Gustaaf Houtman is completing a PhD thesis on Theravada Buddhist vipassana meditation practice in Burma at the School of Oriental and African Studies, and is assistant editor of ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY.

On 31 July 1985 Survival International released a press bulletin entitled `British Museum conceals truth about Amazon genocide: Indians conduct investigative mission to London'. Survival International accused the BM of `inaccuracy' and `superficiality' in its exhibition Hidden People of the Amazon (for an account of this exhibition see this issue). Stephen Corry, Director of SI, is quoted as saying that `it is rather like mounting an exhibition on the Jewish people in 1945 and making no reference to Auschwitz'. This article covers briefly the events which culminated into the biggest controversy Survival International has had with the Museum of Mankind, the ethnography department of the British Museum. Primarily, however, it is an attempt to explain the obstinate nature of SI's objections to the exhibition in the light of recent developments in SI's objectives, as evident from an interview with the Director which I initiated on behalf of ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY long before the controversy became apparent.

SI President Robin Hanbury-Tenison with Cristobel Tapuy (left) and Evaristo Nugkuag, the two Amazonian Indians who declined to remain hidden and visited the Museum of Mankind

A summary of events

Several months before the opening of the exhibition SI contacted the curator expressing the hope that `the exhibition and associated events will go beyond a representation of material culture raised by the rapid ... economic development taking place in the region ... An exhibition on tribal peoples and their culture which failed to reflect the crises they confront would be doing them and the viewing public a disservice'. When the exhibition opened, no account had been taken of SI's suggestions, and one of SI's major objections was directed towards the last part of the exhibition, which dealt with the Amazon Today, and which was dominated by a Panare Indian sitting on a motor bicycle. According to SI the Panare are an exceptional minority group among the Indians of the region who have adapted themselves reasonably well to industrial society, and the Museum is doing the Indians of the area a disservice by not revealing something of the plight of the majority: in Brazil the Indian tribal population has been reduced by about 80% over the last century. Few have official title to their lands and, if they have, then the law does not act to protect them. SI supplied alternative photographs and text for the latter part of the exhibition, but the Museum refused to have its editorial independence imposed upon by what they referred to as a `pressure group'. SI then took the step of organising a press conference for Indian representatives of two major Amazonian Indian organizations; the campaign was funded by Christian Aid, the Onaway Trust and Oxfam. At this point the controversy was made public, went beyond SI and the Museum, and reached some of the major newspapers and the radio/TV channels, few of whom would appear to have accorded a great deal of sympathy to the organizers of the exhibition .[1]

The question we may now pose is: why should SI be so fierce about an exhibition of the Amazon in particular? To the Museum this is an unexpected intrusion on its territory which is not a routine occurrence with exhibitions on other areas: hence the rather clumsy way of dealing with the issue by the exhibition organizers (one can only presume that the Museum has a strict policy of not making changes to exhibitions in response to criticisms from pressure groups). Furthermore, why does SI use its scarce resources to contest a Museum exhibition? Why not use this money to campaign for land rights in the countries of the Amazon itself?

Amazon Indians

We do not have to seek far afield to find an answer to the first question. SI has a history of close association with the peoples of the Amazon region, dating back to its very foundation in the late 1960's.[2] In Summer 1969 the Primitive Peoples Fund came into existence, registered as a charity in November that same year. Its foundation was spurred by an article in the Sunday Times by Norman Lewis, entitled `From fire and sword to arsenic and bullets - civilization has sent six million Indians to extinction'. This article investigated the involvement of commercial interest in the massacre of Indians in Brazil which had become an issue after a 1968 report by the Brazilian Ministry of the Interior showed that crimes were being committed against the Indian population. This report led to the denunciation of Brazil's stance over Indian rights by a group of countries during a subsequent UN Conference on Human Rights. When in 1971 the Primitive Peoples Fund changed its name to Survival International, its first report by Robin Hanbury-Tenison, SI's chairman, was commissioned by the Brazilian government on the Indians in Brazil. In subsequent years SI has continued its special interest in this region, and has its best contacts in that area. It is not surprising therefore that, of all peoples, SI should have organized such protest about the Amazonian Indians.

SI goes public

The second question, as to why SI should make a fuss about an exhibition in England is somewhat more complex to answer. It is perhaps best explained by noting that SI has increasingly gone public over the plight of tribal peoples: it has changed from achieving its objectives through private arrangements with experts such as anthropologists, policy makers, and specialized institutions, to achieving it through the media with the general public.

Recommendations made in SI's first report were never implemented by the Brazilian government, as a subsequent study by the Aborigine Protection Society in the same area showed. Meanwhile foreign investments flowing in through private companies for major economic aid projects were destroying the habitat of the people SI was seeking to protect, particularly through mining and road building. Here education and raising the awareness of a wider public abroad had to become increasingly an objective in itself. SI begun doing so in 1971 by publishing Reports together with the Newsletter. The Newsletter was superseded in February 1976 by a more substantial quarterly Review[3]; in 1983 this quarterly Review was again superseded by a less substantial and less costly quarterly News, intended for a wider readership, and an annual Review. A more important development is the introduction of Information Packs in 1979, which were usually sent to one individual or organization in each country in the hope that this would be distributed more widely, containing information on various ways of influencing government and international funding agencies on particular issues. At the end of 1983 these were replaced by more regular monthly Urgent Action bulletins, sent irrespective of membership to anyone who requests these in order to trigger letter writing campaigns on specific situations of threat to tribal peoples. So the trend has been towards reaching more people, irrespective of whether they are members or not. But the general public cannot be reached without making use of the media, and this is what SI has increasingly been doing. Not without enthusiasm, SI's Director pointed out that a recent radio appeal in England netted 40% coming in through subscriptions and 20% through various grants from funding agencies. Through its increasing emphasis on reaching the general public by using the media it has thus sought and achieved an independence from the constraints of funding agencies so necessary for its independence of action. SI's attack on a Museum exhibition in Britain and its clever arrangement of the media coverage must be understood against this background of changed objectives. As SI put it, the exhibition is `perhaps the largest of its kind ever mounted in Europe [and] is likely to run for two years', and `to give visitors this, rather frivolous, image [the Panare Indian on the motorbike] as a parting shot renders a grave disservice to the public...' As soon as it was known that the BBC were going to be on strike on the scheduled day of the petition, the petition date was changed to ensure coverage by the World Services.

If SI has increasingly diversified its objectives over the years, and is no longer solely worried about the Indians, but sees their welfare in this much wider context of public awareness of the issues involved, then this coincides with its changed role from protector to broker for the native Indian issue. This change in objectives was facilitated by changes in the degree of politicization and organization of the Indians themselves. SI no longer needs to represent the Indians concerned, or devote all its resources to protecting the rights of Indians on the spot, because newly emerging native Indian pressure groups are capable of doing both of these; SI merely requires to help these newly formed Indian pressure group to speak for themselves by providing moral and financial support. This too underscores its changing objective towards raising the standard of public awareness of issues affecting tribal minorities outside the Amazon, and explains the presence of native Indian leaders on the Museum's doorstep on 8 August, for whom SI had secured funds.

The transition of SI's active verb from protection to action is in some ways already implied in its change of name from the Primitive People's Fund, formed on the analogy of the World Wildlife Fund, where its early members were unaware of the dubiousness of the notion of protection, to Survival International, formed more along the lines of Amnesty international, where its members - more self-conscious about the notion of protection - see their priority as lying with publicizing. Indeed, in its 1974 philosophy draft, written by Paul Henley, Survival International may still be described as `concerned with protecting the rights of aboriginal peoples', but `protection' is, as Henley points out, an ambiguous turn which leaves decision on what aspects are to be protected to the interests of the protector. Reservations and homelands may protect, but do they help the people who are in it? And so today SI is, to put it in its own words, `an international human rights organization that acts to help threatened tribal people'.

SI and anthropology

We now understand that SI's choice to dispute an exhibition on the Amazonian Indians intended for the general public and its rallying of media coverage is not altogether a coincidence. However, there is a further factor to be considered in the controversy which is certainly no less important. Many members of and advisors to the BM Ethnography Department are anthropologists and some attention must be paid to the changing relationship between SI and academic anthropology.

The relationship between these two was, and still is, a close one. In its early days, SI's office was at the Royal Anthropological Institute, and its first General Secretary was Barbara Bentley, who at the time ran the administration of the RAI and in 1974 became Director of SI. SI's first Statement of Philosophy was written by an anthropologist. Some publications have been jointly published by the RAI and SI.[4] Of course, much of SI's information on tribal groups, and well over half of the contributors to its periodicals, comes from anthropologists. Many of its members are anthropologists, and over the years we see famous anthropologists on its boards of executives and sponsors, such as Claude Levi-Strauss and Edmund Leach. Stephen Corry notes that SI active members are even identified as romantic anthropologists by the general public.

Though the relationship between SI and academic anthropologists was close, it was not in all contexts a smooth one. The language of professional academia and voluntary action groups is further apart in England than, for example, in the USA or France. Early correspondence between SI members and some members of the academic profession on the concept of ethnocide in RAIN, for example, reveals a fundamental rift of approach.[5] Museum ethnography and university anthropology departments are predominantly government funded, where professionals make careers in studying and representing people. On the other hand, institutions such as SI come into being spontaneously over a particular humanitarian issue, and rely mainly on unpaid committed volunteers with a small nucleus of paid staff. Anthropologists employed by universities and museums are more accountable to experts in their respective academic field and to government than they are to the peoples they seek to represent, while humanitarian institutions such as SI feel accountable to the native Indians and to the public. Academic anthropologists find technical expertise in representing peoples important, while SI members emphasize that the information on tribal peoples should be more than aesthetically pleasing, and should also reflect that hard legal and political circumstances under which the peoples represented live. No doubt this fundamental difference of approach is also involved here in the controversy about the Amazon exhibition.

However, it is SI's public assertion of this fundamental difference that is at stake here. Indeed, Stephen Corry assesses SI's history by noting that the 1970s were dominated by the rather fruitless attempt to establish academic credibility, and looking up to anthropologists for guidance, while in the 1980's it is public opinion that has become more important to SI than opinions emanating from professional anthropologists. Furthermore, the increasingly active liaison between SI and native Indians through their representatives (recently SI opened an office in Brazil), has made SI somewhat less dependent than before on the expert local knowledge of the academic anthropologists. The question is: would Si criticize the Museum as it did if the same exhibition had taken place in the early 1970s, when it still considered its fate bound up with anthropology?

With cuts in the budgets of museums and university departments, anthropologists are increasingly forced to seek employment outside the academic world. Recent developments in the field of applied anthropology are in some respects a spin-off from this situation. In answer to my question about SI's perspective of recent developments in this field, Stephen Corry expressed his worries that the increasing preference for fieldwork undertaken in industrialized society will indirectly deprive SI of much of its essential information on the tribal minorities in remote areas; there will be fewer anthropologists conducting fieldwork among tribal peoples. On the other hand, we may look at it like this: perhaps this very same development will reduce the rift between academia and humanitarian pressure groups such as SI because, as anthropologists increasingly publish on and among the very peoples studied, they cannot avoid becoming accountable to this very same public (particularly since these same people also provide museums and universities with their incomes through taxation). They will be forced to focus on issues demanded by these communities, and present these in a language that community understands and approves. With this increase in accountability towards the public on the part of the academically inclined, can we expect the future to show less controversy and more cooperation across the dividing line?

[1] The story was covered in the days following 8 August in newspapers such as The Guardian, The Observer, The Daily Telegraph, and The Morning Star; periodicals such as City Limits and The British Journal of Photography; radio programmes such as Radio 4 (6 August), LBC (9 August), and BBC World Services; TV channels such as Thames TV News (8 August); and the Central Office of Information (interview for distribution to British Embassies in Latin America.
[2] For a useful summary of SI's history see SI Review, Spring, 1979.
[3] The last SI News appeared in October 1975 as number 12, followed by the February 1976 vol 1, no 1 issue of the Review.
[4] Bennett, G. Aboriginal rights in International law. SI/RAI Occ. Paper 38, 1978.
[5] On the debate between SI members and academic anthropologists on the concept of ethnocide see articles and correspondence in RAIN (Jan/Feb, No 6; Mar/Apr 1975, no 7; Jul/Aug 1975, No 8).

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Survival International: going public on Amazonian Indians GUSTAAF HOUTMAN

Survival International: going public on Amazonian Indians
GUSTAAF HOUTMAN