If one ignored his overblown claims to scientific rigor, though, the exercise did redefine problems in the field of mythology in an interesting and potentially productive way. Just as with kinship, it gave the analyst a point of purchase in an otherwise mystifyingly random field. In true Lévi-Straussian fashion, complex arguments had an ultimately simplifying effect. The abstract bundling into themes and oppositions meant that small variations in different versions of the same myth could be accounted for within the same overall structure. The search for the earliest or truest version was no longer necessary. Across continents, mythic elements endlessly combined and recombined, like the shuffling of genes down the generations. It was this type of epidemiological approach that Lévi-Strauss would spend much of the rest of his academic life exploring, as he took on myth in bulk, looking at hundreds of mythic variations sourced from across the Americas.
If the structural analysis of a single myth could seem arbitrary, the bulk approach felt far more convincing. Lévi-Strauss’s analysis of four different versions of “La Geste d’Asdiwal” (The Story of Asdiwal), published the following year, took the argument into another dimension. Looking at the variations of a Pacific Northwest Coast Tsimshian myth compiled by Franz Boas, Lévi-Strauss found that the differences were systematic, and were themselves part of a structural logic. When the myth traveled from its source into neighboring cultures, it began to degrade. But at a certain point the myth would flip over, reconfiguring itself into an inverted form. He likened the result to optical projections in a light box. As the aperture is reduced, the image begins to blur until, at a pinpoint, the image clarifies, but is upside down and back to front.15
In Lévi-Strauss’s mind, myth was almost like a living thing or a physical process. Like a crystal, “a myth grows spiral-wise until the intellectual impulse that produced it is exhausted,” Lévi-Strauss wrote.16 The idea that a poetic realm of jaguars and anteaters, rivers and stars dreamed up by small, low-tech indigenous groups could ape the symmetries found in natural phenomena and mathematical equations caught the imagination of a generation of scholars. This, and the avant-garde vitality of the splice technique, dazzled his contemporaries. Tristes Tropiques had given him a popular base outside the academy, just as the sheer originality of his ideas on myth was consolidating his position within it.
STRUCTURALISM’S GROWING APPEAL was not just intellectual. Lévi-Strauss’s ideas became attractive at a particular political moment, a point of weakness and uncertainty on the French Left. For many progressive intellectuals, postwar France had been a period of political commitment to the French Communist Party and Marxism. Some, most famously Jean-Paul Sartre, had embraced Stalinism, even as reports of the regime’s crimes were filtering out. In the mid-1950s, Lévi-Strauss still felt the need to refer to Marx, going as far as naming him in Tristes Tropiques as one of his key influences. “I rarely broach a new sociological problem,” he wrote, “without first stimulating my thought by rereading a few pages of The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte or the Critique of Political Economy.”17
But by the end of 1956, all this had changed. In March of that year, as the situation in Algeria deteriorated, the French Communist Party voted in favor of sending four hundred thousand troops to quell the dissent, a move that alienated many of its supporters. That June, Nikita Khrushchev’s speech to the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party was published in full in Le Monde. Khrushchev had accused Stalin of presiding over a reign of terror, involving the threatening and executing of his own party members, such as Comrade Eikhe, a loyal, long-term party member, executed in 1940 after being forced to sign a confession under torture. On top of these revelations, November saw the crushing of the Hungarian uprising. As Soviet tanks streamed through the streets of Budapest, the left-wing Western intelligentsia was thrown into crisis. Although the French Communist Party would remain a potent political force, its credibility had sunk. Intellectuals fled the party as up-and-coming thinkers went in search of a new paradigm. It was “a kind of ceremonious massacre,” remembered sociologist René Lourau, then twenty-three years old. “This made possible a clean sweep, a big breath of fresh air, a hygienic act.”18
Lévi-Straussian structuralism rushed into the ensuing ideological vacuum—except that structuralism, as a detached, abstract science of culture, was itself a kind of vacuum. And that was precisely its appeal. Sloughing off the baggage of postwar politics, Lévi-Strauss offered a way out. Suddenly, arcane analyses of tiny South American tribes began to look attractive, even inspired. The new paradigm “let us stop being forced to hope for anything,” as Michel Foucault later recalled.19
The fallout from the Left, and the impact of Tristes Tropiques, produced the next generation of anthropologists, as young, disaffected scholars were drawn into the orbit of Lévi-Strauss’s developing program. Communist philosophers Alfred Adler, Michel Cartry, Pierre Clastres and Lucien Sebag quit the PCF in 1956 and began attending Lévi-Strauss’s seminar courses at the Sixth Section. Before long, Sebag and Clastres were doing fieldwork in the Americas, while Adler and Cartry headed for Africa. Another key figure in the development of structural anthropology, Françoise Héritier, who would end up as Lévi-Strauss’s successor at the Collège, made the move from history to anthropology, doing fieldwork in Upper Volta (present-day Burkina Faso), along with her future husband and collaborator, Michel Izard.
For the new converts, tracking the evolution of Lévi-Strauss’s thought was not an easy task. Given his peripatetic early career, articles were now spread out through Brazilian, U.S., British, Dutch and French anthropological, sociological and linguistic journals, some available only in English. Feeling that these threads were now coming together into a coherent statement, Lévi-Strauss had already tried to draw them into an anthology, approaching the writer Brice Parain, who was then commissioning for France’s leading publisher, Gallimard, with the idea. He was turned down on the grounds that his thought “hadn’t matured.”20 Parain would live to regret his decision. (He would later compound his mistake by rejecting another seminal thinker’s early work—Michel Foucault’s Histoire de la folie.) After the success of Tristes Tropiques at Plon, Lévi-Strauss had become hot publishing property, and Gaston Gallimard himself, founder of the publishing house, was called in to woo him. But the charm offensive was to no avail—Lévi-Strauss would remain loyal to Plon for the rest of his writing career.21
The resulting Anthropologie structurale (Structural Anthropology) (1958) brought together Lévi-Strauss’s canon in one place for the first time. The classics were placed side by side, from Lévi-Strauss’s groundbreaking early paper on kinship and linguistics to his essays on shamanism and psychoanalysis. There were the more recent explorations of myth and some earlier curiosities such as “The Serpent with Fish inside His Body,” a short paper he had given in Paris at the end of the war, which drew parallels between an Andean myth and motifs on Nazca and Pacasmayo vases. At the last moment, Lévi-Strauss added in two postscripts to settle scores with his critics: Gurvitch and Rodinson, along with Jean-François Revel, who had recently published an attack on Lévi-Strauss in Pourquoi des philosophes? (What Are Philosophers For?).22
The dedication, strangely enough, was to Émile Durkheim, whose work Lévi-Strauss had repudiated in his youth as conservative and socially prescriptive; 1958 was the centenary of Durkheim’s birth, and Lévi-Strauss paid homage as “an inconstant disciple” to the man who had fashioned the tools of modern anthropology. “There was something brilliant in the thought of Durkheim,” he said later. “It was beautifully constructed, monumental.”23
EARLIER IN HIS CAREER, it might have seemed as if Lévi-Strauss had suffered from bad timing. After Brazil, the war had disrupted his progress through the French academic system. On his return to France he had missed the postwar boat, repeatedly blocked by conservatives in the Collège de France. But in the final years of the 1950s, everything clicked. With Anthropologie structurale, Lévi-Strauss had loaded the more accessible Tristes Tropiques
with the intellectual ballast he had patiently stored up through his academic career. His first forays into the world of indigenous mythology presaged a whole new body of innovative, challenging work.
Lévi-Strauss was finding his feet on the eve of the most radical theoretical and institutional upheaval in the humanities in postwar France. A massive expansion of higher education was already under way. The number of students gaining the baccalaureate rose sevenfold from the 1930s to the 1960s. As students poured into the university system, research boomed. In 1955, there had been just twenty social science research centers in France; by the mid-1960s, there would be more than three hundred.24 The period of the trente glorieuses—three decades of unprecedented economic growth in France, spanning from 1945 to 1975—was reshaping the country, ushering in a more modern, technocratic ethos. In the shake-up, old-style scholarship would lose ground to sharper, more quantifiable methods. In the humanities this meant sociology and the new history’s statistical approaches, along with abstract model-building in linguistics and psychoanalysis. In this new environment, Lévi-Strauss’s stock was rising fast.
By the end of 1958, Lévi-Strauss was receiving the backing of Merleau-Ponty, a key bridging figure who was trying to reconcile the formal schemes of structuralism and phenomenology’s excavations of the self. Merleau-Ponty had succeeded in creating the first chair in anthropology at the Collège de France25—a position designed specifically for Lévi-Strauss. The following year, Lévi-Strauss was put forward as a candidate while Merleau-Ponty aggressively lobbied fellow members of the Collège, trying to placate the more conservative wing. “Not only did he present it [Lévi-Strauss’s candidacy], he devoted three months of his life to it, and he was not to live much longer,” remembered Lévi-Strauss, who in gratitude kept a photo of Merleau-Ponty on his desk.26 Again there was some opposition, but thanks to Merleau-Ponty’s support, Lévi-Strauss, now fifty, entered the Collège on this, his third attempt, banishing forever what he would later describe as his “awkward past” (passé aussi lourd).27
HIS INAUGURAL ADDRESS, delivered in January 1960, opened with an old-fashioned riddle based on “the strange recurrence of the number 8, already well known from the arithmetic of Pythagoras, the periodic table of chemical elements and the law of symmetry of the medusa jelly fish.” To these were added a series of dates: in 1858 the “engineers of social anthropology,” Durkheim and Boas, were born; 1908 saw the creation of the world’s first university chair for social anthropology, given to Sir James Frazer at the University of Liverpool; and in 1958, the Collège had finally created one in France. Lévi-Strauss, of course, had also been born in 1908—as had Merleau-Ponty, who was sitting in the audience and was apparently unhappy to be reminded of his age.28
Lévi-Strauss went on to place his work in the context of the greats, referencing, among many others, Saussure, Freud, Marx, Montesquieu, Spencer, Cuvier, Goethe, along with the usual roll call of anthropologists—Boas, Durkheim, Frazer, Mauss, Radcliffe-Brown, even Malinowski. He lingered over Mauss and his development of the almost mystical notion of the “total social fact”—“a foliated conception . . . composed of a multitude of distinct and yet joined planes . . . where body, soul, society, everything merges.”29
While outlining his ideas on kinship and myth, he made his peace with history. The two met in slow motion. With the longue durée, history had almost come to a standstill. In a gesture of conciliation, Lévi-Strauss gave his crystalline structures minimal animation. “Structure itself occurs in a process of development . . . ,” he said, citing Durkheim. “It is ceaselessly forming and breaking down; it is life which has reached a certain degree of consolidation ...”30
He ended on a wistful note, lamenting the fact that the chair had not been created hundreds of years earlier, when Jean de Léry and André Thevet were writing about the Tupi, still padding barefoot through the forests and beaches of Rio de Janeiro’s Guanabara Bay. (He later told Didier Eribon that this was also an allusion to the fact that he had been denied a chair a decade earlier.) “Men and women who, as I speak, thousands of miles from here, on some savannah ravaged by brush fire or in some forest dripping with rain,” he wound up, “are returning to camp to share a meagre pittance and evoke their gods together.” It was to these ragged groups, on the brink of extinction, that Lévi-Strauss as “their pupil, and their witness” dedicated his chair.31
He had entered a rarefied world of tradition and protocol. Merleau-Ponty eased him through the first rituals, providing a floor plan of the chamber where the professors met and reserving the chair next to him so that Lévi-Strauss was spared the embarrassment of sitting in someone else’s place. But beyond the old-world ceremonials lay great opportunities in an elite institution devoted solely to the cultivation of the mind. As the 1960s dawned, Lévi-Strauss’s only official duties were to present original courses every year, with the expectation (backed by resources) that he set would up his own research center.
His dominance in the 1960s and early ’70s would rest not just on his originality and intellectual charisma, but on something far more prosaic—his skills as an institution builder at a time when the French academic system was opening up. As a student he had run a left-wing study group before becoming the personal secretary of the socialist député Georges Monnet. In New York he had been head of the École libre and cultural attaché at the French embassy. Back in Paris he was assistant director of ethnology at the Musée de l’Homme and secretary-general of UNESCO’s International Social Science Council. Once elected to the Collège, he set about building up his own institutional empire.
Its beginnings were humble. Lévi-Strauss’s research center, the Laboratoire d’anthropologie sociale, was initially housed in a building attached to the Musée Guimet in the sixteenth arrondissement on avenue d’Iéna, not far from the Musée de l’Homme. Inside the main building, thousand-year-old Indian, Cambodian and Japanese Buddha heads were on display, the fruits of the nineteenth-century Lyonnais industrialist Émile Guimet’s collecting expeditions to India and the Far East. The serenity of the gallery space was far from the realities of Lévi-Strauss’s ramshackle offices—the remains of an en suite bathroom that he shared with Jean Pouillon. “Pieces of pipe still stuck out of the walls, which were covered with ceramic tile,” remembered Lévi-Strauss, “and I had what was left of the bathtub drain under my feet.”32
An adjoining room was piled high with the Human Relations Area Files—a vast paper database covering hundreds of cultures that UNESCO had secured for France, produced by a conglomeration of U.S. universities. The files, which cross-indexed individual cultural features such as methods of food preservation (dried, smoked, pickled, and so forth), aspects of religious systems and kin terms, was a structuralist storehouse, perfect for Lévi-Strauss’s style of work, saving hours of library research. With their emphasis on North America, the Area Files would be crucial as he began looking at the western hemisphere more and more as a single cultural block.33 So bulky was the accumulation of files that there were fears that the floor would give way under them. Isac Chiva, a pioneer of French rural ethnography who would work closely with Lévi-Strauss as his deputy director at the Laboratoire, remembered their astonishment when Susan Sontag described their cramped rooms as “a large and richly endowed research institute” in her review of Tristes Tropiques for the New York Review of Books in the early 1960s.34
It was in these less than ideal surroundings that Lévi-Strauss met the then up-and-coming literary theorist Roland Barthes, who was looking for a supervisor for his thesis on fashion. Barthes later remembered being received by Lévi-Strauss on the landing on a pair of worn-out lawn chairs while his friend, the semiotician Algirdas Julien Greimas, waited anxiously in a café around the corner. Barthes returned to the café deflated—Lévi-Strauss had turned him down. The meeting, however, would turn out to be influential. During their talk, Lévi-Strauss suggested that Barthes read Vladimir Propp’s Morphology of the Folktale, which was first published in the 1920s but
had recently appeared for the first time in English translation. The book’s proto-structuralist analysis of folktales would go on to have a major impact on the development of Barthes’s ideas on “narrativity.”35
Despite early similarities between their work, Lévi-Strauss grew progressively more skeptical of Barthes’s project. “I never felt close to him,” Lévi-Strauss later recalled, “and my feelings were confirmed later by the direction that his ideas took.” In the 1970s, Lévi-Strauss was asked to write a preface to Barthes’s book S/Z, a structuralist analysis of “Sarrasine,” a short story by Balzac. When Barthes sent Lévi-Strauss a copy of the book, Lévi-Strauss replied with a short parody of the structuralist method, including male/female oppositions, a kin diagram and the conclusion that two characters in the short story, Filippo and Marianina, were in an incestuous relationship. Even though it was written as a joke, Barthes apparently took the analysis seriously, describing it as “stunningly convincing.”36
The letter revealed a mischievous side to Lévi-Strauss, which undercut his reputation as a cold, analytical thinker. Toward the end of her life, Margaret Mead told anthropologist Scott Atran that although Lévi-Strauss appeared “aloof and frail,” “he’s more playful than he lets on and he’ll outlive me by thirty years if a day.”37 (In the event, Lévi-Strauss survived Mead by thirty-one years.) But his practical jokes were not always shared by their intended targets. In the mid-1950s, André Breton was trying to develop a project on magic. He sent out questionnaires, which involved ranking pictures as more or less magical, to his friends, including Lévi-Strauss. By this stage skeptical of Breton’s dilettantish interest in what he considered a serious anthropological subject, Lévi-Strauss ignored the questionnaire. When Breton sent it again, Lévi-Strauss gave it to his seven-year-old son, Laurent, to complete. Breton was furious, firing off a wounded letter to Lévi-Strauss and later sending him a copy of the resulting book, L’Art magique, with a brusque dedication to Laurent.38
Claude Levi-Strauss: The Poet in the Laboratory Page 27