David Maybury-Lewis and Pia: Social/Symbolic and Public Anthropology

David Maybury-Lewis and Pia have influenced my “research, teaching, and activism” in ways that evolved and hopefully will continue to evolve. The trajectory from teacher/scholar to public intellectual, expressed in David’s and Pia’s life and work, also influenced the life and work of others, as illustrated here.

I was still a new graduate student at Harvard (second year) when David arrived as a new faculty member in Fall 1960. Initial impact was intellectual and personal; Cultural Survival and the public intellectual phase had not yet surfaced. David brought, via Rodney Needham and Lévi-Strauss, a certain kind of structuralism and, from Evans-Pritchard, social anthropology. He also brought youth, energy, charm, a sense of adventure fresh from the field in Brazil, and a British and cosmopolitan persona into what was then a very US milieu, in anthropology and in the department of social relations at Harvard. Pia came too, and she and David together were the first faculty to invite me and other graduate students to their house, where we met to discuss social anthropology, eat her Danish pastries, and relish their warmth and verve. Sometimes guests joined us, such as Edmund Leach, who sat in a chair which collapsed, after which he brandished a chair leg from his spot on the floor. While I did not join the Gê project in Brazil, I took the structuralist influences, which resonated with Dutch anthropology, to Indonesian fieldwork and to thinking through an anthropological perspective. Even though my work was not related to his Gê project, David was kind enough to serve on my examining committee, write to me in the field, and express interest in what I did after I returned, as I excitedly and naively recounted what seemed new and original to me but failed to carry forward his own interests. Their civility and kindness I deeply appreciated, and, no doubt nostalgically, I mention it to others— most recently my mother’s brother’s granddaughter, who majored in anthropology at Harvard, thinking that someday she might need a welcoming human being. But it is especially graduate students who need decency in a world offering sparse rewards for what they do.

David’s public intellectual work, through Cultural Survival, the Millennium Series, and other work on advocacy and outreach stands as one of the great achievements by an anthropologist in what some of us term public interest anthropology. If one compares, say, Boas, one would ask whether he managed to create any organization such as Cultural Survival that outlived his own acts as a public intellectual. I have not participated directly in Cultural Survival other than to be a member, but I have been inspired by it in carrying out some related work, even though this initiative began after I had finished graduate work. I shall briefly illustrate, then, two kinds of work that owe a debt to David and to Pia.

The first kind is academic, a social anthropological approach to the study of symbols and meaning. David arrived at a kind of lacunae within socio-cultural anthropology at Harvard and perhaps generally. The summer before he arrived, Clyde Kluckhohn, the anthropological founder of the Department of Social Relations, had died. Not long afterwards, Alfred Kroeber, co-author with Kluckhohn of an exploration of the concept of culture, died also. The death of these two leaders symbolized a dangerous period in US anthropology—the threat of an end to a humanistic and holistic conception of cultural anthropology that had been initiated by Boas with inspiration from German scholarship. However, a second major founder of Social Relations, Talcott Parsons, was still alive and active, together with his protégé, Robert Bellah. Parsonsian theory provided a comprehensive (if not always comprehensible) framework for some of us in the social anthropology program within the Social Relations Department. Terry Turner, Thomas Kirsch, and I had been studying with Parsons in 1960, the Spring before Kluckhohn died and David arrived. Out of this study, in different ways, we forged our own approaches to symbols and meaning. I recall papers that each of...