BLOCKED FROM ASCENT in France’s hierarchical academic system, Lévi-Strauss felt himself adrift. He said that at this point he was convinced he would not have a “real career,” that he even entertained doubts about continuing to pursue anthropology, thinking again about journalism or writing.21 This seems difficult to square with his growing reputation in France and abroad. Even though he had failed entrance to the Collège, his career was progressing. At the end of 1950, on the heels of his second rejection at the Collège, he was appointed director of studies of the more conservative Fifth Section of the École pratique des hautes études, devoted to sciences religieuses (religious studies). He filled the chair left vacant by the retiring Maurice Leenhardt, the same chair that had been held by the great Marcel Mauss from the turn of the twentieth century up until the Second World War. It was another hard-fought appointment process. Leenhardt, a missionary-turned-anthropologist who had studied the Kanak people in New Caledonia, opposed Lévi-Strauss’s selection, favoring one of his student protégés to succeed him. But with the help of Georges Dumézil, Lévi-Strauss finally secured tenure. There he would become part of an illustrious intellectual heritage, which included several figures who influenced the formation of his own thought—Mauss, Dumézil as well as Marcel Granet and Alexandre Kojève.
The chair signaled a major change of direction for Lévi-Strauss, which in retrospect would split his career into two distinct phases. Perhaps fortunately, the post steered him away from the shoals of kinship and into the open waters of religious thought, an area that was looser, more to do with ideas, not so bound to the specifics of field data. Although Lévi-Strauss would continue to come back to kinship periodically, and still harbored a desire to write the Structures complexes companion piece to his thesis, future work would increasingly develop a more interpretive flavor. When I asked him why, after years dedicated to decoding kinship systems, he had lit out into new intellectual territory, he replied in a typically fatalistic fashion. There had been no real choice involved, as the shift in direction was imposed upon him. He had to fulfill his duties in a chair that was devoted to religious studies, he explained, as if he were merely a drone in the academic hive. But in retrospect the pull on the tiller seems rooted in Lévi-Strauss’s own evolving sense of where he wanted to end up. A trail of earlier articles on shamanism, myth and symbolism, written in the late 1940s while he was giving his Religious Life of Primitives seminars at the Sixth Section, had already signaled intent. By the 1950s, Lévi-Strauss was angling toward more interpretive areas of investigation, better suited to his aesthetic, literary frame of mind.
His decade of Wednesday afternoon lectures and seminars at the Fifth Section was a crucial road test for this new line of thinking. Following the method he had adopted in New York, he used his lecture cycle as an opportunity to think aloud, toy with new ideas, giving verbal expositions of what would later turn into essays and books. He worked from a rough outline but would go off on tangents when the mood took him, following chains of associations across the globe, bringing his now considerable ethnographic knowledge to bear on conceptual hypotheses. He was searching, he told Didier Eribon, for “small islands of organisation,” in among “a vast empirical stew.”22 I was curious to know how he had identified these islands. The process, he told me, was essentially one of trial and error.
For this reason he banned the use of tape recorders, so as “to feel at liberty to engage in mental struggle, explore odd byways, submit tentative ideas to the test of oral formulation”—a test he said he often failed.23 He didn’t want what he considered risky, malformed ideas preserved on tape, to contradict him after he had ironed out the inconsistencies. Perhaps he need not have worried—time and again former students have commented on how incredibly clear his expositions were the first time around. “He spoke as he wrote,” said Philippe Descola, Lévi-Strauss’s student and in many ways his natural successor as the current director of the Laboratoire d’anthropologie and professor of anthropology at the Collège. Descola spoke to me in what had been Lévi-Strauss’s office, still containing the low-slung leather chair on which a much younger Descola had sat, terrified, when he had asked Lévi-Strauss to be his supervisor.24 “It was like seeing Kant, Hegel,” Descola told me. “He was one of the great geniuses of the twentieth century.” The office was now book lined and adorned with South American indigenous artifacts, including a mask with clumps of straw for hair and, in a cheeky, postmodern reference, the Arumbaya fetish from Tintin and the Broken Ear. “He built up complex sentences, piling up subclauses, but always landed on his feet,” Descola explained.25
As a method, it was rather like Breton’s automatism—a kind of intellectual free association, which uncovered the hidden links between apparently unrelated data. Through this free jazz of the mind, Lévi-Strauss began exploring the connections that reproduced themselves in a metaphysical world of myth and mysticism. The first course he taught at the Fifth Section, the Visitation of the Souls, returned to his fieldwork in Brazil, looking at relations between the living and the dead among the Bororo. Lévi-Strauss had arrived too late to witness the early stages of Bororo funeral rites—the rotting of the body in an open grave, covered over with loose branches; the washing of the deceased’s bones in the stream, and their painting and adorning with feathers. But he had been present at the long and complex rites that followed.
Fifteen years later, Lévi-Strauss dissected what he had seen. Combining his own fieldwork with his library research in New York, he drew comparisons between the Bororo rituals and those of the North American Algonquian and the Sioux-speaking Winnebago and Omaha, looking at the spatial directions (east-west, up-down, left-right, etc.) as well as certain colors, animals and vegetables that proliferated through the rites. Recurrent symbols, such as the use of a shell for water, a rounded stone for the earth or a star for the sky, were for Lévi-Strauss a kind of “algebra” that could give mathematical shape to these apparently inchoate rituals. Using structural analysis, rich belief systems could be boiled down, reduced to simpler, more formal systems of fundamental oppositions. The resulting dual and tripartite configurations echoed the social organization of the groups. It was a kind of inversion of Durkheimian method, linking ideas, rituals and myth back to the social, rather than the other way round. “The relationship between the living and the dead,” Lévi-Strauss concluded with a kind of proto-structuralist simplification, “is no more than the projection, on the screen of religious thought, of real relations between the living.”26
The following year Lévi-Strauss moved on to mythology, comparing the origin myths among the Hopi, Zuni and Acoma of the western/central Pueblo Indians. It was the beginning of his life’s work—a two-decade-long obsession that would take him further and further into the more obscure recesses of the indigenous imagination. The Mythologiques quartet would begin to appear only in the 1960s, but fragments were already coming together as early as 1952.
IN THE MIDDLE OF 1952 Lévi-Strauss traveled to Bloomington, Indiana, to speak at a conference that brought together linguists and anthropologists. There, he began putting a cognitive, even neurological gloss on what he saw as the growing rapprochement between linguistics and anthropology. He made theatrical references to “the uninvited guest, the human mind,” arguing that language and culture had to be related in some way; otherwise the mind would either be “a complete jumble” or would consist of “compartments separated by rigid bulkheads.”27 The quest lay in a systematic cultural analysis that would ultimately shed light on how the brain worked. “For centuries the humanities and social sciences have resigned themselves to contemplating the world of the natural and exact sciences as a kind of paradise which they will never enter,” he concluded, with an allusion to his introduction to the work of Marcel Mauss. “All of a sudden there is a small door which is being opened between the two fields and it is linguistics which has done it.”28 It was through this “small door” that Lévi-Strauss entered, searching for a communicating passage between anth
ropology and the hard sciences. His enormous influence as a postwar thinker would rest on this initial gamble, and his boldness in bringing together two very different types of inquiry. Over the next decade, scores of scholars from neighboring disciplines—literary criticism, psychoanalysis, philosophy—would follow in behind him, looking for the rigor that linguistics had achieved.
In the same year, Lévi-Strauss’s contributions to a major anthropology symposium in New York drove his arguments further. The event, sponsored by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, brought together eighty scholars to discuss the state of the art in anthropology. It featured many of the discipline’s leading lights, academics such as Margaret Mead, Alfred Kroeber, Robert Lowie and Julian Steward, whom Lévi-Strauss had met in New York during the war. They were joined by scholars from neighboring fields, such as the sociologist Robert Redfield and Lévi-Strauss’s friend and collaborator Roman Jakobson, for a wide-ranging discussion of the discipline’s achievements and its future.
Transcripts of Lévi-Strauss’s contributions show a mind sparking with new ideas, pushing the insights from structural linguistics in novel and eccentric directions. When asked to discuss how structural analysis could be used in domains outside linguistics, he returned to his half-formed thoughts on the differences between plant species that had occurred to him while he idled on the Maginot Line on the eve of the fall of France. Postwar research had confirmed his intuitions. Differences between species could indeed be systematically described in terms of permutations of core features. Just as in linguistics, scientists had nailed down small sets of contrasts—petals and carpels were either separated or united, stamens numerous or few, the corolla regular or irregular, and so forth—which, in different combinations, generated abundant diversity.29 For Lévi-Strauss, the same genetic principal could be equally applied to a range of cultural domains, from fine art to tools, clothing to kinship and mythology.30
Wherever Lévi-Strauss looked he saw formal connections. It was the early days of television, and the snowy images that the sets produced were still a novelty. He was intrigued to notice that low-frequency bands yielded only an outline, a mere sketch of a figure or an object, whereas high frequencies filled in the image, giving it the appearance of solidity. In a far-fetched analogy, he likened the contrast to art’s fundamental properties: the division between drawing and painting. Culture and technology, science and art were blending in the structural echo chamber of Lévi-Strauss’s mind, each revealing the other’s hidden properties.
Lévi-Strauss was already supplementing his prodigious ethnographic reading with Norbert Wiener on cybernetics and Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver’s The Mathematical Theory of Communication. Through the prism of early digital theorizing, crossovers into the social sciences seemed plausible. “Communication is not only a field for linguistics,” Lévi-Strauss explained in the symposium, “but it can be said that society is, by itself and as a whole, a very large machine for establishing communication on many different levels between human beings.”31 The image revealed one wing of Lévi-Strauss’s early thought: a mechanistic outlook that refused to grant cultural phenomena any special metaphysical status. As chief engineer to this “very large machine,” Lévi-Strauss was tinkering with its components, drawing up blueprints of its various interlocking devices, measuring each rotation and monitoring the engine’s rhythms. Yet at the same time—and this disjuncture runs through the whole body of his work—Lévi-Strauss was not ultimately interested in the machine’s functions or outputs. Like Niki de Saint Phalle’s Stravinsky Fountain mobiles beside the Centre Pompidou, with their spouting hoses and whirring wheels, Lévi-Strauss’s cultural engine was an aesthetic contraption that worked, but to no discernible end.
In his concluding remarks at the symposium, Lévi-Strauss was asked to sketch anthropology’s progress so far and its prospects for the future, a task that he warmed to with an interesting take on the discipline’s formation. In the past, anthropology had fed off the scraps, the garbage left over by the established disciplines. In the Middle Ages virtually anything outside Europe was considered, in a philosophical sense, anthropological. With the rise of classical studies, mainstream scholars commandeered Indian and Chinese thought, restricting anthropology to Africa, Oceania and South America. In the modern setting, professional anthropology has been pushed further to the fringes, scavenging in the dustbins of academia. Paradoxically, the “ragpickers” had found gold. Driven to the extremes of human culture, anthropology was now on the point of making profound intellectual discoveries. (Margaret Mead took immediate exception to what she saw as Lévi-Strauss’s equation between indigenous culture and garbage, but his analogy was innocent. It was meant only in the sense that anthropologists were rummaging through the offcuts of other disciplines, as he subsequently explained, “picking up odds and ends.”)
Kant had envisaged the world as a division between the “starry skies” (Newtonian physics) and “moral law” (Kant’s own philosophy); anthropology, via linguistics, Lévi-Strauss concluded, was poised to unite these realms into a federated union of diverse, but related, disciplines:Linguists have already told us that inside our mind there are phonemes and morphemes revolving, one around the other, in more or less the same way as planets go around the solar system; and it is in the expectation that this unification may take place that I feel anthropology may really have a meaningful and important function not only in the development of modern society but also in the development of science at large.32
By the early 1950s, Lévi-Strauss’s vision was filling out. He believed that he was living in an era of massive theoretical convergence. In Paris he was meeting regularly with Jacques Lacan, the mathematician Georges Guilbaud and the linguist Émile Benveniste in cross-disciplinary discussions around the concept of structures and how principles in mathematics could be carried over into the human sciences.33 His seminar course at the École had become a magnet for a new generation of thinkers exploring crossover ideas and soaking up findings from ethnography. Discussions ranged from linguistics to psychoanalysis, mathematics to atomic physics, but the core remained anthropology. Through structural analysis, Lévi-Strauss believed anthropology could become a kind of meta-science, capable of discovering not just the foundations of human cultural exchange, but deep laws that resonated through nature. In spite of career setbacks, he had a research program; it now even had a name. “If you had to pick a date for the birth of Lévi-Straussian structuralism,” wrote his Swiss biographer, Denis Bertholet, “it would be 1952: the articles of that year, in the universal ambition that they bring, mark the moment when the suffix ‘-ism’ can be legitimately added, in the history of thought, to the adjective ‘structural.’”34
HIS GRAYING HAIR RECEDING, Lévi-Strauss was now in his mid-forties, hitting the middle-aged plateau. His youth had been disjointed, but ambitious. He had led the largest anthropological expedition of its time across Brazil and had lectured in São Paulo, New York and Paris. His kinship thesis had been published to wide acclaim. After a period of instability, his life was coming together again. From 1952, Lévi-Strauss mixed academic work with a new job, akin to his posting as cultural attaché in New York. Through Métraux, he was nominated as secretary-general of the International Social Science Council at UNESCO. The work was an empty ritual: “I tried to give the impression that an organization without goal or function had a reason for existing,” Lévi-Strauss remembered, a task made more difficult by the generous budgets, which “had to be justified with a semblance of activity.” After the breakup of his marriage to Rose-Marie Ullmo, Lévi-Strauss had begun a relationship with Monique Roman, whom he had met at Jacques Lacan’s house. Born of an American mother and a Belgian father, she was in her late twenties—eighteen years his junior—and was attending his course at the Sorbonne.
Reintegrated into Parisian intellectual life, Lévi-Strauss was becoming well known in certain circles—a relatively small set of interested specialists who attended his courses and spoke at his seminars. A solid
, if unspectacular, career beckoned, as a middle-ranking academic surrounded by a coterie of disciples. His way forward would be unconventional for its times. In a sense Lévi-Strauss was forced to circumvent the university system in order finally to dominate it.
TWO KEY PUBLICATIONS enabled Lévi-Strauss to reach beyond the academy and find a new audience for his ideas: the short pamphlet Race et histoire (1952) and, far more important, his memoir, Tristes Tropiques (1955). Together they gave a layman’s version of what had been an involved, technical argument relayed largely in specialist journals. While Race et histoire drew Lévi-Strauss into a fiery and very public debate around some of the central tenets of anthropological orthodoxy, Tristes Tropiques fleshed out Lévi-Strauss’s public persona, transforming him from a promising academic into a revered intellectual figure.
Race et histoire, commissioned by Alfred Métraux at UNESCO, was one of a series of pamphlets that formed a part of the UN’s project to combat racism. It was a cultural relativist manifesto outlining positions that had been well rehearsed for many years in professional anthropological circles, but which were less known to the general public. Lévi-Strauss’s main target was the nineteenth-century notion of cultural evolution, which had survived into the 1950s as the commonsense understanding of human history. This was the story of steady progression from primitive hunter-gatherer bands, through to more sophisticated agricultural settlements, then on to classical empires, culminating in the great European civilizations.
Aside from being highly conjectural, this version of events was merely a trick of perspective, argued Lévi-Strauss, the product of a distorted, ethnocentric vision. It was impossible to compare cultures, as each had specialized in different areas, working for solutions to different problems. Lévi-Strauss likened the process to the spin of a roulette wheel in a casino. The same numbers brought different yields, depending on the bets laid. Working their own systems, many cultures had succeeded where the West had failed. Inuits and the Bedouin had excelled at life in inhospitable climates; other cultures were thousands of years ahead of the West in terms of integrating the physical and the mental, with yoga, Chinese “breath-techniques” and “the visceral control of the ancient Maoris.” Australian Aborigines, traditionally seen as at the bottom of the evolutionary ladder, had one of the most sophisticated kinship systems in existence. Polynesians had specialized in soilless agriculture and transoceanic navigation; philosophy, art and music had flourished in different ways around the globe.35
Claude Levi-Strauss: The Poet in the Laboratory Page 22