(I wrote this before my book Galileo’s Middle Finger. You can consult that for more details about this. You can also see this open access article: Darkness’ Descent on the American Anthropological Association.)
The documentary film “Secrets of the Tribe” contains major historical errors, which is odd, because the filmmaker apparently knew well of the historical scholarship that documents the reality. Hmm… I must presume the “problem” is that the reality doesn’t make as profitable a film as fantasy given the spooky background music and Ken Burn effects of a “documentary.”
If you’re intellectual enough to care about historical accuracy–if you feel as annoyed by Holocaust deniers as I am– I recommend the following scholarship.
- Thomas Headland’s page on how the 1968 epidemic really started
- Report from Robert Cox, archivist of the Neel papers at the American Philosophical Society, on what primary source documents actually reveal about James Neel’s activities in the field
- Trudy Turner and Jeffrey Nelson’s scholarly analysis of the real actions and ethics of James V. Neel: Turner_and_Nelson-1.pdf
- John Tooby’s Slate article on the many lies of Patrick Tierney
- Major scholarship by Ed Hagen, Michael Price, and John Tooby and compilation supporting Tooby’s Slate summary (including historian Susan Lindee’s letter debunking the claims by Terence Turner and Leslie Sponsel; starts on p. 61)
- Tom Gregor and Dan Gross’s publication in the Anthropology Newsletter on the AAA’s El Dorado Task Force: guilt_by_association.pdf
- Science magazine report on my research on this matter (forthcoming in a journal article)
Unfortunately, it appears that “Secrets of the Tribe” doesn’t reveal anything new. What a shame. The filmmaker could have done much better with the sources he had.
Note: This page shows the date it was recreated at my new website, not the original date of publication.