Cut some slack by Paris, Lévi-Strauss came to an arrangement whereby he worked in the office in the mornings, leaving the afternoons free for his research and writing. As he was lodged in an upstairs suite, he was on hand to meet and greet visiting dignitaries if necessary. “I cruised through it all,” he later recalled. “I was a very bad cultural attaché; I did the minimum.”27 Some afternoons he kept clear for work at the New York Public Library, where he continued compiling the staggering number of sources that would eventually find their way into Les Structures élémentaires de la parenté. On other afternoons he put the finishing touches on his entries for the Handbook of South American Indians, whose six volumes appeared between 1946 and 1950. He wrote short descriptive pieces on the Nambikwara, the Tupi-Kawahib, as well as the tribes of the Upper Xingu tributaries that irrigate the central Brazilian savannahs. A later piece described the ingenious uses that indigenous Brazilians had made of their natural environment—the razors fashioned from blades of tough savannah grasses; the gums, glues and oils harvested from the forest; the methods of grinding certain roots and fibers and mixing pulp from seeds and bark to form pigments, shampoos and poisons.28
There is something rather aristocratic about this period of Lévi-Strauss’s life. “I was working on a grand scale in a magnificent setting and in what amounted to a virtual Embassy of my own,” he recalled.29 Duties at the embassy barely interrupted his academic research, and he found time to attend conferences at Harvard, and in Chicago and Paris. In Chicago he stayed with leading American sociologist Robert Redfield in his dilapidated farmhouse, with its peeling paint and filthy bathrooms, perched on the edge of the outer suburbs.30 Redfield offered him a job at the University of Chicago. It was one of many academic posts in the United States that Lévi-Strauss would turn down.
His time in America—an intense and formative period in his intellectual life—was coming to an end. In his final months he completed the first draft of his thesis, ordering his surge of creativity in New York into one satisfyingly bulky manuscript. Soon afterward Alfred Métraux, visiting from Washington, noted in his journal:We [Métraux and the German anthropologist Paul Kirchoff] visited Lévi-Strauss and discussed the state of ethnography. He wants a return to philosophy, to one unified idea. Anthropology in the U.S. is a social illness, which afflicts people incapable of tolerating their own civilization. I was overwhelmed by a deep depression. A very bad night.31
It is unclear whether Lévi-Strauss’s ideas triggered Métraux’s bout of melancholy; a manic-depressive, he often ended his journal entries with a comment on his mental state. What is remarkable is Lévi-Strauss’s insistence on “a return to philosophy,” a discipline he had fled in his youth and from which he spent much of his subsequent career distancing himself. What, perhaps, he meant was a return to a philosophical approach to anthropology—to grand systems rather than piecemeal work, to a different style of writing reflecting the philosophical aspirations of his forebears, such as Montaigne and Rousseau.
New York and his association with Roman Jakobson had had a liberating effect on Lévi-Strauss. In a sense he had come of age as an anthropologist not in the rugged scrub of the Brazilian cerrado, but in the reading rooms of the New York Public Library in midtown Manhattan. America was his true culture shock, involving a new language and another way of thinking, and it was in this intellectual climate—part Anglo-American, part continental émigré culture—that structural anthropology had begun to take on a recognizable shape. On one side he had absorbed vast quantities of ethnographic minutiae; on the other, Jakobson had exposed him to new ways of systematizing his accumulating data. Dry model-making had been leavened by the flare and unpredictability of the surrealists. As he hunched over piles of books in the New York Public Library, leafing through ethnographic reportage from around the world, Lévi-Strauss’s ideas had coalesced. The United States was the second country to which he would feel indebted. “The help I received there probably saved my life,” he remembered, “and for several years I found there an intellectual climate and the opportunity for work that to a large extent have made me who I am.”32
LÉVI-STRAUSS RETURNED to Paris in the autumn of 1948—“a sullen, grumbling, drizzling city,” as the American writer Saul Bellow described it during his postwar sojourn. “The city lay under perpetual fog and smoke could not rise and flowed in the streets in brown and gray currents. An unnatural smell emanated from the Seine.”33 The war had ended, but its aftereffects lingered in the run-down façades, the rationing of fuel and food, and the air of a recently defeated nation—a stark contrast to New York’s glass and steel shop fronts and bustling avenues.
Lévi-Strauss was turning forty. Since his late twenties he had been on the move—from São Paulo into the Brazilian interior; from Paris to Montpellier, Marseille to New York. This extended “walkabout” for a man who spent the rest of his life in Paris, the bulk of it in the sixteenth arrondissement, a stone’s throw from his childhood home, is crucial for understanding Lévi-Strauss’s intellectual trajectory in the postwar years. While in the Americas, Lévi-Strauss had missed out on a fundamental intellectual shift in French philosophy. Before he left, Durkheim, Bergson and the philosopher Léon Brunschvicg had reigned; when he returned, phenomenology was dominant. Jean Hyppolite’s translations of Hegel’s Phänomenologie des Geistes, which came out on the eve of the Nazi invasion, had signaled an (as it turned out) ironic turn toward the German philosophical outlook. In 1947, Alexandre Kojève published his celebrated 1930s lectures, Introduction à la lecture de Hegel: leçons sur la phénoménologie de l’esprit. Kantian idealism had been displaced by the “three Hs”: Hegel, Husserl and Heidegger; philosophical systems for interpreting the world had given way to a philosophizing of the very act of interpretation, of being and knowing. Sartrean existentialism was becoming deeply rooted in the broader culture, although among academics it was Merleau-Ponty who was idolized. “It was fashionable to affect scorn for Sartre, who was fashionable,” remembered Michel Foucault of the postwar era. “When we were young it was Merleau-Ponty who counted, not Sartre. We were fascinated by him.”34
Lévi-Strauss’s experiences had been very different. Through Jakobson, he had been exposed to Saussure and the Prague and Vienna linguistic schools—a genealogy that had largely bypassed France, where linguistics was still relatively backward. In Brazil he had worked an anthropological terrain that was only beginning to be studied seriously, while in New York he had absorbed the best of Anglo-American ethnography, with all its layers of dry description and attention to detail. After his travels, Lévi-Strauss would reenter the Parisian scene at an oblique angle, with a unique synthesis that would startle his contemporaries.
While he found his feet, he organized stopgap work at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS) as maître de recherche before returning to the Musée de l’Homme as assistant director of ethnology. As Rivet was retiring and the other assistant director, the archaeologist André Leroi-Gourhan, was teaching in Lyon, Lévi-Strauss pretty much ran the museum, while lecturing to students at the Institut d’ethnologie. The Musée de l’Homme had been virtually abandoned during the war. After years in wealthy U.S. institutions, Lévi-Strauss was made acutely aware of how backward the social sciences were in France at the time. “At the Musée de l’Homme I found French ethnology in its infancy,” he recalled, “struggling to survive in a musty atmosphere that was a little provincial.”35
He began mixing with a new circle of friends, some of whom would subsequently prove influential. On the recommendation of Jakobson, he met the great philologist and scholar of myth Georges Dumézil, with whom he would form a lifelong intellectual bond. At the Musée de l’Homme there was the poet and ethnographer Michel Leiris, an ever-present figure in the early developments of prewar French anthropology, whom Lévi-Strauss finally got to know both as a colleague and as a writer. And through Koyré, Lévi-Strauss met the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. Lévi-Strauss would profoundly influence Lacan; after they met
, Lacan began reading Saussure and exploring structural linguistics, and when Jakobson visited Paris, the three would form a close set. Lacan would soon be setting off on a parallel track to Lévi-Strauss’s developing work on kinship, injecting linguistic theory into psychoanalysis and extending the metaphor of language to the subconscious.
While at the Musée, Lévi-Strauss scouted for professors who could supervise his already written theses: the draft of Les Structures élémentaires de la parenté and his shorter, complementary thesis, or “petite thèse,” La Vie familiale et sociale des Indiens Nambikwara (The Family and Social Life of the Nambikwara), which he had completed over his first summer in New York. Back in 1944 he had written to Marcel Mauss asking him to be his supervisor, but by the time he had returned to Paris, Mauss’s mind had deteriorated. “He did not recognise me,” remembered Lévi-Strauss. “He thought I was Soustelle.”36 He eventually prevailed upon the dean of the Sorbonne, Durkheimian sociologist Georges Davy. The composition of the rest of the jury was complex—such was the breadth and originality of the work that it was difficult to find scholars equally at home with linguistics, global ethnography, the Asian subcontinent and Australasia, or who were familiar with even a small portion of the vast number of sources Lévi-Strauss had used, many of which were published only in English, some unavailable in French libraries. The jury ended up comprising a suitably eclectic group: the linguist Émile Benveniste, the sinologist Jean Escarra and the sociologist of religion and morals Albert Bayet. Marcel Griaule, who had headed the famous Dakar-Djibouti ethnographic expedition in the 1930s and was continuing his work among the Dogon, examined the complementary thesis on the Nambikwara. In June 1948, Lévi-Strauss was passed, an event that he considered a rite of passage. “Successfully defending my thesis not only opened doors for me in the university system,” he remembered, “but it also gave me the feeling that I had become an adult”37—this, on the eve of his fortieth birthday. La Vie familiale et sociale des Indiens Nambikwara was published by the Société des Américanistes at the end of 1948. The following year Les Structures élémentaires de la parenté appeared in print.
LES STRUCTURES ÉLÉMENTAIRES was hugely ambitious. From its title—a reference to Durkheim’s classic The Elementary Forms of Religious Life—and its dedication to one of the founders of American anthropology, the nineteenth-century anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan, it was a pitch for glory. It took on big questions: the relationship between nature and culture, the meaning of the incest taboo, the cognitive basis of dualistic thinking and reciprocity, parallels between language and kinship, words and women. Wide-ranging discussions of Jean Piaget’s work on child development and Freud’s Totem and Taboo filled out a book that was much more than an academic thesis.
Referencing more than seven thousand articles and books, Les Structures élémentaires was a work of prodigious scholarship. Lévi-Strauss boasted that for a brief period in his early career he managed to keep up with the entire output of anthropological literature, before the growing volume of publications outpaced him. Much of this early erudition was on display in Les Structures élémentaires, a book that roams the globe, citing ethnographic examples from Arnhem Land to Assam, Fiji to Peru, but, interestingly, touching only briefly on his own fieldwork in Brazil.
Kinship was a natural target for Lévi-Strauss. At midcentury it was the discipline’s one area of technical expertise, its single claim to professionalism. On one level, kinship had an earthy intimacy. It was the staple of the ethnographic experience, covering the myriad ways in which small-scale societies married, reproduced and defined who their relatives were and how to behave toward them. On another, as Jakobson had immediately realized, it had the potential for mathematical exactness, for modeling, for the systematizing that Lévi-Strauss had craved since his introduction to structural linguistics. The labyrinth of obscure notation and conceptual conundrums was an invitation to abstraction, as his earlier Jakobsonian sketch in Word had shown. So complex were some of the Australian Aboriginal systems that even indigenous specialists had tried to model their own kin systems, practicing a form of ethnography in neighboring tribes. Native anthropologists traveled widely, spending days in conversation with distant kin, arranging broken twigs and scraping lines in the ruddy sands of the outback to represent their involved familial arrangements.38
Against this often byzantine backdrop, Lévi-Strauss proposed a series of simple, all-binding principles. The “elementary structures” in question had a linguistics-like rigor to them. Defined in the very first sentence of the book’s preface, they were either systems that “prescribe marriage with a certain type of relative or . . . which divide them into two categories, viz., possible spouses or prohibited spouses.”39 The key was incest avoidance. For Lévi-Strauss, the incest taboo was the social rule, from which all kin systems flowed. It distinguished humanity’s rule-bound existence from nature’s promiscuity; it marked the passage from nature to culture. In a mysterious way, the incest taboo was “at once on the threshold of culture, in culture, and in one sense . . . culture itself.”40
Lévi-Strauss took his second principle from Marcel Mauss’s influential Essai sur le don (The Gift), which argued that reciprocity was a central feature of all “primitive” societies. According to Mauss, there were no truly free or pointless gifts. Drawing from the ethnographic record, he showed that all gifts were really social symbols, imbued with a power that bound groups together in mutual obligation and solidarity. “Things create bonds between souls,” wrote Mauss, “for the thing itself has a soul, is part of the soul.” Sometimes gifts were simply swapped between clans; in more complex societies, they traveled along elaborate chains of givers and receivers. The drive toward reciprocity was not merely custom, it was deep-rooted and intuitive. Observing gift-giving was “to catch the fleeting moment when the society and its members take emotional stock of themselves and their situation as regards others.”41
Reworking this idea, Lévi-Strauss argued that, in kin systems, women operated as gifts. The incest taboo stimulated their constant circulation between groups; reciprocity structured their movements. In mathematical terms, incest was the limit of reciprocity, “the point at which it cancels itself out.”42 Observance of the prohibition set up a displacement effect, which rippled through the system: “As soon as I am forbidden a woman, she thereby becomes available to another man, and somewhere else a man renounces a woman who thereby becomes available to me.”43 It was, therefore, a positive rule, driving out-marriage, forcing groups into complex alliances. What resulted was a finely equilibrated machine that seesawed between groups, rotating women down the generations.
Focusing on a subset of ideal types, taken from Granet’s divisions between chassé-croisé (restricted exchange, or a more-or-less straight swap) and échanges différés (generalized exchange, or a longer chain), Lévi-Strauss took on a wholesale reinterpretation of the anthropological data he had patiently sifted through in the New York Public Library. What had been traditionally conceived of vertically, in terms of descent through the nuclear family, was upended. Placing exchange at the heart of the system gave Lévi-Strauss a panoramic view across interlocking kinship structures.
In the more restricted system, the dualism that Lévi-Strauss had already noticed in Northwest Coast masks, Maori tattooing and Caduveo face painting seemed to be infused through whole social setups. As he had observed firsthand among the Bororo, the two halves of the village choreographed their reciprocal duties in an intricate interplay of give and take. In other societies the circuit was longer, more complicated and risky, involving four, eight or even sixteen groups in circuits of exchange. But it was also potentially more profitable, widening circles of alliances. The resulting structures were naturalized in indigenous sayings, appropriate unions likened in one instance to “a leech rolling toward a wound,” inappropriate ones to “water flowing up to its source.” Whole systems of symbolic relationships echoed kin structures, from the way a buffalo was carved up and distributed among rel
atives in Burma to the prevalence of twins in the native mythologies of tribes organized around moieties.
Just as the structural linguistic models had switched emphasis from terms to relations, so Lévi-Strauss performed the same shift for the social sciences. “The relationship of reciprocity which is the basis of marriage,” he wrote after a discussion of an apparent anomaly from the Trobriand Islands, “is not between men and women, but between men by means of women, who are merely the occasion of this relationship.”44 Men, as both “the takers of wives and the givers of sisters,” “the authors and the victims of their exchanges,” were nodal points in a web of exchange; women an aspect of its workings. (Much later, when under attack from feminists for the apparent male-centric character of his kinship models, Lévi-Strauss casually inverted his terms: “One could just as well say that women exchange men; all you have to do is replace the plus sign with the minus sign and vice-versa—the structure of the system would not change.”)45
As the book progressed, the analyses thickened. There are pages of kin diagrams—obscure repeat patterns, as if lifted from a native design, undulating in diagonals across the page. Rotating obligations and exchanges of women run clockwise and counterclockwise around circular diagrams, sometimes shifting into three dimensions, spinning on the equator of a sphere. Systems are subdivided into “harmonic” and “disharmonic,” according to the convergence or otherwise of residence and descent. In among colorful ethnographic examples, Lévi-Strauss illustrates native kin systems by drawing analogies to the Duponts of Paris and the Durands of Bordeaux—the only two families in a fictitious France. The principle of reciprocity is evoked both by the exchange of coconuts and dried fish in Polynesia and by an old Marseille café tradition whereby peasants swap their tumblers of wine before drinking.
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