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

  GONE WERE THE POKY apartments of Paris and the provinces, the tight budgets, the freezing winters and the scrimping and saving of interwar rural France. Earning three times their salary in France, Lévi-Strauss and Dina lived in unaccustomed luxury. Soon after arriving, they moved into a substantial house with a walled garden just off Avenida Paulista. When they got there, Lévi-Strauss asked the owner to plant a banana tree “to give me the feeling of being in the tropics.” Much later, after his expeditions into the interior, the garden would house his parrot, along with a capuchin monkey.19 He furnished the house with late-nineteenth-century rustic pieces, fashioned from soft jacaranda woods. They even found they could afford a servant and an almost-new Ford. The historian Fernand Braudel went as far as employing a chauffeur to drive his Chevrolet into the university, while block-booking two hotel rooms—one for himself, the other for his books and papers.

  The French mission saw themselves as cultural ambassadors, and initially formed an expatriate community at arm’s length from their Brazilian counterparts. In the evenings they would go to French realist films staring Jean Gabin and Louis Jouvet.20 On the weekends they explored the outskirts of São Paulo, from the coffee plantations in the north to the makeshift tracks through the ravines in the south. At the university there was an air of competition, and even of snobbishness. “All of us thought our careers were riding on our success or failure in Brazil, so we all attempted to surround ourselves with an exclusive court, more important than our neighbors,” remembered Lévi-Strauss. “It was very French, very academic, but there in the tropics, it was a little ridiculous and not very healthy.”21

  From the outset, Lévi-Strauss trod a difficult intellectual path. Employed as a sociology lecturer, he was expected to teach the prevailing Durkheimian orthodoxy, an approach that he had rejected as politically conservative and too prescriptive. He had perhaps been influenced by the 1932 polemic Les Chiens de garde (Watchdogs), in which Paul Nizan had argued that, as a result of Durkheim’s institutional success, “teachers taught children to respect the French nation, to justify class collaboration, to accept everything, to join in the cult of the Flag and the bourgeois Democracy.”22 In any case, through reading Lowie and Boas, Lévi-Strauss was already moving toward cultural anthropology and more Anglo-American, fieldwork-oriented methods of research. Sociologist Paul Arbousse Bastide, a nephew of Dumas, tried to force Lévi-Strauss to adhere to a traditional French approach, teaching not only Durkheim, but also nineteenth-century philosopher Auguste Comte’s positivist sociology. When Lévi-Strauss bridled, Bastide attempted to fire him. But with the support of colleagues—the geographer Pierre Monbeig and especially Fernand Braudel—Lévi-Strauss survived with his independence intact.23

  His early courses pointed toward the areas that he would go on to develop throughout his career. They included kinship (under the rubric of “domestic sociology”), totemism (“religious sociology”) and cross-cultural research (“comparative sociology”), using a limited bibliography of Durkheim, Lowie, Van Gennep and Westermark. In a later conference he looked at the area with which he would eventually become synonymous: myth. The conference—The Tales of Charles Perrault—compared fairy tales with indigenous mythology and looked at how myths fit into the worldview of indigenous peoples. One area that he would subsequently abandon was physical anthropology—a discipline not yet tarnished by the racist strains developed in Nazi Germany. Like many foreigners, he became fascinated by the variations in skin color and physiognomy in Brazil, the result of centuries of miscegenation. He envisaged Brazil as the perfect laboratory for the study of genetic inheritance and championed the idea of setting up a research department to produce an atlas of physical and cultural anthropology.24

  Using materials at hand, Lévi-Strauss developed practical exercises. For the kinship course, the exam consisted of a series of family trees from which the students had to deduce the social rules of the group and work out who would be able to marry whom.25 Another exercise involved a sociological analysis of the city of São Paulo circa 1820, working from the era’s archives. “I put my students to work on their own city,” remembered Lévi-Strauss. “We did monographs on districts, sometimes on single streets.”26

  Beyond teaching, for thinkers like Braudel and Lévi-Strauss, the Brazil years furnished space for contemplation, reading and research. It was “a paradise for work and reflection,” Braudel remembered. In one of the first experiments in microfilm, he had paid a photographer to take pictures of thousands of documents, which he worked his way through in São Paulo. “I spent three marvellous years in this fashion: in winter, during the vacations, I was in the Mediterranean; the rest of the year, in Brazil, with leisure and fantastic possibilities for reading.”27

  In time, Lévi-Strauss and Dina broke out of their stifling expat environment. Forging links with a circle of Brazilian intellectuals and writers,28 they began engaging with Brazil at a seminal moment in its modern evolution. In the 1930s, the country was rediscovering its roots. Artists, influenced by the symbolist/surrealist strain of the French avant-garde, were turning their attention to Brazilian subject matter: the rustic shantytown, samba groups, Afro-Brazilian coffee plantation workers, pineapples and toucans. Tarsila do Amaral’s Léger-like tumescent women, cacti and palms crowned a homegrown modernist movement with the iconic image Anthropophagy, a tropical riposte to the avant-garde scene in Paris, where she had lived and worked. It was named after Oswald de Andrade’s 1928 Manifesto antropófago (Cannibalist Manifesto), which rejected Western rationalism in favor of “liberating primitivism” and saw Brazilian culture’s creativity as a process of devouring other cultures, absorbing their essences and reconfiguring them into something new and original—a kind of postmodernism avant la lettre. What had previously been denigrated as backward and provincial was now forming the basis of a cultural revival. Gilberto Freyre’s revisionist classic—Casa-Grande e Senzala (The Masters and the Slaves) (1933)—which celebrated Brazil’s racial mix, had just been published; Jorge Amado had begun producing his picaresque novels—such as O País do Carnaval (1931), Suor (1934) and Jubiabá (1935)—exploring the underside of life in Bahia; and the classical composer Heitor Villa-Lobos was turning to regional folk music for inspiration.

  The Lévi-Strausses became close friends with poet and musician Mário de Andrade, the lynchpin of the group. Among his many cultural interests, Andrade had dabbled in what was then called folklore, sponsoring ethnomusicological expeditions to the northeast. In a similar way to John Lomax’s salvaging of American folk music, he had built up a mammoth archive of recordings from the remotest Brazilian towns, from neo-slave-work chants to Afro-Brazilian dance and song and peasant folk music.

  Dina Lévi-Strauss became an active member of the folklore society, which Andrade ran from his offices at the São Paulo municipal government’s Department of Culture, attending meetings and contributing articles. She gave a course on the “science of ethnography,” including physical anthropology, linguistics and archaeology. The focus was on the detailed study of the ethnographic artifact, based on the Maussian notion that “almost all phenomena of life can be decoded through material objects.” To this end she taught how to make systematic documentary records, using tables of preset questionnaires, drawings, photography and film. The course, which attracted a devoted following, was held in a dingy attic in the Department of Culture from eight in the evening until midnight.29

  According to Mário Wagner Vieira da Cunha, future economics professor at the University of São Paulo, who took both Lévi-Strauss’s and Dina’s courses, tensions developed around the warm relationship that Dina had formed with Mário de Andrade:He [Andrade] had a soft spot for her, like we all had, because she was a beautiful girl, around our age. Lévi-Strauss was jealous of this situation—with reason . . . I used to go to their house on Cincinato Braga, because we had a lot of meetings about the Ethnographic and Folklore Society. With Dina, we would start talking and never stop. Lévi-Strauss used to check up on us
. He wouldn’t come into the room where we were. But he used to walk around in the adjoining rooms, stomping about as if to say I am here and I want the conversation to stop soon.

  For da Cunha, Dina and Claude were chalk and cheese: “While he was cold, she was expansive and friendly. They were two people who you couldn’t imagine being married.”30

  THE CITY OF SÃO PAULO was one reality for the Lévi-Strausses in Brazil, with their teaching duties, soirées with the Paulista elite and the more informal meetings with Brazilian intellectuals. The other reality was on the routes out of São Paulo, which Lévi-Strauss and Dina explored on weekends and in breaks from teaching. In the suburbs, where they found a miscellany of Syrian and Italian immigrant communities, along with Afro-Brazilians, they took footage of the Moçambique, Cavalhada and Congada dances, six minutes of which still exist in municipal archives in São Paulo.31 Beyond the city, they reached the outlying German-, Italian- and Polish-dominated towns, along with the closed-off agricultural colonies of the Japanese.

  The first long journeys were into the pioneer zones, which the British colonization company Paraná Plantations Limited was opening up by driving a railroad into the interior. Every fifteen kilometers or so, workmen cleared lots and small towns developed, with dirt roads and roughly constructed wooden houses, built by the Eastern European immigrants who were filtering into the area. The populations dwindled as the plots moved farther down the line, from a thriving town of fifteen thousand in the first settlement to five thousand in the second, followed by a thousand, ninety and forty, down to a solitary Frenchman living in the outermost clearing.32

  The pioneer zone fascinated Lévi-Strauss. These dusty settlements taking shape in the ruddy soils of the interior were like proto-cities; “at the meeting point of nature and artifice,” new entities were coming into being. As roads divided districts, and districts differentiated into the commercial and residential, the settlements self-organized along central and peripheral, parallel and perpendicular axes. Dreamed up by politicians and businessmen, the pioneer towns were as far as you could get from spontaneous, ad hoc development. But even so, Lévi-Strauss sensed a pattern, cut from a panhuman cloth—an involuntary reflex of the human condition. “Space has its own values,” he wrote, “just as sounds and perfumes have colours and feelings weight.”33 And these values molded human behavior in profound ways. As innocuous as they might have looked to the casual observer, the pioneer towns hinted at a deeper truth that Lévi-Strauss would soon recognize in a more traditional ethnographic setting as he pondered the highly structured way in which tribes positioned their huts.

  Farther to the west, the state of Paraná was still a wilderness, out of reach of the colonization projects. It was in this vast forest—today cane fields and cattle ranches—that Lévi-Strauss, accompanied by an agent from the Serviço de Proteção aos Índios, or SPI (Indian Protection Service), had his first contacts with native Brazilians. He had arrived in Brazil drunk with romantic expectation: “I was in a state of intense intellectual excitement,” Lévi-Strauss described much later. “I felt I was reliving the adventures of the first sixteenth-century explorers. I was discovering the New World for myself. Everything seemed mythical: the scenery, the plants, the animals.”34 Eager to win his spurs as an anthropologist, he now stood on the brink of the exotic encounters that he had read about in Paris. But what he found when he entered a small Tibagy encampment in the forests of Paraná was sobering.

  Scattered on the earthen floor of the huts were the flotsam of industrialization—enamel plates, poor-quality utensils and “the skeletal remains of a sewing machine.” There were old-fashioned pistols alongside bows and arrows; matches were known, but rubbing sticks together was still the preferred method of making fire. In among the junk, Lévi-Strauss’s collector’s eye spotted a beautifully crafted stone mortar and pestle, possibly traded from another indigenous group. He left with the impression that they were “neither completely true Indians, nor, what was more important, ‘savages.’” It was an experience that “took away the poetry from my naïve vision,” Lévi-Strauss remembered.35

  Continuing his tour, Lévi-Strauss spent days on horseback, stumbling up and down the narrow forest trails that wended their way under a thirty-meter forest canopy. From time to time their party would pass small groups of Indians, walking in single file through the forest in silence. At journey’s end was the 450-strong São Jerônimo reservation—a series of broken-down sheds strewn across an open clearing, housing members of the Kaingang tribe. The Kaingang had experienced the full panoply of the native Brazilian experience: they had suffered flu pandemics and German colonists had hunted them down before the SPI subjected them to well-meaning but heavy-handed attempts at “pacification” and acculturation, only to abandon them to their run-down reservations.

  The men wore tattered trousers, the women cotton dresses or “just a blanket tucked under their armpits.”36 They fished with half-learned versions of techniques picked up from the colonists, attaching hooks to the end of sticks and using scraps of cloth as nets, as well as harvesting bananas, sweet potatoes and maize from gardens in forest clearings. In the huts there was the same miscellany of cheap industrial products—pots, pans, cooking utensils and, in a surreal touch, an umbrella. Lévi-Strauss had been looking for exquisitely crafted material culture; what he had found was junk—an ironic allusion to nineteenth-century poet the self-styled Comte de Lautréamont’s famous definition of beauty which inspired the surrealist movement: “the chance encounter, on a dissecting table, of a sewing machine and an umbrella.” Lévi-Strauss tried to barter for the few traditional objects that remained—gourds fashioned from hollowed-out marrows—but “felt ashamed to deprive people who have so little.”37

  One traditional delicacy was still enjoyed—a type of pale grub known as koro, which thrived in the rotting hollows of tree trunks on the forest bed. After decades of prejudice and persecution, the Kaingang had become ashamed of their own culture, whisking away the delicacy when outsiders visited. Lévi-Strauss was determined to track some down and, coming across a fever-stricken Indian in a deserted village, resorted to questionable tactics: “We put an axe into his hands, shook him and pushed him.” The Indian did not respond, so “we succeeded in dragging our victim to a tree trunk,” where a single axe-blow revealed a heaving mass of koro inside the sodden wood. Hesitating at first, Lévi-Strauss popped one in his mouth and savored a taste that he described as a combination between “the delicacy of butter, and the flavour of coconut milk.”38

  He had had his first, bittersweet experiences of fieldwork—not the heroics of Léry’s Tupinambá, but the tragicomedy of cultures on the fringes of the ever-expanding frontier. He had arrived too late. All that was left was the cultural gray water, a depressing mix of tradition and modernity, each corrupted by the other. The experience marked him, confirming his jaundiced view of the West, which he would come to see as a corrosive force that was dissolving mankind’s cultural achievements. He realized that he would have to travel farther afield if he wanted to catch a glimpse of something less degraded, more authentic. He realized, too, that this would always be the anthropologist’s fate. Like the indigenous peoples they were trying to study, they were compelled to embark on the ultimately futile exercise of outrunning the spread of their own culture.

  IN NOVEMBER 1935, at the end of the university year when most of the French academics returned to spend the holidays in Europe, Lévi-Strauss and his wife stayed on to embark on their first real attempts at fieldwork in Brazil. Just a generation before, maps of São Paulo state were still being sold with blank spaces marked “unknown territories inhabited by Indians.”39 By the 1930s, Lévi-Strauss would have to cross the state lines into Mato Grosso—then a vast wilderness, loosely connected by train, river, dirt road and mule trail—to get firsthand experience of relatively isolated indigenous peoples. The trip was largely self-financed, with some help from Mário de Andrade at the São Paulo Department of Culture. Lévi-Strauss was i
nstructed by the Museu Nacional in Rio to survey an archaeological site in the region, but his prime objective was to work among the Caduveo40 on the Paraguayan border and to visit “by an as-yet-undetermined route”41 the Bororo in central Mato Grosso, gathering data and material culture for the newly created Musée de l’Homme in Paris.

  Accompanied by high school friend René Silz, who had come out from France for the expedition, the couple flew the first 350 kilometers to Bauru, a small town to the west of São Paulo. The light aircraft passed over rows of squat coffee bushes, furrowing the hillsides like vineyards. Pasturelands stretched out over the red soils of the interior, the vivid russet palette “so typical,” noted Dina, that they “immediately take on a significance for the foreigner who arrives in Brazil.”42 From Bauru, they stowed their luggage—“a trunk, two bags, three navy bags, three tents, a medicine bag and a tent cloth”43—on a rickety wood-burning locomotive for the journey across the western portion of São Paulo state. A fine reddish dust blew off the desiccated landscape, coating the carriages, as the train rattled on toward Porto Esperança. After changing train companies on the Mato Grosso state lines,44 the tracks straightened, and the landscape flattened out, leaving endless forests and fields against huge skies. The greens had deadened, the vegetation settled into dry bush, with scatterings of hardy trees and palms. The well-fed cattle that had sauntered across the Paulista pastures were now scrawnier, bony beasts picking through anthill-covered scrub. It was bleak, yet beautiful, “wild and melancholic, but how grandiose, how moving,” as Dina wrote of these epic landscapes.45