Claude Levi-Strauss: The Poet in the Laboratory (17 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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The uneasy cohabitation lasted a few days. In this unpromising environment, Lévi-Strauss carried out a surreal ethnographic experiment. He handed out blank sheets of paper and pencils, as he had done among the Caduveo, a strange move since the Nambikwara neither wrote nor drew, aside from rudimentary decorations—the dots and jagged lines with which they adorned their gourds. After initially ignoring the paper, the Nambikwara began scribbling a series of wavy lines, from left to right across the page. Unprompted, they had begun “writing.” The chief went one step further, requesting a notepad from Lévi-Strauss. Quizzed on ethnographic points, he “wrote” answers in the pad, handing his doodles to Lévi-Strauss. When the bartering began, the chief made a great show of “reading” the list of exchanges and beneficiaries from a sheet of scribbles.
Somewhere in those scrawled lines lay meaning, not of the literal kind, but in a metaphorical sense. The Nambikwara had intuitively grasped the power of paper, notebooks, pens and markings in Western culture, and the mysterious rituals of ethnography. The chief ’s approach had been a pragmatic one, slotting into an alien culture with a certain ritual fluency, trading symbols alongside beads, arrowheads and lengths of cloth. Writing, Lévi-Strauss concluded, was first about power, and only afterward used for the purpose of aesthetic or intellectual enlightenment. Far from being mankind’s crowning cultural achievement, it had initially been used to create hierarchies between the scribes and the illiterate masses. “The primary function of written communication,” Lévi-Strauss concluded, “is to facilitate slavery.”
48
48
The return journey almost ended in catastrophe. Battling with an uncooperative mule, Lévi-Strauss fell behind the group and quickly became lost in the scrub, an episode recounted as farce in
Tristes Tropiques
.
49
As the sun set, he was contemplating a long, worrying night alone in the bush, without provisions and with uncertain prospects of rejoining the party the following day, when two Nambikwara tracked him down and led him back to the encampment. From Juruena, they made their way back up the line through Campos Novos to Vilhena, where they studied two Nambikwara groups—the Sabané and the Tarundé. “Excellent work,” Lévi-Strauss later wrote in a memo referring to this period—so good, in fact, that when the Nambikwara wanted to leave, Lévi-Strauss gave them sacks of flour to stay put so that he could complete his research.
50
Tristes Tropiques
.
49
As the sun set, he was contemplating a long, worrying night alone in the bush, without provisions and with uncertain prospects of rejoining the party the following day, when two Nambikwara tracked him down and led him back to the encampment. From Juruena, they made their way back up the line through Campos Novos to Vilhena, where they studied two Nambikwara groups—the Sabané and the Tarundé. “Excellent work,” Lévi-Strauss later wrote in a memo referring to this period—so good, in fact, that when the Nambikwara wanted to leave, Lévi-Strauss gave them sacks of flour to stay put so that he could complete his research.
50
Fifteen years later, Lévi-Strauss sifted these fragments of Nambikwara life, looking back on the weeks spent in and around the telegraph stations, the days out on the plains, remembering his relationships—fraught by communication problems—with a handful of Indians. In
Tristes Tropiques
, he searched for a philosophical synthesis. Whether he had seen the dying embers of traditional Nambikwara culture or been witness to the fallout of postcontact demographic collapse was irrelevant. For Lévi-Strauss, these ragged families alone on the plateau represented the end point of Rousseau’s quest for man in the state of nature, uncorrupted by society. They were human society in embryo, stripped of its trappings, pared down to its core. What Rousseau had suggested as an ideal “which perhaps never existed,” Lévi-Strauss claimed, rather extravagantly, to have found in flesh and blood. But uncovering a kind of ur-culture only led on to deeper problems. “I had been looking for a society reduced to its simplest expression,” he wrote; “that of the Nambikwara was so truly simple that all I could find in it was individual human beings.”
51
Tristes Tropiques
, he searched for a philosophical synthesis. Whether he had seen the dying embers of traditional Nambikwara culture or been witness to the fallout of postcontact demographic collapse was irrelevant. For Lévi-Strauss, these ragged families alone on the plateau represented the end point of Rousseau’s quest for man in the state of nature, uncorrupted by society. They were human society in embryo, stripped of its trappings, pared down to its core. What Rousseau had suggested as an ideal “which perhaps never existed,” Lévi-Strauss claimed, rather extravagantly, to have found in flesh and blood. But uncovering a kind of ur-culture only led on to deeper problems. “I had been looking for a society reduced to its simplest expression,” he wrote; “that of the Nambikwara was so truly simple that all I could find in it was individual human beings.”
51
THEY WORKED their way up the line through late September. From the substations of Três Buritis to Barão de Melgaço, the sun-blasted colors of the plateau slowly began saturating; dry savannah gave way to lush grasslands with palms, wild pineapple and clusters of native chestnut trees. Sands turned to mulch, the air humidified and a strong, organic odor rose off what was now the forest floor. At Barão de Melgaço they could look down into the Machado Valley, sinking into the fringes of the Amazon rain forest. The changing environment offered new gastronomic possibilities. They gorged on an exotic range of game, given a Gallic culinary treatment—roast parrot
flambé au whiskey
,
jacu
(a pheasantlike native bird)
rôti au caramel
, along with grilled caiman’s tail—and freshened up, changing their encrusted dungarees for the first time in days.
52
flambé au whiskey
,
jacu
(a pheasantlike native bird)
rôti au caramel
, along with grilled caiman’s tail—and freshened up, changing their encrusted dungarees for the first time in days.
52
Thus began the second phase of the Serra do Norte mission. With the forests thickening and the trails narrowing into overgrown tunnels, they dispensed with the surviving pack animals. (Half would continue on to be sold in rubber-tapping villages in the forest; the other half would make the long trip back to Utiariti.) Much to Lévi-Strauss’s relief, from here on the pace would quicken. A slimmed-down ethnographic team would travel by canoe.
The commander of the Barão de Melgaço substation lent them two light dugout canoes for the onward journey, half floating, half punting down the Machado River. The boats carried around five men, along with wooden crates and a couple of Nambikwara baskets for provisions and equipment. Clamped to Lévi-Strauss’s boot was Lucinda, a tiny capuchin monkey, immortalized in a fine pencil sketch in his field notes, that he had been given by the Nambikwara when she was only a few weeks old. Hardwired to cling to her mother’s back, Lucinda had at first tried to live in Lévi-Strauss’s hair, the way the Nambikwara traveled with small monkeys. But he had managed to train her to accept his boot, an arrangement that would prove painful once they began hiking through dense rain forest. After trying in vain to get her to move to his arm, Lévi-Strauss was forced to stride through the forest to the constant squeals of Lucinda, as she was lashed by the thorny undergrowth.
53
53
Two days downstream they reached the telegraph station at Pimenta Bueno in pouring rain, furiously bailing out their canoes. There, over their first sit-down lunch since setting off from Cuiabá, Indians working at the station told them about two tribes in the vicinity still living in the forest. After five more days gliding up a tributary of the Machado, they reached the first—a breakaway group that had fallen into obscurity and was now camped in the forest a kilometer back from the river.
A set of igloo-shaped thatch huts spread out across a rough-cut oval clearing where twenty-five men, women and children who called themselves Mundé subsisted. Lévi-Strauss was the first academic to contact them, a professional milestone that would quicken the pulse of any aspiring anthropologist. Yet the honor was largely symbolic—he spent just four days among the Mundé, with no interpreter. Stretching credibility, he claims to have gained an insight into “aspects of the Mundé way of thinking and social organisation . . . the kinship system and vocabulary, the names of parts of body and the colour vocabulary, according to a chart I always carried with me.”
54
54
In contrast to the disheveled, ash-powdered Nambikwara, the Mundé were fastidious depilaters. Their stocky bodies were neatly adorned with translucent resin labrets, mother-of-pearl necklaces and beaded nasal septa. Unlike the muted sounds of the Nambikwara tongue, the Mundé language was sharp and zesty, “like the clashing of cymbals.”
55
The Mundé’s exoticism was compelling, yet enigmatic. “They were as close to me as reflections in a mirror,” wrote Lévi-Strauss, musing on the paradox of fieldwork. “I could touch them; but I could not understand them.”
56
And the very act of understanding—the questionnaires, the descriptions of ritual, myth and religion, the charting of kin systems—would have broken the spell.
55
The Mundé’s exoticism was compelling, yet enigmatic. “They were as close to me as reflections in a mirror,” wrote Lévi-Strauss, musing on the paradox of fieldwork. “I could touch them; but I could not understand them.”
56
And the very act of understanding—the questionnaires, the descriptions of ritual, myth and religion, the charting of kin systems—would have broken the spell.
The expedition was nearing its end. After Vellard came down with malaria and withdrew to Urupá to recuperate, the scientific team was reduced to just Lévi-Strauss and Castro Faria. But there was one last indigenous group that Lévi-Strauss wanted to see. Working from reports from rubber-tappers, Tupi line workers back at Pimenta Bueno, a scattering of references from the Rondon Commission papers and Curt Nimuendajú’s ethnographic works, Lévi-Strauss set his sights on contacting the Tupi-Kawahib, whom he believed to be the last descendants of the great Tupi civilization of the middle and lower Amazon. In the first decades of the sixteenth century, ancestors of the Tupi-Kawahib had met the Portuguese and French as they stumbled off their ships onto the beaches of the Brazilian littoral, becoming the subjects of some of the earliest experiments in ethnography. In a romantic gesture, Lévi-Strauss hoped his descriptions would close a four-hundred-year-old ethnographic circle.
First contact was discouraging. Deep in the forest, the party bumped into two natives traveling down the trail in the opposite direction—one wearing a tattered pair of pajamas, the other naked but for a penis sheath. They learned through their interpreter that the Tupi-Kawahib were about to abandon their village for the substation of Pimenta Bueno. “This did not suit our purpose at all,” wrote Lévi-Strauss, so after promising gifts, he convinced the extremely reluctant chief to stay put, so as to afford them a more “authentic” ethnographic experience.
57
57
At around twenty members strong, two of whom were severely disabled, the Tupi-Kawahib were barely a viable group. Their soon-to-be-abandoned houses stood in the undergrowth, adorned with symbols in red and black
urucu
dye—striking images of toads, dogs and jaguars, depicted as if they were climbing the walls. In the background a large wooden cage on stilts housed a harpy eagle whose feathers were periodically plucked for use on ornaments. In hints of earlier conflicts, the women wore necklaces studded with spent cartridges.
urucu
dye—striking images of toads, dogs and jaguars, depicted as if they were climbing the walls. In the background a large wooden cage on stilts housed a harpy eagle whose feathers were periodically plucked for use on ornaments. In hints of earlier conflicts, the women wore necklaces studded with spent cartridges.
Just as the team settled down to work, disaster struck. Emídio, one of the young herders they had recruited from Cuiabá, leaned on his rifle while shooting pigeons in the forest. The report was heard in the village, followed by screams of pain. Emídio had blown his hand apart. “It was incredible,” wrote Castro Faria. “Shattered bones, exposed nerves, severed fingers.”
58
They debated what to do, considering amputation, but since he was a herder by trade and reliant on both hands, they could not bring themselves to do it. They decided instead to clean out the wound, dousing it with disinfectant and wrapping it in cotton and gauze, then retrace their steps back to the river. Delirious, Emídio stumbled down the trail ahead of them as they struggled to keep up. By the time they reached the riverbank, Emídio was in extreme discomfort. Peeling off the dressing, they tried to clean out the maggots that had already infested the wound. Castro Faria ferried Emídio back downriver, from where he was taken to Porto Velho for treatment and later flown back to Cuiabá. Meanwhile, Lévi-Strauss stayed on to complete his fieldwork. The whole incident clearly disturbed him. In the midst of his field notes there is a surreal drawing in the style of Dalí inspired by the accident—a writhing ball of fingers, thumbs, limbs and teardrop eyeballs.
59
58
They debated what to do, considering amputation, but since he was a herder by trade and reliant on both hands, they could not bring themselves to do it. They decided instead to clean out the wound, dousing it with disinfectant and wrapping it in cotton and gauze, then retrace their steps back to the river. Delirious, Emídio stumbled down the trail ahead of them as they struggled to keep up. By the time they reached the riverbank, Emídio was in extreme discomfort. Peeling off the dressing, they tried to clean out the maggots that had already infested the wound. Castro Faria ferried Emídio back downriver, from where he was taken to Porto Velho for treatment and later flown back to Cuiabá. Meanwhile, Lévi-Strauss stayed on to complete his fieldwork. The whole incident clearly disturbed him. In the midst of his field notes there is a surreal drawing in the style of Dalí inspired by the accident—a writhing ball of fingers, thumbs, limbs and teardrop eyeballs.
59
Lévi-Strauss camped by the side of the river with the Tupi-Kawahib, who were still planning to leave the forest shortly. In an expressive image, the now thickly bearded Lévi-Strauss, wearing round black-rimmed glasses, stands awkwardly, his left hand scrunched into a nervous fist. Lucinda, the small monkey given to him by the Nambikwara, clings to his right boot, attached by a lead to his belt strap. On his right is a roughly constructed wooden table, with camping equipment neatly lined up—blackened billycans, a tin plate with a large fruit of some kind and what looks like half a manioc root. In the background, the broad river feeds off into the distance. On the left-hand margin, a naked Tupi boy looks back at Lévi-Strauss—a figure absent from an almost identical image reprinted in the photo album
Saudades do Brasil
.
60
Saudades do Brasil
.
60
In another lightning spell of ethnography, Lévi-Strauss spent two weeks documenting a culture that was unraveling before his eyes. An elaborate ritual involving virgins spitting into a 1.5-meter-tall barrel to ferment maize wine had been reduced to three little girls hawking into a cup. Their polygamous kin system had reached the limits of its sustainability, with the chief monopolizing four of the six available women—the other two being his sister and an old woman. Lévi-Strauss was intrigued by the fact that the Tupi-Kawahib neither cultivated nor used tobacco, a rare omission in central Brazil. The Nambikwara had been keen smokers; the Mundé had blown powdered tobacco through a meter-long pipe into each other’s nostrils. The Tupi-Kawahib, in contrast, were horrified by the substance: “On seeing us unroll our supply of tobacco, the village chief sarcastically exclaimed, ‘
Ianeapit!
’ (‘This is excrement!’).”
61
This strong aversion was apparently long-standing. When Rondon had first encountered the Tupi-Kawahib years before, the Indians had angrily yanked cigarettes out of the mouths of anyone smoking.
Ianeapit!
’ (‘This is excrement!’).”
61
This strong aversion was apparently long-standing. When Rondon had first encountered the Tupi-Kawahib years before, the Indians had angrily yanked cigarettes out of the mouths of anyone smoking.
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