Maybury-Lewis, David 1929-2007 (David H.P. Maybury-Lewis, David Henry Peter Maybury-Lewis)

OBITUARY NOTICE—

See index for CA sketch: Born May 5, 1929, in Hyderabad, India (now Pakistan); died of complications from Parkinson's disease, December 2, 2007, in Cambridge, MA. Anthropologist, educator, and author. Maybury-Lewis was born in South Asia, where his father was a British civil engineer. As a child he traveled widely in the remote areas where dam and waterway construction was underway, until moving to England for his university education. There Maybury-Lewis developed an interest in Latin America and ended up in the mid-1950s living among the primitive and warlike Sherente people of interior Brazil. The experience shaped the rest of his life, and he returned to the continent several times. Maybury-Lewis lived among the more peaceful Shavante of Brazil, where he began his active advocacy for the rights and well-being of indigenous people. In 1972 he and his wife established the international nonprofit organization Cultural Survival, dedicated to assisting indigenous people to develop livelihoods that would not damage their culture or their homeland. Maybury-Lewis taught social anthropology at Harvard University from 1960 to 2004, retiring as the Edward C. Henderson Professor of Anthropology and curator of South American ethnology at the university museum. He was equally respected by his academic colleagues and by the native people he befriended during his fieldwork in central Brazil. Maybury-Lewis celebrated the lives of these people in his public television miniseries and companion book Millennium: Tribal Wisdom and the Modern World (1992). He was honored with many awards, including the Grand Cross of the Order of Scientific Merit of Brazil and the Anders Retzuis Gold Medal of the Swedish Society of Anthropology and Geography. Maybury-Lewis's other writings include The Indian Peoples of Paraguay: Their Plight and Their Prospects (1980), In the Path of Polonoroeste: Endangered Peoples of Western Brazil (1981), and Indigenous Peoples, Ethnic Groups, and the State (1997); he edited The Politics of Ethnicity: Indigenous Peoples in Latin American States (2002).

OBITUARIES AND OTHER SOURCES:

BOOKS

Maybury-Lewis, David, The Savage and the Innocent, World Publishing (Cleveland, OH), 1965.

Maybury-Lewis, David, Akwe-Shavante Society, Clarendon Press (Oxford, England), 1966.

PERIODICALS

Times (London, England), January 1, 2008, p. 48.