Claude Levi-Strauss: The Poet in the Laboratory
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Introduction
Chapter 1 - Early Years
Chapter 2 - Arabesque
Chapter 3 - Rondon’s Line
Chapter 4 - Exile
Chapter 5 - Elementary Structures
Chapter 6 - On the Shaman’s Couch
Chapter 7 - Memoir
Chapter 8 - Modernism
Chapter 9 - “Mind in the Wild”
Chapter 10 - The Nebula of Myth
Chapter 11 - Convergence
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
NOTES
FURTHER READING
INDEX
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ALSO BY PATRICK WILCKEN
Empire Adrift: The Portuguese Court in Rio de Janeiro 1808-21
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First published in 2010 by The Penguin Press,
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Copyright © Patrick Wilcken, 2010
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Wilcken, Patrick.
Claude Levi-Strauss : the poet in the laboratory / Patrick Wilcken.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
eISBN : 978-1-101-44422-1
1. Lévi-Strauss, Claude 2. Anthropologists—France—Biography.
3. Anthropologists—Brazil—Biogrpahy. 4. Structural anthropology. I. Title.
GN21.L4W55 2010
301.092—dc22
[B]
2010017301
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For Andreia and Sophia
Introduction
Some people might ask whether I haven’t been guided by a kind of quixotism throughout my career . . . an obsessive desire to find the past behind the present. If perchance someone some day were to care to understand my personality, I offer him that key.
CLAUDE LÉVI-STRAUSS1
IN 1938, on the eve of his thirtieth birthday, Claude Lévi-Strauss was in Brazil, leading a mule train along the remains of a telegraph line. Its lopsided poles, rusted wires and porcelain adapters were strung out across the rugged scrublands of northwestern Mato Grosso state, on the fringes of the Amazon Basin. Bearded and sunburned, dressed in soiled dungarees, a colonial-style sun hat and high leather boots, Lévi-Strauss was heading an ethnographic expedition to study the Nambikwara—a loose designation for the nomadic groups who roamed the plateau, naked but for nose feathers, bracelets and waistbands. Farther up the line, as scrub turned to jungle and the team switched to canoes, Lévi-Strauss encountered other tribes encamped in rain-forest clearings—the survivors of the Arawak, Carib and Tupi cultures. He worked alongside a team of experts, including his first wife, Dina, the tropical-medicine specialist Dr. Jean Vellard, and a Brazilian anthropologist, Luiz de Castro Faria, on a mission that has become as celebrated as it is controversial.
Photographs from Lévi-Strauss’s fieldwork look dated even for their era. Pack animals heaving crates of equipment through the wilderness, men in pith helmets mingling with virtually naked tribesmen, the exchanging of beads and lengths of cloth for bows, arrows and ritual objects, laden-down canoes and jungle campsites. The skinned carcass of a seven-meter boa constrictor stretches out across one plate, a dozen snake fetuses, its stillborn progeny, spilled out over the earth. “It took a lot of shooting,” Lévi-Strauss recalled, “since these animals are impervious to body wounds and have to be hit in the head.”2 It all has the feel of some grand nineteenth-century scientific expedition.
The effect is doubly disjointed. Following the Polish anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski’s famous fieldwork in the Trobriand Islands off the coast of New Guinea, where he had studied ritual exchange across the archipelago, ethnography had already become strongly associated with solitary cultural immersion. By the 1930s, images from the field were more likely to show a single tent pitched within striking distance of a tribe, a trestle table strewn with notebooks, a rucksack with provisions, possibly some recording equipment stuffed into a satchel. The anthropologist’s lonely vigil was expected to yield worthwhile results only after years of assimilation. In contrast, Lévi-Strauss’s team clocked up more than a thousand kilometers, rarely pausing for more than a few weeks in any one place. His expedition would end up being one of the last ventures of its kind—an antiquated journey across a forgotten corner of Brazil.
Toward the end of 1938 the party broke up, Castro Faria traveling down the Amazon for Rio de Janeiro, Vellard and Lévi-Strauss taking a small steamship up the Madeira River, then boarding an amphibious plane for Cochabamba in Bolivia.3 It had been at best a patchy experience. His field notes, now held at the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris, have a disorganized feel to them. Lévi-Strauss interspersed lists of basic vocabulary of different indigenous groups, confusing kin diagrams, illustrations of weaving techniques, and drawings of animals, faces and spears, along with inventories of the enormous quantities of provisions needed to sustain the expedition.4
Added to a brief, earlier spell of fieldwork among the Caduveo and the Bororo farther to the south, the trip had initiated Lévi-Strauss as an anthropologist, but in a peculiarly diffuse way. Instead of the in-depth analysis of a single group, Lévi-Strauss had briefly surveyed half a dozen different indigenous cultures, dotted across the Brazilian interior. That this should have been the starting point for his career was perhaps appropriate. From the fragments—an arabesque painted on a weathered Caduveo cheek, the Mundé’s igloo-shaped forest huts, the ritual flute songs of the Nambikwara—Lévi-Strauss built a body of work that reflected not so much the intricacies of a single tribe, but features common to all culture.
The great irony was that his nineteenth-century-style expedition ended up being the handmaiden to one of the most avant-garde bodies of work in the humanities. In his
memoir recounting the journey, Tristes Tropiques (1955), written a decade and a half after his experiences in Brazil, Lévi-Strauss put the then emerging discipline of anthropology on the map. From the scraps of his field notes, he pieced together a self-portrait of the anthropologist at midcentury: a cerebral pioneer on a quest to leave the confines of Western culture in order to know another world, another way of being; an outsider condemned to roam the cultural borderlands, forever restless, damaged (“psychologiquement mutilé”5) by chronic feelings of rootless-ness; a forlorn traveler surveying the cultural ruins at the edge of European expansion. At the same time, he wrote of a new theoretical approach. The motley groups of Nambikwara, loitering around derelict telegraph stations, scrounging trinkets and leftovers from missionaries, the barely sustainable forest settlements, the heat, the dust—all this somehow crystallized into a highly stylized image of indigenous culture. The model was called structuralism—an approach that sought to uncover the hidden symmetries that underlay all culture. In Tristes Tropiques Lévi-Strauss captivated readers with early sketches of this method, in the process giving an unexpected coherence to the apparent confusion of indigenous ideas and practices.
“ON THE WHOLE, and all things considered, the interview is a detestable genre,” Lévi-Strauss once said in an interview, “to which the intellectual poverty of the age obliges one to submit more often than one would like.” Yet as his fame grew with the success of Tristes Tropiques and the subsequent march of structuralism, he spoke regularly to journalists and academic colleagues. In the 1960s and ’70s he often appeared on French television, participated in a series of documentaries and, after his retirement, gave the writer and philosopher Didier Eribon extraordinary access, resulting in a book-length interview, published as De près et de loin in 1988.
The more one reads, though, the less one seems to be able to grasp the person behind the words and images. In print and on film Lévi-Strauss was at once forthcoming and elusive. Over the years he produced many details, but little substance. One is left with the impression of strong surface imagery—a vividness without depth. His anonymous Semitic features (he came from a Jewish family, originally from the Alsace) have been endlessly photographed in the same noncommittal pose. The images that have been staged—Lévi-Strauss standing in front of banks of metal card-reference drawers in a Paris archive, for instance, or in a jacket with a parrot perched on his shoulder—seem out of character, as if Lévi-Strauss was resistant to the crafts of publicity. In 1970, Vogue photographer Irving Penn posed Lévi-Strauss sunken into an overcoat, his head enveloped by artfully turned-up lapels, his glasses perched on his forehead, the left side of his face disappearing into the shadows. Compared to Penn’s identically posed portrait of Picasso—whose one visible eye, unmoored from the rest of the face, fixes the viewer with a piercing stare—Lévi-Strauss’s expression is difficult to read. Not even the manufactured intimacy of celebrity photography, with someone as talented as Penn behind the lens, could offer a glimpse of his inner being.
The effacement was in part deliberate: “I share the anti-biographical approach expressed by Proust in Contre Sainte-Beuve,” Lévi-Strauss told the French anthropologist Marc Augé in 1990. “What matters is the work, not the author who happened to write it; I would say rather that it writes itself through him. The individual person is no more than the means of transmission and survives in the work only as a residue.”6 In Lévi-Strauss’s case, though, this residue was a heavy one. His prose is instantly recognizable and impossible to imitate; his approach to his subject matter so idiosyncratic that for much of his career it defied systematic criticism.
On film, Lévi-Strauss had an easy, avuncular manner. He would appear on shows like Apostrophes, France’s weekly cultural program that ran in the 1970s and ’80s, explaining the ins and outs of his theories. The performances were fluid, at times monotone, at others more animated, when he produced an intellectual trump card or delivered the punch line of a well-worn tale. A dry humor and a certain Gallic charm shone through between patient explanations of anthropological conundrums. This is the image that was sedimented in France’s popular consciousness—Lévi-Strauss as a much-loved national treasure, the father (perhaps now the grand- or even great-grandfather) of French anthropology, an icon from an age in which France’s intellectuals were fêted internationally.
Wind the clock back, though, and a different Lévi-Strauss emerges. In a television interview given to Pierre Dumayet for the show Lectures pour tous in 1959, we see a far more serious, businesslike operator.7 Dressed in a somber suit with a waistcoat, he shows an added edge, a hint of arrogance as he responds to Dumayet’s straightforward, factual questions about North American ethnography; his features are stronger, better defined; his delivery fluent and humorless. Here was an intellectual in his prime, on the cusp of entering the prestigious Collège de France, an elite institution that had rejected him twice a decade before; a man who had already “unleashed”8 his pen on several occasions with vitriolic responses to his critics.
Further back still, there are tantalizing glimpses of Lévi-Strauss in the field. Photographs from Brazil show a different kind of expression, one that seems less confident, more hostile. Against the backdrop of Brazil’s dry savannahs, a young cosmopolitan man stares back at the camera, dusty and flea-bitten. In Brazil, Lévi-Strauss was an awkward philosophe standing out against the easy nakedness of the Indians; an embarrassed Frenchman bathing in a stream, fighting with giggling Nambikwara girls for the soap; an adventurer steeling himself against not so much physical discomfort as intellectual privation. In fleeting glimpses on film, he seems detached—an onlooker, an observer, but never a true participant. “My emotional states weren’t that important to me,” Lévi-Strauss later told Didier Eribon, when asked whether he kept a personal diary of his field trip.9 Taciturn and courteous, Lévi-Strauss could also be aloof—“cold, stilted, in the French academic style,” as his longtime friend and colleague the anthropologist Alfred Métraux noted in his diary on meeting him for the first time in the 1930s.10 Though Lévi-Strauss mellowed with age, his reputation for traditional French reserve never left him. “Other than his family and school friends, were there people who addressed Lévi-Strauss in the familiar tu form? I doubt it,” remarked his successor at the Collège de France, Françoise Héritier, after his death.11
I FIRST MET LÉVI-STRAUSS in 2005 at the Laboratoire d’anthropologie sociale, a research institute that he founded in 1960 located in Paris’s fifth arrondissement. The fifth’s streets are littered with references to centuries of learning, from the roads named after Descartes, Pascal, Cuvier and Buffon to the elite institutions that have cultivated France’s most creative minds—the Lycée Henri-IV, the École normale supérieure and the Collège de France, all clustered around the Latin Quarter. At the east of the quartier, Paris’s 1980s monument to inclusiveness, the Institut du monde arabe, with its mosaics of metal apertures dilating and contracting to filter the light, stands like a prematurely aging relic of another era; farther on, Mexican hothouses, Art Deco winter gardens and an old-fashioned zoo are arranged into the geometric plots of the seventeenth-century Jardin des plantes.
Lévi-Strauss’s office was up a tight spiral staircase leading into a mezzanine, lodged in a section of the roof of a converted nineteenth-century amphitheater. On one side there was plate glass looking over iron light fittings hanging from a central beam; down below, researchers and librarians were at work on dark-stained desks, tapping on laptops or sifting through card catalogs. The back wall was stenciled with stylized flowers, strange coats of arms and medieval armor in burgundy, gold and light brown. The office contained almost no exotica—masks or feathers and the like—just books and loosely bound PhD theses. Lévi-Strauss appeared to be a faithful version of images stretching back decades, only shrunken and a little frailer. He wore a tweed jacket that was now slightly too big for him, and it hung loosely off his body. He was courteous and alert; only a pronounced tremor when he went to reach into h
is breast pocket to retrieve his address book betrayed his great age. Well into his nineties, Lévi-Strauss was still going into the office on Tuesdays and Thursdays, though no longer writing much. Our conversation, which focused on Brazil, was a strange combination of the stories I had read elsewhere, faithfully reproduced word for word, and a sentiment that I was not expecting: an acid, but ironic, nihilism.
We began by discussing Tristes Tropiques, the memoir of his fieldwork in Brazil that had brought him fame in the 1950s. It remains his only nonacademic book, written in a literary style that is only hinted at in his more formal work. I asked him why he suddenly lit out into this genre, never to return to it again. “I had a contract to write it, and I needed money” was his frank, though deflating, answer. (The response was atypical. Elsewhere he had given long and complex answers to the same question, going into detail about his motivations and literary aspirations at the time.) We talked about contemporary Brazil’s indigenous populations. “What are their prospects?” I asked. “At my age, you don’t think about the future,” he deadpanned. But he went on to elaborate that, despite their rising population, land demarcations and, in some instances, greater self-determination within the Brazilian state, the indigenous peoples had been culturally impoverished, broken on the wheel of Western expansion.
I was intrigued by Lévi-Strauss’s reaction to Brasília, the modernist capital that had not even existed during his fieldwork days, but which he briefly visited in the 1980s during a state visit with then president Mitterrand. I wondered whether the city might have chimed with his aesthetic sensibility, the formalism of his structuralist theoretical approach, his interest in patterns and designs. “There was not enough time and the visit was very programmed,” he lamented, “but it would be a complete mistake to link my work with modernism”—an answer that has since come back to me again and again, in the light of the seemingly manifold interconnections between the modernist movement and Lévi-Straussian structuralism. Lévi-Strauss appeared not to want to talk about his theories. When I asked him about the legacy of his work, if there were other people pursuing his ideas, whether he thought his theories would live on, he was disarmingly blunt: “I don’t know and I don’t care.” As I prepared to leave, the mood lightened and he talked effusively about the exhibition Brésil Indien, at Paris’s Grand Palais, urging me to go and see it for myself.12