Call Me an Essentialist Slut But....

...ever since I read a biography of Humboldt, who I suspect of being a dirty dog in the way only an aesthete of the Goethe era (Goethe himself! Mignon! Schweinhundt!) can be, and grokked that Thesiger, whose take on the desert is irreplaceable, was a pedophile, recognized a kind of doppelganger in Tobias Schneebaum's Wild Man and realized one of the best travel writers I know is actually a pervert etc etc., I have secretly believed that anthropologists were sociopaths:

This latest film from Jose Padilha, director of Berlinale winner Tropa de Elite, takes anthropology to task for its intrusive methods and claims to objectivity by exploring the controversy over the study of the Yanomamo tribe. The tribe's extreme isolation in South America made them a sort of living time capsule, one upon whom anthropologists imposed their own theories and notions of primitive man. The anthropologists snipe at each other not only over different interpretations of whether the Yanomamo's violence sprang from a desire for women or red meat, but also swap blame for a vast category of ills inflicted on the community: one anthropologist married a 13-year-old Yanomamo girl and took her back to the States; another turned the young boys into sexual playthings, trading much desired guns and knives for pedophilic favors; and a third introduced a measles vaccine that triggered a deadly epidemic.
http://www.vanityfair.com/online/oscars/2010/01/sundance-rocks-the-docs.html