INTRODUCTION

The Ax Fight film is the hub of activities that can fill several sessions of viewing, reading and exploring Yanomamö Interactive. To get the most out of the CD, the following activities should be performed early on in the exploration:

Users of the CD should gain a basic familiarity of Yanomamö culture. Most can accomplish this by reading the textbook with which this CD is packaged. Others can review the basic introductory text, Yanomamö, by Napoleon A. Chagnon (1997).

The Ax Fight film should be seen. Ideally, it would be viewed in its original 16mm format, but the film is also available on video. (For rental information, see the "Yanomamö Filmography," accessible from the Contentsmenu at the top of the screen.) Although the entire Ax Fight film is stored digitally on this CD and may be viewed on computer, the image is small and the focus not ideal. Film or video are far superior for a first viewing. Advantages of the digital version of the film should soon become clear. (High resolution film stills and supplemental photographs of the fight, taken by Chagnon, are accessible from the "Photo Gallery" submenu of the Contents.)

Users should become familiar with the range of materials stored in Yanomamö Interactive. Theseinclude photos, stills, maps, tables, vital statistics of Yanomamö villagers, and data files. A description of the materials and an explanation of how to access them on the CD are contained in the "Help" document. (A hard copy of "Help" is packaged with the CD, but it can also be read on screen where it is accessible from the Contents.) The present introduction does not go over most of the information contained in "Help."

Users should explore Gary Seaman's "Blow-by-Blow Descriptions" (accessible from the Contents menu) of incidents culminating in a Yanomamö ax fight. These descriptions trace the activities of thirty-eight individuals recorded in ten-and-a-half minutes of unedited footage. They are also the basis for much of the advanced work that can be done in Yanomamö Interactive.

Users should read this Introduction.Part I introduces The Ax Fightfilm as the centerpiece of this exercise in anthropological multimedia, and discusses how the film's remarkable structure foreshadows interactive media. In Part II, several exercises are suggested for use of the CD by students of anthropology and film. Users can explore interpretations of Yanomamö culture, engage in film-based fieldwork, and consider new uses of documentary media in anthropology.

A quarter of a century has passed since The Ax Fight was shot in the Yanomamö village of Mishimishimaböwei-teri. The film has subsequently been recognized as one of the most original in the social sciences. Its most brilliant innovations are based on a simple insight. Filmed cultural activities are difficult or impossible to understand when they are viewed once and in real time. Nevertheless, complex interpretations can be understood, questioned and reformulated when footage is repeatedly considered by a knowledgeable analyst.

Yanomamö Interactive re-approaches the insights and questions raised by The Ax Fight. It reconsiders the extent to which additional data can resolve the ambiguity of historical documents and the extent to which any theoretical approach can satisfy the objections and curiosity of interpreters. This CD brings to an understanding of The Ax Fight new empirical and ethnographic data, new images and new technology. Although the computer revolution transformed educational media after the film was shot, the insights and questions raised by The Ax Fight are as fresh as ever. They continue to demand attention.

For years, the complex structure of this film has fascinated anthropologists and film scholars. *1 Nichols (1981) writes that much of The Ax Fight'spower lies in its five-part structure. The film re-displays or reinterprets the same historical event five different ways. The five-part structure, and Yanomamö Interactive's relationship to it, will be discussed in Part I of this essay.



PART I. FIVE WAYS OF LOOKING AT AN AX FIGHT

Section 1. In the first section of The Ax Fight, viewers are shown ten-and-a-half minutes of unedited 16mm footage, exactly as it came from the camera. The footage documents a series of violent encounters that escalated in the plaza and living areas of a Yanomamö village in 1971. Five minutes of the footage in section one were recorded in a single, uninterrupted run of film. All of section one's footage is unedited. For this reason, it has the air of authenticity. It is also chaotic.

As the unedited footage unfolds over time, it depicts fighting that escalated in the village. It began with shouting and progressed to the use of axes. Violence then de-escalated once again to shouting as one man recovered from blows he received. At the height of the engagement, more than fifty men and women, in the village of 268 people, rushed about the principal antagonists. Close inspection of the footage reveals an enormous variety of activities: some individuals sought to maintain peace, some criticized the fighters, and others swung their weapons. All but the last of these details is lost on first-time viewers of this section of the film. The fact that a blur of violence is remembered best was anticipated by the editors of the film.

Just before filming, informants had warned Chagnon that a fight was about to erupt. Chagnon alerted camera operator Timothy Asch, who had only a few moments to prepare. When the action did begin, the camera, attached to relatively immobile tripod, happened to be on the opposite side of the plaza. Events then unfolded in quick succession, permitting no time to turn off the camera and move it closer. The distance between camera and subject was responsible for crucial details of the fight being hidden by the crowd. Important actions were hidden in shadow. When the camera zoomed out to wide-angle, detail was lost. When it zoomed in to telephoto, the distances between bodies were distorted by foreshortening. Principals of the action moved rapidly, and they wore little that could distinguish them for outside observers. Also for outsiders, the audio track is little more than unintelligible screams, punctuated with the sounds of ax on flesh. The latter provoke an emotion that is difficult for the audience to ignore.

Chagnon and Asch included unedited-footage as part of The Ax Fight because of the emotions it raises and its partial unintelligibility. The filmmakers' goal was to recreate in viewers the subjective state of confusion that anthropological fieldworkers experience. Just as the original event could not immediately have been understood by those who witnessed it, viewers of the first section of the film can understand little. The film thus begins with an emphasis on the difficulties of anthropological interpretation and fieldwork. It also gives reason to question anthropological films that make interpretation seem easy.



Section 2. With the beginning of section two, The Ax Fight cuts to black. In the field, the camera had run out of film, but soundman Craig Johnson continued to record audio. The film audience now monitors something of the filmmakers' subjective experience, by hearing their unrehearsed, private conversation. This revelation of "backstage" methodology was as unprecedented as The Ax Fight's use of unedited footage. *2

Over a black screen, the filmmakers are heard attempting to make sense of the fights they had just seen. Chagnon describes an ax blow that was hidden from the camera. He then repeats for Asch and Johnson information that he was given by a Yanomamö informant. According to the informant, before filming began, a woman named Sinabimi had been assaulted by Mohesiwä, a man classified as her "son" in Yanomamö kinship terminology. The fight, Chagnon had been told, broke out because of incest.

The film audience is drawn into the Yanomamö incest story as it would be into a Western soap opera. Listeners feel something of the thrill that Asch expresses when he hears that incest had been committed. "No kidding!" he exclaims over the black screen.

Before section two of the film ends, a final plot element is introduced. Möawä, headman of the village, can be heard asking Chagnon for a bar of soap. The anthropologist complains that this is the tenth person that day who has made the request. Asch tries to assuage the situation by offering to give Möawä his ownbar of soap when they depart from the village. Chagnon heatedly rejects the idea. The Yanomamö, he says, will "make damned sure we leave in a hurry" if the filmmakers promise to give away all of their possessions when they leave!

Years later, Asch criticized Chagnon for his own aggressiveness and his characterization of Yanomamö as "fierce." At this point in the filming, Asch foreshadows his disapproval with deceptive mildness. He says, "Shoriwa[brother-in-law], living in your village is... tiresome." Memory still fresh with the violence of the ax fight, Chagnon simply replies: "Thought I was shitting you about 'the fierce people,' huh?"



Section 3. The film shifts from a representation of the phenomenological, subjective experience of the filmmakers to interpretation and analysis. A subtitle over a black screen explains that an error has been made. It reads: "First impressions can be mistaken. When the fight first started, one informant told us that it was about incest. However, subsequent work with other informants revealed that the fight stemmed from quite a different cause." The mistaken initial interpretation was discovered in the days following the fight. Chagnon conducted several more interviews. He learned that Mohesiwä was a non-contributing visitor from another village who had confronted Sinabimi in her garden and demanded that she feed him. Sinabimi refused to do so (obeying her husband's admonitions against catering to the visitors) and Mohesiwä hit her with a club. It was this act that Chagnon's informants understood to have started the fight. While the fight was taking place, however, the informants simply explained to him that Mohesiwä's offense was yawaremou.

Subsequent interviews allowed Chagnon to realize that when he had first heard the explanation, he had understood the word yawaremou in its most common meaning, "sexual relations with a close kinsperson." In this case, however, a second meaning of the Yanomamö word was intended, "a physical assault on (or any intimate contact with) a woman in a proscribed kinship category."

The admission here that the anthropologist made a mistake may seem trivial, but it deserves considerable respect. Ethnographic filmmakers had never before been so honest about the difficulties of fieldwork. With this revelation, section three introduces a problem that confronts all field anthropologists. Despite the best conditions despite multiple informants, excellent visual documentation and strong language skills errors will occur and interpretations will need to be revised. Thus, The Ax Fight offers another insight into the creative process of anthropological interpretation. Contrary to the illusion produced by slickly-edited documentaries, the process is not simple. Interpretation is created in fits and starts. Meaning has a history.

Although the film is now almost half over, a satisfactory explanation for the fight is still missing. Even though the beating of Sinabimi was forbidden by Yanomamö incest restrictions, Chagnon could not believe that, by itself, a man hitting his classificatory "mother" would have motivated fifty people to the extremes that are documented in the film. Intrigued but caught up in other demands of filming and fieldwork, Chagnon could not develop his interpretation of the fight until five months later. Only then was he able to research the evidence of the footage and, with the help of other field data, establish more precisely its ethnographic context.

As will be seen, Chagnon's research process was an inspiration for the editing and design of The Ax Fight's third section. Chagnon first viewed the footage in an editing room with filmmakers John Marshall, Tim Asch and Craig Johnson. As he watched, Chagnon tape recorded his reactions and comments. Citing film foot-and-frame numbers, watching the footage in slow motion and pointing out individuals, Chagnon identified as many people as he could and described what he saw. (The tape recording of Chagnon's first reactions to the footage was transcribed and is available in this CD: the reactions are synced with corresponding moments of the film in a screen called "Chagnon's First Comments," accessible from the "Historical Texts" submenu of the Contents.)

For several weeks after viewing the footage, Chagnon went over the identification photographs and field notes he had taken in the village. The photographs ultimately allowed him to connect names to the images of thirty-eight people who were on camera during the fight. (Identification photographs may be seen by selecting an individual's name from the Vital Statisticsmenu and clicking the "Photos" button.) Chagnon's field notes allowed him to determine the lineages of people on camera as well as their genealogical relationships with others involved in the fight. Using his ethnographic knowledge of the village, Chagnon was finally prepared to formulate an interpretation of the fight that was more plausible to him than simple "incest" (yawaremou).

). Chagnon then returned to the editing room, able to describe what he saw with increased precision. Again, he tape recorded his analysis. ("Chagnon's Second Comments" is a transcription of the tape recording. It may be accessed, synced with the footage, in the "Historical Texts" submenu of the Contents.)

Chagnon's two "Comments" provide the opportunity for an exercise in the study of field methodology: when the two are compared, they show how the anthropologist corrected errors, formulated ideas and followed up on early suspicions.

In the remainder of section three following the subtitle that rejects incest as an explanation Chagnon's film research process is replicated. The film re-presents much of the original footage, but this time it uses optical techniques most familiar to film editors: the techniques include slow motion, freeze-frames, optical enlargements and arrows identifying individuals. Chagnon's voice-over narration presents a formal version of his "First and Second Comments." *3 In the narration, he identifies the principal antagonists and describes their behavior, making constant reference to the empirical evidence of the footage. Moving from empirical description, the narration then gives a preliminary interpretation of the fight based on Chagnon's understanding of the motives of the individuals. (The "Narration" is transcribed and synced with the footage. It is accessible in the Contents menu.)

Chagnon's interpretation in this section of the film is carefully illustrated and it is compelling. In less than nine minutes of screen time, however, he can only describe what he considers to be the most important people, actions and motives. Only twelve people of more than fifty are identified genealogically or by name. Chagnon does not attempt to provide the detail of his earlier descriptions. Instead, he simplifies them for a verbal presentation. He also reserves for section four of the film a more theoretical explanation of the fight.

The chaos of fieldwork that is represented in the first section of The Ax Fight establishes the problem of anthropological interpretation that the remainder of the film is to address. Section three demonstrates how film footage, appropriately trimmed, slowed down and enlarged, can provide empirical evidence needed to make a credible interpretation.



Section 4. As the footage fades out, The Ax Fightintroduces another innovation to anthropological film: genealogical diagrams of the male protagonists. Over these diagrams, Chagnon offers a complex interpretation that assumes the motives described in section three and complements them with more abstract theoretical constructs. The narration explains the occurrence of the ax fight in terms of village loyalties that shifted with the efforts to satisfy two contradictory needs. On one hand, Chagnon explains, villagers in the film had recently sought to rid themselves of problems that resulted when two men competed for the same role as headman. This tension was relieved by a division, or fission, of the entire village. On the other hand, a group of villagers had also sought to renew the alliance between the divided villages. (Chagnon's argument is left somewhat unfinished at this point; the narration offers no motive to explain why villagers again wanted alliance. Students of Chagnon's case study [1992], however, would expect these motives to include the need for mutual protection against enemies, men's desire for sister-exchange, and women's desire to live in villages where their brothers also live.)

Despite its effort at precision, to many viewers this section of the film is unclear. The confusion comes in part from the poor visual quality of the genealogical diagrams and a series of clumsy cuts and pans. More than this, the argument itself is difficult: not only is it presented verbally and only once, it is unfinished and it describes a rather subtle contradiction. It also necessarily leaves an enormous number of questions unanswered.

To make matters worse, before viewers can even begin to understand the argument they must first associate different faces in the film with genealogical icons, and comprehend the genealogical relationships between the faces. The latter task by itself is difficult to master. *4

In retrospect, it is difficult to imagine a way that this section of the filmcould have overcome the problem of unintelligibility. A film necessarily rushes on, regardless of the viewer's comprehension. Complex communications can best be understood when studied at leisure. (Nonlinear technologies in education do permit leisurely study. CD versions of films help make up for the fact that they are difficult to understand when they are viewed only once.)

Section four's theory of contradiction and village alliance is transcribed in the "Narration" chapter of this CD (accessible from the Contents menu.) There, the transcription is synced with corresponding sound and image. The text and film may be reviewed as often as necessary for comprehension and evaluation.



Section 5. The Ax Fight's unprecedented display of unedited footage, unrehearsed conversation, slow-motion analysis, genealogical diagrams, and ethnographic theory expose by their example the conservatism or the failure of imagination in earlier anthropological films. In another unprecedented move, the fifth section of The Ax Fight confronts the limitations of earlier works. The last section begins with a title card: "The final edited version." It is followed by a new edit of the footage that is unimaginative, polished, and too familiar.

Asch intended the final section of The Ax Fight to be read as ironic (Ruby 1995), a mockery of standard ethnographic film style. It is ironic for viewers who have just been subjected to an overdose of anthropological explanation to find that in the final section nothing is explained! The ending is fast-paced and narrationless. Concern with complex relationships between villagers, painstakingly introduced in sections three and four, has vanished.

In the absence of these subtleties, however, the "final edited version" of the film is far from meaningless. What remains is a stereotype familiar to every viewer, naked savages swinging weapons at each other. A default meaning, borrowed from a thousand Hollywood movies, fills the void. *5

In section five, the stereotype of "violent savages" has been offered for viewers' passive assimilation. In light of the previous examinations, assimilation of this stereotype is difficult. Subtleties about the incident that viewers have already learned cannot be erased by a version that ignores them. The simultaneous presence of the details in memory and their absence on screen is disturbing. This dissonance not only undermines the stereotypes but asks the viewers to consider what they would have thought about Yanomamö violence if the film had been made as most anthropological films are made, polished and fast-paced.

On the surface, section five is a parody of stereotypes that link savagery with race. (It has been demonstrated that the parody is too subtle for a large majority of viewers [Martínez 1990].) The plausibility of the stereotypes is sustained by the absence of corrective interpretation. It will be argued below that the absence of alternatives is also a feature of weak scholarly argument.

The last section of the film contains one final irony. As Ruby (1995) draws out in his interview with Asch, the entire film is self-reflexive, but this section questions the validity of the film's anthropological theory. As described above, on the day that The Ax Fight was shot, Asch was already objecting to Chagnon's interpretations of Yanomamö behavior. His objections there were not limited to the audio track of section two.

The "final edited version" can be read as the film's auto-critique, but its message is ambiguous. At one interpretive extreme, the last section of the film could be read as Asch's acknowledgment of something that might be called the Rashomon effect, from the Kurosawa film (1951). This is the idea that because all versions of an event are biased and incomplete, none is more plausible than the others. The conclusion is anathema to most anthropologists, including those like Chagnon who understand their work to be in the tradition of positivistic science. While scientists accept the idea that theories can always be improved and are always incomplete, they do not conclude from these premises that all theories are equally plausible. The practice of science is designed to weed out errors through rigorous tests.

At the other interpretive extreme, it is possible to read the final version as Asch's criticism of Chagnon a rejection of the narrator's particular emphases and suppressions. It may be that Asch wished to suggest, with the example of artistic manipulation in the "final edited version," a similar problem of scientific manipulation earlier in the film. *6



PART II. AX FIGHTRE-TAKESAND DIGITAL INTERPRETATIONS

The Ax Fight provides a model for scholarship in visual anthropology that has been adopted and extended in this CD. In Yanomamö Interactive, users can reconsider The Ax Fight in two ways: first, they are provided with the means of studying and making more complete empirical descriptions of the incident than is possible with the film; second, users are aided in the effort to integrate the film with more comprehensive anthropological theory.

These extensions of The Ax Fight's method are made possible by the major innovation of multimedia technology, the ability to link time-based media (digital audio and video) with text-based analysis. Users of Yanomamö Interactive can easily move back and forth, between experiencing records of real-time events in real time, and taking time-outs for periods of concerted thought. *7

The capacity to link text and film is the basis for Yanomamö Interactive's primary descriptive tool, a chapter of this CD by Gary Seaman called "Blow-By-Blow Descriptions" (accessible from the Contents menu). *8 The descriptions divide the film's ten-and-a-half minutes of unedited footage into some three hundred and eighty "current moments." For each of these moments, which range from a few frames to a few seconds in length, a paragraph describes the individuals and activities judged to be most important for an understanding of the moment currently in view. A mouseclick on a "Blow-by-Blow" paragraph causes the film at the top of the computer screen to sync up with the moment that is currently described.

Chagnon's "First and Second Comments" identify thirty-eight people in The Ax Fight's footage. A screen in the CD is assigned to each of these people and to twelve other village residents. ("People" screens are accessible from the People menu.) Each screen collates only those "Blow-by-Blow" paragraphs that mention the activities of the featured person. The descriptions in the "People" screens isolate individuals and individual activities from the mass-confusion of the fight. This clarifies much about individual behavior and will assist users to develop ideas about Yanomamö culture and possible motives of Yanomamö men and women.

Resources in this CD can be used as a means to engage in theoretical controversies, but there is no easy way to decide which of competing interpretations is correct. No single ethnographic observation, piece of film footage or informant-generated report can settle a theoretical problem. Nevertheless, anthropologists value field data very highly because the empirical clues it provides are essential for justifying a stand within theoretical controversies. Equally important is the existence of theoretical controversy within scholarly disciplines: theory becomes more comprehensive, and more useful, when scholarly traditions persist and compete. New perspectives on data are essential for the discovery of theoretical blind spots and misemphases.

For these reasons, The Ax Fight film is an extremely valuable document. It is rich ethnographically, it is supported by an array of supplemental ethnographic materials, and it sheds light on important controversies. Studying The Ax Fight therefore provides students with an experience that is like fieldwork in interesting ways.

Most ethnographic field research includes a percentage of work that is based on deductive hypotheses. In other words, working deductively, ethnographers seek evidence that tends to confirm or disconfirm theoretical perspectives proposed in advance. Research exercises that use resources in this CD are proposed below. They are based on a number of the hypotheses that have made debates about the Yanomamö so fruitful and heated. *9 Additional exercises, based on new hypotheses, can certainly be devised.

The most famous theoretical debate over Yanomamö ethnography was begun by Marvin Harris (e.g., 1974, 1984). He and Chagnon disagree concerning the ultimate cause of Yanomamö violence and warfare. For both, however, the cause lies outside conscious awareness and control. For Harris, it is a combination of nutritional requirements and environmental limiting factors. Yanomamö men promote a male-centered ideology, and engage in population-depleting wars, Harris argues, not because of their conscious dislike of one another (which is often extreme), but because their Amazonian environment has only enough high-quality animal protein to support a low-density human population. Wars occur before the protein supply is irreversibly depleted.

For Chagnon (e.g., 1988), in contrast, the ultimate cause of violence and warfare is Darwinian. He argues that Yanomamö male violence takes many forms, from displays with clubs and axes to the killing of enemies, because violence is rewarded with reproductive success. According to Chagnon's statistics, the most violent Yanomamö males have a greater number of offspring who will carry forward their genetic material. As is true of Harris' argument, the ultimate cause of violence for Chagnon is not conscious. It is not the enjoyment of sex, parenthood or being waiteri ("fierce"), all of which Yanomamö men do praise. The ultimate goal of Yanomamö, and of all organisms, is reproductive survival.

In 1979, Chagnon co-authored with Paul Bugos, Jr. (the editor of The Ax Fight) an essay titled "Kin Selection and Conflict" (available in the "Historical Texts" submenu of the Contents.) The Chagnon/Bugos essay provides the opportunity for a number of exercises using Yanomamö Interactive. The Ax Fight plays a crucial role in the essay, and its rich ethnographic material can be explored in relation to it. Chagnon and Bugos interpret the behavioral evidence recorded in the film in their effort to make an evolutionary argument. They first distinguish between two groups of Yanomamö villagers. One group is designated the "supporters" of Mohesiwä in the ax fight; the other group is designated "supporters" of his antagonists, Uuwä and Keböwä. The essay then summarizes the data in four Tables which compare the "supporters'" genealogical relatedness to the two combatants. (The four Tables, 8.1, 8,2, 8.3 and 8.4 [a and b ] may be accessed from the "Maps and Figures" submenu of the Contents.) *10 Evidence for the evolutionary argument takes the form of statistics in these Tables which suggest that "supporters" share more genetic material with the man whom they supported than with the man whom they did not. Thus, Chagnon and Bugos argue, people take sides consistent with predictions from evolutionary theory - they support close kin over distant kin. The argument claims that violent men are rewarded by more offspring who share their genetic material. It also proposes that all activities that promote differential fertility are selected for evolutionarily. *11 A possible exercise in field method with The Ax Fight begins with users first reading "Kin Selection and Conflict." With this background, users can recreate the analytical process of Chagnon and Bugos. *12 For each person who is designated as a "supporter" in the essay's Tables 8.4a and 8.4b, users can confirm or disconfirm the designation. Accessing footage in the "People" screens of the identified people, users can find the "raw" observations, the continuous, multi-faceted streams of behavior, that Chagnon and Bugos designate as "support." These designations constitute the essay's "data," the discrete, discontinuous units that can be subjected to statistical analysis.

The translation of "behavior streams" into "data" requires discussion. Close inspection of the footage confirms that many of the thirty people identified by Chagnon and Bugos to be "supporters" do act supportingly: they bait or physically threaten the opponents of those whom they are said to help. This data seems to confirm Chagnon and Bugos' argument. (However, twelve people named in the essay as "supporters" have not been identified in the film. They have been assigned "People" screens in the CD, but their names are not mentioned in Chagnon's or Seaman's descriptions of the footage.)

The example of one "supporter" in particular demonstrates further points about the translation of field observation into statistical data. Mohesiwä's classificatory "father," Yoroshianawä, is identified by Chagnon and Bugos to be Mohesiwä's "supporter" (Table 8.4a). Observation of Yoroshianawä's activities reveals, however, that on at least three occasions he prevented an attack against Mohesiwä's antagonist. Superficially, this seems to constitute a misidentification of "support," although, as will be seen, the identification may ultimately be correct. The first point to be made, however, is the importance of close observation and clearly-defined coding criteria when footage and field observations are translated into data.

A second point about this example was raised by Gary Seaman (in conversation). Although Yoroshianawä prevented attacks on Mohesiwä's antagonist, this de-escalation of violence may have prevented Mohesiwä from being killed by a powerful opponent. (Yoroshianawä had good reason to believe that his classificatory "son" was in considerable danger.) In addition, Yoroshianawä's action probably had the long-term consequence of promoting the survival of Mohesiwä's lineage. Members of this lineage were in this case vulnerable at the time and extremely dependent on the good will of Mohesiwä's antagonists. Ironically, Yoroshianawä's "failure to support" violence in this case would have had Darwinian consequences that affirm the Chagnon/Bugos hypothesis: Mohesiwä's survival in the ax fight may not only have been necessary for the reproduction of his own genes, but instrumental for the reproduction of his lineage's gene pool. "Support" - in this case, action that advances the reproductive survival of individuals - is not a simple thing to recognize or define.

Another exercise concerns the extent to which field observations, and ethnographic film footage, can justify a choice among competing theories. The Ax Fight and the "Kin Selection" essay were not produced explicitly for the purpose of debating Marvin Harris' ecology-based theory of violence, but they can be considered in that light. With access to The Ax Fight's footage and Chagnon's meticulously-collected genealogies, users are in a good position to evaluate whether Harris' argument could predict the fact that so many close kinsmen support each other in a fight. Is something more than the need for protein required to explain the actions recorded in the film? Are a need to reproduce one's genes and a need to sustain a supply of protein mutually exclusive?

In the social sciences, theories that search for a single, all-powerful explanation are called reductionistic. All factors that contribute to the existence of a phenomenon are "reduced" to only one. Both Harris (1984:196) and Chagnon (e.g., 1989) argue that their goals are not reductionistic because they acknowledge the existence of many factors that contribute to Yanomamö behavior. *13

In many cases, however, reductive explanations are difficult to avoid because they are not recognized as such. Documentary films, for example, often tempt viewers to interpret reductively. Viewers are presented with a brief moment recorded in the stream of history and are asked to believe that the recording is "truthful" and the moment is representative of a larger whole. The Ax Fight offers five versions of a moment in history, and suggests that none is the definitive truth. In that sense, it is a corrective to reductionism. The best antidote to a reductive interpretation is a nonreductive alternative. The film's emphasis on ten-and-a-half minutes of violence, however, necessarily ignores many things, notably the many sociable aspects of Yanomamö village life. *14 The range of behavior in the sample is not representative of the current whole.

The same problem of interpretive reductionism also has an historical aspect. If viewers of The Ax Fight had no other evidence, they might easily make interpretations of the Yanomamö that are reductively ahistorical. They would have difficulty recognizing the extent to which recent history has transformed Yanomamö life. The change that is most obvious in the film, once it is pointed out, is the introduction of steel axes into the village. It is intriguing and disturbing to speculate about other changes brought by contact with the West. Albert (1989:637) hypothesizes that Yanomamö villages which are relatively close to Western settlements have been inclined to unprecedented violence by the introduction of steel tools and the population explosion that resulted from them: the violence in The Ax Fight may be in part a distant consequence of Western expansion. Chagnon disagrees with Albert's hypothesis, but affirms that many external developments have had devastating consequences for the Yanomamö. *15

Chagnon argues that Yanomamö women play a relatively passive and minor role in political affairs, compared to the violent and dominant role of men. A few anthropologists have debated his interpretation and qualified it with the suggestion that women display considerable power behind the scenes (Ramos 1979, Lizot 1976). The debate suggests a deductive foundation for research exercises in Yanomamö Interactive. Selections from the People menu allow users access to brief ethnographic records of women's activities. The footage of Nakahedami and Yaukuima, sisters of the principle male antagonists in the fight, shows them to be much more active than many other women. Footage of Keböwä, Uuwä, Mohesiwä, and Törawä clearly exemplifies the ideal of Yanomamö male behavior, waiteri, that Chagnon frequently describes. The footage of Yoroshianawä, like that of Nanokawä and Möawä (as discussed in Chagnon's narration), suggests that there is a time and place for alternative male strategies. A particularly striking case of is that of Yoinakuwä, the individual who was probably most responsible for escalating the violence in the ax fight. (He is also the man who told Sinabimi to stop feeding the visitors.) In every piece of action described in the "Blow-by-Blows," Yoinakuwä displays an uncanny ability to promote violence while keeping himself far away from the swinging axes.

The depictions of many individuals in The Ax Fight present short but suggestive biographies that can be read in "People" screens. Sinabimi's young son Räaiyowä, for example, offers users the opportunity to pursue a footage-based exercise in biographical research. On first screening, the ten-year-old boy is nameless and invisible. When his movements are tracked over time, however, he is discovered everywhere. Räaiyowä is concerned about his mother's plight and anxious to study the ways by which Yanomamö men avenge abuse.

Yanomamö Interactive also makes possible explorations that should interest students of film, as distinct from students of anthropology. As described above, sections three and five of The Ax Fight are re-edits of the unedited, original footage of section one. A special feature, for users who wish to understand editing decisions in The Ax Fight, permits nonlinear navigation between precise frames in the edited sections and the equivalent frames in the original. This feature is available in the "Narration" chapter (accessible from the Contents menu). There, descriptive paragraphs for sections three and five contain bolded "REF" footnote numbers. A mouseclick on any part of a paragraph that is not in bold will cause the movie to sync with the current moment that is described in the paragraph. A click on the "REF" number itself will jump the movie back to the equivalent picture frame in the unedited footage. *16 Students of film should also be interested in the still photographs that Chagnon took while The Ax Fight was being shot. (They are accessible from the "Photo Gallery" submenu of the Contents .) The alternative compositions and perspectives that these photographs provide reveal the limits of single-camera film production.

The last exercises I suggest with the footage are intended for viewers of ethnographic film in general. They explore the way that narration focuses and unfocuses attention. Here is a case in point, a line of Chagnon's narration near the middle of the fight: "Alarmed by this new threat, a woman from Keböwä's group seizes his [Törawä's] ax handle, turns the sharp side back down and drags him out of the fight." The narration thus emphasizes Törawä's failure of purpose, mentions no one except Törawä and a woman, and gives no special emphasis to the fact that it is a woman who blocks a man so effectively. Both the emphasis and deemphasis have consequences for viewers.

Before I began work on this CD, I had taught with or viewed The Ax Fight about ten times. In all of those viewings, I had concentrated on Törawä's failure, following the narration's emphasis. I did not find it particularly interesting that a woman (Keböwä's sister, Yaukuima) had "out-manned" a Yanomamö man. Now, having reconsidered the footage since reading Ramos (1979), I have become intrigued. Inspection of the footage also reveals that at the moment when Törawä is blocked by the woman, Yaukuima, Törawä's classificatory "father" (in an apparent effort to de-escalate the violence) shoves Törawä off balance. I had never noticed Yoroshianawä shove Törawä, though he does it in plain sight. I now realize that the interpretation of the incident given in Chagnon's narration not only emphasizes the failure of the weak Törawä, it also de-emphasizes the roles of the woman, Yaukuima, and the classificatory "father," Yoroshianawä.

Ethnographic film narration serves a complex function. On one hand, it provides the crucial role of helping viewers to make sense of visual chaos. The Ax Fight demonstrates this point perfectly in the contrast of its first and third sections. *17 Narration must be directive: it must interpret footage according to priorities of the ethnographer. On the other hand, even the best narration is coercive: by directing attention to one perspective, it manifestly desensitizes viewers to other perspectives.

To study this phenomenon, users may employ the film and "Blow-by-Blow Descriptions" in exercises that direct the perceptions and interpretations of others. An exercise that can help hone the skills of field observation and ethnographic argument is to produce a number of different narrations for a single moment in the film. The narrations could emphasize alternative aspects of a single action or present different (perhaps mutually exclusive) theoretical slants on it. *18

The paradox of blinding interpretive light defines The Ax Fight and has influenced the design of Yanomamö Interactive. It affects all analysis, all people who make films and who try to make films out. The best way, I believe, to contend with the essential difficulties of interpretation is to follow the practices of scholarship. Keep close watch on priorities, keep reading alternative perspectives, and keep checking that the data makes the case.

Interactive media has the potential to integrate the best resources of scholarship in anthropology (Biella 1993). The discipline grows through juxtaposition of competing theoretical interpretations, but is also based on a foundation of non-recurrent empirical observations. Ethnographic film, with the essential tool of narration, makes a good beginning at documenting and interpreting these observations. Before the advent of interactive media, however, anthropological images were difficult to unlink from the coercive interpretations of their makers. Because of this resistance to scholarship, ethnographic film has not always seemed serious. Like its precursor, The Ax Fight, interactive media offers important correctives. It slows down the footage and allows changing relationships to be considered repeatedly. Nonlinear links to texts release interpretation and open ethnographic film more fully to the search for new meaning.

FOOTNOTES

*1 Essays that discuss The Ax Fightinclude Klein and Klein (1977), Cohen (1979), Chagnon and Bugos (1979; available in this CD under the "Historical Texts" submenu of the Contents), Asch (1991), Bugos, Carter and Asch (1993), Loizos (1993), Reichlin (1993), Weinberger (1994), Marks (1995), Moore (1995) and Ruby (1995). [Click anywhere in this field to return to the main text.]

*2 Rouch and Morin's path-breaking documentary, Chronicle of a Summer 1960], does include filmmaker conversations, but the talks were premeditated and took place for the purpose of being included in the film.

*3 When The Ax Fight was released in 1975, it was unique stylistically. Its viewers may have been reminded of slow-motion news-footage replays of the Kennedy assassination. They may also have recalled the optical enlargements and slow zooms found in such fiction films as Antonioni's Blow Up (1966) and Zabriski Point (1970). In the social sciences, however, the optical fireworks of The Ax Fight's section three were unprecedented and stunning. Apart from the film's optical effects, the repetition of the footage was itself remarkable, though something similar to it had been used by John Marshall (in An Argument About A Marriage 1958]) and by Asch and Chagnon themselves in their earlier Yanomamö film, The Feast (1968). Only Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead, Asch's mentor, had previously advocated such close attention to the use of 16mm film as empirical evidence in anthropology (Bateson and Mead 1942). No one before Asch and Chagnon had gone to so much trouble to integrate evidence with theory in an anthropological film. The innovation was important historically, and it is the foremost precedent in the discipline for contemporary multimedia.

*4 Three diagrams of Ax Fight participants are accessible for study from the Genealogies menu at the top of the screen. These diagrams are only an indication of the village's genealogical complexity. Users are urged to become acquainted with Chagnon's much more complete genealogical information. It is found in the "Carved and Dyadic" and "Census and Participants" data files stored elsewhere in this CD.

*5 Martínez (1990) analyzes viewer stereotypes about "savages" in The Ax Fight. For more on the "savage slot" in anthropology's ideological niches, see Trouillot (1991) and Dumont (1988).

*6 Is the implicit conclusion of the "final edited version" that all analysis, everywhere, is illusion? Asch implies something to this effect in his interview with Ruby (1995), but he may have been reading contemporary postmodernism backward into his work of 1975. The claim that all interpretations are equally invalid because they are all born of human illusion is called solipsism. The film's ambiguity on this philosophical question is no doubt intentional but, as far as I am concerned, the ambiguity is a weakness. In any case, if the claim were that all interpretation is illusion, then further investigation of The Ax Fight's footage would be no more than an exercise in interpretive aesthetics. There could be no superior interpretation because there are no real patterns in human action or culture.
Interestingly, the position of solipsism is self-negating. Either people can really know that all interpretations are illusions, or people can really know nothing, because all knowledge is illusion. Solipsism can't have it both ways.

*7 A fuller discussion about the implications of digital media in anthropological scholarship is made in Biella (1993).

*8 The "Blow-by-Blows" were written by Gary Seaman in 1996 during his close reinvestigation of The Ax Fight footage. The original identifications and genealogies of the people in the film, which made Seaman's descriptions possible, were supplied by Chagnon. (Chagnon is probably the only person outside of Yanomamöland who has extensive knowledge of the Mishimishimabowëi-teri villagers.) The "Blow-by-Blows" also benefited from another analysis of The Ax Fight that was based on Chagnon's research, written by Seth Reichlin (1993; Reichlin was an anthropology major at Harvard who was hired to write a study guide by the film's distributor, Documentary Educational Resources.) Chagnon read, approved or corrected all of the "Blow-by-Blows." I too spent many hours going over them and making sure that what they described, I could see.

*9 For a recent summary of the theoretical controversies in which Chagnon's work has played a major role, see Monaghan (1994). The essay is quite biased: it promotes almost exclusively the views of Chagnon's detractors.

*10 The Tables illustrating the Chagnon/Bugos argument can also be accessed from the Illustrations menu of the "Kin Selection and Conflict" screen. The mathematical calculations used in the Tables can be verified using data provided in the "Carved and Dyadic" and "Census and Participants" data files that Chagnon gathered in the field. They are presented elsewhere in the CD.

*11 In his comments on this Introduction, Chagnon suggests that factors which contribute to reproductive success of Yanomamö men include much more than the capacity for violence. They also include having skill as a shaman, multiple wives, membership in a powerful lineage, exceptionally numerous matrilateral kin, and exceptionally numerous ascending generation kin.

*12 Ax Fight footage was the "raw" observational record from which Chagnon and Bugos designated villagers to be "supporters" of one faction or the other. While users' access to this footage and to Chagnon's genealogical data (stored in "People" screens and elsewhere in the CD) does not reproduce for users the original fieldwork experience, it replicates very well the conditions under which the analysis was made.
Like the extraordinarily frank material that Chagnon includes in his Studying the Yanomamö (1974), the "raw" footage of The Ax Fight and the genealogical material in this CD are the sort of field data that anthropologists ordinarily repress. Honesty facilitates what is likely often to be hostile outside critique. In the past, it has been the absence of such extensive honesty (in conjunction with the absence of imagination in the use of film and digital technologies, I might add) that has prevented anthropology from finding a means to approximate a basic criterion of scholarship: the provision of data with which independent observers may attempt to verify results.

*13 See Chagnon's comments on "The Great Protein Debate" in his monograph (1997). In written comments to this Introduction, Chagnon offers the following in regard to the debate:
"Harris' "theory" about the male-supremacist complex was borrowed directly from one of my own publications - a chapter in a book Harris edited with Morton Fried and Robert Murphy (Chagnon 1968). I characterized it as the "waiteri complex", but it all hinged logically on whether or not it was empirically true that Yanomamö infanticide was female preferential infanticide: that Yanomamö killed more female babies at birth than males .... I could not demonstrate empirically a female sex bias in Yanomamö infanticides, rendering both the logic of my "waiteri complex" hypothesis untenable and the logic of Harris' derivative version equally untenable. Harris' version is now widely identified in his re-wording of his earlier arguments (Divale and Harris 1976) ....
"While cultural determinists like Marvin Harris argue that the behavior of tribesmen is almost exclusively determined by material factors - doing things that lead to the economic survival of their cultures - I argue that individuals in all cultures tend to do things that promote their selfish individual reproductive survival: they do not exist to promote the survival of groups, villages, tribes and cultures. They exist to promote their own reproductive interests. Harris reduces conflict and warfare to material causes - struggles for food, meat, water holes, territory, etc. I expand the repertoire, advised by modern biological theory, and include many other causes of human conflict, including conflicts over reproductive resources - females - that Harris rejects as "too biological". Yet Harris' own theory rests on the same, but unstated, assumption: food is a biological necessity for survival. Ultimately, Harris' theory is as "biologically reductionist" as mine. It would even be possible and logical to claim that Harris is positing a "gene" for maximizing protein intake or material well-being. If this isn't the mechanism that causes people to strive to get more protein (and water holes, territory, etc.), then what does Harris posit as the "cause" for this striving? How different is Harris' basic assumption from my own?"

*14 Only two days after the fight occurred, for example, Yanomamö elders promoted an impromptu meat distribution feast. Chagnon and Asch (1975b) made a film about this event, but the work is rarely screened and its cultural significance in counterpoint to the famous film about an ax fight is rarely recognized. Moore's (1995) essay on the subject is an important exception.

*15 Chagnon considers Albert's hypothesis that capitalist expansion has increased Yanomamö violence to be groundless speculation, wishful thinking based on Western myths about the peaceful, Noble Savage.
In any case, it is true that beginning in the 1950s, steel axes were introduced to Yanomamö villages as trade goods offered by missionaries and other Westerners. Chagnon has frequently discussed the modification of Yanomamö culture due to the introduction of steel axes. He argues for example that axes have been integrated into Yanomamö stages and rituals of violence (Chagnon 1992:64, Chagnon and Bugos 1979). More recently, the introduction of shotguns has made inter-village disputes more lethal. Chagnon reports incidents where heavily armed miners have slaughtered Yanomamö, and, as an investigation of the causes of death listed in "People" screens of this CD will show, great devastation has been brought to Yanomamö by epidemics, often of Western diseases. See Chapter 8 of Chagnon (1997) for additional data on mortality due to Western contact.

*16 When this occurs, the "Return" button, in the lower right of the screen, is activated and a click on it will re-cue the movie back to the current moment. On a few occasions, original and edited frames linked together with "REF" numbers are not identical: this is the case because some film information was lost when the film was digitized at 15 frames-per-second.

*17 As pointed out above, in the absence of narration, informal guidelines are always available to fill the void. Stereotypes like "primitive, savage violence," though unspoken most of the time, are also blinding and coercive.

*18 The "Blow-by-Blow Descriptions" were written with the goal to maintain a reasonable degree of objectivity. By this is meant, first, that they describe almost exclusively what can be seen on camera at the current moment; second, they are written, almost exclusively and to the extent possible, in language that minimizes value judgments and psychological or cultural interpretations. (Exceptions are usually marked off in brackets.) The design of the "Blow-by-Blows" was restricted in this way in order to acknowledge uncertainty about indigenous Yanomamö meanings and motives, and also to leave unprejudiced, as much as is possible, users' interpretations that will be based on the descriptions.
Behavioral descriptions carry their own theoretical baggage, but the writing style was not intended to promote a reductive model of human action.

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