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Connections

Postmodern Thoughts, Illuminated by the
Practices of a Premodern Tribe

Claude Lévi-Strauss

Two painted Caduveo women in 1935, as pictured in “Structural
Anthropology” by Claude Lévi-Strauss. He studied the Brazilian tribe.

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By EDWARD
ROTHSTEIN

Published: June 18, 2007

News of the death of the philosopher Richard Rorty on June 8 came as I was
reading about a small Brazilian tribe that the French anthropologist Claude
Lévi-Strauss studied in the 1930s. A strange accident, a haphazard juxtaposition
— but for a moment this pragmatist philosopher and a fading tribal culture
glanced against each other, revealing something unusual about the contemporary
scene.

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Richard
Rorty, Philosopher, Dies at 75 (June 11, 2007)

University of Virginia

The philosopher Richard Rorty.

Mr. Rorty was one of America’s foremost philosophers, who in midcareer, after
devoting himself to the rigors of analytic philosophy, decided that “it is
impossible to step outside our skins — the traditions, linguistic and other,
within which we do our thinking and self-criticism.” He argued that we are
always dealing with multiple and conflicting claims of truth, none of which can
be conclusively established. We choose what to believe based on what is useful
for us to believe. For Mr. Rorty, the importance of democracy is that it creates
a liberal society in which rival truth claims can compete and accommodate each
other. His pragmatism was postmodern, tolerant to a fault, its moral and
progressive conclusions never appealing to a higher authority.

But the Caduveo of Brazil would not have welcomed that kind of all-inclusive
embrace, and probably that embrace would not have been so readily offered to
them. When Mr. Lévi-Strauss wrote about this dwindling tribe in “Tristes
Tropiques,” his fascinating 1955 memoir, he compared these “knightly Indians”
with their “aristocratic arrogance” to a deck of European playing cards; they
even looked the parts of jacks, kings and queens, he wrote, with their cloaks
and tunics decorated in red and black with recurrent motifs resembling hearts,
diamonds, spades and clubs. The tribal queens, Mr. Lévi-Strauss noted, even
seemed to trump Lewis Carroll’s imagined Queen of Hearts with their taste for
playing with severed heads brought back by warriors.

The Caduveo, in Mr. Lévi-Strauss’s description, would never have considered
for a moment that their beliefs and their society were arbitrarily constructed.
The Caduveo had all the presumption and self-importance of royalty. They
tattooed their bodies with elaborate “asymmetric arabesques” that served as
coats of arms and signs of status. Their leaders removed every bit of facial
hair, including eyelashes, and sneered at hairy Europeans. They even intimidated
their Spanish and Portuguese conquerors.

They were, then, preliberal, premodern. In their midst every principle Mr.
Rorty valued was violated. They provided their own transcendent authority and
demanded its universal recognition. A neighboring, related tribe essentially
became their serfs, cultivating land and turning over produce.

The Caduveo founding myth recounts that, lacking other gifts at the moment of
creation, the tribe was given the divine right to exploit and dominate others.
Mr. Lévi-Strauss once suggested that the Indian tribes of the Americas were like
peoples of the Middle Ages, lacking the example of Rome; but the Caduveo, in his
descriptions, are more like nobility from the 17th to mid-18th century, lacking
the example of either the American or French revolutions.

But there was also something else about this tribe that drew Mr.
Lévi-Strauss’s attention: “It was a society remarkably adverse to feelings that
we consider as being natural.” Its members disliked having children. Abortion
and infanticide were so common that the only way the tribe itself could continue
was by adoption, and adoption — more properly called abduction — was
traditionally implemented through warfare. The tribal disdain for nature
extended into its active denigration of hair, agriculture, childbirth and even,
perhaps, representational art.

In all of this the tribe was proclaiming that while its dominance derived
from nature and was beyond question, its superiority meant that nature had no
further claim on it. Everything else was created by the tribe itself,
particularly the ornate and elaborate tattoos and paintings on members’ bodies.
In this respect the tribe was not countercultural but counternatural. It refused
to defer to external forces or commands.

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Richard
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