The bow and the basket
Tony Gould
CHRONICLE OF THE GUAYAKI INDIANS by Pierre Clastres, translated by Paul Auster Faber, £9.99, pp. 349 If, in the words of the poet, 'the proper study of mankind is man', then anthropolo- gy should have a very broad appeal. Yet how rarely does an ethnographic study break out of the academic ghetto and achieve a general readership? Even this remarkable work owes its English-language edition to factors other than its intrinsic interest. This is evident from the equal billing given by Faber to author and trans- lator.
Outside academe Pierre Clastres may not be a name to conjure with, but Paul Auster is; and Faber publishes his very suc- cessful fiction. Add to that the story of the miraculous recovery of a set of uncorrected proofs of his translation at a book-signing session 20 years after its disappearance many years, too, after the anthropologist's tragically early death in a car accident (reminiscent of that of another French intellectual, Albert Camus) — and you have the ingredients of what the publisher at least must hope will be a huge commer- cial success.
But the book does not lend itself as easi- ly to hype as the translator's story. It is a dense, sober, scholarly and engaged study of a dying culture. It is a rewarding, but not an easy read. Though it deals with sensa- tional matters — cannibalism being the most obvious — its treatment of them is the reverse of sensational.
Here is an anthropologist who is neither self-aggrandising nor entirely self-effacing. He recognises that his presence among the nomadic Guayaki Indians of the forests of Paraguay has implications which it would be dishonest to ignore; but he is not on an ego trip, and he stays in the background, telling us no more of himself than we need to know or would want to ask if he had not pre-empted our curiosity. He is, as Paul Auster claims, 'that rare scholar who does not hesitate to write in the first person'. But Auster goes too far when he says that `the result is not just a portrait of the people he is studying, but a portrait of him- self. This does Clastres a disservice.
When he discovers his Guayaki commu- nity's cannibalism late on and almost by chance, Clastres comments:
Being an ethnologist does not make one immune to the things that fascinate other Westerners, at least in the beginning.
The rider is important, since the group's cannibalism is shown to be less a matter of appetite than of religion. It is far from indiscriminate; they only eat their own dead, and the underlying purpose of this is to prevent 'the souls from penetrating the bodies of the living'. But this does not mean that they don't enjoy the taste of human flesh, any more than Clastres' hard- won understanding of their ritual is a denial of his initial thrill at the discovery.
A recent issue of Granta published an extract from this book, 'The Life and Death of a Homosexual', which I found baffling. But in context the chapter pro- vides a clear definition of gender roles and the way in which the Guayaki community can tolerate, even respect, deviant behaviour provided the individual accepts its implications. In a society in which `Man = hunter =bow, woman=gatherer= basket' and there is 'no third equation, no additional space to protect those who belong neither to the bow nor the basket' a homosexual may find acceptance by carry- ing a basket and doing the womanly chores. As far as sex is concerned, by a bizarre but logical reversal of the male-female taboos — in this particular case at least — `Krem- begi's partners were his own brothers'. The only other homosexual in the group did not conform to the model of female behaviour and was ridiculed even by the children, who normally treated their elders with respect.
As Auster (who should know) points out, `In delineating this unknown civilisation for us, Clastres writes with the cunning of a good novelist.' He reveals the complexities of an apparently simple culture with detailed precision, stripping it layer by layer until he reaches the kernel of truth. But as he unravels the mysteries of birth, adolescent initiation, mating, hunting and, finally, death rituals with the skill of a magician who increases our wonder by explaining his tricks as he goes along, our delight at the sense of order and common humanity behind the apparently alien exis- tence of the Guayaki is tinged with sadness at its inevitable extinction.
`For us to be able to study a primitive society', his mentor Alfred Metraux told Clastres, 'it must already be starting to dis- integrate.' At the edges of the Guayaki world there are many threats, but none greater than the white men ready to `unleash their thunder' — guns against bows and arrows — and steal the Indians' children, enslaving them under the guise of civilising them. Then there is the threat to their environment, the ever-diminishing forests of South America. Even the Paraguayan who nominates himself their protector is, in fact, their exploiter and the alliance with the white man which some of the Guayaki favour will ultimately undo them.
Clastres does not labour these points, though he felt them so deeply that he could not bear to revisit the Guayakis after 1963- 64, the year he spent with them. He did go back to Paraguay several times and heard of their steady decline, 'eaten away by ill- ness and tuberculosis, killed by lack of proper care, by lack of everything'. He compares the survivors with 'unclaimed objects':
Hopelessly forced to leave their prehistory, they had been thrown into a history that had nothing to do with them except to destroy them.
But that's progress, isn't it? Appropriate- ly, Clastres quotes Montaigne on the con- quest of America, still in the process of completion four centuries later:
So many cities razed, so many nations exter- minated, so many peoples cut down by the sword, and the richest and most beautiful part of the world overthrown for the sake of pearls and pepper! Mechanical victories.
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