David Maybury-Lewis

David Henry Peter Maybury-Lewis (May 5, 1929 – December 2, 2007) was an anthropologist, ethnologist of lowland South America, activist for indigenous peoples' human rights and professor emeritus of Harvard University.

Born in Hyderabad, Pakistan, Maybury-Lewis attended Oxford University, at which he earned a D.Phil. In 1960, he joined the Harvard faculty, and was Edward C. Henderson Professor of Anthropology there from 1966 until he retired in 2004. His extensive ethnographic fieldwork was conducted primarily among indigenous peoples in central Brazil, which culminated in his ethnography among the Xavante, as well as post-modernist renditions. In 1972, he co-founded with his wife Pia Cultural Survival, the leading U.S. based advocacy and documentation organization devoted to "promoting the rights, voices and visions of indigenous peoples."

Awards

• Former president of the American Ethnological Society
• Grand Cross of the Brazilian Order of Scientific Merit, Brazil's highest academic honor, in 1997
• Anders Retzius gold medal of the Swedish Society for Anthropology and Geography, in 1998

Selected bibliography

• Akwe-Shavante Society (1974) ISBN 0195197291
• Dialectical Societies: The Ge and Bororo of Central Brazil (1979) ISBN 0674202856
• Prospects for Plural Societies: 1982 Proceedings of the American Ethnological Society (1984) ISBN 0942976045
• The Attraction of Opposites: Thought and Society in the Dualistic Mode (1989) ISBN 0472080865
• Millennium: Tribal Wisdom and the Modern World (1992) ISBN 0670829358
• The Savage and the Innocent (2000) ISBN 080704685X
• Indigenous Peoples, Ethnic Groups, and the State (2001) ISBN 0205337465
• The Politics of Ethnicity:Indigenous Peoples in Latin American States (2003) ISBN 0674009649

External links

• Biography
• Cultural Survival
• Tribute to Maybury-Lewis, see Tipití (2008) 6(1-2):115-22.[1]