Chiefs, Scribes, and Ethnographers: Kuna Culture from Inside and Out (The William and Bettye Nowlin Series in Art, History, and Culture of the Western Hemisphere) Review

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(More customer reviews)Chiefs, Scribes and Ethnographers: Kuna culture from inside and out, copyright 2009, University of Texas Press, Austin, is the latest book from anthropologist James Howe. In keeping with his earlier works, The Kuna Gathering and A People Who Would Not Kneel, Howe writes on the Kuna of Panama. In contrast to his earlier works, which discuss a specific cultural practice and a specific historical event respectively, in his latest work Howe examines the Kuna experience more generally. Surveying a long history of interaction with Westerners, Howe focuses on the development and use of writing among the Kuna. While managing to keep the theme of the development and use of writing within Kuna Society central to his narrative, Howe also uses this theme as backdrop for a broad analysis of ethnography itself. Howe implicitly relies on his own vast experience with the Kuna as a platform from which to critically evaluate the writings of a vast array of Westerners who have interacted with the Kuna for over more than three centuries, including a host of ethnographers, himself included. Throughout the book, Howe weaves the narrative thread of the story of a collaborative ethnographic effort in which Kuna have actively participated as both subjects as well as agents.
James Howe is currently a professor of Anthropology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Professor Howe received an A.B. degree from Harvard College (1966), an M.A. from Oxford University (Social Anthropology, 1967) and a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania (Anthropology, 1974). His research is focused on political and historical anthropology, indigenous-state relations, and missionization. He has worked closely with the Kuna for nearly 40 years, beginning his work with the Kuna in the early seventies.
Howe is clearly deeply concerned that the Kuna have a voice in their ever increasing engagement with the outside world and that, as much as possible, it be their own. The Kuna, one of the most studied and well known native societies in Latin America, have long had the ear of a variety of interested westerner listeners, but the message was often garbled due in part to the limitations of the Kuna, but also through the constant misinterpretation and misrepresentation of the Kuna by a host of interested parties. Although Howe takes pains to be as neutral as possible in his accounts of the deeds and writings of the Kuna, he is not shy in applying criticism to the seemingly endless blunders and biases of foreigners. Indeed, it is almost as if Howe identifies more with the Kuna than with his Western counterparts. Occasionally his attempts to distance himself from the ethnographers of whom he writes are a bit uncomfortable, such as when he refers to his own experience and work with the Kuna in the third person, making no effort to clarify that he is speaking of himself.
The breadth of time and personalities covered over the course of the book's 11 chapters is staggering, beginning with the French pirate Lionell Wafer's encounters with the Kuna in the 1680's, and ending with coverage of contemporary scholars, both Kuna and foreign. Howe draws from a vast array of sources, including journal entries, letters, reports, newspaper articles, master's and doctoral thesis, pamphlets, books, and first-hand accounts. The nature of the Kuna relationship to writing ranged from the Kuna's initial resistance to literacy, to their limited acceptance of western education, to their extensive use of writing to convey their grievances and requests to the national government, to the drafting of laws, and most importantly for Howe, to the use of writing by the Kuna to record their own history, habits, customs as ethnographers. Howe sheds light on the role of a small but growing class of young, educated men known as "letrados," or "sikkwis" in Kuna, as scribes and intermediaries (34), who were often recruited by chiefs in order facilitate communication with outside officials and dignitaries.
Of all the accounts, in chapters six and seven, Howe gives the most detailed coverage to the story of the collaboration between the Kuna and a Swedish anthropologist Baron Erland Nordenskiold. This interaction involved the travel of a young Kuna scribe to Sweden in 1931, and resulted in a massive collection of textual ethnographic material.
Howe's overall purpose seems to be to reveal how the elements of writing, agency through writing, and ethnology worked together in the Kuna story to uniquely enable the Kuna to confront the outside world. He draws inspiration for his book from the works of James Axtell and William McLoughlin who studied the role of writing in the struggles of indigenous peoples with state and imperial powers. These writers studied the Huron and the Cherokee respectively (3-4). The critical methodology that Howe employs is drawn from the theoretical writings of Said, Gramsci, and Foucalt, which focus on the connection between knowledge and power, and the problems inherent in cultural representation (9). While Howe embraces their emphasis on contextualized analysis, he claims to step back from their pessimistic dogmatism that condemns, rather than scrutinizes, dominant ideologies. He refers to his own work as a "reflexive historical reexamination...of a whole corpus of work on one society or region," a tradition which he traces to James Boon's Anthropological Romance of Bali (1977) (19).
Howe is particularly successful in showing the practical and theoretical developments in the field ethnography during the 20th century and into the 21st. By focusing on the integral role that the Kuna have played in facilitating and shaping the delivery of their own story, he is showing the importance, even inevitability, of a collaborative approach to ethnography. As indigenous communities become more accessible and integrated into modern societies, and they continue to cultivate their own scholars, it is essential that western scholars begin their interaction with indigenous societies firmly entrenched in the tenets of the collaborative approach.

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The Kuna of Panama, today one of the best known indigenous peoples of Latin America, moved over the course of the twentieth century from orality and isolation towards literacy and an active engagement with the nation and the world. Recognizing the fascination their culture has held for many outsiders, Kuna intellectuals and villagers have collaborated actively with foreign anthropologists to counter anti-Indian prejudice with positive accounts of their people, thus becoming the agents as well as subjects of ethnography. One team of chiefs and secretaries, in particular, independently produced a series of historical and cultural texts, later published in Sweden, that today still constitute the foundation of Kuna ethnography.

As a study of the political uses of literacy, of western representation and indigenous counter-representation, and of the ambivalent inter-cultural dialogue at the heart of ethnography, Chiefs, Scribes, and Ethnographers addresses key issues in contemporary anthropology. It is the story of an extended ethnographic encounter, one involving hundreds of active participants on both sides and continuing today.