Introduction

The appendix of Whiffen's The North–West Amazons: Notes of Some Months Spent Among Cannibal Tribes tabulates the physical characteristics of the principal indigenous communities of the Putumayo in minute detail. Categories include the colour–analysis of hair and of exposed and unexposed parts of the body, depilation, and stature. Some twenty individual measurements of the body are given, with particular attention to the head (including the nose, chin, and ears). Whiffen's resulting anatomical descriptions range from the scientific (‘prognathism […] very slight’) to the less–scientific (‘plump’, ‘fat’, ‘very plump’). Although he would be called upon by the Foreign Office to answer questions about the conduct of the PAC during his stay in the Putumayo in 1908–09, Whiffen's book, at least, gives the impression that his time in the Amazon was spent not observing the terrible conditions on the ground but rather measuring, photographing, and classifying native bodies.

The term ‘visualism’, which Johannes Fabian uses to describe anthropology's ‘ideological bias toward vision’, helps to position Whiffen's penchant for tables, diagrams, and photographs within a broader Western tradition that attempts to situate the racial Other apart from the self. This pattern is familiar throughout ethnographic writing on the Putumayo: accounts by Casement, Hardenburg, and Whiffen, among others, are markedly visual and often try to establish a relation between the physical characteristics of a tribe and their temperament, as when Casement describes the Boras as ‘straight, clean–limbed, with often very pleasing features, and […] brave, intelligent and capable’. Such accounts usually efface the individual, either by presenting native populations en masse, engaged in dancing or feasting for instance, or by singling out a generic ‘type’ – the medicine man, the hunter, the chief.