Claude Levi-Strauss: The Poet in the Laboratory

by Patrick Wilcken

  The ethnographic record was vivid, especially among Australian Aborigines. Lévi-Strauss devoted a chapter to the work of A. P. Elkin, an Anglican priest and Australia’s first professor of anthropology. At the end of the 1920s, Elkin had spent a year studying a variety of Aboriginal groups, traveling by lorry, packhorse, mule and motorboat from Broome up to the Drysdale River, through the Kimberley region in the north of Western Australia. This fieldwork, combined with library research on other regions, exposed Elkin to a huge variety of totemic beliefs and practices. He found that totems could be attached to every conceivable grouping—the moiety, subsection, clan and so on—as well as to dreams, to cults, to gender, to ancestor worship. Individuals could have their own personal totems and several further group totems. In northeastern South Australia, each person had matrilineal “flesh” totems, patrilineal “cult” totems, a dream totem and secret knowledge of his mother’s brother’s patrilineal cult totem. Among the Southern Aranda (central Australia) there were more than four hundred totems grouped into sixty different categories. While riveted by the detail that Elkin had managed to compile, Lévi-Strauss was disappointed by his conclusions. When Elkin tried to synthesize his findings, he was left with two rather vague ideas: totems expressed cooperation of man with nature, and continuity between past and present. The question that played on Lévi-Strauss’s mind was why these peoples would need such rich intellectual systems to convey such bland propositions.

  An intuitive solution proposed by Bronislaw Malinowski was that native peoples ritualized animals and plants to protect them because they were edible or useful to the group in some way. This “functionalist” approach was too neat for Lévi-Strauss, and he flooded the text with counterexamples culled from well-known ethnographies. The waterbuck, monitor lizard, various trees, certain diseases, hide, the red ant, monorchids, papyrus, durra-bird, gourd, rope—the list reads like an exercise in psychoanalytic free association, and yet for the Nuer of East Africa they were all considered totems. At the same time, plants and animals that were central to their diet and economy were treated with complete indifference. In central Australia, mosquitoes, flies and crocodiles commonly appeared as totems, even though they were seen as harmful. The less than convincing functionalist solution to this dilemma had been to say that they were venerated because they brought discomfort to their enemies. Lévi-Strauss was scathing: “In this respect it would be difficult to find anything which, in one way or another, positively or negatively (or even because of its lack of significance?), might not be said to offer an interest.”10 Endlessly adaptable, functionalist theories explained everything and nothing.

  At the turn of the twentieth century, Oxford-educated Baldwin Spencer had teamed up with a stationmaster at the Alice Springs Overland Telegraph Station, Frank Gillen, who had little formal education, but an avid interest in Aboriginal culture and direct experience of their communities. In 1901-2 the pair mounted a major expedition across the desert plains of central Australia. They documented groups that had had only sporadic contact with Europeans, and produced some of the earliest film footage of native Australians—haunting black-and-white images of clay-daubed men performing ritual dances with bunches of dry foliage tied around their ankles, rhythmically pounding the desert sands.

  Spencer and Gillen had come up with a different solution to the problem of “negative” totems. They had argued that Aborigines ritualized flies and mosquitoes and willed them to multiply because they were associated with periods of heavy rain. The idea had a functionalist flavor, but nevertheless reframed the argument in a suggestive way. The flies and mosquitoes had been transformed from “stimuli” to “signs,” from natural objects to symbols. It was this more conceptual view of totemism that interested Lévi-Strauss. He praised a long line of anthropologists, including Raymond Firth and Meyer Fortes, who had looked at totemic complexes not in utilitarian terms, but as symbolic representations of human relations.11 But again, this seemed too tidy. For Lévi-Strauss, the question that returned “like a Leitmotiv” whenever totemic systems were discussed was why specific animals or plants were chosen above others. Why the hawk rather than the eagle, the cassowary and not the emu, the wallaby rather than the kangaroo?

  Once more he found his solution in the realm of logical abstraction. The choice of totems had nothing to do with utility or analogy—it was an expression of pure intellect. By way of an example, Lévi-Strauss returned to Radcliffe-Brown: not his earlier functionalist theories, but a lecture he had given in 1951, four years before his death. Looking cross-culturally, Radcliffe-Brown had noticed that totems relating to moieties were generally two species, often birds. In British Columbia opposing moieties were named eagle and raven. For certain Australian groups of the Darling River, it was the eagle-hawk and the crow; the white cockatoo and crow were used in Western Australia, and the white cockatoo and black cockatoo in Victoria. In eastern Australia, the bat and the night owl featured as male and female totems, respectively. The sea-eagle and the fish-hawk were common in Melanesia. Other pairs of animals were also used: two species of kangaroo, two types of bee, the coyote and the wildcat. Looking at the myths associated with these pairs, Radcliffe-Brown concluded that these choices were not so much about the animals themselves as their relationships—each pair expressed a kind of connected duality, a union of the similar, but different. The animals were related yet opposed, their structural pairing echoing the relationships between the moieties they represented, as a kind of yin and yang of indigenous thought.12

  For Lévi-Strauss, Radcliffe-Brown’s insight was fundamental. His change of emphasis from “animality” to “duality,” as the French philosopher Henri Bergson had put it, lifted him “beyond a simple ethnographic generalisation—to the laws of language, and even of thought.”13 Indigenous peoples were involved in a conceptual game, building metaphysical models out of what they had readily at hand. It was not animals’ individual characteristics that interested the native mind, but the way they contrasted, forming a code whose symbols were drawn from nature. On the one hand there are kinship relations; on the other there are relationships between animals and plants. In the system taken as a whole, “it is not the similarities, but the differences that resemble each other,” Lévi-Strauss explained in a formula that somersaults in the mind. As such, totemism did not exist as a separate entity—a protoreligion; a primitive, utilitarian ritual—it was just one aspect of a highly abstract metaphorical style of thought. “Natural species are chosen not because they are ‘good to eat’ [bonnes à manger] but because they are ‘good to think’ [bonnes à penser],” Lévi-Strauss concluded with his much-quoted jibe against Malinowski.14

  Le Totémisme aujourd’hui had all the tropes of Lévi-Strauss’s distinctive style. The ethnographic detail wedded to logic, the unexpected shift from classical anthropological theories to linguistic models and, with his whimsical comparison between a passage from Henri Bergson and reflections of a Dakota wise man in the last chapter, the melding of French philosophy and native thought. The book also contained the clearest exposé of structuralism to date, signposted at intervals through the text. In the opening chapter Lévi-Strauss outlined the structuralist method, step by step: “(1) define the phenomenon under study as a relation between two or more terms, real or supposed; (2) construct a table of possible permutations between these terms; (3) take this table as the general object of analysis which, at this level only, can yield necessary connections . . .”15 In this bald proposition, one can see both the inherent radicalism of the enterprise and its strangely alienated nature. Lévi-Strauss was fascinated by ethnographic minutiae, but only as the raw material for a second-order analysis.

  Toward the middle of the book, he made explicit the intellectual step that set him apart from contemporary anthropological thinking, be it the British school of structural functionalism or the then emerging symbolic approaches. What was novel about Lévi-Strauss’s outlook was a conceptual leap from figurative to formal analogy, from an actual to a structural
resemblance. Like in his analyses of kinship, Lévi-Strauss was interested in comparing different relationships, not making one-on-one correspondences. A bear totem did not relate directly to a bear-clan; the clansmen were not in some metaphorical sense bearlike, as some anthropologists had argued. But contrasted against, say, a salmon totem of the neighboring clan, it made up one element of a cultural equation: bear is to salmon as bear-clan is to salmon-clan. His ultimate goal was to map out these “similarities between sets of differences,” as he phrased it, using a Saussurian turn of phrase, similarities that could be as oblique, lateral and associative as the abstract art that he had disowned.

  Anthropology’s painstaking documenting of cultures was not an end in itself, Lévi-Strauss concluded. Its role was to trace the structural echoes that Lévi-Strauss believed reverberated through thought, cultural output, social relations and even the physical world. In so doing, he wrote as he drew Le Totémisme aujourd’hui to a close, anthropology would fulfill its role as a master discipline, integrating essence and form, method and reality.

  WHILE LÉVI-STRAUSS was working on Le Totémisme aujourd’hui, material for La Pensée sauvage was coming together through his seminars at the Collège. The result was almost simultaneous publication. Just two months after Le Totémisme aujourd’hui appeared in March 1962, La Pensée sauvage came out to ecstatic reviews. Claude Roy, writing in Libération, called it “a major event in the history of modern humanism”; for Emmanuel Mounier, founder of the leading journal Esprit, which devoted an entire issue to the book in 1963, two “événements philosophiques” had appeared “back to back” (coup sur coup).16

  The book’s title was a double pun in French—pensée can mean both “thought” and “pansy”; sauvage, both “wild” (in the sense of “untamed”) and “savage.” Sauvage was at once an ironic reference to the derogatory nineteenth-century term for primitive and an allusion to the centuries-old French philosophical tradition typified by Rousseau and Montaigne, to which Lévi-Strauss saw himself as heir. Was there also a more contemporary reference to l’esprit sauvage—a theoretical term that had been used by the late Merleau-Ponty, to whom Lévi-Strauss dedicated the book? Whatever the case, Lévi-Strauss was being deliberately provocative: “I reprised the term ‘savage’ on purpose,” he said in an interview after the book’s publication. “It carries an emotive and critical weight, and I think that one shouldn’t take the vitality out of problems.”17

  Pensée as “pansy” introduced a rustic, poetic touch. There was the idea of natural systems, and perhaps even a coded allusion to Lévi-Strauss’s moment of revelation on the Maginot Line, when as a young conscript he had stopped to contemplate a bunch of dandelions. With pensée in the sense of “thought,” it seemed as if he was joining the age-old philosophical debate on whether there were fundamental differences between “civilized” and “primitive” ways of thinking. For a Parisian intellectual audience in the early 1960s, the book would at first have appeared to be in the spirit of Lucien Lévy-Bruhl’s earlier studies of la mentalité primitive. But as Lévi-Strauss’s argument unfurled, it became clear that La Pensée sauvage ultimately referred to something far more abstract and universal: not primitive thought, but a kind of untrammeled thinking, the mind running free. Taken together, the words in the title encapsulated all the elements of Lévi-Strauss’s project—nature, culture and the intellect—in one sonorous expression.

  In La Pensée sauvage Lévi-Strauss moved on from the simple dualities of Le Totémisme aujourd’hui into a world of extraordinary complexity. At its heart was the idea that “primitive” peoples were driven by the same disinterested intellectual curiosity as their modernized counterparts. Whether in the deserts of central Australia and New Mexico or the forests of the Philippines and West Africa, indigenous groups gathered information systematically, scouring their environments and synthesizing what they found with a logical rigor. In the process, they had built up an encyclopedic knowledge, rich in detail. The Hanunóo from the southern tip of Mindoro Island in the Philippine archipelago named more than four hundred different animals, including sixty classes of saltwater mollusk; New Mexico’s Tewa distinguished more than forty-five types of ground mushroom and ear fungus; while one ethnographer had recorded eight thousand animal and plant terms from a single informant in Gabon. Lévi-Strauss pulled examples from ethnographies from around the world of a knowledge that was poetic in its descriptive precision. The Tewa had forty different ways to describe the shape of a leaf; the Fang of Gabon could express subtle differences between “winds, light and colour, ruffling of water and variation in surf, and the currents of water and air.”18

  The exhaustive classification of plants and animals went far beyond the day-to-day needs of preliterate groups. Rummaging around their environment, “savages” observed, experimented, categorized and theorized, using a kind of free-form science. They combined and recombined natural materials into cultural artifacts—myths, rituals, social systems—like artists improvising with the odds and ends lying around their studio. The central image that Lévi-Strauss used to describe this process was that of the bricoleur—a tinkerer, an improviser working with what was at hand, cobbling together solutions to both practical and aesthetic problems. La Pensée sauvage—free-flowing thought—was a kind of cognitive bricolage that strived for both intellectual and aesthetic satisfaction. It was a very French idea, which brought together the artist and the atelier, the artisan and the dying crafts of a more creative age, an era that Lévi-Strauss experienced at first hand as a boy helping his father cobble together furniture in the living room of the rue Poussin apartment. “My father was a great bricoleur,” Lévi-Strauss later recalled. “It was he that gave me the pleasure and the skill for bricolage.”19 As intellectual concepts, bricolage and the bricoleur were rich and evocative, and would prove influential in the years to come as a shorthand for a kind of off-the-cuff experimentation used in the visual arts, literature and philosophy.

  La Pensée sauvage set out to explore the logic underlying bricolage, delving deeper into the realm of Saussurian linguistics of signs and symbols, binary oppositions and “relationships of differences” that Lévi-Strauss had deployed since listening to Jakobson lecturing in New York in the 1940s. There was now not even any need to invoke a range of plants and animals to build up a logical set of sufficient density. A single species could yield enough differences for the most intricate model. For the Osage (southern Sioux), the eagle is divided into the golden, spotted or bald eagle, by color and even by age. Through the eagle the Sioux were able to create a “three-dimensional matrix,” a quotidian aspect of their environment becoming an “object of thought,” a rich “conceptual tool.”20 Add a bear and a seal, and the permutations rose exponentially. Lévi-Strauss drew up the multiplying possibilities in a diagram that resembled a line drawing of a refracted crystal. “Species” and “individual” appear at the vortices; at its pivots are seal, bear, eagle, head, neck, feet. The intersections are given values: h1, h2, h3; f1, f2, f3; and so forth. The properties of what Lévi-Strauss called the “the totemic operator” were a distillation of structuralist rhetoric: The whole set thus constitutes a sort of conceptual apparatus which filters unity through multiplicity, multiplicity through unity, diversity through identity, identity through diversity. Endowed with a theoretically unlimited extension on its median level it contracts (or expands) into pure comprehension at its two extreme vortices, but in symmetrically reversed forms, and not without undergoing a sort of torsion.21

  This was Lévi-Strauss at his most arcane, theoretical discourse at its most French. The model, as complex as it appeared, he went on to explain, represented “only a small portion of a cell,” a “minute fraction” of the possibilities, given the potential numbers of individuals, species and parts of the body that could be analyzed. Modeling such a vast array of logical combinations was a task “reserved for ethnology of the next century,” Lévi-Strauss concluded, which “could not be done without the aid of machines.”
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br />   In La Pensée sauvage, Lévi-Strauss also returned to the Scottish biologist and mathematician D’Arcy Thompson’s On Growth and Form, which he had read in the New York Public Library while writing his thesis, Les Structures élémentaires de la parenté. It was from D’Arcy Thompson that Lévi-Strauss elaborated on one of the keystones of structuralism—the idea of transformations. D’Arcy Thompson had shown that the form and structure of different species were mathematical transformations of each other. By warping a geometric grid, systematically elongating, squashing or tapering forms plotted onto its coordinates, a tapir’s skull could be transformed into a horse’s, a horse’s skull into a rabbit’s into a dog’s. Antelope, rhinoceros and goat horns; teeth, tusks and seashells were but logarithmic transformations of each other.

  Again Lévi-Strauss took only the flavor of these insights—the idea of mathematically generated patterns and the logic of form—applying them in his own idiosyncratic way. What he found, looking at the panorama of different ethnographic descriptions, was not so much a gradual evolution or seeping influences from neighboring cultures, but systemic structural change using the same overall symmetries and proportions. “I was soon to notice that this way of seeing was part of a long tradition,” Lévi-Strauss recalled. “Behind Thompson was Goethe’s botany, and behind Goethe, Albrecht Dürer and his Treatise on the Proportions of the Human Body.”22