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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
Academic, writer, figure of melancholy, aesthete - Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908-2009) not only transformed his academic discipline, he also profoundly changed the way that we view ourselves and the world around us. In this award-winning biography, historian Emmanuelle Loyer recounts Lévi-Strauss's childhood in an assimilated Jewish household, his promising student years as well as his first forays into political and intellectual movements. As a young professor, Lévi-Strauss left Paris in 1935 for São Paulo to teach sociology. His rugged expeditions into the Brazilian hinterland, where he discovered the Amerindian Other, made him into an anthropologist. The racial laws of the Vichy regime would force him to leave France yet again, this time for the USA in 1941, where he became Professor Claude L. Strauss - to avoid confusion with the jeans manufacturer. Lévi-Strauss's return to France, after the war, ushered in the period during which he produced his greatest works: several decades of intense labour in which he reinvented anthropology, establishing it as a discipline that offered a new view on the world. In 1955, Tristes Tropiques offered indisputable proof of this the world over. During those years, Lévi-Strauss became something of a French national monument, as well as a celebrity intellectual of global renown. But he always claimed his perspective was a 'view from afar', enabling him to deliver incisive and subversive diagnoses of our waning modernity. Loyer's outstanding biography tells the story of a true intellectual adventurer whose unforgettable voice invites us to rethink questions of the human and the meaning of progress. She portrays Lévi-Strauss less as a modern than as our own great and disquieted contemporary.
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Seitenzahl: 1881
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
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Contents
Cover
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Introduction: The Worlds of Claude Lévi-Strauss
Around the world
The mystery of Lévi-Strauss
Beads of the necklace
Ethnographic knowledge and the anthropological discipline: the Other as object
The structure of a life and body of work
To talk to a bird
Notes
Part I: Yesterday’s Worlds ( –1935)
1 The Name of the Father
A halo around the name
A genealogy
Genealogy of Claude Lévi-Strauss
Art as legacy
Notes
2 Revelations (1908–1924)
Landscapes of childhood
The richness of the world
An heir without inheritance
Notes
3 Revolutions (1924–1931): Politics vs. Philosophy
Converting to left politics and to philosophy
Apprentice philosopher and militant socialist
A socialist party thinker
Notes
4 Redemption: Anthropology (1931–1935)
Growing up
Bifurcating
Notes
5 The Enigma of the World
Epistemologies
Temporal settings
Notes
Part II: New Worlds (1935–1947)
6 France in São Paulo
Heading to the Americas
Open-air laboratory or sociological paradise
Notes
7 In the Heart of Brazil
Dina, Mário, São Paulo, 1935–1938
Ethnographic initiation (November 1935 to March 1936)
Back from the field
Notes
8 Massimo Lévi with the Nambikwara
Archives of an expedition: the Serra do Norte Mission
The Rondon line
‘A philosopher among the Indians?’
Spring 1939: an ‘ascent through layers of time’
Notes
9 Crisis (1939–1941)
Returning to Paris, to the present and to history
The war
Taking shelter
Exile
Notes
10 A Frenchman in New York City: Exile and Intellectual Invention (1941–1944)
In the mugginess of a New York summer (1941)
Bohemian life in New York
Academics and politics
Notes
11 Structuralism: The American Years
France’s liberation, from afar
Refounding anthropology
Between science and administration
A new French cultural policy in the United States
Notes
Part III: The Old World (1947–1971)
12 The Ghosts of Marcel Mauss
Kinship according to Lévi-Strauss
Fathers and sons of French social science
Notes
13 Manhood
The measure of the world
The Occident as accident
Notes
14 The Confessions of Claude Lévi-Strauss
Tristes Tropiques
, time travel
The great divide between art and science
Notes
15 Structuralist Crystallization (1958–1962)
Place Marcelin-Berthelot
Crystallization of the paradigm
Odds and ends:
The Savage Mind
The time of structuralism
Notes
16 The Manufacture of Science
Rebirth of a discipline
A mythical laboratory: The Laboratory of Social Anthropology (LAS)
Laboratory life
The primacy of anthropology
Notes
17 The Scholarly Life
City Lévi-Strauss, country Lévi-Strauss
Physiologies of knowledge: a disciplined life
Claude Lévi-Strauss’s ‘Tetralogy’
Structuralist stardom
‘At this late hour in my career …’
Notes
18 The Politics of Discretion
A contemplative sociologist
‘All science is political’
‘Opting for the Neolithic’
Notes
Part IV: The World (1971–2009)
19 Immortal
Structuralism cannibalized
Apotheosis
The way of art
Anthropology and history: I love you, me neither
Claude Lévi-Strauss and women, from Marguerite Yourcenar to Françoise Héritier
Notes
20 Metamorphoses
Zen master of the French intelligentsia
The view from afar
Retirement
Mythical transformations (1): The making of a biography
Mythical transformations (2): The minor mythologiques
The avatars of Claude Lévi-Strauss
Notes
21 Claude Lévi-Strauss, Our Contemporary
The enigma of Beauty
The lost craft
Look, Listen, Read:
a savage aesthetics?
The anthropologist in the public sphere
Ageing, dying, rebirth
The Claude Lévi-Strauss to come
Lévi-Strauss, our contemporary
Notes
Works by Lévi-Strauss
Archives Consulted
Other archives:
Abbreviations of Works by Lévi-Strauss
Index
End User License Agreement
Illustration
Man and bird. ‘The bird seemed to have mistaken him for a jackdaw and taken up residence on his shoulder …’: artist and friend Anita Albus, who photographed Lévi-Strauss in Lignerolles in 1979: © Anita Albus.
Caricature of Isaac Strauss, lithograph by Paul Hadol (1835–75), published by Bertauts (circa 1854): © Bibliothèque National de France (hereafter BNF).
Postcard celebrating the visit of Napoleon III to the Strauss Villa in Vichy, 1861: © BNF.
Family tree: © Charles Vallaud.
Postcard, Brussels, rue Van Campenhout, with Claude Lévi- Strauss’s handwriting indicating the apartment where he was born: © BNF.
Cover of the book Gracchus Babeuf et le Communisme (Éditions de l’Églantine), with an inscription to Maurice Deixonne. Maurice Deixonne Archives: © L’OURS, Paris.
SFIO membership card (1927–35): © BNF.
Article announcing a public lecture by Claude Lévi-Strauss in São Paulo: © BNF.
Claude Lévi-Strauss, Jean Maugüe and René Courtin posing in front of the Ford that would take them to the far reaches of the state of Goyaz, 1,500 kilometres north of São Paulo (summer 1936): © BNF.
Article in Diario de São Paulo describing Claude and Dina Lévi-Strauss’s expedition in Mato Grosso (November 1935–January 1936): © BNF.
Map by Noël Meunier of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s two expeditions: Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques: © Éditions Gallimard, Pléiade edition, p. 1723, Paris, 2008.
Caduveo patterns drawn by Claude Lévi-Strauss: © BNF.
Cover of the catalogue for the exhibition at the Galérie des Beaux-Arts (Wildenstein), 21 January–3 February 1937: © BNF.
The ‘Picadia’: a trail in the sertão: © BNF.
The sertão in the dry season (Mato Grosso): © BNF.
The port of Corumbá: setting off for Cuiabá by steamship on Rio Paraguay: © BNF.
Cuiabá: ‘capital’ of Mato Grosso. Departure of the ‘Serra do Norte’ expedition (June 1938): © BNF.
Drawing by Claude Lévi-Strauss after Emydio’s accident: © BNF.
The ship Capitaine Paul Lemerle: © All rights reserved.
The false Luce-Saunier identity papers: © BNF.
The VVV review: Max Ernst © ADAGP, Paris, 2015.
Cover of a book by André Breton with photomontage by Marcel Duchamp: © Succession Marcel Duchamp/ADAGP, Paris 2015; photo © Bridgeman Images.
Brochure for the École libre des hautes études (ELHE): © BNF.
The structuralist afterthought: © BNF.
Poster for the Loubat Lectures: © BNF.
Cover of the Drouot catalogue for the sale of 21 June 1951, ‘Collection Claude Lévi-Strauss. Objets de haute curiosité’: © Commissaire priseur: Maître Rheims.
First page of the manuscript from Tristes Tropiques: © BNF.
Claude Lévi-Strauss’s typewriter: © BNF.
The original cover of Tristes Tropiques: © Plon, 1955.
Cover of the first issue of L’Homme: © All rights reserved.
The Claude Lévi-Strauss seminar and the convivial gathering after Lévi-Strauss’s final lecture at the Collège de France in 1982: © BNF/Jean-Pierre Martin/Collège de France.
‘The structuralist banquet’, caricature by Maurice Henry, published in La Quinzaine littéraire, 1 June 1967: Maurice Henry Archives/IMEC © ADAGP, Paris, 2015.
Cover of The Way of the Masks, republished by Plon in 1979: © Plon, 1979.
‘Japan Speaks, 1980’: © BNF.
Claude Lévi-Strauss with Shimon Peres in Jerusalem: © BNF/ Mishkenot Sha’ananim Newsletter/Asher Weill.
Google homepage: © Google Inc.
Preliminary sketch by Claude Lévi-Strauss of the set for L’Heure espagnole: © BNF.
Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Leica camera: © BNF.
Childhood: All images © BNF, except Claude Lévi-Strauss riding his mechanical horse: Monique Lévi-Strauss Collection; Photo Astrid di Crollalanza © Flammarion.
The young man: Oil on canvas, by Raymond Lévi-Strauss depicting his son Claude in 1913: Monique Lévi-Strauss Collection; Photo Astrid di Crollalanza © Flammarion.
Portrait of Claude Lévi-Strauss as a young man: © BNF.
The house at Camcabra: © BNF.
Oil on canvas, by Raymond Lévi-Strauss depicting his wife Emma: Monique Lévi-Strauss Collection; Photo Astrid di Crollalanza © Flammarion.
Photograph of the 158th Infantry Unit in December 1931: Monique Lévi-Strauss Collection.
The Brazilian years (1935–39): All images © BNF, except photograph taken in the garden of the National Museum of Rio de Janeiro: © Luiz de Castro Faria Archive, MAST/MCFI, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
Two riders in the forest: First foray outside Sao Paulo: © BNF.
In the heart of the tropics: All images: © BNF.
First expedition: the Caduveo and Bororo (December 1935– January 1936)
All images: © BNF.
Second expedition: the Nambikwara (June 1938–January 1939) All images: © BNF.
The ethnographer at work: All images: © Luiz de Castro Faria Archive. Document © BNF, except the extracts from Lévi-Strauss’s expedition notebooks: © BNF.
Bohemian life in New York City (1941–44): Dinner at the restaurant Au bal Tabarin © Jean-Jacques Lebel Archives.
The surrealist group: © Anonymous photograph. Association Atelier André Breton.
Claude Lévi-Strauss’s New York apartment: © BNF.
Lévi-Strauss, cultural attaché in New York (1945–47): Claude Lévi-Strauss in conversation: © American Institute of France. Document © BNF.
Rose-Marie Ullmo and Laurent Jacquemin Lévi-Strauss: © Laurent Lévi-Strauss Collection.
Claude Lévi-Strauss in a light-coloured suit: © Blackstone Studios NYC. Document © BNF.
Masks: Dzonokwa (Kwakiutl) mask (left): Photo: Rebecca Pasch © UBC Museum of Anthropology.
Dzonokwa (Kwakiutl) mask (right): © Milwaukee Public Museum.
Swaihwe (Salish) mask (bottom): Photo: Jessica Bushey © UBC Museum of Anthropology.
Swaihwe (Cowichan) mask (opposite): © Werner Forman Archive/ Bridgeman Images.
Collège de France: The eminent professors of the Collège de France: © Tourte et Petitin. Document © BNF.
Claude Lévi-Strauss in conversation with Jean Malaurie: Document © BNF.
Collège de France professors in 1976–77: © Tourte et Petitin. Document © BNF.
Roman Jakobson giving a lecture at the Collège de France in 1972: © Keystone / Gamma-Rapho.
Lévi-Strauss seated at his desk in a houndstooth suit: © René Saint-Paul/rue des Archives.
Lévi-Strauss’s final lecture at the Collège de France: © Jean-Pierre Martin/Collège de France.
The Laboratory of Social Anthropology: ‘Anthropology of the family or the future of entropy’: © Frédéric Jude.
Claude Lévi-Strauss, in his last office at the Collège de France © Sophie Bassouls/Sygma/Corbis
Claude Lévi-Strauss in the Files: Document © BnF
The anthropologist crowned by the motto of the École Polytechnique: © Sophie Bassouls/Sygma/Corbis.
Claude Lévi-Strauss in his office at the Collège de France in 1970: © Keystone/Gamma-Rapho
Lévi-Strauss surrounded by LAS members: © Keystone/ Gamma-Rapho.
The Académicien: The Académicien and his medals: © Micheline Pelletier/Sygma/ Corbis.
Lévi-Strauss leaving the Institute with his wife: © Michel Petit. Document © BNF.
Claude Lévi-Strauss flanked by his wife and mother: © Michel Petit. Document © BNF.
Session at the Académie Française: © BNF.
Claude Lévi-Strauss’s new tribe: © BNF.
United States, Canada, Japan: All images: © BNF, except Claude Lévi-Strauss at the Smithsonian Institute: © Smithsonian Institute. Document © BNF.
Parental iconography: Monique Lévi-Strauss and Matthieu: Monique Lévi-Strauss Collection.
Monique Roman, in Saint-Tropez: Monique Lévi-Strauss Collection: © BNF.
Laurent Lévi-Strauss: © BNF.
Claude Lévi-Strauss at his desk: © Eva de Muschietti.
A through line spanning several generations at Lignerolles: Monique Lévi-Strauss Collection.
The Lignerolles baskets: Monique Lévi-Strauss Collection.
As a gentleman farmer in Lignerolles: Monique Lévi-Strauss Collection.
Effigies: Claude Lévi-Strauss in the country: © BNF.
Claude Lévi-Strauss in the 1950s: © BNF.
The anthropologist in his office: © André Grassart. Document © BNF.
Claude Lévi-Strauss’s grave: © Matthieu Lévi-Strauss.
An animated Claude Lévi-Strauss: © BNF.
Painting by Anita Albus.
Lévi-Strauss the Amerindian: Claude Lévi-Strauss, in ceremonial cape, on the Rio Seine: Monique Lévi-Strauss Collection.
Claude Lévi-Strauss wearing an embroidered bead jacket: © BNF.
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Lévi-Strauss
A Biography
Emmanuelle Loyer
Translated byNinon Vinsonneau and Jonathan Magidoff
polity
First published in French as Lévi-Strauss © Flammarion, Paris, 2015
This English edition © Polity Press, 2018
This work received the French Voices Award for excellence in publication and translation. French Voices is a program created and funded by the French Embassy in the United States and FACE (French American Cultural Exchange).
This book is supported by the Institut français (Royaume-Uni) as part of the Burgess Programme.
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press101 Station LandingSuite 300Medford, MA 02155, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-1201-0
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
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To the girls, and to their father and stepfather
Acknowledgements
After these past several years, which I have now come to see as an extended conversation, it is with great pleasure that I express my sincerest thanks to Monique Lévi-Strauss, without whom, as the saying goes, this book would not exist. I found her to be endowed with that most important of anthropological skills: the ability to see her own career and that of her husband from a distance, and to consider them as objects of knowledge. In addition to a friendly (and gustatory) welcome, she gave me complete freedom of investigation and interpretation. She alone knows the extent of the debt I owe to her.
Matthieu Lévi-Strauss followed the course of my research with some initial perplexity, then genuine interest, providing me with a few lessons along the way in photographic technique and Burgundy zoology, for which I am grateful. From more of a distance, Laurent Lévi-Strauss kindly accorded me his confidence. As for Catherine Lévi-Strauss, she gradually revealed herself to be an attentive interlocutor and reader.
In the course of this research, I have been a frequent visitor to the Manuscripts Department at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, where the Lévi-Strauss Archive is held, as well as to the Laboratory of Social Anthropology, which has kept its own institutional archives and those of some of its researchers. Catherine Faivre d’Arcier initiated me into the mysteries of the former, Marion Abelès and then Sophic Assal into those of the latter. I would like to warmly thank all three of them here. I am also grateful to Grégory Cingal at the Jacques Doucet Library and Frédéric Cépède at the Office interuniversitaire de recherche socialiste.
In addition to the Paris-based archives, I went in search of documents, information and testimonials, following leads out into the Lévi-Straussian world. In Brazil, I am indebted to the many people who provided me with invaluable assistance, always in a kind and generous manner (and often in flawless French): Fernanda Peixoto, Afranio-Raul Garcia, Heloïsa Maria Bertol Domingues, Luis Donisete Benzi Grupioni and Manuela Carneiro da Cunha, as well as Mariza Corrêta, Helena Monteiro Welper and Antonio Carlos da Souza Lima. I am especially grateful to Luisa Valentini and Emmanuel Diatkine for ‘translating’ the city of São Paulo for me and teaching me to fully appreciate it. From Paris, my French friends Olivier Compagnon, Anaïs Fléchet and Benoît de l’Estoile indulged me by acting as intermediaries. The Brazilian chapters thus owe much to them.
For the New York chapters, I would like once again to thank Pierre-Yves Saunier and the Rockefeller Archives Center, and especially the extremely efficacious Michele Hiltzik.
In Japan, Michaël Ferrier and Soizic Maubec played host to this French researcher who found herself utterly lost in translation. Yasu Watanabe, Jinzo Kawada and Atsuhico Yoshida generously recounted tales of their Japanese Lévi-Strauss.
In Paris, as well, many people agreed to take part in the sometimes melancholy exercise of remembrance and to recall the figure of Lévi-Strauss, the one they had personally known: his former colleagues at the LAS and elsewhere – George Balandier, Nicole Belmont, Carmen Bernand, Philippe Descola, Maurice Godelier, Françoise Héritier, Jean Jamin, Marie Mauzé, Jean Monod, Michel Perrin, Anne-Christine Taylor, Emmanuel Terray, Nathan Wachtel, Françoise Zonabend; contemporaries, friends and acquaintances who, in whatever institutional context or circumstances, had rubbed shoulders with or come to know Claude Lévi-Strauss: Anita Albus, Catherine Clément, Sylvie Dreyfus-Asséo, Pierre Nora, Élisabeth Roudinesco, Germain Viatte, as well as Alain Badiou (about Dina Dreyfus) and Inès de La Fressange. Jean-Jacques Lebel agreed to lend me one of his New York photographs and Frédéric Jude his ‘photomontage’ of the Laboratory team – a fitting expression of the small world of the LAS.
While I indulged rather rarely in academic discussion during the researching and writing of this book, I am nonetheless grateful to the many colleagues and friends who shared their insights. These include Jean-François Bert, Anne Collinot, Alice Conklin, Jean-Marc Dreyfus, Christine Laurière, Patrice Maniglier, Jean-Claude Monod, Wiktor Stoczkowski and Jean-Claude Yon. Others went as far as to read all or part of a manuscript that grew ever thicker with time: Antoine de Baecque, Vincent Debaene, Daniel Fabre, Thomas Hirsch, Maurice Olender, Yann Potin, Paul-André Rosental and Jean-Louis Tissier. I am keenly aware of how much this book owes to the time and energy they devoted to it. In the same way, I am grateful to my mother Denise Loyer and my father Jean-Claude Loyer, a seasoned professional indexer. I would also like to pay tribute to the support and discussion group of the Center for History at Sciences Po Paris and to the institution as a whole for granting me a sabbatical semester in the autumn of 2013, at a moment when I greatly needed it, thus allowing me to concentrate my energies on finishing this book. Finally, this learned assembly had a Palermo outpost – even though Lévi-Strauss himself never visited Sicily – in the form of the meticulous and inspired editing of Juliette Blamont, with the assistance of Crisitina Fatta del Bosco.
However important people have been, places have mattered just as much. And I promised myself I would conclude these acknowledgements with a nod to the great periodicals room, the so-called ‘oval room’, of the Richelieu branch of the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris, in which, sheltered from the world, I spent many a happy moment writing this biography, daydreaming about the glorious cities whose names are inscribed in mosaics under the rotunda – London, Babylon, Vienna, Thebes, Rome, Carthage, Jerusalem, Paris, Byzantium, Washington, Florence, Athens, Nineveh, Berlin and Alexandria. Like an offering to a history that is greater than us, these hours spent at the library pulled me out of my quotidian and rendered me oblivious to the passage of time.
Introduction: The Worlds of Claude Lévi-Strauss
I would have liked, once in my lifetime, to communicate fully with an animal. It is an unattainable goal. It is almost painful for me to know that I will never be able to find out what the matter and structure of the universe is made of. This would have meant being able to talk to a bird. But this is the line that cannot be crossed. Crossing this line would be a great joy for me. If you could bring me a good fairy who would grant me one wish, this is the one I would choose.
Claude Lévi-Strauss, Interview with F. Raddatz1
Around the world
For a long time, Claude Lévi-Strauss would spend his afternoons in his study at home on the fifth floor of 2 rue des Marronniers in the 16th arrondissement of Paris. This magisterial space – with its encyclopedic library, its carefully chosen objects, minerals, ‘curiosities’ and works of art – recomposed the world in miniature and ordered form.
Let us enter the sanctuary. A large rectangular room with a rounded wall on the window side, surrounded by shelves filled with books, bound journals, encyclopedias and dictionaries. The desk itself – of dark wood in the Spanish style acquired in New York – stood aslant, at the far end; Lévi-Strauss would sit at it to write, or to read or edit, in an armchair on casters so that he could move easily between a cylinder desk filled with stationery and a small steel table on which was perched a typewriter (with German keyboard). From the radio would flow an indispensable stream of classical music. Settled at his desk, sometimes leaning back with his feet up, Lévi-Strauss faced an enormous representation of Tara, the green asexual divinity from Nepal – an image of serenity and calm, purchased at Paris’s Drouot auction house in the 1950s. A Thai crocodile, a giant carved tree root from China, and Japanese prints and sword guards rounded out the presence of the Far East. A few rare ethnographic objects, including the cedar-wood haida mace for bludgeoning fish that figures in one of the aesthetic meditations in The Savage Mind, further intensified the otherworldly atmosphere. On the desk were a few stones, and among them a cube of lapis lazuli and a dagger. No plants. Somewhere between a cabinet of curiosities and an artist’s studio, the room was an ode to beauty, a visual and aural environment where, in the muffled afternoon quiet, all the elements could find harmony, coming together in the utopia of an enclosed space containing a world in microcosm: the library. Indeed, following Xavier de Maistre in A Journey Around My Room, Lévi-Strauss could travel the world without leaving the confines of his office, contemplating this paper edifice: on the wall to his left, Africa, Oceania and Asia; directly opposite, periodicals and index card files; to his right, South America; behind him, in the corner, North America, with the remainder of that wall devoted to encyclopedias and dictionaries – all within reach of a single turn on his rolling armchair. ‘My library was a marvel’, he would later say.2 Indeed, the entire world was represented within its walls, and each book was placed where the population with which it dealt would have been situated on a map. This geographical classification (by continent) thus achieved a kind of anamorphosis of map and library – two homologous representations attesting to the fullness and richness of the world.
The sophisticated ordering of this circumnavigating library should not distract us from its essential components: the 12,000 books and, above all, the complete series of international journals, notably Man and American Anthropologist, as well as thousands of offprints, supplied the material necessary for scholarly endeavour. There could be no knowledge without the capillaries through which this data circulated, regularly indexed on cards. Like all scholars of his generation, Lévi-Strauss was an avid user of the index card, which had become, by the early twentieth century, an indispensable tool for all comparative study. He owned a piece of furniture designed to store these cards, which held summaries of all the books he had read at the New York Public Library during the war years – i.e., several thousand works. ‘For a period, in the 1940s–1950s, I could say that nothing published in the field of anthropology escaped my attention.’3 Lévi-Strauss’s library encompassed the entire world and the full range of knowledge, constituting an archive for a kind of scholarly practice in which the impulse to exhaustiveness was still very much the order of the day. At the beginning of the 1960s, several uncaged parrots would fly about this den of erudition, having just arrived from Amazonia thanks to a complicated series of ploys contrived, at the limits of legality, by Isac Chiva, Lévi-Strauss’s assistant at the Laboratory of Social Anthropology at the Collège de France. Chiva was well aware of his colleague and friend’s love of animals, and that he had lived with some monkeys brought back from Brazil. Chiva knew that, if left to his own devices, Lévi-Strauss would have allowed dogs, cats and all manner of creature to find shelter in his study, transforming the office into a menagerie. Indeed, something of the sort did come to pass: the parrots would regularly make off with the anthropologist’s glasses and soil the floor and furniture. Lévi-Strauss ultimately had to give up the birds, as well as his dream of a human existence at one with the animal world. He would manage, however, to revive this chimera by immersing himself in a world that suited him perfectly: that of Amerindian myth, in which animals and humans partook of the same universe.
The mystery of Lévi-Strauss
The Renaissance studiolo that served as Claude Lévi-Strauss’s office is both revealing and surprising: it does not ‘square’ with the avant-garde persona of this pioneer of structuralism – that high-flying theory, often associated with the modernist context of the 1950s–1960s. Structuralism aimed to map the operations of symbolic thought through a new technique of comparison. It was not, as is often thought, a quest for invariants across the societies studied, but rather a method for identifying their differences, understood as variations, with an emphasis on the relations that allow for the passage from one to another. The theory, which was originally developed in the field of linguistics and then spread not only to anthropology but also to other fields (literary criticism, psychoanalysis, history, etc.), arose in connection with the triumph of science, as well as that of the anthropological discipline that Lévi-Strauss helped bring into the mainstream of social science in France during the second half of the twentieth century. So goes the standard story of the adventure of structuralism conjured up by his name, a story some of whose fundamental episodes, we discover to our surprise, took place in the study of a … Renaissance man.
Who, then, was Claude Lévi-Strauss? A child of the twentieth century, he was born in Brussels in 1908 and died in Paris more than a hundred years later, in 2009. He grew up in a Jewish family that had earlier enjoyed the classic French experience of upward mobility, from Alsace to Paris. In this bourgeois world, deeply rooted in the nineteenth century, Lévi-Strauss blossomed as a beloved only child, on whom rested all the hopes of a somewhat down-at-heel family. His father was an artist, as were two of his uncles. Those who did not dedicate themselves to the arts went into business. A large, warm and close-knit extended family, perfectly coherent in its secular and patriotic Judaism, peopled the childhood of the young Claude. A star pupil, he pursued his studies in the literary classes préparatoires at Paris’s prestigious Lycée Condorcet, and yet decided against sitting the entrance exam to the highly selective École normale supérieure, in the first of what would become characteristic existential turns. He became something of a student dilettante, pursuing a double degree in law and philosophy, which led him to sit the competitive agrégation exam in 1931 in order to qualify as a professor. In these years, he was, above all, a committed socialist who, under the auspices of Karl Marx and the SFIO (the French section of the Workers’ International), was keen to change the world. However, unlike many of his comrades, such as his cousin’s husband Paul Nizan, he never became a communist. Rather than change the world, in 1935, he chose to leave the one in which he had grown up. An offer to teach in Brazil presented an opportunity to study Amerindians – who, from the perspective of Paris, were thought to be living in the suburbs of São Paulo. This personal and intellectual turn – he abandoned the old world of philosophy for the young world of anthropology – was of course decisive, and marked the beginning of a second period in his life, set in the new worlds of Brazil and, later, during the Second World War, the United States.
These biographical elements distinguish Lévi-Strauss’s path through the twentieth century. Yet what weight are we to give to the two detours he took in the first half of his life? The first was his decision to distance himself from his family’s Judaism. In the history of the social sciences, Lévi-Strauss is hardly the only intellectual to have broken with the synagogue, yet how much of a link can we establish in his case between the reconstitution of his identity as a non-Jewish Jew and the innovative character of his analytical and theoretical formulations?4 The second reorientation was the one that took him away from the Old World of Europe, pitching it against the new worlds of Brazil and the United States and creating a triangulation of Europe/South America/North America from which the structuralist approach truly sprang. The genesis of this consummate French intellectual, hailed upon his death as a national monument, passed through long periods of expatriation, whether voluntary or forced. Indeed, between the years of 1935 and 1947, Lévi-Strauss was almost entirely absent from France, exploring the brush of the Brazilian Sertão from 1935 to 1939, then in exile in New York from 1941 to 1947, establishing himself first as a social scientist, then as liberated France’s first cultural attaché on Fifth Avenue. This intellectual trajectory was unique among French scholars at the time, who were for the most part characterized by a rather stay-at-home bent, reinforced by their conviction that they were at the centre of the world. It is unquestionable that this mix of old and new worlds, classical French philosophy, Brazilian ethnographic experience and exposure to American anthropology – itself steeped in German traditions – contributed to the development of a powerful and powerfully original intellectual figure.5
The return to the Old World in 1947 marked the beginning of the period of his life dedicated to the writing of his major works, which are saturated through and through with this transatlantic life experience. Indeed, several decades of intense toil followed, during which Lévi-Strauss, now settled in Paris, experienced multiple setbacks before being enthroned at the Collège de France in 1959. A few years earlier, in 1955, in a fit of literary effusion over the course of just a few weeks, he wrote 400 feverish and intense pages recounting his Brazilian odyssey. Tristes Tropiques would become a classic of twentieth-century thought and quickly make its author famous the world over. It was in the 1960s, however, that Claude Lévi-Strauss, having become a public figure of the French intelligentsia, put structural anthropology at the centre of the intellectual and political debates of the times, then in the throes of Marxist revisionism and the endgame of decolonization. The austere savant, his persona shrouded in secrecy and silence, with a touch of cultivated dandyism, orchestrated a veritable structuralist moment among the younger generations, who felt they had found in it their America. At his side, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Louis Althusser and Jacques Lacan were all gathered together at this ‘structuralist banquet’,6 which saw the prestige of the human and social sciences reach its apex. The philosophy embodied by Jean-Paul Sartre found itself significantly challenged by this thought, which sought to relativize it, as Lévi-Strauss himself does in a few memorable pages at the end of The Savage Mind. His polemical zeal provided a stark contrast to the image that was to gradually take over: the image of a contemplative savant and aesthete, averse to political interventions of whatever stripe and taking great delight in his calculated provocations. Politically unclassifiable, he was seen by left-wing students after 1968 as an incorrigible reactionary. And, as if to prove them right, he became a member of the Académie Française in 1973.
He was then sixty-five years old and would go on to live for another thirty-six years. Such longevity accounts for the striking metamorphoses in the reception of his work. Whereas structuralism fell into a state of purgatory lasting several decades, Lévi-Strauss himself escaped any such intellectual discredit. In the 1980s, he became a sort of Zen monk in the world of French letters, which was then mourning the passing of its luminaries – Raymond Aron, Roland Barthes, Jean-Paul Sartre and Michel Foucault all died between 1980 and 1985. Little by little, the old and then very elderly man became a figure of national glory, albeit at some remove and increasingly affirming a distance from the century in which he lived. Yet, strangely, it was this very distance that enabled him to cast a most incisive and subversive gaze on our dispirited modernity. The more Lévi-Strauss aged, the more contemporary he seemed to become.
Beads of the necklace
The present biographical endeavour is intimately connected with the recent opening of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s personal archives – the 261 boxes deposited at the Manuscripts Department of the National Library of France that constitute the core source material for this book, its treasure trove. Other archives were also consulted: the archives of the Laboratory of Social Anthropology at the Collège de France; in Brazil, the numerous traces left by the French university in São Paulo and by the ethnographic expeditions carried out in Mato Grosso; and, finally, in New York and Washington, DC, all the archives relating to French exiles during the Second World War. Building on this considerable mass of new material, much of which is available for the first time, this biography attempts to distinguish itself from the autobiographical thread of Tristes Tropiques by inserting this celebrated narrative into a history – one that would serve to renew its status, significance and impact. The biographical genre has had, for quite some time, a lot to answer for. It was Pierre Bourdieu who delivered the most direct critique of ‘biographical reason’, with its illusion of coherence, its tendency to rationalize the life course, to unearth ‘callings’ and give ‘meaning’ to life, quickly turning any existence into a Bildungsroman.7 These pitfalls are undeniably real. And yet, drawing on new ‘ego-documents’ – i.e., correspondence, notebooks, memoirs, files, diaries, lesson plans, manuscript drafts, drawings, photographs, etc. – with the potential to recreate the various contexts that have framed the life of an individual, biographical studies remain, and have even prevailed as, a productive mode of understanding in intellectual history in the broad sense.
It makes for quite a challenge to imagine Lévi-Strauss as a young man: a kind of gravitas that is said to be the prerogative of old age prematurely congealed around his persona. Very early on, he already seemed old. The freshness of his letters to his parents are all we have today to help us conjure up the newly minted professor teaching philosophy to the young women of Mont-de-Marsan, a town in the southwest of France, where he held his first position. Indeed, from the first half of Lévi-Strauss’s life no contemporary witness remains, except Antonio Candido de Mello e Souza in Brazil, now a major figure of the Brazilian intelligentsia, who still remembers the young bearded professor disembarking with his wife in São Paulo to teach sociology in 1935. Lévi-Strauss himself, when I interviewed him about his New York years for a previous book project in the early 2000s, told me that he was probably the only surviving participant in that extraordinary world of French exiles in the United States during the war years.8 Not unlike many of the Amerindians he had met – the last witnesses of a vanished world, the memory of which they were the sole bearers – Lévi-Strauss became, in his way, the last man of the pre-1940 world. Thankfully, however, many of those who took part in the adventure of French anthropology from the 1960s onward are still with us. I met with them as much as time would allow. Not being an anthropologist myself, I was able to approach them free of any professional ego. And conversely, the brotherhood of anthropologists welcomed me with the benevolence that is often reserved for those who do not belong to the order. In the course of these interviews, I was given a sense of the extraordinary professional aura that the very name of Lévi-Strauss still evokes, an aura which is not fully matched by his broader intellectual celebrity. In a thousand details, the work of memory brought my interlocutors back to the singular stature of the man and the long shadow he cast across the entire discipline.
And yet the very subject of the present biography, Claude Lévi-Strauss himself, often insisted on how little individual identity he accorded to himself, and how little importance he ascribed, in the end, to the ‘individual’ of Western modernity – that object of all that hope and concern in philosophy, destined, according to the anthropologist and certain of his contemporaries, not the least Michel Foucault, to vanish into dust, to exit the stage. ‘Move along now, there’s nothing (left) to see!’ The individual, here, will thus be less of an entity in itself than an occasion for sizing things up at a micro-historical level; no longer an essentialized substrate, but rather a scale at which to operate. Like the photographer in Antonioni’s film Blow-Up, who discovers the premise of another story upon enlarging a series of snapshots, I have attempted, by adjusting my focal length on the figure of Lévi-Strauss, to uncover another point of view on the intellectual and artistic history of the twentieth century, for which the anthropologist constitutes an ideal vantage point.9 In this, I hope not to have betrayed him. I have tried to produce a kind of Japanese biography, in the manner of the ‘centripetal’ philosophy of the subject that Lévi-Strauss thought he had identified in Japan: ‘[I]t is as if the Japanese person constructed his “I” by beginning from the outside. The Japanese “I” thus appears to be not an original given but a result towards which one moves with no certainty of reaching it.’10
Placed within a familial and disciplinary genealogy, the present biographical study is intended to be anything but the preordained temple of a demiurge. In the end, there is an undeniably magisterial body of work. Lévi-Strauss – the subject – appears in it, but only at the end of the line, as the sum total of experiences, travels and readings, in multiple contexts, eminently connected to the history of the century. It is indeed striking to note the extent to which this great figure of ‘detachment’ from the intellectual life of a period so marked by political commitment was tossed about by the currents of history, notably during the Second World War when anti-Semitism in the form of the Vichy regime forced him, along with many others, into exile.
Lévi-Strauss himself made a contribution to the defence of the biographical genre in anthropology. Beginning in the 1940s, many ‘native biographies’ were published in the United States, for the most part coauthored by anthropologists and their principal native informants, often partially ‘civilized’ Amerindians. The anthropologist Leo Simmons had thus commissioned the Hopi Indian Don Talayesva to write the story of his life, torn between two worlds and profoundly shaken by a spiritual crisis that brought him back to his native village to act as the ‘meticulous guardian of ancient customs and rites’.11 In the preface he contributed to this volume, Lévi-Strauss rather enthusiastically celebrated the change of scale: ‘From the very start, Talayesva’s narrative achieves, with incomparable ease and grace, what the anthropologist dreams his whole life of attaining but never fully manages: the restitution of a culture “from within”, as experienced by the child and then the adult. A bit as if, as archaeologists of the present, we unearthed, one by one, the beads of a necklace; and then we were suddenly given a glimpse of them, threaded in their original order and supplely placed around the young neck they were intended to adorn.’12 The metaphor of the beaded necklace captures the truly erotic excitement aroused by the promise of achieving the ‘anthropologist’s dream’ that motivated Lévi-Strauss:13 to reconcile the description of a social system with the ways it is refracted and internalized by each of its members, to subsume scientific objectivity into indigenous subjectivities – and to do so without allowing either to prevail. Biography would thus be the very site where the articulations between constraint and liberty, social determination and participant decision, between the emergence of an undeniably ‘brilliant’ thought and the collective foundation that gave birth to it, are most likely to appear in all their delicate and interwoven texture, not unlike that of the Indian basketry that Lévi-Strauss enjoyed sketching in his field notebooks.
Ethnographic knowledge and the anthropological discipline: the Other as object
Lévi-Strauss’s biography tells the story of an individual as well as that of a scientific discipline, one of immense ambition, since it purports to embrace no less than mankind as a whole. Its name varies depending on national traditions; in France, Lévi-Strauss helped the term ‘anthropology’ to prevail, but that of ‘ethnology’ remains in common usage.
The ethnologists and anthropologists of the twentieth century were heirs to a vast domain of ethnographic curiosity, which had manifested itself in various scenes since the Renaissance – from the exploration of exotic lands abroad to the investigation of lower classes at home, and even the missionary animus of religious orders to convert pagans into Christians. Ever since voyages of exploration became possible, all manner of ethnographic impulses have fuelled scholarly enterprises with the Other as object. If it is generally understood that anthropology began to develop as a science in the second half of the nineteenth century, with the work of Lewis H. Morgan and Edward Tylor in the Anglophone world and Émile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss in France, it remained closely tied to the rarefied realm of curiosities, the unusual and astonishing objects that destabilized and called into question established knowledge.14 Hence the celebrated cabinets of curiosities that whetted the appetite for knowledge of all European savants in the classical age.
To say that Claude Lévi-Strauss’s study was reminiscent of a cabinet of curiosities is to acknowledge the fact that, in him as well as in the anthropological practice he came to represent, several orders of scientific time coexisted: not only curiosity, but also the drive for exactitude, the imperative for measurement, the properly ethnographic collection of ‘facts’, the regional synthesis of the anthropological field and, finally, at the ultimate level of generalization, the rules governing kinship and myth akin to the laws of Newtonian physics. This is what Lévi-Strauss called anthropology, appropriating the English-language term.15
Rather than the ‘exemplary life’ of a theoretician who imported hard science into the social world, I believe, on the contrary, that one should see in Lévi-Strauss a site of multiple and sometimes contradictory tensions between different modes of scientific practice, and in his biography a kind of open-air archaeology of the discipline, through its most illustrious representative. Indeed, in part, Lévi-Strauss practised the investigative method pioneered by Herodotus, adopting a distant and external gaze on others; he showed how structural anthropology rested on contrasting description and the study of differential gaps. Yet his anthropology was also steeped in affect, dreams and nightmares, bringing it closer to another knowledge project, which Daniel Fabre has identified as the ‘paradigm of the last witness’.16 This idea (fantasy?) was often expressed by Lévi-Strauss during his Brazilian voyage: that the anthropologist is face to face with the ‘last’ of the Indians, a potential informant of an entire world, but also the final product of an apocalyptic history. Tristes Tropiques gave expression to the tragedy of this history, and also, so to speak, accepted responsibility for it.
On the one hand, there is the research centre that Lévi-Strauss established in 1960 as the new locus of scientific production in anthropology: the Laboratory of Social Anthropology at the Collège de France. On the other, there is his home study, the humanist’s lair, where the anthropologist conversed across the centuries with Montesquieu, Rousseau and Chateaubriand, with the anthropology of the Enlightenment, and even, reaching further back through another two centuries of discovery, with the explorer Jean de Léry, one of the first Europeans to discover the Brazilian coast, whose freshness of gaze was matched only by that of Montaigne, his companion in the last decades of his life. The undeniable modernity of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s intellectual project has been emphasized often enough for us to feel comfortable, here, restoring the unabashed archaism of his approach, since he claimed to embrace everything; in him, the various strata of knowledge of classical Western modernity all jostled together.
The structure of a life and body of work
Lévi-Strauss cultivated a lifelong friendship with the linguist Roman Jakobson. The day after the latter’s death, in October 1982, the anthropologist wrote: ‘What do we mean, in fact, when we speak of a “great man”? Certainly not merely an original or engaging person. And still less the author of a considerable body of work that we have difficulty relating to the personality of its creator. What strikes one, most of all, when approaching Roman Jakobson is the intense kinship between the man and his work.’17 Lévi-Strauss continued: ‘The vitality, abundant generosity, and demonstrative power, finally the sparkling eloquence bursting forth in the man as much as in the work.’ This ‘intense kinship’ between the man and his work can also be claimed for Lévi-Strauss himself, and even further reinforced and confirmed in his case by a homology with the very object of his work, or rather its anthropological foundation, namely, the Amerindians who, thanks to the work of the anthropologist, have become part of the narrative of the twentieth century, with their labrets, their mild manners and their ultimate denouement, as a kind of figure of repentance and hope. At the end of his journey, Lévi-Strauss described the profound inspiration he drew from the mythological material he had worked on in his four-volume Mythologiques, sketching what constituted a motif in the Levi-Straussian tapestry: a dualism, but one whose two elements were opposed in a perpetual seesaw movement, which, according to the Amerindians, set the universe in motion.
This unstable binary also characterized his intellectual drive and innermost personality, poised between, on the one hand, a careful attention to detail, rigorous empirical research and the botanist’s keen eye, and, on the other, a powerful theoretical drive, feverish tendency to generalization and a penchant for bold hypotheses; between his Buddhist-inspired wisdom, his detachment from the world, his revelatory contemplation of nature and his sense of the joy of self-abnegation, and his worldly interventions, his socialist youth, his institution-building and his professional responsibilities; between the desire for intimate community and the rejection of it; between uncompromising abstraction and a quivering, raw sensibility; between the longing for a meaningful order and the metaphysical intuition of meaninglessness; between the quest for universality and the logic of difference; between science and art. This last opposition has generated much commentary, especially when Claude Lévi-Strauss became a member of the Académie Française in 1973, based on a body of scholarly work whose literary quality was seen as an asset by some and a liability by others. In a recent book, Patrick Wilcken offers a somewhat simplistic portrait of Lévi-Strauss as an artiste manqué, who redirected into scholarly work a creative sensibility left untapped since his decision as a teenager not to pursue an artistic career for a perceived lack of talent.18 This characterization fails to see the active power of the unstable dualism or to grasp the fact that Lévi-Strauss, in this tension between art and science, strove for a kind of belletristic reconciliation, in which scholarly excellence was indistinguishable from the artistry through which it was presented. After all, did Buffon not enter the Académie Française with a Discourse on Style?19
To talk to a bird
At once a man of the nineteenth century, in his personal affect and family roots, and a vexed contemporary of the long twentieth century, Lévi-Strauss delighted in romping through sixteenth-century travel chronicles, recovering the fresh gaze of the Renaissance – which, for the most part, embraced the disruptions provoked by the discovery of the primitive. He also took part in and passionately engaged with the scientific advances of his time. Claude Lévi-Strauss did not hesitate, however, to point out atavistic paths – even privately suggesting a ‘return to the Neolithic’. In his approach to science, in the twists and turns of his life, but also in his philosophy of history – insofar as he had one – and in his political and ideological positions, Claude Lévi-Strauss composed a singular score, made up of elements of both sur-modernity – just as his friend André Breton sought a sur-reality – and archaism, rejecting the rupture of modernity in its various binary oppositions (rationality vs. obscurantism, science vs. myth, evolution vs. cyclical time, progress vs. stability, etc.). The course of his life, like that of this biography, advances through time, but rather in the form of a spiral, proliferating recoveries of scraps of the past – ‘there is so little chronology in our life’20 – where the very remote in time might well appear closer than the very recent past. And his work, also, ‘has a face turned towards anthropology’s past, which it crowns, and another looking into and anticipating its future’.21
In this respect, the man who refounded anthropology would seem to be making a return today in our distraught and disturbed twenty-first century, in the grips of technological revolutions we do not control. Claude Lévi-Strauss is a world-man, through the restless wanderings that characterized the first half of his life, and a time-man, through his very long and varied life, especially through what he called his ‘quixotism’, by which he meant the ‘obsessive desire to find the past behind the present’.22 The multiple times that coexisted in him, as much as the wide range of places he covered, are the core of his striking philosophical and existential ‘decentredness’: nobody before him went quite as far in profoundly challenging our historical trajectory and its impasses. If the anthropologist offered no recipe or programme, he did exhort us to appreciate and protect our cultural, natural and social diversity, as a precious value that signals the contingency of our own system. As early as 1976, he demonstrated remarkable political imagination when he suggested, on the model of exotic societies that had managed to integrate the nonhuman, that we replace our conception of the ‘rights of man’ with the ‘rights of the living’23 – the human as a living being and no longer as a moral being, together with animals, plants, minerals and things rather than to their exclusion. Lévi-Strauss’s thought offers us a truly reconciled humanism, commensurate with our anthropocene.
To talk to a bird, then. The thinker whose thought is often reduced to the inviolable opposition between nature and culture sought, throughout the course of his development, to try out – in his life as well as in his work – the lesson of inclusion offered by Amerindian myths, which were, in the eyes both of the anthropologist and of the native Americans themselves, stories from a time when humans and animals understood each other …
Notes
1
. ‘Entre Marx et Rousseau’,
Die Zeit
, 2 September 1983.
2
. Claude Lévi-Strauss, ‘Lévi-Strauss en 33 mots’, remarks collected by Dominique-Antoine Grisoni,
Le Magazine littéraire
, 233, October 1985, p. 26.
3
. Claude Lévi-Strauss, ‘Il y a en moi un peintre et un bricoleur qui se relaient’,
Le Monde
, 21 June 1974.
4
. On this question, see the reflections of Viktor Karady, ‘Les intellectuels juifs et les sciences sociales: Esquisse d’une problématique’, in Johann Heilbronn, Rémi Lénoir, Gisèle Sapiro (eds.),
Pour une histoire des sciences sociales: Hommage à Pierre Bourdieu
, Paris, Fayard, 2004, p. 166; see also Pierre Birnbaum,
Géographie de l’espoir: L’exil, les lumières, la désassimilation
, Paris, Gallimard, 2004.
5
. See Benoît de l’Estoile, ‘Genèse d’un “intellectuel français”’,
Slate
, 6 November 2009.
6
. The caption to a caricature by Maurice Henry, published in
Quinzaine littéraire
, 1 June 1967, depicting Lévi-Strauss, Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes and Jacques Lacan as ‘savages’.
7
. Pierre Bourdieu, ‘L’illusion biographique’,
Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales
, 62–63, 1986, vol. 62, pp. 69–72.
8
. Emmanuel Loyer,
Paris à New York: Intellectuels et artistes français en exil aux
États-Unis, 1940–1947
, Paris, Grasset, 2005.
9
. On the heuristic value of the change in scale effected by microanalysis, I would highlight, from a substantial bibliography, two texts by Jacques Revel: ‘Introduction’, in Revel (ed.),
Jeux d’échelle: La microanalyse à l’expérience
, Paris, Gallimard, 1996; and an interview with Revel, ‘Un exercice de désorientation:
Blow-Up
’, in Antoine de Baecque and Christian Delage (eds.),
De l’histoire au cinéma
, Paris, Complexe, 1998, pp. 103ff.
10
.
ACPMW
, p. 25.
11
. Claude Lévi-Strauss, ‘Préface’, in
Soleil Hopi: L’autobiographie d’un Indien Hopi by Don. C. Talayesva
, texts collected by Leo W. Simmons, Paris, Terre humaine, 1959, p. ix.
12
. Lévi-Strauss, ‘Préface’, in
Soleil Hopi
, p. x.
13
. See Daniel Fabre, Jean Jamin and Marcello Massenzio, ‘Jeu et enjeu ethnographiques de la biographie’,
