Claude Levi-Strauss: The Poet in the Laboratory (16 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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As night fell, the Nambikwara gathered about their fires in animated conversation, which Lévi-Strauss tried with great difficulty to understand, while children milled around, goading the newcomers to join them in their games. When the Nambikwara lay on the ground to sleep, the team retired, Lévi-Strauss slinging his hammock, around which he hung a curious, box-shaped mosquito net, specially designed by a seamstress in Cuiabá.
It seems there was little collaboration. “I work alone . . . ,” Castro Faria wrote. “Individualism, as a method of work, is absolute.” Lévi-Strauss was “silent, introspective,” he remembered later. “He had no true relationship with Vellard or me. It was absolute individualism: each kept his own notes. Vellard had no idea what Lévi-Strauss was writing down and vice versa. For a Brazilian it was a very unusual experience.”
34
Lévi-Strauss was solitary by nature, more suited to the Malinowskian-style fieldwork to which he aspired, begging the question of why he had ended up organizing such a large and logistically complex mission. He was also guarded about his own findings in front of the Brazilian anthropologist, for both professional and political reasons. But in the rough campsites on the plateau, with the team struggling to understand the worldview of the Nambikwara, the scenario has a strange, almost neurotic feel to it.
34
Lévi-Strauss was solitary by nature, more suited to the Malinowskian-style fieldwork to which he aspired, begging the question of why he had ended up organizing such a large and logistically complex mission. He was also guarded about his own findings in front of the Brazilian anthropologist, for both professional and political reasons. But in the rough campsites on the plateau, with the team struggling to understand the worldview of the Nambikwara, the scenario has a strange, almost neurotic feel to it.
AFTER ONLY TWO WEEKS’ WORK, a gonorrheal eye infection spread by the
lambe-olho
fly began to afflict the Nambikwara. The group was soon in agony, sitting on their haunches or lying in the sands clutching their foreheads while family members administered some kind of herbal remedy through a leaf rolled up into a cone. By July 10, Dina Lévi-Strauss had caught the infection and her eyes were full of pus. Lévi-Strauss ordered medical supplies from Cuiabá, and then, in consultation with Vellard, decided that Dina’s condition was too severe for her to continue in the field. They accompanied her back to Cuiabá, from where she returned to São Paulo for treatment. There, Mário de Andrade received a letter from a friend, Oneyda Alvarenga, describing her condition in alarmist terms:
lambe-olho
fly began to afflict the Nambikwara. The group was soon in agony, sitting on their haunches or lying in the sands clutching their foreheads while family members administered some kind of herbal remedy through a leaf rolled up into a cone. By July 10, Dina Lévi-Strauss had caught the infection and her eyes were full of pus. Lévi-Strauss ordered medical supplies from Cuiabá, and then, in consultation with Vellard, decided that Dina’s condition was too severe for her to continue in the field. They accompanied her back to Cuiabá, from where she returned to São Paulo for treatment. There, Mário de Andrade received a letter from a friend, Oneyda Alvarenga, describing her condition in alarmist terms:
Did you know that Mme. Lévi-Strauss is almost blind and will perhaps lose her sight? She caught a purulent conjunctivitis in Mato Grosso which her husband avoided, they told me, by wearing glasses (which I thought was ridiculous). I don’t know any more. She’s here and might be leaving for France. Lévi-Strauss is going ahead with his work among the Indians.
35
Although, after returning to Paris, Dina did in fact make a full recovery, the infection could have caused blindness if it had been left untreated. It was also very contagious, and over the following weeks it spread through the rest of the team, with the exception of Lévi-Strauss. Castro Faria’s diary entries plot the ailment’s progress. August 7: “Everyone is terribly affected by a purulent ophthalmia.” August 8: “I have contracted the ophthalmia that afflicts the rest of them. It really is excruciating.” August 10: “A night of terrible suffering. I didn’t sleep a wink, tormented by an almost unbearable pain.”
36
After months of preparation, fieldwork had ground to a halt almost as soon as it had begun.
36
After months of preparation, fieldwork had ground to a halt almost as soon as it had begun.
Lévi-Strauss went on ahead up the line to Campos Novos—“Journey very long and without interest . . . long and difficult crossing of dry forest,” he scribbled in his field notes—where he spent a despondent fortnight waiting for the others to recover.
37
Alone on a poverty-racked substation, living off wild pigeons, guava and
caju
, Lévi-Strauss became dejected. The few inhabitants there were riddled with hookworm and malaria. Unlike the indigenous families at the Utiariti station, the local Nambikwara groups that he had come to study were at one another’s throats, and took a particular dislike to Lévi-Strauss. Retreating to the sidelines, he watched the spectacle of a Nambikwara feud. The two groups confronted each other, yelling insults, holding their penises and pointing them in aggression, and trying to steal bows and arrows, before eventually exchanging bracelets,
urucu
paste and gourds in reconciliation.
37
Alone on a poverty-racked substation, living off wild pigeons, guava and
caju
, Lévi-Strauss became dejected. The few inhabitants there were riddled with hookworm and malaria. Unlike the indigenous families at the Utiariti station, the local Nambikwara groups that he had come to study were at one another’s throats, and took a particular dislike to Lévi-Strauss. Retreating to the sidelines, he watched the spectacle of a Nambikwara feud. The two groups confronted each other, yelling insults, holding their penises and pointing them in aggression, and trying to steal bows and arrows, before eventually exchanging bracelets,
urucu
paste and gourds in reconciliation.
Disillusioned, unable to work, Lévi-Strauss marked time by rereading his notes, checking his diagrams and jotting down ideas, but he soon tired of recycling his own material. He fell into a depression, taunted by regret and self-doubt:
It was now nearly five years since I had left France and interrupted my university career. Meanwhile, the more prudent of my colleagues were beginning to climb the academic ladder: those with political leanings, such as I had once had, were already members of parliament and would soon be ministers. And here was I, trekking across desert wastes in pursuit of a few pathetic human remnants.
38
Exasperated, he began work on a play, written on the reverse sides of his field notes. It was called
L’Apothéose d’Auguste
(
The Apotheosis of Augustus
), an involved companion piece to the seventeenth-century French playwright Pierre Corneille’s classical tragedy
Cinna
.
39
Beginning as the senate discusses Augustus’s possible deification, it centers around Cinna, the object of affection of Augustus’s sister Camille. Although in love with Camille, Cinna has rejected society, spending ten years on the road in self-imposed exile, subsisting off lizards and snakes. His hard-won outcast status will enable him to return and claim Camille authentically and not merely as a result of social convention.
L’Apothéose d’Auguste
(
The Apotheosis of Augustus
), an involved companion piece to the seventeenth-century French playwright Pierre Corneille’s classical tragedy
Cinna
.
39
Beginning as the senate discusses Augustus’s possible deification, it centers around Cinna, the object of affection of Augustus’s sister Camille. Although in love with Camille, Cinna has rejected society, spending ten years on the road in self-imposed exile, subsisting off lizards and snakes. His hard-won outcast status will enable him to return and claim Camille authentically and not merely as a result of social convention.
As the story progresses, Cinna seems more and more like a cipher for Lévi-Strauss himself and his predicament—a drifter who is beginning to doubt the validity of his adventures. Enlightenment through travel, Cinna concludes, is a lie, “a snare and a delusion.” Stories of adventure exist only in the mind of the listener; in reality “the experience was nothing; the earth resembled this earth and the blades of grass were the same in this meadow.” Cinna ends up filling his days reciting Aeschylus and Sophocles until they become meaningless, stripped of their beauty, now only reminding him of “dusty roads, burnt grass and eyes reddened by the sand”—just as Lévi-Strauss found that he could not shake the melody of Chopin’s Étude no. 3, op. 10 from his head as he tramped through some of the remotest regions of western Brazil.
40
Moving into the third act, the plot pushes forward in a typically classical direction. Augustus, told by Jupiter’s ragged eagle that becoming a god would involve a Cinna-like journey into oblivion, talks to Cinna about his dilemma. They come up with a solution to their respective problems: Cinna must assassinate Augustus. Augustus will achieve lasting public veneration, while Cinna will realize his goal of social rebellion.
41
40
Moving into the third act, the plot pushes forward in a typically classical direction. Augustus, told by Jupiter’s ragged eagle that becoming a god would involve a Cinna-like journey into oblivion, talks to Cinna about his dilemma. They come up with a solution to their respective problems: Cinna must assassinate Augustus. Augustus will achieve lasting public veneration, while Cinna will realize his goal of social rebellion.
41
At the end of act three, inspiration deserted him. Like Cinna, Lévi-Strauss had reached an impasse. Travel had promised a new world of ideas and experiences, yet here he was, holed up in a banal two-horse town in the Brazilian backlands, trapped inside his head. Had he hacked hundreds of kilometers down the telegraph line seeking the truths of indigenous nomads, only to return to the myths of antiquity?
Loneliness, depression, the weight of expectation, the sense of futility, the shadow of madness—Lévi-Strauss was finally experiencing the truth about modern fieldwork. Unlike any other discipline, that era’s anthropological research was based on a situation of maximal alienation. The feeling of being cut off, stranded both geographically and culturally, was thought to be the route to true knowledge. Lévi-Strauss was fortunate that he could return to the rest of the expedition. However formal his relationships with the rest of the team were, there was at least the prospect of familiar references and conversation.
AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST BUELL QUAIN had no such option as he began fieldwork in the Xingu. He had chosen difficult hosts. The Trumaí lived in fear, besieged by their neighbors, the Suyá and the Kamayurá. “All death is murder,” he wrote in a letter to his supervisor at Columbia, Ruth Benedict. “Nobody expects to live longer than the next rainy season.” The small group was also riven with sexual tensions—a paucity of available women had turned a girl whom no one would claim as a relative because of her ringworm into the tribe’s prostitute. Struggling with the language, Quain compiled notes with little assistance from the Trumaí themselves. “There is nobody among them who volunteers information of ethnological value,” he wrote to Benedict. “For three months I dug for structure and got very little.”
42
42
Quain’s fieldwork ended prematurely when he was recalled by the SPI; he did not have the requisite paperwork to be in the region and was forced to return to Rio de Janeiro. In Rio he took a run-down rooming house, the Pensão Gustavo, on the Rua do Riachuelo in Lapa, a bohemian district full of bars and flea-bitten brothels, just as the carnival celebrations were getting under way. In his diaries the anthropologist Alfred Métraux, who had just arrived in Rio on his way to Buenos Aires, remembered dining with “Cowan,” along with his Columbia colleague Charles Wagley, at his hotel, the Belvedere, in Copacabana:
Cowan told us about his journey to the Xingu, and then spoke extravagantly on the subject of his syphilis. I detected a hint of desperate bravado in his brutal frankness and in the jokes he made about his condition . . . Cowan is quite drunk and fills the dining room with his booming voice. Wagley calms him with a delicate, courteous hush, hush.
43
After sorting out his paperwork, Quain set off for the Upper Xingu again, this time to study the Krahô. He began fieldwork, but fell into a deep depression after receiving a series of letters from home. Having burned the letters, he left the village abruptly, accompanied by two Indian boys. The journey ended two days later, near the town of Carolina, now situated on the Maranhão/Tocantins state lines. It was from here that he wrote his last letter back to Heloísa Alberto Torres of the Museu Nacional in Rio de Janeiro: “I am dying of a contagious disease. This letter will arrive after my death. It should be disinfected. I would like my notes and tape recorder (unfortunately with no recordings) to be sent to the Museu. Please forward my notes to Columbia.”
44
After his indigenous companions had retired for the night, Quain tried to commit suicide by slashing his arms and legs with a razor. When this failed, he hanged himself with the rope of his hammock from a nearby tree.
44
After his indigenous companions had retired for the night, Quain tried to commit suicide by slashing his arms and legs with a razor. When this failed, he hanged himself with the rope of his hammock from a nearby tree.
Intrigue still surrounds Buell Quain’s death. Lévi-Strauss, among others, attributed his suicide to his belief that he had contracted syphilis. But according to a local barber who had befriended Quain during his last spell of fieldwork, this was a fantasy—he was in good health and showed no physical signs of illness.
45
There was also speculation about his drinking habits, family problems and guilt over casual sexual encounters in Rio, possibly homosexual.
46
Whatever the truth, Quain remains a tragic figure in the annals of anthropology, a testament to the pressures of fieldwork, as it was then conceived, as a long-term solitary exercise in an unpredictable and sometimes hostile environment. “A feeling of aloneness permeates the Quain notes,” summarized the anthropologist Robert Murphy, who edited his Trumaí findings for publication after his death.
47
Where many others had soldiered on, Quain had buckled under the strain.
45
There was also speculation about his drinking habits, family problems and guilt over casual sexual encounters in Rio, possibly homosexual.
46
Whatever the truth, Quain remains a tragic figure in the annals of anthropology, a testament to the pressures of fieldwork, as it was then conceived, as a long-term solitary exercise in an unpredictable and sometimes hostile environment. “A feeling of aloneness permeates the Quain notes,” summarized the anthropologist Robert Murphy, who edited his Trumaí findings for publication after his death.
47
Where many others had soldiered on, Quain had buckled under the strain.
LÉVI-STRAUSS ABANDONED
The Apotheosis of Augustus
a short way in. It was time to bury his doubts and return to work. Traveling back to the rat-infested Jesuit mission station of Juruena, he rejoined the rest of the expedition, minus Dina.
The Apotheosis of Augustus
a short way in. It was time to bury his doubts and return to work. Traveling back to the rat-infested Jesuit mission station of Juruena, he rejoined the rest of the expedition, minus Dina.
They were studying a moving target, a nomadic group ranging across their enormous territories. Lévi-Strauss wanted to see the Nambikwara in situ, on the plains, rather than as hangers-on around the substations. As it happened, the chief of the group at Utiariti, who had traveled up to Juruena, was just about to set out on a trip across the plateau to a traditional meeting with disparate Nambikwara groups. The meeting place was a few days out of Juruena, in the very same region where the Nambikwara had massacred the seven telegraph workers in the 1920s. The chief was reluctant to let the expedition accompany them, nervous about how the other Nambikwara groups would react to the sudden arrival of Lévi-Strauss’s party. But after much negotiation, he agreed on the condition that Lévi-Strauss scale back his entourage, taking just four oxen as pack animals.
Soon after setting off, traveling down a different route from their normal one to accommodate Lévi-Strauss’s oxen, Castro Faria noticed that there were no women in the Nambikwara group—just taciturn men with hunting weapons. Lévi-Strauss’s party nervously fiddled with their Smith & Wessons as they were led with few provisions out into a vast and featureless landscape. At midday they were relieved to catch up with the women, who, laden with animals, children and baskets, had in fact been sent off earlier. When they finally pitched camp, the chief faced an open revolt after an unsuccessful hunting expedition left the Nambikwara hungry and irritable. Lévi-Strauss hoarded his provisions, while the Nambikwara were forced to dine on crushed grasshoppers, a dish even they considered frugal.
After a difficult two-day journey, they arrived at an opening by a stream, a gravelly campsite peppered with Nambikwara gardens. The atmosphere was tense. Families filtered in intermittently off the plateau. By nightfall Lévi-Strauss had counted around seventy Nambikwara in all, many of whom had apparently not seen a Westerner since their encounter with the telegraph workers more than a decade before. As the temperature dipped, Lévi-Strauss’s party bedded down on the sands in the Nambikwara mode for a long, restless night, racked by mutual suspicion.
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