Thomas A. Gregor (Ph.D., 1969, Columbia)
Professor Gregor is interested in psychological anthropology, gender roles and sexuality, peace and aggression, psychoanalysis and culture, anthropological ethics, and native peoples of South America and anthropological film. He is the author of Mehinaku: The Drama of Daily Life in a Brazilian Indian Village and Anxious Pleasures: The Sexual Lives of an Amazonian People. His edited books include A Natural History of Peace and The Anthropology of Peace and Nonviolence (coedited) and Gender in Amazonia and Melanesia: An Exploration of the Comparative Method (coedited). He has worked as a film maker for the BBC, Grenada Television and NET in making the television films Mehinaku, We are Mehinaku, Feathered Arrows and Dreams from the Forest. Professor Gregor is currently completing a book on peaceful relations among tribes in Central Brazil, and an article on ethics and contemporary anthropology.

My work as an anthropologist as largely been among the Mehinaku Indians and their neighbors in the Mato Grosso of Central Brazil. My first visit to the Mehinaku was in 1967, and my most recent visit was in 2005.  The peoples of the region live along the headwaters of the Xingu river, which is one of the major tributaries of the Amazon. The area is home to ca. 2,000 native peoples living in the Terra Indigena do Xingu, a vast reserve of some 10,000 square kilometers. The Xinguanos, as they are known to Brazilians, are divided into nine separate ethnic communities speaking five unrelated languages and, within three of these groupings, mutually unintelligible dialects.

The Mehinaku village of Uyaipuky, June, 2005. Note the water tower and fenced solar panels on the lower left (© Thomas Gregor, 2005).

The region is well known among anthropologists as one in which native culture persists despite acculturative influences. To this day there is no missionization, roads, centralized electrical systems or an internally significant cash economy or wage labor. To be sure there are changes which are in striking contrast with my previous field trips.  There are now schools within many of the villages (certified through the 5^th grade), television sets within some of the houses (connected to parabolic antennas and generators), motor boats, tractors, foot-treadle operated sewing machines, a few motor cycles, and many balloon tired bicycles (useful on forest paths and across the flood plain). The contrast of cultures is jarring, but the overall picture is that of an essentially native culture and a struggle to maintain it in the face of temptations and encroachments from the outside.

My most recent work among the Mehinaku has focused on the remarkable system of non-violent relationships in the Upper Xingu. Although the peoples of the region speak three unrelated languages, they are generally peaceful. They trade with one another, attend each other’s rituals, and intermarry. Values are “anti-violent” and children are almost never physically punished. Warfare among the Xinguanos is unknown, although historically there have been defensive wars with groups outside the region.

My present research examines how the peace is sustained. The question is an important one in that peace is unusual in Amazonia, and for that matter much of the world. One study, which has scoured the literature, found but 25 examples of societies which can be confidently described as peaceful. Some of these are enclaved groups within larger societies, and many of the remainder are small-scale societies, often hunters and foragers who live on islands, mountain tops, arctic wastelands and plateaus, or in dense forests.  They seem to achieve their peaceful status by evading rather than solving the problems of intergroup relations.Not so the Xinguanos.  It is precisely in the area of positive relations between separate communities that they claim attention. The overall pattern of intense, peaceful relationships among closely-connected villages speaking different languages, is an extraordinary native American achievement.

I am approaching the question of peacefulness by looking at the system from the perspective of the individual: how the Mehinaku and their neighbors are motivated to participate in and sustain the system of peace. I am particularly concerned with their recognition of the consequences of aggression, their food sharing and generosity, their empathy and concern for others, their pattern of romantic and familial love, and their own concept of being a Xinguano. The question of identity is important, in that the villagers appear to live in an “emotional community” whose boundaries include the peoples of the region. As one of the Mehinaku said to me, Xinguanos are people “who weep for one another when they die.”

I plan to return to the Mehinaku and the other peoples of the region this coming fall to continue my research under the sponsorship of the National Science Foundation, and to assist the villagers in bee-keeping, an environmentally sustainable project that I am implementing with the assistance of the Perls Foundation.