by Leanan » Fri 11 Mar 2005, 15:50:53
No, I don't mean that the Ik are all sweetness and light. And yes, their way of life had been significantly disrupted when Turnball was there. At least, in the areas he studied they were.
But whether Turnball's depiction is correct is questionable. Not many scientists want to live in the boondocks of Uganda for years to check Turnball's work. And even if they did, the Ik may not want to talk to them, having been burned before.
I always take this sort of ethnography with large amounts of NaCl. You can send two different anthropologists out, and they'll come back with completely opposite impressions. It's the nature of this kind of study. Even when you've been studying people for years, you can be surprised.
An example was in Discover magazine last year. Anthropologists had been studying a tribe in South America for twenty years. They thought they understood the culture pretty well. Until one day, when they were shocked to discover that, rather than being completely monogamous, as they'd always thought, women in the tribe were in the custom of taking "second husbands." It was believed that one husband wasn't enough to create a child. The woman needed frequent sex to have a successful pregnancy, and one man just didn't have the stamina. So she would take a second, sometimes even a third, husband to help out.
The anthropologists were astounded. How could they have lived with these people for 20 years and not discovered this element of their lives? Turns out, the natives had had some exposure to missionaries. The missionaries had been horrified at the idea of second husbands. Assuming that all white people felt this way, they were careful to hide this practice from the anthropologists. Meanwhile, the anthropologists, projecting their own cultural biases, were reluctant to ask about the subject of sex, because it's a sensitive topic in our culture. So no one brought it up, on either side. For two decades.