The blood belonging to the Yanomami is here in this
country, he said. We met in our communal longhouse to talk about
this. We thought that it had been thrown out. But it still exists. So I
came here to find this blood and take it back. ... I don't want to
return empty-handed.
According to Mr. Yanomami and certain other activists from his
community, the Yanomami originally thought that the blood samples —
many of which were gathered in the late 1960s — would be used only
briefly for medical research and then destroyed. They now realize that
samples from thousands of individuals are still frozen, nearly 40 years
later. The problem is that many of those individuals are no longer
alive.
During Yanomami funerary rituals, all body parts and social remains
of the dead must be ritually
annihilated, writes the anthropologist Bruce Albert in an e-mail
message. Mr. Albert, who is a senior anthropologist at the Paris-based
Research Institute for Development and a vice president of the
Pro-Yanomami Commission, a private organization in Brazil, wrote his
dissertation at the University of Paris-Nanterre in the mid-1970s about
Yanomami mortuary practices.
It is totally horrifying to them, says Ms. Gomez, a professor of
anthropology at Rhode Island College, to think that even small parts
of their grandparents or great-grandparents might still be in a lab.
It's like the reaction Westerners might have at the thought of human
skin being made into lampshades.
. . .
Here, as with Penn State and Binghamton's collections, the Venezuela
question looms as a potential stumbling block. When asked whether the
institute could sort through the samples and send those of Brazilian
origin to Mr. Fabretti, Ms. Zahm says that she does not know how
feasible that is.
We have some paper records, which we have started to look at,
she says. The question is, are we going to be able to know, on a
vial-by-vial basis, which specimens came from which location? And I
don't know the answer to that yet.
Mr. Kopenawa concedes that he has very little communication with
villages on the Venezuelan side of the border, and he cannot directly
testify about their opinions on the blood-sample question. (The
Yanomami region is huge — more than 70,000 square miles — and some
villages, especially in Venezuela, are extremely remote.) Ms. Watson of
Survival International says that the Yanomami in Venezuela are much
less politically organized than those in Brazil, and it is unlikely
that any Venezuelan authorities will take up the cause of the blood
samples.
One person who has recently visited Yanomami villages in Venezuela is
the Brazilian filmmaker José Padilha, who is best known for the
documentary Bus 174, about a hijacking in Rio de Janeiro in 2000. Mr.
Padilha is now at work on a film about the Yanomami. In an e-mail
message, Mr. Padilha says that conditions for the Yanomami in Venezuela
are considerably worse than on the Brazilian side. They are dying of
malaria and dysentery at high rates, and the Venezuelan government and
the local anthropologists have not been able to help them out,
especially the most isolated ones.
Mr. Padilha expresses a certain impatience with the blood-sample
fracas. I do not believe that giving the blood samples back will
solve the most important problems the Yanomami face, he writes.
Why should it?
That question hangs over Mr. Borofsky's campaign: Is this a purely
symbolic effort to "ritually annihilate" (as Mr. Albert might put it)
the real and alleged past sins of American
anthropologists?
