Ethnobiologist Forced From Brazil After Harassment By Authorities

Three weeks ago, ethnobiologist Darrell Posey closed the door of his house in Belém, Brazil, leaving behind his life and scientific work of the past 12 years. The 42-year-old United States scientist’s involuntary departure from his post as coordinator of ethnobiology at Belém’s Museu Paraense Emilio Goeldi, South America’s oldest natural history museum, was forced by Brazilian authorities, who Posey says are retaliating for his activism on behalf of native rights. In the past two years, he says, they have charged him under the country’s sedition laws, excluded him from his study area, kept him on a short leash at work, undermined his scientific and personal reputation. and generally created an intolerable research climate. The case of Darrell Posey—an eminent scientist deprived of his research platform as a result of extra-science factors—prompts serious questions about the proper role of researchers working abroad in politically sensitive areas. Is one’s effectiveness or objectivity compromised by involvement in local social and political issues? Does the scientist stay in the eye of the storm and fight to the last? If so, how vocal should his involvement be—and what personal and professional liabilities, beyond the interruption of scientific pursuits, are at risk? Posey was indicted in July 1988 under Brazil’s Foreign Sedition Act after he and two Kayapo Indians traveled to Washington, D.C., to lobby against a massive hydroelectric project planned for Brazil’s Xingu River. In creating the worlds largest man-made lake, the project would have inundated 7.6 million hectares of forest and savanna, including some of the Kayapo reserve, the site of Posey’s research. Now postponed, the complex also would have dislocated 11 indigenous nations, further eroding the body of traditional native knowledge that Posey believes is vital to the preservation of biological and ecological diversity in Amazonian rain forests. During the Washington trip, in February 1988, the trio appeared at the World Bank and other agencies to oppose a $500 million package of electrification loans. Posey was later charged with meddling in Brazil’s internal affairs, denigrating its image abroad, and jeopardizing economic interests. The Indians were indicted as accomplices by Brazilian authorities, and because Posey traveled without official permission, he was also accused of violating emigration regulations. The charges were later dismissed for lack of evidence, and Brazilian consular officials now downplay the indictment. But this is not enough to offset Posey’s complaint that he has been subjected to a barrage of harassment. A salaried employee of the Brazilian national science council, he has twice over the past eight months had applications for sabbatical rejected at the highest levels of government, foiling his hope for “a cooling-off period.” Following the last rejection in April, he served notice that he would leave the museum anyway to take up residency at the Stattsmuseum Zoologiche in Munich, West Germany, where he intends to spend at least two years writing his research on the threatened Kayapo Indians. While some of the official harassment perhaps can be viewed as ill-conceived manipulation by resentful bureaucrats in Belém, it is also symptomatic on a deeper level of the inability of the Brazilian government to reconcile its xenophobia over the Amazon with its dependence on foreign aid. In regard to the consequence of a scientist’s high-profile activism, Posey’s timing could not have been worse. “His visit [to Washington oc curred] at the height of a general opposition to foreigners trying to tell [Brazilians] what to do in the Amazon,” explains Maritta Koch-Weser, a senior sociologist in the World Bank’s Brazil division. Brazilian President Jose Sarney “was saying once a week, ‘The Amazon is ours,”’ she says. “One must choose the correct moment in history for one’s adventure.” Posey attaches a more sinister significance to his indictment. “Anthropologists have long been seen as a threat to the Brazilian image,” he says. “The idea that dissenting voices in the scientific community are somehow damaging to the Brazilian image exposes the shallowness of the democratic facade.” But one prominent U.S. ethnobotanist with long experience in Latin America has a simpler, if somewhat less inflammatory, view of the indictment. “The idea of a foreigner going into a country and telling them they are wrong would raise anyone’s hackles—particularly if he is right,” he says. Posey first went to Brazil in 1977 to do graduate research on the role of insects in traditional agriculture. (He had studied entomology, anthropology, and geography at Louisiana State University and received his Ph.D. in ethnoentomology from the University of Georgia). He began studying a remote tribe near the Guyana border, but when Brazil’s now-defunct military dictatorship declared the frontier off-limits, he redirected his attention to the Brazilian Kayapo, long known as some of the Amazon’s most skillful farmers. It is Posey’s thesis that the Kayapo—indeed, most Amazonian tribes—have manipulated their habitat far more than anyone realizes. Landscapes that appear to be natural are, in fact, prepared by the Indians to yield plants for food or medicinal uses, or to attract game animals. “At the beginning of my work with the Kayapo, I had the idea of documenting traditional knowledge and using it as a way of arguing for the protection of native peoples and their habitat,” Posey says. The museum’s Kayapo task force includes some 20 scientists—among them linguists, anthropologists, and biologists—who are studying the subtleties of the Kayapo culture. They hope, among other things, to evaluate how the tribe’s agroforestry techniques measure up against those of ranchers and farmers who are flooding into the Amazon. “The key to the whole project depends on long-term study,” Posey says. While the Xingu project would displace only about 3,500 individuals, Posey says, “such a numbers game is dangerous. They are the only surviving members of these tribes, which have been in this area for millennia. Each tribe has its own knowledge system. If you move them without giving them time to prepare their lands to live off them, they will die.” His departure comes at a time when the tribe’s culture and its traditional ways are already quickly vanishing, either through attrition of tribal elders or the onslaught of Western culture. “It’s hard for me to leave the Amazon,” he says. “So many things are happening so rapidly. It’s like a war, a social revolution—the Indians in crisis. If you miss a year, you miss a lot.” Only a month before his exile was to begin, Posey and a Kayapo chief, Payakan, were in the U.S. to receive a Sierra Club award. Posey was also meeting with producers who have proposed putting the story of Posey and the Kayapo on film. While their saga may indeed be screen-worthy it is not unique. The issues Posey has faced are mirrored by the dilemmas encountered by many other scientists—particularly by researchers in the human and animal fields whose research subjects are endangered by forces over which they have little control (see accompanying story). Increasingly, their response is to stay and fight. although how vigourously they do it is a matter of debate. “Personally, I like Dr. Posey, but professionally I cannot agree with his position,” says his boss at the museum, Guilherme M. de la Penha. “I don’t think he is a scientist anymore; he - is just involved in this cause. But few others contacted for this article believe that Posey’s activism and public relations tactics are improper or that they have necessarily compromised the quality of his science. ‘The more you defend your research subjects, the more they open up to you,’ observes the ethnobotanist who requested anonymity. “It can enrich your science.” That view is shared by Roy Rappaport, president of the American Anthropological Association. “I’m not going to say offhand I disapprove of Posey’s public relations tactics to gain support for the tribe, and I don’t, as a matter of fact,” says Rappaport, who speculates about the emergence of a “postmodern science,” in which scientists are no longer emotionally detached, and their subjects are not considered in isolation from a political context. University of California, Santa Barbara, anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon, renowned for his 25-year study of the Yanomamo Indians of Brazil and Venezuela (The Scientist, Oct. 3, 1988, page 1), goes further. “I not only endorse, but applaud him,” Chagnon says. “The rate at which greedy forces are ransacking the Amazon can only increase unless scientists stand up.” Quite apart from the ethics of Posey’s activism are the personal costs of it. He has gained a reputation at the museum as something of a prima donna. “The feeling at the museum is bad,” says de Ia Penha. "[People question] why this guy is allowed to leave for the States or Europe without filing the necessary paperwork and waiting for permission. The rest of us have been coping with these [emigration] laws for a long time.” Posey came under heavy attack even before his indictment for his participation—or lack of it, de la Penha asserts—in an environmental impact study of the Xingu hydroelectric project. In 1987, a Sao Paulo consortium of consulting engineers, CENEC, hired Posey to coordinate the study. “They tried to get other anthropologists to do the study, but it was a polrtical hot potato, and no one would touch it,” Posey says. “I thought I could do it.” What happened next is a matter of debate. Posey says that when it became clear that he intended to write a negative report, money for the study dried up. Wanting no part of a whitewash—and perhaps realizing that charging in alone on his white horse would be futile—Posey withdrew from the impact study just before the application deadline tor a World Bank electrification loan, helping to sabotage the hydro project’s immediate prospects. Suddenly he found some scientific colleagues in both the U.S. and Brazil accusing him of impropriety for taking on the study, and of incompetence for the report he did produce. “My entire scientific and personal reputation was put on the line,” he says. De la Penha tells a very different story, that of fiasco. While the study was conducted under the museum’s aegis, de Ia Penha says, Posey never consulted him about hiring museum staff and, indeed, hired people outside the museum. “They were not properly trained, because he was always out of the country,” he says, calling the resulting 30-page report “trivial” and “elementary.” “It was the worst report that the museum ever produced about ecological impact. I had to convince CENEC to accept it. “It was bad for us to spend so much money [the equivalent of $300,000] and not have anything to show. Most Brazilian scientists never dreamed of having this much money to do field research. Posey had the funds and did not do the research.” De Ia Penha supported Posey’s right to “make statements that have a scientific basis,” but he felt he was out of line appearing at the World Bank. “As public servants it is not our role,” he says. “There is an ambassador in Washington to do this.” In fact, Posey and the Indians’ testimony did not cause the bank to delay the electrification loans, as their indictments suggested. Rather, the stoppage was due to Brazil’s decision to lump together its nuclear and hydroelectric projects under the loan program, according to the bank’s Koch-Weser. “Our loans are based on least-cost energy development,” she says. “When you add atomic power, it is not least-cost.” A number of the bank’s directors, including one board member from the U.S., had also opposed the loans on environmental grounds. After returning to Brazil from Washington, Posey was questioned by police about misrepresenting his trip to the U.S. (he had taken sick leave). Although he was never arrested or incarcerated, the charges were unsettling enough—threatening him with a prison term of up to three years, followed by expulsion from the country. In a bit of bad timing, the local authorities pressed charges during the First International Congress of Ethnobiology in Belém, which had attracted scientists from 35 countries. A resolution passed at the congress succeeded in mobilizing support for Posey and resulted in a firestorm of bad publicity tor the authorities, following which the charges were dropped. The government’s strong-arm tactics had backfired, but the cat-and-mouse game was only beginning. Already shut out of the Kayapo reserve (all Indian reserves have been declared militarily sensitive), he was forbidden to leave the museum for, more than five days without the director’s permission. Posey continued to travel abroad to conferences or lectures, but had to use vacation time. He became convinced he was under surveillance. “On one of my ‘vacations,’ I was speaking at the Smithsonian when a man came up to me and asked, ‘And how are you enjoying your holiday, Dr. Posey?’ Only my museum director could have supplied him with that information.” Despite the outrage and moral support other scientists have expressed, most in similarly precarious circumstances generally practice self-censorship or keep a low profile, says Jason Clay, research director for Cultural Survival, the Harvard-based anthropological group that monitors human rights abuses worldwide. Clay believes that no scientist is forced out of a foreign country—or threatened with expulsion— because of his research, but for activism. “Most take the threat seriously and make sure they don’t cross the line,” says Clay. “But Posey is the exception. [He] quite rightly made the decision to support the Kayapo.” For his part, Posey has no apologies. “I was trying to defend science and scientific freedom, and native peoples and their right to express themselves, and I was defending the Amazon, and I am not ashamed of that.” Michael McRae is a writer living in Ashland, Oreg.

Ethnobiologist Forced From Brazil After Harassment By Authorities

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