Book Reviews

535

though issued in an edition of 20,000 copies, this writer urges that an Ihglish-language
version be published, with full credit to its Soviet compilers.

The H i g h Ti~lley.KENNETH I<. READ.New York: Charles Scribners Sons. 1965, xvii,
266 pp., glossary, 19 illustrations, index. $6.95.
Rrvirwed by CORADu BQIS,Harvard University

The dust jacket of this handsomely produced book states i t to be an autobiographical account of two years spent in the central highlands of New Guinea. It is that
but also more. I t is a selective and personalized ethnography giving us what we rarely
find in professional literature: a frank and humanistic account of episodes in the lives of
people seen through the eyes of a man \Tho felt almost too sensitively his sympathy for
but his distance from them.
The Galuku-Gama live in the Asaro valley, south of the crest of the Bismark Range,
and are reached by plane from Lae. The countryside is admirably depicted and the
descriptions of episodes and people are vivid. The reader, however, should be warned
that the people and environment descrihed in this book reminded me so much of similar
landscapes, people, and episodes in Alor that I may read greater vividness into the book
than others will see.
The ethnographic episodes discuss successful and unsuccessful bids for leadership,
the early play period oi boys iollowed by drastic initiation rites, marriage exchanges,
sex roles, childbirth, and the endless round of gardening punctuated by dramatic
quarrels among a vigorous and aggressive people.
This i s certainly a franker document than most ethnographers are willing to write or
able to write so well. I t is not. a complete or a scientific account, but a t least it avoids
what is oiten the pseudo-precision of more scientifically pretentious documents. We can
only hope that Professor Read will fill in the lacunae more than he has so far in professional publications.
Occasionally Kenneth Read leaves me unsure, not of the description of episodes that
he reports, but of his psychological interpretations. His very sensitivity may a t times
betray him. I wonder, for example, whether his friend and patron, the leader Makis, was
as objective as he is reported to have been, whether he was a force for modernization
and whether he sensed that he was being outstripped by changes? Is the anguish of
Asemo, the initiate, the authors or Asernos? Did the much loved child, Tarova, suffer
from her early marriage as much as Kenneth Read and as much as he imputes to her
kinsmen? The time is past when psychological factors can be guessed a t rather than investigated. However, just as clinical psychology is often essential to raising questions
that more rigorous psychologists then grapple with, so this type of document raises
questions to which others can address themselves more precisely.
This book will arouse dehatc since the differences between the humanists and the
scientists in anthropology are still unresolved. Comparing The R i g h VaZley to a few of
the more distinguished personal documents that I happen to have read in recent years,
I consider i t outstanding in honesty, empathy, and eloquence, if not always in objectivit.y. It avoids the disjoint.ed intellectualizations of L6vi-Strauss Tristes Tropiques
(19.59, the self-engrossment of Rowens Rel.zi,rn to Laughter (1954), the youthful adventuring of Huxleys ;l.fable .Sawtigees (19j7), and the made-to-order patness of many
articlcs in Casagrandes I n the Compaizy of M u n (1960).
So long as we consider field work in unfamiliar societies essential to the formation of
every professional anthropologist, the good personal documents have an important
function for training students. The High Valley must not be read as a handbook for

536

American Anthropologist

[68, 19661

ethnographic research, nor is it a model ethnographic report to be recommended to

students. This was surely not Professor Reads intention. But it is an important document of a sensitive ethnographers reaction to the experience of cue-lessness in a
strange and perplexing society. Participant observation and empathy arc necessary to
good field work. Unfortunately, they are not sufficient.
The Suvage and the Innocent. DAVID
MAYBURY-LEWIS.
London: Evans BrothersLimited,
196.5; also, Cleveland and New York: The World Publishing Company, 1965. 270
pp., 37 illustrations, index, 2 maps. 35 s., $4.95.
Reviewed by CHARLESWAGLEY,
Columbia University

This is the story oC eight months field research among the Sherente and of a slightly
longer period among the Shavante Indians of central Brazil. As the author states in his
preface: I have tried to put down here many of those things which never get told in
technical anthropological writings. He has been eminently successful in doing so.
Furthermore, although Maybury-Lewis book is not intended as a travel book, it is
far better than most books about the Brazilian jungle and the Indians. The author
understood what he saw and heard-or he had the honesty to say that he did not understand. His story is intrinsically interesting and thrilling without seeking to be spectacular. The book is well written. I am amazed that he was able to record so much dialogue
and I am pleased that so much of it rings true to my ear.
The Sherente and the Shavante are central G& speaking tribes who were once
thought t o be a single people-or a t least closely related tribes. (I gather from the present book that they are not as similar as once supposed.) In the late 18th and early 19th
century, both tribes had contact with Brazilian frontier society. The Sherente, after a
period of hostility, entered into peaceful relations with Brazilians in about 18.50. As a
result they were highly acculturated and living in misery when David Maybury-Lewis
and his wife, Pia, came to study them in 1955 and 1956. The Shavante, on the other
hand, reverted to outright hostility in the 19th century. They migrated westward across
the Araguaya River where they fought and killed frontiersmen, missionaries, and
Indian officers who intruded into their territory. It was not until 1946 that they entered
into peaceful relations with the Brazilian Indian Protective Service. When MayburyLewis arrived (now accompanied by his wife and a baby son) in 1958,the Shavante were
still leading a way of life little changed from that of aboriginal times. He had the unusual experience of studying a basically hunting and gathering society before it was
disrupted and disorganized.
Both tribes were already relatively accessible when the Maybury-Lewises visited
them. The Sherente could be reached overland from the town of Carolina on the
Tocantins River. There was a landing strip serviced by Brazilian air force planes a t the
Indian post in Shavante country. But nothing is really accessible in central Brazil.
Maybury-Lewis describes vividly the seemingly eternal days, even weeks, of waiting
for the boat that does not come, the baggage that got left behind, or the airplane which
suddenly swoops down without warning. Waiting is a large part of any field trip to this
part of Brazil. He also describes his first contacts with the people, his relations with
informants, his own moods and anxieties, and his vicissitudes and successes infield
research. There is also considerable social and cultural data about the Sherente and the
Shavante in this book. His data on the Sherente is particularly valuable since Curt
Nimuendajus monograph reporting on field work in 1937 is available. In my opinion,
Maybury-Lewis account of his field experience among the Shavante would have been
more useful to a professional audience if it had been preceded by his forthcoming mono-