Under the Blue Derby

AFFABLE SAVAGES (285 pp.)--Francis Huxley--Viking ($4.75).

To be hantan (hard) or membek (soft) --that is the question every Hamlet of Brazil's Urubu Indians must try to answer. Hantan men spend their lives out hunting in the jungle along the Gurupi River; membek fellows stay at home with the girls, which makes them even membeker. The girls like their lovers to be tough, but only because it's more fun tempting them to become membek. And anyone who succumbs to such temptation is liable to be turned into a toad after death. It's all a big problem, the Urubus assured Anthropologist Francis Huxley, who lived with them for several months, and some fellows end up quite impotent trying to figure out a compromise.

The rules of the game were laid down long ago by Mair, the hantan hero-god who lives in the blue sky (which is solid, and rests on the circular rim of the earth like a blue derby). Mair used to make all human beings in a pot, but one day a silly woman walked past one of the pots and peeked into it--ruining a half-made baby. Mair was so angry that he picked up the fetus and threw it in the woman's belly. "That'll teach you to be inquisitive," he said. "Now you'll have to bear children, and ... it will hurt." So women must be hantan too.

Civilization has barely scratched the Urubu. For the visitor this makes conversation strictly one-way, because talk about railway trains, skyscrapers or factories only bewilders them. Huxley found that the only Western institution the Urubus could appreciate was Queen Elizabeth's coronation, which he was required to enact again and again. Missionaries told the Urubu Indians about the Christ child long ago; but then the missionaries sailed away, leaving Mair in full possession. Today, only dogs, chickens and ducks are deemed the creations of the Christ child. Everything else is ghosts and spirits--and an impressive ghost gallery it is. Anyang, "the spirit of the dead," walks about moaning "Meh, meh, meh," and will "eat your soul" unless you hum back at him in a gentle singsong. Tall Timakana, "the leg-bone ghost," has big, swollen knees that beat together when he walks and make a noise like "ti-ye-wo, ti-ye-wo." The ae lives in the trees "like a very large spider monkey" and has "red hair, red eyes, a blue penis, and blue bones." Of course all this crew is active only at night, when the stars--"which are attached to the sky by a little stalk" --push out their heads, led by Grandfather Cotton (the Southern Cross) and Grandfather Many Things (the Pleiades).

The Urubus have no police, no law courts, no prisons, no divorces, apparently no murders and scarcely any theft. They have an elected chief whose duty it is to chide them when they are too membek; they ignore him with profound respect. Their social sense is deep enough on the whole to make them well-behaved members of the community, but not so deep as to keep them from the fear of becoming toads. Anthropologist Huxley, son of Biologist Julian and nephew of Novelist Aldous, found the Urubus excellent companions, and his study of them is a sprightly mixture of history, mythology and hammock-chat. It is by turns hilarious, touching and beautiful, but it is not for the kiddies, no matter how interested they may be in anthropology. The book's unminced words will bring blushes to the cheek of the most hantanned reader.

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