The counterattack came from Roger Caillois, a writer, sociologist and founding editor of the interdisciplinary journal Diogène. Superficially, Caillois’s life had closely paralleled Lévi-Strauss’s. In the interwar years he had mixed academia with surrealism, joining Bataille and Leiris in the short-lived experiment of the Collège de sociologie, set up to pursue Mauss’s research into the sociology of the sacred, which combined surrealism and anthropology.36 On the outbreak of the Second World War, Caillois found himself stranded in Argentina, where he taught and wrote. Like Lévi-Strauss, he had headed into the backlands, roving as far afield as Patagonia, subsequently writing eloquent accounts of his journeys. They met after the war in New York, when Lévi-Strauss, then cultural attaché, invited Caillois to give a talk. Both became acolytes of Dumézil; both developed a fascination for mythology. Their paths crossed again when they went head-to-head for Marcel Mauss’s old chair, which Lévi-Strauss had ended up securing. Erudite, cultured, an intense thinker and poetic writer, Caillois could have been Lévi-Strauss’s alter ego. “We ought to have got along,” recalled Lévi-Strauss.37
But despite their similar formations, Caillois had come to radically different conclusions than Lévi-Strauss, which he explored in a critical review of Race et histoire, published in two parts in La Nouvelle revue française.38 By the 1950s Caillois had cast off his youthful infatuation with surrealism, the irrational, the primitive, and was beginning to reassess his own sympathies. Surrealists and anthropologists like Lévi-Strauss saw their own society as sullied and hypocritical, and had naïvely sought purity, “safe at the opposite ends of the geographical spectrum.”39 For Caillois, Lévi-Strauss’s veneration of preliterate cultures at the expense of the West was a question of inverse ethnocentrism—a twentieth-century disease of decadence and cultural malaise. Lévi-Strauss had perversely exaggerated the achievements of primitive societies. The complexities of aboriginal kinship systems said nothing about the aboriginal cultures themselves. What was an achievement, argued Caillois, was anthropology’s attempts to model them. The West’s openness to other cultures, the very existence of a discipline such as anthropology, was, for Caillois, a clear sign of superiority.40
In “Diogène couché,” published in Les Temps modernes, Lévi-Strauss responded, launching a violent, thirty-three-page assault on Caillois. He reiterated his position, charging Caillois with crude ethnocentrism, accusing him of underestimating the mental efforts that went into constructing and sustaining so-called primitive cultures. Referring to his opponent as “M. Caillois” throughout, Lévi-Strauss pulled no punches. “America had its McCarthy and we have our McCaillois,”41 he wrote, portraying Caillois as a dangerously paranoid apologist for the West. The debate—a classic progressive-conservative battle in the culture wars of 1950s France—rumbled on in the following issue, which published an exchange of letters between Caillois and Lévi-Strauss. “The Caillois-Lévi-Strauss controversy has been the big event in Parisian literary circles,” Métraux wrote in a letter to the photographer and self-taught ethnographer Pierre Verger. “Lévi-Strauss’s response is a masterpiece of reasoning, language and cruelty.”42
Caillois’s piece had clearly hit a nerve. “It made me very angry,” Lévi-Strauss recalled.43 Years later, Caillois remembered being shocked, rendered speechless by the vehemence of the counterattack. The aggressiveness was, indeed, out of character for Lévi-Strauss, but an undercurrent of defensiveness ran beneath the rhetoric. Perhaps the most wounding of all Caillois’s criticisms was the accusation that Lévi-Strauss had been part of a group that was surrealist before being ethnographic. The implication was that Lévi-Strauss was an intellectual lightweight, following a poorly thought-out avant-garde vogue for the exotic, rather than a solid anthropological position.
Lévi-Strauss conceded that he was an “autodidact” where fieldwork was concerned, but distanced himself from the surrealists. He admitted to contributing articles to their magazines, but said that he had never really collaborated with them; he knew Breton, but their ideas were “completely different.”
Maneuvering himself away from the avant-garde, Lévi-Strauss repositioned himself in far less controversial territory—back to the very French tradition of using primitive cultures as “tuning forks” in philosophical debates. His intellectual interest in the “primitive” was more classical, a part of a genealogy running from Montaigne and Rabelais and passing through Swift, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Voltaire and Diderot, “a tradition of Western thought that presses an exoticism, real or imaginary, into service for a social criticism.” Contemporary fascination for the primitive was not merely a symptom of a twentieth-century crise de conscience, as Caillois had argued, but one that had produced classics such as Essais, Discours sur l’origine de l’inégalité and Candide. “I am not the person Caillois thinks I am,” Lévi-Strauss concluded with a rhetorical flourish, writing that perhaps this person, “a wavering surrealist, an amateur ethnographer, a muddleheaded radical”—surréaliste velléitaire, ethnographe amateur, agitateur brouillon—was closer to Caillois himself.44
Lévi-Strauss was fighting for credibility, for gravitas in a small academic world that had already rebuffed him. He was trying to build his reputation as a serious academic, steering anthropology in a more rigorous, scientific direction. In this context, Caillois’s charge of being a dilettante was wounding. But Lévi-Strauss would soon find that it was Caillois who was out of step with the mood of the nation. Its confidence destroyed by the years of occupation, France was about to suffer a further string of defeats, as the age of empire sped toward its conclusion.
7
Memoir
A man lives two existences. Until the age of forty-five he absorbs the elements surrounding him. Then, all of a sudden, it’s over; he doesn’t absorb anything more. Thereafter he lives the duplicate of his first existence, and tries to tally the succeeding days with the rhythms and the odours of his earlier active life.
PIERRE MAC ORLAN1
THE FRENCH EMPIRE, which had been in limbo through the occupation, had begun to unravel at the end of the Second World War. From the late 1940s on, there was unrest in Morocco, Cameroon, Madagascar and Algeria, with growing Vietminh resistance in French Indochina. In 1954, at Dien Bien Phu, a basin sunk into the hills of the modern-day Vietnamese-Laotian border, the French Empire went into retreat. After parachuting thousands of men in to secure a dilapidated Japanese-built airstrip, the French Expeditionary Forces were humiliatingly overpowered by Ho Chi Minh’s army—pounded by artillery from the high ground and reduced to trench warfare in the jungle valleys. Months after losing Indochina, France faced rebellion in her North African départements . The National Liberation Front maquisards (guerrillas) launched attacks across Algeria, beginning the traumatic and drawn-out loss of what was then seen as an integral part of France itself. By the mid-1950s the colonial paradigm, which had shaped not just geopolitical arrangements, but French attitudes and culture, was beginning to fall apart.
Postwar France was gripped by a renewed sense of pathos and disillusionment, but it was coupled with a growing interest in the non-Western cultures then emerging from beneath the imperial boot. Anthropologists became well-placed witnesses to this moment of revelation. Their field sites were at the margins of collapsing empires; the people they studied, after years relegated to bit parts in colonial sagas, were finding their voice. Culturally, the world was bending back on itself, rediscovering its own diversity, as one by one the imperial blocks began to disaggregate. The renaming of Lévi-Strauss’s chair was symbolic of the shifting sensibilities. When he took up the post it was called Religions of Uncivilized Peoples (Religions des peuples non civilisés), a title that became less and less tenable. On several occasions Lévi-Strauss remembered having his interpretations challenged by the “uncivilized” people themselves—African students studying at the Sorbonne. He eventually succeeded in modernizing the chair’s title to Comparative Religions of Peoples without Writing (Religions comparées des peuples s
ans écriture)—a firmer, more scientific designation, less likely to offend.
ONE OF THE many thinkers and writers who were sensing the changing mood was the geographer and ethnohistorian Jean Malaurie, a ruggedly handsome man with strong Gallic features, then in his late twenties. In the aftermath of the Second World War he had taken part in a series of scientific expeditions to Greenland. At around the same age as Lévi-Strauss when he had set off for Brazil, Malaurie had gone solo, traveling into the labyrinth of hummocks around Thule in the higher latitudes of the Arctic, in an expedition that had none of the trappings of Lévi-Strauss’s adventures. “I landed in Thule on July 23, 1950 . . . after twenty-three days at sea,” wrote Malaurie. “I immediately decided to spend the winter 150 kilometers farther north, in Siorapaluk: thirty-two inhabitants, six igloos . . . My equipment? There was none. I extracted permission from the Danish authorities to spend the winter there for one year once I was there.”2
In spite of the remoteness of their territories, the Inuit were also living on the edge of empire. While traveling through the region by dogsled, Malaurie had stumbled across what at first appeared to be a monstrous mirage—a fenced-off compound housing an anonymous steel installation, the noise of machinery muffled by the snowfields. It turned out to be a top secret U.S. Air Force nuclear base, one of the many springing up as part of a developing Cold War logic. Even in these Arctic wastes, the West was on the move, bumbling blithely into Inuit territories, with no thought of the impact this might have. Although not trained as an ethnographer, Malaurie produced the first written genealogical records of these Inuit groups and became a passionate advocate of their culture.
On his return, Malaurie was out walking in Paris when, on the spur of the moment, he knocked on the door of the publishers Plon and proposed an account of his adventures. At the same time he put forward a new idea for a series of books to be called Terre humaine. His timing was perfect. Postwar, publishers in France were reworking their nonfiction lists, turning for inspiration to the new wave of the humanities to meet the needs of an expanding educated readership. In 1950 Gallimard launched Sartre and Merleau-Ponty’s Bibliothèque de philosophie. The Bibliothèque de psychanalyse et de psychologie clinique and the Bibliothèque de sociologie contemporaine came out under the imprint Les Presses universitaires de France in the same year. Soon afterward Plon responded with two new collections: Recherches en sciences humaines (1952) and Civilisations d’hier et d’aujourd’hui (1953).3
Terre humaine would be subtly different from what had gone before. Malaurie envisaged a series that would be a collection of “voyages philosophiques ” for the twentieth century, featuring modern-day savants on the move through the cultural hinterlands. The books would be intellectual but autobiographical, scientific yet engaged, feeding off the rich and largely unexplored literary terrain of indigenous cultures and ethnographic research.
By chance, Malaurie had come across Lévi-Strauss’s complementary thesis on the Nambikwara while browsing in Paris’s old university press library. He later confessed that he had found it boring, but while the ethnographic descriptions had left him cold, he had been captivated by the photographs—Lévi-Strauss’s expressive images of the nomadic Nambikwara. Perhaps as a counterpoint to his own experiences in the Arctic, Malaurie looked to the tropics for one of the first books in the new series, asking Lévi-Strauss if he could write a nonacademic book about his experiences in Brazil.
Lévi-Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques joined the collection’s early titles along with Jean Malaurie’s own Les Derniers rois de Thulé; Victor Segalen’s docunovel about his turn-of-the-twentieth-century experiences in Tahiti, Les Immémoriaux; and Afrique ambiguë, by anthropologist Georges Balandier. Later Malaurie mixed in the autobiography of Native American Don Talayesva, Soleil Hopi, for which Lévi-Strauss would write a preface, as well as Margaret Mead’s Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies and her controversial classic Coming of Age in Samoa, under the title Moeurs et sexualité en Océanie.
Tristes Tropiques was a book of loss, of mourning, a middle-aged lament for the passing of time. It came out of a particular period in Lévi-Strauss’s personal life. On top of his divorce and related financial problems, his father, Raymond, had died in 1953. He had been hugely influential in Lévi-Strauss’s early years, something that he would fully realize only much later. The cultural references that Raymond had imparted to his son would shape the latter part of Lévi-Strauss’s career, and in interviews he would come back again and again to his experiences with his father.
Ironically, Tristes Tropiques represented a lowering of expectations around his career. Had he believed he was still in contention for the Collège de France, he later confessed, he would never have dared embark on something that could be seen as intellectually lightweight, but as it stood he felt he had nothing to lose. He had already dabbled with a more literary style of writing, with his abortive attempts at a novel. His notes from Brazil that had followed him around the world were still boxed up, a good deal of the material as yet unused. He was just entering middle age, trying to settle down and put his eventful past behind him. “I had a full bag that I wanted to unpack,” he later said.4
Lévi-Strauss had also sensed that his academic work lacked a human dimension. In spite of his aloofness, he was, after all, flesh and blood. “I was sick of seeing myself labelled in universities as a machine without a soul,” he told the historian François Dosse, with uncharacteristic feeling, “good only for putting men into formulas.”5 Nevertheless, he wrote Tristes Tropiques consumed by guilt, feeling that it was taking up time that should really have been devoted to proper academic work, like the second volume of his kinship studies, which he would never in fact write. This combination of guilt and liberation, the feeling that he was shirking his professional duties and the thrill that he might be burning his bridges once and for all produced an adrenal rush of activity. Over the winter of 1954-55, working at the astonishing pace of more than a hundred pages per month, he hammered through the first draft in “a permanent state of intense exasperation, putting in whatever occurred to me without any forethought.”6
Written on a small German typewriter that Lévi-Strauss had picked up in a bric-a-brac shop in São Paulo, the resulting manuscript, held at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, is one continuous stream of words, with the occasional “changer de page” or “chapitre” typed midpage the only indication of a break in the narrative. As if working up a collage, Lévi-Strauss cut and pasted sections from old papers and notes onto the page, using strips of sticky tape, now brittle and yellowing with age. Whole chunks of his petite thèse, La Vie familiale et sociale des Indiens nambikwara, were included verbatim, stuck onto blank pages, modified only by replacing the academic nous with the more intimate je. Lévi-Strauss incorporated lectures, course notes and old articles. Chapter seventeen, for instance, which describes Lévi-Strauss’s first disappointing fieldwork experiences among the Tibagy and the Kaingang in the state of Paraná, was culled from “Entre os selvagens civilizados” (“Among the Civilized Savages”), an article he had written for the culture supplement of the Brazilian national newspaper the Estado de São Paulo. Since his own notebooks on the Caduveo had disappeared during the war, parts of chapters eighteen and nineteen were lifted from his wife Dina’s notes. And he filled out discussions of Nambikwara familial relations with an early Freudian interpretation of tribal dynamics, “The Social and Psychological Aspects of Chieftainship in a Primitive Tribe,” published during the war in Transactions of the New York Academy of Sciences.
Many of the aphorisms that seem to crop up spontaneously were actually copied directly from a green notebook that Lévi-Strauss used to jot down ideas as they came to him, such as: “The tropics are less exotic, than out of date”; “Napoléon is the Mohammed of the West”; and “Le moi est haïssable” (The self is detestable). Above this last he wrote, in red, “Pas de moi = ilyaun rien et un nous” (The absence of self = there is a nothingness and an us), which
reappeared at the end of Tristes Tropiques as, “The self is not only hateful: there is no place for it between us and nothing.”7 (However, other interesting thoughts, like the cryptic “travel = the same and the reverse of a psychoanalysis,” were left out.)8 But there was much that was new, including a wealth of personal reminiscence, largely about Brazil, but also from his university days.
In between the spurts of speed-writing, some sections were labored over—particularly the often complex concluding sentences in which Lévi-Strauss tried to encapsulate his ideas on a given topic. In the preparatory notes he made for the book, there are five different versions of the last sentence in the section on Caduveo face painting, for instance. He ended up with a labored finale,9 but perhaps he would have been better off with one of the versions he rejected—the less cumbersome and more lyrical “In this charming civilization the fashions of the female beauties evoke a golden age; laws are turned into poetry, and rather than be expressed in codes, are sung through their finery as they reveal their nudity.”10 But what is remarkable about the original manuscript is that it is in fact only lightly edited. Comments in crimson ballpoint and blue pencil are mainly minor tightening of language—semble becomes est, for instance, or redundant adverbs like sans doute, complètement, profondément are scored out, as are the odd flippant remarks. After a discussion of the erotic effect of Caduveo face designs, for example, Lévi-Strauss exclaimed, “Our powders and rouges pale in comparison!,” but then decided against it.11
Claude Levi-Strauss: The Poet in the Laboratory Page 23