MILLENNIUM: Tribal Wisdom and the Modern World...

MILLENNIUM: Tribal Wisdom and the Modern World by David Maybury-Lewis (Viking: $45; 397 pp.). There’s a lot of negativity about the future going around--to the point where any other vision of the horizon seems downright simplistic. Progress is swallowing us whole, leaving a soulless skeleton in place of God’s favorite vertebrate. Anthropologists, besides making us envious of their phantasmagorical lives, earn their living poking their noses into various cultures, points in history and academic disciplines. They come up with a mixture of storytelling and theory-building that tells us, “The way you’re living isn’t the only way to live; it may not even be the best way.”

David Maybury-Lewis, a professor of anthropology at Harvard and the founder of the organization Cultural Survival, has written a book that is edifying, entertaining and comforting all at once. “Millennium” is the companion volume to the TV series that will air May 11 on PBS. The book and the series both are attempts to disabuse the general public of the notion that societies pass through inevitable stages as they evolve to the pinnacle of Western Civilization. The ideas that served us well for the past 500 years, Lewis writes, don’t work any more. They’ve left us alienated from each other and from the natural world. Tribal societies can teach us something about how to build communities based on mutual obligation, and about how to live in the natural world, not outside or above it. That’s the edifying part.

The entertaining part is the part that reveals the rich strangeness of life: Aztec songs, Yakut shamans, Aboriginal dreamers (above). There’s a chatty British tone to the book, and the language is sometimes disconcerting. For example, the first sentence of the first chapter: “I met my first aliens in early childhood.” The words “aliens” and “exotic peoples” seem out of place in a book about cultural relativism, but given the overall premise of the book, we’ll chalk it up to quaint. What’s comforting is that Maybury-Lewis offers alternatives to the rootlessness of the present age--an antidote to civilization--reminds us of the larger family, and introduces us to relatives we never knew existed.