He set down his ideas while teaching at the newly established Sixth Section of the École pratique des hautes études—an autonomous social science research center, the institutional home of the famous Annales school of historical research. He had been recruited by founder of the Sixth Section Lucien Febvre in the winter of 1948-49, the first fully functioning year of the institution, to give a seminar on the Religious Life of Primitives. In two essays—“The Sorcerer and His Magic” and “The Effectiveness of Symbols”—he placed ethnographic examples from Brazil, Panama, Mexico and the Pacific Northwest against Freudian psychoanalysis.
“The Sorcerer and His Magic” followed the story of Quesalid, one of Franz Boas’s informants from the Kwakiutl group near Vancouver. Quesalid is a native skeptic who becomes a shaman in order to unmask “the false supernatural,” the fakery of the shaman’s art—the hidden nails, the tufts of down concealed in the corner of the mouth, the use of “dreamers” (spies) to find out information about the patient who is being treated. But through the course of his debunking quest, as Quesalid himself becomes a great shaman renowned for his cures, he begins to doubt his own skepticism. He finds that some deceptions work better than others, that certain rituals do in fact make patients better. Through his cures Quesalid discovers that the power of performance is in some sense real. The interactions between the patient, the shaman and the group, the structuring of a psychic universe, however achieved, bring about concrete results.3
This point was vividly demonstrated in Lévi-Strauss’s companion piece, “The Effectiveness of Symbols,” written at around the same time. Dedicated to Raymond de Saussure, the essay worked through a ritual incantation used to assist difficult childbirths in Panama, which had been recorded by Swedish ethnologists. The incantation describes the shaman’s and his spirit assistants’ journey into the woman’s vagina and up to the uterus on a quest to release the unborn child. The child must be liberated from the Muu—the spirit who forms the fetus, but who in this case has abused her powers. The shaman sings the woman’s predicament as she lies in a hammock, knees parted, pointing eastward, “groaning, losing blood, the vulva dilating and moving.” He calls on diverse spirits, “of the winds, waters and woods,” as well as, in a Conradesque touch, “the spirit of the silver steamer of the white man.”
As the torturous labor continues, the shaman embarks on his journey. Through blood and tissue, into a uterine “hell à la Hieronymous Bosch,” he marshals his spirits in single file along “Muu’s way.” The group struggles up the woman’s birth canal, the shaman calling on “Lords of the wood-boring insects” to cut through the sinews, clearing a path through a jungle of human fiber. After defeating Muu and her daughters with the use of magic hats, and thus releasing the child, the shaman’s troop begins the descent, another perilous journey, analogous to the act of childbirth itself. The shaman urges his troop on toward the orifice, employing more “clearers of the way,” such as the armadillo. After the delivery of the child, the shaman throws up a cloud of dust, obscuring the path to prevent Muu’s escape.4
The myth, rich in literary effect, worked by focusing the woman’s mind and body, by organizing—structuring—the otherwise chaotic experience of an interminable labor. Lévi-Strauss likened the process to the psychoanalyst’s “abreaction,” whereby the patient, guided by the analyst, relives painful past experience in order to unblock subconscious impasses. Based on the same elements, the shamanistic cure was actually a tidy inversion of psychoanalysis: while the analyst listens, the shaman speaks. Guided by the analyst, the patient elaborates his own personal myth, normally a stylized version of vague childhood memories. The shaman, on the other hand, declaims an equally formulaic social myth. With transference, the patient articulates through the analyst, while the shaman speaks on behalf of the patient. But both approaches were ultimately premised on the assumption that the unconscious—that apparently mysterious, subterranean place of inchoate feelings, the bizarre and the unexpected—was in fact a logically structured universe. Both shamanism and psychoanalysis worked by eliciting this symbolic structure, evoking the hidden order of experience.
Lévi-Strauss’s point was that modern techniques were merely reworkings of ideas that have been with us from the dawn of time. When Europe was still chaining up the mad, shamans in “primitive” societies were already treating patients on the metaphorical psychoanalyst’s couch.5 (Much later, he would argue in La Potière jalouse that many of Freud’s psychoanalytic theories, such as the oral or anal character, effectively recycled indigenous Jivaro myths.) In fact, it was only in the then most experimental branch of psychoanalysis, namely group therapy, that modern practitioners were beginning to approach the most sophisticated techniques that had been known to shamans for millennia.
Lévi-Strauss’s concluding remarks moved from psychoanalysis to the unconscious to myth, making perhaps his strongest appeal yet to the kind of structuralism of symbolic and mythic thought that would end up dominating the rest of his career. Memories, strange incidents, and personal histories related to the unconscious like words to a language, where “the vocabulary matters less than the structure.” Myths, whether embodied in individual neurotic complexes or social narratives, were stocks of unconscious representations, structured by a limited set of laws. He ended by drawing a direct parallel between language and myth, already hinting at a project that would culminate in the Mythologiques quartet:There are many languages, but very few structural laws which are valid for all languages. A compilation of known tales and myths would fill an imposing number of volumes. But they can be reduced to a small number of simple types if we abstract from, among the diversity of characters, a few elementary functions. As for the complexes—those individual myths—they also correspond to a few simple types, which mold the fluid multiplicity of cases.6
Lévi-Strauss’s brief foray into the world of psychoanalysis left an indelible mark on the future of the profession. The essays deeply influenced Jacques Lacan, who cited them in his early theoretical breakthrough lecture delivered in Zurich, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function ‘I’ as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience,” as well as in his 1953 Rome discourse, a polemic calling for a return to the analysis of the patient’s language. Lacan’s intervention signaled a break from the psychoanalytic establishment and the opening up of a new form of practice—as abstruse as it was influential—that spread through the humanities in the 1960s and ’70s.
MANY HAVE NOTED the extraordinary unity of Lévi-Strauss’s intellectual output. These early essays, packed with hints of the future direction of his work, are a testament to his steady progression and the internal consistency of his ideas. By the end of the 1940s, he had eased into position the foundation stones on which he would construct his life’s work; many of the theoretical set pieces that would crop up again and again in books, interviews and articles were already in place. For Lévi-Strauss, language, as a formal system of differences, had become more than just an analogy. It was a template that could draw out new truths from diverse domains: kinship, the unconscious, symbolic thought, myth and aesthetic composition.
Lévi-Strauss’s remarkably coherent theoretical outlook was twinned with the conviction that the whole of the humanities, following the lead of linguistics, was on the brink of a scientific revolution, destined to move in his direction. He even read back into previous key works the beginnings of a struggle toward structuralist thought. When, in 1950, Lévi-Strauss was asked by the sociologist Georges Gurvitch to write an introduction to the work of Marcel Mauss as part of a series of books on recently deceased intellectual greats (Mauss had died three years earlier, at the age of seventy-seven, after a bout of bronchitis), Lévi-Strauss tried to portray him as a proto-structuralist. In this rewriting of French intellectual history, the Essai sur le don (The Gift) was the breakthrough—a work in which anthropology finally moved beyond mere observation and crude comparisons to look at its subject matter as a system, alive with correlations, formal equivalences and in
terdependent parts, and reducible to a limited set of operations. “The Essai sur le don therefore inaugurates a new era for the social sciences, just as phonology did for linguistics,” wrote Lévi-Strauss, and “can be compared to the discovery of combinatorial analysis for modern mathematical thinking.” Mauss had provided the inspiration, but had not been able to follow through. “Like Moses conducting his people to the promised land whose splendour he would never behold,” Lévi-Strauss concluded, Mauss had halted “at the edge of . . . immense possibilities.”7
Gurvitch was unhappy with this interpretation, which did indeed seem to willfully manipulate the legacy of France’s most celebrated anthropologist. Claude Lefort cut to the heart of Lévi-Strauss’s sleight of hand in Les Temps modernes, in the same review in which he had taken on Les Structures élémentaires. For Lefort, Lévi-Strauss’s reading “seems foreign to his inspiration: Mauss aim[ed] at meaning, not at symbols,” wanted to understand “behavior without leaving the realm of experience” and was never trying to construct a Lévi-Strauss-type superstructure of logic.8
ON THE STRENGTH of Les Structures élémentaires and a now respectable body of published articles, Lévi-Strauss’s reputation was growing, and moves were already afoot to have him admitted to the prestigious Collège de France. Founded in the sixteenth century by Francis I for the king’s lecturers, the Collège de France remains an elite institution, the pinnacle of French intellectual life. Part of its attraction is that it functions at a remove from the university system. It does not award degrees or administer exams, nor is there a syllabus or student body. The day-today bureaucracy of university life is eliminated in favor of pure, original research, presented in a series of twelve two-hour lectures, open to the public. Membership is for life, voted by existing members. In the secure but open-ended environment of the Collège, with its mission “to teach science in the making,”9 academics either flatlined or innovated. Lévi-Strauss, who was already furrowing his own idiosyncratic intellectual path, would surely thrive.
At the time, admission to this elite intellectual sect still seemed a surreal prospect for Lévi-Strauss. “I hardly knew what the Collège de France was,” he recalled, remembering it from his youth as “a fearsome place, off limits,” which he had avoided even setting foot in as a student.10 But unbeknownst to him, even before he arrived back in Paris, his supporters had begun mobilizing on his behalf. As he was leaving New York, Gaston Berger had made the throwaway remark that Lévi-Strauss was returning to France to enter the Collège. At the time, Lévi-Strauss had dismissed it as banter, but when he arrived back in Paris, the psychologist Henri Piéron called him for a meeting and told him that he had supporters in the Collège who wanted to see him elected. Lévi-Strauss was seen as a modernizing force, both in terms of his theories and his progressive politics—progressive, that is, in comparison with the sclerotically conservative hierarchy that still dominated the institution. The old guard was epitomized by Edmond Faral, who had held the chair in Latin Literature of the Middle Ages since 1924 and was then the Collège’s administrator.
When a chair became vacant, Piéron put Lévi-Strauss forward for election, in November 1949, but he was defeated. One year later another chair at the Collège came up. The linguist Émile Benveniste nominated Lévi-Strauss once more, but again he was turned down. By coincidence, Lévi-Strauss was giving the Fondation Loubat lecture series at the Collège as his application was being considered for the second time, delivering six talks on the Mythic Expression of Social Structure. In the audience were Max Ernst, André Breton, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Georges Dumézil. It was during these talks that Lévi-Strauss cemented his friendship with Dumézil—a key influence and ally in the years to come.
“Not naming any names,” Lévi-Strauss told me, “there was an element of anti-Semitism in my failure.” Faral, who during the occupation had barred Jews from the Collège even before the October 1940 law had required him to do so,11 apparently told Lévi-Strauss to his face that he would never enter the Collège. More generally, Lévi-Strauss had been caught up in a struggle between conservatives and progressives. “I had been an innocent,” he told Didier Eribon, “brought in to a quarrel between ancients and moderns: the traditionalists still included men who, by their spirit or arrogance, belonged to another century.”
The double blow at the Collège was compounded by the separation from his second wife, Rose-Marie, a marriage that had lasted only a few years. “I broke with my past, rebuilt my private life” is as forthcoming as Lévi-Strauss ever was on the subject.12 Short of money, he moved into the then working-class eleventh arrondissement—one of his rare spells outside the sixteenth. He was also forced to sell part of his treasured collection of indigenous artifacts—the masks and bowls for which he had scrimped and saved in New York. Half went to his friend Jacques Lacan, with other objects being sold to André Malraux, the Musée de l’Homme and a museum in the Dutch university town of Leiden.
BETWEEN THE TWO REJECTIONS from the Collège, Lévi-Strauss traveled to the subcontinent. He had secured funding through Métraux, who was then working for UNESCO’s Bureau for Racial Relations, for a two-month mission to Pakistan and India studying the possibilities for future research in the region, for UNESCO’s social sciences division. Lévi-Strauss traveled in the aftermath of one of the most cataclysmic partitions in history—Britain’s rapidly concocted division between India and Pakistan, which had erupted in bloodletting and left millions destitute in refugee camps, scattered on both sides of the borders. He visited Karachi, Dacca, the Chittagong Hills, Calcutta, New Delhi, Lahore and Peshawar, later condensing the six hundred pages of notes he took into two sections in Tristes Tropiques.
He flew to Karachi via Egypt, over the pale pinks—“peach bloom, mother of pearl, the iridescence of raw fish”—of the desert sands before rolling mists dissolved into the night.13 A dawn flight took him across the newly created partition, floating over a patchwork of pink and green agricultural fields, akin to “the geographical musings of Paul Klee.” Down to the mouths of the Ganges globular fields clustered together, surrounded by the viscous waters of the floodplains and the mangrove forests of the Sundarbans.14
In Calcutta he found himself mobbed by stump-waving beggars, rickshaw touts, shoeblacks, pimps and porters, while in the Chittagong Hills, where he stayed in a luxurious room in a Swiss-style chalet called the Circuit House, he was smothered by the attentions of teams of manservants. They preempted his every whim, serving five meals a day, continually offering to bathe him, even waiting outside the privy “to snatch the master’s substance from him.” He was repelled by their unctuousness—“There is something sexual in this anguished submission,” he observed—imprisoned in a colonial bubble that had survived independence intact.15
Traveling into the tribal areas north of Chittagong, Lévi-Strauss engaged in another short spell of on-the-hoof ethnography among the Kuki. He stayed in a bamboo house perched on a hillside, with ample verandas where women pounded paddy in a giant mortar with two-meter-high pestles. Deer, monkey, boar and panther skulls were used as decorations. On the evening of his arrival, the festivities began. They were served rice beer in oxen horns and treated to “extremely monotonous” dance songs, which Lévi-Strauss later transcribed. The boys wore loincloths, sashes and glass bead necklaces; the girls, knee-length skirts loaded with copper tubes, beetle-wing-fringed breastplates and ivory earplugs.
Lévi-Strauss’s experiences generated two almost apologetic papers, which remain elegies to his earlier forays into ethnography in Brazil. The first outlined a set of kinship terms for the Cakma, Kuki and Mog tribes, a list that remained incomplete “on account of the briefness of our stay in the native villages”; the second consisted of “highly fragmentary” descriptions of the Kuki village.16 Interestingly, the Kuki had already featured in Les Structures élémentaires as one of the key examples of a simple form of “generalized exchange.”17
Lévi-Strauss’s impressions of the subcontinent were bleak. In so
me of his most misanthropic writing, he recalled teeming cities, festering slums and dull, functional apartment blocks, like the half-built concrete cube he had driven past in the abandoned city in Brazil’s interior. All that he saw around him was “filth, chaos, promiscuity, congestion; ruins, huts, mud, dirt; dung, urine, pus, humours, secretions and running sores.”18 In a disturbing image, he likened the city slums to goose pens for producing foie gras, which he had seen in Mont-de-Marsan during his first year teaching at the Lycée Victor-Duruy. Each goose was wedged in a box, “reduced to the status of a mere feeding tube.” But there was an important difference—while the geese were being fattened up, the poor were being slimmed down. Like some sinister structuralist model, their tiny cubicles were “mere points of connection with the communal sewer,” reducing human life “to the pure exercise of excretory functions.”19
Was it temperament, culture shock or the difficult phase of his life—the disappointment at the Collège and his unraveling marriage—that produced such a toxic response to his experiences on the subcontinent? Whatever his reasons, the trip confirmed his growing disillusionment with modernity. Overpopulation would become thematic in Lévi-Strauss’s evolving critique. Man had once been in proportion to the natural landscapes he inhabited, roaming through vast forests, settling along thousand-kilometer littorals and roaring rivers. He was now reduced to “life on a pocket handkerchief scale,” in the drab uniformity of the world’s rapidly expanding cities.20
Claude Levi-Strauss: The Poet in the Laboratory Page 21