As far as I can understand it, as it was explained to me by Denise and a few others in the field, the phenomenon surrounding the Sebali tribe stemmed not from the extensive and comprehensive documentation of the tribe by Hammond and Grant, which was remarkable, but from the purity of the tribe, which had survived, unmarred by anything outside of its very small chain of islands, longer than any other group of people. “The Sebali people,” Denise told me, with a hushed urgency that bordered on wistfulness, “were aboriginal in the truest sense of the word. Untouched. For a millennium, maybe longer. Consider,” she then went on to explain, “a group of people removed to an island and that island placed inside a box and that box sealed off from the rest of the world for one thousand years. Remove that island from its box, and what you have then is Hammond and Grant’s Sebali people. That the tribe even existed — had not been wiped off the face of the earth through starvation or by disease or by too much inbreeding — overshadowed the fact that they were discovered by two unheard-of amateurs, barely out of school, who had recorded faithfully their daily routines and rituals down to the tiniest detail, and had managed to do so without disrupting the tribe’s social structure.” She paused, a look of disbelief on her face, and then continued: “I mean, how could we have believed that they ate and slept and hunted with these people, wholly foreign people, without once tarnishing their society?”
Before the truth about the tribe had been revealed, a few scientists had originally conjectured that, perhaps inadvertently, Hammond and Grant had caused not only their own disappearance, but the disappearance of the Sebali people as well, which led to a minor resurgence of an ongoing debate in anthropology and sociology concerning the ethics of fieldwork. Not a few cultures have been irrevocably altered through the intrusion of science and anthropologists, and there have been some cases of anthropologists tampering with small tribal communities — falsifying observations or, worse yet, guiding tribal thought toward more and more exotic rituals and ways of life — in order to achieve the kind of shocking evidence that most people have come to expect of a relatively untouched tribe of aboriginals such as the Sebali. Most, however, considered these accusations, at least at the time and in light of the disappearance and possible deaths of Hammond and Grant, unfounded and somewhat inappropriate.
“There have been times,” Denise explained to me, “when it seemed that a people have disappeared, vanished, as if the earth had opened up, swallowed them whole, but once research is done, a good explanation, nine times out of ten, clarifies what happened.” Like everyone else studying or working in anthropology at the time, Denise wanted to figure out what happened to Hammond and Grant with the hope that this might help her understand what had happened to the Sebali.
The scouting party, while searching the remains of the Sebali tribe for signs of Hammond and Grant, took a number of photographs but did not bring home physical samples, leaving the site untouched, instead, for a future, more extensive research party. Denise was able to study reprints and enlargements of the photographs, consisting mainly of pictures of emptied-out huts, littered with broken pieces of pottery, dried pieces of meats and fruits scattered on the dirt floors, as well as huts that appeared untouched, the rooms clean and appearing like a home just recently vacated by a family that planned to return in a matter of moments, but she found the photographic evidence difficult to work with. Photographs, though they are indispensable to sharing discoveries, testing theories, and publishing articles, cannot, according to Denise, replace firsthand observation, fieldwork, or simple legwork and research.
Boston University, in collaboration with Tufts University and the University of Wisconsin — Madison, received funding to begin a summer program that would allow students of anthropology to work together with professors and field specialists in cataloging the remains of the Sebali tribe and looking for clues as to what caused the tribe’s disappearance. Denise, however, was then only a first-year graduate student and was not chosen to participate in the program. Instead, after examining the photographs brought back by the original scouting party, she contented herself with spending her time researching a paper she planned to write, a biographical piece on the lives of Hammond and Grant and their contributions to the science of anthropology, which, she hoped, would provide her with some clues as to what had happened.
Denise began her research close to home, at Harvard University, where Joseph Hammond taught a course on untouched civilizations, and where he himself had gone to school from 1960 until 1964. While involved with her research, however, she struck a wall.
She had no problem finding information on Hammond after 1975. “I had interviews, articles published by him and about him, his course work, his lecture notes, his slide presentations, his test papers. But when I wanted to go back as far as his years as a student, I couldn’t find anything.” Denise checked official school records through the Registrar’s Office and then through the office of Alumni Affairs and Development, but was unable to locate student records, grades, class schedules, thesis papers, immunization records, financial statements, or anything else that would connect Hammond to Harvard.
“At first,” she explained, “we thought that maybe his files had been misplaced, or that maybe some fanatic had somehow gotten his hands on these records, but we couldn’t believe that anyone could be so thorough. Most of these records are kept in separate files, such as his immunization records, which would have been kept in the Health Services office, and his high school transcripts, kept with the Registrar’s Office.”
Frustrated, Denise went in search of professors in anthropology or sociology who had been with the college long enough to have perhaps taught Hammond and who might remember him.
“That’s how I found Dr. Stephens,” she said. An associate professor in 1962, Dr. Stephens taught in the Department of Anthropology for four years before leaving to teach in Chicago, but who had just recently returned to Harvard. “I asked him about Hammond, but he had no idea, didn’t remember him at all, not from back then, couldn’t remember ever meeting him.” Stephens went on to explain to Denise that he had come back to Harvard, in fact, to take over the one or two classes Hammond usually taught, but Hammond left before Dr. Stephens’s arrival, and so the two had, to Stephens’s knowledge, never met. Denise left Dr. Stephens’s office more confused and frustrated than before. Unsure of how to continue her research, she took a long walk, walking from Harvard Square across the Charles River into Boston proper, and from there continued walking until she finally reached her apartment, a walk of nearly five miles, and by which time the sky was dark and her feet a little sore. “Exhausted and cold and uncomfortable,” she told me, “I considered on my walk home dropping the project, leaving the Sebali tribe, Hammond, and Grant to someone else, moving into an area more interesting, more generous, and I cannot say that, if I had not found the message stuck to the refrigerator that Dr. Stephens had called and that I should call him back as soon as I could, I would not have given up, but the message was there, and so I called him.”
After Denise left his office, Dr. Stephens, himself intrigued by the mystery of Joseph Hammond, found an old photo album that contained photographs taken at a 1963 department mixer, one of which captured the entire department, department head, professors, associate professors, and students — graduate and undergraduate — their wineglasses raised, the kind of photo taken toward the end of a party in which everyone is leaning against everyone else in order to remain standing up. Joseph Hammond, Stephens told her, was not in that photograph, nor any of the other photographs, which, by itself, wasn’t damning or interesting evidence, but then Hammond wasn’t in the mixer photographs for 1962, either, or 1961, or 1964, which Stephens found altogether a little too strange. It was this final bump in the road that caused Denise Gibson to change course.