Claude Levi-Strauss: The Poet in the Laboratory Read online

  The following week, I wandered through the dazzling array of feather headdresses. There were plumes in electric reds and blues; fish, bird and jaguar heads fashioned in what looked like papier-mâché, molded around wicker frames; and four-foot-high porcelain funerary urns found on Marajó, a huge island at the mouth of the Amazon. Lévi-Strauss’s collections closed out the exhibition. Under plate glass there were the Nambikwara nose feathers, the Caduveo’s geometric-patterned urns, and ritual ornaments of the Bororo that I had read about in Tristes Tropiques. Beautifully composed black-and-white photos, taken on Lévi-Strauss’s Leica, lined the room. The short films that he had shot in the field were projected onto the walls. Silent, overexposed, a little wobbly and interspersed with Portuguese intertitles, the footage was a cross between early newsreel and home movie. In one unforgettable sequence, an old Caduveo woman dressed in a tattered floral dress drew geometric motifs onto her face—designs that fascinated Lévi-Strauss throughout his career. There was little to connect the young bearded figure that flickered on the wall with the man I had just met. The great gulfs that time had opened up seemed unbridgeable, the mountain of work that Lévi-Strauss had produced in the interim only accentuating the sense of distance, the sense that these ghostly images related to another life, lived in another era entirely.

  A second meeting at his home in the sixteenth arrondissement found Lévi-Strauss much more relaxed. In the intervening period we had corresponded regularly, with Lévi-Strauss diligently replying to questions about his experiences in Brazil. He lived in a large, haut-bourgeois apartment—solid, comfortable and in extremely good taste. The walls were adorned with an eclectic mix of beaux arts and indigenous artifacts—a wooden bowl from British Columbia, an antique rug, a romantic portrait of a girl in an ornate gold frame. We spoke in his study, a podlike room with solid parquet flooring and soundproofed door, a heavy writing table with thick, elaborately carved legs playing off against a modular black sofa. He took my coat and hung it in the hall—an operation carried out in the slow motion of extreme old age.

  He spoke of his life in deliberate sentences, halting from time to time for breath. I asked questions about his experiences in Brazil, his flight from Nazi-occupied France and his formative years as a Jewish émigré in 1940s New York, where he mixed with exiled surrealist artists including André Breton and Max Ernst. I moved on to his return to academic life in Paris, and the stalling of his career in the 1950s when he contemplated quitting anthropology altogether and becoming a journalist. He was voluble at first, but when we got on to theoretical issues and the rise of structuralism, he began tiring and his answers became shorter and shorter.

  We ended on a contemporary issue—the controversy surrounding the opening of Jacques Chirac’s vanity project, the Musée du quai Branly. Housed in a vegetation-clad building across the Seine from the Musée de l’Homme, variously described as a giant intestine or a nave on stilts, the project pitted ethnographic purists against professional curators; academic fustiness against aesthetic theater. When the museum was first mooted, there was uproar at the Musée de l’Homme. Curators were said to have stashed prized objects in their living rooms rather than give them up to the fine-arts graduates charged with arranging the Quai Branly displays.

  The collection, arranged in the grottolike penumbra of the museum’s innards, contains some of Lévi-Strauss’s Brazilian artifacts; in the museum’s basement is the Lévi-Strauss Auditorium. When I put to him the criticism that the museum might exoticize the cultures whose artifacts it was displaying, he became animated once again. “Anthropology is an ethnocentric science par excellence,” he parried. “If the Musée du quai Branly is displaying objects out of context, what about the Louvre and all the religious art there?” So you can approach indigenous art from a purely aesthetic perspective? “If you want,” he replied. The thought seemed to have exhausted him, and the interview came to a halt. I took two pictures of Lévi-Strauss staring blankly back into the lens—identikits of scores of recent photographs.

  I had found Lévi-Strauss open, even eager to help me, to fill in details, to recount (no doubt for the nth time) stories from his past. There were glimmers of a fully fleshed-out character, small breaches in the studied front, but still a kind of emptiness, an isolation. Old-world charm was matched by an inner reticence. In the end, the mask had barely moved. Later, when I strayed onto personal territory, asking in a letter about his second marriage and the final illness and death of his father, he politely, but firmly, closed the door.

  LÉVI-STRAUSS CAME OUT of an age when universities housed tiny elites, when the branches of the humanities were only semiprofessionalized. Anthropology was in its infancy, fieldwork the preserve of a few score academics working on the edges of the still-extant European empires. The physical world had been mapped, but culturally whole regions were virtual blanks. Ethnographers were scouring the world not for unknown headwaters, sea passages or gorges, but for cosmologies, rituals and art. They were exploring the limits of human experience, documenting the rich alternatives that were emerging from the shadows of nineteenth-century prejudice.

  An autodidact, Lévi-Strauss plowed through the classics, both Anglo-American and French—Edward Tyler, Robert Lowie, Sir James Frazer, Marcel Granet, Marcel Mauss—largely on his own. As one of the few French anthropologists of his generation not to attend Mauss’s famous fieldwork seminars, he organized his own ethnographic expedition, deliberately choosing as remote a region as possible. His main thesis, later published in 1949 as Les Structures élémentaires de la parenté (The Elementary Structures of Kinship), was unsupervised, written in the New York Public Library while in exile from Nazi occupation. (Back in Paris, he had to go hunting for a supervisor after the fact so that he could be examined.) Initially blocked from ascending into the elite Collège de France, he spent much of the 1950s questioning his future as an anthropologist. What emerged were truly innovative ideas, spared the groupthink of a formal critical environment.

  Drawing inspiration from surrealism, linguistics, aesthetics and music, Lévi-Strauss cut a fresh trail through the humanities. Through his career he subjected kinship, indigenous religious thought and myth to iconoclastic reinterpretations. He was an anthropologist in the broadest possible sense of the term, alternating between the minutiae of ethnographic detail and cultural universals, isolated tribes and the laws of the mind. An oeuvre that began with highly technical ethnographic analyses ended with meditations on the birth of the novel, the evolution of Western music and the irrevocable decline of the visual arts.

  Through his encounters with Russian linguist Roman Jakobson while in exile in New York, Lévi-Strauss picked up on one of the most fundamental shifts in twentieth-century thought—the swing from meaning to form, the self to the system. His philosophical rationale, his mission “to understand being in relation to itself, and not in relation to oneself ” (de comprendre l’être par rapport à lui-même et non point par rapport à moi),13 which defined the structuralist project, heralded a belated modernist turn in the social sciences. It was through Jakobson that Lévi-Strauss discovered the ideas of the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure and began to apply them to his own research. Henceforth, language became the metaphor for cultural analysis; following Saussure, culture began to be viewed as a system of contrasting elements, like phonemes in language.

  Lévi-Strauss also presaged the cognitive revolution in the social sciences, with his insistence that the way culture was organized was ultimately rooted in the workings of the brain. His dream was a convergence between areas of knowledge that had long been separated: the social and the hard sciences, culture and nature. Against the prevailing philosophical winds, he set out to study the mind rather than the individual, abstract thought in place of subjective experience—a radical rupture in an intellectual climate then dominated by the introspective philosophies, existentialism and phenomenology.

  Lévi-Strauss is the only anthropologist to have achieved global fame. (Margaret Mead comes to m
ind, but, unlike Lévi-Strauss, her popular renown was largely confined to an Anglo-American audience.) From the mid-1960s on he became a fixture in the French press, giving interviews to publications such as Le Monde, Le Figaro, Le Nouvel Observateur and L’Express. Beyond France, American Vogue ran a Henri Cartier-Bresson photo-essay on him; he was on American television, and interviewed for Playboy magazine. Features came out in the pages of the New York Times, the Washington Post, Newsweek and Time describing his structural analyses of the workings of the “savage mind” as a revolution in the social sciences—a Copernican moment in which human culture was finally yielding to scientific method. In Britain, he was interviewed by the BBC, regularly appeared in the pages of the Times Literary Supplement, and was often referenced in the broadsheets. His death in November 2009 made front-page news around the world.

  Although media celebrity is often unearned, in the case of Lévi-Strauss it was based on concrete achievements. Freud shook up the moribund discipline of psychiatry with his psychoanalytic revolution. Two generations later, Lévi-Strauss would have the same seismic effect on anthropology. Like Freud, his influence spilled over into neighboring disciplines, as he became the reference point for a new style of thinking. It was through his influence that the immediate postwar world of Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir ceded the high ground to the likes of Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes and Jacques Lacan in the 1960s, Lévi-Strauss’s pointed attack on Sartre in the last chapter of La Pensée sauvage (The Savage Mind ) hurrying the process along. Even though the next generation rejected Lévi-Strauss’s grand theorizing style, it was still grappling with philosophical debates that he had initiated. Today’s leading theoreticians, like the Slovenian Slavoj Žižek, France’s Alain Badiou and Italy’s Giorgio Agamben, can be understood only through the prism of Lévi-Strauss’s decisive reorientation in the mid-twentieth century.

  As a hinge figure of twentieth-century thought, Lévi-Strauss looked both forward and back. He rode the new wave with an early infatuation with the avant-garde. He was seduced by the promise of technology postwar, and by the possibilities this might have for future anthropological research. Early computing, cybernetics, atomic physics and mathematics seemed to offer new ways into the low-tech but highly complex social and cultural worlds of indigenous peoples. However much he might deny it, modernist techniques—narrative disruption, juxtaposition, collage—became staples of his work.

  But he was equally fascinated by images from an earlier age: the hall of mirrors, the kaleidoscope, playing cards, hieroglyphics, the clocks and steam engines that continually crop up as metaphors in his work. In his middle age, the nineteenth century would exert a strong attraction through the music of Wagner, the romantic seaport pictures of Joseph Vernet and the novels of Balzac and Dickens. Lévi-Strauss repudiated nonfigurative art and rephrased his earlier interest in surrealism—the type of surrealism that had attracted him was not the bizarre, taboo-breaking dreamscapes of sex and death, but a more genteel, dandyish strain that looked back to the symbolists. By the time he retired, he said that he had largely lost interest in twentieth-century music, never went to the cinema and that the only novels he read were more than fifty years old.14

  THIS BOOK is an assessment—an intellectual biography of Lévi-Strauss’s long life of the mind. It follows him from Paris to São Paulo and into the Brazilian interior. It tracks his turbulent wartime years—his flight from Vichy France to New York and his eventual return to Paris—in search of the “residue” that made his thinking so beguiling and distinctive. It is not a blow-by-blow account of his career, which, postwar, would in any case amount to little more than the recounting of lecture series, book publications, conferences and awards. Nor does it attempt to excavate his private life. A traditional Frenchman, Lévi-Strauss was guarded about his three marriages—two relatively short-lived (Dina Dreyfus and Rose-Marie Ullmo) and one enduring (Monique Roman)—which produced two sons: Laurent, from his marriage to Rose-Marie Ullmo, and Matthieu, from his marriage to Monique Roman. What is interesting about Lévi-Strauss is not the minutiae of his life, but the way this ascetic figure, the very opposite of a Sartre-style charismatic intellectual, managed to capture the high ground of theory and ideas at a particular moment in the twentieth century. For someone whose work was often technical and demanding, Lévi-Strauss struck a powerful chord both within and outside the academy.

  In the first half of the book I have looked in some detail at the formative, more eventful period of Lévi-Strauss’s life, tracing the germination of his thought through his fieldwork days in Brazil and his life in exile in America to the publication of Tristes Tropiques. From the mid-1960s, his life settled, as he retreated into his own world of myths, masks and indigenous art. “I have no social life. I have no friends. I pass half my time in the laboratory, and the rest in my office,” he could say to a journalist from Le Monde in the early 1970s, in a statement that, although exaggerated for effect, captures the progressive isolation of his later life.15

  The second half of the book leaves behind the biographical detail to deal with his ideas. Reassessing his key articles and books, I have tried to steer a path between the dismissiveness of some of his critics and the reverence that he still inspires in France and, strangely enough, in Brazil. It is one thing to marvel at the output of an extraordinary mind, quite another to swallow whole what could at times be a quixotic project, and one that drifted in an increasingly idiosyncratic direction as he aged. His success in the 1960s speaks of a looser, perhaps more creative era—a time when big, experimental ideas could take flight, when the stream of consciousness of one mind could leave a deep cultural imprint. His great longevity means that his life has ended up tracing a vital intellectual thread back through the twentieth century. Whatever may have become of structural analysis, Lévi-Strauss’s thought stands as an important promontory on the intellectual landscape of our time.

  1

  Early Years

  The “return to the primitive” was the return to the community, but also a return to the sacred, and even, perhaps, the return of the gods.

  MARCEL FOURNIER1

  AT A BEND in the Seine, as the river turns southward before looping back around the Bois de Boulogne, two stone pavilions arc around a stone terrace. It was here that Adolf Hitler and Albert Speer posed for photographs in 1940, grinning in front of the Palais de Chaillot, the Eiffel Tower rising from the far bank of the Seine in the background. A year before the invasion, Lévi-Strauss, then a young anthropologist fresh from fieldwork in Brazil, had been at work in the Palais’s recently installed Musée de l’Homme, cataloging the nose feathers, gourds and arrows that he had bartered for glass beads in the backlands of Mato Grosso, for an exhibition that would never go on display.

  The site has resonance not just for the history of anthropology in France, but for the evolution of avant-garde art at the beginning of the twentieth century. Founded in 1938, the Musée de l’Homme marked the beginning of modern, professional ethnographic displays in France. Looking back at the museum’s previous incarnation, the Musée de l’ethnographie, is like stepping back into another curatorial world. Occupying part of the Palais du Trocadéro, a Moorish, Byzantine folly on the same site as today’s Palais de Chaillot, the Musée de l’ethnographie housed largely pre-Columbian artifacts, but later soaked up the spoils of the advancing French African empire—the spears, drums and masks that colonial traders hawked in ports up and down the west coast of Africa. Objects were classified by theme rather than by region or tribe. Curators piled up musical instruments in one corner and textiles in another; there were corridors of wood-carved statuettes, back rooms stacked up with fertility symbols, all displayed with little—if any—context.

  “When I first went there, at Derain’s urging, the smell of dampness and rot there stuck in my throat,” remembered a young Pablo Picasso in 1907, of a visit to the museum’s labyrinth of musty, dim-lit corridors. “It depressed me so much I wanted to get out fast, but I staye
d and studied.” Picasso had been drawn to the museum’s clutter of artifacts by aesthetic instinct. A few years earlier he had acquired a West African mask, which he had studied not as an archaic fetish or a throwback to a bygone age, but as an artistic expression in its own right. But it was in the bowels of the Palais du Trocadéro that the penny had dropped. It was not just the plastic forms, distortions and poetic freedoms that struck Picasso, but the realization that art need not be an exercise in mirroring reality. Ethnographically speaking, it could have a “magical” role of capturing and controlling terrors and desires, pinning them down with color and form. “The day I understood that,” Picasso said later, “I had found my path.”2

  A famous photograph dated a year after this revelatory experience—the year in fact of Lévi-Strauss’s birth—has a twenty-seven-year-old Picasso seated in his studio in the Bateau-Lavoir in Montmartre with a pair of African wooden statues and what looks like a pig’s skull on one side, and a bookcase filled with pre-Columbian figurines on the other. Gone were references to classical antiquity, Christian icons and the Renaissance. A new generation of artists was looking outside their immediate cultural surroundings for inspiration. Around the same time as Picasso’s epiphany, artists like André Derain, Maurice de Vlaminck and Juan Gris were latching on to tribal art from Dahomey and the Côte d’Ivoire, and collector Paul Guillaume was buying up African sculpture. By the time Brancusi’s eerie totem pole-like Endless Column (1918) went on display, a strain of modern art had become virtually indistinguishable from indigenous artifact.