More promising were the structuralist readings of modern Western mythologies—not the operas of Wagner, but classic films. Raymond Bellour took the West’s own mythemes—the shower scene in Hitchcock’s Psycho, Melanie (Tippi Hedren) motoring across Bodega Bay in The Birds, Cary Grant’s famous crop duster sequence in North by Northwest, or Philip Marlowe played by Humphrey Bogart talking to Vivian (Lauren Bacall) in a studio mock-up of a car journey in Howard Hawks’s The Big Sleep. Bellour’s frame-by-frame analysis looked at how the camera alternated between static and moving, distant and close, the speaker and the listener, short and long takes. With columns, diagrams and axes, he took Lévi-Straussian structuralism into new and fertile territory. Jim Kitses’s Horizons West (1969) adopted the bulk approach in a study of the western, examining the works of directors like John Ford, Sam Peckinpah and Sergio Leone. Structured around contrasts between society and the frontier, civilization and wilderness, the genre was a natural target for structuralist analysis. Kitses teased out a series of key polarities—the West/ the East, nature/culture, the individual/the community—which generated further oppositions: purity/corruption, self-knowledge/illusion and humanity/savagery. He looked at common motifs, such as the imperiled community, the outsider and the sacrifice. Like much of Lévi-Strauss’s work, it was not so much the conclusions as the close analysis that was so revealing. Subjecting these overfamiliar scenes and genres to a detailed reading, breaking them apart into their constituent units and examining their hidden structural properties brought them to life in a new way.31 It was almost like wandering through the director’s subconscious.
Landmarks in linguistics and psychology were also appearing, with Piaget’s Le Structuralisme and Noam Chomsky’s Language and Mind both published in 1968, along with Payot’s new edition of Saussure’s famous Cours de linguistique générale. There were a slew of commentaries, PhD theses and books on structuralism, including Jean-Marie Auzias’s Clefs pour le structuralisme and an edited collection of reflections from different disciplines, Qu’est-ce que le structuralisme? Literary journals ran special editions on the phenomenon, with Les Temps modernes, L’Arc and Esprit all devoting whole issues to the work of Lévi-Strauss. Everyone was turning toward the metaphor of language, anonymous matrixes, systems of interrelations, the logical, diagrammatic view of culture. “Structuralism was the air we breathed,” remembered Anne-Christine Taylor, director of research at the Musée du quai Branly, whose doctoral research had been supervised by Lévi-Strauss in the 1970s.32
In July 1967, Maurice Henry’s illustration in the literary journal La Quinzaine littéraire portrayed caricatures of Michel Foucault, Lévi-Strauss, Jacques Lacan and Roland Barthes as tribesmen in grass skirts, sitting together in a tropical forest. Foucault is smiling, explaining something; Lacan, bare-chested except for his trademark bow tie, looks on disapprovingly; Lévi-Strauss is engrossed in a sheet of paper, with Barthes leaning casually back on his hands. With an average age of more than fifty (Lacan was already in his mid-sixties), they were not exactly a new generation, but they were nevertheless at the intellectual vanguard. Henry captured the moment: a group of outwardly conservative, middle-aged men dealing in densely intellectualized exotica—a blend of tribal culture and psychoanalysis, literary theory and anthropology.
As structuralism peaked in the late 1960s, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey was released. With its sense of anonymous mystery, its characters who seemed dimmed by their surroundings—ultimately dominated by a machine—and György Ligeti’s frenetic but impersonal soundscape, it captured the awesome emptiness of a posthumanist world. It was also at around this time that early minimalist music arose, when composers like Terry Riley and Steve Reich broke away from the anguished dissonance that had long characterized modern music and started experimenting with new forms of expression. Looping melodies gradually falling out of step, repetition with periodic ruptures, the drone effect—it was the aural equivalent of the succession of similar-but-different models that appeared through the Mythologiques quartet, or the Caduveo tattoos, as they moved through their hundreds of subtle variations on a theme. At once modern and ancient, religious and atheistic, cold and romantic, the structuralist aesthetic signaled an easing off, a release of spiritual tension—not through a soothing reassurance, but as a result of being cast into the void.
ACCORDING TO THE HISTORIAN François Dosse, structuralism peaked as early as 1966, and by 1967 intellectuals were beginning to distance themselves from the label:Some players sought less-trodden paths in order to avoid the epithet “structuralist.” Some even went so far as to deny ever having been structuralist, with the exception of Claude Lévi-Strauss, who pursued his work beyond the pale of the day’s fashions.33
There were already rumblings of what would become known as post-structuralism, with Jacques Derrida’s opening salvos against Lévi-Strauss and Foucault in De la grammatologie and L’Écriture et la différence, both published in 1967 (although many of the essays were in fact written much earlier). Dosse went on to argue that it was precisely at this moment of disaggregation that the media really picked up on the phenomenon.34
Uniquely, for a French anthropologist—indeed, for any anthropologist—Lévi-Strauss achieved global fame. English versions of his books were now appearing: the controversial translation of La Pensée sauvage, The Savage Mind, came out in 1966, and The Elementary Structures of Kinship was belatedly published in 1969, along with The Raw and the Cooked. Newsweek ran a piece, “Lévi-Strauss’s Mind,” on the publication of The Savage Mind. Time magazine responded with the essay “Man’s New Dialogue with Man,” the New York Times following with the more penetrating feature “There Are No Superior Societies,” written by French-American writer and biographer Sanche de Gramont (aka Ted Morgan—an anagram of de Gramont). Lévi-Strauss went on American television, interviewed on NBC by Edwin Newman on the chat show Speaking Freely, and he appeared in Vogue’s “People Are Talking About . . .” photo-essay page, shot by Henri Cartier-Bresson. Meanwhile, honorary degrees flooded in—from Yale, Columbia, Chicago and Oxford—and Lévi-Strauss symposia spread through the world’s universities. As one American anthropologist put it, by the late 1960s Lévi-Strauss “was as unavoidable at cocktail parties as cheese dip.”35
For Lévi-Strauss, the exposure was a double-edged sword. It undoubtedly consolidated him institutionally. After securing funding from Braudel’s Sixth Section and the CNRS, the Laboratoire d’anthropologie finally moved out of its shabby quarters in the Musée Guimet at the beginning of 1966 and into the Collège itself, taking up rooms that had hosted the chair in geology. The roomy offices, decked out with solid oak tables and antique mahogany cabinets in which Louis XVIII had stored his mineral collections, was like a dream come true for Lévi-Strauss. He was taken by its old-world feel, its “aura of a mid-nineteenth-century library or laboratory.” It fit with his image of the hallowed wings and arcaded courtyards of the Collège, where great scholars had labored down the centuries. “That was how I saw the Collège de France I aspired to enter: the workplace of Claude Bernard, Ernest Renan . . . ,” he remembered after his retirement.36 Although the furniture was bequeathed to a stately home in Meudon, outside Paris, Lévi-Strauss oversaw the refurbishing of the woodwork and antique bookcases in his office. As his Mythologiques project moved up into North America, he pinned a three-meter-by-two-meter map of the United States behind his huge desk. As if in a war room, he could plot the coordinates of new myths on the march northward.
The Laboratoire grew into a major international research center, frequented by scholars from around the world, like the influential American anthropologist Marshall Sahlins, who spent the late 1960s in Paris. Its focus would always be anthropology, but it was seen as cutting-edge in the humanities and hosted interdisciplinary seminars, including sessions involving the emerging stars of post-structuralism: the Lithuanian semiotician Greimas, the writer on film Christian Metz, the Bulgarian-French literary critic Julia Kristeva and the cultural theor
ist Tzvetan Todorov.37
Lévi-Strauss’s work was now being fueled by the field reports from the institute’s scholars—a new generation of ethnographers, many born in the 1930s, when Lévi-Strauss was doing his own fieldwork. Before his suicide, Lucien Sebag along with Pierre Clastres had done fieldwork among the Guayaki, Euyaki and the Ayoré indigenous groups in Paraguay and Bolivia. Arlette Frigout was studying the Hopi in Arizona; another group—including Pouillon, Robert Jaulin, Isac Chiva, Ariane Deluz and Françoise Héritier—was bringing back data from field sites across Africa. From 1967, Maurice Godelier was in New Guinea studying the Baruya, a highlands tribe that had been in contact with outsiders only since the 1950s. It was an arrangement that Lévi-Strauss liked—“They are happy to spend a year in a tropical land, and I am happy to stay in Paris and write in my ‘laboratory,’ listening to classical music,” he told writer Guy Sorman. 38 The Laboratoire’s expansion greatly facilitated Lévi-Strauss’s own work. He now had a large staff supporting the Mythologiques project—Pouillon transcribing his lectures, Isac Chiva along with Lévi-Strauss’s wife, Monique, reading and correcting early drafts, and other researchers compiling myths.
But on an intellectual level, the sudden vogue for structuralism rankled. As soon as Lévi-Strauss hit the spotlight, he began publicly distancing himself from what he described as a “journalistic tic” of associating his work with the other thinkers—Lacan, Foucault, Barthes—with whom he was constantly being grouped.39 Interviewed by de Gramont for the New York Times piece, he was forthright in his rejection of his new cult status:In the sense in which it is understood today by French opinion, I am not a structuralist . . . The best way to explain the current infatuation with structuralism is that French intellectuals and the cultured French public need new playthings every 10 or 15 years. Let’s make one thing very clear. I have never guided nor directed any movement or doctrine. I pursue my work in almost total isolation, surrounded only by a team of ethnologists. As for the others, I don’t want to name names, but to pronounce the name of structuralism in connection with certain philosophers and literary people, no matter how talented or intelligent they may be, seems to be a case of total confusion. I have the greatest admiration for the intelligence, the culture and the talent of a man like Foucault, but I don’t see the slightest resemblance between what he does and what I do.40
The only true structuralists, according to Lévi-Strauss, were himself, the linguist Émile Benveniste and the mythographer and comparative philologist Georges Dumézil.41 It was a strange choice. Although he clearly felt an intellectual kinship with Benveniste and Dumézil, who were colleagues and friends, Lévi-Strauss in fact rarely referenced them in his own work, which had an altogether more avant-garde flavor.
What Lévi-Strauss could not see was that the cult around him and his work was in part his own making. Not only was he appearing a great deal in the media, but his mature work introduced a mystical feel to what was already exotic material. Reading Lévi-Strauss—like reading parts of Foucault or Lacan—there was a sense of a prophet hinting at deep truths.42 Lévi-Strauss may have felt that he was being crudely misrepresented. “Structuralism, sanely practiced, doesn’t carry a message, it doesn’t hold a master key, it doesn’t try to formulate a new conception of the world or even mankind; it doesn’t want to found a therapy or a philosophy,” he told a journalist from Le Monde. But the very fact that he felt the need to deny any greater meaning to his work spoke volumes.
Even professional anthropologists were not immune to the charismatic aspects of Lévi-Strauss’s thought. Claude Meillassoux remembered attending Lévi-Strauss’s seminars at the height of the Mythologiques project:I went to Lévi-Strauss’s courses at the Collège de France. He was the king who opened the door; the moment it seemed the philosophers’ stone had been found, he shut the door again and took up another subject in the next seminar. Still, it was fascinating because he came up with intellectually stimulating comparisons and combinations.43
At his most expansive, Lévi-Strauss talked in vast tracts of time, about Nature with a capital N, universal modes of thought, Buddhism, the death of art and the elimination of the self. Yet in his own mind he was a mere artisan of cultural inquiry, a scholar patiently documenting and analyzing indigenous myth. The more he protested, the more commentators and critics saw the outlines of a unified discourse that cut across not just the humanities, but contemporary culture and politics.
Some saw the rise of structuralism as not simply the birth of a new intellectual movement, but a reflection of contemporary France. After the traumatic end of the war in Algeria, France had entered a period of stasis, headed by the elderly, sclerotically conservative General de Gaulle. Long buffeted by historical forces in the twentieth century, the country was returning to its provincial roots while quietly modernizing. Structuralism’s closed, inert systems fit a time when French history was thinning out, cooling, slowing down; its appeals to science, mathematics and geometry suited a technocratic age. As de Gramont put it in the New York Times, “Despite pronouncements of General de Gaulle in both hemispheres, France no longer has much influence in world affairs. De Gaulle seems in fact to want to freeze history . . . perhaps he will be remembered as the first structuralist chief of state.”44
The argument was given a political twist in a piece by François Furet writing for the left-liberal journal Preuves. Furet linked the rise of structuralism with the decline of Marxist political aspiration. Revolution was no longer in the air, de Gaulle’s smothering orderliness having silenced the Left.45 Sartre, finding his footing after the attacks in La Pensée sauvage, put it more strongly—structuralism was “the last barrier that the bourgeoisie can still erect against Marx.”46
AS THE 1960S WORE ON, Lévi-Strauss was drawn deeper and deeper into the Mythologiques project. His identification with his work was complete. He rose at five each morning and entered into a communion with the indigenous groups he was working on, inhabiting their world and their myths “as if in a fairytale.”47 The process was one of absolute immersion. “The myths reconstitute themselves through my mediation,” Lévi-Strauss told Raymond Bellour. “I try to be the place through which the myths pass. I allowed myself to be entirely and totally penetrated by the matter of the myths. I mean the myths existed more than I did during that period.”
Lévi-Strauss likened mythic elements to atoms, molecules, crystals and fragments of glass in a kaleidoscope, but in reality his method relied on intuition, flair and intellectual artistry—even chance. “You have to let the myth incubate for days, weeks, sometimes months,” he said in the 1980s, “before suddenly something clicks.”48 He also spoke of making notes on cards and then dealing them out at random in the hope of finding unexpected correlations.49 The artistic approach was seductive, but left many professional anthropologists—particularly Anglo-American ones—cold.
By the second volume of the Mythologiques quartet, Du miel aux cendres , some were losing patience. British anthropologist David Maybury-Lewis, then a professor at Harvard, was well placed to produce a critique of the evolving Mythologiques project. He was a Brazilianist who had done fieldwork among the Xavante and the neighboring Xerente in the mid-1950s—both Ge groups of central Brazil, closely related to the Bororo and squarely in the path of Lévi-Strauss’s analytical sweep. Although sympathetic to the structuralist approach, in 1960 he had written a detailed criticism of Lévi-Strauss’s essay “Do Dual Organizations Exist?” questioning him on both ethnographic and theoretical grounds, to which Lévi-Strauss had responded with a long and at times bruising rebuttal.50
In a review for American Anthropologist Maybury-Lewis described reading Du miel aux cendres as “one of the most exasperatingly onerous tasks I can remember assuming . . . What was pardonably experimental in Le Cru et le cuit,” he went on, “becomes frankly irritating in its sequel.” Du miel aux cendres was, indeed, a demanding book, which took Lévi-Strauss’s arguments further and further away from commonsense interpretation. Extending his fir
st-volume investigations into the origin of cooking, Lévi-Strauss injected two further symmetrically opposed elements, honey and tobacco. Honey as a foodstuff found ready-made in nature was “less than cooked,” positioned at “the near-side of cooking”; tobacco, being “more than cooked”—in fact vaporized into ashes and smoke—occupied a structural position at the “far-side of cooking.” They were sensually opposed, one wet and viscous, the other dry and crumbly, leading to further oppositions between rain and drought, glut and fasting. Honey, as nature’s temptation, represented the descent to the earth; tobacco, through the wafting of smoke upward, the ascent to the heavens—hence the interplay in myths between high/low, sky/earth, world/heaven. As Lévi-Strauss struck out beyond the core of Amerindian myths he had examined in Le Cru et le cuit, another, more fundamental set of oppositions was appearing: the logic of forms. Container/contained, empty/full, inside/out were thematic—as seen, for example, in the proliferation of empty and filled gourds; or, in a more complex contrast, in the tree trunk stripped of its bark set against bamboo: one a solid cylinder, the other a hollow envelope; one with an outer absence, the other an inner void. Du miel aux cendres had more mathematical formulae and pensée sauvage logic, as well as moments of poetry: frog is to bee as wet is to dry, for instance.
But Maybury-Lewis was not convinced. Too often the oppositions felt forced, only tenuously grounded in the ethnography. Lévi-Strauss seemed more intent on closing his own logical circuits than on faithfully rendering the beliefs of the indigenous peoples he was covering. Part of the problem was his prose style, which glided over contradictions, assumptions and unlikely associative leaps, “just as a conjurer’s patter distracts attention from what is really happening.”51
Claude Levi-Strauss: The Poet in the Laboratory Page 33