Revised and edited version of essay originally published in Special Issue of Semiotica ,
Volume 46: 2/4: Signs in the Field: Semiotic Perspectives on Ethnography , edited by
Michael Herzfeld.
Introduction
Several years before Jim Jones established his community, I was living in an
Arawak village in northwestern Guyana, about 75 miles from the future site of
Jonestown. It was an Amerindian village, but a very modern one – everyone spoke
Creole English, wore Western clothing, and embraced Western values generally. The family I knew best was especially progressive by local standards – of five mature children, three were training for professions: teacher, surveyor, engineer. The family was also musical, and two of the boys, responding to their changing environment, had acquired Japanese-made electric guitars and amplifiers. One brother taught at a nearby school and was soon to continue the training that would make him a highly qualified government surveyor. Music and technology, two domains of a modernity he was anxious to make his own, provided the basis of many conversations between us.
The conversation I remember best was about the film Woodstock . My friend had returned to the village after a visit to the capital, Georgetown, where Woodstock was playing to large and enthusiastic audiences. At the beginning of the 1970s
Guyanese youth were caught up in the complex forces of an imported counterculture and a local nationalism newly stimulated by the 1970 proclamation of Guyana as a
“Cooperative Republic.” So, besides his reaction to the music in
Woodstock , I was interested in my friend’s reaction to the festival as a cultural event – in how he interpreted the happening from a Guyanese perspective. We talked for some time about the various bands and singers, and in that discussion I, as a non-musician, was clearly a listener and learner. But before I could steer the conversation toward the
1

festival as cultural event, my friend asked a question that stopped me cold.
Interrupting his commentary on singers and their songs, he paused and with a perplexed expression asked, “But tell me, where did they find all those actors?”.
“Where did they find all those actors?”. My thoughts raced; the world turned over. It was one of those moments described by Kafka, when the world at its most mundane — acquaintances having a casual conversation — becomes suddenly vertiginous and alien. Amid a tumult of thoughts I realized that my friend and I, although perfectly able to carry on an extended conversation, had not been talking about the same thing. For me, the film Woodstock documented a novel and exciting event in American life. The 200-odd thousand who attended were not paid actors, but, on the contrary, people affirming a mode of life they wished to create and experience.
My friend, being more pragmatic and — as it turned out - more accurate, regarded all the events in Woodstock as parts of a staged performance he thought of as an
“American movie.” And the “American movie” was fiction; it paraded unreal lives lived out against backgrounds of unattainable luxury.
When I tried to explain that Woodstock “really happened,” that it was not “just a movie,” he became as uncomfortable with that idea as I had been with his interpretation
(after all, the ethnographer does not have a monopoly on Kafkaesque experiences). A crowd a third the size of the entire population of his country had gathered on that New
York farm that weekend, and just to listen to music and indulge in bizarre, outrageous behavior. That an event of such magnitude and theatricality should just happen spontaneously was an uncomfortable, irrational notion. He found it more consistent with all he knew and believed to regard Woodstock as one more American movie, but with the proverbial “cast of thousands.” Hence his question, “Where did they find all those actors?”. I have no evidence on how representative my friend's interpretation was —
I did not conduct a survey — but my knowledge of Guyana makes me feel that his was not an unusual view among Guyanese at the time. And whether or not that is true, the episode taught, or began to teach me, about the nature of ethnography, and prepared me to understand a future American cult event, this one staged on Guyanese soil and mostly away from the recording photographic eye.
The Ethnographic Event
How does one begin (or rather, recommence after this faux départ
) to make anthropological sense of Jonestown? I propose to do this (indeed, I hope I have already begun) by dwelling on ethnographic events I have experienced, using those to reflect on the nature of ethnography, and situating that reflexive discussion within a large and growing corpus of texts on Jonestown produced by various sources — Guyanese
2

and American, anthropologist and nonanthropologist.
1
But what — since we are all consciously striving here to come to terms with ethnography — is that “ethnographic event” to which I just referred? How do we know when we are doing ethnography?
(How do we know when we are making love?) Surely this question is vital to the project at hand, for in seeking to establish the connection between semiotics and ethnography we are responding to an intellectual tradition that has already — even if only implicitly -- identified that relationship as a disjunction. “Semiotics,” however vague and mysterious the word may sound, can be classified in that tradition as some form of analysis or, in a more literary mode, interpretation. And what does one analyze or interpret? Well, the data — the experiences, the events, the discourse — one has been exposed to in the course of fieldwork. Data and analysis, fact and theory, action and reaction, these disjunctions are the comfortable foundations of our thought. And when we consider the particular disjunction that makes anthropology a distinctive field — the native and the ethnographer — it seems quite natural to collapse it within those other, more encompassing disjunctions of modern thought. The native is the source and repository of factual experience; he is studied and made to yield up that body of fact that, through a painstaking process spanning years, is massaged into analytical statements. Within this general intellectual framework, then, the ethnographic event corresponds to the simplest model in information theory: the native is Sender, his action or statement is Message, and the ethnographer is Receiver. The reality, the factualness, of the native's actions and statements are incontestable within such a model. The ethnographer observes and records, much as an experimenter charts the events in a physical laboratory.
Within the tradition I am describing the ethnographic event is a positive, healthy-minded action; it is much like collecting specimens of rock (we have heard the geological metaphor before) to take back to the lab for — what else? — classification and analysis. Or, in a somewhat different vein of the same tradition, the ethnographic event is the dissolution of that very subject/object distinction (an embarrassingly nineteenth-century credo, after all) in a psychic blending of diverse intelligences, an empathy, that opens the heart and mind of the ethnographer to the compelling integrity of the native's experience. The empathic ethnographer, like the data-and-analysis ethnographer, believes that the native is in full possession of his world, is its architect and privileged resident. And, despite massive evidence to the contrary, both retain vestiges of the popular illusion of the native as a unique being poised in a primitive world of delicately balanced harmony. The empathic ethnographer in particular wants to acquire a lease on that world, wants to understand the native's experience as an interconnected, intelligible system. He would proceed, like Pilgrim, from a state of ignorance and confusion to one of relative enlightenment, via any number of Sloughs of Despondency familiar to all of us.
3

The problem with this conception of the ethnographic event, as with the tradition of disjunction from which it arises, is that it insists on a radical separation — native and ethnographer — that somehow, through the latter's analytic or empathic efforts, gives way to a delicious sharing of secrets and worldview. The ethnographer is a vessel, waiting to be filled (there was another vessel, waiting to be drunk, brimming with a lavender horror of Kool-Aid and cyanide) from the fount of native wisdom.
“But where did they find all those actors?” The question recurs, for in thinking about my own experiences as ethnographer, I cannot dispel the memory of that acute disorientation. In attempting to frame a notion of the ethnographic event, I find the little anecdote I have related much more revealing than the glossy textbook account of ethnography as one-way empathy.
How is it revealing? How does the incident show that ethnography is going on? There are two critical points here. First, the colossal discrepancy in our understanding of Woodstock became apparent only after a fairly lengthy, relaxed conversation in which both my acquaintance and I seemed perfectly in control of the subject matter. Rapport, intelligibility, the long drawn-out process of empathic understanding was already established when that little bit of Kafka intruded. And the disorientation, the shock, was greater than if we had been consciously groping for a common linguistic or cultural ground. Second, the disorientation was mutual: the
“native” was as fallible as I. “Drinking at the fount of native wisdom” is impossible when the native is as thirsty as oneself. The peculiar turn in our conversation was edifying precisely because it revealed our mutual mis understanding; we were forced to recognize that our ability to make sense to one another rested on a profound difference in basic outlook. I have come to regard that underlying difference, that
“edifying puzzlement,” 2
as the critical feature of the ethnographic event. For it seems precisely then, when both parties are seized by a kind of cultural vertigo, that understanding is possible. It is then that the Other surreptitiously enters.
The view of ethnography that emerges from this discussion is not that of the
“data and analysis” or even the empathic approach. The latter is unsatisfying because it retains a Benedictian faith in the internal consistency and boundedness — the wholeness — of cultures. And while insisting on their integrity, the empathic approach curiously strives to penetrate those whole cultures, to stand beside, or behind, the native and “read over his shoulder.” 3
The ethnographer is a privileged reader, but the native retains full possession (and authorship; he holds the copyright) of the text.
The “data and analysis” approach emphasizes answers (hypothesis testing) rather than questions, and thereby discounts the interpretive process of creating a cultural text.
There are variations on this approach, and I do not propose to examine them here; they range from the search for environmental determinants of behavior to recent ethnosemantic works that give context and interpretation an important place in
4

models of conceptual relations. I find the approach generally mistaken, for I think that analytical entity we call “culture” is really a set of fundamental questions and their groping, desperate responses, and not a recipe-like set of answers (a view developed in American Dreamtime, “Culture, Mind, and Physical Reality,” and “The Serpent’s
Children: Semiotics of Cultural Genesis in Arawak and Trobriand Myth”). The models we sometimes construct, even when they do not profess to identify the “causes” of cultural phenomena, constrain our thinking in such a way that the restlessness of thought in the rough gives way to the poise of an analytical construct.
The degree of underlying organization, or structure, of cultural productions is probably the major issue in anthropology today; it is certainly the major issue in anthropological semiotics. The little anecdote about Woodstock serves to call attention to that issue and, hopefully, to promote a skeptical attitude toward ethnographic accounts that render the described culture altogether explicable.
Failures, sometimes colossal, to understand oneself, one's group, and other groups are as much part of culture as are orderly semantic categories. In what follows, I pursue the idea that self-doubt and vertigo are fundamental aspects of cultural activity, and hence of the ethnographic event.
Jonestown as Ethnographic Event
In the sense I have just outlined, Jonestown is for me an ethnographic event, though I was certainly not present at Port Kaituma on that fateful day in November,
1978, nor even in the country at the time (I arrived about two months later, on my third research visit to Guyana). Jonestown was a colossal failure, a hideous stain on the fabric of the human spirit. The massacre-suicides threatened to overwhelm the last refuge of a basic human decency and caring in a modern consciousness numbed by the imminence of nuclear holocaust and the commonness of individual violence.
Somehow the horrors of nuclear war, assassination, and urban crime paled by comparison with a community of persons ready, at the command of a madman, to destroy not only themselves but their children. I was closer to it than most, but its appalling normlessness and vertigo afflicted all of us. And yet the event's notoriety and ugliness are precisely what would lead most anthropologists to discount it as an ethnographic subject. The Jonestown horror is a specifically non -ethnographic event for them because it was so bizarre and so modern. Although we do not write a great deal about the subject in methodological texts, we do cling to a distinction — intuited more than taught — between journalistic and ethnographic events. And Jonestown was decidedly a journalistic event; like a major earthquake or political assassination it seemed to demand the kind of attention only international correspondents could give.
5

And give it they did, to the extent that it has become the truest media event in recent times: what other isolated jungle community has been so much discussed in newspapers, television, and popular literature?
But it is not my intention to dwell on Jonestown as media event (although that would form part of a comprehensive study). I will begin instead by asking why the professional instinct of my anthropological colleagues is to ignore Jonestown? I believe there are two factors at work here: the event's sensationalism and its ugliness.
While I find the two interconnected, I feel my colleagues would tend to emphasize the first, claiming that Jonestown was a bizarre and probably unique event precipitated by an American outcast in a foreign land. Hence its analysis would yield nothing in terms of understanding the regularity, the everyday functioning, of any social or cultural system. This caveat, however, disguises a more fundamental reason for avoiding a professional examination of Jonestown, and that is the basic human reluctance to confront malignancy — a reluctance we actually enshrine in our theories of society by representing social processes and institutions as long-term, adaptive, integrative affairs.
The feeling is that a social or cultural system, after all, must be systematic, must possess a high degree of organization and stability, if it is to persist over time.
Although we are prepared to discount functionalist explanation in contemporary theory, we do not seem to have abandoned its penchant for assuming that it is enduring, shared sets of social relations and beliefs that are the proper objects of study.
Social change may be studied, to be sure, but only if it is orderly (and preferably part of a large-scale, seemingly irreversible process, such as “liminality,”
“urbanization,” “class conflict,” or ‘revolution”).
Disorderly change, the eruption of the bizarre and ugly into our placid lives, is rarely discussed in our monographs. The problem is essentially that we are ideologically committed to the idea of society or culture as an enduring, growing, constructive entity, and we regard the study of that entity as an enlightening, in some ways almost religious, pursuit. Jonestown thrusts its malignancy in our faces and, unless we isolate and dismiss it as aberrant, forces us to reconsider the nature of social inquiry. Ethnography as it has generally been practiced is the methodical study of Radcliffe-Brown's “social morphology,” of that healthy, whole, functioning totality called “society.” Yet if we are to confront Jonestown as ethnographic event, it is necessary to reflect that ethnography — and anthropology itself— is a species of inquiry closely linked to pathology. Our discipline historically has concentrated on the systematic, first-hand inspection (dissection) of imperiled, sick, and dying societies. It is an intellectual curiosity (and scandal ) worth some reflection that this project, while insisting on direct empirical investigation of societies on the threshing floor of history, should have produced the theory of structural-functionalism. And while we pride ourselves today on having transcended the empty formulae of functionalism, it is still
6

true that we long for integrity — and even prettiness — in our ethnographic subjects.
We begin and end our studies by asking the native to be beautiful and whole. But what if he is deformed and self-destructive? That is the question Jonestown poses.
I approach that question from two directions. I will first work from the inside out, focusing on my own reactions to Jonestown as an ethnographer of Guyanese society and one very much acquainted with life in that part of the interior where
Jonestown was located. Then I reverse my analytical direction, working from the outside in to consider a few of the many texts others have produced on the subject.
From the “data and analysis” perspective (and, strictly speaking, the empathic perspective as well) my first strategy is suspect, since the ethnographer's impressions are not admissible data (and are, in fact, to be suppressed lest one’s readers suspect that the analysis is “subjective” and “impressionistic”). This objection cannot be sustained here, however, for — at the risk of seeming presumptuous — my own thought, my own personal reactions to Jonestown furnish one of the more valuable texts on the subject (Herzfeld's notion of the ethnographer as text, published in Semiotica , suggests that my claim is not so idiosyncratic). And am I modifying, producing, or reproducing those impressions as I write this, that is, as I “translate” those impressions into written text? Is the “text” in fact the joining/hinging (Derrida’s brisure ) of those impressions I have built up for years and this actual exercise of writing? When did the writing process begin? For the present I will resort to the device of pretending (but am I pretending?) to describe my immediate impressions, as they came to me in the first hours and days following the news of Jonestown.
Besides myself, I know of only one other North American anthropologist
(Kathleen Adams) who did extensive fieldwork in the Guyanese interior during the
1970s. I do not know if she has chosen to write about Jonestown, but I do know from speaking with her that the event sent comparable shock waves through both our ethnographic consciousnesses. However, one anthropologist (Marvin Harris) did respond to the news immediately in writing while the U.S. Army burial squad was still completing its grisly assignment. But Marvin Harris's article in the New York
Times (November 26, 1978), while full of impressions and a revealing ethnographic document of its own accord, is not ethnography. It actually serves to define what ethnography is not.
4
Presumptuously or not, then, I regard the flood of impressions I experienced in late November 1978 as extremely valuable information. For me they have come to be the meaning(s) of Jonestown, and thinking about them has taught me something about how events mean. Because those meanings are so different from interpretations that have poured from television, newspapers, magazines, books — and even a prominent anthropologist — I would like to record them here.
7

An American Movie
“But where did they find all those actors?” I have spent over two of the past twelve years in Guyana, long enough to experience as my own this (for me) characteristically Guyanese reaction upon learning the news of Jonestown. I have queried North American friends — anthropologists and non-anthropologists — about their immediate reactions to Jonestown, and come to the conclusion that the horror and disbelief, the sense of a nauseating disaster, that they reported have a strong North
American cast to them.
Americans believed the reports about Jonestown; as with Woodstock they had a documentary sense, even an appetite, for the event . Guyanese, however, waited for the credits and house lights. In their eyes Jim Jones had been staging a performance since his appearance on the national scene in late 1974 and was continuing that performance with Jonestown. Americans experienced Jonestown as a media event, beginning with Congressman Ryan's departure for Guyana several days before the fateful November 18th. But for Guyanese the experience was more like being in a movie than watching one. The very notion of “media event” is alien to Guyana.
There is no television (making this surely one of the last outposts), and the movies that arrive, if they are occasionally, like All The President's Men , about dramatic real-life events, are so outdated that they lack any sense of immediacy. Lacking these amenities,
Guyanese were spared the appalling news photographs of stacked and bloating corpses which Walter Cronkite served up to Americans with their evening meal. And the
Guyanese press and radio — as State-controlled agencies of a State implicated in a very ugly mess — were virtually silent about an event that was receiving world attention.
If Guyanese were dazed by the enormity of the news, they were also thrown off balance in finding themselves suddenly discovered by the world. Overnight, the name of a country ordinary North Americans hazily associated with Africa (Ghana? Guinea?) or the South Seas (New Guinea?) was splashed across the pages of international newspapers and magazines (which did find their way into the country and were avidly collected). In a country where the “news” consists of the Guyana Chronicle feverishly proclaiming that the Government is about to do something, that something is finally about to happen, there materialized entire metropolitan news crews, Lear jets, helicopters, crates of video equipment, fleets of taxis.
The staggering reality of Jonestown as it appeared to the American receiver of all those video broadcasts and newspaper articles was for Guyanese a distant puzzle, which had occurred in a part of the country very few had ever seen or cared much about.
It appeared rather that the movie was happening in Georgetown. Guyanese began to perceive themselves, unbelievingly, as actors on an invisible stage where news teams
8

roamed, hungry for scraps of information and forbidden to travel into the interior, interviewing and photographing in the streets. When I arrived in late January it was still possible to feel the stage consciousness. Jonestown, the American movie set never directly experienced, had been dismantled, and the most of the American journalists and cameramen who created it had returned to their homes in the north, homes that contained the television sets and newspapers for which the movie set had been constructed (although a few stayed on; Larry Layton was on trial). But Georgetown and the Guyanese remained, locally recruited extras whose air fares had not been part of the agreement.
It Has Happened Again
If one of my first impressions was of the unreality of Jonestown — my sense as an ersatz Guyanese that the nightmare was performance, another of my immediate impressions was of the chilling recurrence of a horror from the past: it had happened before. Jonestown burst on the American and Guyanese consciousness alike as an utterly novel event; commentators and scholars were hard pressed in the days that followed to come up with the analogies of Masada, Tai Ping, the Ghost Dance. Yet the closest analogy I know comes from Guyana itself, more than a century earlier and some four hundred miles in the deep interior south of Jonestown. There, in a millenarian community called Bekeranta, an Arekuna Indian named Awakaipu created a hell on earth that eerily parallels Jim Jones's own.
The amazing story of Awakaipu is well documented. He was an Arekuna Indian who had lived for some time in Georgetown and learnt English. The Schomburgks recognized his usefulness and employed him on their expeditions. Richard
Schomburgk speaks in admiration of the way he behaved when attacked by pirai
[piranha] — “biting his lips with the raging agony he rolled about in the sand; yet no tears flowed from his eyes, no cry passed his lips.” From the tone of
Schomburgk's remarks about him he seems to have kept his true nature from his employers. After the Schomburgks had left the colony, Awakaipu, still only twenty-five, was seized by a folie de grandeur and wished to make himself chief of all the Indian tribes of British Guiana. He sent messengers throughout the Indian country saying that all who wished to see wonderful happenings, and to know the way to become as rich and powerful as the white men, should meet at the beginning of the dry season in the valley of the Kukenaam at the foot of Mount Roraima. All who came, he said, must forget their quarrels and bring presents, for which they would receive magical presents in return. A thousand Indians from every tribe gathered at the foot of the mountain and
9

gave Awakaipu knives, powder, shot and fish-hooks. In return he gave them pages from The Times , which he said would act as charms — I have already mentioned the Indian’s reverence for print or drawings. These copies of
The
Times had been used by Richard Schomburgk for pressing his wild flowers.
Awakaipu named his settlement Bekeranta, which is an Indian form of a
Dutch-Creole word meaning Land of the Whites. He built a two-storeyed hut, living on the upper floor himself and installing a harem of chosen girls in the floor below. He enhanced his mystery by rarely mixing with the gathered
Indians, and when he addressed them he swathed himself in magical ritual garments so that only his eyes were seen through the folds. On these occasions he threatened death to anyone who did not obey him implicitly. He encouraged cassiri [manioc beer] drinking-bouts and dancing, hoping that this would induce a state of mind in which all would accept his leadership. Later he decided that he would have to kill all untrustworthy elements so that the others would follow him. On the night of a general orgy he appeared and announced through the folds of his gown that he had just been received in audience by the great spirit Makunaima , who had told him that the Indians must never be driven out of their own land by the white people. They must become greater and more powerful than the whites; they must have white women as wives, and themselves have white skins. Makunaima , he went on, had told him that all gathered at Bekeranta could have white skins. They would have to kill each other and their souls would rise to the summit of Roraima, where they would be reborn and return to the valley of Kukenaam in two days; their skins would be white and they would have all the knowledge of the white people. And they would be the rulers of all the Indians.
Awakaipu had touched the deep-rooted and still surviving skin envy of the
Indian; they heard him with terror. Awakaipu seized a war-club, attacked a man and smashed his head open so that the blood spurted into a gourd of cassiri , which he then drank. The drunken Indians now began to fight each other and submerged hatreds erupted once again. It is said that four hundred men, women and children were killed during that night of massacre, and the survivors waited day after day to see the resurrected come down from
Roraima. When two weeks had passed there were murmurings against
Awakaipu, who seems to have had sufficient belief in his intimations from
Makunaima not to leave the valley. Food was now running out and there was hunger in the camp. Eventually it was realized that there would be no resurrection and a party of Indians went to the two-storeyed hut of Awakaipu and beat him to death with their clubs. (Michael Swan, The Marches of El
Dorado , pages 243-245)
10

The structural points and counterpoints of the two events add up to a staggering irony. Blind devotion to a charismatic leader; a community hidden away in the tropical forest from the outside world; the leader's paranoid concealment and sexual license; his fear of betrayal that unleashes a murderous orgy: murder and selfdestruction as sacrifice: all these unite Bekeranta and Jonestown in a hellish alliance that spans the miles and years separating the two communities. And yet how differently — for what different ends — they were constituted. The Arekuna
Indian Awakaipu established the Land of the Whites in his homeland and peopled it with local Indians. The white American Jim Jones created a community named after himself in a foreign land ruled by blacks and filled it mostly with black refugees from white American society. Awakaipu's village was a land of plenty; there the Indian fantasy of subsisting on cassava beer was realized. Jones's was from start to finish a place of mean privation: backbreaking work and a wretched diet were imposed on all but the chosen few. Bekeranta was meant to be a way station to the material luxury of the whites who had just made their appearance in the Guyanese interior. Jonestown, for all the poverty demanded of its residents, was in some respects the materialist dream which the people of Bekeranta and contemporary Guyanese longed for.
I have said that Guyana lacks television. Actually, until November 1978 one community did possess its own closed circuit system of cameras and monitors —
Jonestown. The community was remarkable to me, as an ersatz Guyanese, for its material wealth, acquired by the shipload in U.S. cargoes routed around Guyanese customs and offloaded directly at Mabaruma on the Venezuelan border. In
Georgetown the country was running out of money and the people were running out of food; crowds waited and pushed outside shops temporarily stocked with a few cases of rare commodities such as tinned milk, soap, coffee, and toilet paper. But in Jonestown, buried in the tropical forest, Jones and a few of his followers enjoyed tinned meats and other items not only unavailable throughout the country but the object of import bans, whose violation was punishable by fine and imprisonment. On the coast, East Indian peasants were being charged when army or police roadblocks caught them with a bag of potatoes or a few onions. In a grotesque irony, the Kool-Aid that served its fatal purpose — that combination of innocent childhood beverage and lethal poison that so repulsed North Americans — is for Guyanese an avidly desired contraband item.
These incongruities of “luxury” foods and television pale, however, when one considers the guns. For over fifteen years the government of Forbes Burnham has kept in force a Security Act, passed during a time of racial disturbances, that severely restricts private citizens’ possession of guns and ammunition. During the same period
Burnham has built up armed military and paramilitary forces at an alarming rate, so that today approximately one in 13 adults is armed by the State. The paramilitary accounts for much of this figure, which is to say that Burnham has put guns into the
11

hands of the Party faithful. The effect of the Security Act on Amerindians and interior settlers is that hunting and predator control are possible only through the most circuitous means. In the area where I lived (the upper Pomeroon River) three men owned antique, single-firing shotguns that they used and loaned out to dozens of other men anxious to bag the occasional bush hog, curassow, or labba. Ammunition for these shotguns was handled like the precious commodity it was; a hunter typically would not use a half dozen shells on a hunting trip lasting several days and would complain bitterly if he missed and wasted a shot. Jonestown possessed an arsenal of automatic weapons, wielded by the fanatics Jones had fashioned into his security force and, later, executioners.
And the guns will kill again. Impounded as evidence and kept in a police armory in Georgetown after the massacre, they were stolen in June 1979 by a daring band masquerading as police officers. The impostors simply checked them out of the armory “for investigative purposes” and drove away. While the State press hinted darkly that the thieves were tied to the now martyred Walter Rodney's Working
People's Alliance, the consensus “on the street” was that a rival strong arm faction within Burnham's own People's National Congress party was responsible.
Bekeranta and Jonestown, Awakaipu and Jim Jones, the squalor of
Georgetown and the smuggled American tinsel of the People's Temple, an Amerindian hunter conserving his ammunition and the killing bursts of automatic weapons fire on the landing field at Port Kaituma — the points and counterpoints swirled in my mind as the news of the jungle massacre unfolded. Jonestown seemed at once the antithesis of everything I knew about the Guyanese interior and Guyanese, and the embodiment — a macabre resurrection — of Awakaipu and his victims. It has happened again. This haunting juxtaposition of American and Amerindian cultists remains my strongest impression of Jonestown. It is also a highly idiosyncractic reaction, for the mass of publications and news broadcasts contains no reference to Awakaipu, although many are filled with accounts of cults and cultism — one of the conventional interpretations of Jonestown. (While the reaction was idiosyncratic, it was not unique to me, for in the first days of the event, talking with Kathleen Adams on the phone, we discovered that each of us had immediately thought of the Roraima tragedy.)
Yet it is precisely in this idiosyncratic reaction to Jonestown that I find the most valuable clue to understanding it as an ethnographic event. For the juxtaposition of
American and Amerindian cultists, with all its interwoven points and counterpoints, poses the fundamental question: Where did Jonestown happen? We know the physical location of the People’s Temple community, but what are its cultural coordinates? In which culture did Jonestown occur? When we consider Jonestown as ethnographic event it is easy to assume conditions of an event in general. We believe that an “event” has a time, a place, a perpetrator. Something happens somewhere;
12

someone does something someplace, sometime. I suggest that these assumptions do not fit the ethnographic event and, in the specific case of Jonestown, are at the root of a great deal of journalistic and literary misinterpretation. It is probably true that the assumptions do not fit events at all, but that is a philosophical question I address here only from the particular standpoint of ethnography.
As I reflect on and attempt to organize my impressions, the critical idea that emerges is an enormous paradox: the meaning of Jonestown is at once utterly transparent (for who is to doubt its ugliness?) and inscrutable (for its madness precipitates a flood of conflicting interpretations). Its meaning is univocal in that all our natural impulses recoil from the atrocity; we label it unambiguously insane. Yet its meaning is also multivocal, since it is artifice and death, a movie set and mass murder in one. The meanings we assign the nightmare continuously shift from one perspective to another, so that the discreteness or boundedness of Jonestown as event breaks down (we will see that the corpus of texts dealing with Jonestown also possesses the mercurial quality of my impressions). What remains in these ruins of the event is the imprint of the several perspectives — the several trains of thought, past experiences, etc. — one develops and wrestles with in trying to come to terms with the enormity of what took place. And if Jonestown is found to consist of assorted imprints of previous events, can one commit the current pedanticism — itself rather monstrous, considering what we are discussing — and call Jonestown a text? I can see no alternative.
Certainly the event that is Jonestown has been textualized to a greater extent than the life and death of any other small community. Our first impulse on hearing the news of the jungle deaths is to recoil in horror — and then plunge into this new abyss in our sensibility and attempt to fill it with sense. What, after all, is the event as physical fact? A large group of people — Americans — found life unbearable and arranged or submitted to their own destruction in a foreign land. Nothing remained, nothing but stacks of corpses rotting in the jungle. Through an extraordinary military and diplomatic mission, these were flown out of the jungle, back to the United States, subjected to pathological examination, and buried in a mass grave. It was a brief trauma in our daily lives that left few tangible reminders: the community in life was inaccessible; even the location of Guyana was a mystery; survivors were few and did not become media personalities (contrast the public reaction to Jonestown and the
Iranian hostage crisis). For all the platitudes about American racial oppression underlying Jonestown, none of the hundreds of poor, black victims has been elevated to the status of even a minor martyr.
It is as if interpretations of Jonestown seek out collective, sociological reasons for the event in order to avoid having to deal with the more than 500 individual stories of adult lives that took various paths to the jungle slaughterhouse. The event itself is
13

always out of reach, a transient, elusive disturbance in the fabric of time and place. It was over and done with before we caught our breath, leaving us, collectively, to produce and consume texts about the event and, individually, to mull over impressions.
Public texts and private impressions both confront the paradox of transparent opacity; an event that seems to demand no classification defies classification.
Pioneers
In searching for the where and what of Jonestown I have so far discussed those of my impressions that involved the unusual and puzzling. Appropriating a Guyanese perspective, I reacted to Jonestown as though it were an American movie.
Simultaneously drawing on a specialized knowledge of Guyana that even few Guyanese possess, I was struck by the parallels between Awakaipu and Jim Jones, Bekeranta and
Jonestown. The incongruity of these impressions alone is enough to confuse, enough to undermine the comfortable notion that particular events have particular meanings.
And welling up in my mind during the first days of the Jonestown story was a third interpretation, in its way more bizarre than the remembered episode of Woodstock or my knowledge of Bekeranta: Jonestown was an extreme consequence of Guyanese economic development programs. As with the story of Awakaipu, very few North
American commentators on Jonestown possessed the background knowledge that would have led them to compare Jones’s experiment with rural socialism to similar experiments undertaken by the Guyanese government.
One of the first questions asked about Jonestown was how conditions in the camp could have reached such extremes without Guyanese authorities intervening.
Jones and his followers were, after all, citizens of a foreign nation not well regarded by Guyana's ostensibly socialist government, and so their activities should have fallen under closer scrutiny than they had received back in the United States. One familiar answer to this question is that Jones bought his way into Guyana and managed to stay there through a well-orchestrated series of bribes and sexual favors dispensed by female cultists to government officials. While it is quite likely that these charges are true, it is mistaken to view Jones’s commune and Guyanese government policy as related only through graft and corruption. For Jones’s success with Guyanese officials stemmed as much from his political ability as from his power to corrupt with money and sex. Remember that this was a man with letters of reference from the White House and Congress and with a background of municipal government service in California.
Just as he “read” the civil rights movement in Indiana and urban renewal programs in
San Francisco and used them to his own advantage, so he took in the Guyanese political scene and moved with it until he became a leader and exemplar of what the Guyanese
14

were trying to accomplish for themselves.
What the Guyanese were trying to accomplish in 1974 and 1975 was interior development, and interior development of a kind that would help to foster a sense of cultural identity among a decolonized and factionalized populace. Following independence in 1966 the new Guyanese government under Prime Minister Forbes
Burnham was faced with two major problems: national integration and economic development. Guyana is a multiethnic country, populated by the descendants of
African slaves, East Indian, Portuguese, and Chinese indentured laborers, European settlers, and indigenous Amerindians. Political struggles in the early 1960s resulted in ethnic factionalism, climaxed by murderous racial fighting between blacks and East
Indians that spread throughout the coastal areas and was contained only after British paratroops arrived. The struggle for independence took the form of parliamentary debate, rather than united armed resistance, and the new government was chosen in an indecisive election that left many Guyanese frustrated. This ambiguous beginning has made the task of fashioning a viable cultural identity a difficult one.
In order to mute internal discord, Burnham has cultivated an ethic of national unity by drawing on the image of being Guyanese first and foremost rather than
African, East Indian, and so on. The presence of ethnic enclaves on the coast (where
East Indians live mainly in country villages and Africans are concentrated in the two largest cities) made the interior an attractive place from the standpoint of the drive to achieve national integration: while East Indians grew rice and Africans worked in the bauxite mills, it would be Guyanese who developed the interior.
Further political implications of interior development had to do with the perceived role of the former British colonial administration vis-à-vis the interior. After assuming power, Burnham noted that for a century and a half the people of his country had been effectively excluded from the greater portion of their land by British indifference to exploiting the resources of the hinterland. He and other Guyanese read rather sinister political intentions into this neglect, arguing pointedly that a plantation labor force would have been impossible to maintain in the presence of a beckoning frontier. Free or cheap land and the promise of an independent lifestyle would have enticed the best workers away from the sugar plantations, thus crippling the colonial economy. It was thought that the British maintained the interior as a preserve for themselves to adventure in, where they could explore the exotic and meet those “children of the forest,” the Amerindians.
Economically, the new nation was afflicted with many of the standard ills of underdeveloped countries. Postwar improvements in hygiene and standard of living
(particularly the control of malaria) set off a prodigious increase in the birth rate. By
1967 more than half the population was below the age of 15, with little evidence in sight of a trend toward smaller families. Political independence did not mean economic
15

self-determination, and the new leaders of Guyana found themselves confronting international cartels and multinational corporations that were mainly interested in extractive industries. The sugar plantations operated on a pre-independence model, employing, large numbers of unskilled local workers on a seasonal basis and hiring managerial and technical staff abroad. The bauxite mills, owned by Canadian and
U.S. corporations, paid the highest wages in the country, but comparatively few
Guyanese were employed and these were faced daily with the disparity between their living and working conditions and those of the group of North American engineers who ran things.
Not only was production foreign-dominated, but consumption habits too were almost compulsively oriented toward foreign goods — the kind of colonial mentality of the marketplace lamented throughout the Third World. The few local products that appeared in stores could not compete with similar but shoddy ones of metal and plastic from abroad. Graceless living room and dinette sets of veneer, plastic, and aluminum tubing were preferred over the same articles in local hardwoods and wicker by those who had money to buy.
The solution Burnham proposed to these dilemmas was a seemingly novel political philosophy of “cooperative socialism.” The initial idea behind this philosophy was to encourage the growth of a third sector of the economy — cooperatives — that would combine the best features of the private and public sectors.
Government sponsorship of cooperatives was initially modest, but gradually increased until the cooperative emerged as the primary instrument of economic development. In February, 1970 Guyana dissolved its formal ties to the British
Commonwealth and became the world's first “Cooperative Republic.” The changeover was accompanied by considerable ideological fanfare. As a foreign observer present during the event, I was struck by the symbolic elaboration of what at first appeared to be mainly part of an economic program. It became clear to me that the two issues of economic development and national integration were closely related, so that understanding what was involved in a Guyanese becoming a member of a farming or timber cooperative meant understanding what it was to become Guyanese in the first place. A popular government slogan in the early days of the Republic was, “The small man will be the real man” (usually rendered by ordinary Guyanese as “de small mon gon be de real mon”). As well as serving as catchy propaganda, I believe the phrase was taken up in the popular media because it evoked the ethic of the postcolonial: political powerlessness and economic dependency were about to give way to an era in which the individual would be more the author of his destiny.
In the period 1970-1980 the architects of the Cooperative Republic followed two general plans to achieve economic development: nationalize existing (coastal) industries; and exploit interior resources with groups that represented the new
16

socialist way. The first of these is the more significant economically, for the bauxite mines, sugar plantations, and rice farms of the coastal area account for nearly all the country's exports. The cooperative socialist program of nationalization proceeded quite rapidly, with the bauxite industry becoming government-controlled in 1971 and the first plantations in 1974. It is the second aspect of cooperative socialism, however, that cleared the way for Jonestown. Although the Guyanese interior was still so under-populated and undeveloped that its economic importance was marginal, it had tremendous significance for this very reason as a tabula rasa on which the socialist future would unfold.
The potential for making the frontier a laboratory for the new society seemed great, in part owing to a happy result of the previous colonial system. The British policy of limiting access to the interior was effected by declaring virtually all of it
Crown Lands, with special provision for those areas populated by Amerindian groups.
With independence in 1966, administration of those Crown Lands was transferred to the new national government. Hence, most of Guyana is State-owned property. The government was consequently in an ideal position to design and carry out programs of social change — what, in fact, the nationalized press of the mid 1970s called “making the Revolution” — without having to confront a welter of vested interests, property claims, and so on.
The major emphasis behind plans to develop the interior was the attainment of economic self-sufficiency. A colonial economy is by definition lopsided, since it functions to fulfill the economic requirements of a foreign people. Nationalistic political aspirations in postcolonial Guyana thus conflicted with established remnants of a dependent economy. The most crucial aspect of this dependency was in agriculture, where the plantation economy had functioned for generations to produce a surplus of a single crop — sugar — while subsistence demands were met only by relying on food imports from metropolitan countries.
A serious problem in the inaugural year of the Republic was the widespread preference Guyanese showed for imported foods. Georgetown residents disdained local subsistence foods that were available for consumption in the city, such as cassava, yams, eddoes, tanniers, and breadfruit, looking on these as being of low status and typical of “country” tastes. They preferred to purchase foods that were not easily grown in Guyana, mainly potatoes, onions, cabbage, and apples. The colonial system of production therefore greatly influenced habits of consumption, creating in this instance a colonialism of the palate and posing difficult problems for the government drive toward self-sufficiency. The difficulties were of two kinds. First, farmers' incentives to grow surplus provision crops were few so long as they could anticipate marketing problems. Second, the tons of agricultural imports arriving in
Georgetown harbor each month represented a serious drain on the country’s precious
17

foreign reserves: the money going abroad could, the government felt, be better spent on industrial equipment to spur the development program. Moreover, the international oil and food crisis that began in 1973 intensified the plight of Guyana's agricultural dependency. Not only were transportation costs doubled and tripled, but the price of the agricultural products themselves increased alarmingly owing to the rising price of petrochemical fertilizers. To add to these grave problems, the exchange value of Guyanese currency, then tied to the troubled British pound, declined by nearly
30 per cent between 1970 and 1975.
Translated into human terms, the economic reversals were even more alarming to average Guyanese. At the end of 1975, an unskilled laborer could expect to receive a daily wage of under S3.00 U.S., while office workers and teachers received about
$100 - $200 U.S. a month. These incomes could support people living in the countryside and growing much of their own food, but for the tens of thousands who had moved into Georgetown it became terribly difficult simply to exist.
Unemployment, already high, continued to rise as urban migrants could not find work. The “choke and rob” criminal became a fixture of city life, and his activities increased in violence, from simple muggings to assaults with machetes (the Creole term, ever graphic and picturesque, is “choppings”) and, increasingly, guns. While the government no longer releases statistics on crime, the terrorized mood of the city readily communicates itself to the foreign visitor, not just through the cautions routinely given the tourist, but through the precautions taken by Guyanese residents of the city.
Wire mesh and iron grillwork over jalousie windows give the once graceful tropical city the (accurate) appearance of being in a state of siege, and as evening approaches private guards (“de gate mon”) appear before the entrances of even the moderately well-to-do.
It is in this context of a deteriorating society that programs for interior development were conceived and implemented, and so it is not surprising that they often appeared improvised and harsh. The interior beckoned as the solution to the ills of overcrowding and unemployment on the coast, but beyond a general commitment to development loomed two hard tactical questions: Who was to do the developing?
What exactly were they to do first? The peculiar demography of the country, together with its recent political history, made the first question tougher than it might at first seem. Except for Amerindians, prospectors, missionaries, and a few ranchers, nobody lived in the interior. There was no peasant population to mobilize and organize into cooperative schemes; there were just forest, rivers, and savannah. Moreover, the 35-
40,000 Amerindians and mixed-Amerindians of the interior were unsympathetic to the predominantly black government, for a variety of reasons. In the first years of nationhood they were particularly apprehensive about the disposition of lands they had traditionally occupied, and consequently official talk about interior development left
18

them with some uneasy feelings. And yet the Amerindians, because of their familiarity with the techniques of interior agriculture, were in the best position to implement development plans. A similar problem in interethnic relations obtained on the coast, where the farming population was predominantly East Indian, and politically alienated from the Burnham government following the widespread racial rioting in
1963-64. The answer to the first of the two tactical questions was thus arrived at by a process of exclusion: the remaining possibility, and one that promised to solve two problems at once, was to recruit and train unemployed, predominantly black,
Georgetown youth to become the “Pioneer Cooperators” of the Cooperative
Republic.
The second question — what were the Pioneer Cooperators to do? — was readily answered in the context of the growing food crisis and the lack of a technological infrastructure to support large-scale operations of any kind (especially timber and mineral extraction): the Pioneer Cooperators were to establish small agricultural cooperatives in the interior. When the first Pioneer Cooperatives were begun in 1970, plans called for them to be staffed by 20-30 individuals and to be subsidized by the government for their first year or so of operation. By that time it was felt the Pioneers would have cleared land and harvested their first crops, keeping some for subsistence and marketing the surplus through the national cooperative outlet in Georgetown.
These groups were highly publicized, and considerable funds were spent to airfreight supplies and heavy equipment into remote areas.
Despite these ambitious beginnings, the Pioneer Cooperative program was plagued with difficulties. The first groups of Cooperators were recruited from that section of the population with the least agricultural experience and, because of the sense of urgency behind the program's formation, they received inadequate training.
In addition to lacking basic agricultural skills, many of the volunteers labored under an even greater hardship: a pervasive suspicion and fear of the “bush.” Although
Georgetown residents live within 100 miles of raw tropical forest, few of them have occasion to experience it firsthand. Consequently, a prolific folklore about “Buck people” (Amerindians), jumbies (evil spirits), and kenaima (murderers with supernatural powers) has grown up, with the result that the average Guyanese is not enthusiastic about spending time in the interior. The sites selected for some of the first
Pioneer Cooperator camps seemed intended to maximize that anxiety, for they were located in far-flung corners of the country, in virtual isolation from the coast, and often miles from even an Amerindian village. Plucked from the streets of Georgetown and thrust into the deep interior, some Cooperators reacted desperately. In one case, an entire group of young, fearful volunteers swarmed aboard a supply plane and demanded to be flown back to the city. They left behind them only one old man, who for some months was the sole occupant of the Pioneer encampment. In another case,
19

the alien forest apparently unhinged one young volunteer, who began to see and call out to bush spirits. His companions had to prevent him from running into the forest and becoming hopelessly lost.
Added to the psychological strain were organizational problems that brought the Cooperator program to an untimely end. Mechanized agriculture in the interior had never been seriously tried, and a host of problems grew out of the experiment that were beyond the competence of the volunteers. When some crops were produced, there was the serious problem of transportation infrastructure: except for light aircraft, there was none. Even with the Cooperators receiving little more than subsistence provisions for their strenuous efforts, it was simply not a viable proposition to fly in heavy equipment and gasoline across hundreds of miles of forest and fly out meager quantities of produce such as black-eyed peas and peanuts.
After 1973, and about the time Jones was planning his own agricultural community, the Pioneer Cooperator, object of so much lavish praise in the national press, was quietly forgotten. His place was taken in the public eye by another socialist frontiersman — the National Service Pioneer. The National Service is organized along paramilitary lines and represents Guyana's commitment to building a socialist state on the model of Cuba and China. Today young volunteers for the National
Service are trained for varying lengths of time, but in the first years of the program most attention was given to a small group, just a few hundred, who had trained for a year as Pioneers. Government planners sought to profit from mistakes made with the Cooperators by recruiting volunteers from a broader ethnic and geographical base and giving them extensive practical experience under close supervision. Beginning in 1973, three National Service camps were created in various parts of the country: Kimbia, the first and nearest to the coast;
Tumatumari, on an interior river; and Papaya, in the Northwest District and not far from the site of Jonestown — which was begun a year later. Volunteers in the
Pioneer Corps, young people of both sexes usually between the ages of 15 and 25, were expected to spend an uninterrupted year at one of these camps. Rather than serving solely as a training facility for persons who would later be involved in small cooperatives, the National Service camp was itself intended to be a primary instrument of development. Crops grown at Kimbia and the other camps were to be marketed through the government's outlets and some, like cotton, were to supply the raw material for developing food-and textile-processing industries.
The Pioneers' life was arduous, since their agricultural tasks were only part of a political education designed to transform them into model citizens of the new
Guyana. The National Service camp was organized as a military base, with uniforms, military etiquette, barracks living, and a rigid schedule. The day began at four in the morning, when the Pioneers were mustered out for two hours of calisthenics and drill
20

practice followed by a run. They showered upon returning, had breakfast at seven, and assembled for duty roster. At Kimbia in the Fall of 1975 the Pioneers’ energies were focused on the cotton crop, an agricultural experiment for the country and heavily publicized as yet another step toward full economic self-sufficiency.
Much of the first cotton crop was grown and harvested by hand, so that the Pioneers found their working days filled with hard manual labor. Although picking machines were introduced, they left so much cotton on the plants that Pioneers were still assigned to glean the fields after the machines had finished. Others were responsible for large vegetable gardens and for livestock and fowl. As well as feeding the camp, these operations were expected to produce significant surpluses that could be marketed in town.
After a full working day in the fields, the Pioneers had an hour or so to relax and refresh themselves before the evening meal. Following that, at about eight o'clock, they assembled for a series of “national policy” lectures. Because the National
Service was the government's most important ideological experiment throughout the late 1970s, the camps received a steady flow of highly official visitors who addressed the Pioneers on the values and goals of the Socialist Revolution. In addition to ideological talks and discussions, some evenings were given over to technical lectures by agricultural experts. The national policy lectures generally lasted until around
11 o'clock, by which time the young Pioneers were quite ready for a few hours’ sleep before the next reveille summoned them to the parade ground. The exhausting schedule, the emphasis on economic self-sufficiency, and the intensive political indoctrination were fixtures of Pioneer life that Jim Jones, who knew little about Third World development programs before coming to Guyana, was to incorporate in Jonestown.
The government expected to enlarge the three camps and to establish new ones in other parts of the interior, so that an increasing number of Guyanese youth would receive a solid grounding in the lifestyle of the future. But events overtook the
Pioneers, as they had the Pioneer Cooperators before them. On the coast the real economy, the one implacably mired in racial conflict and the rest of the colonial legacy, was breaking down. In 1975 the sugar market faltered, then plunged, just when the government had negotiated a generous nationalization scheme with the planters. The bauxite industry, recently nationalized, was whipsawed by the international cartel and local labor disputes. Escalating oil prices made the cost of electricity and transportation on the coast prohibitively expensive, and cut interior development off at the knees. Guyanese were emigrating in numbers, heedless of currency restrictions that made emigration economic suicide.
Meanwhile, at Kimbia, less was said of the cotton crop. The national press, which always pushed plausibility to the limit, stopped writing about the new industry in textile exports that was to follow naturally from the first crop at Kimbia. It turned
21

out that the soil at Kimbia was not rich; fertilizers were introduced but were obviously too expensive for regular use. When the Pioneers harvested their crop and sent the bales to the new spinning mill outside Georgetown provided by the Chinese, it was discovered that the machinery was designed for cotton with a different fiber length. Other agricultural production — vegetables, chickens, eggs - ran into marketing problems: spoilage, waste, and poor distribution kept Kimbia from becoming the vanguard of a powerful third sector of the economy. As its economic value dissipated, the national policy aspect of Kimbia and the other camps acquired new importance. Young civil servants, including the many young teachers responsible for educating the enormous school-age population, began to be cycled through the camps over their two-month summer break. The Cooperative Republic would be built over the holidays.
As far as several figures in the Guyanese government were concerned, Jim
Jones was the right man in the right place at the right time. While Guyanese were giving up on interior development (“They’re packing it up in the interior,” as one development specialist put it to me), Jones offered to fund an enormous agricultural project in the remote Northwest District. And while the ideological posturing and pocket-lining of government ministers and secretaries were rapidly alienating the
Guyanese people, Jones was eager to parrot the official line. And he offered more, for his scheme promised to salvage the best aspects of earlier development programs. He would settle in the interior, like the bands of hearty Pioneer Cooperators in the early
1970s, but he would do so en masse, like the Kimbia Pioneers, and with the aim of becoming a major food supplier. After a decade of false starts, Jones and his community would prove Burnham and his ministers correct in claiming that the interior was the key to prosperity and national integrity. Nor did it matter that this economic miracle was to be wrought by Americans; the invidious suggestion that they would succeed where Guyanese failed was parried by noting the kind of Americans involved. They were poor and black, refugees and outcasts from the capitalist oppressor to the north, who looked to Guyana as an earlier generation of immigrants had looked to a young and vibrant United States. The United States had grown old and rich and evil; the future was waiting on the Guyanese frontier.
In Our Father Who Art in Hell , James Reston, Jr. describes Jonestown as
“uniquely an American story” (1981: ix) and notes the reaction of students on his own university campus:
Yet if Jonestown was genuinely felt as a tragedy by anyone in America, it was the college generation. Perhaps they did not verbalize or seek to define the nature of their sorrow in the wake of the Event, but their mourning was evident as they moped about the campus, newspapers tucked under their arms.
22

Their identification was clear. As the generation that felt rather than intellectualized, they felt their own susceptibility to the Joneses of their decade. Jonestown was their Kent State. (1981: 74)
For all the merits of his book, Reston's is a uniquely American reaction to the
“Event.” For Guyanese and those who have followed Guyanese affairs closely over the past decade, Jonestown was a grotesque end to uniquely Guyanese efforts at economic self-sufficiency and national integration. Too much ideological capital had been invested in just the kind of frontier development scheme Jonestown represented to allow the implication to pass unnoticed: the Pioneer Cooperators, the Pioneers, and the victims of Jonestown would share a common grave. While it is difficult to identify a movement (Reston’s “feeling generation” perhaps?) among American youth for which Jonestown represented the demise, it is clear that the massacre/suicides coincided with a stage in Guyanese history and consciousness that gave them a dreadful ring of finality. Try as Burnham and his government might to dismiss
Jonestown as the doings of American crazies, they could not escape the verdict that they not only profited in sordid ways from their alliance with Jones but, by linking his community with Guyana’s development strategy, extinguished the spirit of nationalist commitment among their countrymen.
Brother Jonesie
Where there is political repression, poverty, and despair in the Caribbean, there is also reggae music. If America’s media response to Jonestown was massive television and journalistic coverage, the Guyanese or Caribbean response took the form in part of instantly released reggae songs. These were promptly banned on the government radio, but could be heard blaring from the rum shops and record bars that dominate street corners in Georgetown. Of the three I know, Brother Jonesie (by the Tradewinds’ Dave Martin) is the most poignant:
23

Brudder Jonesie come to town and preachin’ brudderhood,
No more fear and sorrow.
Open up a temple in da jungle far away,
All the people follow.
When he tell them “jump,” they jumpin’,
When he tell them “bump,” they bumpin’,
When he tell them “dance,” they dancin’,
When he tell them “scratch,” they scratchin’.
Brudder Jonesie livin’ like a king in olden days,
Ruling men and women.
And the Yankee money comin’ in by aeroplane,
Brudder Jonesie countin’.
When he tell them “dig,” they diggin’,
When he tell them “shake,” they shakin’,
When he tell them “rise,” they risin’.
When he tell them “sleep,” they sleepin’.
But the vibration turn bad and the people want to leave.
Brudder Jonesie bawlin’.
Let me tell you people when I rise, you rise with me.
When I fall, you fallin’.
When he tell them “move,” they movin’,
When he tell them “groove,” they groovin’,
When he tell them “blink,” they blinkin’,
When he tell them “drink,” they drinkin’,
When he tell them “drink,” they drinkin. . .
Brother Jonesie is produced as text here, but I discovered it as performance.
It was late January, 1979, and I had just arrived in Georgetown on my third research visit to the country, which was to last until the following fall. I was staying at a friend’s house in the city, and when the first tropical weekend I had seen in a long time rolled around, I decided to sample a widely advertised musical event at the local Pegasus Hotel.
Dave Martin and the Tradewinds, a group of Caribbean musicians based in Toronto, were playing under the stars.
The Pegasus is Guyana’s one “international” hotel, one of a chain but, like virtually everything in Guyana, with significant government ownership. British Airways also has some affiliation with it, but the relationship has been strained since flight crews
24

arriving in the late evening stopped staying at the Pegasus. Electricity failures and food shortages, endemic throughout the country, made life at the Pegasus less than luxurious, and so the crews preferred to turn their ship around and go back to Trinidad.
And since the planes bring few tourists, the clientele of the Pegasus is a curious mixture of visiting Third World delegations, U.S. and Canadian technicians with their families, high-rolling Guyanese entrepreneurs and government officials, prostitutes, assorted diplomats, and some university staff. The Pegasus keeps going by throwing large parties and buffets with live steel band or, occasionally, reggae music that attract middleclass Guyanese as well as the seedier regulars. And the Tradewinds party was a real bash, for the group had an international reputation with several records to its credit.
The setting was outside, on the landscaped grounds (plenty of bougainvillea, hibiscus, and almond trees) around the pool.
The Tradewinds were set up on a thatched platform with a dancing area in front and the party tables and chairs and buffet tables scattered over the grounds. Light instrumental music accompanied the buffet, which was mostly chicken and rice and, like other Pegasus buffets, consumed in quantity. As the action around the buffet tables eased and bar orders for rum-and-anything increased, the music became livelier and included some vocal numbers. Couples began to crowd the dancing area. Then
Dave Martin announced Brother Jonesie , saying something about it being his reaction to Jonestown and welcoming a new arrival: it was a U.S. television news team. Martin said they had come to see how the Guyanese people were reacting to the news. And the
“Guyanese people” reacted as they had been reacting for the past half-hour — by dancing. Brother Jonesie , like every good reggae melody, is a marvelously rhythmic invitation to dance. There in the tropical night, about 150 miles from Jonestown,
Martin sang to the crowded dancers and the laughing partygoers at the tables, the television news crew panned the scene, and I watched, sipping a rum-and-ginger and thinking, among other things, of an ancient conversation about Woodstock .
Jonestown as a dance tune is something Tom Lehrer might have come up with, but no one danced to his songs. But was it offensive, or — the only way I can ask the question — was I offended? Not really. Startled, certainly, and with a certain wellconditioned, conventional revulsion at dancing on this mass grave. But so much was happening in the scene, I found it impossible to hold on to a clear, strong impression.
There was artistic composition and performance, the effervescence of ritual, the surprising presence of a U.S. news team in this backwater of the world, and my own presence as anthropologist, as a conscious, compulsive entity striving to take it all in, think about it, write about it, and no doubt in the process make it something it never was or, certainly, no longer is. The Tradewinds probably barely remember the engagement, the dancers and drinkers have danced and drunk over the intervening years until that night has slipped into anonymity, and the news crew has had other
25

assignments. Was their footage actually used? I have never learned. And if it were used, if the party scene were beamed into several million American homes under the aegis of Walter Cronkite or Dan Rather, what would the inhabitants of those untropical, tidy dwellings think of the song, the singer, and the dancers? Would I need to learn their reactions before comprehending the event? And would their reactions have been clear and distinct, even at the time of the broadcast — even if I could have hastened back to the U.S. that evening and hastily done some opinion polling? Or would I have found reflected in their responses to the program — if it were ever aired — something of my own bafflement and ambivalence? Would they, too, not have known what to make of the conjunction of the lively dance tune and the
Jonestown horror?
Once again a trivial incident — talking to a friend about a movie, attending a dance — has led to fundamental questions about the nature of an ethnographic event. What are the boundaries of the event? Are there in fact boundaries — does it leave off anywhere at all? Does the event belong to a particular group of people?
Was Woodstock a definitively American movie, with a distinct meaning only
Americans could grasp while others, like my Arawak friend, would misinterpret it? And was even Jonestown, although it occurred thousands of miles away in the jungles of
South America, a “uniquely” American phenomenon, as Reston claimed? And if it is ever possible to say that an event belongs to a certain people, a certain place, does it follow that there exists an authoritative interpretation of the event? Do certain people, because of privileged access to information, superior intelligence, perseverance, or whatever, get it right , come to know the true meaning of the event, while others, less gifted or less industrious, only get part of the story and produce mistaken interpretations?
The incidents I have related surrounding Woodstock and Brother Jonesie are, I feel, impossible to “get right” in the sense of producing authoritative interpretations.
Like Jonestown itself, those little episodes belong to no identifiable, bounded group or society; their only reality is a shifting, paradoxical assortment of perspectives that, when described together and in some detail, produce, not an authoritative version of the singular event, but a dissolution of the very idea that an authoritative version can exist. Ethnographic discourse does not yield such a version, whether authoritativeness be construed as bound up in office — anthropologist, government spokesman — or as rooted in a popular wisdom about cults, the Third World, America. Instead, ethnographic discourse proceeds with an account of events to the point where several overlapping and mutually inconsistent versions are identified and their interrelationship made clear. Ethnographic discourse thus provides a meticulous account of how contradictory positions enter into a single event, and are often held by a single participant. Ethnography rephrases and illuminates what is puzzling and ambivalent
26

about basic human situations.
Georgetown Gossip
The preceding accounts of Awakaipu, the Pioneers, and Brother Jonesie represent approaches to understanding Jonestown as an ethnographic event from, respectively, historical, national policy, and popular culture perspectives. As such the accounts are, in a sense, predigested; those events and their discourses have already been subsumed by nomothetic systems. The story of Awakaipu is there in the history books for all to read (though practically no one does); Guyana's interior development programs are reviewed by local government officials, visiting technicians, and international agencies; Brother Jonesie , apart from its performative mode is, literally, a record that anyone can listen to and comment on. But to round out a
Guyanese perspective on Jonestown, it is necessary to examine how Guyanese in the course of their daily lives talked about, textualized if you like, the event for themselves.
They did not cite the historical record (I doubt if one Guyanese in five hundred knows the story of Awakaipu). Nor did they make the close comparison I have made to their country's own development programs, although they did criticize privately Jones’s ties to their government and its propaganda campaign for interior development. And while numerous Guyanese attended the Pegasus festivities, Brother Jonesie itself was already composed, and without their participation (in fact, Dave Martin is Trinidadian).
Newspapers and radio provided no forum for an open discussion of Jonestown; The
Chronicle avoided extensive commentary until early December, when it began to look as though the international news saturation would never dry up. And then The Chronicle published a special issue attributing the disaster to American cultism while describing at length the accomplishments of Jonestown the agricultural commune. Denied that public forum, Guyanese did what they have always done. They gossiped.
With a population of 800,000, Guyana is a tiny society. Coastal crowding, racial barriers, physical barriers posed by enormous and unbridged rivers, and the consequent isolation of Georgetown from the rest of the country fragment that tiny society into claustrophobic networks of kin, neighbors, lovers, workmates, friends. In the small postcolonial city of Georgetown, cut off from its own countryside and from the outside world, generations of Guyanese have developed an institution of oral narrative — “stories” — that flourishes still. Whether a daily newspaper is available, or whether it exists and is controlled by a corrupt and fearful State, is in some respects irrelevant, for Guyanese rely on “stories” that come to them from their individual associations with other Guyanese anxious to know what is going on.
“Stories” circulating in Georgetown in the days and weeks following
27

Jonestown focused on several incidents or rumors that received little if any attention from American journalists: a United States “attack” on or “occupation” of Guyana; the
Prime Minister’s wife’s broken arm; Yankee dollars on the local black market; and
Jones’s secret hideout. Taken together, the stories compose an interwoven text of perspectives at the level of Guyanese common understanding, a text that differs significantly from those of my impressions I have examined up to now and, certainly, from “official” American and Guyanese commentary.
How the Story Broke
In Georgetown in mid-November they knew that a U.S. Congressman was in town and that he had come because of some problems in the Jonestown community, although The Chronicl e admitted only Ryan’s presence in the country for unspecified reasons. At the end of the fatal weekend (the airstrip murders at Port
Kaituma were committed on the afternoon of Saturday, November 18 and the massacre/suicides at Jonestown that evening), Georgetown residents were alarmed by several U.S. military aircraft flying in low over the city and circling Timehri Airport about thirty miles away. More than a few thought it was an occupation force, that
Burnham had finally exceeded the limits of U.S. tolerance and was being overthrown.
It is difficult to piece the story together, but some said fighter aircraft were involved in support of the first U.S. transport flights (which brought the burial squad).
The chaotic news coming out of the U.S. Embassy in Georgetown must have been difficult for State Department and Pentagon officers to interpret. A Congressman and several of his party had been killed in the jungle of an unfriendly country, whose government had opposed the Congressman’s mission there and apparently supported the group implicated in the murders. So the first U.S. flights were dispatched as a military mission to secure the airfield and await further developments. And the first
Army units off the transports were in full battle gear; a Pentagon spokesman later said that was a routine procedure, but the Guyanese saw and heard “invasion.” Some planes fly over, the leader is deposed. The supposition gives a scale to the level of confidence and stability in this Third World country precariously balanced on the shoals of a continent whose language and culture are alien to its citizens.
Viola's Broken Arm
Official Guyanese response to the Jonestown killings was late and disorganized, with much initial reservation about doing anything at all (remember that armed Guyanese soldiers, a contingent of the Guyana Defense Force, were present at the Port Kaituma landing strip and did nothing while Ryan and his party were being slaughtered). A second detachment of Guyanese Defense Force soldiers was sent to investigate and guard the premises of Jonestown. But it was the jungle, the soldiers
28

were blacks from the city who knew about bush spirits and “Buck” (Amerindian) people, and the scene was one of unbelievable carnage. The soldiers kept to the edges of the Jonestown dwelling area — except for the looters among them, who picked over corpses and ransacked buildings searching for the Yankee money they knew was there. U.S. newsmen talked or bribed their way into the camp and were given extraordinary liberties to collect documents and tapes. High-ranking Guyanese officials visited the scene in the first days, and arrogated to themselves inspection privileges that led to “stories.”
The most remarkable of these “stories” concerned the wife of the Prime
Minister, Viola Burnham, who had visited Jonestown on previous occasions and apparently understood the scale and funding of Jones’s operation. As the story goes, she and a prominent government official traveled to Jonestown on Sunday, the day after the killings, before even the GDF team had taken up positions. There she supposedly collected a suitcase full of U.S. currency and jewelry from a cache in
Jones’s personal quarters (these were ransacked several times in the course of the next few days). With this booty she returned to Georgetown and shortly thereafter drove back to Timehri Airport, where she cleared customs with a ticket on an overseas flight.
She was skipping the country and her husband with the loot. However, an alert immigration officer, who knew where his allegiance lay, telephoned the Prime
Minister's residence with the news that Viola Burnham was making an unscheduled trip. Forbes rushed to the airport, where he and Viola had a tremendous scene that ended with Viola being bundled back to the Residence with a broken arm. She appeared in public a few days later with her arm in a sling, and The Chronicle , as usual, supplied no information. But the story had spread like wildfire, and all
Georgetown was talking about that broken arm. Then The Chronicle ran another photo of Viola at a State function, with her cast, and in a caption supplied the incidental information that the Prime Minister’s wife, Comrade Viola Burnham, was suffering from a flare-up of an old injury sustained when she fell from a horse some years previously. The rum shop humor was unsparing of this gaffe: “Who de horse, who de horse?” was the refrain, with no one in any doubt that the Prime Minister was the angry stallion.
Yankee dollars
Whether or not one chooses to believe the story of Viola’s broken arm — and most of Georgetown was eager to believe it — it is a fact that a great deal of U.S. currency was taken out of Jonestown by Guyanese in the first days after the event.
Stories of suitcases full of greenbacks, of men murdered for their possession, of wads of bills hidden in Amerindian homes around Port Kaituma circulated along with the story of Viola. The police and army sent to guard the premises and, perhaps,
29

officials there to inspect them searched among the rotting, bloated bodies for the fortune concealed there. Guyana is a country almost out of money, and a fiscal desperation rules the actions of everyone from the Minister of Internal Affairs to the simplest housekeeper. Inflation and exchange rates have seriously eroded Guyanese currency over the past few years, but that is not even the major problem: the government has made the Guyanese dollar a restricted currency. It is illegal to take it out of the country and, if one does smuggle it out, it is worthless in the outside world.
Guyanese money cannot be used to escape the country, which resembles a sinking ship more each day. Nor can it be used to purchase items from abroad, so that businesses flounder and personal needs are unfulfilled. In the context of this dying, desperate economy the Yankee money at Jonestown was an irresistible opportunity. Several hundred thousand dollars were brought out, apparently mostly by GDF soldiers, and soon flooded the local black market. At the time, the official exchange rate was 40 cents U.S. to one Guyanese dollar (it is now [circa 1983] around 30 cents) and such were the needs of local businessmen and ordinary Guyanese planning trips abroad that the black market rate had pushed the Guyanese dollar as low as ten cents. The infusion of Jonestown money changed the situation dramatically; suddenly there was as much American currency as anyone needed and the black market rates sagged. They remained at a depressed level for several months until, in June of 1979, they began to climb again.
In this ironic fashion Jim Jones’s hoard, which he had squirreled away compulsively to use for future supplies from the U.S. and for bribing Guyanese officials, was put to use by ordinary Guyanese for purposes of their own. One can suppose that, in addition to Guyanese businessmen using the dollars to obtain supplies needed in their businesses, some of the money was used to enable Guyanese to escape their repressive and crumbling society. The victims of Jonestown consigned their savings and Social Security checks to Jones, who led them from California to their deaths in the jungle. Guyanese who fell heir to the tainted money used it to make the opposite journey, fleeing confinement, poverty, and social disintegration for the very society Jones wrote off as a lost cause (and, in fact, there is a large Guyanese community in California). The reversal is chilling to contemplate: it was the move to
Guyana that provided the isolation and normlessness essential to Jones’s insane scheme; and it was escape from Guyana that motivated many of the black market purchasers of the Jonestown dollars. Jonestown and Georgetown, the community of
Americans who escaped to die, the city of Guyanese who seek to escape a creeping death, are two faces, two modalities of a single horror.
30

Working the Field, Graphing the Ethnos:
Steps toward an Ethnographic Semiotics
It has been a premise of anthropology since the discipline's beginnings that other people, specifically exotic people, inhabited societies that could be methodically observed, described, and analyzed. As we know, this attitude represented a major advance over the established tendency to dismiss the doings and sayings of
“primitives” as deficient and inferior. Today, however, we have reached a crisis point in ethnography conceived as the systematic elucidation of other societies. The crisis occurs on two fronts and reaches its fever pitch where the two coincide, forming a juncture, hinge, or bridge. The fronts are the activities of doing fieldwork and writing ethnography.
If it is true that anthropologists since Boas and Malinowski have conscientiously pursued inquiries into the nature of ethnographic fieldwork, producing a large methodological literature in the process, it is also true that they have rarely posed in print the really difficult questions about their craft (although that has changed in recent years, with
Rabinow 1979 and Dumont 1978 being notable exceptions). As I see it, those questions are: What is it that the ethnographer goes to study?; and, What separates or distinguishes him from what he studies? The first question might be rephrased as a fill-in-the-blanks questionnaire: “Biologists study
_____?; “Economists study _____?; “Ethnographers study _____?”. Two problems present themselves in completing this seemingly simple task. First, there is a classificatory lapse in passing from biologists and economists to “ethnographers.” If the questionnaire had instead said “anthropologists,” the student might have felt safe in responding with “indigenous societies” or something to that effect. But to say
“ethnographer” is to introduce a bifurcated identity, that of anthropologist
/ethnographer, which appears to be absent from other disciplines (how could one meaningfully respond to biologist/_____ or economist/_____?). This difficulty signals something of the peculiar nature of our craft. We are presumed to move from one to the other, from the distant and romanticized “field” (even if it lies in a neighborhood of one of our cities) to the study or classroom, where the results of fieldwork are themselves worked and reworked until they become lectures, articles, or books. As anthropologists/ethnographers we operate as double agents, and it is in acknowledging that notion of double (Kristeva 1969) that we begin to discover an essential feature of the species of inquiry that is anthropology.
But simply filling in the blank in our questionnaire is difficult enough. I proposed “indigenous societies;” others would undoubtedly suggest other terms that
31

emphasize social change, urbanism, etc. I have no problem with those formulations, but the range of hypothetical substitutes is too small. For definitions or assumptions of what ethnographers study inevitably refer to entities called “societies” or “cultures” and invest those entities with a substantiveness, or presence as Derrida (1967) would have it, all their own. This is the problem with which I began this essay: What if the object of ethnography, the “native,” is not the privileged possessor of that set of actions, beliefs, rites, and practices to which E. B. Tylor referred us at the discipline’s beginnings? Only if we dismiss this carping doubt and accept the privileged status of the ethnographic object is it possible to proceed with the constructive methodological tasks of designing interview formats, sampling techniques, transcription conventions, and all the other items in our empirical tool kit. I would suggest that doubt cannot be so easily dismissed. Without really clarifying the basics of what we are doing, we employ the above tools or techniques to gradually build up an information storehouse, adding to it bit by bit (byte by byte?) as we gain the confidence of the natives — of those who know the secrets — until we at last have an adequate rendition of their society. Alternatively — and it is really not so very different at this level — we might presume that the natives’ views are relatively unimportant and proceed straight away to observing their actions and formulating underlying, “objective” principles of behavior on the basis of those observations.
Jonestown is an ugly smear across this tidy methodological landscape, and across the landscape of human consciousness itself. Approaching Jonestown from an ethnographic perspective, it is impossible to retain the conventional assumption that the natives are the experts, that they know what they are doing and that our job is to watch, listen, and discover the underlying pattern of their assertions and behavior. It is also impossible, unless one embraces one of the grand cynicisms of an ism (Marxism, structuralism, functionalism, it does not matter which), to view the horror of Jonestown as a manifestation of hidden principles of social structure. For in this particular case the natives were insane, or permitted the insane to occur. And the natives of
Jonestown are also dead, their lives extinguished by the very paranoid fury that brought them to our attention.
Why, then, have I attempted to treat Jonestown from an ethnographic perspective, to maintain that it is not only an authentic ethnographic event, but an important one? It is because the ugliness and horror of that event transfixed persons who are neither insane nor dead and compelled them to render the event intelligible, to interpret it. An act of colossal madness fills the cultural atmosphere with a blizzard of texts and interpretations which tie that act to those persons who do the interpreting. All those texts, or as many as the ethnographer can assemble (as I have attempted to do here) provide him with the material necessary to his craft and thereby enable him actually to do something that can legitimately be called “ethnography.”
32

And because so many people, from different countries, walks of life, and ideological persuasions, have been involved in the interpreting of Jonestown, it is impossible to say that the ethnographic event belongs to or represents a particular “culture.” Consequently, the first question I posed — “What is it that the ethnographer goes to study?” — cannot here receive the easy reply, “He goes to study a group of people, a society, a culture.” The reality of Jonestown is the heterogeneous assemblage of all the impressions, reactions, interpretations it has provoked; its madness opens a window on a multifaceted world of the cultural continuum (Drummond 1980).
Doing fieldwork hinges on an assumption that one knows what manner of thing one is studying, and any such assumption is false if it involves a notion of a bounded culture with a single authentic or authoritative discourse. If that notion can now be rejected and some concept like the cultural continuum put in its place, then my second question — “What separates or distinguishes the ethnographer from what he studies?” — finds an answer. It follows from the deconstruction of the notion of a bounded culture that there is no decisive barrier between the ethnographer, or the ethnographic subject, and the native, or the ethnographic object. The former cannot look to the latter as a neophyte to an adept, for the circumstances of social life are such that both are frequently confused and ambivalent about the aspects of cultural organization that seem most essential. Neither enjoys a privileged status; culture is a text whose author has lost his authority and even identity.
Throughout this essay I have attempted to explore the complex interrelationship of my individual reactions to Jonestown and others’ public interpretations. Each of my impressions — of the American movie, of Awakaipu, of the Pioneers — led into a welter of texts, characters, social institutions basic to
Guyanese and, sometimes, American culture. Note that the combination of impressions is peculiar to me; as far as I know no chronicler of Jonestown has attempted to bring such a diverse collection of materials together. In a sense, then, my own considerable experience in Guyana and my on-again, off-again fixation on
Jonestown over the past three years itself constitutes a major text of Jonestown
(which you are now reading). Nor is my situation fundamentally different from that of ethnographers working on more traditional topics; if anything, those ethnographers can be far more authoritative than I, for my meager academic essay is chaff before the winds of television, journalism, and book coverage. Firth on Tikopia, Evans-Pritchard on Nuer, Malinowski on Trobrianders — each of these ethnographers has performed the remarkable and paradoxical feat of becoming the voice of “his” people while holding fast to canons of scientific objectivity that irrevocably distance him from them. His private audience with them has granted him the privileged status we customarily reserve for the native: he was there; he dwelled among them; he knows whereof he speaks.
33

Into this classical world (post)modernity rushes like a tempest, destroying the ethnographer's throne and drowning his voice in a sea of electronic images and newspaper pages. Simultaneously, the native begins to speak for himself— and not just in the village or the colonial capital, but in the same cities inhabited by his ethnographer. The two catch glimpses of one another waiting for a bus, entering an office building, being interviewed on television. It is only at this point that the nature of ethnography as dialogue (or, really, polylogue , after Kristeva 1977) becomes apparent; before, it was still possible to pretend — and it was pretending — that the ethnographer alone could speak, could produce his definitive monologue on the society.
Cultures are heterogeneous assemblages of overlapping, conflicting interpretations, and their lack of boundaries means that the crucial notion of ethnos loses its former meaning. I have tried to identify some of the far-reaching consequences the dissipation of this notion has for doing fieldwork. But it is the second, virtually unexamined root of “ethnography” that poses the most fundamental questions. Recent theoretical discussions of ethnicity (Galaty 1982, Herzfeld 1983) have alerted us to the textual properties of ethnos , but how often do we scrutinize the activity of graphing the ethnos ? What is ethnography as a species of writing (as James
Boon asks)? In the framework of scientific discourse that has dominated and contained ethnography up to the present, it is assumed that the object of research is the sole issue.
The tools of description — the writing and not the written of ethnography — are regarded as frictionless, non-contaminating agents of the research act. We may agonize over research design, elicitation techniques, or — that old favorite — rapport, but proceed doggedly with the task of “writing it up” (in much the same sense as
“wrapping it up,” referring to goods collected and purchased and waiting to be packaged).
Everything I have said about Jonestown as ethnographic event argues against this way of looking at ethnography. There are too many discordant voices, too many facts that turn out to be impressions and impressions that turn out to be facts, too much ambivalence on the part of ethnographer and native alike, and, perhaps encompassing all the rest, too powerful a sense that the importance of words and deeds lies in their carnivalesque quality — in dressing ideas and social institutions in the garish costumes of the stage — for us to continue the wholesome illusion that our writing graphs the contours of an entity out there, before our eyes, waiting to be sketched. It is time to examine the lens of print through which we examine societies.
I am advocating that we treat as a text not only culture, but the ethnographer as well (as Herzfeld argues), and that the textual (really, intertextual ) properties of the two cannot be meaningfully distinguished from each other. In making this claim, however, I do not think I am surrendering cultural anthropology to literary criticism
34

and calling on my colleagues either to turn in their badges or, if they have been fellow travelers all along, to come out of the lit crit closet. The ethnographer does, indeed, produce a text; he tries to graph the ethnos (whatever that may be). But, unlike the literary critic, he also does fieldwork; he works the field as a productive act in tandem but not synonymous with the productive act of graphing the ethnos . It is at the juncture of these dual productions, these two fronts, where the most fundamental questions of ethnography are to be found. If a literary text, as Kristeva claims, is an acquisition, an iteration, an interpretation of other texts, a cultural text is similarly but more radically intertextual .
A contemporary writer, Pynchon, say, is undoubtedly influenced by Joyce, and in reading Pynchon we are influenced by our readings of Joyce. But Joyce did not read
Pynchon, nor did he have to contend with our contemporary and ongoing readings and interrogations of him. And since he spent so much of his time writing, he interacted with his peers rather less than an ethnographer might find desirable in an informant (what do we do with “ethnographic” reports based on work with a kind of super-Ogotomeli?). Suppose we applied the acid test of traditional ethnography to
Joyce's work: I know virtually nothing about culture X; you hand me a monograph on it; what does it tell me about culture X? If the monograph is Ulysses I would be hard put to it for an answer that would satisfy the traditionalist. Certainly a large part of my difficulty would stem from my (as we now know) mistaken assumption that there is a culture X out there, waiting to be described by someone who writes sensible prose. (If I have not persuaded you to entertain the idea that this assumption is mistaken, then you would assign all the blame to Joyce.) But does all the difficulty lie with my old-fashioned, functionalist ideas about culture? Are there, to borrow from and rephrase Barthes (1974), ethnographerly texts and non-ethnographerly texts, just as Barthes claimed there are “readerly” and “writerly” texts (he much preferred the latter). Surely we can reject outmoded theories of culture without abandoning the idea that there are good and bad, more and less, ethnographic texts.
Culture happens fast and furious; the textualizers are interacting with and interpreting one another at the rapid clip of life itself. It is into this fray that the ethnographer steps, retreats to mend the damage and teach and write for a few months or years, then steps back, retreats again, writes some more, goes someplace new, writes about the old place in terms of the new, and through it all wonders how greatly the spaces in between — those periods of what he wants to call his “private life” — affect the doing and writing of his ethnography. In the meantime, while all this is going on, his “natives” do not keep silent; they do not remain locked in his word processor.
And, like him, they are growing older and more complicated; their lives and the society around them are changing, often far more dramatically than the ethnographer’s own society. What I have called the ethnographic event is subject to all the pushes
35

and pulls of their own retrospective interpretations and, more critically, to their disposition to repeat the event under similar circumstances.
This tumultuousness makes for involved, even torturous discourse
(ethnographers may well end up writing like Joyce after all!). But it is, I believe, a serious mistake to reject that discourse because of its unscientific embrace of confusion, ambivalence, and the carnivalesque — a serious mistake, and a terrifying one when one considers how far some are prepared to go in the name of certainty. In the heterogeneous array of ambivalent texts and characters that comprise the Jonestown horror, the figure most sure of himself, sure of his reading of the situation, sure he had got it right , was Jim Jones. The meaninglessness of the mass murder and suicides effects a dialectical closure of paranoid and scientific logic: there was a single truth. The stench has finally lifted and the jungle is reclaiming the clearing that was Jonestown
(Burnham has abandoned the ludicrous project to turn it into a museum). What remain are living Guyanese and Americans, the principal bystanders, and everything they have said, written, photographed, and thought about the event of Saturday
November 18, 1978.
An Evening of Ballet
In the years that followed our conversation about Woodstock , my friend and I saw little of each other. I returned to the U.S.; he continued teaching at the school in the bush until, a year later, he won a position at the Government Training Institute in
Georgetown. There he followed through on his plan to become a surveyor — a position in great demand in a country like Guyana, where nothing is charted and everything is to be built. When I returned to Guyana in 1975 for a few months he had already graduated and was the supervisor of a crew mapping the maze of sandbars that choke the mouth of the Essequibo River. He had left the Amerindian village of
Kabakaburi, where his identity as Amerindian or “Buck” was made problematic by an
Afro-Guyanese, or Creole, ancestry. And he had joined the coastal society, where being a “Buckman” was a real social liability. A mixed Arawak , marked in his natal village as something other than Arawak, who, among his workmates on the coast, yet was a man of the interior, of the bush, a “Buckman” — this new man of Guyana moved uncertainly across the shifting internal boundaries of his new nation.
In 1975 my work was still in the interior, still centered on the complex ethnic milieu surrounding the village of Kabakaburi. We moved, then, my friend and I, in different directions and when we did meet it was, fittingly, in transit. On a trip from
Georgetown to Kabakaburi, a journey of 100 miles and 12 hours, I reached the right bank of the Essequibo too late to catch the next leg of transportation — a ferry that
36

departed daily on the three- or four-hour passage to the other side of the river. I was stranded, left to contemplate an evening on the stelling (the Dutch term is retained) as I watched the ferry pull away in its churning wake.
I turned away, disappointed and angry, and there was my friend. It was our first meeting in four years, although I had been living with his parents in Kabakaburi for the past month or so. The filmgoer and former rural teacher was now master of a vessel, a small tug being used by his survey crew to map those sand bars through which the departed ferry was even then threading. He offered me a lift. Or, rather, he proposed a chase — they were about to depart upriver and would try to overtake the ferry and put me aboard. It turned out to be more of a chase than either of us had bargained for.
The ferry was large and cumbersome-looking, but faster than we realized. The logical boarding point, a jetty on an island where the ferry stopped briefly to take on or disgorge a few travelers, was missed — the ferry pulled away before we could overtake it. Finally, we closed the gap in mid-channel. After much shouting and gesturing from both ships the ferry slowed to a trawl, our tug pulled abeam for an instant, I was persuaded to jump from rail to rail, my bag was thrown across, and my friend's ship dropped back.
The chase had been punctuated, in the Guyanese way, by drinks and jokes and, in the final moments before I clambered up on the rail, we agreed to get together “in town” for more of the same. But that arrangement didn't work out; my time was short and I kept close to Kabakaburi, avoiding the squalor and nuisance of
Georgetown. We met once more, a few weeks later, and again on the ferry stelling . But that time a chase was unnecessary; the ferry was waiting and I was just another harried traveler anxious to get aboard.
Four more years elapsed before our next meeting. We did not correspond, though I kept abreast of his career through letters from other members of the family. I learned that he had married; he now lived in Georgetown. When I returned to the country in 1979 we were finally able to have that drink in town, though the circumstances had changed. I was invited to dinner at his home, and came with his sister and her husband, who also lived in Georgetown and who was my closest friend in
Guyana. Our host lived in the southern part of the city, in an area that had been sugar cane fields a few years before, when we were chasing ferries. The home was one of a large tract developed during the “Feed, Clothe, House the Nation” campaign of the late
1970s. It and its neighbors represented an extension of the cane that had preceded and still bordered the homes — an architectural monocrop designed for cheapness and ease of construction, new homes for the workers of the new Cooperative Socialist
Republic. A light rectangular frame on stilts, it was constructed so that the ground level beneath could be used as living and working space while the upper chambers, like a tree house, vibrated and shifted with the movements of their occupants.
37

Before the meal, while we consumed that long-promised drink, I was shown the
Wedding Book. How many of these have I seen during my intermittent incursions in
Guyana? Homes in every part of the country have them, more or less elaborate depending on the social circles one is moving in. Occasionally a book spans generations, with the parent’s Wedding Book supplemented by wedding pictures of married children. I remember (how long ago it seems, before I had lost count of these Wedding Books) being embarrassed and more than a little disappointed when one of my first Arawak acquaintances produced such a book and spoke proudly, sitting there in his Kabakaburi home, of the unions his daughters had made with men whose pictures showed them to be non-Amerindian men from the coastal belt that turned its back on the interior and its Amerindians, on my host and his fellow Arawak villagers. After all, I had come to live among and study Amerindians — Arawak and Carib — had come a long way and at considerable expense. And I had not expected to be shown wedding pictures, particularly pictures that documented the extinction of the very people whose “culture” (as I then supposed existed) I had come to study.
Life plays tricks on one’s categories. That afternoon in the tract house in
Ruimveldt Gardens I found myself, nearly ten years after my initial disappointment with
Wedding Books, in the company of people pictured in those very books. My host was a Guyanese or, perhaps I should say, Kabakaburi success story. A boy of mixed
Amerindian parentage had grown up in the bush, worked and studied hard, landed a prestigious professional job with the Government, married a woman from the city, and now had a home there. On top of that, his wife was Afro-Guyanese or, as the
Guyanese still say, “African,” and was active in cultural programs sponsored by the
Government. She was, if not one of the Party faithful, at least closely aligned with it.
Amerindian and African, the bush and the city — the flimsy home strained under the oppressive weight of these Guyanese dichotomies.
The afternoon passed easily enough, but there were no moments like those when my friend and I had shared our thoughts about Woodstock , nor like those when we joked and drank during our ferry chase. He was now married, a man of substance, and was entertaining in his home. The occasion had a certain gravity about it. And there was an underlying political tension. He and his wife were of the Government; his sister and her husband were not. They had not loosened their ties with the interior as effectively as he; and while he appeared to be a permanent resident in the city, they talked of returning to a country district. Conversation about recent events, including
Jonestown, was punctuated by small hesitations: how much could be said and how much only hinted at?
Several weeks later we met for the last time, by accident. It was at a performance of ballet and modern dance by a visiting French troupe and took place at the recently opened Cultural Centre. The Cultural Centre was an attraction and a
38

thing of pride for Georgetown residents; it represented the first modern auditorium in the country. Before its completion, cultural performances were limited to the facilities of school auditoriums, cricket grounds, or, worst of all, the Georgetown movie houses. These movie houses are still, twelve years after the proclamation of the
Socialist Republic, divided into classes of seats: “balcony,” the highest and best;
“house,” a section of less comfortable seats below “balcony;” and the “pit,” in which
Georgetown youth howl at the action on the screen from rows of wooden benches. So the Cultural Centre bypassed and, in a sense, erased the ignominy of the movie houses, where the crowds stand at attention for the playing of the national anthem before resuming their seats in the “balcony,” “house,” or “pit.”
The Cultural Centre is located on the eastern edge of the city, near the Prime
Minister’s Residence, the Botanical Gardens, and the recent Cuffy Monument (Cuffy was the leader of a failed slave rebellion, brutally suppressed by Dutch planters).
Between this public area and the center of the city, where hotels and major businesses still give the appearance of normalcy, there lie the squalid ruins of Georgetown, city of the Third World. Decaying wooden shops that have little left to sell are heavily barred and shuttered, streets and sidewalks are grimy with refuse, and the drainage trenches that lace this city below sea level are choked with filth, backed up and running over with a dark, septic fluid that is turbulent with parasitic life. As one rides to the evening performance at the Cultural Centre, the night people of central Georgetown have already taken up their stations: small groups of the homeless have unrolled their bundles of rags on the sidewalks and lit kerosene flambeaux ; prostitutes lean like decrepit pickets against the fence surrounding the central Independence Park; youth gangs patrol their territories. Frequent blackouts, the result of the city's exhausted electrical generating facilities, plunge the entire scene into darkness and accentuate the noises and smells of bedlam. To travel through this scene is to realize how bad things really are: on these streets, in this nation, there is no order, there is no law; anything could happen here. And anything did happen. Jonestown was 150 miles away and a few months in the past.
The appearance of the French troupe at the Cultural Centre was a rare event, a piece of genuine high culture that had somehow been diverted on its way back to
France from French Guiana. To celebrate the fact, the Comrades of the Party’s cultural hierarchy had turned out in numbers. And they came in their full regalia: heavy women wore Afro fabrics of European design and Asian manufacture; large men, their skin in glistening rolls, costumed themselves in the stiff, ill-fitting shirt jackets that have become the Party uniform. They had negotiated the same streets as I to reach the Cultural Centre that evening. What had their thoughts been on that ride?
The dance pieces were extraordinary, a sampling of brilliant ballet and innovative modern dance. I have been to so many flops in Guyana, sat through so many
39

terrible productions in hot, cramped, ill-lit halls, that the evening at the Cultural Centre was a revelation. It was almost possible to forget what was outside, what awaited on the drive home, to forget the extinguished lives in the jungle community. And a small incident at the beginning of the performance, when a sound man mistakenly started a piece of modern, discordant music and the audience, anticipating the obligatory national anthem, half rose, confused, not knowing for a moment where the patriotic gesture lay, until the mistake was corrected and they could stand proudly in their
Cultural Centre while the anthem played — this incident only detracted for a moment from the compelling performance that followed.
It was only at intermission that I ran into my friend and his wife. He was shirt-jacketed in the official way and held a rum drink; she was in an Afro gown and her eyes sparkled with the importance of the occasion. But the Comrades had been made uneasy by the performance; it was impossible to translate it into their political cant and, even more unsettling, its intensity provided a harsh contrast to the shallowness and self-deception of their public lives. They were drinking heavily at the lobby bar, and soon the noise and gestures of the rum shop began to assert themselves in the Cultural Centre. My friend was on the edge of the crowd, drawn to the power at its center. Some of those men had been minor accomplices of
Jonestown, officials who knew yet did not know what Jones was doing out there in the jungle. My sudden appearance was an embarrassment to my friend; the worlds of
Kabakaburi and the Cultural Centre, the casual conversation about movies and the serious business of Party recognition, the white man in the bush and the same man across the street from the Prime Minister’s Residence, were too disparate. As we talked his eyes wandered nervously to his wife and to the shirt-jacketed figures at the bar.
He made large gestures, in the manner of one full of purpose and needing to be off. In the crowded, cocktail party setting the separation was easily accomplished. We both understood what was expected; the crowd rippled and we were no longer standing together.
In a few minutes the dancers would begin the second part of the evening’s performance. But at that moment the stage had shifted to the lobby, where these new men and women of Guyana, my friend and his wife among them, were giving a separate performance in the midst of the larger one provided by the visiting representatives of another, less devastated society. My thoughts wandered over that conversation about
Woodstock years ago, over the recent horror of Jonestown and the present horror that waited in the streets outside, over the French dancers and the Guyanese drinkers. My friend had helped me see the event of Woodstock as performance; he now showed me the stage on which he performed. And somehow Jonestown was caught between, implicated by these two episodes, and thereby placed on a stage that lacked the coordinates of place, of nationality, of cause and effect. Performer and audience,
40

event and interpretation, writer and reader — how is it really possible to distinguish these in the ethnographic field? Where did they find all those actors?
Notes
1.
A rash of “instant books,” articles and reports (Kilduff and Javers 1978, Krause et al.
1978, Harris 1978, U.S. House of Representatives 1979) that appeared immediately following the tragedy has been supplemented by more considered pieces (Lewis
1979, Lane 1980, Naipaul 1981, Reston 1981), so that a considerable Jonestown literature now exists.
2.
“Edification by puzzlement” is a theme developed by Fernandez (1981).
3.
The reference is to Geertz (1971: 29): “The culture of a people is an ensemble of texts, themselves ensembles, which the anthropologist strains to read over the shoulders of those to whom they properly belong.” There are at least two problems here. First, the nature of texts precludes their belonging to somebody or to some homogeneous group — to an author — for they are always exchanges or interactions among diverse subjects. Always ensembles, as the citation notes, they iterate and encompass a diversity that undermines the conventional notions of ownership and authorship. Second, even if some texts did belong to a particular person or group, they would not be the texts that anthropologists usually see, which are texts produced by persons whose worlds are filled — if not drowned — by an intrusive, media-saturated modernity. The native’s texts are riddled with the bits and pieces of Western culture, so that, in reading over their shoulders, we often find an editorialized version of our own copy.
4.
The article is a polemic against, among other things, cults, the U.S. school system, and the editorial committee of the American Anthropological Association's annual meeting. Jonestown itself is not discussed, nor is the fact that it happened in
Guyana, a Third World nation that bears little resemblance to the middle-class
America that is the real target of Harris's invective. The possibility that the events at Jonestown could be tied to their Guyanese context does not seem to have occurred to Harris, an omission that makes his piece the antithesis of an ethnographic account.
41

References
Barthes, Roland (1974). S/Z. trans by Richard Miller. New York: Hill & Wang.
Boon, James (1983). Functionalists Write, too: Frazer/Malinowski and the Semiotics of the Monograph. Semiotica 46: (2-4), pages 131-150.
Derrida, Jacques (1967).
L’Ecriture et la Différence
. Paris: Editions du Seuil.
Drummond, Lee (1980). The Cultural Continuum: A Theory of Intersystems.
Man (N.S.) 15(2), pages 352-374.
— (1981). The Serpent's Children: Semiotics of Cultural Genesis in Arawak and
Trobriand Myth. American Ethnologist 8(3), pages 633-660.
Dumont, Jean-Paul (1978). The Headman and I: Ambiguity and Ambivalence in the Fieldworking Experience . Austin: University of Texas Press.
Fernandez, James (1981). Edification by Puzzlement. In Explorations in African
Systems of Thought . Ivan Karp and Charles S. Bird (eds.), pages 44-59.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Galaty, John (1982). Being “Maasai”; Being “People-of-Cattle”: Ethnic Shifters in East
Africa. American Ethnologist 9(1), pages 1-20.
Geertz, Clifford (1971). Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight. In Myth,
Symbol and Culture . Clifford Geertz (ed.), pages 1- 38. New York: W. W.
Norton & Co.
Guyana Chronicle (1978). Special Supplement on Jonestown. December 6, 1978.
Harris, Marvin (1978). No End of Messiahs. New York Times . November 26, 1978.
Herzfeld, Michael (1983). Looking Both Ways: The Ethnographer in the Text.
Semiotica 46: (2-4), pages 151-166.
Kilduff, Marshall and Javers, Ron (1978). The Suicide Cult . New York: Bantam.
Krause, Charles A. et al. (1978). Guyana Massacre: The Eyewitness Account . New
York: Berkeley Press.
Kristeva, Julia (1969).
Semeiotikè: Recherches pour une Sémanalyse
. Paris: Editions du
Seuil.
— (1977). Polylogue . Paris: Editions du Seuil.
Lane, Mark (1980). The Strongest Poison . New York: Hawthorn Press.
Lewis, Gordon K. (1979). Gather With the Saints at the River: The Jonestown
Guyana Holocaust of 1978 . Rio Piedras, Puerto Rico: Institute of Caribbean
Studies.
Martin, Dave (1979). Brother Jonesie . Bridgetown, Barbados: West Indies Records,
Ltd.
42

Naipaul, Shiva (1981). Journey to Nowhere: A New World Tragedy . New York: Simon and Schuster.
Rabinow, Paul (1977). Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco . Berkeley: University of California Press.
Reston, James, Jr. (1981). Our Father Who Art in Hell . New York: Times Books.
Swan, Michael (1958). The Marches of El Dorado . Boston: Beacon Press.
U.S. House of Representatives (1979). The Assassination of Representative Leo J. Ryan and the Jonestown Guyana Tragedy . Report of a Staff Investigative Group to the
Committee on Foreign Affairs. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing
Office.
43