Readings:
There are numerous responses to publication of Darkness in El Dorado and the events around it. Your assignment is to read some of them. I have found a good place to start is the page that comes up when one types "Patrick Tierney" into the Expanded Academic Index.
Of the reactions to the book that come up there, I would especially recommend the original reviews and the responses to them published in Current Anthropology, as well as the long and thoughtful review by David Stoll in The New Republic.In addition, just to enjoy his rhetoric, you should probably also take a look at Clifford Geertz's take on the whole thing from The New York Review of Books.
Then there are the reactions to the controversy, and the reports by very serious and important-sounding panels. You could look at the less neutal-sounding ones by universities potentially liable in court if anything were to be shown to have been unethical: The University of California, Santa Barbara and the University of Michigan. Or you could look at what at first glance (no, I haven't yet read the whole thing) a lot more neutral report by the American Anthropological Association. In addition to their own conclusions, these reports also contain further links, if you get really caught up in the whole business.
Assignment:
Free-for-all. I would ask you, however, both in your postings and in your class discussion remarks later on, to consider what I think is one of the most important issues here: the connection between ethical concerns (which are real) and mutual accusations between scientific and humanistic, or postitivist and post-modernist intellectual positions.
In class:
Whatever. Don't need much structure in advance, but I will try to monitor the discussion to keep it from getting unproductive.