farewell to an anthropologist

the death of Levi-Strauss

follows inevitably the death of Levy-Bruhl

living to 101 against the entropy rule

me not understanding entropy fully

not understanding sacrament at its core

watching from the nonexistent sidelines

not so safe on the disappearing shore

a nice rule to follow: always work on the tough issues

by peering into the poetic pipeline first:

what's back there? have i been here before?

from L-B to L-S via what Via, say Marcel Mauss?

the circulating gift of madness in our shrinking haus

The closing pages of Tristes Tropiques, cited as the great work by obiters,

scared the bejesus out of me as a grad student 50 years ago

because cultural entropy, the combining of value systems that had been separate,

discrete, seemed like a destruction of Eden, and of Blake's very indiginous and

exclusively local four fold vision, over and over and over and over and over again

until all sacred diversity was obliterated, once and for the destruction of all.

Psychologically: we humans might still number in the thousands or millions

after the anthropogenic sixth extinction, and after all cultures had been pulverized

into a shallow consumeroid value system, but we will all be thinking

in the same passive, technococooned way. When the Hot Evil is over,

we will be contemplating the destruction from the claustrophobic safety

of some stale cold evil technosphere, every single one of us with tubes

in our veins and a dancing tom delay tube down our throat.

The first missionary, anthropologist, or oil geologist to say "hell-oh"

spoiled a prime worldview, a unique understanding of the cosmos, forever.

Over and over again.

One thing about entropy is that it's Hericlitean.

You can't step into the River of Time over again.

But you can say "hell-oh" and ask another question:

"do you believe in christ our savior?"

"what's your kinship terminology?"

"seen any black gooey stuff around?"

And life, for those people who can not find a pristine stream

deeper in the rainforest, is over.

Even the west-resistant Pirihan will go under eventually,

if "progress" is allowed to continue.

Has anyone asked the Bororo lately

if they exist as arara, red parakeets?

It's been a while since I read Claude Levi-strauss

on the Bororo, but any "original participation" ideas

they may have had probably long gone by the time he arrived

in their part of the jungle.

The monotheisms and their attendent monomanias

create a totalizing context for primacy wars

against any other power tribe on the horizon

and all prime peoples all the time.

"Civilization originates in conquest abroad and repression at home."

(This is the first sentence of Stanley Diamond's great book,

In Search of the Primitive.)

When we lose a Levi-Strauss (or Levy-Bruhl or a Diamond)

a unique idioculture inside one cranium

we lose one of the few minds that didn't get suffocated

by civilized typhos

and persisted in asking the difficult questions.