Tribal Wisdom Comes to the Modern World : PBS Series Shows How World’s People Live

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. —  Even the Brazilian Air Force had its doubts when it dumped David Maybury-Lewis and his family off in a remote corner of the Amazonian frontier 35 years ago.

After all, the nearest landmark was the Rio das Mortes, the River of Death. And the tribe that inhabited the region, the Xavante, was known either to be bellicose or fiercely self-protective. Either way, no outsider was about to mistake it for friendly.

So while his wife and baby son watched the small Air Force plane take off without them, Maybury-Lewis kept his eyes on the approaching Xavante tribesmen.

“Could someone help us take this stuff to the village?” Maybury-Lewis finally asked, to the great mirth of the young men who were surrounding him.

It seemed not so much that the anthropologist’s request was ridiculous--but that his accent, in the dialect of Xerente, another nearby tribe, was. Touched by his attempt to speak their language, and curious about a tall, bearded Englishman who would bring his wife and small son into their wilderness, the tribesmen led the Maybury-Lewises into what evolved into a lifelong relationship.

His years with the Xavante became the foundation for Maybury-Lewis’ firm belief that all the peoples of the world can learn from one another, that “there are other ways of living, and they have a dignity and an integrity of their own.”

In turn, that philosophy became the guiding force behind “Millennium: Tribal Wisdom and the Modern World,” a public-television series that will air in two-hour installments over five weeks, beginning Monday. The companion book that Viking is publishing concomitantly and with the same title is scheduled for a 100,000-copy first-run printing.

Phylis Geller, a senior vice president at KCET Channel 28, which co-produced “Millennium,” says that she was attracted to the project in part because it seemed to speak to the soul of a North American society that is itself examining its own polyglotinous nature.

The series, Geller explains, “is about people learning to live together and to learn from one another--and in my mind, there couldn’t be a more imperative issue of our time.”

“The critical thing to remember,” she says, “is that the series is about choices--how different societies choose to govern, to share wealth, to define identity. While we are still reeling from last week’s events in Los Angeles and all over the country, the themes of ‘Millennium’ seem more compelling than ever.”

With his crisp accent from “the other Cambridge--the one in England,” and with his anthropologically correct rubber-soled shoes, Maybury-Lewis, the host for the “Millennium” series, presents an inviting persona that seems to be equal parts Alistair Cooke and Indiana Jones.

Maybury-Lewis, in his office in the Peabody Museum here, cringes at the very suggestion.

“Anthropology isn’t an Indiana Jones-like experience anymore and it shouldn’t have been in the first place,” he says with healthy indignation. Rather, says this Harvard professor, his own attraction to the field began “as an attempt to understand how people lived--to walk a mile in their shoes, in other words.”

He soon realized that in dealing with indigenous peoples, “to understand them takes an enormous feat of empathy.” And then, says Maybury-Lewis, “you have to come back and communicate a vision to your own folks back home.”

His desire to bridge those two mandates led Maybury-Lewis and his wife, Pia, to found an organization called Cultural Survival 20 years ago that seeks to defend the rights of indigenous peoples. Maybury-Lewis likens the nonprofit group to a lesser-known version of Amnesty International.

“Everybody understands the problems of the political prisoner,” Maybury-Lewis says. “Whereas the right to self-determination of remote peoples, that strikes a lot of people as too abstract.”

Maybury-Lewis offers a grim smile. “We keep beating people over the head with the message that there are people in the rain forest, too--not just trees and toads,” he says.

While “Millennium” deals with a number of tribes around the world, Maybury-Lewis says it was his experience with the Xavante that made him sense how imperiled such indigenous people really are. Without television or telephones, without fax machines or even a language understood by large numbers of people, these tribal men and women could not possibly be aware of the threats to their cultures from the ostensibly civilized outside world.

“The Xavante didn’t know what was about to happen to them. We did,” Maybury-Lewis says.

This same sense of urgency impelled Maybury-Lewis and one of his former students, Richard Meech, to begin shaping a television series that would examine the precarious lives of tribal peoples. With his own partner, Michael Grant, Meech found private funding for the project that ranged from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation to the Body Shop, which manufactures and sells environmentally safe skin-care products.

“I wanted through the series to encourage people to stop and think about how we organize our lives in certain ways,” Maybury-Lewis says. “Obviously, I’m not going to parade through 10 episodes telling people how to live their lives, which would be intolerably arrogant. But what I could do was to show how other people live. What I could do was to start the discussion.”

As an academic, Maybury-Lewis says he courted social opprobrium by venturing into the scandalously popular medium of television. “All my friends were telling me horror stories,” he says.

But Maybury-Lewis says the allure of television was its non-exclusivity: “The whole purpose was to reach such a large audience with the notion that these people are real people.”

Still, Maybury-Lewis concedes, xenophobia dies hard. “I’m not sure we’re going to affect an instant change,” he says. “But there are a lot of people who are more ignorant than prejudiced--or, they are prejudiced because they are ignorant. These are the people to whom we are trying to reach out.”

He refutes the suggestion that the series--and indeed, his entire life’s work--is a kind of endorsement for ethnic diversity. Rather, says Maybury-Lewis, “what we’re arguing for is a world in which people live together with mutual understanding and respect.”