The buildup of evidence is numbing, as is the language, twisting and turning through kinship conundrums of increasing complexity. At times examples read like a riddle: “In the great majority of cases there is marriage with the father’s sister’s daughter who is at the same time the mother’s brother’s daughter (where the father’s sister has married the mother’s brother).”46 In other parts, kinship is pared down to a biblical simplicity: “All told, two men and two women; one man creditor, one man debtor; one woman received and one given.”47
In the end, Lévi-Strauss had mapped out a vast area, covering the Asian subcontinent, Siberia and Oceania, where elementary systems predominated. The geographical extent was supposedly arrived at “without prior design or foreknowledge,” although it was in effect a reinterpretation of previous research done by Frazer, William Rivers, Radcliffe-Brown and Granet, who had looked at distributions of the phenomenon of cross-cousin marriage. In the final pages he likened his analysis to that of the phonologist, drawing parallels between exchange and communication, women and words. For Lévi-Strauss, the properties of these structural systems were ingrained in a whole way of thinking. Kinship, as a rule-bound system operating below the threshold of consciousness, held up a mirror to the inner workings of the human mind.
Lévi-Strauss had sketched a world of rules and obligations, of imposed collaboration, of compulsory to-ing and fro-ing. Depending on which way you looked at it, this was either an expression of a long-lost instinct for community or a necessary but claustrophobic web of responsibilities. Lévi-Strauss left it to a final, mischievous paragraph of a five-hundred-page book to hint at the latter: “To this very day, mankind has always dreamed of seizing and fixing that fleeting moment when it was permissible to believe that the law of exchange could be evaded, that one could gain without losing, enjoy without sharing.” It was a perennial dream “eternally denied to man, of a world in which one might keep to oneself.”48
For the appendix, Lévi-Strauss asked the mathematician André Weil, brother of the philosopher and writer Simone, to analyze a particularly convoluted Australian kinship system. The resulting rows of mathematical notation seemed a long way from actual human relations—the easy intimacy of the ashen-faced Nambikwara, rolling in the dust of their campsites—but, as the logical end point of Lévi-Strauss’s quest for abstraction, it was a fitting way to close out his first full-length book.
LES STRUCTURES ÉLÉMENTAIRES created an impact well beyond academic circles. No doubt this was due to the book’s own structure—the broad, more accessible opening chapters on incest and reciprocity, adapted from lectures he had given in New York, gave the book a lofty intellectual flavor, before the descent into technical kinship analyses blotted out the narrative for all but a handful of specialists. But it was also due to Simone de Beauvoir’s early interest in the project. She had heard about Les Structures élémentaires even before it was published, through Leiris, who was working with Lévi-Strauss at the Musée de L’Homme. At the time de Beauvoir was finishing off writing Le Deuxième sexe (The Second Sex) and she wanted an overview of the latest anthropological research, so she arranged to spend a few days at Lévi-Strauss’s apartment going through the manuscript. It is unclear how useful Les Structures élémentaires was for de Beauvoir’s own book, since sections on anthropology in Le Deuxième sexe rely on an outdated nineteenth-century evolutionary scheme. But much later her thank-you note, in the form of a long, glowing review in Les Temps modernes—the highly influential journal of politics and philosophy founded by Jean-Paul Sartre in late 1945—would launch Lévi-Strauss’s ideas on the Parisian intellectual stage.
The oft-quoted opening line set the tone: “For a long time French sociology has been slumbering; Lévi-Strauss’s book, which marks its dazzlingly awakening, must be hailed as a major event.”49 This is not just a book for specialists, wrote de Beauvoir. Beyond the baffling diagrams lies the “mystery of society as a whole, the mystery of mankind itself.” No adulation was too great—the book was reminiscent of a young Marx; it reconciled Engels and Hegel. Strangely, de Beauvoir located Lévi-Strauss’s thought “in that great humanist mainstream, that considers human existence bearing within itself its own justification,” even claiming that it echoed certain existential arguments. Lévi-Strauss’s long battle against both humanism and existentialism had not yet begun, but was surely implicit in a text in which human lives dissolved into models, their most intimate decisions an epiphenomenon of the system. Philosophical contradictions notwithstanding, de Beauvoir was impressed. The final sentence of the review was a simple, unambiguous endorsement: “Il faut la lire” (It has to be read).50
Soon afterward, Georges Bataille wrote another long piece on Les Structures élémentaires, the incest taboo and eroticism, titled “The Enigma of Incest,” in the literary-philosophical review-journal Critique, which he had founded. In a largely positive review, Bataille included some uncharacteristic honesty when dealing with dense but supposedly great intellectual work:A dogged patience is called for, able to take in its stride the tangled data . . . It goes on and on and alas, it is desperately tedious: roughly two-thirds of Lévi-Strauss’s big volume are devoted to the detailed examination of the multiple permutations and combinations thought up by primitive humanity to resolve one problem, the problem of the distribution of women . . . Regrettably, I myself am obliged to enter this maze; for a clear conception of eroticism we must struggle out of the darkness that has made its significance so hard to assess.51
A kind of aura developed around Les Structures élémentaires, aided by the fact that very few copies of the first edition were printed.52 Looking back, French scholars remember it as a landmark publication, a parting of the waters for the humanities as a whole. Decades later, the French anthropologist Marc Augé recalled being impressed by the book’s “will to scientificity” and its “quest for the most encompassing model to account for phenomena that do not appear, initially, to be a part of the same categories of analysis.” “This was an important, decisive moment,” remembered the philosopher Olivier Revault d’Allonnes. “At the time I saw a confirmation of Marx in Les Structures élémentaires de la parenté.” Much later, after copies of the first edition had dried up, the anthropologist Emmanuel Terray remembered borrowing a friend’s first edition and transcribing the first hundred pages of the book by hand. For Terray, Les Structures élémentaires was as important as Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams and Marx’s Das Kapital.53
Although much of Les Structures élémentaires was written in the United States and was based on American sources compiled in the New York Public Library, it took almost twenty years for the book to appear in English.54 In the meantime, two French-speaking British anthropologists, Rodney Needham at Oxford and Edmund Leach at Cambridge, were reading the book in the original.
Needham had come across a copy of Les Structures élémentaires in Blackwell’s bookshop in Oxford and took it with him on his fieldwork among the Penan forest nomads of Sarawak in Borneo. “At that time the scene was arid in the humanities, staid, unexciting, dry,” he told me, sipping on a pint of ale at the Turf, the famous, low-beamed seventeenth-century tavern hidden down a series of meter-wide passageways in the heart of the Oxford colleges. “Suddenly there was this new wave—Lévi-Strauss, Dumézil, McLuhan, Borges—who breathed life into a flat postwar intellectual world.” To this meticulously tidy man, who kept cross-indexed scrapbooks of all his notes and publications, Lévi-Strauss’s formal modeling must have been immediately attractive. Needham recalled being “seduced” by Lévi-Strauss—a word that crops up repeatedly in intellectuals’ reminiscences of first coming across his work—and began developing his own brand of structuralist analysis in Britain.
For Leach at Cambridge, reading Les Structures élémentaires was a paradoxical revelation. He had spent the war in Indochina, arriving in 1939 and traveling up to the northern Burmese hill tribes. He conducted an initial eight months’ fieldwork among the Hpalang, a small Kachin community on the no
rtheastern Burmese border, who practiced shifting monsoon cultivation, overlooking the paddy fields of the Chinese Shan states. Later, working as a British intelligence agent, he returned to the Kachin hills, where he spent long periods studying remote communities that had had little contact with Westerners. Through the chaotic years of the Japanese invasion, he lost all his field notes, photos and a draft of his manuscript, but later managed to reconstruct his findings, publishing them in the postwar classic Political Systems of Highland Burma. As it happened, the central section of Les Structures élémentaires, the chapter that contained the very nub of Lévi-Strauss’s arguments, related to the Kachin, a group about which Leach had recent firsthand ethnographic knowledge.
Leach quickly recognized that Lévi-Strauss had based his analysis on earlier, poorly researched ethnographic accounts that were factually inaccurate. He also became concerned at the way Lévi-Strauss had marshaled his evidence, drawing questionable parallels between a hodgepodge of different hill tribes. In a review essay, Leach concluded that the book’s huge ambition of establishing “the general laws of development governing all Asiatic societies, ancient and modern, primitive and sophisticated” was achieved only “by adopting a decidedly cavalier attitude towards the facts of history and ethnography.” He criticized Lévi-Strauss’s “inexcusable carelessness” of assuming customs among the Haka Chin were applicable to the Kachins—two entirely different groups separated by hundreds of kilometers. He also questioned Lévi-Strauss’s use of sources: Head’s Handbook on Haka Chin Customs, which Lévi-Strauss had described as “an unrecognised treasury of contemporary ethnography,” was in actual fact a “pamphlet of forty-seven pages, originally priced at eight annas” written by “a Frontier Service administrative officer with no professional competence as an ethnographer.”55
And yet there was something about Lévi-Strauss’s account that intrigued Leach. In spite of the inaccuracies, he found certain insights—specifically, the way marriage circuits had a tendency to break down and morph into caste systems—that even he had not realized in the field, but which with hindsight fit the evidence. Curiously, in a kind of inadvertent structuralist effect, Lévi-Strauss’s model had somehow been inverted in the process—“He’d got it back to front and upside down,” laughed Leach in an interview given to the literary critic Frank Kermode in the early 1980s. “This fascinated me,” he continued, “as how someone could be wrong about the facts, but right somehow about the theory.”56
Writing in a review essay for the New Left Review in the mid-1960s, Leach described Les Structures élémentaires as “a splendid failure,” with one very good idea drawn from Lévi-Strauss’s reading of Marx, Freud and Jakobson—that social behavior is conducted with reference to a logically ordered conceptual scheme, “a model in the actor’s mind of how things are or how things ought to be.” For Leach, Lévi-Strauss’s structural method was like psychoanalytic dream interpretation. “The basic assumption is that the actual dream . . . is an ephemeral, trivial matter, but is at the same time a precipitate of something much more important and enduring, a logical puzzle in the dreamer’s conceptual system.”57 Taking the analogy a step further, Leach grafted Freud’s triad, the id, the ego and the superego, onto Lévi-Strauss’s nature, culture and human mind. There is indeed a similar flavor to the works of Freud and Lévi-Strauss: both chose their arena of intellectual invention at a remove from surface reality; both invented a set of logical interrelations that were said to exist beyond the threshold of consciousness.
Leach and Needham would later emerge as the key interpreters of Lévi-Strauss in the English-speaking world, a role that would become fraught with mutual suspicion and, in Needham’s case, personal animosity, when Lévi-Strauss began questioning their interpretations of his work in the 1960s.
In France, criticism was couched in more conceptual terms. In a piece for Les Temps modernes, the philosopher Claude Lefort, a student of Merleau-Ponty, launched what would become a standard line of attack. Les Structures élémentaires was overly abstract—it reduced behavior to rules, meaning to mathematics. For Lévi-Strauss, this was exactly the point. “Is there any need to emphasise that this book is concerned exclusively with models and not with empirical realities?”58 he hit back in the introduction to a later edition of Les Structures élémentaires—an extraordinary statement that was a measure of how far he had traveled from conventional anthropological analysis. By the end of the 1940s, Lévi-Strauss’s experiences among the Caduveo, the Bororo and the Nambikwara were dissolving. Their day-to-day lives, their relationships, their struggle for survival on the margins of twentieth-century Brazil, so evocatively captured on film and in his field notes, had shrunk to a pinpoint on a graph.
LES STRUCTURES ÉLÉMENTAIRES remained Lévi-Strauss’s favorite book throughout his life, although interestingly he did not include it in Gallimard’s Bibliothèque de la Pléiade selection of his works, published in 2008. In many ways, though, it was the least convincing application of the structural method. The central claims, made with such gusto in the opening chapters, have not stood up well over the years. Anthropologists have since questioned the universality of the incest taboo, citing examples from ancient Egypt and Achaemenid Persia where brother-sister, father- daughter and mother-son relations were actually encouraged. Though the incest taboo is deep-rooted in human societies, evidence now points toward its biological, adaptive foundations, an argument ridiculed by Lévi-Strauss. Once seen as “a cultural taboo, putting a break on innate desires,” incest prohibition is now viewed “as an innate tendency, which is being eroded by culture.”59 Advances in primatology have destroyed Lévi-Strauss’s strict distinction between promiscuous animals and rule-bound humans, the cornerstone of the nature/culture divide.60 Indeed Lévi-Strauss would later completely recast the book’s central claim—the elemental division that he believed existed between nature and culture. This, he came to realize, was an opposition in the mind, rather than an empirical reality.61
More fundamentally, the idea that these structures were truly “elementary”—that is, forming the building blocks of all kin systems—has never progressed. At the time Lévi-Strauss envisaged a second volume (Les Structures complexes de la parenté), but he eventually realized that the combinatory possibilities of less restricted systems were so vast that the task was beyond him. He also wanted to extend the work introduced in his essay for Word, systematically mapping attitudes between members of kin systems, but this too would remain on the drawing board.
When Lévi-Strauss had sent his manuscript to Robert Lowie, the great American anthropologist told him that it was a work “in the grand style.” Lévi-Strauss at first took this as a compliment, but with the passing of time he would become less sure about what Lowie really meant.62 Much later, when he had begun to understand Lowie’s backhanded compliment, he could admit that the project had been overambitious.
But the grand edifice of Les Structures élémentaires took decades to crumble. Its originality, the confidence of its assertions, the sense of a long-overdue theoretical reorientation, made it the landmark publication of its times. Only a handful of specialists (like Leach) were equipped to evaluate Lévi-Strauss’s sometimes fast-and-loose use of ethnography; the rest were left to marvel at the book’s theoretical implications, which seemed to offer a way out of a double bind—the logjam of empiricism and the subjectivity of contemporary philosophical thought—while promising the birth of leaner, more scientific humanities. Lévi-Strauss’s own summaries of his work, many of which imply, to the untutored eye, that Les Structures élémentaires had demonstrated that all kinship systems (not just the very restricted and in some ways atypical set that Lévi-Strauss had examined) were but variations on limited sets of structural laws, periodically primed the pump.63 But as a pioneering, if flawed, attempt at using the tools of linguistics in a completely different domain, Les Structures élémentaires levered open new theoretical space.
In the book, Lévi-Strauss had criticized Freud’s famous accou
nt of the origins of the incest taboo as a myth. Yet he had produced his own kind of myth: a peculiarly mid-twentieth-century appeal to abstraction, displacement and mathematics. Like Freud, Lévi-Strauss’s claims were ambitious, though not always fully backed up by the evidence. But they were endlessly suggestive. Against the intellectual current, Lévi-Strauss had introduced a series of ideas that were destined to change the intellectual ecology for decades to come.
6
On the Shaman’s Couch
Most of us regard psychoanalysis as a revolutionary discovery of twentieth-century civilisation and place it on the same footing as genetics or the theory of relativity. Others, probably more conscious of the abuses of psychoanalysis than the real lesson it has to teach us, still look upon it as one of the absurdities of modern man.
CLAUDE LÉVI-STRAUSS1
LÉVI-STRAUSS WAS AS FASCINATED by the work of Sigmund Freud as he was skeptical of the practice of psychoanalysis—then becoming an established, if left-field, treatment for psychosexual problems and neuroses. In New York, he had met the famous Freudian psychoanalyst Raymond de Saussure through Jakobson, and back in Paris his friendship with Jacques Lacan was blossoming. In the 1960s he would make the distinction between the psychoanalyst’s “theory of the mind” and “theory of the cure,” saying that it was only the former that interested him.2 But in the late 1940s he began exploring the borderlands between psychoanalysis and anthropology, the therapist and the shaman, analysis and ritual cure. It offered him a way back to the matrix of the unconscious, the irrational and the primitive—the aesthetic hunting ground of the surrealists. It also opened up another area that was occupying his thoughts more and more: myth.
Claude Levi-Strauss: The Poet in the Laboratory Page 20