The century of Claude Lévi-Strauss
How the great anthropologist, now approaching his 100th birthday, has earned a place in the prestigious Pléiade library
In 1938, the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss drove a mule train up a derelict telegraph line, which wound its way across the scrublands of Mato Grosso state in Brazil. He headed an ethnographic team conducting fieldwork among the semi-nomadic Nambikwara who roamed the plains through the dry season. Photographs from the journey look dated even for their era. Men in pith helmets mingling with virtually naked tribesmen, mules heaving crates of equipment through the wilderness, laden-down canoes and jungle campsites – it all has the feel of some grand nineteenth-century scientific expedition. Yet, after the Second World War, Lévi-Strauss would add a modern twist to anthropology with the development of a completely new way of thinking about ethnographic data.
He did this, as Vincent Debaene writes in the preface to this retrospective of his work, by marrying “formal classicism and methodological modernism”. In some ways Lévi-Strauss looked back to an earlier era of scholarship, with its encyclopedic reach and grand philosophizing; in others he is a man of the mid-twentieth century, with its fascination for atomic science, early computing and linguistic models. Add to this avant-garde techniques of splicing and recombining narrative, of wordplay and abstraction, and what emerged was a singular body of work which had a huge impact across the humanities in France and around the world.
As he approaches his 100th birthday on November 28, Lévi-Strauss has become one of the few living authors to find a place in Gallimard’s Pléiade library. From the almost weightless Bible paper and soft leather cover to the pale pink flyleaves and the gold-embossed “Claude Lévi-Strauss Oeuvres” on the spine, Gallimard has retained the library’s old-world gravitas. In a testament to just how differently the publishing industry works across the Channel, this 2,000-page, seventy-euro edition sold 13,000 copies in its first three months.
The classic memoir Tristes Tropiques (1955), which recounts Lévi-Strauss’s Brazil years, leads off the collection. Over the next 1,500 pages are a further six books: the novella-length essay Le Totémisme aujourd’hui, and the philosophico-anthropological piece La Pensée sauvage, both originally published in the early 1960s; three late books on indigenous myth – La Voie des masques (1972), La Potière jalouse (1985) and Histoire de Lynx (1991) – which came out after his retirement; and Regarder écouter lire (1993), a slim volume of essays on art and aesthetic appreciation. Commentaries, explanatory notes and snatches of unpublished material round out the edition.
The first thing one notices about this book is a huge absence. Organized chronologically, the collection skips from 1962, when Lévi-Strauss had only recently entered the Collège de France, to the mid-1970s, after his retirement; from the birth of structuralism in the popular imagination to the beginning of its decline. The core of Lévi-Strauss’s career when he was professor at the Collège, a media celebrity and one of the most influential theorists of his age, has been excised. Lévi-Strauss has opted for what he described as his “petites mythologiques” over the centrepiece of his career, the monolithic Mythologiques quartet. A further absence is his PhD thesis, Les Structures élémentaires de la parenté (1949), the reinterpretation of the field of kinship studies which established him as a leading thinker in post-war France. As Lévi-Strauss himself made the selection, it seems a timid assessment of his own output.
For the reader, though, the choice is felicitous. Throughout his career Lévi-Strauss has combined lyricism with analytical density. In this collection, his least readable stretches – the interminable analyses of myths, the long and technical demonstrations of kin structures – have been filleted out with no apparent loss of substance. Arguments presented in both Les Structures élémentaires and the Mythologiques quartet crop up time and again through his oeuvre, which, like a complex chemical solution, has a remarkable overall consistency.
Almost like an extended introduction to his thought, Tristes Tropiques works well at the head of this collection. Travelogue, memoir and ethnography jostle with philosophical musings in a book that Debaene describes as less about the empirical reality of fieldwork than the mental crisis that fieldwork threw him into. Tristes Tropiques is here reproduced with the original cover design of 1955 – a semi-abstract drawing of a Caduveo woman, whose face is covered by the strange arabesque designs that fascinated Lévi-Strauss in the field. His evocative photographs from the field are finally placed where he had originally wished them to be – after the chapters they relate to, rather than in a promiscuous clump at the end.
The Pléiade edition benefits from previously unpublished material from Lévi-Strauss’s recently opened archive at the Bibliothèque nationale, which gives a tantalizing glimpse backstage into his classic work. Tristes Tropiques was written in record time – almost 500 pages in the space of four months – and the original manuscript shows how this extraordinary feat was accomplished. Written on a small German typewriter that Lévi-Strauss had picked up in a bric-a-brac shop in São Paulo, the manuscript was one continuous ream of words, with no breaks for chapters. As if working up a collage, Lévi-Strauss literally cut and pasted sections from old papers and notes onto the page; whole chunks of his “petite thèse”, La Vie familiale et sociale des Indiens Nambikwara, were included verbatim, pasted onto blank pages, modified only by replacing the academic “nous” with the more intimate “je”.
Many of the aphorisms which seem to crop up spontaneously in Tristes Tropiques were actually copied directly from a green notebook that Lévi-Strauss used in Brazil, where he had jotted down ideas as they came to him, such as: “the tropics are less exotic, than out of date”, “Napoleon is the Mohammed of the West” and “le moi est haïssable” (“the self is detestable”) to which he wrote over the top in red “pas de moi = il y a un rien et un nous” (“the absence of self = there is a nothingness and an us”).
The hurriedly assembled manuscript also included a famous description of a sunset, which was part of a “vaguely Conradesque” novel that Lévi-Strauss had begun to write on the eve of the Second World War. The Pléiade edition includes a handful of previously unseen pages from this aborted novel, which follows Paul Thalamas, as he, like Lévi-Strauss, set off on a voyage to the tropics. The extract is intriguing, combining melodrama – “Il respira profondément” was the opening sentence – with awkwardly introduced philosophizing: “de façon très vague, Paul Thalamas pensa à Berkeley et à la célèbre théorie par laquelle l’évêque anglais prétend prouver, par la différence entre les dimensions apparentes de la lune au zénith et sur l’horizon, la relativité de nos impressions visuelles” (“in a vague way, Paul Thalamas turned his thoughts to Berkeley and the famous theory in which the English bishop tries to prove the relativity of our visual perceptions, by the apparent differences in the size of the moon at the zenith and on the horizon”). Clearly Lévi-Strauss had not yet mastered the flow of fiction, but who knows what he might have been able to achieve had he ploughed his formidable intellectual energies into a literary career instead of an academic one. What the extract does show is that his modus operandi was the same whatever he turned his hand to – a very Gallic blend of drama and philosophy.
Also published for the first time is a brief extract from his field notes. In contrast to the rich evocations in Tristes Tropiques, written fifteen years after the event, the style is businesslike – “Visites indigènes et distribution de menus cadeaux. Dîner à la nuit. Le soir allons rendre visite aux Indiens. Chants et danse”. (“See indigenous people and distribute small gifts. Dinner at night. In the evening we visit the Indians. Songs and dance”) – with frequent references back to France. Certain escarpments in the Brazilian outback were like those found in the haut Languedoc; a wooded area reminded him of forests in central France.
The collection continues with Le Totémisme aujourd’hui and La Pensée sauvage. Lévi-Strauss has described these books as “a pause between two bursts of effort”, as he drew breath between his earlier exploration of kinship systems and his later work on myth. With references to letters from the comparative philologist Georges Dumézil, the Pléiade edition fills in some of the backstory. In 1960, Dumézil commissioned a short book for the Presses Universitaires de France’s Myths and Religions series, to be adapted from Lévi-Strauss’s 1960–61 lectures at the Collège de France on totemism. But as the scope of the course expanded, Lévi-Strauss asked for the book to be produced in two volumes. The final solution was two completely different books – the second, La Pensée sauvage, published by Plon, who had already had a bestseller with Tristes Tropiques. Various titles for the first were floated, including “La Fin du totémisme”, “Derrière le totémisme” and “Au-delà du totémisme” – in some ways better than Le Totémisme aujourd’hui, given that the book argues that the whole phenomenon of totemism was in fact an anthropological illusion, masking a more generalized human capacity for abstract model-building and categorization.
In relation to La Pensée sauvage the Pléiade edition revisits the controversy over Sybil Wolfram’s ill-fated English translation. Wolfram, an Oxford University philosophy lecturer in her early thirties, fell out with Lévi-Strauss over criticisms he made of early drafts of the first two chapters. She almost left the project at this point, but the publishers persuaded her to complete the translation. When she handed in the script, Lévi-Strauss was damning: “I could not recognise my book as she had rendered it”, he complained in a letter to the journal Man. For her part, Wolfram disassociated herself from the heavily edited version of her work that finally appeared in print, which she felt was “full of howlers, pieces of sheer nonsense, ungrammatical sentences, extreme infelicities, pointless substitutions, often resulting in absurdity and inaccuracy, the loss of allusions I have carefully preserved”. The Pléiade edition reproduces excerpts from a letter in which Wolfram accused Lévi-Strauss of having “an inadequate knowledge of English”, and labelled philosophical terms like “être” and “devenir” used as substantives as “meaningless metaphysical expressions”. “If you do not mean what I put, then I do not understand what you mean”, wrote an exasperated Wolfram. She later joked, paraphrasing Lévi-Strauss, that the editing process had miraculously succeeded in “turning the cooked into the raw”. Lévi-Strauss has the last word here by inserting a quote from Hamlet, “and there is pansies, that’s for thoughts”, on the flyleaf of La Pensée sauvage – a way of capturing in English the wordplay of the title in French. (La Pensée Sauvage = both “untamed thought” and “wild pansy”, though it was rendered simply The Savage Mind in English.)
The Wolfram dispute underlines the enduring gulf between Lévi-Strauss and his British counterparts, Latin and Anglo-Saxon intellectual sensibilities. Lévi-Strauss’s elliptical, poetic style was indeed resistant to more literalist Anglo-American interpretations. His repeated use of hard-science metaphors goaded critics who found it impossible to pin down the detail of Lévi-Strauss’s arguments, and were indeed suspicious that his florid prose masked a lack of rigour. Even those sympathetic to Lévi-Straussian structuralism – such as Edmund Leach and Rodney Needham – ended up getting short shrift from the master, while Lévi-Strauss would often deflect criticisms from across the Channel by claiming that his ideas had been misunderstood and/or misrepresented.
Lévi-Strauss’s “petites mythologiques”, reproduced in full in Oeuvres, was a mop-up operation. In them he tied up loose ends, pursued miscellaneous issues left over from the original Mythologiques quartet, while clarifying arguments and fielding criticisms. Reading these books is a journey into Lévi-Strauss-land – a geometric world in which mythic narrative, conceptual models and intellectual superstructures nestle one above the other in a strange conglomeration of vivid detail and logic. In La Voie des masques, contrasting shapes of British Columbian masks are in inverted relation to different versions of the same myth in neighbouring populations. La Potière jalouse’s scatological joust with Freudian psychoanalysis has the sloth and the goatsucker bird in South American Jivaro mythology as symbols of anal and oral retention/incontinence. Human jealousy becomes a form of psychological retention; the body akin to a kiln for cooking excrement. While in the Histoire de Lynx, the mythic figures of the lynx and the coyote, the wind and the fog and the recurring appearance of twins in indigenous mythology slot together in a series of logical configurations.
It is easy to get lost in the intricacies of the argument. The plots of indigenous myths can be convoluted and confusing, as are Lévi-Strauss’s own, at times eccentric, interpretations of them. But the overall model that he has worked with throughout his career is remarkably simple. Responding to a query from Edmund Leach, Lévi-Strauss summarized his philosophy with a prosaic metaphor. Reality, wrote Lévi-Strauss, was like a club sandwich. It was composed of three similarly structured strata: nature, the brain and myth. Each of these elements cascaded from the other – the brain being merely one aspect of nature, and mythic thought a subset of mental function. These strata were separated by “two layers of chaos: sensory perception and social discourse”.
Beyond the disorder of our first impressions, beyond the eccentricities of a living culture, were logical relationships – the symmetries, inversions and oppositions that Lévi-Strauss never tired of identifying. These structures underlined the order of all natural phenomena, be they crystals, organisms, language, kinship systems, or the free flow of human thought in oral cultures, as a shaman retold a myth by a communal fire in the depths of the Amazon rainforest. “I am much closer to the XVIIIth century materialism than to Hegel”, concluded Lévi-Strauss, since the human brain’s “laws of functioning are the same as the laws of nature”.
This stripped-down philosophy, in which everything is in the last instance interchangeable, can give Lévi-Strauss’s work a hermetic quality, which is especially apparent over the long haul of the Pléiade format. Gallimard’s new edition shows both the breadth and scope of Lévi-Strauss’s ideas and the ultimately claustrophobic theoretical space he carved out. His published work alone could comfortably fill a further two Pléiade-sized volumes, but the result would not add much depth to what is already on display in this collection. Throughout his career, ethnographic descriptions, mythic narratives and his own theories have folded back on one another in an endless process of self-reference. His fellow mythologist Wendy Doniger has likened Lévi-Strauss’s way of thinking to the Klein bottle – a three-dimensional mathematical form made by sticking two inverted Möbius strips together, which Lévi-Strauss reproduces in La Potière jalouse to illustrate the structure of a myth. The comparison is apt. Mathematically generated, but with an organic feel, the Klein bottle’s bulbous, undulating form is self-consuming and conceptually difficult to grasp. It has no true inner or outer surfaces. Like Lévi-Strauss’s oeuvre, it eternally feeds back through itself.
What gives air to Lévi-Strauss’s output, and introduces the lyricism that baffled his Anglo-Saxon critics, was a profound interest in aesthetic expression and appreciation that ran in tandem to the cognitive side of his work. His lifelong quest to reconcile the “sensible” and the “intelligible” – that is to say, how raw sensory perception, which is an especially rich experience in oral cultures, relates to a more abstract intellectual understanding – added an artistic flavour to what could have been a dry theoretical exercise. In an interview with the film critic Raymond Bellour in the 1960s, Lévi-Strauss said that the whole myth project was really searching for answers to the perennial questions: What is a beautiful object? What is aesthetic emotion? – problems that preoccupied him more and more as his career progressed.
Regarder écouter lire is a gentle coda that largely breaks free of Lévi-Strauss’s obsessional exegesis of indigenous cultures. Here is the classical side of Lévi-Strauss’s modernist/classicist matrix, moving through a history of aesthetic ideas and theories of sounds, colours and words via musings on Diderot, Rousseau, Proust, Poussin and a half-forgotten eighteenth-century proto-structuralist musicologist called Michel-Paul-Guy de Chabanon. The tone is conversational, studded with Lévi-Strauss’s intriguing observations, such as, “in France we prefer a golden yellow, leaving the English to a pure yellow which we find bland”, and fascination for sensory crossover – from the eccentric invention of the “ocular or chromatic clavichord” to concepts of “coloured hearing” and the meshing of musical and linguistic codes.
Although structuralism has dated fast, barely surviving Lévi-Strauss’s own retirement, and his brand of philosophical anthropology no longer exists in what is now a far more specialized discipline, this Pléiade edition is a reminder of how original his contribution has been. Comparisons are often made to Freud, and indeed there is a certain early-twentieth-century-man-of-ideas feel to Lévi-Strauss. Like Freud, Lévi-Strauss was a fearless theoretician who threw out scores of suggestive ideas, turned speculation into cast-iron models and worked vast areas with an at times reckless confidence. In common with many of Freud’s, many of Lévi-Strauss’s specific claims have since been refuted, but the body of work as a whole has left an indelible mark on twentieth-century thought.
Claude Lévi-Strauss
OEUVRES
Edited by Vincent Debaene, Frédéric Keck, Marie Manzé and Martin Rueff
2,063pp. Gallimard. ¤71.
978 2 07 011802 1
Patrick Wilcken is the author of the pamphlet Anthropology, the Intellectuals and the Gulf War, 1994, and Empire Adrift: The Portuguese court in Rio De Janeiro, 1808–1821, published in paperback in 2005. He is working on a book about Lévi-Strauss.
With no language misunderstanding in France did C L-S have supporters there willing to explain and defend him internationally (and in English) or simply loyal disciples? Why did Structuralism in Soc Anthro boom then bust? What did Structuralism tell us of lasting value? Something or nothing?
Bob T, London, UK
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