At Play in the Fields of the Lord
There is little more fascinating than discovering and meeting with people from another culture, especially if that culture is strange and exotic. It has been a theme in literature for decades, wonderfully exploited in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels in 1726, a novel containing one Lemuel Gulliver’s narrative about his four fictional voyages to remote regions of the world. In the first, Gulliver is shipwrecked off the shore of Lilliput. Falling asleep he is tied up by the Lilliputians, people who are less than 6 inches tall. The Lilliputians are not just small, they are small-minded, with ridiculous customs and petty debates. At one point Gulliver is asked to help defend Lilliput against the Blefuscu empire at odds in a war over at which end of a cooked egg the shell should be broken. If you thought that was weird, his second voyage takes him to Brobdingnag, inhabited by a race of giants. In that story the Brobdingnagian king responds to Gulliver’s description of the government and history of England by concluding that the English must be a race of “odious vermin.”
The voyages continue, and in yet another, the third, he finds himself arriving on the flying island of Laputa, where the people are so lost in thought that they must be reminded to pay attention to the world around them. They’re so greatly concerned with mathematics and music, they have no practical applications for their learning. Finally Gulliver visits the land of the Houynhnms, a race of intelligent horses who are cleaner, more rational and considerate than a brutish, filthy, greedy, and degenerate humanoid race called Yahoos. After Gulliver describes his country and its history, the Houyhnhnm concludes that the people of England are as unreasonable as the Yahoos. Gulliver returns to England so disgusted with humanity that he avoids his family and buys horses to converse with them instead.
Gulliver’s Travels is a satire on humans, but it can be read as a children’s story, as science fiction and as a forerunner of the modern novel. It is often read as a systematic rebuttal of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, a rather more optimistic account of human capability. It seems likely Swift was writing his fiction to refute the notion that the individual precedes society, (as Defoe’s novel about Robinson Crusoe seems to suggest). Gulliver repeatedly encounters with established societies rather than desolate islands and uses them to lampoon various ways of thinking. For example, the experimenters in Laputa are used to illustrate the effects and cost on society on an extreme embrace and celebration of policies pursuing scientific progress, together with a questioning of modern liberal democracies.
Alongside such fictional views of the world of others, sit the results of real life accounts by social anthropologists. One of the early classics of social anthropology was a study carried out in the Trobriand Islands by Bronislaw Malinowski, who had decided to accept voluntary internment in the Southern Pacific during the First World War. His monograph, Argonauts of the Western Pacific, was a wonderful piece of ethnography, observing, describing and interpreting a series of exchanges, of shell necklaces and arm bands, between leaders in the various islands. The exchanges were concerned with status, and the objects were never ‘owned’, but looked after by the recipients before they were exchanged in the next round.
A discussion of the Kula Ring, as Malinowski described it, deserves a commentary of its own. However, quite apart from the study and analysis, there are other less central parts of this research study that deserve mention. One of these has to do with Malinowski himself, and a couple of photographs in the books. They are quite stunning, and very revealing. There is Malinowski in his tropical gear, safari suit and pith helmet, surrounded by a nearly naked group of young men and women. They make clear, with unexpected clarity, Malinowski’s relationship to the Trobriand Islanders. He was a Westerner, who sustained his identity in a rather idyllic tropical location, clearly and markedly separated from those he met. He was an observer, and he could have been studying the inhabitants of a distant planet.
Those photographs speak to a view of social anthropology of which Malinowski was an exemplar. We have moved from fictional imagination to observation, looking at another group. However, Malinowski was a distinct and detached observer: he could have been studying the islanders as if they were the inhabitants of one of those glass sided ant farms. When you read his book, a marvel of observation and analysis, you know you are on the other side of a window. You can observe what is taking place, every action described in detail, but you are doing so ‘objectively’, a scientist observing his specimens.
Some 40 years later, another anthropologist was undertaking fieldwork, this time in Brazil. David Maybury-Lewis found himself ‘poised between two worlds’. Despite their rich heritage, the Shavante were urged to join the rural poor or follow the missionaries. “Nobody mentioned the other option,” wrote Maybury-Lewis, “that they might retain their lands and enter the Brazilian economy while modifying, but not abandoning, their own traditions.” In The Savage and the Innocent he details his own mid-20th-century time when he met and befriended a people regarded by westerners as the ‘wildest Indians’ and ‘notorious savages’, claimed to have killed multiple previous parties of white interlopers. However, he isn’t a Malinowski, and he neither romanticises nor ennobles the ‘savage’, but instead reveals, with empathy, what happens to people like these who do not resist western encroachment.
Key in this was his wife, Pia. Wanting to travel, he was encouraged by a Cambridge professor to pursue fieldwork among the Indigenous tribes of Brazil, a relatively unexplored territory for anthropologists at the time. David left for South America in 1953, and Pia followed several months later via a 24-day trip on a freight ship from Norway. On their first visit to the Xerente, Pia noticed the deplorable racist attitudes Brazilians held towards the country’s Indigenous Peoples. David took a turbo-prop plane and Pia, due to lack of space on the flight, again followed, in a boat. “The [riverboat] captain heard that we were going to see the Xerente. He said at night he just stops in the middle of the river because they eat you. There wasn’t a horrible thing they didn’t say about the Indians,” she recalled.
After living with the Xerente for 18 months, the Maybury-Lewis’s returned to England and Pia gave birth to their first son, Biorn. When it was time for David to return to Brazil to begin his fieldwork with the Xavante, Pia’s family encouraged her to stay behind and take care of the baby, but Pia insisted on following her husband and bringing her child with her. David, Pia, and Biorn spent several months with the Xavante over the next year. Pia worked in the fields with the other women, carrying Biorn on her back in a sling wherever she went. “He was a toddler. A little baby would have been easier,” she remarked.
It is probably fair to describe this as another step forward in social anthropology as David and Pia Maybury-Lewis describe what they find disturbing, annoying, and even disgusting about the Shavante and the neighbouring Sherente people, but also what the Sherente and Shavante find savage, disgusting and risible about their uninvited white guests. Maybury-Lewis’s toddler son quickly adapts to village life and helps David and Pia develop the self-critical instincts and an understanding of the anthropologist’s perspective that was to transform the ethnographies of the 1980s and 1990s. Rather than the distanced observations of Malinowski, now the observer’s own relationships to those described are exposed, and so is our insight into an author’s awareness of limits to his own understandings.
These academic studies of other cultures are paralleled by the accounts of missionaries, studying the native populations of groups they were sent to convert. One extraordinarily detailed account is that given by Harry Ignatius Marshall, whose 1922 book The Karen People of Burma contains rich data on the lives of these people. For example, in Chapter XIX he includes an extraordinarily detailed account of a marriage. Here’s one part:
“the villagers early on the second morning of the wedding ceremonies prepare a feast of rice and chicken curry for their guests. Not less than two young roosters or two pullets are used in the preparation of this final feast, every part of the fowls being cooked, even the intestines, which have been carefully cleaned. Bits of stewed plantain stalks are included in the dish, inasmuch as the prolific nature of this plant is supposed to be communicated to those partaking of its, thus assuring the large families desired. A joint of bamboo full of liquor is also brought out. The bride and groom must then dip their fingers into the liquor and the food, while calling out “Pru-r-r k’la, heh ke” (“Pru-r-r k’la, come back”), two or three times. The elders now shout: “This day you twain, husband and wife, have become one spirit. May God take care of you. May the Just One watch over you, May the powerful Thi Hko Mu Xa (Lord of the demons) shield you. May you have strength to work and gain your livelihood. May you sleep in peace and eat the fruits of the land. May you have long life, ten children, and one hundred grandchildren.”
Our fascination with other cultures is never-ending, whether in terms of fact or fiction. To move to contemporary fiction, Peter Matthiessen wrote a masterly, and eventually rather dark, novel, At Play in the Fields of the Lord, which combines the study of other cultures with missionary activities and human fallibility. This complex and amazing story is set far away from civilisation, so very far back in the jungles of the Amazon headwaters that not even an anthropologist has visited nor observed the lives the Indians of a little naked tribe which might be the last in the world still untouched by civilization (the dream of most social anthropologists). This story explores how this remote society is ‘touched’ and how it falls undone, largely the result of the actions resulting from the allure of ultimate remoteness and almost obsessive enchantment this hidden society exerts on an assortment of Americans.
As reviewers have noted, “Matthiessen’s novel has nearly everything–a powerful plot, a rich variety of characters, a perceptive, deeply felt view of man’s yearnings and his essential ironic tragedy and a prose style that is vivid, sensuous and disciplined by his intelligence”. At the same time, it leaves us, as do so many other accounts of societies unlike our own, feeling outside the events, as observers curiously detached from much of what is happening. Perhaps it is always like this when we try to write about people who live in another culture, trying to make sense of another and often almost impossibly different world.
This tribe in the Amazon rain forest, the Niaruna, is depicted as utterly primitive, stone age Indians whom everyone outside wants to change. The Niaruna are seen as dangerous, both politically and morally. This is because they harass neighbouring Indians, so that the local chief is under pressure to ‘civilize’ and pacify them, or drive them across the border, or kill them, or get rid of them some other way. To do this, he hires two cynical, rootless mercenaries to bomb the forest. One of them, Lewis Moon, a North American and half-Indian himself, bails out, and soon becomes someone whom the Niaruna tentatively accept as a god.
To add to the complexity of the story, on the edge of the jungle worldly Roman Catholic and fanatical Baptists missions are already competing for the honours of converting the naked savages to Christianity. “I am enjoying the profits of a business deal I entered into with the Lord,” exults one inspired Baptist. The novel tells how this begins as by plane, outboard motor canoe and jungle trail a group of Americans, including two missionary families, bring about the first successful contact of the modern world with the ‘savage Niaruna’. It’s dramatic. At every stage of their complicated adventure, the various characters are exposed to every variety of danger, confronted by piranha-infested rivers, by the filth and disease of jungle outposts, by the treacheries of the local government-appointed official, by their enmities for one another, by drink, drugs, madness, by machine gun and rifle and pistol fire, by spears, machetes, arrows, knives, fists, and broken bottles. If that wasn’t enough, they are tormented day and night by lusts, racial hatreds, and religious enthusiasms. It’s a catastrophic tale, in which some die, while others find their lives dramatically altered.
At Play in the Fields of the Lord is a novel of adventure, and it’s a good old-fashioned story about adventurers going into an unknown world. However, Peter Matthiessen doesn’t fool around with the elements of an adventure story, but rather he tells it straight. The perils of his adventurers, both physical and spiritual, are the key elements of the plot, and his tale is serious, full of modern sensibilities, and extremely engaging, to the point our excitement in wanting to know what happens next, leads to an almost unconscious acceptance of how skilful and even ingenious a story is being told.
In the first place, he makes it clear the characters assembled here are far from an accidental or coincidental group, coming together by chance while pursuing their separate fates. Each of them has his own complicated necessity for the push through the jungle to the Niaruna tribe. Their relations with one another are characterised by their confrontations, quarrels, fights, and loves, often leading to unexpected stages in the plot. If the perils are vivid and violent, no single adventure seems to be there just for the sake of giving the reader a thrill. Rather, the events keep increasing in intensity, until every character has been laid bare, every gun that had been hanging on a wall has been proven to be no mere ornament, and the basic elements of the novel’s opening prove themselves to be inescapable omens of fate and necessity.
Two antagonists in the story compete for the Niaruna, each wanting to save them. One is a soldier of fortune, totally disenchanted and self-debauched, but because he is, of all things, a college-educated American Indian, he is determined first of all to find some “real” Indians, and then, finding them, he is determined to lead them in what might well be a successful military defence of their territory. The other is a missionary, one of the American group determined to save the Indians’ souls for Christ. The soldier of fortune, of necessity, becomes a god; the missionary, of necessity, loses his faith and becomes the tool of secular interests. And between them, in their exchanged roles, they destroy the tribe they have so spectacularly risked their lives to save.
However bizarre and astonishing, for the reader these plot elements and complications don’t come across forced or impossible as they unfold. The story remains to the end an adventure, with the scale and intensity of the action constantly growing almost uncontrollably. This is no mean an achievement. If, having finished this novel, you were to turn back to the start and read the early chapters again, you would see how all this was brought about. This is a good old-fashioned writing, albeit using a plot resting on an exotic locale, combining jungle, river, sky, bars, latrines, bordellos, hog-wallows, and other sordid horrors of frontier villages. False morality, myth, magic, the Noble Savage, man’s tragic destiny to corrupt himself and find innocence only in madness, are at the centre of “At Play in the Fields of the Lord”, a title that masks that this isn’t a comedy but a tale of bitter endless irony. And it’s all too real …
