The French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, who is credited with founding structural anthropology, made the claim that human beings tend to group together either physical or social objects, which explains the dichotomous nature of academic models of society. These models include local-cosmopolitan ones (Merton), folk-urban ones (Redfield), universalist ones (Parsons), and so forth.A Claude Levi-Strauss investigation demonstrates his intellectual ability while serving as a philosophy professor in exile in Brazil. He left the Amazon basin and traveled primarily, stopping in locations like Caduveo, Bororo, Nambikwara, and Tupi-Kawahib. In reality, he discovers in these locations that human society has degraded to a more primitive expression. Also, in these places he manages an intense travelogue coming across cultural diversity which leads to his great works of literature. His fieldwork is discussed in the book Tristes Tropiques that tolerates a great anthropological milestone.Levi-Strauss passed on October 30, 2009.
Marco Polo, a renowned traveler visits the enterprising people of Kirman, at the eastern parts of Persia. He manages to witness the manufacture of steel and its products. He saw the splendid turquoises as well as learning the diabolical art of darkness production aimed at obscuring caravans that they intended to rob. It’s at Ormus that Marco encounters heated wind, so hot that it caused death to those that came into contact.
Marco Polo attests to a Khan ritual performed annually at Xanadu, which involved scattering milk on air as a spiritual offering for guard of the land as well as its crops. At the same time, Polo refers Kinsai, the capital as an heavenly city filled with elegant courtesans who are “highly proficient and accomplished in the use of endearments and caresses, with words suited and adapted to every sort of person, so that foreigners who have once enjoyed them remain utterly besideselves and so captivated by their sweetness and charm that they can never forget them” in his book Tristes Tropiques, C.L Strauss is stunned by Brazilians who constantly conceal what they hate such as presence of black Brazilians in Brazil as well as children in Bahia who walked barefoot .
Again, there develops a new understanding of slavery based on the racial background especially between the Indians and Europeans. Struss notes that Indians stick to each other even to death. Their immense social injustice is vivid as ten years later Ortiz speaks as follows at the council of the Indian in that they would feed human flesh lice, spiders and worms, all raw having less notion of justice. Another instance of injustice was exhibited where Ortiz says that any man who had beardwas forced to pull them out hair by hair. Incidentally, Oviedo says that
TheEuropeans captured by Indians from Porto Rico Island killed by drowning. The dead bodies were guarded for a couple of weeks to ensure putrefaction.This brings out the differences between the white men and he Indians, in that the whites invoked socially while the Indians suspected the whites for gods hence honoring such human race.
The Indians are said to have some influence to the culture of the Europeans that treaded their territory. Infact there always emerged an intercultural interaction which the author calls “modern” and “primitive” as quoted; “Nowthat these Indians were thrown back upon their own resources,there could be noted a strange reversal of the apparent equilibrium between modern and primitive cultures.”He adds that, “Old ways of life andtraditional techniques reappeared; the past to which they belonged was, after all, neither dead nor distant. How else could one account for the admirably polished stone pestles which stood side by side, in the Tristans houses, with the enameled metal plates, the cheap mass-producedspoons, and in more than one instance die skeletal remains ofa sewing-machine?”
Again, Levi-Strauss claims that his voyage exposed his mind to a refreshed atmosphere having been imprisoned by a constant practice of philosophical ideologies.“My mind was able to escape from the claustrophobic, Turkish-bath atmosphere in which it was being imprisoned by the practice of philosophical reflection… Once it had got out into the open air, it felt refreshed and renewed”. Furthermore, he was not very active in artistic life in France since much of his time was spent in the other side of Atlantic. Though the atmosphere by then did not favor constant familiarialization of the culture there he uses collages and paradoxes to create a picture of life up there. He makes use of grotesque drawing by a Cauveo woman trying to depict the image of a native woman who having a subtle yet complicated arabesque. This unveils the issue of primitiveness among the people.
While in India he realizes the quest of the Indian people to quality production through hard work. He notes; India used the means of caste system work out the problems of the high population growth about three thousand years ago. This was aimed at changing quantity into quality hence being competitive with other groups though this experimentation did not fare well. In fact, he says “Men can coexist on condition that they recognize each other as being all equally, though differently human, but they can also coexist by denying each other a comparable degree of humanity, and thus establishing a system of subordination.”
Claude is disgusted by the anarchy of the Brazilian people during their voyage. He is able to face many facts and objects, which constantly enriched his meditations. He is perplexed at some point. He writes,“When was the right moment to see India? At what period would thestudy of the Brazilian savage have yielded the purest satisfaction and the savage himself been at his peak?... would it have been better to have arrived at Rio in the eighteenth century, with Bougainville, or in the sixteenth, with Lery and Thevet...? With every decade that wetravelled further back in time, I could have saved another costume, witnessed another festivity, and come to understand another system of belief….But I m too familiar with the texts not to know that this backward movement would also deprive me of much information, many curious facts and objects, that would enrich my meditations….The paradox is irresoluble: the less one culture communicates with another, the less likely they are to be corrupted, one by the other; but, on the other hand, the less likely it is, in such conditions, that the respective emissaries of these cultures will be able to seize the richness and significance of their diversity… The alternative is inescapable: either am a traveler in ancient times, and faced with a prodigious spectacle which would be almost entirely unintelligible to me and might, indeed, provoke me to mockery or disgust; or I am a traveler four own day, hastening in search of a vanished reality… In either case I am the loser and more heavily than one might suppose; for today, as I go groaning among the shadows, I miss, inevitably, the spectacle that is now taking shape... My eyes, or perhaps my degree of humanity, do not equip me to witness that spectacle; and in the centuries to come, when another traveler revisits this same place, he too may groan aloud at the disappearance of much that I should have set down, but cannot. I am the victim of a double infirmity: what I see is an affliction to me; and what I do not see, a reproach.”
To add onto this, Strauss learns a new way of body decoration. This involved inlaying of teeth and filing them down using specialized tools. He notes their culture was made upfor the most part ofancient traditions (such as the practice, still common among them, offiling down and inlaying their teeth) which had out against the influence of the whites. But it also included certainborrowings from the civilization ofour own day, and the combination,though not rich in the accepted dements of the picturesque, was nevertheless an original field of study, and one quite as instructive as that offeredby the uncontaminated natives with whom I was to have to do later.
The nature of Indian federal government was fascinating. First, they build wooden houses for its citizens. The houses were grouped in villages ranging from fire to six and water was nearby. A more isolated houses built by the Indians were also vivid. Interestingly, families considered living on branch hung awnings leaving the adjacent houses unoccupied. “We visited the wooden houses which the federal government hadbuilt…They were grouped in villages of from five to six fires, with water nearby; we also saw the more isolated houses which the Indians occasionally built for themselves; these consisted ofa square palisade of palmito-trunks, bound together with liana, and a roof made of leaves and hung on to the walls by its four corners. And we also examined those branch-hung awnings beneath which whole families would often live, leaving the adjacent house unoccupied. In such cases, the inhabitants would gather round a ever glowing fire with men taking the overall security measures. The author notes,“The inhabitants, in such cases, would be assembled round a firethat was kept burning night and day... The men generally wore lie ragged remains of a shirt and an old pair of trousers, and the women either a cotton dress, worn need: the skin or a blanket rolled armpits… The children went naked… wore, as did ourselves while travelling, large hats of straw; the making of these was, indeed, their only activity and their only way of making money… Both menand women bore, at every age, the marks of the Mongolian type: lightly built, with broad fiat faces, prominent cheekbones, yellow skin, narrow eyes, black straight hair worn either long or short, in the case of the women and the body almost or entirely hairless They live in one room….They eat, at no matter what time ofthe day, the sweet potatoes that lie roasting in the ashes picking them out with long pincers of bamboo… They sleep on either a thin layer of bracken or a pallet of maize-strawEach lies with his feet nearest the fire”.
In those Indian made houses, only one room was put in use with all kind of Indian worldly goods placed on the floor. One would easily confuse with the ones made from other places.“Notably the furniture was the rudest,”he notes, “with a few wooden pieces of log attached in a quake manner.”
The Indians had kings and queens, as well captured in the book Alice in Wonderlandby Lewis Carroll, were the nobles of the land. The author states “loved to play with the severed heads thattheir warriors brought back from battle… Nobles ofboth sexes delighted in tournaments and were absolved from all menial tasks by an enslavedpeople that had been installed there long before the Caduveo and differed from them both in language and in culture: the Guana, All that now remains of these is the Tereno, who live in a governmental reserve not far from the little town of Miranda, I went to see in there… In former times the Guana tilled the soil and paid the Mbaya lords a tribute of agricultural produce in exchange for their protection, as an insurance, that is to say, against pillage and sacking by bands of armed horsemen… A sixteenth-century German who ventured into the region described the relationship as similar to that then existing in central Europe between the feudal lords and their serfs.”
The culture of Bororo people captivate a new picture of a society at helms of earths occults. Claude realizes that this community has deeply been groomed to their traditions with each clan enjoying it own technical privileges as shown in this text; “Each clan has a capital of myths, traditions, dances, andfunctions, either social or religious. The myths are, in their turn, at the bottom of the technical privileges which are one of the most curious features of Bororo culture… Almost all Bororo objects are emblazoned in such a way that the owner s den and sub-den may be identified…The privilege lies in the use of certain feathers, or colours of feathers; in the way in which an object is carved or cut; in the disposition of feathers differing in colour, or species; in the execution of certain decorative work: fibre-plaiting, for instance, or feather-mosaics; in the use of particular patterns, and so on.”
It’s also worth noting that the nobles had distinct attires unique in their own ways as Claude expresses, “The nobles bore, quite literally, the mark oftheir rank in the formofpictorial designs painted or tattooed on their bodies. These were the equivalent of an escutcheon. They plucked out all their facial hair eyebrows and lashes included and recoiled in disgust from the bushy-browed European: the ostrichesbrother was their nameforfern- Men and women alike were accompanied in public by a suite of slaves and hangers-on: these vied with one another to spare them all effort.”
Indian girls bore an interesting character. They would follow their counterpart warriors to serve them as mistresses and occasionally dance with them. No man would be jealous since the dancing partner was randomly chosen. Claude explains that, “Our Indians were monogamous; but the girls sometimes chose, inadolescence, to fellow the warriors in their adventures, serving them as equerries, pages, and mistresses... The noble ladies, for their part, had to dance attendance upon them; often these were also their lovers, bet no husband, in such a case, and would deign to make any show of jealousy: by so doing he would have lost face. What we call natural sentiments were held in great disfavor in their society: for instance, the idea of procreation filled them with disgust. Abortion and infanticide so common as to be almost normal to the extent, in feet, that it was by adoption, rather than by procreation, that the group ensured its continuance. One of the main objects of the warrior’s expeditions was to king back children.”
It would be absurd to leave behind this issue of body painting in India which was done by women by either using paint or tattooing though tattooing was slowly halted. The author states“The motifs were, at one time, either tattooed or painted; buttattooing has now quite dropped out. The painter, a woman, works on the face or body of one other fellow-woman, or sometimes on those of a .small boy. (It s becoming rarer and rarer for a grown man to be painted.) The artist uses a fine bamboo spatula dipped in the juice of the genipap initially colorless, this later turns blue-black by oxidation and she improvises her design on the living model, withneither sketch, nor prototype, nor focal point to guide her…She ornaments die upper lip with a bow-shaped motif finished off with a spiral at either end. Then she divides the face with a vertical line; this she occasionally cuts across horizontally.”
Other incidences would occur when people would gather during wee hours around a camp-place where the happenings of the day would be discussed. Some other times a viper bite victim would require to be nursed by a woman who would traditionallytreat him. Their custom involved undressing the patient and passing water on him or her. This wasparticularly done by the few women who nearly all were prostitutes as noted by the writer, “But that particular evening the talk around the camp-fire turned onthe everyday hazards to which our visitors were exposed…. I learnt, too, something of the picturesque language of the Sertao…As bad luck would have it, someone had just found gold in his wash-trough. This augurs ill for the diamond-hunter, whose only reaction is to throw it back into the river at once. (Weeks of ill fortune must otherwise follow.) Another hunter had been wounded bythe tail of a poisonous snake. This was a hurt not easily cured, for he had to find a woman who would consent to undress and pass water on the wound…. As the few women in the garimpo are nearly all peasant prostitutes this ingenuous remedy often brings in its train a particularly virulent form of syphilis.”
At the same time, another aspect, show off, unveils at garimpo where the rich buy superfluous goods at any price so as to attract women. It’s the legendary stroke of luck that draws these women to thearea.” His prospector may become rich overnight; and, if he does, his police record will force him to spend the money then and there…That’s why the lorries lumber to and fro with their load ofsuperfluous goods. The moment the cargo arrives at garimpo it will be mapped up at no matter what price; not necessity, but the wish to show off, will be the motive.”
It was still at Borobo that Claude realized another strange thing, that the Borobo pottery was painted lest for use in religious grounds.“A few calabashes; some black pots, bowls and shallow basins, withsometimes a long handle, ladle-wise… These objects have a great purity of form, and this purity is underlined by the austerity of their component materials….One strange thing: it seems that Bororo pottery used to be decorated, and that in relatively recent times this was forbidden on religious grounds. Perhaps it is for the same reason that the Indians no longer carry out Rupestral paintings such as may still be found in rock-protected shelters of the Chapada: yet these paintings contain many elements taken from Bororo culture. To make quite sure of this I once asked them to decorate for me a large sheet ofwhite paper…A native set to work with a paste made of Urucu and some resin; and although the Bororo have forgotten when they used to paint those rocky walls, and indeed no longer frequent the escarpments where they are to be seen, the picture which he made for me was an almost exact version, on a smaller scale, of one ofthem.”
The writer also describe these nomadic Borobo people in a unique way in that their human existence is transitory between a fish and the Arara. The dead undergo dual burial ceremony, in that the body is first left in a ditch for perturbation after which the bones are taken out, washed, painted and thrown into a lake. In fact death was perceived natural and against the peoples culture. Whenever it occurred, the village would organize for a collective search for the moiety that the dead wasn’t a member, a step taken in belief of punishing nature. A sizeable animal such as a jaguar would be killed, and its skin brought home together with a set of nails and teeth.
The author gives this account of such tradition he witnessed, “A man had just died when I arrived in Kejara but, unluckily, he had died some way away, in another village. I could not, therefore, witness the double burial ceremony: first, the body is put in a ditch, covered with branches, in the middle of the village, and then, when putrefaction has been completed, the bones are washed in the river…Next, they are painted and ornamented with feather-mosaics stuck on with glue and, finally, they are sent down in a basket to die bottom of a lake or a running stream. All the other ceremonies at which I was present were in strict traditional style, inclusive ofthe ritual scarification of the relatives at the place where the provisional tomb had had to be dug. I was also unlucky in that the collective hunt had taken place either the day before, or on the afternoon o my arrival, so that I could not witness it. Nothing had been killed, in any case, and an old jaguar-skin was brought into service for the funeral dances. I even suspect that our Irara was commandeered to take the place of the missing prey. They would never tell me if this was the case and morels the pity: for, had it really been so, I could have claimed for myself the role of the uiaddo, or chief huntsman and representative of the dead man, His Emily would have presented me with an armbandof human hair and a ori, or mystic clarinet: this was made up of a little befeathered calabash which served as amplifier to the bamboo reed-pipe on which the huntsman would play when the kill had been completed; and, later, it would be attached to the skin. I should have shared out, as I was bound to do, the meat, the hide, the teeth, and the nails among die dead man s relatives; and they would have given me in exchange a ceremonial bow and arrows, another clarinet in commemoration ofmy services in the field, and a necklace offlat discs made from shells… I should also, no doubt, have had to paint myself black in order to escape the notice of the evil spirit which had been responsible for the man s death. By the rules of the man, this spirit would be incarnate in the animal I should set out to kill; and, although it had to offer itselfby way ofcompensation for the harm it had done, it would be filled with a vindictive hatred for its executioner… For, in a sense, the Bororo’s murderous Nature is human and operates through the intermediary of a special.”
Nambikwara, another nomadic group bring in a new dimension of cultural life, as the author writes, “…in that their material culture could not be associated with the lofty cultures of south and central America but as survivors ranged from stone age… The women wore, atmost, a single strand of shell-beads round their waists and another strand or two as necklaces or as shoulder-belts; their ear-rings were of feathers or mother-of-pearl, their bracelets were carved from armadillo shell or, at times, made up from straw or cotton (woven by their men) and tied round their ankles or biceps… The men s wardrobe was even more summary, except that some of them wore a tuft of straw that hung from their belts just above their genitals.”
In regard to their armaments, the Nambikwara arsenals were more sophisticated compared to Borobo’s. Their whole possession could be assembled in a basket, easily slung on their backs especially during seasons of nomadism. In fact, the author states that “In addition to bow and arrows, their armament consisted of a sort offlattened spike… But this seemed to relate as much to magic as to the hunt, for I never saw it used except to deflect a hurricane or to kill off, with a well-directed throw, the Atasu, or evil spirits of the bush…The name of Atasu is given also to the stars and to our oxen, ofwhomthey lived in terror. (And yet they will readily kill and eat mules, though they made their acquaintance at the same time as that of the oxen.)”
When it came to leadership, a Nambikwara chief presumed first the virtue of generosity. He was required to have an excess of almost everything in any case an individual, a band or a family were in need of anything a request would be made to him who would then give according to his generosity. The chief enjoyed privileges of polygamy, as well as power to give verdicts upon his subjects. Polygamy had an auxiliary significance apart from private satisfactions in that it acted as experimental friendship uniting the entire clan. It was a technical condition of power.as the author notes, “The Chiefstruck me as an informed and resourceful leader, who was always turning over in his mind some possible political maneuver…His colleague was a man, not of action, but of contemplation: he had an attractive and poetical turn of mind and was unusually sensitive. He realized that his people were decadent, and for this reason his conversation had often a note melancholy. ‘I used to do that once,’ he would say, ‘but now it’s finished …”
In conclusion it is clear that the author gains a vast knowledge on the different cultures of people from the place he managed to get. He was able to impact some of these cultures to the people he would meet as well as learn more from those that he met. The writer comes into conclusion that we need each other for growth and that culture is simply an amplification of our common agreement as a group or society based on beliefs and can be impacted to others as well.
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