Read Claude Levi-Strauss: The Poet in the Laboratory Online
Authors: Patrick Wilcken
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Claude Levi-Strauss: The Poet in the Laboratory (11 page)
BOOK: Claude Levi-Strauss: The Poet in the Laboratory
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A few of kilometers from the main village, the expedition party stopped off at a small Caduveo settlement on the Pitoko River—“a silent stream that arose mysteriously somewhere in the Pantanal, and disappeared just as mysteriously.” There, they slung hammocks in a couple of derelict houses that had once served as SPI offices. Lévi-Strauss managed to barter a few examples of the ceramics that the Caduveo were still making, but the experience was disappointing. “The Indians of Pitoko are completely civilized, in the most disturbing sense of the word,” wrote Dina, “that is to say very debased [
très déculturés
].”
48
très déculturés
].”
48
On the final stretch of the journey, they set off at midnight to take advantage of the cooler temperatures, only to be hit by a violent tropical storm—two hours of lightning and thunder, pounding and flaring “like shells from an artillery barrage.”
49
The squall moved off, revealing the sodden outlines of a village up ahead: groups of wall-less dwellings—fibrous roofs mounted on wooden posts—standing on low hillocks. They were expected. News of their arrival had traveled on ahead through networks of indigenous herdsmen, spreading an age-old anxiety that the arrival of foreigners brought.
49
The squall moved off, revealing the sodden outlines of a village up ahead: groups of wall-less dwellings—fibrous roofs mounted on wooden posts—standing on low hillocks. They were expected. News of their arrival had traveled on ahead through networks of indigenous herdsmen, spreading an age-old anxiety that the arrival of foreigners brought.
In many ways the Caduveo had reached a similar impasse to the Tibagy and the Kaingang—once an aristocratic tribe, dominating the region and enslaving the Terena, their less fortunate neighbors, they were now plagued by alcoholism, reduced to the impoverished life of Brazilian peasant ranchers. But there was a crucial difference. Elements of their material culture described by nineteenth-century travelers had survived the ravages of a predatory landgrab, the diseases that followed, as well as the Paraguayan War (1864-70), into which they had been coopted as cavalrymen.
The men were the sculptors, wrote Lévi-Strauss, the women the painters.
50
Among their artifacts were decorated ceramics, necklaces fashioned from beaten pieces of silver, and sculpted figurines, sometimes used for worship, sometimes given to children as playthings. Most striking, though, were the patterns—once tattooed, now painted on the faces of the women and girls. Lévi-Strauss had seen the late-nineteenth-century photographs by the Italian explorer and ethnographer Guido Boggiani, who had spent more than a decade on Brazil’s far western borderlands before being killed in Paraguay by a tribe who believed he was a witch. But he had not expected to find Caduveo art still intact and actively practiced.
50
Among their artifacts were decorated ceramics, necklaces fashioned from beaten pieces of silver, and sculpted figurines, sometimes used for worship, sometimes given to children as playthings. Most striking, though, were the patterns—once tattooed, now painted on the faces of the women and girls. Lévi-Strauss had seen the late-nineteenth-century photographs by the Italian explorer and ethnographer Guido Boggiani, who had spent more than a decade on Brazil’s far western borderlands before being killed in Paraguay by a tribe who believed he was a witch. But he had not expected to find Caduveo art still intact and actively practiced.
The women worked a fine bamboo spatula, tipped with
jenipapo
juice, producing clear lines that blackened on the face with oxidation. The patterns radiated from the mouth in scrolls and arabesques, then quartered the face with exquisite geometric motifs. As art, this was not the rough-cut primitivism that Lévi-Strauss would later document in the backlands of Brazil, but well-executed design, of a complexity and refinement that belied the squalid surroundings. At first he photographed them, but since they charged per image and demanded that he take a copious number of photos, he ended up feigning taking photographs and paying the fee, to preserve his film stock. He tried to draw the designs himself, and then handed out pieces of paper and got the women to reproduce them on the page, which they did without any difficulty whatsoever. He gathered several hundred, each alike, but none exactly the same—a register of S-shapes, whorls, crosses and opposed spirals, convex and concave arabesques. For Lévi-Strauss it was not so much the motifs themselves that were unique (some were in fact reminiscent of the Spanish baroque style, elements of which the Caduveo may have borrowed), but the way they were combined in alternating curvilinear themes. The women’s faces were a patchwork of slightly off-kilter symmetries and inversions that referenced each other with a hard-to-decipher logic.
jenipapo
juice, producing clear lines that blackened on the face with oxidation. The patterns radiated from the mouth in scrolls and arabesques, then quartered the face with exquisite geometric motifs. As art, this was not the rough-cut primitivism that Lévi-Strauss would later document in the backlands of Brazil, but well-executed design, of a complexity and refinement that belied the squalid surroundings. At first he photographed them, but since they charged per image and demanded that he take a copious number of photos, he ended up feigning taking photographs and paying the fee, to preserve his film stock. He tried to draw the designs himself, and then handed out pieces of paper and got the women to reproduce them on the page, which they did without any difficulty whatsoever. He gathered several hundred, each alike, but none exactly the same—a register of S-shapes, whorls, crosses and opposed spirals, convex and concave arabesques. For Lévi-Strauss it was not so much the motifs themselves that were unique (some were in fact reminiscent of the Spanish baroque style, elements of which the Caduveo may have borrowed), but the way they were combined in alternating curvilinear themes. The women’s faces were a patchwork of slightly off-kilter symmetries and inversions that referenced each other with a hard-to-decipher logic.
So caught up in the Caduveo aesthetic world was Lévi-Strauss that the discomforts of travel off the beaten track began to fade: “Conditions are of course tough,” he wrote in a letter, updating his friend and patron Mário de Andrade. “The heat is always overwhelming in the Pantanal. Some nights in Nalike we can’t help shivering and the mosquitoes are as you would imagine. But there are so many interesting and admirable things here that other matters are not terribly important.”
51
51
During his two-week stay, Lévi-Strauss took a series of close-ups of the women’s faces. On the older women, the designs play off wrinkles, the hollows of the cheeks, the creases on the forehead, like ornamental filigree on medieval parchment; while on the girls, pure lines swirl around the mouth with a seductive, flowerlike effect. There are also a couple of reels of film, a tantalizing glimpse backstage of his memoir,
Tristes Tropiques
. Only a few unsteady minutes of footage were shot, presented between silent-film-style explanatory text in Portuguese:
Entardecer
(Dusk),
Festa da puberdade de Nalike
(Nalike puberty celebration),
Confecção de rede
(Hammock making) and
Pinturas de face
(Face paintings). Black and white, shaky, slightly speeded up and at times overexposed, the footage has an antique vérité feel. A rapid opening pan across the village captures a glimpse of the backs of Lévi-Strauss and his French friend. They are dressed identically, looking like stereotypical nineteenth-century colonial expeditionists: white baggy overalls are fastened high up with a belt; hanging off the belt is a small leather sheath suitable for a hunting knife. The outfit is completed by sturdy hunting boots and sun helmets, of the type worn by Livingstone. Another shot has Dina Lévi-Strauss in animated conversation with one of the women. They seem to be talking about an object—perhaps a necklace—that Dina holds out between them.
Tristes Tropiques
. Only a few unsteady minutes of footage were shot, presented between silent-film-style explanatory text in Portuguese:
Entardecer
(Dusk),
Festa da puberdade de Nalike
(Nalike puberty celebration),
Confecção de rede
(Hammock making) and
Pinturas de face
(Face paintings). Black and white, shaky, slightly speeded up and at times overexposed, the footage has an antique vérité feel. A rapid opening pan across the village captures a glimpse of the backs of Lévi-Strauss and his French friend. They are dressed identically, looking like stereotypical nineteenth-century colonial expeditionists: white baggy overalls are fastened high up with a belt; hanging off the belt is a small leather sheath suitable for a hunting knife. The outfit is completed by sturdy hunting boots and sun helmets, of the type worn by Livingstone. Another shot has Dina Lévi-Strauss in animated conversation with one of the women. They seem to be talking about an object—perhaps a necklace—that Dina holds out between them.
The village looks more like a frontier campsite than anything resembling an indigenous settlement. A closer pan shows the eclectic cultural mix—inside the wall-less huts, a man sucks
mate
through a straw, a virtually naked woman weaves what looks like an ornamental belt, while in the background a figure dressed in cowboy gear sits by the campfire; as the camera turns toward him, he tilts his wide-rimmed cowboy hat to cover his face. More jerky footage has the women squatting together, drawing the disembodied designs on the sheets of paper that are scattered around them. An old woman in a tattered floral dress decorates her face using a pocket mirror; a younger, bare-breasted woman leans over a girl resting her head in her lap, applying
jenipapo
juice to the girl’s cheeks from a small pot at her side. The film ends with a final close-up of the most spectacular design—an old woman bedecked in jewelry. Her wrinkled face is evenly covered with dotted lines and scrolls, as if she were “peering out from behind a complicated ornamental screen.”
52
Her stare back into the camera is unwavering—an unreadable blank, to which hostility, defiance, world-weariness, indifference, boredom or a simple unfamiliarity with the act of being filmed could equally be ascribed.
mate
through a straw, a virtually naked woman weaves what looks like an ornamental belt, while in the background a figure dressed in cowboy gear sits by the campfire; as the camera turns toward him, he tilts his wide-rimmed cowboy hat to cover his face. More jerky footage has the women squatting together, drawing the disembodied designs on the sheets of paper that are scattered around them. An old woman in a tattered floral dress decorates her face using a pocket mirror; a younger, bare-breasted woman leans over a girl resting her head in her lap, applying
jenipapo
juice to the girl’s cheeks from a small pot at her side. The film ends with a final close-up of the most spectacular design—an old woman bedecked in jewelry. Her wrinkled face is evenly covered with dotted lines and scrolls, as if she were “peering out from behind a complicated ornamental screen.”
52
Her stare back into the camera is unwavering—an unreadable blank, to which hostility, defiance, world-weariness, indifference, boredom or a simple unfamiliarity with the act of being filmed could equally be ascribed.
The trip had been a success. To the surprise of the French
fazendeiros
, who had considered the Indians alcoholic layabouts, Lévi-Strauss’s party arrived back from their expedition laden with superb indigenous artifacts, among them huge pottery jars, deerskins and wood carvings. From this point on, the French
fazendeiros
cultivated ties with the Caduveo, decorating their farmhouse with indigenous art. But the relationship ended in tragedy: ten years later one of the
fazendeiros
was killed by a local Indian. “It is unlikely that two bachelors were able to resist the charms of the young Indian girls,” Lévi-Strauss speculated, “when they saw them half-naked on feast days, their bodies patiently decorated with delicate black and blue scrolls which seemed to fit their skin like a sheath of precious lace.” Lévi-Strauss felt he bore some indirect responsibility for the death, for in the end the
fazendeiro
had been “not so much a victim of the Indians, as a victim of the mental confusion into which he had been plunged by the visit of a party of young anthropologists.”
53
fazendeiros
, who had considered the Indians alcoholic layabouts, Lévi-Strauss’s party arrived back from their expedition laden with superb indigenous artifacts, among them huge pottery jars, deerskins and wood carvings. From this point on, the French
fazendeiros
cultivated ties with the Caduveo, decorating their farmhouse with indigenous art. But the relationship ended in tragedy: ten years later one of the
fazendeiros
was killed by a local Indian. “It is unlikely that two bachelors were able to resist the charms of the young Indian girls,” Lévi-Strauss speculated, “when they saw them half-naked on feast days, their bodies patiently decorated with delicate black and blue scrolls which seemed to fit their skin like a sheath of precious lace.” Lévi-Strauss felt he bore some indirect responsibility for the death, for in the end the
fazendeiro
had been “not so much a victim of the Indians, as a victim of the mental confusion into which he had been plunged by the visit of a party of young anthropologists.”
53
More than the artifacts that he had collected, it was the Caduveo face designs that resonated with Lévi-Strauss. Over the following years he would come back to them often, writing articles and devoting a chapter of his memoir to his experiences. In a recent interview he described the women as “great artists.”
54
In spite of the sorry state of their culture, the Caduveo had clung on to something that he found both aesthetically appealing and intellectually challenging. But it would be many years before he had the tools to analyze them. While he was in Brazil he toyed with conventional, if ambitious, explanations, trying to connect Caduveo design to the patterns on the pottery that had turned up thousands of kilometers away on the vast island of Marajó, which sits at the mouth of the Amazon, a line of inquiry that he later abandoned. By the time he had reached his conclusions, the phenomenon had slipped into history. The village was abandoned ten years after Lévi-Strauss passed through, the tradition of face painting disappearing in the cultural turbulence of the frontier.
54
In spite of the sorry state of their culture, the Caduveo had clung on to something that he found both aesthetically appealing and intellectually challenging. But it would be many years before he had the tools to analyze them. While he was in Brazil he toyed with conventional, if ambitious, explanations, trying to connect Caduveo design to the patterns on the pottery that had turned up thousands of kilometers away on the vast island of Marajó, which sits at the mouth of the Amazon, a line of inquiry that he later abandoned. By the time he had reached his conclusions, the phenomenon had slipped into history. The village was abandoned ten years after Lévi-Strauss passed through, the tradition of face painting disappearing in the cultural turbulence of the frontier.
FOR THE LAST YEAR, Lévi-Strauss had been on a slow, arduous journey away from the West—from Paris to São Paulo, from the frontier towns to the pitiful indigenous reservations of Paraná, and then on to the Caduveo, whose traditional culture was in its last stages of unraveling. The next phase would finally deliver him into the classic fieldwork scenario he had been hankering after since leaving Europe—a tribe remote enough to display the trappings of authenticity, the fetishized objects of the Western imagination: penis sheaths, multicolored headdresses, nose feathers, lip ornaments and body paint. Despite their long contact with Silesian missionaries and the beginnings of an influx of Western tools, clothes and diseases, the Bororo still looked the part—particularly the men, whose athletic bodies were smeared with vegetable dye and decorated with shells, palm fronds and feathers. The Bororo’s highly ritualized lifestyle, their myths, their rich cosmology and material culture filled out the ethnographic possibilities for the young, ambitious anthropologist.
But Lévi-Strauss had to work hard for his prize. There were days in a steamer that took the Paraguay River’s twists and turns upstream to the regional capital of Cuiabá. From there the Lévi-Strausses traveled by truck through rough gold-prospecting camps, then, taking a half-abandoned road, dropped down to the São Lourenço River. The last phase of the journey descended into chaos. The truck battled a boggy, overgrown track, often becoming marooned in the mud or blocked by foliage. Between digging the truck out of the mud and shifting fallen trees, the team spent uncomfortable nights sleeping on the bare earth, kept dry by rubber mackintoshes doubling as groundsheets.
55
Most of the bridges had been burned out by bushfires, forcing them to ford streams in the truck or to punt across rivers on rafts. When they reached the São Lourenço River, where the first Bororo camps were said to be, they found only five empty huts, obscured in the mists of the valley. Exasperated, they fanned out in all directions, but found nothing. Their only contact was a pale fisherman who told them that yellow fever had recently spread through the area, scattering the villagers. The nearest Bororo settlement—the Kejara
aldeia
(village)—was some way upstream.
55
Most of the bridges had been burned out by bushfires, forcing them to ford streams in the truck or to punt across rivers on rafts. When they reached the São Lourenço River, where the first Bororo camps were said to be, they found only five empty huts, obscured in the mists of the valley. Exasperated, they fanned out in all directions, but found nothing. Their only contact was a pale fisherman who told them that yellow fever had recently spread through the area, scattering the villagers. The nearest Bororo settlement—the Kejara
aldeia
(village)—was some way upstream.
The expedition spent a week canoeing against a swift current powered by tropical downpours as they ascended the Rio Vermelho, a tributary of the São Lourenço. Upstream they spotted naked figures—Bororo tribesmen—in the distance. “It’s as if it were yesterday,” Lévi-Strauss remembered in a television interview he gave some thirty years after the event. “Camped on the riverside, we saw two, three shapes, rather red, on the edge of the water—they were the first Bororo that we laid eyes upon.”
56
The expedition members approached and tried to engage with them, but found that the only Portuguese word they seemed to know was
fumo
(tobacco). Communicating by gesture, they worked out that the Bororo village was but hours away. The tribesmen went on ahead to announce their imminent arrival, while Lévi-Strauss’s party embarked on the final leg of their journey.
56
The expedition members approached and tried to engage with them, but found that the only Portuguese word they seemed to know was
fumo
(tobacco). Communicating by gesture, they worked out that the Bororo village was but hours away. The tribesmen went on ahead to announce their imminent arrival, while Lévi-Strauss’s party embarked on the final leg of their journey.
Later that day, climbing the steep banks of the river, Lévi-Strauss at last found himself among the “virtuous savages” he had philosophized about, a 140-strong indigenous village with few outward signs of acculturation. He was overwhelmed by fatigue and excitement, “hunger, thirst and mental confusion.” He noticed the great huts, “not so much built as knotted together,” woven into a kind of giant garment, of “grassy velvetiness,” that protected their naked bodies.
57
Unlike the timid, broken indigenous peoples that Lévi-Strauss had already seen, the Bororo stood proud, glowing with a red pigment made from a mix of
urucu
seeds and animal fat, imprinted with black resin and dusted over with a mother-of-pearl powder. They laughed and joked as they stowed the expedition’s luggage in a corner of the twelve-meter-by-five-meter hut, where Lévi-Strauss and his wife would sleep alongside the shaman’s family and an elderly Bororo widow. (Dina, a slender, gamine figure who wore trousers and sported cropped hair, was apparently assumed to be a man by the Bororo, so special arrangements were not necessary.)
58
Lévi-Strauss was in a state of heightened sensitivity. “As I proceeded to settle into our corner of a large hut, I was soaking up these images, rather than grasping them intellectually,” he later recalled.
59
He dozed off to the sounds of Bororo song—an elaborate ritual prelude to the eating of the
irara
, a type of badger that the expedition party had shot earlier and presented to the Bororo as a gift. Wind instruments, gravel-filled gourd rattles and the low chants of the men’s voices played out their rhythms, which Lévi-Strauss later wrote were as sophisticated and subtle as those coaxed by Europe’s finest conductors.
60
57
Unlike the timid, broken indigenous peoples that Lévi-Strauss had already seen, the Bororo stood proud, glowing with a red pigment made from a mix of
urucu
seeds and animal fat, imprinted with black resin and dusted over with a mother-of-pearl powder. They laughed and joked as they stowed the expedition’s luggage in a corner of the twelve-meter-by-five-meter hut, where Lévi-Strauss and his wife would sleep alongside the shaman’s family and an elderly Bororo widow. (Dina, a slender, gamine figure who wore trousers and sported cropped hair, was apparently assumed to be a man by the Bororo, so special arrangements were not necessary.)
58
Lévi-Strauss was in a state of heightened sensitivity. “As I proceeded to settle into our corner of a large hut, I was soaking up these images, rather than grasping them intellectually,” he later recalled.
59
He dozed off to the sounds of Bororo song—an elaborate ritual prelude to the eating of the
irara
, a type of badger that the expedition party had shot earlier and presented to the Bororo as a gift. Wind instruments, gravel-filled gourd rattles and the low chants of the men’s voices played out their rhythms, which Lévi-Strauss later wrote were as sophisticated and subtle as those coaxed by Europe’s finest conductors.
60
BOOK: Claude Levi-Strauss: The Poet in the Laboratory
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