By David Moberg
But contact with Brazilians had brought diseases, and inadequate medical care allowed these new illnesses to spread. As a result, within a relatively short period the Kayapo had become “dependent mendicants,” Turner says, “wards not being well looked after. It was a period of cultural demoralization and economic misery.”
He returned to Harvard and enrolled in its famed department of social relations–which encompassed the study of anthropology, sociology, and psychology–and from there he went to live with the Kayapo. A professor at the University of Chicago since 1968, Turner has maintained a close relationship with the tribe ever since his first two-year stay, returning repeatedly for research, documentary filmmaking, and various collaborations on economic and political projects.
“I thought of my project as getting beneath the veneer, and really getting to the essential Kayapo culture underneath,” Turner says, “but it didn’t occur to me then that Kayapo culture itself could be a viable basis for ongoing interaction with Brazilians. It seemed to me that the choice for the Kayapo was essentially to become Brazilians or somehow to remain as isolated as possible under their own communal authority far off in the jungle beyond Brazilian frontiers, as they then were.”
Yet just as they would befriend and respect him at one moment, they might try to rip him off the next. Once he left for a couple of days to help at a nearby village during a serious flu epidemic. When he returned, he discovered that someone had burglarized his house. In exasperation he stomped into the central plaza and delivered a Kayapo-style oration on how angry he was that someone took his possessions while he was off saving the life of one of the tribe’s grandmothers. If they were going to act this way, he said, he was simply going to sit in his house with his shotgun across his knee, guarding his belongings and refusing to help them anymore. Bit by bit, the Kayapo sheepishly began returning various items, but not his razor blades, which he sorely wanted.
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Turner returned to the United States in 1964, teaching first at Cornell University, then moving to Chicago in the fall of 1968. By then he had worked out his basic understanding of the core institutions of Kayapo culture. Unlike the dominant anthropological approaches of the time, Turner’s own view focused on something other than the rarefied realm of cultural symbols or how various social institutions fit together and reproduce themselves. He thought that anthropologists had to start with people’s actions, including their interactions with each other, and the ways in which they produce not just their means of sustaining life but also the values, power, and rituals that characterize their culture. The ceremonies and institutions of a society provide the ongoing means for creating personal identity–or, as Turner says, “the ways of feeling and thinking of yourself in relation to other people, as not completely separate from other people.”
