Word: peissel
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...three men approached a police checkpoint at the village of Lotsum, along the tense cease-fire line between India and Pakistan in the Himalayas. The travelers looked like ordinary Kashmiri peasants, and the guards let them pass. But one of them was not what he seemed. French Anthropologist Michel Peissel had disguised himself in garb like that of his two local guides, staining his face with walnut dye in order to enter a region long forbidden to foreigners: the Dansar Plain of "Little Tibet," the no man's land of a legendary tribe known as the Minaro...
...Peissel, 47, a onetime Harvard Business School student who turned to anthropology after a summer's roaming of Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula, is convinced that the Minaro are Aryans, but his reports hardly evoke the image of an Asian master race. In a book just published in Paris called L'Or des Fourmis (The Ants' Gold), Peissel argues that the Minaro constitute "a living museum of life in the days of stone-age men." They live in adobe huts, erect great druidic stone monuments and center their livelihoods on the ibex, a wild mountain...
Though white-bearded elders preside symbolically over village ceremonies, says Peissel, who spent six months studying them, the Minaro are a matriarchal society. Most married women have more than one husband. The women dominate the men and slap them around in public. The principal deities are female, goddesses of fortune and fertility, who preside over lesser goddesses that reign over time, the hunt and the village...
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