Biography

About the Trip

Related Sites

Sources

	David Maybury-Lewis The Savage and the Innocent
"A twentieth century expedition among the legendary tribes of Central Brazil..."

"My wife and I lived among the Sherente for eight months in 1955-56 and among the Shavante for slightly longer in 1958. This book is an account of our experiences; it is not an essay in anthropology. Indeed I have tried to put down here many of those things which never got told in technical anthropological writings - our impressions of Central Brazil, our personal reactions to the various situations in which we found ourselves, and above all our feelings about the day-to-day business which is mysteriously known as 'doing fieldwork.' The narrative is therefore intentionally anecdotal. To those readers who find that this book is not as thrilling as a book about the wilds of Brazil should be, I offer my apologies. I can only add by way of explanation that every incident is true"-Maybury-Lewis, Preface to text

BACKGROUND:

• David Maybury-Lewis was born in Hyderabad, Pakistan in 1929
  
• Served in British Army from 1947-1948, terminated secondary studies, received Bachelor of Arts 1952
• Earned Ph.D. in Anthropology from Oxford University, 1956
• Traveled extensively in Brazil, 1955, 1956, 1958
• Emigrated to the United States in 1960, joined staff at Harvard as cultural anthropologist
• Found Cultural Survival, Inc. in 1972, an organization promoting the "rights and voices" of indigenous peoples
• Hosted series "Millennium: Tribal Wisdom and the Modern World" on public television in 1992, which dealt with a comparative study of different world cultures.
• Awarded the Grand Cross of the Order of Scientific Merit, Brazil's highest academic honor, in 1997 for contributions to Brazilian social science via chronicles of the lives of the indigenous peoples of the country, as well as books: Dialectical Societies: The Ge and Bororo of Central Brazil, The Attraction of Opposites: Thought and Society in the Dualistic Mode
• Received the Anders Retzuis gold medal of the Swedish Society of Anthropology and Geography in 1998.
• Current professor of cultural anthropology at Harvard University, senior fellow in the Institute's Jennings Randolph fellowship program,, director of the Program on Nonviolent Sanctions and Cultural Survival, a research program at Harvard, former president of the American Ethnological Society, current member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

David Maybury-Lewis with student at Harvard graduation

ABOUT THE TRIP:

-An undergraduate who had once taken a course in the discovery, conquest, and settlement of Spanish America, and who retained a gift for languages, Maybury-Lewis "marveled" at the first-hand accounts of the American Indians. Greatly longing for the opportunity to satisfy his curiosity by actually meeting the native peoples, he once "wandered into an international conference" while at Cambridge, which was being held by anthropologists specializing in American studies. Testing the waters, he inquired as to how a "young Englishman with no money could go out to the Americas and do anthropological research." His inquiries were entertained but momentarily, and he received little more than sympathetic glances and good wishes...from the majority in attendance. One German professor, however, did listen with acute interest to his desire to travel, and assured him that there was an enormous amount of work for the undertaking in the "interior." Relating to Lewis that he himself would soon be venturing south and west, he invited him to accompany him as his student, (although he proposed no remedies for the financial constraints). Perplexed as to what to do, Lewis ultimately decided to accept the offer: "Nevertheless the idea, with its piquant associations of the un-mapped and the unknown, appealed to me. Out of this slightly surrealist conversation came a succession of events which was to land me six years later together with my wife and a small baby in the midst of one of the most notoriously bellicose tribes of Mato Grosso," (14).

- "I conceived a romantic desire to know more about some of the people who had inspired such highly coloured narratives and who still, four hundred years later, seemed remote and exotic in a world jaded with travelogue," (13).

	-"We had not yet learned the first lesson of the interior, which is to relax and make yourself comfortable wherever you are so that you may save your energies for a crisis..." (26). "My feet suddenly felt exposed in their thin tennis shoes and I wished that I had not been too proud to put on my boots that morning. I let Jacinto go ahead in his home-made sandals," (43).
	-"On our first night in the hotel we had been shown into a small, airless room whose soul furniture was a hard-looking double bed. It was lit by a naked bulb dangling from the ceiling, giving a pale splodge of light which left the walls and corners cobwebby with shadows/ Pia remembered stories of tarantulas which descended from the thatch and preyed on passing travellers.../I have to admit that that night we slept with my revolver beside our heads, prepared for such eventualities as the travel books had led us to expect," (25). "There were about ten mud houses, eight of them drawn up in two lines facing each other across a plaza of trodden earth. At one end of this oblong stood the chief's house and the house of assembly, elegantly flanked by a row of palm trees./The arrangement was aesthetically pleasing and academically exciting, for the Sherente had built their villages in sweeping semicircles in aboriginal times. The northern arc contained the houses of one moiety, which faced the houses of the other moiety located on the south side. From east to west the village was bisected by the 'path of the sun,' as they called it," (39).
	"Strange to think I was out hunting with 'Red Indians.' It felt much more like being out with a party of nineteenth century frontiersmen, waiting all the while for the Indians to appear. Appear they did, when we emerged on to the savannah and found them grouped under a spreading cashew tree. The deliciously juicy fruits had all been eaten and the ground was littered with the nuts that attach them to the boughs, looking as if somebody had emptied a tin of those salted shapes so popular in Europe," (49).

References:

Maybury-Lewis, David. The Savage and the Innocent. Beacon Press, Boston: 1956.

autobiography