ABSTRACT
This chapter is in two parts. The first part presents a slightly revised version of remarks in Ideology and the Image (Nichols 1981) in which I responded to The Ax Fight by film-maker Tim Asch and anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon, one of the central works in their series of films on the Yanomamö Indians of the Orinoco and Ocamo river basins in southern Venezuela. The second part offers a reconsideration and different angle of vision on the film, examining it less in terms of narrative structure and more in terms of historiographic concerns. The complex relation of narrative to the process of sustaining and representing both a sense of culture and history serves as a central preoccupation.
