After loading up the truck with crates of medical supplies, ammunition, tools and provisions, the anthropologists set off on June 6, in the predawn hours of a Monday morning. To Lévi-Strauss’s dismay, only a couple of hours into their journey they overtook the mule train; the herders had advanced just fifty kilometers in the week since they had left. “I lost my temper for the first, but not the last time,” recalled Lévi-Strauss.16 The pace, it seemed, was being dictated by the whims of the oxen. Lévi-Strauss never adapted to the languid rhythms of backland travel—the constant loading and unloading, grazing and herding, the rest days that could hold up the expedition for an age in the middle of nowhere.
Leaving the mule train, they continued by truck through a string of dismal satellite towns. In Rosário Oeste they met a well-built caboclo, an ex-line worker who had just arrived from Utiariti. “He was the first person to talk about the Indians, even the Nambikwara, without that sense of apprehension, an almost involuntary fear,” wrote Castro Faria in his diary.17 Even better, the caboclo told them there were currently some fifty Nambikwara around the Utiariti station. This was a relief, given that they might have to wait anything up to three weeks there for the mule train to catch up.
A little farther on from Rosário Oeste, grinding up a rocky path at the Serra do Tombador, the chainwheel of the driving shaft snapped. The party found themselves stranded in the bush, while they sent word to Cuiabá to have a new part flown up from Rio. They slung their hammocks and waited, with nothing to do “but sleep, dream and hunt.”18 The hunting was good: the drivers managed to kill a small deer (“a wonderful dish,” according to Castro Faria19) and an armadillo (an “explorers’ club menu,” Lévi-Strauss joked in a letter to Mário de Andrade20), which they dined on. Drinking mate around a campfire, they listened to the drivers tell fantastic stories of the backlands—popular legends involving anteaters, jaguars and Indians.
An image from this brief interlude taken by Castro Faria sets the scene. The boyish Dina Lévi-Strauss, wearing a loose jacket, jodhpurs and high leather boots, sits on her haunches jotting down something (“field notes,” according to Castro Faria, although at this stage they had not yet begun ethnographic research). Around her, on the rocky scrub, lies a pile of charred branches, metal plates, a tin can and pots. A hammock is slung loosely from the back of the truck. Behind it, an expressionless Lévi-Strauss stands looking out from under his sun helmet.
When the new chainwheel finally arrived and was fitted, they made for the line. At Pareci they came across the abandoned weapons of the much-feared Beiços de Pau Indians and were told by telegraph workers that they had recently been spotted in the distance. Lévi-Strauss’s group camped in nearby marshlands, but slept fitfully; a few kilometers off, wisps of smoke rose into the night sky, almost certainly from native campfires.
They had reached the line. From here onward, twisted telegraph poles stretched into the distance over a wasteland of sand, gravel and scrub. The combination reminded Lévi-Strauss of Yves Tanguy’s landscapes, with their mysterious, soft-focus contraptions set against a woozy backwash, an effect created by thinning paint with turpentine. Lévi-Strauss’s tristes tropiques were not the lush rain forests up ahead, but this dusty plain, doused during the four-month rainy season and then baked dry for the rest of the year.
The line was scored by a series of rivers flowing down the plateau into the Amazon Basin, each requiring a cumbersome crossing. Unloading the truck at the Cuiabá River, they eased it onto a rickety raft, made up of a wooden platform mounted on four shallow-bottomed canoes. During the crossing the ferryman confirmed that there was a group of Nambikwara in Utiariti, just three leagues up ahead. When the dirt track ended at the next river, Lévi-Strauss caught his first glimpse of members of the group that would end up being the focal point of the expedition. There were three of them, “completely naked, medium height, well built,” according to Castro Faria’s diary entry, waiting on the far bank of the river, accompanied by a Jesuit priest from the mission farther up the line in Juruena. (Lévi-Strauss remembered just two.)21 The Nambikwara laughed as they helped carry their luggage to a straw hut that had been used to store equipment while the line was being constructed, which the mission had prepared for their stay.
In marked contrast to the highly charged descriptions of entering the Bororo village for the first time, Lévi-Strauss skips over his first impressions of the Nambikwara in his memoirs, moving straight on to ethnographic descriptions. But a candid account of the first day among the Nambikwara survives in a letter sent from the field to Mário de Andrade in São Paulo:Of the journey, I will say nothing. This region of Brazil is a god-forsaken, deserted bush land, through which we drove for 700 km. We were warmly welcomed by the telegraph team in Utiariti, who had prepared a beautiful hut on the banks of the river, situated, in a very thoughtful gesture, right next to the Nambikwara encampment. I am writing to you in the midst of fifteen men, women and children who are stark naked (but that’s a shame since their bodies are not beautiful), with an extremely welcoming nature given that they are the same group (and probably the same individuals) who had slaughtered a Protestant mission in Juruena five years ago. Unfortunately, work promises to be extremely difficult: there is no interpreter at hand, a total ignorance of Portuguese and a phonetic language that seems impossible to understand. But we have only been here for 24 hours.22
As with the Bororo, the Nambikwara celebrated the anthropologists’ arrival with a night of music. Seated about a fire, they listened to the songs’ mesmerizing rhythms while the Nambikwara stamped their feet in the earth to the beat.23
AMONG THE CADUVEO, Lévi-Strauss had found aesthetic excitement in the women’s exquisitely tattooed faces. When he entered the Bororo village, with its hangar-sized longhouse and highly evolved metaphysics, he was humbled. Virtually bereft of any cultural overlay, the Nambikwara offered no easy entry point.
The Nambikwara spoke a hushed, whispered tongue. They slept naked on the bare earth, rolling toward their smoldering night fires as the temperature dropped in the early hours of the morning. Powdered by ash, their skin took on a ghostly pallor as they crisscrossed the savannah, their worldly possessions scarcely filling the cylindrical baskets that they hitched, Sherpa-style, to their foreheads. Their “houses” during the dry season (the nomadic phase of the Nambikwara year) consisted of bunches of angled palm fronds jammed into the ground, periodically repositioned throughout the day to protect them from the sun, wind or rain. They made no pottery and few manufactured items. Instead there were hatchets dating back to Rondon, empty gasoline cans, tins and assorted cooking utensils scrounged during intermittent contacts with telegraph line workers. Canoes were unheard-of; when necessary, the Nambikwara floated across rivers on bundles of drift-wood. They used no spices or salt, and cooled cooked food before eating it. Their main technological achievement was the use of poison-tipped arrows, but on the exposed grounds of the savannah the hunting was often difficult. When there was no game, they survived on berries, palm nuts, grasshoppers, microscopic lizard eggs and mouse-sized bats.
Even the penis sheath—common among South American hunter-gatherer groups—was not generally used. Nambikwara men and women were completely naked save for a set of accessories: nose feathers, bamboo-fiber labrets, arm- and waistbands made out of dried palm leaf, simple shell necklaces, armadillo-tail bracelets, and the occasional jaguar-skin hood for men. As if sampling from an extensive wardrobe, the Nambikwara regularly changed their ornaments, mixing and matching to suit their moods.
On the move, the Nambikwara filed across the savannah “like a column of ants.”24 They were accompanied by an eclectic menagerie: cocks and hens perched on the lips of their baskets (descendants of Rondon’s efforts to encourage poultry farming), parrots, small monkeys balancing on the women’s heads and babies strapped loosely to their mothers’ thighs. The small-statured Nambikwara women were dwarfed by their baskets, which contained only the bare essentials: kindling, balls of wax, bones, teeth an
d porcupine quills, along with pebbles and shells. It was a nomad’s survival kit, the raw materials for on-the-go invention—slim pickings for Lévi-Strauss’s ethnographic collection.
In place of the rigid rules of a Bororo-like tribe, Lévi-Strauss found a casualness, a lightness of touch, an atmosphere of easy intimacy and banter. In broad daylight the Nambikwara rolled around on the ground in amorous play, fondling each other in twos and threes. Lévi-Strauss observed these joyous embraces carefully: “I never once noticed even an incipient erection,” he noted, though it seems that he found it hard to share the native insouciance. “It was difficult . . . to remain indifferent to the sight of one or more pretty girls sprawling stark naked in the sand laughing mockingly as they wriggled at my feet.”25 In the mornings he was embarrassed when the Nambikwara women groped him while he bathed in the river, trying to steal his soap. (A comical picture survives of Lévi-Strauss, naked, pale and bearded, surrounded by a group of Nambikwara at the river’s edge.)26 Throughout the day he would find women taking a siesta in his hammock, leaving the fibers stained with urucu dye. “People who live in a state of complete nudity are not unaware of modesty,” concluded Lévi-Strauss. “They define it differently”—just as, in the other direction, the burka merely leads to “a shifting of the threshold of anxiety.”27
The team got down to work, making observations throughout the morning. After lunch, as the heat peaked at over a hundred degrees, they would take a siesta before checking their findings during the afternoon. They took photos, Lévi-Strauss with his Leica, Castro Faria using a more unwieldy Contaflex, and drew pictures—“really bad ones, but good for documentary record,” according to Castro Faria.28 He later lamented that although they had brought with them a bulky, hard-to-transport radio transmitter and a record player, they had no recording equipment for interviews or indigenous music.
Lévi-Strauss was a copious note-taker, but he never followed the strict formulas that his wife had taught her students in São Paulo, with their tables of set questions and standardized responses. Instead, he filled French-style graph paper exercise books with a mélange of information. He mixed diary-style entries with kinship diagrams, staves of music recording indigenous songs and lists of basic vocabulary—feu, eau, terre, soleil, lune, vent, nuit; petit, grand, près, loin, beaucoup, joli, laid, for instance, and their indigenous equivalents.29 Expedition lists were thrown in promiscuously. “Luiz: ice, socks, throat medicine, Agfa film . . . ; Me: sunglasses, alcohol, razor,” he scribbled at one point, next to which he had written, “Done, done, done.” Every so often he noted down bulk provisions, “60 kg rice, 10 kg salt, one arroba [just over fourteen kilograms] of sugar” and so forth, along with miscellaneous articles—tents, Winchester rifles, axes and radio sets. On other pages there were short excerpts from books in French, English, German and Portuguese, references to articles and books about Brazil, and names of contacts, including Buell Quain. Drawings were scattered through the pages—of plants, penis sheaths, a monkey’s head, a pregnant woman, along with rough maps and settlement plans. 30
In contrast to the rich evocations in Tristes Tropiques, written fifteen years after the event, in more discursive moments the style of his notes was businesslike: “See indigenous people and distribute small gifts. Dinner at night. In the evening we visit the Indians. Songs and dance,” he wrote of their first contact with the Nambikwara. In these short, staccato entries Lévi-Strauss complained often about the rigors of travel: “Very cold night—moonlight quickly covered by clouds—and a very hard bed . . . return to camp at the end of the day where it is teeming with insects . . . a day of anxiety and inaction.” He referred back wistfully to his native country—certain escarpments in the Brazilian interior were like those found in the Haut-Languedoc; a wooded area reminded him of forests in central France.
“My notebooks are rough,” Lévi-Strauss later admitted. “I am horrified how poorly put together they are.”31 There is indeed a kind of a haphazardness to his field notes. Apart from the general disorganization, the entries are uneven. Some of the sketches, for instance, are well executed—a detail of hand and twine to demonstrate weaving techniques, close-ups of spear tips, a spherical nose flute, palm fronds, a face densely tattooed around the chin and lower lip. But others are more like doodles, childlike drawings of jaguars, armadillos, birds and fish.32 The overall impression is of an artist trawling for ideas rather than an academic at work.
Focusing on material culture, Lévi-Strauss bartered for the simple artifacts—nose feathers, bows and arrows—that were available, while Vellard conducted experiments using native curare, a poison used to asphyxiate prey. Vellard watched as the Nambikwara made their preparation, first shaving off the rust-colored outer casing of roots, then boiling them in a billycan over the campfire. The liquid immediately turned an intense red, frothing up before reducing to a thick, murky substance. The Nambikwara dipped their arrowheads into the concentrate before setting off on hunting expeditions. Vellard tried it out on a dog, plunging the arrowhead into muscle tissue in its leg and holding it in for five minutes. The dog immediately became groggy, its leg stiff and anesthetized. After a second jab, it died of asphyxiation. “A positive result,” Castro Faria noted in his field diary, alongside a forlorn picture of a dead dog.33
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.
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: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 co
ntracted 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.
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.
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
Claude Levi-Strauss: The Poet in the Laboratory Page 11