Claude Levi-Strauss: The Poet in the Laboratory (13 page)
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Authors: Patrick Wilcken
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BOOK: Claude Levi-Strauss: The Poet in the Laboratory
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It was there, on the riverbank, that they came across a small outpost of semiacculturated Karaja Indians. Karaja villages spread up the immense Araguaia Valley, across the world’s largest interfluvial island, the two-million-hectare Ilha do Bananal. For centuries the Karaja had moved through this region, fishing, hunting turtles and cultivating maize, manioc and watermelons in forest gardens. Now some groups had dropped down into the outskirts of Brazilian frontier towns, hawking artisanal wares to passing travelers. Lévi-Strauss sat down with them and tried to communicate, apparently with some success. “I marveled at how he could decipher gestures that for Courtin and me were merely picturesque,” remembered Maugüé.
78
While Lévi-Strauss asked questions and took notes, a timid little girl fashioned two clay dolls with giant phalluses for Courtin and Maugüé. Lévi-Strauss collected several other examples of the unbaked dolls, with their black wax hair, bark loincloths and ballooning thighs. He was impressed by the formal similarities between these dolls and statuettes dug up in prehistoric Aurignacian culture, also drawing parallels to short, distended thighs found in Mexican Gualupita terra-cotta figures.
79
He took pictures—one of a Karaja woman in a loose patterned dress inspecting a doll; another of a native woman at work, sitting on fibrous mat with a knife, a pot of dye and a ball of string lying about her.
78
While Lévi-Strauss asked questions and took notes, a timid little girl fashioned two clay dolls with giant phalluses for Courtin and Maugüé. Lévi-Strauss collected several other examples of the unbaked dolls, with their black wax hair, bark loincloths and ballooning thighs. He was impressed by the formal similarities between these dolls and statuettes dug up in prehistoric Aurignacian culture, also drawing parallels to short, distended thighs found in Mexican Gualupita terra-cotta figures.
79
He took pictures—one of a Karaja woman in a loose patterned dress inspecting a doll; another of a native woman at work, sitting on fibrous mat with a knife, a pot of dye and a ball of string lying about her.
After a few days among the Karaja, they turned the car around. On the return trip, Courtin’s Ford, which had battled from town to town down fifteen hundred kilometers of rutted tracks more normally used by mule trains and oxcarts, began to deteriorate. The front suspension snapped, leaving the engine balancing on the axle. They managed to make it a hundred kilometers farther before carrying out makeshift repairs in a small town where a mechanic fitted a strip of metal to hold up the engine. Then it was an anxious six-hundred-kilometer slog home. As the car bumped its way through São Paulo state, Maugüé caught a glimpse of his companions. “From the back of the car, I watched Lévi-Strauss, sitting beside Courtin,” he remembered. “His sober expression nonetheless betrayed the jubilation we shared on being back in the city with all its comforts and above all a bathroom.”
80
80
AS LÉVI-STRAUSS set his sights on more intensive fieldwork, the political turbulence of the 1930s was already threatening to intervene. In the streets of Rio de Janeiro, the Nazi-styled Integralists were goose-stepping in uniforms emblazoned with a swastika-like emblem, the sigma (Σ), the mathematical sign of the integral. They churned out crude anti-Semitic propaganda, with books like
Brazil: Colony of Bankers
and
The São Paulo Synagogue
, and branded refugees from Hitler as “human garbage.” In a bizarre ethnographic reference, they hailed one another with a strong-arm salute, accompanied by the word
anauê
, a native Tupi greeting. To the far left, communist agitators threatened insurrection, staging wildcat strikes and violent protests. President Getúlio Vargas was adopting an increasingly authoritarian path through the morass. After being courted in Europe and brought over to teach in Brazil, the French were now viewed with suspicion. Lévi-Strauss’s links to French socialism, as well as his connection to the well-known leftist and antifascist campaigner Paul Rivet at the Musée de l’Homme, put him in a particularly sensitive position. “We had interminable difficulties renewing our contracts,” remembered Maugüé.
81
Brazil: Colony of Bankers
and
The São Paulo Synagogue
, and branded refugees from Hitler as “human garbage.” In a bizarre ethnographic reference, they hailed one another with a strong-arm salute, accompanied by the word
anauê
, a native Tupi greeting. To the far left, communist agitators threatened insurrection, staging wildcat strikes and violent protests. President Getúlio Vargas was adopting an increasingly authoritarian path through the morass. After being courted in Europe and brought over to teach in Brazil, the French were now viewed with suspicion. Lévi-Strauss’s links to French socialism, as well as his connection to the well-known leftist and antifascist campaigner Paul Rivet at the Musée de l’Homme, put him in a particularly sensitive position. “We had interminable difficulties renewing our contracts,” remembered Maugüé.
81
In France, the pendulum was moving in the other direction. Listening to the news on shortwave radio, Lévi-Strauss was elated to learn of the victory of the socialist Front populaire and the ministerial post of Georges Monnet, for whom he had worked as a secretary in the 1920s. He was expecting to receive the call to work for Monnet and, had it come, Lévi-Strauss later recalled, “I would have boarded the first outward-bound ship.”
82
In retrospect, it was a fork in the road: “My former comrades had forgotten me. Events, the new course my life was taking, did the rest . . .”
83
In the historical cauldron of the mid-1930s, Lévi-Strauss’s political aspirations died at the very moment that his career as an anthropologist was lifting off.
82
In retrospect, it was a fork in the road: “My former comrades had forgotten me. Events, the new course my life was taking, did the rest . . .”
83
In the historical cauldron of the mid-1930s, Lévi-Strauss’s political aspirations died at the very moment that his career as an anthropologist was lifting off.
3
Rondon’s Line
Imagine an area as big as France, three-quarters of it unexplored, frequented only by small groups of native nomads who are amongst the most primitive to be found anywhere in the world, and traversed, from one end to the other, by a telegraph line.
CLAUDE LÉVI-STRAUSS
1
1
LÉVI-STRAUSS BEGAN SCOUTING for field sites for a major ethnographic expedition. He had two points of reference: his own brief stay among the Bororo, and Nimuendajú’s more detailed studies of the indigenous groups in central Brazil. Through correspondence with Nimuendajú, it seemed that even though they were describing tribes more than a thousand kilometers apart, their findings tallied; the assumption was that the scattered tribes of central Brazil made up one vast cultural/ linguistic area—the Ge. It was thought that the Ge had once occupied the coastal zone, but had been pushed back into more inhospitable terrain by the Tupi-Guarani before European colonization. When the Portuguese arrived, they found Tupi cultures spread out along a great arc running along the Amazon corridor, down the Brazilian littoral and back up the Paraguay River into the interior. The Ge had been left with the rugged savannah of the central plateau, now at the anthropological frontier.
Ambitiously, Lévi-Strauss conceived of a “cross-section through Brazilian anthropology” traversing this region, from Cuiabá to the Rio Madeira. Accompanied by a team of experts, he planned to spend a year crossing an immense stretch of wilderness in an attempt, as he immodestly put it, “to understand America” rather than “study human nature by basing my research on one particular instance.” Lévi-Strauss’s goal was not just to survey the western outer reaches of the Ge, but—once over the rim of the Amazon Basin and into the forest—to contact little-known outposts of the Arawak, Carib and Tupi cultures as well. Later he would consider even this enterprise inadequate. “Today,” he wrote in the 1950s, “I realise that the western hemisphere must be studied as a whole.”
2
2
The route that Lévi-Strauss eventually chose was forbidding. Beginning in Cuiabá, it traced a diagonal running in a northwesterly direction, roughly parallel to the border with Bolivia. Dirt tracks first crossed an arid scrub, broken by the orchardlike
cerrado
, where evenly spaced trees with gnarled trunks and contorted branches squatted along the plains. Farther north, thickets concealed a series of Amazon tributaries, which gushed down the otherwise parched plateau. At the halfway mark, Vilhena, the terrain changed again; dust turned to vapor, the biscuit-colored scrub to the deep greens of the great Amazon rain forest. In the 1930s this was still a virtual blank on the map. The frontier had stalled somewhere between the exhausted goldfields of the south and the impoverished riverine communities of rubber-tappers to the northwest. So little was known about this region that it was named after a mountain range—the Serra do Norte
—
that is, in fact, no more than a rocky outcrop. It might have seemed like inauspicious terrain in which to travel, let alone mount a large-scale ethnographic mission, but there was one potential route through—a single telegraph line whose filaments looped their way across the plateau, threading along a narrow
picada
(trail) hacked through the forest a quarter of a century before.
cerrado
, where evenly spaced trees with gnarled trunks and contorted branches squatted along the plains. Farther north, thickets concealed a series of Amazon tributaries, which gushed down the otherwise parched plateau. At the halfway mark, Vilhena, the terrain changed again; dust turned to vapor, the biscuit-colored scrub to the deep greens of the great Amazon rain forest. In the 1930s this was still a virtual blank on the map. The frontier had stalled somewhere between the exhausted goldfields of the south and the impoverished riverine communities of rubber-tappers to the northwest. So little was known about this region that it was named after a mountain range—the Serra do Norte
—
that is, in fact, no more than a rocky outcrop. It might have seemed like inauspicious terrain in which to travel, let alone mount a large-scale ethnographic mission, but there was one potential route through—a single telegraph line whose filaments looped their way across the plateau, threading along a narrow
picada
(trail) hacked through the forest a quarter of a century before.
Its origins lay in the life of Cândido Rondon (1865-1958), a military officer and the founder of the SPI, the predecessor of today’s federal agency the Fundação Nacional do Índio, or FUNAI (National Foundation for the Indian). A short, upright man with a bushy mustache, Rondon was a rare breed for the times—a frontiersman who was sensitive to the plight of the indigenous peoples, who he believed could become assimilated Brazilians, working as clerks or seamstresses. He placed his faith in positivism, a secular religion based on the theories of Auguste Comte, which stressed progress through the dispassionate application of science and technology. Through his long career, he single-handedly explored much of the state that now bears his name, Rondônia, making peaceable contact with many indigenous groups whose only previous exchanges with Europeans had been running skirmishes with frontiersmen.
In 1907, Rondon was put in charge of the extension of Brazil’s telegraph system from Cuiabá into the Amazon, with a view to connecting the then federal capital, Rio de Janeiro, all the way up to the Bolivian frontier. Crews began by cutting a trail. They dug a series of holes for the crooked tree trunks that served as telegraph polls, attached the porcelain elements to the tops of the posts, and slung them with reels of wire. At intervals they established telegraph stations, equipped with leather chairs, telephone exchanges and Morse code machines. Over the first stretch the going was relatively easy, but when the line entered the forest, cutting involved felling hardwoods and clearing solid vegetation, all in a sodden ninety-five-degree heat. Malarial fevers swept through the work crews, livestock began dying off, morale slumped, but Rondon drove his men on with strict military discipline. In the middle of the jungle he would insist on lecturing his workers for hours on end, showing slides of the Brazilian president and playing the national anthem on gramophone records.
Indigenous peoples, many of whom would only ever have seen lone rubber-tappers passing through, periodically approached the construction site as it shifted slowly through the forest. It is difficult to know what they would have made of several hundred men with pack animals and mountains of equipment hewing a corridor through the forest. From later reports it seems they ended up attaching a naturalistic significance to the telegraph line itself—equating the rounded shape of the transformers and their humming sound with beehives.
Some indigenous groups, however, did make contact. Photos from the line-building expedition show an enthusiastic Rondon handing out pairs of white cotton trousers and draping indigenous children in Brazilian flags. Various “improving” habits were taught—one photo has a group of Paresi children in rows balancing awkwardly on one leg with arms outstretched, performing calisthenics, a type of Swedish gymnastics. In others, a teacher instructs a small brass band made up of indigenous children trying to master trombones, trumpets and clarinets. Children were taught to read and write, along with basic mathematics. The boys also learned potential trades, such as shoe repair and Morse code, while the girls practiced sewing, embroidery and typing.
The Rondon line never really worked properly. Loose connections, power failures and substation breakdowns made the service intermittent and unreliable. In any case, as the last posts were being driven into the ground, the seven hundred kilometers of wood and wire were already obsolete. After a decade of work and the deaths of hundreds of men, the telegraph line was quietly superseded by shortwave radio. As Lévi-Strauss prepared to journey up the line, all that was left of Rondon’s
grand projet
was a handful of employees stranded in lonely telegraph stations, unable to leave because of the debts they had racked up to backland traders. At other posts, in a rebuke to Rondon’s positivist ideology, missionaries had filled the vacuum, proselytizing the local indigenous population. The line itself—with its lopsided posts and sagging wire—had begun its long decline.
3
grand projet
was a handful of employees stranded in lonely telegraph stations, unable to leave because of the debts they had racked up to backland traders. At other posts, in a rebuke to Rondon’s positivist ideology, missionaries had filled the vacuum, proselytizing the local indigenous population. The line itself—with its lopsided posts and sagging wire—had begun its long decline.
3
RETURNING TO PARIS in November 1937 at the end of the Brazilian academic year, Lévi-Strauss read what little had been published on the so-called Serra do Norte and the Ge-speaking groups that he hoped to study: a classic ethnography by the Brazilian anthropologist Edgar Roquette-Pinto, who had accompanied Rondon; work done by Curt Nimuendajú on central Brazil; the first volumes of the Rondon Commission, a documentary project set up in conjunction with the building of the telegraph line; and the memoirs of Theodore Roosevelt, whom Rondon had hosted on a game-hunting expedition in the 1910s. With financial backing through Paul Rivet at the Musée de l’Homme in place and letters of introduction to the Brazilian authorities, Lévi-Strauss stocked up on trinkets for bartering in wholesale outlets at the Carrefour Réaumur-Sébastopol. After his experiences among the Bororo, he had some idea of what was likely to be prized—small beads in a spectrum of colors that the Indians were already familiar with: blacks from palm nuts, whites from mother-of-pearl river shells, yellows and reds from the
urucu
dyes.
urucu
dyes.
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