The following interview is one of eleven carried out as part of a master's thesis that explored how anthropologists deal with issues of subjectivity. In addition to Edmund Carpenter, McBride interviewed Gerald Berreman, Stanley Diamond, Clifford Geertz, Marvin Harris, Robert Murphy, Paul Rabinow, Rayna Rapp, John Rowe, Gene Weltfish, and Eric Wolf. The interview transcripts, along with brief character sketches that relayed the setting and spirit of each interview, were included in the thesis. McBride's interview with Carpenter took place in his home office overlooking New York's Central Park on February 27, 1980.

Edmund Carpenter Interview: New York City, February 27, 1980

Ted (Edmund Carpenter): I don't think we should try to conceal our biases. [We should be] aware of them, acknowledge them, and expect them. The denial of these biases, the absolutely imaginative world of objectivity which anthropologists talk about - I have no idea what they're talking about. And soon they begin to lose all contact with what they're there for and, worse still, they become party to the problem.

Up in the arctic I knew neighborhoods that had heartbreaking problems, and I don't find anthropologists talking about these real problems. They set up consultation companies, things like that. But they haven't really done the practical thing and tried to solve the dilemmas.

A coherent and legitimate art form offers an environment of the mind that a person can enter, and he can survive. The main Indian and Eskimo artists are invariably those who have left their own world and come into, understood, and often succeeded in our world. They have learned certain media - they have learned to write, or they have learned as artists exactly what these other grammars are. Then they have gone back to their own culture and, seeing it and its art form, have entered into that art form with absolute coherency. They have been able to find their entire culture - its outline, patterns, meaning - in that art form. They've been able to identify that art form with their own past and their own culture. Now, that requires that the world they rediscover be a coherent and honest world, but too often what we offer them isn't that at all. We offer them the powwow. We offer them NBC costumes. We offer them - God help us - the rebellion, the world of anger, confrontation. This won't work. For one thing it's not a coherent world, and it's a degrading one in which they are simply playing parts on our stage for our amusement—

That's right. They're used by us and by our media. And they are so helpless against these media.

The most harrowing thing I've ever seen is [television] networks out at Wounded Knee: the Indians on horseback with rifles and big painted signs, "It's a good day to die;" the FBI behind sandbags, facing the Indians with weapons; the cameras waiting, the networks urging people to perform in what would have been a "big event" on TV.

An exploitable tourist attraction.

Well, the best modern Eskimo art I've ever seen is a salt and peppershaker made of plastic and brushed aluminum. It was made in a way that is the absolute essence of Eskimo art: a sliding box within a box. Amazing simplicity, function, ingenuity and superb craftsmanship combined with a beauty of line. And more than this, they actually used an Eskimo technique which is so ancient it's Paleolithic. Marvelous.

Yes, I think so. It's an intuitive thing, but not in the mystical sense. It's an awareness on a very low threshold of certain rules. You might look at one [piece] and say, 'I don't know why, but it's wrong.' Then you find out why.

Oh yes. I think anthropology should be deeply rooted in humanism - and in humility. Modern efforts made in the direction of social manipulation and social control under the guise of being scientific - which it has not been - have not benefited anthropologists and certainly have not benefited mankind. There was an anthropology of long ago that was wonderful. We speak of the "BAE Man" - the Bureau of American Ethnology Man - and many of them were most remarkable. They were interested in American Indian life, sympathetic to it. They studied it in detail, participated in it, and recorded it on its own terms. And they recorded it primarily because they feared it would be lost. It was almost like preserving the last passenger pigeon - they didn't want to see it go. They couldn't bear to see all the evidence of it disappear. They also felt that to some extent they might serve to help keep it alive - by showing respect for it, and by making their books the repositories of this knowledge so that later generations could go to it and regenerate, reconstruct. If they were talking about how to make pottery, they didn't dare leave out a single step. It was like a recipe - the chicken had to taste right. So their books are filled with fabulous details. Also, they recorded things they didn't understand, which is marvelous, because later generations could, perhaps, interpret them.

Later anthropology became politically oriented and socially conscious - all of which may have been good, but it didn't help studies of people. The bulk of the anthropological volumes written from about 1930 on are greatly inferior to the studies made earlier.

And when anthropology discovered psychology, psychoanalysis and projective techniques, it didn't really contribute much. There is a very simple test [of contribution] in translation: translate something from English to Greek. Then translate from Greek back to English and compare the two English versions. Now, can you do that with these [more recent] ethnographic reports? Can you translate from a native culture into films, books, or whatever, and then reconstruct back? No way! But the old time anthropologists did. They didn't just go down to an electronic store and buy things; they had to build them. They literally built their own typewriters with phonemic scripts. They got hold of old movie cameras. They filmed. They took stills. They drew. They collected objects. They wrote poems. They did plays.

Oh yes. It was primarily different people. I knew some of these men, and by any standards they were unusual people. But I noticed one characteristic that was shared by all of those I knew: they had very strong, successful fathers with whom they were not in sympathy, but whose respect they wanted. And they were drawn to mothers who were unhappily married, very beautiful, and interested in the arts. And, repeatedly, these were mothers who turned in somewhat mystical directions in the latter part of their lives.

These men would often leave behind the world of power which their fathers excelled in. They would undertake the most rigorous expeditions. Oh, amazing, amazing! Rasmussen traveled from Greenland to Siberia by dogsled. It took him four years. So, these men were hard workers, disciplined in their lives, very brave in many of the trips they undertook, but highly mystical in their thinking - and they often concealed this [latter fact] from people. When John R. Swanton retired from the Smithsonian after 30 years of the most painstaking and reliable research there, he wrote a letter - I received a copy of it - stating that for many years he had believed in extra sensory perception. While he was on the government's staff he felt he had no right to reveal himself, but now that he was retired he felt under no compulsion to restrain himself.

Yes, of course.

Oh, you know (pause) social scientists wear armor, and they're not very kind to those who really speak out in a coherent way. I don't have much interest in anthropology as a profession. It offers certain tools - the comparative method is its greatest. And it has this fantastic literature which is largely neglected. And it still has its identification with this field of data that we haven't even begun to understand. But if you look at the tools of anthropology as a profession, if you look at the total work that it cultivates, it's a menace. Ghastly stuff. Just look at the American Anthropologist - it's unreadable.

You don't need to psychoanalyze them. You can tell if you step back and read their works. You don't even need to read between the lines. It's all there. I remember picking up a book on some Eskimo, and the opening line was: "Research was conducted..." Oh! If that's not a constipated statement of fact. What does the person mean, "Research was conducted."?! What you should say is, "I lived in this village for a good period of time ... Someone told me this, and I'm not sure if they're right or wrong ..." That's the reality of it. When you read the works of Dorothy Lee, you know exactly what her bias is: she's interested in human dignity, and she dared to declare it. She's not claiming to deal with the whole of human experience. She wouldn't deny that there were great areas of human behavior that she never mentioned. At the same time she's a fantastic anthropologist.

Oh! (laugh) That's a big question. There are many levels of validity. Is a statement or an object or an act valid within its own context? But then it goes beyond that, because if you limit yourself to that question you reach the extreme level of cultural relativity, which justifies anything. So the next question is, is it valid in terms of a larger human community? Killing Jews may have been valid in Nazi Germany, but is killing Jews valid within humankind? Finally, there's a question that goes ultimately to perception. If perception is too far removed from nature, I don't think a culture could survive. Often cultures will offset this by having several methods of codifying experience. The Eskimo are unbelievable observers - in terms of accuracy, detail and fidelity of rendering - when they choose to be. Their renderings, maps and drawings have no parallel anywhere, to my knowledge. A good illustration of this is maps I once printed that were drawn by two Eskimo. Each Eskimo had been sent out to circumnavigate an island of 20,000 square miles. Each, upon returning, had been asked to draw a map of that land, even though both were unfamiliar with pencil and paper. Each one separately drew a map, and when you compare them with an aerial photograph made 21 years later, it's absolutely astonishing the detail they had. Arctic maps, until the 1950 survey of the Canadian North, were based almost wholly on Eskimo drawings. In a few cases where the British sea captains had composed their own ideas, they proved to be wrong, and ships were lost as a consequence. The Eskimo were by far the better navigators and mapmakers.

But, when [Eskimo] choose to describe the world that lies beyond the [natural] world, they're not affected by gravity, perspective or the actual appearance of animals or people. Then they're making some other statement. But they don't confuse these two. When they need one thing, they know how to use it.

In science?

I don't accept that, because in the field of art we may be able to repeat out of imitation. But could people independently come up with [16^th-century Hans] Holbein's Image of Man? No.

Yes. There have been many imitators, some very clever. But Shakespeare will remain forever Shakespeare, and I don't challenge him because he stands alone.

I can see on a very simple level that someone can go into the field and record that in Papua most of the spear points are dipped in a certain poison, and then we go to a museum and we check and see if there's poison on the spears. All right, that's fine. That type of repeatability, yes. But not the insights. I turn to [Charles Doughty's Travels in]  Arabia Deserta because I don't expect to ever get that image again from anyone. And no matter how many people have written on the Bedouins, Charles Doughty has given us what I regard as the most extraordinary image of it.

He shows them for what they are - smithering and deceitful. He lives with them and takes them on their own terms, and there's no question that ultimately he respects them as human beings in that form. He doesn't reject them. He's fascinated by them and afraid of them - with good reasons: he stands a very good chance of being killed by them. But there they are, and I've never read anything like it.

And there's a book by Samuel Hearne called The Journey to the Mouth of the Copper Mine. It's a true story in which he tells how, in 1772, he sets out on foot and walks through Fort Churchill to the Copper Mine River and back. He accompanies some Chippewa, and the goal of the expedition is hardly commendable: they are going up just for the sport of killing some Eskimo – which they do. But Hearne describes the headman and his chief companion with a description that [and here Carpenter kisses his fingertips with a smack - Italian style]. He doesn't love him because he's an endearing character, but he shows him to be a human being, a man, an exceptional person. And it's absolutely convincing. But, of course, I've never read anything like that since.

I don't know that it doesn't happen to me. And I certainly don't have all the feelings toward other people that I wish I did have. I've never been, frankly, drawn to any other group. I've been drawn to individuals in that group, but never to a particular group per se. And to some groups, often, I've had the opposite reaction. By and large I find many things quite offensive about some of these cultures, but individuals within that group have become my closest friends. I happen to feel the same way about my own culture. I don't particularly care for it. I like people within it. It's like New York City - it's very hard to love New York, but it's hard not to live here.

New Guinea is purely vacation to me. People talk about it as if it were some ordeal. Ha! Ordeal! It's the most beautiful place. I hope the tourists never find it. I've never in my life known a place where it's such a joy to wake up in the morning. And to hear the birds! And the colors and the excitement and the life that's there!

New York would be an infinitely more rewarding place to do field work. I'm not sure that I would dare.

I'm not sure that I would really have the nerve to move up to Harlem and live there, to participate in that life, spend several years living in Harlem. You'd have to be very daring to do it.

Oh no. Not any more. No, no, no. The problems - tropical diseases - are certainly real enough. But in terms of danger from human beings - no. It's much safer there than here. You can have some experiences there. You can do some very foolish things and get yourself in a lot of trouble. The real danger in a place like New Guinea is the rivers. The river drives so rapidly after a rainfall.

On one level, there's pure selfishness; it's fun. It's play. And we all play. But I think to play you need rules and you need goals. Again, on a personal level, I find it a great challenge to do some of these things. And that's a very selfish way of putting it, but I wouldn't be honest with you if I didn't tell you that I derive an enormous satisfaction out of this work. 

But on a bigger level, on a sense of relation to other people and so on, the people I find greatest satisfaction in reading are people like Rasmussen, Speck, Dorothy Lee, and much of Boas - I don't want to turn this into a popularity contest. The one thing that these people share in common is that they respected the dignity of other ways of life. They understood it. It wasn't some gut reaction, some sentimental nonsense. It went right into the point of studying it in great detail in an effort to help preserve it, reaffirm it, or even recreate it.

On the Northwest coast, for many years, they had the Northwest coast Indians making souvenirs. It was the ultimate demeanment of their art and of them. Then Bill Reed, who was part Indian, part white, began to study this art in detail. He became an absolute master at it, equal to the greatest carvers in the past. I'm sure that in 200 years his [work] put side by side with the great work of the 1830s will be equal to it. [Bill] served as a most interesting inspiration to other Indians who apprenticed under him. They learned the rules and saw the dignity of this man in what he was doing. That's the nicest story I can tell you about American Indian art.

But there's opposition toward such efforts. For example, behind you is a collection of objects [12-18 wooden boxes, masks, carvings, displayed on built-in white shelves], part of a small group of things that Adelaide [de Menil, Carpenter's wife] and I have assembled. We'd like to bring that collection as close to perfection as we can in terms of a specific art form, so that there's not a single violation in it. We are getting rid of pieces that are inferior to others we come upon. And our plan is to, somewhere, create a small center, a small public museum, and display these things so that anyone walking in who wishes to study, can see in flawless detail the rules and realization of this art. That's what matters.

. . . .

I'm afraid I have a very selfish explanation of that: I got me a small mind and I needs to use it (laugh). I find specialists boring. The moment you're caught on something, it's best to flee.

Anthropology, I'm afraid, has got its share of small minds. You know, Margaret Mead lived with us in the last few months of her life, and at one point she said to me: "Ted, you sit down, right there. I want to talk to you." (laugh) So I sat down and she said, "You go around saying all these bad things about anthropology. I know anthropology is full of little minds, but the remarkable thing about it is that if you put them in a room together and lock the door, I don't care how small they are," - and here she listed a whole series of anthropologists - "they would come out with a statement that's valid and human."

Margaret went on and argued that the method was larger than any of the people. What she was really implying was that anthropology is something like Euclidean geometry, and that you can take a
small mind and come up with a competent surveyor. I'm not so sure that's true. I think anthropology is more than a simple method. It's an art - as much an art as a method. And art doesn't come out of committees and out of small minds. The fact is we have many anthropologists, but we don't get many good books of anthropology.

There's a reality there. The Arctic is a place in which you believe that there's an objective reality. Anyone who doubts it is dead. It's a place where you have compulsory education with a vengeance. Anyone who ignores nature's rules does not survive. This is one reason Eskimo can have an art form that's surreal while they demand absolute accuracy in two-dimensional perspective [(e.g. maps)]. They have to know nature in a practical way. Eskimo need a hard, clear image of life.

Well, I don't think we have an accurate view of society at all. We have a myth.

The question is, what type of accuracy do you want? Accuracy in what areas? Do you want an accurate account of human dignity? Or do you want a description in which you map the land, survey the resources and make a census of the people - for no other purpose than control? When we say an "accurate account of culture," do we mean we simply want to classify that culture and the people in it for manipulation? When a cop takes down your name and takes a photograph of you, he's got you. Is that what we mean? Is that what we want - a control of people? If that is the image they're after, well, I hope they never achieve it.

You know, we call the first census the "Doomsday Book" - not just because it was for taxation, but because it wrote peoples' names down and exerted a control over them that became quite frightening.

When I was in New Guinea I made one recommendation that I've had doubts about ever since. [I was] confronted with a problem that seems very real to me: there is cannibalism there. One of my sons was a patrol officer there for six years, and although he never talked to me about any of these things, he did give me access to the government records. And there's no question that cannibalism was very serious and by our standards horrendous. A man would suddenly turn on a member of his family - wife, mother, sister - kill her and eat her. So, I recommended that they fight this not by banging people on the heads or locking them in jail for six months, which is what they were doing. And which didn't work. I recommended they go in and make a census and make it a great show: the patrol box is brought out, with a guard on either side. The sergeant unlocks all the padlocks, opens [the box], takes out this huge census book and puts it on a table. The patrol officer gets his chair, opens the book, and [calls forth] the interpreter. Trembling men are standing in front of him. He gets each man's name, writes it down and shows it to them. And he repeats it - he shows it to them. He closes and reopens the book: there's the name - it's still there. Then he takes a Polaroid shot of each man, develops it and explains it to them: "forehead - forehead, nose - nose, that's you." And he staples each photo into the book with each name. And he closes the book and he opens it, and he shows he has [each name and photo]. Then he puts the book back in the box, the guards lock all the padlocks, and he says to each man: "If you ever commit cannibalism again, we have you. We won't need to come looking for you. We have you here [in the book]. We have your spirit."

Yes, of course it worked. Now the problem is, what are the side effects that are going to come out of this? Have you destroyed his whole sense of being? I don't know.

Yes. We humbled them by destroying them. Now, if that's necessary to end these practices [of cannibalism], then - but if you do a thing like that you must immediately bring in ways of restoring dignity and cultural assets; really honor people. We talk about human values, but to go way way beyond human values you should really be talking about value. What we call human values are simply the social means of any society for implementing value.

So what is value? I saw something the other day that fascinated me. A friend came to stay with us, and when time came for him to leave [we took] him, his wife, and his tiny little daughter to the train station. The daughter is walking now, but can't yet speak. We couldn't stop watching this little child. There was a [steep] embankment, and she ran up it, then down it, and then she ran up it higher. That child was challenging herself. She was not doing what was easy but what was hardest for her, pushing herself. Aristotle tells us there's an instinct for curiosity. That would be hard to document, but when you have something like this [little girl before you], I can believe it. And I think there is an instinct for dignity - difficult to document but [very evident].

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