Chapter 23 - Anthropology

Summary

As a traveler, Elizabeth Bishop valued direct experience and the particularity of other cultures, key elements of anthropology. During her residence in Brazil, she drew on anthropological works of Richard Burton, Gilberto Freyre, Charles Wagley and Claude Lévi-Strauss. Introducing her translation of Minha Vida de Menina, she cited Burton’s Brazilian travels. She thought Freyre “really gives one some idea what it’s like” to live in Brazil, but, like him, ventured into controversy about race and class in several works, notably “Manuelzinho.” Wagley’s Amazon Town was a direct source of her poem “The Riverman,” articulating her regard for the intuitive power of dreams and dreamlike experience in folk arts and in poems. In works such as “Questions of Travel” and “Crusoe in England,” Bishop reveals her affinity with the skepticism of Lévi-Strauss in Tristes Tropiques. Both articulate doubts about modernity and our mastery of knowledge.