A Flash of the Spirit

Abstract

As a young student of anthropology at Harvard, I was fortunate to fall into the orbit of David Maybury-Lewis, who became my undergraduate tutor. A man of searing intelligence, whose formal eloquence masked a deeply humane spirit, Maybury-Lewis was one of the great Americanists, a brilliant scholar who had lived for years among the Akwe-Xavante and Xerente Indians in central Brazil. A student of Rodney Needham at Oxford, he had come to anthropology after earning a degree at Cambridge in romance languages, and his fluidity in every tongue was astonishing. His German, Russian, Danish, Spanish, and Portuguese were flawless, but it was the way he spoke English that fired the senses. His accent implied erudition. Combined with the precision of his thoughts, the effect was mesmerizing. David had traveled to central Brazil in the mid-1950s to investigate and, in a sense, celebrate the so-called Ge anomaly. Throughout the nineteenth century and well into the first decades of the twentieth, anthropologists had maintained that technological sophistication and material well-being were a direct measure of the complexity of a culture-a convenient concept that invariably placed Victorian England at the top of a Darwinian ladder to success. Modern ethnographers rejected the notion out of hand, arguing that every human culture had by biological definition the same mental acuity. Whether this potential was realized through technological prowess or by the elaboration of intensely complex threads of memory inherent in a myth was a matter of cultural choice and historical circumstance. Nowhere was this modern notion more perfectly displayed than among the peoples of eastern Brazil, the complex of fierce tribes known as the Central Ge. Living in the forests of Mato Grosso and on the arid savannas and uplands that separate the southern Amazon basin from the Atlantic coast, the Akwe-Xavante and Xerente, Kayapo, Timbira, and a host of other tribes all spoke dialects of the Ge language family. Semi-nomadic hunters and gatherers, they ranged across vast territories, hunting peccaries for meat, and birds for brilliant plumage to be woven into ceremonial coronas that shone like the sun. Their material culture was exceedingly rudimentary. They knew nothing of canoes, though rivers dissected their lands, and as late as the 1950s were still dependent on the bow and arrow. They cleared the savanna, but their harvests were meager-their sparse plantings reminiscent of the dawn of agriculture. Yet beneath the primitive veneer lay an astonishingly rich and complex worldview-a tangle of religious beliefs and myths that informed all of life and gave rise to patterns of social organization Byzantine in their sophistication, yet perfectly elegant in their elaboration. This apparent contradiction-a marginal people, technologically backward yet mentally and intellectually afire-confounded many early ethnographers. Hence, the notion of the Ge anomaly. But the great French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss saw the situation quite differently. For him-a scholar of immense vision capable of embracing all of the Americas in a single thought-the cultures of the Central Ge represented nothing more than a simple triumph of the human spirit and imagination. Having lived briefly among the Bororo-a people whose social structure was very closely related to that of the Ge tribes-Levi-Strauss had come to see their world as a universe of oppositions: man and woman, light and darkness, good and evil, the sun and the moon, the raw and the cooked, the wild and the tame. Every facet of their society-every ritual and institution, every concept of kinship and procreation, the very cycles of life and death, the transitions of birth and initiation, even the architecture and settlement pattern of the seasonal encampments-reflected a subconscious and indeed conscious attempt to resolve in harmony these opposing elements. Thus, there were two moieties and two exogamous patrilineages, entwined by cross-cousin marriages. …