An Update on the James Neel controversy (fwd)

Dear WSNers:

I know that many folks were intrigued by the postings on the controversy
surrounding anthropologists studying the Yanomamo.  Like many of you, I
didn't really know what to make of it.  So I asked one of our
anthropologists here at UC-Irvine about it and he told me that he thought
that the about to be released Tierney book was highly suspect.  Tonite he
sent me a copy of another letter that is making the rounds in his
discipline.  It seems like a rather measured assessment of one of the key
parts of the controversy (the measles epidemic). 

Of course, I don't really KNOW anything about this whole matter except
what I read on e-mail (a source that is almost inherently unreliable in my
experience).  My guess is that MANY of the folks who have the most
knowledge and information about this business also have some strong
interests in how it gets interpreted by the rest of us.

cheers,

dave smith
sociology, uc-irvine 

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Tue, 26 Sep 2000 13:06:06 -0700 (PDT)
From: Michael L. BURTON <MLBURTON@uci.edu>
To: David Smith <dasmith@uci.edu>
Subject: An Update on the James Neel controversy (fwd)

The email from the woman who read Neel's field notes. Mike

--------------- Text of forwarded message ---------------
Date: Fri, 22 Sep 2000 12:47:28 -0700 (PDT)
From: Deborah Heath <heath@lclark.edu>
To: Dan Segal <dan_segal@pitzer.edu>
cc: "'Vincanne Adams'" <vadams@itsa.ucsf.edu>, sca-anthro@uiowa.edu,
        m-silverstein@uchicago.edu, rlancast@gmu.edu, pstrong@mail.utexas.edu,
        lrofel@cats.ucsc.edu, anagnost@u.washington.edu,
        farquhar@email.unc.edu, Mac Marshall <mac-marshall@uiowa.edu>,
        "Virginia Dominguez (E-mail)" <domingue@blue.weeg.uiowa.edu>
Subject: An Update on the James Neel controversy


I am forwarding a letter from science historian Susan Lindee, which
includes a close review of archival material concerning James Neel's work
in Venezuela, taking issue with certain specifics of reports on the
Tierney book that is the subject of the now widely circulated email which
Virginia sent to the SCA board.

Susan is a careful historian; while she agrees with the general
anti-colonial critique of medical/technoscientific interventions in the
Amazon, her attention to detail is appropriate and warranted.

Those of us made wary by earlier skirmishes in the 'Science Wars' are
particularly invested in having our critiques grounded in defensible
scholarship.

Yours,

        --Deborah

(Fwd): From:  Susan Lindee <mlindee@sas.upenn.edu>
Subject:  James Neel's work in Amazonia
Date:  Thu, 21 Sep 2000 22:49:50 -0400



Colleagues:

Today I had the opportunity to read James Neel's entire field notes for
the
1968 work in Venezuela.  I also read archival materials relating to his
consultations with the Centers for Disease Control in late 1967 in
preparation for the program in measles immunization he and his
colleagues
planned to undertake.  And I read other correspondence in his papers,
including correspondence with missionaries, Venezuelan authorities,
Chagnon, and others.

The picture that emerges in these documents is at some variance with that
presented in a widely circulated email describing the arguments in a new
book by Patrick Tierney.

First, there are explicit matters of fact:

1. Neel had Venezuelan governmental permission to carry out the vaccine
program-the telegram providing that permission is in his papers.

2. Neel had consulted a CDC expert on measles about how to administer the
vaccine in November 1967, before the field trip which began in January
1968.  The correspondence with CDC is in his papers as are records of the
trip he made to Atlanta to meet with infectious disease specialists.

3. Neel included gamma globulin with all the vaccines he administered and
kept meticulous records of names of persons immunized, and doses given.
Apparently some vaccines were administered without gamma globulin by
Roche, who was involved in a different project (measuring iodine uptake)
with Amazonian populations.

4.  Neel heard reports of a measles outbreak at a party on January 20
while he and his team were still in Caracas buying supplies. He did not
give any vaccines until January 25, when he vaccinated 14 children under
age 5 in a village that had experienced a measles outbreak five years
earlier.

5. When the measles problem was identified as an epidemic, on or around
February 16, Neel provided penicillin and terramycin not only to those
affected in the villages he visited, but also to those who would be able
to bring it to persons affected elsewhere.  There is no evidence that he
attempted to discourage anyone from providing treatment, and indeed for
about two weeks he spent much of his own time administering vaccines and
antibiotics.

6. Furthermore, Neel himself worked out a plan for controling the
epidemic, from 2 to 4 a.m. on 16 February, after he was awakened by a
messenger bearing a frantic note from a colleague at the Ocama Mission, a
note which said that there was a serious outbreak of measles, and asking
him to send gamma globulin.  His "all Orinoco" plan included controlling
movement of people in and through the five primary ports of entry to the
region, liberal use of penicillin, vaccination when practical, and gamma
globulin when practical.

It is clear from his notes that the epidemic drastically disrupted his
field research, making it impossible for him to collect the kinds of data
he had intended to collect, and it is clear that he was at times
frustrated, even angry, about this situation.  A measles outbreak
emphatically did not facilitate his research.

I am of course basing the above account on correspondence and field notes
in the papers of James V. Neel, and if we wish to adopt an X-files theory
of history, we could propose that he planted these records, including the
much-scribbled on and often almost illegible field notes, in order to
mislead future historians about his actual behavior in the field.

There is one detail that does suggest a certain amount of forethought.
All of Neel's fieldnotes, for his work in Japan, Amazonia, and elsewhere,
stayed at his home institution of Ann Arbor after his death earlier this
year.  He did make one exception.  He photocopied his entire field
notebook for the 1968 Venezuelan trip, and placed these photocopied pages
in a file marked "Yanomama-1968-Insurance."  Having spent a good deal of
time with James Neel, and even more time reading his correspondence, I
know that he had a shrewd, dry sense of humor.  I suspect that by the time
he began parceling out his papers, he knew that Tierney was working on
this book, and he copied the field notes for APS, where they would be
widely available to scholars, as "insurance" against Tierney's claims.

Of course none of the above addresses what might be considered the real
questions.  Neel was a Cold Warrior deluxe, and an elitist, who was
confident about his hierarchical rankings of races, sexes, civilizations,
fields of knowledge production, and forms of social organization.  His
work drew heavily on the notion of the Yanomama as "primitive" and as a
natural population which could be used to understand the "conditions of
human evolution."  Furthermore Neel knew--because he had asked the CDC to
test antigen responses in his blood samples in 1967--that Yanomama in the
very small villages he would be visiting had probably never been exposed
to measles, or indeed to many other infectious diseases.

And so I think of Tierney's book, which I have not seen, and I want to
both refute the specifics-I am convinced that Neel's intentions were
benevolent in the classic colonialist sense-and express sympathy for the
generalities.

 Amazonians have in fact been grievously damaged, in many ways, by those
who came to them seeking to construct technical knowledge. But the book
cannot be right if it does not respect the complexity of that damage, or
the tangled human acts and ideas through which it came into being.

I am grateful to Robert Cox for helping me to navigate Neel's recently
accessioned papers so quickly, and to Jonathan Marks, Ricardo Santos, Joel
Howell, Rayna Rapp, Gerard Fitzgerald and others who have been
participating in this ongoing exploration of a book none of us seems to
have read.  Please feel free to share this email if you feel it is useful.

Susan Lindee
Department of the History and Sociology of Science
University of Pennsylvania