At the Intersection of Scholarship and Activism

Abstract

David Maybury-Lewis is appreciated for his theoretical contribution to the anthropology of lowland South America, but he will also be recognized as a public intellectual who shaped public discourse about indigenous peoples' rights. When Claude Levi-Strauss made his survey of indigenous groups in southern Brazil in the 1930s, he lamented that indigenous societies were mere remnants of what he imagined had been pristine tribes. David, on the search for dual societies in the late 1950s, discovered that even the most isolated groups had suffered incursions of frontier settlement. While keeping one foot firmly planted in traditional scholarship, David set out to publicize the situation of these indigenous groups and advocate for their rights. Even as he worked on his first major scholarly work, Akwe-Shavante Society (1967), Maybury-Lewis published a popular account of his fieldwork, The Savage and the Innocent (1965). A radical step for a scholar, the book offered the public a view of indigenous life without pandering to popular images of the primitive. Embedding himself in the ethnographic description, he took an early and important step to bring transparency to the relationship between fieldwork practice and the production of ethnographic text. Even before our awareness of the practice of ethnography as an instantiation of power relations, the work provides a vision of contact and conflict between indigenous populations and the larger world. It was as president of Cultural Survival that David Maybury-Lewis assumed the mantel of public intellectual. In lectures, the press, and even television, he spoke with utmost authority on the fate of the world's most isolated people. David and his wife Pia created Cultural Survival, Inc. with a small group of anthropologists in 1972 to speak for indigenous groups, like the Xavante, that were losing their battle to remain independent and autonomous. By intention, these were highly-respected academics that could use university positions to publicize the plight of indigenous peoples, and scholarly reputations to influence policy. Anthropology in the 1970s was coming down from its ivory tower to be both socially engaged and politically active. Having just begun to develop the idiom of activist anthropology, there remained a clear divide between science and politics, as between academia and political action. Conflict roiled academic waters as scholarly paradigms shifted, and anthropologists searched to make their field relevant. Anthropology was on the cusp of developing a politically engaged, theoretically informed approach. The complexity of integrating scholarship and political action became clear in 1978, when David was asked to report on indigenous peoples in Paraguay. The Carter administration's efforts to promote democracy in Latin American countries took aim at Paraguay's dictator, Alfredo Stroessner. At the same time, rumors circulated that the Nazi war-criminal Josef Mengele was hiding in the forests of the country's eastern regions. Human rights activists soon linked Stroessner's policies toward indigenous peoples with the extermination of European Jews under Hitler. Both the International Working Group on Indigenous Affairs (IWGIA) and Survival International began international campaigns about a Paraguayan policy of genocide against its indigenous minorities (Munzel 1973, 1974; Arens 1978). …