Claude Levi-Strauss: The Poet in the Laboratory

by Patrick Wilcken

  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

  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.

  Back in Brazil, Lévi-Strauss faced an uphill bureaucratic battle to mount the expedition. The major hurdle was the Conselho de Fiscalização das Expedições Artísticas e Científicias (Council for the Monitoring of Artistic and Scientific Expeditions), formed in 1933 to oversee and control research in Brazil in an increasingly xenophobic era. Lévi-Strauss tried to apply first through the Museu Nacional in Rio and then under the auspices of the University of São Paulo, as a “Franco-Brazilian” expedition that would share results and ethnographic collections. Part of the process involved the agreement of the SPI, which was at first reluctant. None of their agents were in the region, and there was a feeling that the expedition might disturb the already fragile relations between frontiersmen and the Indians. The nomadic Nambikwara, whom Lévi-Strauss was planning to study, had killed seven telegraph workers in 1925 and another six members of a Protestant mission in 1933. A few years before Lévi-Strauss’s trip there had been rumors that a line worker had been found buried waist-deep, with scores of arrows sticking out of his chest and his Morse keypad on his head.4 Eventually, after interventions from Mário de Andrade and writer Sérgio Milliet, agreements were made between the SPI, the Museu Nacional, the Department of Culture and the University of São Paulo. The SPI warned that the service could not guarantee Lévi-Strauss’s safety and that he should not retaliate in the event of an attack.5

  Lévi-Strauss initially proposed a team of five experts from various disciplines—an anthropologist (Dina Lévi-Strauss), an ethnographer (himself), a naturalist/biologist (Dr. Jean Vellard), a linguist (Dr. Curt Nimuendajú) and his high school friend who had traveled on the previous expedition, René Silz, whom he put down as “cartographer.” But recruitment did not go according to plan. Silz was unavailable and Nimuendajú turned him down, saying that he needed time to write up results from fieldwork among the Canela and Xerente, and that he had already arranged with Robert Lowie to travel to the south of Bahia to continue studying another branch of the Ge. The real reason, though, was the presence of Vellard. Nimuendajú had read one of Vellard’s reports in the Journal de la Société des Américanistes that described some distinctly nineteenth-century methods he had used while on an expedition in Paraguay. In the report, Vellard related how his party had counterattacked with guns when they had come under arrow-fire from an encampment of Guayaki Indians. The Guayaki fled, leaving a small boy behind. Vellard described ransacking the village for artifacts and taking the boy, whom he measured, weighed and photographed. Vellard wondered whether he could find a family in the Paraguayan capital, Asunción, to take care of the boy and speculated that it might be interesting to study his development. Nimuendajú was shocked by this account, and flatly refused to have anything to do with Vellard.

  In his stead, the Museu Nacional insisted that a Brazilian anthropologist, the twenty-five-year-old intern Luiz de Castro Faria, join the expedition. From his field notes published in 2001, Um outro olhar: diário da expedição à Serra do Norte (Another Look: The Diary of the Serra do Norte Expedition), a belated and rather dry account of the expedition, Castro Faria comes across as a young man overawed by his selection. In contrast to Lévi-Strauss, he cultivated a more
down-to-earth interest in regional Brazilian music and folk culture. He ended up in a difficult role as an unwanted team member—seen, as he put it years later, as “a nuisance,” and a potentially dangerous one. Part of his job was to monitor the progress of the party and report back to the Museu Nacional. “I had the power to stop the expedition,” he said in an interview in 1997, shortly before his death.6 Lévi-Strauss was uncomfortable with the inclusion of a rival anthropologist, writing to the director of the Museu Nacional, Heloísa Alberto Torres, that “an ethnographer will have little work to do, because the scientific data, in this area, will be used in my doctoral thesis.”7 He was also unhappy about Castro Faria’s secondary role as the eyes of the Brazilian state, or “tax inspector” as Lévi-Strauss disparagingly put it.8

  By April 1938 final preparations were under way in São Paulo. Castro Faria met Lévi-Strauss and gathered together the vast amount of equipment needed for the expedition—some 1,470 kilos of it, including a bulky radio transmitter, a typewriter, a large-format Contaflex camera, an arsenal of hunting rifles and three thousand rounds of ammunition. By now there was considerable press interest. Lévi-Strauss and Castro Faria gave interviews, with the evening papers trumpeting an expedition that would, according to the Diário da Noite, “collect all possible knowledge about Amerindian peoples who are on the brink of destruction.” “In among the many trunks of goods that will be used on the expedition,” added the Folha da Noite with a lighter touch, “there are numerous toys which will be handed out to the indigenous children.”9

  Unable to find a seat on the plane up to Cuiabá, Castro Faria was forced to take the arduous train trip through the interior to Corumbá, the route Lévi-Strauss had traveled to the Caduveo, and from there up the Paraguay River to Cuiabá. At dusk on May 2, 1938, he boarded the Eolo—a two-story paddleboat slung with hammocks. He inspected his cramped cabin and was disappointed to find that, although he had expressly asked to be alone, someone else’s things were already in the room. Two books were lying on the lower bunk bed—one by the nineteenth-century German ethnographer Karl von den Steinen, the other by the Brazilian anthropologist Estevão Pinto. Incredibly, among the diamond traders, Syrian peddlers and assorted Mato Grossenes, there was another anthropologist on board—Buell Quain, an ethnographer from Columbia University in New York.

  A young man with an almost Latin complexion and strong, even features, Quain was the son of a well-off medical family from the Midwest, and had done his first spell of fieldwork in Fiji, where he studied the island’s literature and epic poetry. Castro Faria had already come across him while he was researching at the Museu Nacional in Rio de Janeiro. He’d even fetched a book for Quain—Vincenzo Petrullo’s Primitive Peoples of Mato Grosso, Brazil. As the paddleboat began its weeklong meander upstream they fell into conversation, Quain talking of his plans to do a year’s fieldwork in the Upper Xingu. “An extraordinary coincidence had resulted in us meeting here,” Castro Faria noted down in his diary, “both on the way to distant regions, driven by the same desires.”10

  Buell Quain was one of several Columbia students who were turning their attention to Brazil. While he was in the Xingu, Ruth Landes was studying the Afro-Brazilian religion Candomblé in Salvador and the Texan Charles Wagley was beginning ethnographic work among the Tupispeaking Tapirapé of central Brazil. To the west of the Tapirapé, William Lipkind was on the Araguaia River working with the Karaja Indians—the same group that Lévi-Strauss had chanced upon on his road trip through Brazil the previous year.

  In Cuiabá, Castro Faria, Quain and Lévi-Strauss stayed at the same hotel, the Lebanese-run Esplanada. Quain and Lévi-Strauss, as two foreign anthropologists out in the sticks, struck up a brief but warm friendship. As they got to know each other, Quain unburdened himself to Lévi-Strauss, explaining that after he had left Rio he had begun to develop disturbing symptoms and was convinced he had contracted syphilis. Lévi-Strauss advised him to return to Rio and seek specialist help, but after a long stay in Cuiabá, Quain set off for his fieldwork site in the Upper Xingu.

  While waiting for the arrival of Vellard from Asunción, Lévi-Strauss and Castro Faria filled their days trying to gather up-to-date information on the indigenous groups along the telegraph line. Around a hundred line workers still manned the substations, operating sections of the line that still functioned—a motley crew of semi-Westernized Paresi Indians, impoverished Brazilians, along with a handful of eccentric Europeans. They had intermittent contact with the Nambikwara, communicating with them using a forty-word half-Portuguese, half-Nambikwara pidgin.

  Lévi-Strauss sent telegrams to the functioning substations with a series of simple questions: “Are there Indians in the vicinity? Are they friendly or do they mount attacks? Do they bring goods to sell? Do they ask for gifts? Do they show up regularly? Do they speak Portuguese? Do they dress like civilized people? Do they invite civilized people to their villages?”11 After a lengthy delay, replies began trickling in. A shadowy group, the Beiços de Pau (literally “wooden mouths,” after the plugs they wore in their lower lips), had recently attacked one of the stations. They were thought to live some distance from the line, spoke no Portuguese, and it was unclear what their native language was. Another station reported that the local Nambikwara regularly cut through the wires on the line “to show that they are enemies” and at times threatened violence. Indigenous groups near Vilhena seemed friendlier, but were prone to infighting. A line worker who happened to be in Cuiabá at the time confirmed the reports, but other lines of inquiry were less successful. Castro Faria went to the SPI offices, but was told that the government posts had closed down and that they had lost contact with operatives in the region. 12

  Buell Quain had lit out into the Amazon alone. Lévi-Strauss would set off with his wife, Castro Faria, Jean Vellard and a team of twenty men, fifteen mules, thirty oxen, a few horses, tons of equipment and a truck. Throughout the month they spent in Cuiabá preparing for the expedition, they had scoured the region for suitable recruits, with Lévi-Strauss’s ending up buying every mule for sale within a fifteen-kilometer radius of the city. The men, poor locals of conservative Portuguese stock, were promised a rifle and a small daily allowance.13 Out on the plateau, they would subsist on salt beef, dried fruit and any game that might come their way. Guides would be employed en route, as and when needed. When the crew and equipment were finally assembled on fields on the outskirts of Cuiabá, the herds of pack animals, the boxes, bags and saddles, the bearded men in loose cotton shirts and leather boots looked more like a traveling country fair than a scientific expedition.

  In the pages of Tristes Tropiques, this large supporting cast often vanishes into the background, leaving Lévi-Strauss center stage. In reality, the Serra do Norte expedition was as far from the Malinowskian ethnographic gold standard—the early-twentieth-century loner, painstakingly learning the native language, submerging himself in their culture—as was possible. In contrast to the Conradesque journey to the extremes of humanity, much of the time Lévi-Strauss’s entourage would outnumber the natives he was trying to study. So large and complex were the logistics that Castro Faria ended up doing a kind of ethnography on the mechanics of the expedition itself—documenting “the precise science of the porters,” how they rearranged the saddle to load the crates, balancing packing cases across the oxen’s back using specially designed wooden frames.14

  Lévi-Strauss had barely set off before he was asking Rivet for extra money to cover spiraling costs. Prices had risen since his last visit to Cuiabá, he explained. The region was so dangerous that he had been forced to expand his team, and therefore the provisions and the number of oxen. As it stood, the thirty oxen were not enough to haul the tons of equipment required to subsist for six months in a region with no resources. (The team would in fact end up spending only short periods in the wilderness, with regular stop-offs at telegraph stations.) He calculated that he had just enough to get to the end of the expedition, but not enough to send the team back or frei
ght his ethnographic collections. “I am therefore obliged to ask you for a supplementary credit of 40,000 francs,”15 he concluded, to be deposited into his bank account at the Royal Bank of Canada, 3 rue Scribe, Paris, before December 1. Lévi-Strauss hoped that he would be able to cash checks somewhere on the upper Madeira River.

  The scale of the expedition gave Lévi-Strauss’s enterprise the feel of a nineteenth- or even eighteenth-century South American scientific venture, harking back to the journeys of Alexander von Humboldt and Charles Marie de la Condamine with their pack animals, porters and canoes. Like them, he sought enlightenment through mobility, an explorer’s overview rather than an obsessive’s single case study. There are also obvious parallels with the Mission Dakar-Djibouti, launched a few years before Lévi-Strauss had set off. In contrast to the intense engagement of the Anglo-American method, expedition leader Marcel Griaule had approached that trip as a documentary exercise. The mystique of “going native” was entirely absent, with translators used throughout. That team’s goal had been not so much to render a lived reality as to map a mind-set, a cosmology, a civilization: l’homme noir.

  THE MAIN BODY of the expedition set off to the shouts of the herders, the pack animals kicking up dust as they moved slowly off into the distance. The idea was to give the drovers a week’s head start. Lévi-Strauss and the others would truck up to the Utiariti telegraph station, joining the mule train five hundred kilometers north of Cuiabá, where the first group of Nambikwara could be found. The truck would be abandoned on the banks of the Papagaio River, its contents loaded onto the oxen, and the expedition would then set off into the backlands.