One of the main observers of the art of the Kadiwéu, an Indigenous people from South America, was French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. In the early 20th century, he visited Indigenous villages in what is today Brazil’s Mato Grosso do Sul state and photographed the inhabitants’ traditional ceramics and elaborate body paintings made with ink from the genipap fruit. The guardians of this rich artistic tradition are the women of the Ejiwajegi people, as the Kadiwéu call themselves, who preserve their cultural memory while also generating an income from their creations. Like other Indigenous peoples throughout Brazil, the Kadiwéu have for centuries suffered from colonial exploitation. And the most recent manifestation of this centered around their art: A book featuring the never-before-seen art of their ancestors was about to be published half a world away, and no one had thought to consult them about it. In 1935, in the Indigenous village of Nalike, near what’s now the village of Alves de Barros in the municipality of Porto Murtinho, Claude Lévi-Strauss stayed with the Kadiwéu and received several drawings as gifts from the Indigenous women. These artworks remained in the anthropologist’s personal archive for decades, until his wife, Monique Lévi-Strauss, found the folder containing more than 30 original drawings. French publisher Éditions du Seuil took an interest in the works and prepared to publish a new book around them: Peintures caduveo — Suppléments à Tristes Tropiques (“Caduveo Paintings — Supplement to Tristes Tropiques”). It would be released to commemorate Lévi-Strauss’s 1955 classic…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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