Alan Tormaid Campbell (1990).
To Square with Genesis: causal statements and shamanic ideas in Wayapi.
Edinburgh: Polygon.
On a recent visit to the Scottish capital I paid the princely sum of £1.49 for this fascinating monograph at the Oxfam store in the Royal Mile. On googling the author, I have not been able to unearth more than the scantiest biographical background. He apparently published at least one other book about his experiences working as an anthroplogist in the early 1970s alongside the Wayapi, an indigeneous people in Northern Brazil. In 1998, according to the
Times Higher Education Supplement, Campbell took early retirement as a lecturer at
Edinburgh University, claiming he had been repeatedly overlooked for promotion and victimised by Departmental bureaucrats he nicknamed Fat Puff and Bonbon. Beyond this intriguing detail - nothing. If Campbell is still alive he will be in his mid-sixties.
Campbell's nominal subjects are hardly less obscure. Already, at the time of his study decimated by diseases brought about by contact with the modern world, there the seems little doubt that the unfortunate remnants of the pacific, self-effacing and acquiesent Wayapi have effectively reached the brink of extinction if not yet entirely succumbed. Campbell makes frequent mention of a related group across the border in French Guiana. These were reported by
Der Spiegel in 2005 to be 'sitting in bars along the riverbank getting drunk on Antarctica beer and sugarcane spirits.' Neither they nor their Brazilian counterparts, in contrast to more assertive, flamboyantly 'exotic' and thus more widely-studied indigenous groups has ever seemed to have excited interest beyond a handful of anthropologists and a few local officials.
To Square with Genesis, not least for this very reason, deserves to be far better known. It is a brave, heartfelt and at times brutally honest meditation on the business and form of ethnography as an
encounter. Cutting deep into the philosophical and linguistic ground from where 'we' in the West acquire the means and tendency to invent and make judgments of difference, Campbellimpressively and strenuously resists the temptation to radically 'other' the Wayapi. Instead he addresses the implacably relational nature of social-scientific enquiry.
Speaking as a sociologist rather than as an anthropologist, the experience of reading this book was profoundly multi-layered. On one level I
did learn a great deal about the Wayapi and came to feel privileged to share a slither of Campbell's evident and compassionate respect for them. Secondly, I found his refreshing insouciance towards ethnographic convention, coupled with the breadth of his engagement with basic epistemological questions - the subtitle's emphasis on causation provides a clue -
informed, refreshed and entered into an interior dialogue with my own (very different but fundamentally similar) intellectual preoccupations. Thirdly, and even more rarely for a specialist academic work, I became drawn into a relationship with the writer himself to an extent that tickled the curiosity to find out more alluded to at the beginning of this review.
Finally, not the least merit of the book is that it is beautifully presented and formatted by the publishers. The paperback is sturdy and a delight to handle. Reproductions of photographs and diagrams are exquisitely rendered.