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When David Maybury-Lewis died on December 2, 2007, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the world of anthropology lost one of its most distinguished members. A brilliant thinker with an international reputation, he was also a humane defender of the rights of indigenous peoples everywhere. He had been an intrepid field-worker in the cenado (sprawling woodland savannah) region of (central) Brazil, under conditions that would have dismayed if not terrified ordinary souls. He held generations of Harvard students in thrall with his inimitable lectures full of wit and learning, delivered in his mellifluous, unforgettable voice. At the time of his death, he was the Edward C. Henderson Professor of Anthropology, Emeritus, at Harvard.
Maybury-Lewis was born on May 5, 1929, in Hyderabad, Sindh, in what is today Pakistan, then under the British Raj. His father was a civil engineer in the Indian Civil Service working on dams and irrigation in the Sindhi deserts. The young David was sent as a boarder for his early education to King's School, Canterbury, in England. He served in the British Army in Vienna in the years after the war, from 1948 to 1949. He then went on to Trinity Hall, Cambridge University, to study modern languages, receiving a B.A. in 1952 in Modern Languages and Literature. But while an undergraduate at Cambridge, he attended a course on the discovery, conquest, and settlement of the "New World" and became interested in the Indians of South America.
In 1954, David went to Brazil, where he got a job teaching English and English literature at the Cultura Inglesa language school in Säo Paulo. He also enrolled in the School of Sociology and Politics (associated with but not part of the University of Sâo Paulo). There he studied with Herbert Baldus, a prominent ethnographer of German origin. BaIdus had been deeply disturbed by the rise of the Nazis and had left Germany in 1932. Embraced by the Brazilians, he helped make the school in Säo Paulo the preeminent Americanist institution in South America. David took classes with people like Sergio Buarque de Holanda, who would become one of the most respected 20th-century Brazilian historians. He also began fieldwork with the Sherente.
It is extraordinary to note that Maybury-Lewis eventually acquired fluency in no fewer than nine...