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.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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 gravell
y 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.
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
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
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
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
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
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
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.
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 pap
ers 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
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.
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
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