Tristes Tropiques (Penguin Classics) by Levi-Strauss Claude

Author:Levi-Strauss, Claude [Levi-Strauss, Claude]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781101575604
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2012-01-30T16:00:00+00:00

Fig 28. A lip ornament and earrings made of mother-of-pearl and feathers

Gradually, all these people went away; we were sharing the hut, which measured approximately twelve metres by five, with the silent and unfriendly family of a medicine-man, and an elderly widow who subsisted on the charity of a few relatives who lived in neighbouring huts. But they often forgot about her, and she would sing for hours about the loss of her five successive husands and of the happy time when she lacked neither manioc, maize, game nor fish.

Already singing was beginning outside in a low-pitched, resonant, guttural tongue, with clearly enunciated sounds. Only the men sang; and their combined voices, the simple and constantly repeated melodies, the contrast between solos and choruses and the tragic virile style recalled the martial choruses of some Germanic Männerbund. When I asked why they were singing, I was told it was because of the irara, which we had brought with us. Before it could be eaten, a complicated ritual had to be performed to pacify its spirit and consecrate the hunt. Being too exhausted to behave as a conscientious anthropologist, at dusk I fell into a sleep which was troubled by fatigue and the singing which went on until dawn. This, incidentally, was to be the pattern throughout our entire visit: the nights were given over to religious ceremonies, and the natives slept from dawn until midday.

Apart from a few wind instruments which were brought out at certain prescribed moments in the ritual, the only accompaniment to the voices was provided by gourd rattles filled with gravel and shaken by the principal players, who were wonderful to listen to: sometimes unleashing or stopping the voices with a short sharp crack; sometimes filling in the silences with the rattling of their instruments in long-drawn-out crescendos or diminuendos; and sometimes directing the dancers with alternations of silence and noise, so varied in their duration, intensity and quality that no conductor of a large European orchestra could have surpassed them in indicating his intentions. It is not surprising that, in former times, natives of different tribes, and even missionaries, should have thought they could hear the demons speaking through the medium of the rattles. Besides, it is a well-known fact that although old illusions about the so-called ‘drum languages’ have now been dispelled, very probably – among certain peoples at least – such languages are based on a genuine coding of speech, which has been reduced to a few significant symbolically expressed outlines.

At dawn, I got up to go out and visit the village; at the door I tripped over some pathetic-looking birds: these were the domesticated macaws which the Indians kept in the village so as to be able to pluck them alive and thus obtain the feathers needed for head-dresses. Stripped of their plumage and unable to fly, the birds looked like chickens ready for the spit and afflicted with particularly enormous beaks since plucking had reduced their body size by half. Other

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.