Millennium: Tribal Wisdom And The Modern World

While PBS has certainly been guilty of making programs which miss the mark, they rarely make something that is downright silly. Enter Millennium. Anthropologist David Maybury-Lewis is the host for this series which purports to contrast the wisdom of tribal societies with the apparent folly of technologically advanced societies. We watched the second episode, "Strange Relations," which begins with an interesting bit of scholarly legerdemain. Standing near a castle in France, Maybury-Lewis tells us (while the camera goes angle crazy in a desperate effort to appear modern) that the medieval shift from arranged marriage to romantic love was ushered in by the concept of "courtly love" as practiced by the aristocracy. In the space of five minutes, the idea of "courtly love" (long a bone of contention amongst literary critics) goes from being a literary conceit to an historical fact. Debatable to say the least, but what happens next is a real jaw dropper. We visit the Wodaabe tribe in Niger and watch one babe who has the hots for a dude who's already married to a whole bunch of babes. Excuse the informal language, but a) these are actors saying such heavy subtitled remarks as "I want him," and b) the gorgeous cinematography is being used for what could be the model for the African Harlequin line. After about 15 minutes of this, we're abruptly returned (like the end of an Outer Limits episode) back to our "normal" station: Mr. Maybury-Lewis. Contemplating the Wodaabe couple's bliss, he seems wistfully envious. Then it's on to Nepal, where a Nyinba couple has the opposite arrangement: one wife, many husbands, and we get a second primary-level reader treatment of family relations. A weak tie-in to a Canadian couple (he's on his second marriage) rounds out the program, and we're left wondering what the hell is Maybury-Lewis trying to say. He implies that monogamy may be a dying art, and kind of points toward tribal polygamy as the inside track. But, hey, among us non-anthropologists it's a pretty well-known fact that tribal polygamy usually has a lot to do with the fact that these societies are agricultural-based, and therefore labor-intensive. Trust me on this one, David, it's not gonna fly in downtown Kansas City. Beautiful to look at, rather absurd to listen to, Millennium is a truly optional purchase. The other episodes in the series are: "The Shock of the Other," "Mistaken Identity," "An Ecology of Mind," "The Art of Living," "Touching the Timeless," "A Poor Man Shames Us All," "Inventing Reality," "The Tightrope of Power," and "At the Threshold." (See FRONTLINE: THE DEATH OF NANCY CRUZAN for availability.)