Within weeks, I fell into the orbit of Professor David Maybury-Lewis, who became my tutor. A man of searing intelligence, whose formal eloquence masked a deeply humane spirit, Maybury-Lewis remains one of the great Americanists, a brilliant scholar who had lived for years among the Akwé-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. 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.
Maybury-Lewis had travelled to central Brazil in the mid-1950s to investigate and, in a sense, celebrate the so-called Gê 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 Gê.
Living in the forests of Mato Grosso and on the arid savannahs and uplands that separate the southern Amazon basin from the Atlantic coast, the Akwé-Xavante, Xerente, Kayapó, Timbira and a host of other peoples all spoke dialects of the Gê language family. Semi-nomadic hunters and gatherers, they ranged across vast territories, hunting peccaries for meat, 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 1950 s were still dependent on the bow and arrow. They cleared the savannah, but their harvests were meagre, 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 of a marginal people, technologically backward yet mentally and intellectually afire, confounded many early ethnographers. Hence, the notion of the Gê anomaly. But the great French anthropologist Claude Lévi-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 Gê 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 Gê tribes, Lévi-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. The men lived apart from their families, in a ceremonial structure at the centre of the enclosure. The women dwelled with the children in huts on the periphery of the encampment, at the edge of the human realm. Outside the domestic space was a ring of fields, feral and unkempt, where women birthed and husbands coupled with their wives. Beyond the clearings, the forest and savannah reached in all directions to the horizon.
This quest for balance, Lévi-Strauss maintained, was a fundamental human urge, a key adaptive trait that allowed peoples such as the Bororo to come to terms with the fragility of their lives and the harshness of the natural world that surrounded them. At the very least, it provided an illusion of control, that in their scattered encampments they were not utterly at the mercy of the fickle forces of life and death. Modern industrialized society has precisely the same need to insulate the individual from nature and indulges in similar illusions that it can be accomplished. The difference lies in the medium. We build machines and dwell in cities. The Gê peoples find protection in a web of ideas, beliefs and ritual practices dreamed into being at the beginning of time.
From these insights, Lévi-Strauss elaborated a model of dualistic societies so simple and yet so all-encompassing as to almost defy belief. Clearly, it allowed for a better understanding of the Bororo. But what of the other societies of Central Brazil? It was, in part, a desire to challenge Lévi-Strauss, or at least to test his model, that in 19 57 led David Maybury-Lewis to travel up the Río das Mortes, the River of the Dead, and to fly into a remote mission adjacent to the lands of the Akwé-Xavante, at the time the most feared and warlike of all the indigenous tribes of Brazil.
“From the air,” Professor Maybury-Lewis recalled one afternoon when we met for a tutorial in his book-lined office overlooking the courtyard of the Tozzer Library, “everything looked right.”
Laid out before him, just as Lévi-Strauss had described, were the men’s circle and ritual shelters at the epicentre, the concentric rings of houses, fields and forest. But after months on the ground, and despite having mastered the language, Maybury-Lewis was more confused than ever. There were not two patrilineages, but three, and the marriage rules were inconsistent with the simple bilateral pattern that Lévi-Strauss had reported for the Bororo. What’s more, the bonds of kinship were crosscut by age sets.
Irrespective of lineage, every male of the same age shared the same age set. Each spanned five years, and there were eight in all. Thus, all boys aged five to ten, for example, or men thirty to thirty-five, were united as members of a named age set. Those few who lived beyond the age of forty once again became members of the first cohort. Several times a year, the age sets would divide into two teams for a race, with cohorts 1, 3 , 5 and 7 going up against 2 , 4 , 6 and 8 , an arrangement that ensured that each side would have a similar mix of infants, boys, men and elders. The race itself entailed each side carrying a large and heavy log for long distances across the savannah, a marathon of dust, sweat and endurance that left every participant spent and exhausted.
Maybury-Lewis loved the excitement and avidly took part, though once again he found the ritual confusing. For one thing, no one was particularly concerned that the logs carried by each side be of similar weight. For another, it was not uncommon for the leading side to pause in the midst of the race, allowing the other to catch up. The first time Maybury-Lewis ran, his team did well, crossing the finishing line hours ahead of the opposition. He revelled in the victory, until he noticed that all of his teammates were downcast. The next time they raced, several weeks later, the other side won decisively, and everyone seemed crestfallen. Totally bewildered, Maybury-Lewis took part in yet a third race. This time, to the disappointment of the competitor in him, the sides approached and crossed the line at the same instant. To his utter surprise, both teams and the entire community erupted in a whirlwind of celebration.
“The goal wasn’t to win,” he recalled with a smile, “it was to arrive together.”
All the tensions inherent in three competing lineages, every conflict within the culture, are distilled into two opposing factions, the two teams that give their all in a frenzied effort to reach a tie. Opposition and harmony, the resolution of conflict in ritual balance. It was more complex than Lévi-Strauss had ever imagined. The dualistic notion permeated every aspect of the culture, as did the central quest for resolution and equilibrium.
“What would happen,” Maybury-Lewis asked me, “should the race not occur, or should it never end in a tie?”
I hesitated, uncertain how to answer. Then I heard myself say, “The culture would atrophy.”
“Yes!”
