Wisdom from a Rainforest: The Spiritual Journey of an Anthropologist

From the outset, Schlegel, a professor emeritus of anthropology at UC-Santa Cruz, informs readers that this book ""is much more personal than just an ethnographer's report from the field.... I will also take you into some extraordinarily sensitive times in my own life. I want to introduce you to the thinking of these people in all its beauty and elegance."" The subjects are the Teduray ""forest people"" of the Philippines. Schlegel lived among them twice in the 1960s, first as an Episcopal missionary and later as a graduate student of anthropology. He chronicles his second two-year stint, experienced as a participant-observer rather than as an evangelist. All aspects of Teduray society--cooperative farming, family structure, shamanic medicine and environmental care--were informed by one pervasive edict: not to ""give anyone a bad gall bladder,"" meaning to avoid wounding anyone in any way. The result of this overriding principle, writes Schlegel, was a culture without competition, violence or inequality. Schlegel leads readers along his own journey toward the conclusion that contemporary American life, with its glorification of competition, is, in the words of the Teduray, ""no way to live."" Schlegel's observations of Teduray culture are sharp and insightful, a quality of attention that saves his book from slipping into the sort of vague, antimodern moralism that finds virtue only in the noble savage. His message is made all the more poignant by the fact that the peaceful Teduray with whom he lived were massacred in the early 1970s. (Jan.)