Mind and Experience in Tahiti, Nepal, and Beyond

Abstract

his special section of Ethos is dedicated to the memory and legacy of Robert I. Levy who died of complications from Parkinson's disease on August 29, 2003, in Asolo, Italy. Levy, 79, was professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, San Diego, from 1969 until his retirement to Chapel Hill, North Carolina, in 1991. Originally trained in medicine, psychiatry, and psychoanalysis, but with extensive fieldwork experience in Tahiti in the early 1960s, Levy was brought to UCSD to strengthen its emerging program in psychological anthropology. His graduate seminar on person-centered interviewing and observation strongly influenced several generations of UCSD students, and has since been recreated in several other departments of anthropology around the country. Levy will be best remembered for his two large books, Tahitians: Mind and Experience in the Society Islands (1973) and Mesocosm: Hinduism and the Organization of a Traditional Newar City in Nepal (1990), in which he explores the relationship between persons and their social and cultural contexts. Influenced by the two ecologists of mind and behavior, Gregory Bateson (to whom Tahitians is dedicated) and Roy Rappaport (his cousin and intellectual confidant), Levy was particularly interested in illuminating how the structure of life and interpersonal relations in a community affected the psychological organization of its actors; and in turn, how the psychological organization of actors helped shape and maintain social and cultural forms. He sometimes likened this complex interrelationship to that between a dancer and his or her dance and credited the Yeats poem, Among School Children, with suggesting this metaphor to him: body swayed to music/ O brightened glance/ How can we know the dancer from the dance?