purple motes

In 1980, a famous ethologist went into the jungles of Venezuela to videotape Yanomama natives.  He would videotape them seven or eight hours a day.  A graduate student helping him observed:

After a while people started getting unnerved, particularly since he was shooting right at them. They were especially upset about their babies, whom [famous ethologist] was concentrating on in an effort to record mother-child interaction. They were sure that what he was doing was detrimental and harmful. Some of the women were crying about it, and finally two of the men came up and asked me to drive [famous ethologist] out of the village.[*]

What could motivate an ethologist to behave so uncivilly?

Related work: Slavoj Žižek, The Metastases of Enjoyment: On Women and Causality (Verso, 2006). Last week, I saw a man in his 50s, sitting alone on a sidewalk table outside a coffee house, apparently reading this.

[*] From Kenneth Good, with David Chanoff, Into the heart: one man’s pursuit of love and knowledge among the Yanomama (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991). This is a wonderful book.