The Department is very sad to learn of the death, on 13th January 2020 at the age of 81, of our long-time and dearly remembered former colleague, Dr Gilbert Lewis. Gilbert was a pioneer in the development of medical anthropology as well as a distinguished ethnographer of Papua New Guinea and theorist of ritual and magic. Colleagues who were taught by or worked with him remember a man of remarkable sensitivity and kindness, as well as a highly creative intellect. We offer our warmest sympathies to his family.
For Gilbert Lewis: A Eulogy by Michael Young
The day Nico Lewis wrote to tell me of his father’s passing my wife Elizabeth and I had as a house guest Don Gardner, whose ANU PhD had been examined by Gilbert. By coinci- dence, that evening another of Gilbert’s students, Colin Filer, came to a small dinner party we hosted. Colin is another Canberra-based anthropologist whose Cambridge PhD had been supervised by Gilbert. There were three men around the table, including myself, whose lives Gilbert had influenced profoundly, two of them had done fieldwork in Sepik societies like Gilbert. Together, we raised our glasses to his memory and reminisced about our shared his- tory with him. Gilbert had been a student of Anthony Forge at the LSE, who also supervised Don after taking a foundation professorship at the ANU.
While deeply saddening, the news of his death was not unexpected. I had been dreading it, as he had told me in his email messages of the series of punishing operations he had endured in recent months. Poignantly, the day that he died happened to be my 83rd birthday, and I reflected that we had been the best of friends for fifty years.
I first met Gilbert in late 1969 just after we were interviewed in Cambridge for the post of Assistant University Lecturer in the Faculty of Anthropology chaired by Meyer Fortes. We did not know one another then but chatted over a beer while waiting for the train back to London, sharing our experiences of recent fieldwork in Papua New Guinea. As I had already been awarded my PhD from the ANU and had my first book in press, I won that position, but a year later, equipped with his LSE PhD, Gilbert was appointed to a second assistant lectureship in Meyer’s department. Our friendship ripened as we shared temporary accommodation; our children played together, and our wives shared their grievances with the male-dominated ‘College System’ which excluded them. I left Cambridge in 1974 to return to the ANU while Gilbert, with the additional incentive of a Fellowship at St John’s College, spent the rest of his career at Cambridge.
Our voluminous correspondence began in 1975 and continued until our final exchange (Subject: ‘A Bad Week for Good Humour’ referring to the deaths of Clive James and Jona- than Miller) a few days before Gilbert’s own demise. Filling four thick folders, our letters
© 2020 Oceania Publications
Oceania 97
will join smaller collections of mainly academic correspondence in my archives to be deposed in the ANU.
In a different key, I would like to offer some thoughts about Gilbert’s complex charac- ter. As you well know, he was a man of many professional parts: medical doctor, social anthropologist, widely-read scholar. As a consummate fieldworker, his insightful social observation also informed his talents as a writer, a painter, and a photographer; he was a dis- criminating collector of books and ethnographic artefacts. There was little he couldn’t turn his hand to. On the home front, he cooked (complementing Ariane’s dishes) and gardened (I recall spinach was his speciality). For exercise he walked and cycled but gave up jogging after his first heart attack. He doted on a beloved French dog, Ola, until it succumbed to old age.
Beyond the family home, Gilbert had a passion for bird-watching. The multifarious avian fauna of Australia and New Guinea was a joyous revelation to him, and he was envi- ous of the variety of bird-life (especially the colourful parrots) that visited our Canberra gar- den. His comment from Barnes last August was sad: ‘It’s been a bad year for birds, hardly a swift in the sky and no swallows.’
Gilbert’s painting was inspired by unfamiliar locations. In a Spanish house-party orga- nized by my wife to celebrate my 70th birthday, he painted a ghostly ‘apparition’ of Bronislaw Malinowski (the Polish subject of my biography) which appeared during the eve- ning. This framed painting still hangs on my study wall.
Finally, in tribute to Gilbert’s remarkable literary skills, I shall refer to a review I wrote in 1981 of Day of Shining Red: An Essay on Understanding Ritual. The focus of this second Gnau monograph is a short male initiation rite that involved the smearing of initiands with the penile blood of their mothers’ brothers. Gilbert engages in a painstaking search for ‘con- text-dependent meaning’ (bearing in mind that ‘meaning is a word of easy virtue’) to ‘explain’ the rite by examining the nature of evidence and the possible grounds of interpre- tation which allow us finally to say ‘we understand’ when confronted with the exotic prac- tice. It is Gnau experience of their ritual that mattered most to Gilbert rather than any inferred or imputed cognitive significance. Not for him a reification of the meaning of a rite, as anthropologists are typically inclined to promote. Like Montaigne, he was deeply scepti- cal of claims to truth. Discursive, tentative, continually qualifying and self-correcting (but never jargon-snagged), Gilbert’s writing is inseparable from his cautious probing into mean- ing. He button-holes the reader with a candid, garrulous charm, and despite its meandering course through thickets of what might appear to be evidence for one interpretation or another but then turn out to be neither, the book entertains and delights.
Gilbert, through our long friendship I can only reiterate that you have gladdened and delighted my heart. I will sorely miss our conversations.
Michael W. Young, 29 January 2020
The following are Dr Lewis’ main publications
Knowledge of Illness in a Sepik Society: A Study of the Gnau, New Guinea, Athlone
Press, 1975; Day of Shining Red: An Essay on Understanding Ritual, Cambridge University Press, 1980; A Failure of Treatment. Oxford University Press, 2000; Pandora’s Box: Ethnography and the Comparison of Medical Belief. HAU Books: The University of Chicago Press, 2020.
Religious doctrine or experience: A matter of seeing, learning, or doing. In H. Whit- ehouse and J. Laidlaw, eds. Ritual and Memory: Toward a Comparative Anthropology of Religion, Altamira Press, 2004.
------
Gilbert Lewis's funeral was held on 6 February 2020. Dr Stephen Hugh-Jones read the following short eulogy, which he has kindly agreed that we reproduce here:
'To me – and surely to you too - Gilbert’s tragic and untimely death has come as a terrible and unexpected shock. That he is no longer with us is still an open wound: raw, very painful, difficult to accept and even harder to understand.
To express my affection for Gilbert and sadness at his passing, all I can do is to say a few words about him and some of things that he meant to me. Hopefully this will evoke something of him in you too.
I worked alongside Gilbert for the whole of our academic careers in the Department of Social Anthropology and came to know him very well. He was much more than a colleague – he was a close personal friend.
In the Department, we shared much in common - everything from his pipe - we smoked this together in the morning as we swapped news of family and children - to jokes about ‘Basil Brush’, our private code for Jack Goody, our Head of Department - Jack was also our friend and, like Gilbert, a fellow of St John’s.
Gilbert and I had also married the opinionated sweethearts of our youth and, perhaps unusually for our generation, we stayed with them, Gilbert with Ariane, I with Christine. We joked about this too – a mix of affection and mutual understanding.
We had both worked with tribal societies, Gilbert with the Gnau in Papua New Guinea and I in Amazonia - Gilbert even tried to teach me his special Gnau way of whistling.
Work with tribal societies set us slightly apart in a department turned increasingly to modernity and complexity. It also led to a shared interest in ritual. But whereas I stuck with structuralism, Gilbert, in his brilliant, original and unconventional Day of Shining Red, made these then fashionable views part of the problem. Drawing on Gombrich’s Art and Illusion, Gilbert argued that ritual was not about communication but rather about expression. To know what was expressed required painstaking attention to detail – as in painting or art appreciation.
Gilbert was painstaking and meticulous - in what he did and what he said. He had the keen, sometimes ironical eye of a novelist for those around him, often noticing things that others might miss. But he hated confrontation, avoided criticising others and thought carefully before expressing his opinions – always in that soft, unassertive, slightly breathy voice of his. He loved art, was a talented painter himself and, with his training in both medicine and anthropology, straddled the ground between science and the humanities - like his hero Gombrich.
Gilbert had a brilliant, original mind - something of an older-style polymath. He read widely and eclectically – especially from piles of old TLS – and seemed to know about almost everything – full of curious facts, off-beat pieces of wisdom and authoritative references to literature. He disliked pretence and avoided fashion – in his ideas and in his clothes - though Ariane occasionally tried to smarten him up.
With, and through, Ariane, Gilbert loved France and things French. He was never happier than at Naumas, his remote house hidden away on La Montaigne Noir, surrounded by acres of woodland and open fields patrolled by hen harriers – Gilbert loved birds and was a keen bird-watcher. I remember our holidays at Naumas, swimming with Gilbert, Jerome and Niko in the nearby pond and Gilbert injecting me in the backside when I fell ill from exhaustion after digging out a deep pit. I can see Gilbert now, outside the house keeping the grass and bracken at bay with his scythe, then coming in for an evening of good food, good wine and animated conversation – with Gilbert cursing the dormice that we admired.
I am very lucky to have had Gilbert as my friend. He enriched my life in so many ways. I wish he was still with us now.'