Remembering David

Remembering David Nur Yalman David H.P. Maybury-Lewis Thanksgiving Service, Harvard Memorial Church, Cambridge, MA, March 23, 2008, 2 pm. I wish I could speak as many languages as David did. If I could, I would have liked to express my admiration for David in all these many languages, especially Português, for the benefit of our dear Brazilian friends whom he loved. He admits in his brilliant, path-breaking book Akwe-Shavante Society, with his engaging modesty: "When I arrived in Brazil, I spoke fluent French, German, and Spanish, good Danish, and quite good Russian...," but no Portuguese. Portuguese then came later: "For 18 months, I studied at the Escola de Sociologia e Politica in Sao Paolo." Then came Xerente-"with no grammar or dictionary," and then Xavante-languages of small Amazonian tribes. [End Page 1073] On Empathy I mention this, which is merely a footnote for David, to indicate the extraordinary nature of David's openness and generosity of spirit. Those of us who can manage some languages know first hand the degree to which a "language" opens an entirely different world-really another universe. They are almost like those "unknown continents" (terra incognita) we see in ancient maps, which need exploration. But to have 8 or 9 of them with fluency is indicative of a very unusual person--someone with immense resources of empathy. "Empathy"-a trait so rare in our modern world. David had it in generous quantities. This rare quality, empathy, as Claude Lévi-Strauss says in reference to J.J. Rousseau, is the very essence of understanding in the social sciences. It is what makes us human. Speaking of empathy, if E.E. Evans-Pritchard claims famously that the Nuer people of southern Sudan (not a pun on my name!) drove him to Nuerosis, consider what David writes about his and Pia's life among the Xavante (which I cite from his book Akwe-Shavante): "The complete and perpetual lack of privacy imposed a strain on us which became almost intolerable as the months passed. There were always Shavante lolling or sleeping in our hut. Some invariably spent the night with us; others came to while away the hot hours in the middle of the day, under our roof, dozing and begging from us alternatively. This created a number of problems. (!) We did not mind most Shavante habits but we did object to their spitting on our small patch floor or voiding their phlegm in the thatch of our hut. They were most amused by this idiosyncracy of ours and used to hawk loudly and make as if to spit whenever they wanted to catch our attention, as for example when I was trying to write my notes." Privacy was evidently impossible. "It became virtually impossible during the period when the chief's hut was being re-thatched. All its occupants moved into our house while theirs was being repaired. Since it poured with rain on the following days, the thatching could not proceed and we were cooped up with seventeen people, and their pets, in a hut the size of a small room." [End Page 1074] Such was evidently the mental preparation which allowed David and Pia to accept large numbers of tribes of anthropologists and other "exotics" into their home during their legendary-and most welcome-Open House parties on most Sundays during term for many years at Harvard. We are grateful to the Maybury-Lewis family for all that unstinting generosity. But what courage and what selfless tenacity to undertake such difficult fieldwork with young children in real danger in the jungles of the Amazon. Personal Recollections I first met David at a conference in Austria, Burg Wartenstein, with Edmund Leach and David Schneider. I had just returned from fieldwork in Sri Lanka (then Ceylon) at the time and from the Middle East. The year was perhaps 1964. We hit it off right away as the young anarchists questioning the two great and famous professors among us. We had both been undergraduates at Cambridge. We both spoke German. We were both interested in the theoretical problems which challenged anthropology: theoretical problems concerning how to "understand" another "people," another "culture

Biblical Studies and Interpretation · Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies