The emergent scheme was involved, yet elegant. An invisible north- south axis divided the village into moieties (that is, two intermarrying descent groups); within the moieties were clans, and within the clans, a tripartite system of castelike grades. Marriage was permitted only between moieties and within grades, with a procession of men, once married, crossing the yard to live on the other side—in their in-laws’ huts. The village circle was then quartered by an east-west axis running parallel to the river, the upstreamers organizing the downstreamers’ funerals, and vice versa. What resulted was “a ballet in which two village moieties strive to live and breathe each through and for the other; exchanging women, possessions and services in fervent reciprocity; intermarrying their children, burying each other’s dead . . .”63 So integral was this system to the Bororo that Silesian missionaries had learned early on that changing the village layout led to a rapid cultural meltdown.
Just as with the Caduveo face designs, Lévi-Strauss was struck by the geometry of human culture. In this small tribal settlement on a scrubby clearing in a remote corner of Mato Grosso, a set of rules—computerlike in their dispassionate symmetry—had evolved over time. Guided by a “smokescreen of institutions,” the Bororo lived out orderly lives.64 What looked like a motley rural hamlet was in fact a precision machine. The circular-hut plans spread out across the vast central Brazilian plateau as a common feature of the Ge linguistic group. Lévi-Strauss could only hint at what this might mean in broader anthropological terms, but he would later look back on the Bororo with affection and an exaggerated sense of their influence on the development of his theories. In the early 1990s, he explained to a French documentary crew:I have the feeling now when I try to reconstitute my intellectual history—it’s very difficult because I have a terrible memory—I have the feeling that I was always what later became known as “structuralist” even when I was a child. But meeting the Bororo who were the great theoreticians of structuralism—that was a godsend for me!65
An old-fashioned ethnographic inventory survives on film, similar to the footage of the Caduveo, with the natives acting out life scenes for the camera: a Bororo pulling back the string on his bow (but not actually firing it); two men laboriously making fire by rotating a stick on a wooden base; a shuffling dance; Bororo men testing their physical strength by balancing 1.5-meter-high discs made of grasses and dried palm stalks on their heads; a canoeing scene. The flickering, speeded-up images carry the strange power of the amateur-shot silent film—a mystery, an emotional charge, a melancholy—reinforced by a fleeting glimpse of Lévi-Strauss himself. The camera tracks the Bororo as they paddle long, slender canoes down the river. For a few stray frames a figure in colonial garb appears leaning back on a branch, smoking a cigarette as he watches the canoes glide by.
IN NOVEMBER 1936, Lévi-Strauss and Dina sailed for Europe to winter in France. Stowed in the hold were crates of indigenous artifacts, sourced mainly from the Caduveo and the Bororo, with a handful of objects from the Terena (neighbors of the Caduveo) and the Kaingang. In one case was a set of Bororo bull-roarers, slender wooden boards tapered at each end and painted with arcs and dots. The bull-roarers made a low humming sound when spun from a length of twine—the drone of spirits greatly feared by the women. The Bororo had reluctantly traded them on the condition that Lévi-Strauss lock them in a chest and not open it until he had reached Cuiabá.
Along with the bull-roarers, the Lévi-Strausses had amassed a spectacular ethnographic collection of hides, headdresses and musical instruments from a poorly documented part of Brazil. Indiens du Matto Grosso66 would be the first exhibition organized under the auspices of the Musée de l’Homme, although as the museum was not yet opened to visitors, the collection was put on display at the Wildenstein Gallery, at the corner of the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré and the rue La Boétie. But perhaps there was something appropriate in the alternative arrangements—a year later the same gallery would host a major exhibition featuring leading surrealist artists.
According to Lévi-Strauss, the exhibition received “a polite appraisal,”67 but a review in the Brazilian Jornal do Comércio was effusive:Many intellectuals, travelers, artists and curious people visited the art gallery in the evening, admiring around a thousand objects—ceramics, skins, masks, hammocks, flutes, hunting bows and arrows and other examples of indigenous art gathered by the Strausses from their visit to the Bororo and other tribes. Professor Lévi-Strauss gave explanations of these objects fascinating to the visitors, who were astonished and seduced by the originality and the beauty of this exhibition.68
Some of these objects—a shuttlecock, a funerary clarinet, a spectacular armadillo-claw pendant adorned with feathers, mother-of-pearl discs and porcupine quills—can still be seen today, in a glass case in the Musée du quai Branly. What remains striking are the colors of the decorative feathers: shocking reds and yellows that, after decades in storage, are still vivid enough to pierce the museum’s penumbra.
More than the exhibition, Lévi-Strauss’s first significant academic publication, “Contribution à l’étude de l’organisation sociale des Indiens Bororo”—a detailed analysis of the Bororo clan/moiety structure and its relationship to the village layout for the Journal de la Société des Américanistes69—signaled his entry into the small world of 1930s French anthropology. Marcel Mauss, no less, hailed the Lévi-Strausses as “the great hopes for French study of the Americas.”70 The article, which appeared late in 1936, was greeted with excitement by specialists and would travel widely, being remarked on in Brazil, the United States and France. Even hardened field-workers, like the great German anthropologist Curt Unckel, who had adopted the native name Nimuendajú and spent years on solo expeditions into central Brazil, were intrigued. Nimuendajú wrote him an encouraging letter saying that he hoped Lévi-Strauss would have the opportunity to carry out a proper long-term study in the future. He also wrote to Robert Lowie in the United States about Lévi-Strauss and his work, opening up a link to American academia that would soon prove vital.
Lévi-Strauss later said that the enthusiasm around his early work was not so much due to its “slim merit”71 as its good timing—South America was the new frontier of western-hemisphere anthropology, and U.S. scholars were looking with interest at the work that was beginning to come out of Brazil. In truth he was disappointed by the brevity of his contact with the Caduveo and the Bororo, and modest about the significance of his findings. Replying to Nimuendajú, he explained: “My stay among the Bororo was unfortunately very short; I could only get an idea of certain problems, but I need to return and stay for a long period this time, to try and solve them. I hope you will excuse the poverty of my responses”—a self-deprecating tone that, although absent from Tristes Tropiques, he would later cultivate when questioned about the quality of his fieldwork.72
On more sensitive issues, where the building up of trust was crucial, his fleeting visits were not enough. Bartering for artifacts sometimes degenerated into farce. When Lévi-Strauss began negotiating for a hairpiece—the only object passed from mother to daughter among the Bororo—the women flew into a rage.73 He tried, and failed, to collect a full set of physical anthropological data from the Caduveo and the Bororo (a part of his research that was written out of subsequent accounts), as he explained in an interview with a journalist from the Brazilian newspaper O Jornal on his return from the field:We collected only a few anthropometric measurements, and only from male Indians, because the women were shy and reserved. It was impossible to obtain measurements of skeletons and bones from both the Caduveo and the Bororo of Rio Vermelho . . . Blood type was also not obtained, because the Indians refused to cooperate, and they also made it difficult to obtain photographic negatives as they feared death and curses.74
These early, impressionistic spells of fieldwork set the tone of Lévi-Strauss’s whole method as it later developed. He combined rapid assimilation of situations and ethnographic materials with boldly intuitive model-building. Time and again these h
it-and-run tactics would pay off, bringing out fresh perspectives. Anthropologists could get bogged down in detail, trapped inside their own stale arguments; after years of patient cultural excavation, there was a tendency to lose sight of the overall design. In contrast, Lévi-Strauss captured a culture through fragments, filling the gaps in his mind, conjuring models as if from thin air.
IN MARCH 1937, Lévi-Strauss returned with his wife to São Paulo for his third and final academic year, determined to make the most of what he knew would be his last spell in Brazil. While making plans for a major, long-term ethnographic expedition, he went on a number of smaller trips, on one occasion even fitting in some impromptu fieldwork. In July, he went on the road with Jean Maugüé and René Courtin, a law graduate from the University of Montpellier who had just joined the French mission. Traveling in Courtin’s new Ford, their goal was to go “as far as his car would take us” in a roughly northerly direction out of São Paulo.75 They dressed for the part: Maugüé in boots, a cotton cloth shirt, a wide-brimmed straw hat, armed with a knife and a revolver; Courtin in flannel trousers and a woolen jacket, with a shotgun and cartridges “as if he were about to set off on a hunting trip in the Cévennes”; while Lévi-Strauss was in his familiar colonial explorer’s uniform with his camera about his neck and a “Sherlock Holmes-style” sun helmet.76
They drove up through the coffee plantations of Campinas, on to Uberlândia and across the rapids of the Paranaíba River. From there Courtin’s Ford broke free, motoring across semiarid plains studded with giant anthills. Stranded in empty fields, they passed by the building blocks of Goiânia, the future state capital. A hundred or so half-built houses stood alongside a hotel—a massive cement box dumped on the red flats. It was a brutalist architectural statement that took Lévi-Strauss aback: “Only the fear of disaster could justify the existence of the block-house,” he later wrote, a disaster that “had, in fact, occurred, and the silence and immobility all around was its ominous aftermath.”77 They pushed on to the diamond-trading center of Goiás Velho, a baroque town of cobbled streets and pastel-fronted Italianate eighteenth-century houses set in rolling palm-topped hills. Farther north still, the road petered out at the Araguaia River, a major waterway that disgorged into the mouth of the Amazon a farther thirteen kilometers downstream.
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.
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
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
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.
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-STRAUSS1
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 Araw
ak, 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
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.
Claude Levi-Strauss: The Poet in the Laboratory Page 9
