When the first Europeans arrived on the coast of Brazil, the Tupí-speaking Indians they eneountered spoke disparagingly of the Gê-speaking Indians of the interior, describing them as fierce nomads. For the next several hundred years the myth of the culturally inferior “tapuya” of central Brazil was perpetuated, first by historians and later by anthropologists. That we are finally able to correct this misconception is in large part due to David Maybury-Lewis, the editor of Dialectical Societies. In addition to conducting fieldwork among two of the Gê-speaking tribes, Maybury-Lewis in 1962 organized the Harvard Central Brazil Project, which eventually sponsored research among five additional Gê-speaking groups.
The present book is a collection of eight original articles by seven of the anthropologists who were members of the project. The emphasis in each article is on social organization, since it is the intricate way in which the Gê organize themselves, especially for ceremonial activities, that makes them distinctive. Although intent on correcting the ethnography of the first important student of the Gê, Curt Nimuendajú, the authors of this volume are less interested in providing ethnographic detail (a later descriptive volume is promised) than in analyzing Gê institutions from a theoretical perspective. As the title of the book is intended to suggest, in most cases this perspective is structuralist, which emphasizes ideology and requires that all institutions be analyzed in terms of basic oppositions. This approach is especially appropriate when analyzing the moiety organization of some of the tribes, but at times the interpretation seems somewhat forced. Moreover, the facts of Gê social organization are sometimes difficult to discern within the elaborate interpretative framework. The nonspecialist is advised to read first the lucid introduction and conclusion by Maybury-Lewis before attempting the other chapters.
