among themselves about the anthropologists, the film certainly convinces the viewer of the authenticity of their witnessing. The film likewise also epitomizes the sensibilities of those who suffered at the hands of anthropology elsewhere in the world and perhaps have not had the same opportunity to bear witness. In short, there is more than enough reason in this film as representative of the voices of those wronged by anthropology to convince an anthropologist who is currently employed in the field to question whether he or she has taken a wrong turn in choice of professional career, while there is even more reason for a young scholar to turn away from the field before it is too late.

Worse still, there is no “and yet” silver lining to what happened. The scandal provoked a split in anthropology. Of those involved in the alleged misconduct, some changed fields to align themselves with behavioral scientists or took other steps to distance themselves from professional anthropology. The mission of anthropology is thus being pursued by some with other professional affiliations and thus outside of the professional ethics agreed upon by professional anthropological associations. Secrets of the Tribe does a good job of letting malcontent former anthropologists give voice to their dissatisfaction with the very language in which anthropology is now being conducted. The decision of these former anthropologists was “to call the whole thing off.”

Of those involved in leveling charges of misconduct in anthropological research on the Yanomami, they retain their professional affiliations with the American Anthropological Association, yet there is ample reason to feel unease at their own professional conduct in alerting the association of to the alleged misconduct. The film describes the confidential email where the anthropologists Terence Turner and Leslie Sponsel raise comparisons with the Joseph Conrad novel Heart of Darkness, and add in parentheses the damning disclaimer “though not, perhaps, a Josef Mengele” (quoted in Geertz 2010: 213). Mere mention of Josef Mengele in this email—the “Angel of Death who performed “experiments” of unbelievable cruelty on prisoners in Nazi Germany death camps—is a damning reflection upon the ethical character of the accusers themselves. Disclaiming the resemblance and claiming that the communication was confidential is no excuse for this sort of language.