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Hello all. As a traveler in Anthroland, I feel compelled to respond to Louis' points, which are basically true but might benefit from further elaboration (in a few cases, for instance, things are worse than he says; in others, merely more complicated). But I'm not just going to rattle off a full response now; I'll post something more considered a bit later. But I did want to touch on the Rigoberta Menchu/David Stoll issue that Louis brought up, because I think that it is incredibly important.
Stoll portrays his work as truth-seeking and supposedly not destructive, but it's apparent that he has an agenda, one that I've started to take apart in other works of his and within a larger discussion going on in anthropology. I have not seen the NYT article, but I've been following a lengthy debate around this issue on the Cultural Survival website (www.cs.org) in their Active Voices section, which has published several of Stoll's articles about Menchu and related issues (as well as many rebuttals, although I don't think any have come from indigneous folks). I urge folks to check out his work and the many responses to it at that site.
In particular, John Beverely has quite rightly pointed out that what Stoll is really doing is shoring up his own authority and that of academia at the expense of Menchu and indigenous peoples' ability to tell their own stories and control how they are represented, and has missed the deeper significances of such testimonies. Stoll has tried to lay out his assertions in greater detail, but it still smacks of a witch-hunt in service to another cause.
I think that cause emerges in Stoll's related work on land and the peace process, one article of which is also at the CS site. Basically, Stoll believes that only a strong state will fix Guatemala's problems, which for him boil down to local bickering, which seems a serious misreading of the vicious and complex politics that have characterized the country since the CIA/United Fruit shenanigans several decades ago. He is suspicious of revolution and issues like self-determination for indigenous communities, or even a different kind of state configuration than the tired old U.S.-style "democracy", do not appear on his map. But given his bias, it makes sense that Cultural Survival has supported him so strongly, given the strong statist bias of its founder David Maybury-Lewis as evinced in his recent book *Indigenous Peoples, Ethnic Groups, and the State* (I'd be happy to send anyone interested a review I wrote of this and two other books that was first published in *Native Americas* and that I am now working on expanding).
What makes Stoll and others who pursue this sort of academic path, anthros or not, dangerous is that they attempt to set themselves up as the arbiters of truth, rather than as positioned analysts who themselves have bias and goals. allegiances and limits. As more indigenous folks talk back, and themselves set the agendas, narratives like Menchu's, problematic or not, become a threat to such experts, who seem to forget that they have a responsibility to serve their "subjects" rather than larger power interests. I think this is what undergirds a lot of the issues Louis brought up, such as "Kennewick Man" and the recent anthro conference about populations, which one friend of mine who attended described as "eerie," and is one that indigneous peoples and their supporters and allies need to keep hammering at, to get at another sort of truth that will break down prevailing power structures and allow comunities and peoples to relate to each other in more affirmative, cooperative ways.
John H. Stevens Cornell University
Louis Proyect
(http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)