David Maybury-Lewis,78 ; anthropologist studied tribes
NEW YORK - David Maybury-Lewis, an anthropologist whose studies of native tribes in Amazonia pushed him, as the learned visage of a popular series on PBS, to advocate for the preservation of other indigenous groups, died Dec. 2 at his home in Cambridge. He was 78.
The cause was Parkinson's disease, his family said.
Dr. Maybury-Lewis arrived in central Brazil as a graduate student in the 1950s and began studies of the Xerente, Xavante, and other linguistically related lowland peoples. He observed social customs, ceremonies, and kinship within the Xavante.
He described the group's structure in a comprehensive book, "Akwe-Shavante Society" (1967). The book was "hailed as groundbreaking and was the first full-length social-anthropological study of a Brazilian indigenous people," said Terence S. Turner, an emeritus professor of anthropology at the University of Chicago.
Dr. Maybury-Lewis became close to the people he studied and was increasingly alarmed by what he saw as the corrosive effects on tribal culture and the environment by development.
In 1972, as a partial remedy, Dr. Maybury-Lewis, who taught at Harvard, helped to found a human rights organization, Cultural Survival, which he intended as a touchstone for native groups in Latin America and elsewhere. The organization advocates for the preservation of tribal languages, rights, and customs through scholarship and public education. Dr. Maybury-Lewis was the group's president and was assisted by his wife, Pia Maybury-Lewis.
Jean E. Jackson, a professor of anthropology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said Cultural Survival had been influential in raising money and had played a "vanguard role" in informing the public "at a time when tribal peoples were being systematically annihilated" in the 1970s.
In 1992, Dr. Maybury-Lewis lent his face and elegiac voice to the concerns, as the host of "Millennium: Tribal Wisdom and the Modern World," which appeared on PBS in 10 hourlong episodes. Among other excursions, the series crossed time zones to take a cross-cultural look at sex and marriage in tribes in Niger and an isolated region of Nepal.
The son of a British civil servant, David Henry Peter Maybury-Lewis was born in Hyderabad, in what is now Pakistan. He attended Cambridge University and received a doctorate in anthropology from Oxford in 1960.
He was named an assistant professor of anthropology at Harvard in 1961. Dr. Maybury-Lewis became a professor of anthropology in 1969 and was chairman of Harvard's anthropology department from 1973 to 1981.
In the 1960s and '70s, he helped lead a collaboration between Brazilian researchers and Harvard, to document native cultures of the central
Dr. Maybury-Lewis was named an emeritus professor of anthropology in 2004. He was also a curator at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard.
In addition to his wife, Dr. Maybury-Lewis leaves two sons, Anthony of London and Biorn of Cambridge; two sisters, Patricia of Oxford, England, and Jean McLaren of Bristol, England; and four grandchildren.
