NONFICTION - May 2, 1993

PARALLEL WORLDS: An Anthropologist and a Writer Encounter Africa by Alma Gottlieb and Philip Graham (Crown: $22; 318 pp.). While loaded with all of the funny First-World-meets-Third stories we have come to expect from those chronicling vanishing tribes, this account of the authors’ yearlong stay with a Beng tribe in Africa’s Ivory Coast is unique because its jokes do not come at the “primitive” culture’s expense. The Beng, for instance, greet one another with a sing-song, theatrical ritual so lengthy that they have often walked 30 feet past each other by the time they are finished. But after milking the ritual for humor, Gottlieb, an anthropologist, and her husband Graham, a fiction writer, go on to illustrate its superiority to the “suspicious, sidelong glances” Americans give one another on the street. “Parallel Worlds” is sometimes derivative; when the authors observe that Joseph Conrad sketched Africans simplistically, for instance, we observe that African writer Chinua Achebe said it earlier and better. But the authors’ honesty about their professional ambitions gives these pages a fresh twist: They may be living in an exotic land of panther dancing, sacred forests and human snakes, but their wheeling-and-dealing ways of coaxing valuable data from savvy tribes would hardly seem out of place on Wall Street, say, or Capitol Hill.