BOOK: Neil Whitehead, "Dark Shamans"

Neil L. Whitehead: Dark Shamans: Kanaimà and the Poetics of Violent Death. Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2002. 0822329883. x + 310 pp. Online on academia.edu.

I first heard of this book last year, when I read Evelyn Waugh's Ninety-Two Days, which is about Waugh's journey to Guiana in 1932 (see my post about it). At one point Waugh records some observations about the culture of the Indians in the interior of the country, and he mentions this unusually mysterious phenomenon: “The life of every Indian in these parts is overshadowed by an ever present, indefinable dread, named Kenaima. I met plenty of people [. . .] who were willing to explain Kenaima to me and each told me something different. [. . .] Its existence and importance cannot be doubted; [. . .] but no one has yet discovered what exactly constitutes it. All unexplained deaths are attributed to Kenaima, certain places are to be avoided on account of Kenaima, strangers may be Kenaimas, people can set a Kenaima on you, you are in danger of Kenaima if you associate with men of another tribe. Various ceremonial acts are necessary to propitiate Kenaima. It is certainly something malevolent and supernatural, that is all that can be said certainly of it.” (Pp. 117–18 in the 2021 OUP edition.) The editor's notes in that book (p. 214) mentioned Neil Whitehead as “a recent anthropologist who claims to have had terrifying personal experience of the phenomenon” and cited his book, Dark Shamans.

Naturally I was intrigued by Waugh's description of kanaima and how elusive he made it sound, so I decided to read Whitehead's book in the hopes of learning more about it. Unfortunately, this book was a pretty big disappointment for me. No doubt it is a good book, for the right sort of reader, but it isn't the book I was hoping to read. It is the old curse of the humanities — their books aren't full of equations to keep us laypeople away, so it's only when you actually try to read it that you realize it's fairly technical stuff most of which you don't really understand particularly well, nor do you find it particularly interesting.

The book actually starts in a fairly promising way. Whitehead introduces kanaima as one of several “shamanic complexes” (p. 5) practiced by the Patamuna Indians (and some other nearby tribes); later we find that the practitioner of this form of shamanism is also called a kanaima, or sometimes a kanaima'san (this latter term is glossed as “kanaimà adept” on p. 97; or as the leader of a group of kanaimas, p. 104). On p. 14 he gives this concise summary of the most shocking aspects of the phenomenon: “In both the colonial literature and native oral testimony, kanaimà refers to the killing of an individual by violent mutilation of, in particular, the mouth and anus, into which are inserted various objects. The killers are then enjoined to return to the dead body of the victim in order to drink the juices of putrefaction.” (See also pp. 14–15 for a long quote with more grisly details, from one of his earlier publications; and pp. 116–119 for an account of kanaima symptoms and injuries by a local nurse.)

In the first chapter, Whitehead describes his fieldwork among the Patamuna in the 1990s. At one point he was shown what he had been led to believe would be an archeological site of an urn-burial, but it turned out that the site was anything but archeological; the ritual vessels were still in use by a local kanaima named Pirai, and contained recent human remains (p. 19). Pirai and his associates were apparently sufficiently upset about this they tried to poison Whitehead and made threats against him (pp. 21, 24), which got him to end his field trip early. However, some of the other Patamuna encouraged him to investigate kanaima shamanism, which he did on a subsequent field trip a few years later, and even managed to interview several of its practitioners (p. 28). Perhaps unsurprisingly, some people did not appreciate his snooping, and took to prowling about his house at night, “scratching at the doorframe and windows” (p. 30) and somehow contriving to introduce venomous snakes into the house (pp. 31, 89)!

This is all very interesting, indeed delightfully creepy, and it opens up many questions which I naively hoped the rest of the book would answer. Was Whitehead's food poisoning just an accident or was it really a quickly arranged but fortunately unsuccessful murder attempt by Pirai? Why was the latter so upset just because Whitehead had touched and photographed one of his ritual vessels? Were the human remains in them those of a recent murder victim, and if so, who was it and why had she (p. 254, n. 6) been murdered? Indeed how and why do all these kanaima murderers get away with their crimes? Is Guiana really such a failed state that in the interior of the country even the most gruesome murders do not get investigated? When the kanaimas suck the juices of a three-day-old corpse (p. 15), how can they stomach this? How don't they all fall seriously ill from it? How insane must they be to even attempt such a crazy thing in the first place? Why do the relatives of the murder victim not thwart the kanaimas' design by burning the corpse instead of just burying it?* (Since the kanaimas “will try and discover the burial place of their victim” (p. 15), they clearly do not by themselves bury the victim, and the family of the victim surely cannot avoid recognizing that it was a kanaima murder and not some other cause of death.) In fact, since a fatal kanaima attack often comes “many months, or even a year or two” (p. 14) after a “preliminary” attack which causes only minor injuries — why don't the victims move away instead of waiting for the fatal attack which “will certainly follow”? And finally, why isn't something done to put an end to all this crazy business of murdering? Take for instance the Pirai fellow mentioned earlier. It's not like his being a kanaima was some sort of secret — it seems that everyone in the community knew it. So why don't they simply gang up on him and lynch him (seeing as law enforcement appears to be as good as nonexistent in that area)?**

[*Interestingly, according to a 19th-century missionary, “the family of the victim may try to defend the grave against the kanaimà by placing some ourali (curare) poison on the body” (p. 64). One of Whitehead's informants likewise mentioned a case where a kanaima was killed because the family members of his victim “poisoned her corpse in anticipation of his visit” (p. 126). In view of this I now begin to wonder why this practice is not more widespread.]

[**Well, perhaps sometimes they do; see p. 110, where one particularly notorious kanaima was eventually “shotgunned in the face” to end his career; and the wife of the above-mentioned Pirai was eventually beaten to death in revenge by the relatives of his victims (p. 112); and on p. 185, one man claims to have killed as many as four kanaimas.]

Lots of questions, but, alas, not many answers. I should have known that these are not the sort of questions that an anthropologist would be interested in answering. The idea that murderers — indeed murderers of a particularly monstrous and deranged kind — are evidently walking about the jungles of Guyana with complete impunity and that something should be done about it, is never seriously entertained. I suppose it is like with the zoologists, who might study how lions attack a gazelle but it would never occur to them to try saving the gazelle from the lions; so the anthropologist might study how murderers operate in a certain community but would never dream of trying to bring their activities to an end.* This book should have been written by some sort of crime investigator, a detective or forensic specialist or something along those lines.

[*Whitehead even says that “no one would wish to inflict a campaign of ‘law and order’ on the people of the Highlands, for such exercises are themselves apt to become indiscriminately lethal.” (P. 7.) Considering how poor and poorly governed Guyana seems to be, he is probably right to be worried about that.]

But I don't wish to sound too critical; there were still many interesting things in the book. Whitehead continues with a chapter about the early mentions of kanaima in the writings of outside observers, mostly from 19th-century travellers, missionaries and, from the late 19th century onwards, anthropologists or ethnographers (prior to the 19th century it's hard to say whether certain descriptions refer specifically to kanaima or to some other kind of shamanism or sorcery; p. 48). The 19th-century observers often describe the kanaima as committing their murders for the sake of vengeance, as something that society resorted to since it lacked a legal system (pp. 61, 77; Whitehead likes to make use of the phrase “lex talionis”, though he consistently misspells it with “talionsis”*). Some authors caused confusion by going too far in this, and attributing “all cases of vengeance or contract killing” to kanaima (p. 74); moreover, the Indians themselves sometimes understood kanaima “as the source of ‘very nearly all bodily evil’ ” (p. 77; cf. also Waugh's account quoted at the start of this post). Interestingly, in some legends the kanaima transforms into a kind of ‘were-jaguar’ to accomplish his killings and mutilations (pp. 65–6); or perhaps he is just a man wearing the skin of a jaguar (p. 80). In the 20th century, kanaima was also the inspiration for some writers and artists; for example, there is a 1935 novel titled Canaima by Rómulo Gallegos, a Venezuelan writer and politician (mentioned here on p. 84).

[*Incidentally, another embarrassing error in the spelling of foreign terms occurs on p. 78, where Walter Roth is described as “that doyenne of Guyanese ethnology” :))]

Ch. 3 then presents Whitehead's own findings about the kanaima, based on his conversations with families of victims and even with a few perpetrators. It became clear that many kanaima attacks cannot be explained in terms of vengeance (as the 19th-century authors would have it); it is more a matter of kanaima practitioners ‘hunting’ for victims as (ritual) food; “the selection of victims is ultimately a matter of indifference, in the sense that anyone will do” (p. 90); “the young as well as the old are victims” (p. 115); “[t]hey go to small children because they're easy to attack” (p. 118). “Rather than being a revenge complex, then, kanaimà is a form of shamanism” (p. 97). But in practice, some kanaimas seem to be little better than gangsters who “revel in their notoriety and use it in innumerable petty ways to advance themselves materially and sexually” (p. 105). In some families the practice passes from father to son, otherwise a would-be kanaima has to find an experienced practitioner willing to initiate him (pp. 106–7). Outsiders still generally think that kanaima is just some sort of malignant spirit, and consequently reports of kanaima crimes, even if they are made to the police, are not taken seriously (pp. 117–18).

Ch. 4 is about the origins of kanaima and its relations to other forms of shamanism. Kanaima emerged, or at least grew in importance, in the early 19th century, as guns became available to the Patamuna and surrounding tribes; “the guerilla tactics of gun warfare made smaller parties much more effective” (p. 138), so the sort of fighting that kanaimas practiced (secrecy, small groups, moving quickly) was more important in tribal warfare than before. There was a further increase of interest in kanaima due to the suppression of tribal warfare by the colonial governments in the 19th century (p. 53), and due to the restrictions on gun ownership in the 20th (p. 104).

To the natives of that area, even christianity seems more or less like just another form of shamanism and a “direct and effective means of countering kanaimà” (p. 128). Another interesting form of shamanism is called “alleluia” and emerged in the late 19th century as a result of early contacts with christian missionaries (p. 150); it seems to consist mostly of singing chants and dancing in a circle. Its founder claimed to have received this new form of religion directly from (the christian) god; it is regarded “as being the special ‘short-cut’ for Amerindians, the Bible being not wrong but rather the ‘long way round,’ and so redundant” (ibid.). How very convenient :)) The different kinds of shamanism were sometimes in conflict with each other, with alleluia standing for a kind of modernity and kanaima for tradition (p. 140; but sometimes the same person is involved in both kinds of shamanism, p. 162).

Whitehead actually witnessed a ritual performed by a piya shaman with the intention of killing a kanaima who operated in the area (pp. 163–5); the piya said that the kanaima's corpse would be found in a hole in a certain location, and Whitehead went there to check: “as we approached the spot we could see birds circling and smell something truly awful [. . .] but it appeared quite impossible to actually get to that spot without climbing equipment. I must confess that I in fact had no wish to get there and have remained quite shaken by this experience” (p. 166). This is extremely intriguing, but also so frustrating! It shows how different his priorities were from what I would like to see in a book like this. Did the piya plant the corpse of some dead animal in a hard-to-reach location prior to his ritual so he could impress his credulous audience by ‘predicting’ the spot later? Did he (or some associate of his) perhaps even kill the kanaima by some more conventional means and drag his body there? Surely it should have been Whitehead's top priority to try getting to the bottom of this — but instead, what we get is “I had no wish to get there”... :(

In more recent times (ch. 5), kanaima plays a role in the reaction of the Indians against the changes brought about by modernity and development, and against the oppression and neglect they have experienced from the Guyanese authorities (the Guyanese state appears to be dominated by the coastal, mostly black, population): “Kanaimàs appear as hypertraditionalists, that is, as rejecting the tokens of modernity, such as metal tools, guns, matches, and, particularly, clothing. [. . .] kanaimà attacks have also become more explicitly directed toward blacks and Brazilians”, especially related to “disputes in the mining camps” (p. 182).

There's a pleasantly bizarre tale of a man who offered some resistance to a kanaima attack: “In 1994 RJ killed four kanaimàs, who had chased him for several hours [. . .] They kept chasing him, bringing on a light rain to confuse him. He dropped his bag at one point, but later found it on the trail ahead of him. [. . .] As he watched, they came toward him and one of the baboons turned into a man.” He killed several of them, but later “came down with fever and was flown out to the Georgetown Hospital”; one of the kanaimas, named Caesar, followed him there; RJ “killed Caesar in a toilet at the hospital but himself died within a few days.” (P. 185.) What a crazy story! But it also illustrates the huge gap between what I hoped for in a book like this, and what Whitehead is interested in. What interests him is the fact that RJ was not an Indian, but a black man, and this evidently allowed him “a greater space and ability to resist the magic of the attack”; and the other thing that interests Whitehead here is that kanaimas are evidently active even in Georgetown, the largest city in Guyana, showing that “kanaimà symbolically engages modernity through a performance of hypertradition”. But he makes no effort whatsoever to engage with the obvious impossibilities of the story. Men cannot ‘bring on a light rain’, they cannot magically pick up a bag dropped by the victim whom they are chasing and then deposit it on the trail ahead of him, and they cannot turn into baboons and back. Fine, they could have worn costumes, and the light rain could have been a coincidence; but the bag cannot be anything other than pure fiction. And yet Whitehead is not in the least interested in trying to figure out what exactly the truth of the story is. Nor does he try to follow up on the killing of Caesar in a hospital toilet — you would think that such a thing must have left some sort of paper trail which an investigator could try to find to see if at least *that* part of the story has any basis in truth. But these things are not important to our author, they do not interest him and he doesn't attempt to investigate them.

There's an interesting section on the making of a short film showing the re-enactment of a kanaima attack, for which Whitehead “operated the videocamera” (p. 187). But it is very bizarre that he titles this section “Kanaimà: the snuff movie”, seeing as the very definition of a snuff movie is that it shows a person being killed for real, and this is obviously not what they have done here. Later he also mentions the filming of alleluia rituals; I was pleasantly surprised to see that the Patamuna not only did not object to such recording, but actually welcomed it (p. 189).

*

In the last two chapters, the book grows increasingly ‘anthropological’, losing itself in long discussions full of vague and fuzzy words that probably count as technical terminology amongst the anthropologists. I mostly didn't feel that I understood anything any better after reading these things than before; mostly they just confirmed my impression that I just temperamentally can't stand anthropology as a field. I can't do much more here than note a few particularly insane takes:

“The violence of capture, killing, and consumption of enemies is itself a ritual form understood by both perpetrator and victim, and for this reason can be seen as expressing agreement or accord over the wider issues of sociocultural reproduction, since both killers and victims participate in the same cultural quest for cosmological status. Accordingly, violence and warfare may actually represent interaction, familiarity, and exchange.” (P. 192.) You must be very smart, and study very hard and very long, in order to be able to come up with something as stupid as that. Sure, you can stretch the meaning of words like ‘familiarity’ and ‘exchange’ so far as to cover even violence and warfare, but what use is that? Having been stretched so far, the words become useless. (‘Interaction’ didn't need stretching, it was already broad enough (and hence useless) to begin with.) You can't make any useful observation with terms as broad as that. Alice has a friendly chat with Bob about the weather; Clive kidnaps Dave and slowly tortures him to death; the anthropologist notes that these are merely two interactions, two instances of exchange between people who were familiar to each other, and pats himself on the back for his sagacious observation. Much wisdom. Wow.

“Perhaps this process of violent State incorporation should be understood as a means of making a kind of modern maba [maba are the supposedly ‘honey-like’ juices which the kanaimas suck from the rotting corpse of their victim; p. 15], through the intoxicating consumption of industrial human labor—a State cannibalism, which echoes the plot of the movie Soylent Green, in which our bodies are ritually produced as labor value, profit for the consumption of the Shamanic State evident in the occult institutions of industrial capital, global finance, and the military order.” (P. 195.)* Where do you even begin with something as insane as this? There's actually a tiny nugget of sense somewhere behind this; a normal person could have said ‘a state often perpetrates a lot of violence, and sometimes it is focused unfairly on some subgroups of the population for the benefit of certain other subgroups, and this is a bad thing and we should try to reduce it as much as possible’ — that would have been true and reasonable, but it would also have been blindingly obvious and quite useless since it provides no ideas as to how we might go about reducing this sort of violence. But nooo, he can't say something reasonable like that, he has to jerk himself off under the table and be like ‘ho ho ho you guys, what if the violence of the state is just like when a bunch of savages fall upon their victim in the middle of the jungle, stick an armadillo tail up his ass, wait until he dies of diarrhea, then come back three days later and insert a stick into his rotting corpse and suck the juices off it’ like some drug-addled sophomore dorm-room philosopher... I miss the good old days when, if you were an anarchist, you at least went out and assassinated someone or planted a bomb or something like that, instead of just mouthing off pointlessly in academic monographs.

[*Another good one from Whitehead's 2001 paper (p. 243): “we can say that Kanaimà persists as a mimesis of the continuing colonial consumption of the Amerindians. [. . .] just as now the highlands are eaten up by miners, anthropologists, and eco-tourists.” Om nom nom :)))]

You can't help noticing that both of the previous two examples were ultimately about the same problem: anthropologists look at things from such a tremendous distance, with such an enormous amount of abstraction, that it all begins to look the same to them and they can't make useful distinctions any more. But if you're going to do that, why bother having anthropologists at all? It would be enough to have physicists, who would tell you that we're all just walking blobs of atoms (or quarks or strings or whatever they're into this week), and then they would shrug and go back to their equations.

There is another passage on a related note in the introduction (pp. 8–9): “kanaimà violence is an authentic and legitimate form of cultural expression and is mimetically linked to the violence of economic and political ‘development’.” What does ‘authentic and legitimate’ even mean here? It sounds like something that could be said with the same amount of justification of lynching, widow-burning, and the throwing of christians to lions, each in the context of its suitable time and place. Nobody in their right mind would conclude that these practices were therefore OK; so what was the point in going to the trouble of calling them authentic and legitimate? Indeed if you call kanaima killings authentic and legitimate, what's stopping you from considering any old murder to be just as authentic and legitimate, or for that matter any old war of conquest against the neighbouring tribe or the neighbouring country (preferably with some genocide thrown in for that bonus old-timey authenticity)?

[Whitehead puts it slightly more reasonably in his 2001 paper (cited below), p. 237: “I disagree [. . .] that Kanaimà activity is never regarded as legitimate, even if it is always feared and acknowledged as an antisocial force.” That may well be true, for a suitable definition of ‘legitimate’; but then one may still wonder why we, or anyone else, should give a damn whether something is legitimate in this sense or not.]

In short, the author not infrequently sinks to the level of a walking caricature of a hideously woke anthropologist. Back in its beginnings during the heyday of imperialism in the late 19th century, anthropology did not hesitate to call a savage a savage, and did not pretend that all cultures were somehow equal; but the poor anthropologists have felt terribly guilty over that ever since, and now insist until they are blue in the face that even the most gruesome murders and mutilations are “an authentic and legitimate form of cultural expression” — as long, of course, as they are performed by people sufficiently high on the victim hierarchy.

Another fine load of utter balderdash from p. 103: “Kanaimà mutilation thus can be read as a form of death that poetically renders the human hunter as divine prey by inverting the definition of ‘person.’ A real person is the possessor of an ‘incontinent mouth,’ which represents the dangerous capacities for both beautiful words and cannibalism, and a ‘continent anus,’ which stands for the control of those supremely social effluvia of sperm, menstruation, and blood.* [. . .] Kanaimà mutilation reduces this person to a ‘thing,’ evident from its ‘continent mouth,’ or lack of speech, as achieved by the insertion of snake fangs into the tongue, and its ‘incontinent anus,’ or lack of sociality, as achieved by the insertion of the ‘magic arrows’ of the armadillo or iguana tail and flexed sticks, which renders the victim physically incontinent.” In a way this is almost impressive. You have to have... a special kind of imagination to come up with this sort of stuff. Not a very healthy one, I guess. But then I suppose that kanaima murderers don't have very healthy imaginations either; but even so, are we really supposed to believe that this kind of thinking, about inverting the definition of a person, and about continent and incontinent orifices at one or the other end, is going through their mind as they devise and perpetrate their grisly crimes? If you picked out some suitably gruesome murder from the annals of crime in some developed country, and presented it to a professor of anthropology (perhaps with suitable adjustments to make it seem like it took place amongst some remote tribe somewhere), would he have any real difficulty in coming up with an equally plausible just-so story which would purport to explain why the details of *that* particular gruesome murder make some kind of deep symbolical sense? In short, are the sort of anthropological cerebrations quoted here really any better, and any more credible, than fortune-telling from coffee dregs?

[*He deserves an Ig Nobel prize for medicine for this. He talks about a continent anus and the first three things that come to his mind are sperm, menstruation and blood, which normally don't pass through the anus anyway...]

At times you wonder why anthropologists don't just self-disband their entire field of research: “ethnography also, through its explanations, undoubtedly robs cultures of some of the force of their performative expression. In this sense, knowledge itself becomes colonial” (p. 37). If you really believe this nonsense, well, just shut down your department and go flip hamburgers at McDonald's.

I'll conclude with just one more example from early in the book, showing how all the nonsense theories they've taken such pains to swallow can actually make it harder for anthropologists to do their research. The author arrives to Patamuna country with the intention of doing some ethnographical study, and the local nurse tells him of kanaima attacks and suggests he should be investigating those instead. “However, my initial reactions to the Nurse were to try to fold her testimony into that more general discourse on ‘witchcraft’ and to see her declarations as a performance of Patamuna alterity and desire to differentiate and distance themselves from others, especially white anthropologists.” (P. 15.) Like, man, pull your head out of your ass for a moment! A woman is telling you that people are getting murdered, gruesomely and painfully, in her community, and your reaction is ‘oh, she's just performing alterity, nothing to worry about’... At least you've got to give this to the evil 19th-century imperialist anthropologists: if an Indian woman had told them that her fellow-tribesmen were murdering each other in gruesome ways, they would have believed her, and they wouldn't have waffled about ‘performing alterity’.

*

What to say at the end? There are many interesting things in this book, but they are mixed with so much infuriating twaddle that on the whole it was quite a frustrating read; and, as I already said earlier, my curiosity about kanaima was far from fully satisfied, because the author simply happened to be interested in different questions than me. But I have no doubt that the book will be much more enjoyable for those many other readers who are better ideologically aligned with modern anthropology than I am, and to them it can be recommended unreservedly.

ToRead:

• Neil L. Whitehead's academia.edu profile has a number of his other papers and books on more or less related subjects. I suppose some of them would be just as interesting as this book, though I suspect they would also be just as frustrating.
   
• Neil L. Whitehead, “Kanaimà: Shamanism and Ritual Death in the Pakaraima Mountains, Guyana”. In: Laura Rival and Neil L. Whitehead (eds.), Beyond the Visible and the Material (Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 235–45. (The volume is a festschrift for Peter Rivière, Whitehead's doctoral advisor.) This paper is almost like a shorter version of Dark Shamans, containing many of the same ideas; and in some ways I found it easier to follow than the book, because it's so much shorter. I found the following passage particularly interesting: after saying that the kanaimas mostly kill their victims as a kind of ‘hunting’ for food (in a ritual sense), he adds: “it remains possible, if dangerous, to intercede with a Kanaimà sorcerer to ask for the death of a specific enemy, and Kanaimà seems to have accompanied warfare in the past in just this kind of way. [. . .] but, even when such killings take the idiom of Kanaimà, it is killing, not murder. This distinction between mundane murder and magical death is very clearly drawn by Patamuna.” (P. 240.) How very convenient! You hire someone to kill your enemy, but somehow it doesn't count as a murder — it's magic, literally!
   
• William Henry Brett: The Indian Tribes of Guiana (1868; there was also a shorter version in 1852); Legends and Myths of the Aboriginal Indians of British Guiana (1880). Brett was a 19th-century missionary who wrote these and several other books about Guiana.
   
• Rómulo Gallegos: Canaima (1935; English translation 1984). A novel, mentioned here on p. 84. The author later became the president of Venezuela.
   
• Everard im Thurn: Among the Indians of Guiana (1883). An early anthropological work about them.
   
• Theodor Koch-Grüneberg: Vom Roroima zum Orinoco (5 vols., 1916–28). Mentioned here on p. 79. The author was a German explorer who travelled in the Amazon region in the early years of the 20th century.
   
• Victor Norwood: The Skull of Kanaima (1951). An adventure novel, but it seems to have little to do with the actual kanaima shamanism: it just “uses the exoticism of the word to refer to a ‘shrunken skull’ the ‘size of a small orange’ ” (p. 261, n. 27). Norwood appears to have been a prolific writer of fiction under an impressively large number of pseudonyms.
   
• Sir Walter Ralegh: The Discoverie of the Large, Rich and Bewtiful Empire of Guiana, edited, annotated and transcribed by Neil L. Whitehead (1997). Mentioned here on pp. 46–9. This is apparently a new edition of Ralegh's work, with extensive notes by Whitehead; according to this review, which praises it highly, it was the first new edition of Ralegh since the 1940s. On the other hand there is a very negative review by a reader on amazon.com, saying: “Whitehead, never having done any long-term fieldwork in Amazonia, offers little new insight to his readers. He gets away with this by theorizing, as postmodernists often do, from a distance (and using the hard work of others). This book, as so much of his other work, is a sign of the decay of anthropology in USA.” I'm not sure what to make of this. On the one hand, we see from Dark Shamans that Whitehead did a good deal of fieldwork in Amazonia in the 1990s, but perhaps that doesn't count as “long-term” to the reader who left that review. On the other hand, I'm sympathetic to his complaints about theorising and postmodernism, since that's pretty much what I also ranted about in my post about Dark Shamans here.