Volume 48, Number 2 · February 8, 2001
Life Among the Anthros
By Clifford Geertz
Darkness in El Dorado: How Scientists and Journalists Devastated the Amazon
by Patrick Tierney
Norton, 417 pp., $27.95
We are entering, we are told, a weightless, frictionless, speed-of-light age in which we will all be but address nodes in an endless flow of information packets, scurrying message handlers continuously assaulted from all directions. So far as scholarly life is concerned, that is still more specter than reality; promises (or threats) of e-books and downloadable doctoral theses and flooded-over inboxes aside, communication still proceeds at a more or less human pace, in a more or less politic manner. However, to judge from the on-line blizzard of charge and countercharge that has attended the mere rumor of Patrick Tierney's blistering indictment of anthropological practice in the Venezuelan Amazon, Darkness in El Dorado, it may not do so very much longer. Such established academic customs as looking into books before reviewing them, editing drafts before publishing them, and couching even polemic in consecutive argument may well be on the way out—runes and relics of a less hurried time. In cyberspace, it is velocity that matters. Velocity and volume.
Review, 4688 words
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