FOR MANY, TRISTES TROPIQUES was more than simply a mesmerizing read—it was life-changing. After reading it, Pierre Clastres switched from philosophy to anthropology and headed for South America. “I remember that Pierre Clastres was crazy about Tristes Tropiques, and had read it four or five times,” recalled his friend and fellow convert Alfred Adler. The Belgian anthropologist Luc de Heusch, a student of Griaule’s, had a similar revelatory experience. He had skimmed Structures élémentaires before setting off for fieldwork in Africa in the early 1950s. There he had set off on a Griaule-style quest, deep into the forests of the Belgian Congo. “In the utopian hope of gaining esoteric knowledge, I had myself initiated into a secret society, ‘the masters of the forest.’ But all the mysteries led to dead ends.” He returned to France disillusioned. But he then read Tristes Tropiques and met Lévi-Strauss in his UNESCO office. “It was the beginning of a long dialogue,” he recalled. “I might have given up ethnology, having been disappointed by fieldwork if, at this critical juncture, Lévi-Strauss had not revealed the possibility of a comparative study of ‘archaic’ societies.” When he returned to Africa, de Heusch embarked on a structural analysis of Bantu myth.31
Jean Pouillon, the philosopher and close friend of Jean-Paul Sartre, was another of the many thinkers inspired by the book. After reading Tristes Tropiques he went back over all of Lévi-Strauss’s published work, writing a laudatory summary—“L’Oeuvre de Claude Lévi-Strauss”—in Les Temps modernes.32 (Intriguingly, in his review Pouillon referred to a forthcoming book by Lévi-Strauss entitled Ethnologie et marxisme, which never in fact appeared.) During this period Pouillon began attending Lévi-Strauss’s seminars, before moving over to anthropology. By 1958 he was in Chad, savoring his own bittersweet experiences of ethnographic fieldwork.
The book had a crystallizing effect, drawing the disaffected into a new intellectual paradigm, as it evoked the brewing melancholy of a soon-to-be postcolonial France. Lévi-Strauss clothed new ideas with a world-weariness, giving them a gravitas that appealed to a certain type of intellectual. “I was sensitive to the pessimism, to this end-of-the-road aspect,” remembered another of his future long-term collaborators, Michel Izard, about first coming across Tristes Tropiques.33
Through Tristes Tropiques, Lévi-Strauss was gathering acolytes, the foot soldiers of the coming structuralist revolution. But as his reputation grew, the critics circled. Caillois had attacked from the right; the historian Maxime Rodinson took him on from the left. Rodinson, a Jewish Marxist historian specializing in the Middle East, had been radicalized early. As lower-middle-class tailors, his Russian émigré parents had joined the French Communist Party soon after its formation. They later perished in Auschwitz in 1943 while Rodinson was serving in Syria and Lebanon. In two articles for La Nouvelle critique, Rodinson picked up on what he felt to be Lévi-Strauss’s ultimate political agnosticism. How could political progress be possible in a world of disparate cultural invention—each creation apparently as valid as the next? Coming from a Marxist perspective, Rodinson argued that anthropologists fetishized the trivial, putting games, material culture or rituals on an equal footing with core socioeconomic realities such as the division of property or labor. Tristes Tropiques’s relativist outlook, he concluded, denied the possibility of revolutionary change, a stance that would “bring desperation to Billancourt”—Paris’s industrial hub, where the highly unionized Renault workers were fighting for better pay and conditions.
While parallels between French factory workers and Nambikwara nomads might seem far-fetched, many would share Rodinson’s critique with more pointed examples from colonial conflict zones. In spite of Lévi-Strauss’s diatribes against the West, his lofty philosophical tone refused political engagement. “Lévi-Strauss led us to this peaceful place,” the anthropologist Alban Bensa told me. “It was a kind of escapism from the realities of twentieth-century indigenous life.” Bensa, who has written classic ethnographies of the Kanak of New Caledonia, was one of the many anthropologists of the following generation who, like Rodinson, would come to question structuralism from a political perspective. He found its stillness and symmetry out of step with the violent late-twentieth-century world he was witnessing in New Caledonia. “Lévi-Strauss painted a perfect picture, of everything fitting into an overarching scheme. But when I started going into the field and seeing the effects of colonialism, I began to have my doubts.”
In the 1950s, this strand of thought was typified by Georges Balandier, a key figure in the formation of anthropology in France. Like Lévi-Strauss, Balandier had started out as a militant socialist; unlike Lévi-Strauss, his fieldwork in Africa on the eve of decolonization had radicalized him even further. Between 1946 and 1951, he worked in Senegal, Mauritania, Guinea, Gabon and Congo and became actively involved in the brewing emancipation movements. What he found there was not the wistful remnants of once great indigenous cultures, but grinding poverty and the political backlash against centuries of exploitation. Interviewed by historian François Dosse, he drew diametrically opposite conclusions to Lévi-Strauss’s brand of hopeless pessimism:I can in no way accept the idea that in these societies myth shapes everything and history is absent, in the name of a notion in which everything is a system of relations and codes, with a logic of possible permutations that enables the society to maintain an equilibrium . . . societies are not produced, they produce themselves; none escapes history even if history is made differently and even if there are multiple histories.34
As colleagues and friends at UNESCO, Lévi-Strauss and Balandier were still on good terms in the 1950s, but would diverge thereafter. The more radical students—such as the left-wing writer and intellectual Régis Debray and anthropologists Marc Augé and Emmanuel Terray—attended Balandier’s courses, forming a rift at the heart of the humanities in France. Decolonization, after all, was then being hotly debated as the struggle in Algeria intensified. While Balandier and his students protested against France’s role in the war, Lévi-Strauss’s interest in politics was declining—a radical position in itself, in an era in which political engagement was the sine qua non of the Parisian intellectual.
In France, colonialism—particularly in relation to the deteriorating situation in Algeria—had become the subject of passionate debate. Perhaps it was no coincidence that the year that Tristes Tropiques appeared Lévi-Strauss engaged in what would be his final high-profile political act.35 He joined Jean-Paul Sartre, André Breton and Georges Bataille, among others, in signing a letter, published in November in L’ Express, supporting the creation of a comité d’action (action committee) for peace in Algeria. But thereafter he shied away from political involvement. By the late 1950s he described political thinking as “an essentially emotional attitude,” which had nothing to do with his role as a leading intellectual. 36 In 1960 he declined to participate in the high-profile “Manifeste des 121,” a petition supporting Algerian independence, signed by a roll call of the era’s leading lights.37 Years later he would even forget that he had signed the 1955 letter.38
Even his rhetorical opposition to colonialism could have a conservative undertow. In 1956, he appeared to support the thinking behind Britain’s catastrophic withdrawal from India, the aftermath of which he had witnessed firsthand, with this comment:Fifty years of modest, unprestigious research carried out by a sufficient number of ethnologists would have prepared Vietnam and North Africa for the solutions of the type that England managed in India—in a matter of months—thanks to the scientific effort that she had pursued for a century: maybe there is still time in black Africa and Madagascar.39
Politically, Tristes Tropiques may have pointed in the conservative direction in which Lévi-Strauss was drifting, but as a work of nonfiction, it was ahead of its time. Blurring the boundaries between serious academic literature, memoir and travel writing, he had created a hybrid that, although commonplace today, was rare in the 1950s, when the bulwarks between academic and popular writing were still fortified. This brought resentment fro
m insiders, such as Paul Rivet, for whom the book was akin to a betrayal. He broke off contact with Lévi-Strauss, making peace only on his deathbed.40 The disaffected, though, were far outnumbered by new readers, eager for a glimpse into the world of the professional anthropologist.
After the success of Tristes Tropiques, Lévi-Strauss was apparently still toying with the idea of continuing his literary writing career, perhaps as a journalist.41 But it is difficult to imagine him sheering off at this point. If anything, his commitment to academia was strengthening. At the same time as he was fantasizing about feature writing, he was applying for funds from the Rockefeller Foundation to set up an anthropological institute (he was turned down), while continuing his courses at the École pratique des hautes études. In the winter of 1955-56 he returned to the more technical earlier work on kinship with a course entitled Prohibitions du Mariage.
In spite of his earlier rejections, through the second half of the 1950s his star began to rise once more. His financial problems now behind him, he moved back into the sixteenth arrondissement with his new wife, Monique Roman, into a solidly bourgeois apartment block where he lived until his death, and where I would meet him on a dark February morning half a century later. He installed his library, by then a formidable collection spanning the world, arranging his books not alphabetically or by theme, but geographically, with North America above Brazil, Africa under Europe. His new home was consecrated with the birth of his second son, Matthieu, in 1957. “My life had changed,” recalled Lévi-Strauss.42
But the mere thought of Lévi-Strauss as a reporter or novelist is tantalizing. Sadly, Tristes Tropiques has remained a one-off. Other than the odd short essay, like his later reminiscences about wartime New York, he would never return to the genre. The passion that drove Lévi-Strauss to write Tristes Tropiques was extinguished as soon as it had served its purpose, just as its subject matter—his intense relationship with Brazil in the 1930s—had faded on his return to France.
TRISTES TROPIQUES gallops to a close. As if receding into a mythical prehistory, the Bororo, Caduveo and Nambikwara disappear back into their remote forests and scrublands. The Brazilian backdrop changes abruptly to that of the Indian subcontinent, where Lévi-Strauss had recently traveled, the empty South American wastes giving way to the human density of the East. Days become centuries stretched into millennia, as Lévi-Strauss talks about all human history, world religions and philosophy.
He reserved his harshest judgment for Islam, a religion he saw as dangerously exclusive and xenophobic, incapable of seeing beyond itself and its own suffocating system. Its austerity, its combination of rigid rules, obsessive cleanliness and the marginalization of women made it “an ideal barrack-room religion.”43 Part of his revulsion had to do with an uneasy self-recognition. In Islam, Lévi-Strauss saw a reflection of certain tendencies in French thought: the same backward-looking orientation, the same blind faith in abstract solutions, the same dogged application of doctrine and a haughty disdain of other cultures.44 Though himself a nonbeliever, he was not opposed to religion per se. “I get along better with believers than out-and-out rationalists,” he told Didier Eribon. “At least the first have a sense of mystery—a mystery that the mind, it seems to me, is inherently incapable of solving.”45 But what he saw as Islam’s doctrinaire approach rankled, and throughout his life he would air his dislike of the religion again and again, courting controversy in a progressively more multicultural, multifaith France.
In the final pages of Tristes Tropiques, Lévi-Strauss searched for an alternative. He returned to his stay in the Chittagong hill tracts, in a small, impoverished Buddhist village where the soft tolling of the gong mingled with the sounds of schoolchildren rote-learning the Burmese alphabet. Accompanied by village priests, he climbed barefoot through clayey soils up a hill to the jédi—a rudimentary pagoda composed of earthworks fenced off by bamboo. A thatched hut on stilts, with woven bamboo flooring, brass statues and a stag’s head, served as a temple. After washing the mud from their feet, they went in. “A peaceful barn-like atmosphere pervaded the place and there was the smell of hay in the air,” wrote Lévi-Strauss. The room was like “a hollowed-out haystack,” and the muffled acoustics, the simplicity, the stillness drew him in as he observed the priests prostrating themselves before the shrine.46
Repelled by Islam, Lévi-Strauss found an intellectual kinship with Buddhism, which he saw as a corollary of his own philosophical outlook. 47 Like a Buddhist priest, he sought the erasure of the self and the dissolution of meaning. His structuralist method operated on a kind of a meditative loop of unanchored existence, endlessly combining and recombining elements, emptying them of their original significance. Buddhism was accepting of a paradox that underlined all human endeavor, summarized in Lévi-Strauss’s unsettlingly convoluted formula: “Truth lies in a progressive dilating of meaning, but in reverse order, up to the point at which it explodes.”48 Both Buddhist and “savage” thought constantly edged toward this spiritual zone in which all distinctions between meaning and its absence fall away, where “fluid forms are replaced by structures and creation by nothingness.”49 The quest was one of total immersion, of unintellectualized embodiment. Like the seamless mixing of the religious and the everyday among the Bororo, who would conjure spirits with whirling bull-roarers in the men’s house, where they also slept, worked and socialized, Buddhism appeared to integrate deep spirituality with everyday life, making each mentally attuned to the other.
The blend was seductive: on its own, structuralism could appear brutalist and reductive, but framed within Buddhism it took on an element of mystery. Just as Lévi-Strauss’s raw materials—the dreamlike Pueblo myths, the colorful Bororo funerary rites, sensual body art and so forth—softened the blow of abstraction, so a hint of mysticism would help popularize his theories.
Yet his outlook could also be bleak. “The world began without man and will end without him,” he wrote. Man’s endeavors are merely a “transient effervescence,” a fizzing chemical reaction destined to burn itself out, ending in sterility and inertia. Anthropology should be renamed “entropology,” he concluded, since it is really recording a process of the breaking down, the dismantling of structures, as cultures like the Nambikwara disaggregate, losing their special forms and ideas.50 The Nambikwara, as Lévi-Strauss had documented them, were already halfway there, scavenging on the edge of a degraded frontier.
“And yet I exist,” Lévi-Strauss wrote, offering a glimmer of hope, only to go on, “not, of course, as an individual,” but as a precarious stake “in the struggle between another society, made up of several thousand million nerve cells lodged in the anthill of my skull, and my body, which serves as its robot.” There was no escape. From both the far-off vision of cosmological time to the intimacy of the self, all was infused with fatalism. Between the “transient effervescence” of human history and the “anthill” of Lévi-Strauss’s skull there could be little hope, warmth or joy. In the end, the prose gathering pace for one last grandiose thought, all that we could hope for was direct, unmediated experience, the kind of raw sensuality that was still central to indigenous culture—the scent of a lily, the beholding of a precious stone, “or in the brief glance, heavy with patience, serenity and mutual forgiveness, that, through some involuntary understanding, one can sometimes exchange with a cat.”51
The final chapters of Tristes Tropiques completed Lévi-Strauss’s vision—a melancholic fusion of science, philosophy and asceticism. Just as his more academic work was looking forward with optimism to the new scientific horizons being opened up by linguistics and computing, so a backward-looking, romantic strain was merging with shades of Baudelaire, Mallarmé and Proust. This middle-aged bass note resonated through his mature work, introducing the hint of darkness and drama to an oeuvre that was finding its shape.
8
Modernism
At the middle of the century . . . an orientation away from mankind began. Once again one looked up to the stars and began an intensi
ve measuring and counting.
KARLHEINZ STOCKHAUSEN1
IN THE MID-1930S, Lévi-Strauss had driven René Courtin’s deteriorating Ford through the rust-colored earth of central Brazil. Out on the flats they had sped past a building site—“half vacant lot and half battlefield, bristling with electronic cable poles and survey posts.” The future state capital, Goiânia, was being built from scratch on an empty plain.2 By the late 1950s, a little to the east of Goiânia, architects had embarked on an even more ambitious project. Engineers marked out Brasília’s superquadras onto a grid ruled into a low basin, a thousand kilometers from the coast. As the site was not yet connected by road, construction companies had to fly in thousands of tons of gravel, steel and machinery at exorbitant cost. Workers poured vast quantities of concrete, sculpting it into convex and concave forms, ramps and curved perimeters. By the end of the decade rows of ministry buildings lined the airplane-shaped design’s central fuselage, a cascade of treeless lawns crisscrossed by multi-lane highways and overpasses. Later, geometric neighborhoods duplicated themselves down the wings.
Brasília was a peculiarly 1950s vision, built around clean lines and mathematical layouts. The era’s models of tidy apartment blocks on stilts, sparse open spaces studded with evenly spaced shrubs, and cars whizzing along empty tarmac were spellbinding in miniature, but disorienting to scale. Architects Lúcio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer’s original proposal had in fact been based on fifteen freehand sketches and a short statement. The detail—the population studies, economic or social-impact assessments, notions of how this blueprint would actually function as a living city—was absent. To this day, Brasília is a difficult city to walk around in.
Claude Levi-Strauss: The Poet in the Laboratory Page 25