Introduction

The article you are about to read is the last one completed by the late David Maybury-Lewis (called “David” by most of his former students). Reading the manuscript was a very emotional experience for me, since the opening sections brought back to life vivid memories of sitting in a classroom as a junior at Harvard nearly 45 years ago, listening spellbound to David’s deep mellifluous voice as he introduced us to the complexities of the Central Brazilian societies. I was surprised to see my own words, as well as those of one of my students, approvingly quoted in the final pages. In this last paper, the author returns to a subject central to his long career as a social anthropologist, public anthropologist, and teacher. Let me put it in perspective.

When David and his wife Pia began their research on the Xerente in the 1950s, British social anthropology was strongly focused on concepts of lineage and descent, and Claude Lévi-Strauss had recently published his Elementary Forms of Kinship, which focused on marriages as systems of exchange. Descent and exchange were seen as the organizing features of “tribal” societies. The Gê-speaking societies of central Brazil were considered anomalies, since their material culture was relatively simple, but their social organization was complex. Furthermore, descriptions of both kinship and marriage practices in different Gê groups were puzzling to the anthropology of the day—a point made by Lévi-Strauss in three articles on Gê social organization included in his famous collection of essays, Structural Anthropology (1963). The northern Gê societies did not fit gracefully into the existing models of kinship, descent, and cultural complexity. For example, the northern Gê groups revealed different forms of dual organization linked with multiple sets of moieties—a trait also characteristic of the distant Inca society in the Andes. The Apinaye, a northern Gê group, were described as having four marriage regulating groups formed by a system of parallel descent—very rare in South America and not particularly clearly described by anthropologist Curt Nimuendaju (1939). The complex social organization of the neighboring Bororo led Lévi-Strauss to question the very existence of dual organization. David concludes section four with a description of these anomalies.

David’s narrative omits a crucial point that Lévi-Strauss also made in “The Social Structures of Central and Eastern Brazil” (originally published in French in 1952). There, Lévi-Strauss wrote: “The study of the social organization among the populations of central and eastern Brazil must be thoroughly restudied in the field…this study must be carried out on a comparative basis” (1963b:126). Lévi-Strauss thus called for a complete restudy of the Central Brazilian societies in order to understand the anomalies. One of David’s enduring contributions to anthropology was his decision to undertake the restudy called for by Lévi-Strauss in 1952 on a large scale, through an ambitious bi-national project in collaboration with the Department of Anthropology of the Museu Nacional in Rio de Janeiro. Established jointly with anthropologist Roberto Cardoso de Oliveira, the project involved graduate training, field research, and collaboration among a group of outstanding young Brazilian and US scholars (listed in his footnote seven). The project not only achieved the restudy of the Northern and Central Gê described in David’s paper, it also helped to establish the program at the Museu Nacional as one of the best in South America, and it still serves as a model of international collaboration. Many of the works on the Gê David cites in the rest of the paper would never have been written had he not initiated the restudy project. David was also an enthusiastic supporter of researchers in Brazil and the United States who were not originally part of the project—my own advisor was his student Terence Turner, and both Vanessa Lea and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro were my students at the Museu Nacional. The collegial interaction encouraged by advanced training in both Harvard and Rio de Janeiro led to a series of ethnographic studies of the Gê that examined kinship, social organization, and cosmology from...