ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
First and foremost I would like to thank my brother Hugo, whose contribution through many conversations and e-mail exchanges, as well as close readings of various drafts, was immense. I would also like to thank the late Professor Lévi-Strauss for meeting and corresponding with me, as well as allowing me access to his field notes and a manuscript of Tristes Tropiques. Professor Lévi-Strauss’s family kindly granted permission to use fieldwork images from the 1930s, as well as family portraits. Of the many people who shared their thoughts on the work of Professor Lévi-Strauss I would like to thank the late Rodney Needham, Philippe Descola, Anne-Christine Taylor, Alban Bensa, Jean-Patrick Razon, Dan Sperber, Marcelo Fiorini, Stephen Nugent, John Sturrock, John Hemming and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro.
I am grateful for a research grant from The Society of Authors, which funded one of my trips to France. A traveling fellowship from the Winston Churchill Trust gave me the opportunity to visit the region where Lévi-Strauss carried out his fieldwork. Special thanks go to Alfeu França for enduring a five-thousand-kilometer drive along the potholed roads of the Brazilian central west during this trip. In Mato Grosso, my thanks go to Ivar Busatto, Anna Maria and José Eduardo da Costa and João dal Poz.
I would also like to thank my agent, David Godwin, who from the outset believed passionately in this book and whose enthusiasm drove the project forward. At Penguin, thanks go to my editor, Laura Stickney, for her astute comments and the fantastic work of the production editor, Noirin Lucas. My editor at Bloomsbury, Bill Swainson, provided invaluable input, and production editor Emily Sweet nurtured the manuscript into print in the UK. Staff at the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris, the British Library in London, along with the Museu do Índio and the Museu de Astronomia e Ciências Afins in Rio de Janeiro provided professional assistance throughout.
I wrote sections of this book in Brazil, where I enjoyed the attentive hospitality of Maria Alice França, Zenir de Paula, Laura and Edyomar Vargas de Oliveira Filho. In London, Leila Monterosso helped my family through a difficult but inspiring phase of our life in 2008. As ever, my family in Australia has been a source of constant encouragement. I am also grateful for the contribution of Helen and Paul Godard in Nîmes.
Finally, I would like to thank my wife, Andreia, for her unconditional love and support throughout the long and bumpy process that book writing entails. Our daughter, Sophia, appeared halfway through the writing of this book and over the last two years steered it to its conclusion.
NOTES
INTRODUCTION
1 Cited in Lévi-Strauss and Didier Eribon, Conversations with Claude Lévi-Strauss, Paula Wissing, trans. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), p. 94 (hereafter Eribon, Conversations).
2 Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, John and Doreen Weighman, trans., (London: Picador, 1989), p. 277. This image, taken on Lévi-Strauss’s earlier expedition among the Bororo, is reproduced in Claude Lévi-Strauss, Saudades do Brasil: A Photographic Memoir, Sylvia Modelski, trans. (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1995), p. 87.
3 Lévi-Strauss’s wife Dina had left the expedition earlier, having contracted a virulent eye infection at the beginning of the trip.
4 See “Cahiers du terrain—Mai 1938,” Archives de Lévi-Strauss, Bibliothèque nationale de France.
5 Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques (Paris: Plon, 1971), p. 59.
6 Marc Augé, “Ten Questions Put to Claude Lévi-Strauss,” Current Anthropology, vol. 31, no. 1, February 1990, p. 86.
7 Pierre Dumayet with Claude Lévi-Strauss, “Claude Lévi-Strauss à propos de Soleil Hopi,” Lectures pour tous, April 15, 1959, http://www.ina.fr/art-et-culture/litterature/video/I00014610/claude-levi-strauss-a-propos-de-soleil-hopi.fr.html.
8 Eribon, Conversations, p. 59. Lévi-Strauss quotes the expression of his friend and fellow Americanist Alfred Métraux.
9 Ibid., p. vii.
10 Alfred Métraux, Itinéraires 1 (1935-1953): Carnets de notes et journaux de voyage (Payot, 1978), p. 41.
11 Françoise Héritier in “Claude Lévi-Strauss était ‘un passeur exceptionnel,’ ” Le Monde, November 4, 2009.
12 Lévi-Strauss, interview with the author, March 2005.
13 Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, Picador, p. 71; Claude Lévi-Strauss, Oeuvres, eds. Vincent Debaene et al, Gallimard: Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 2007, p. 47.
14 See Denis Bertholet, Claude Lévi-Strauss (Paris: Plon, 2003), p. 404.
15 Cited in David Pace, Claude Lévi-Strauss: The Bearer of Ashes (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983), p. 4.
1: EARLY YEARS
1 Marcel Fournier, Marcel Mauss, Jane Marie Todd, trans. (Princeton, N.J.: Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2006), p. 326.
2 Pablo Picasso cited in Françoise Gilot and Carlton Lake, Life with Picasso (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966), p. 257.
3 Marcel Mauss, The Gift, Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societie, Ian Cunnison, trans. (London: Cohen & West, 1954).
4 Mauss ran the institute along with the sociologist Paul Rivet and the philosopher and theorist on “primitive mentality” Lucien Lévy-Bruhl.
5 Fournier, Marcel Mauss, pp. 277-78.
6 Michel Leiris, L’ge d’homme (Paris: Gallimard, 1946), pp. 189-90; translation from Colin Nettelbeck, Dancing with de Beauvoir: Jazz and the French (Carlton, Victoria: Melbourne University Press, 2004), p. 113.
7 James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth Century Ethnography, Literature and Art (Cambridge, Mass., and London: University of Harvard Press, 1988), pp. 117-51.
8 See Vincent Debaene, “Les Surréalistes et le Musée d’ethnographie,” Labyrinthe, vol. 12, 2002 (http://labyrinthe.revues.org/index1209.html), for a discussion on this point.
9 Claude Lévi-Strauss in the documentary film by Pierre-André Boutang and Annie Chevallay, Claude Lévi-Strauss in His Own Words (Claude Lévi-Strauss par lui-même), Arte Éditions, 2008, time code 33:43.
10 From a 1973 interview with Jean-José Marchand for L’Office de Radiodiffusion-Télévision française (l’ORTF), reprinted in Lévi-Strauss: l’homme derrière l’oeuvre, ed. Emile Joulia, (Paris: Éditions Jean-Claude Lattès, 2008), p. 167.
11 Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, Picador, p. 300.
12 Lévi-Strauss in Eribon, Conversations, p. 6.
13 Levi-Strauss in Boutang and Chevallay, Claude Lévi-Strauss in His Own Words, 32:08.
14 Lévi-Strauss in Eribon, Conversations, pp. 93-94.
15 Ibid., p. 93.
16 Ibid., p. 172.
17 Claude Lévi-Strauss, The View from Afar, Joachim Neugroschel and Phoebe Hoss, trans. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985), p. 275.
18 Lévi-Strauss is referring here to Romains’s twenty-seven volume Les Hommes de bonne volonté (1932-46) novel cycle, set around the time of Lévi-Strauss’s childhood. The characters—the philosopher Pierre Jallez and the politician Jean Jerphanion—become friends as students at the École normale supérieure in the first volume and then reappear throughout the novels as commentators, discussing contemporary events and French society, in letters and on long walks through Paris.
19 Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, Picador, p. 494.
20 Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked: Introduction to a Science of Mythology 1, John and Doreen Weightman, trans. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), p. 15.
21 Interview with Jean-José Marchand for l’ORTF in Lévi-Strauss: l’homme derrière l’oeuvre, ed. Joulia, p. 174.
22 Vauxcelles had coined the terms fauvisme and cubisme (“Braque reduces figures, houses to geometric schemes, to cubes”) along with the less memorable tubisme to describe Léger’s tubular style, but was an arch-skeptic of modernism. He was cool toward Lévi-Strauss’s topic, but nevertheless encouraged him to write.
23 Lévi-Strauss in Eribon, Conversations, p. 172.
24 Ibid., p. 5.
25 Bertholet, Claude Lévi-Strauss, p. 28.
26 Claude Lévi-Strauss interview wi
th Philippe Simonnot, “Claude Lévi-Strauss: un anarchiste de droite,” L’Express, October 17, 1986.
27 Lévi-Strauss in Eribon, Conversations, p. 8.
28 See the interview with Jean-José Marchand for l’ORTF, reprinted in Lévi-Strauss: l’homme derrière l’oeuvre, ed. Joulia, pp. 170-71.
29 Cited in Bertholet, Claude Lévi-Strauss, p. 27.
30 Although not at that point integrated into the Sorbonne.
31 Claude Lévi-Strauss interview with Jean-José Marchand, Arte France TV, 1972. In a more acerbic mood, he told a Time magazine journalist in the 1960s that he had chosen philosophy “not because I had any true vocation for it, but because I had sampled other branches of learning and detested them, one and all,” in “Man’s New Dialogue with Man,” Time, June 30, 1967.
32 Lévi-Strauss in Boutang and Chevallay, Claude Lévi-Strauss in His Own Words, 31:25.
33 Bertholet, Claude Lévi-Strauss, p. 31.
34 Claude Lévi-Strauss, “Autoportrait,” Le Magazine littéraire, hors-série no. 5, 4e trimestre, 2003, p. 8; Eribon, Conversations, p. 8.
35 Lévi-Strauss in Eribon, Conversations, p. 15.
36 Bertholet, Claude Lévi-Strauss, p. 49.
37 Ibid., pp. 56-57.
38 Claude Lévi-Strauss, signed Georges Monnet, “Picasso et le Cubisme,” Documents, Picasso special edition, 1929-30, pp. 139-40.
39 Fournier, Marcel Mauss, p. 285.
40 A. A. Akoun, F. Morin and J. Mousseau, “A Conversation with Claude Lévi-Strauss,” Psychology Today, vol. 5, 1972, p. 83.
41 Bertholet, Claude Lévi-Strauss, p. 42; Lévi-Strauss: l’homme derrière l’oeuvre, ed. Joulia, p. 169.
42 Lévi-Strauss quoted in 1929 in Bertholet, Claude Lévi-Strauss, p. 44.
43 Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, Picador, p. 64.
44 Lévi-Strauss in Eribon, Conversations, p. 12.
45 Ibid., p. 11.
46 Ibid., p. 10.
47 Ibid., p. 13.
48 Pierre Dreyfus would go on to become CEO of Renault and serve under François Mitterrand as minister for industry.
49 Lévi-Strauss in Boutang and Chevallay, Claude Lévi-Strauss in His Own Words, 34:23.
50 Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, Picador, p. 69; Richard Fortey, “Life Lessons,” Guardian, April 7, 2005.
51 “three sources of inspiration” in Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, Picador, p. 71; “trois maîtresses” in Tristes Tropiques in Lévi-Strauss, Oeuvres, p. 46.
52 Claude Lévi-Strauss, “Ce que je suis,” Le Nouvel Observateur, June 28, 1980, p. 16.
53 Paul Nizan, Aden Arabie, Joan Pinkham, trans. (New York and London: Monthly Review Press, 1968), pp. 61, 65.
54 Véronique Mortaigne, “Claude Lévi-Strauss, grand témoin de l’Année du Brésil,” Le Monde, February 22, 2005.
55 Bertholet, Claude Lévi-Strauss, p. 71.
56 See James A. Boon, From Symbolism to Structuralism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1972), p. 144.
57 Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, Picador, pp. 55-56.
58 Jean Maugüé, Les Dents agacées (Paris: Éditions Buchet/Chastel, 1982), p. 76.
59 Quoted in Thomas E. Skidmore, “Lévi-Strauss, Braudel and Brazil: A Case of Mutual Influence,” Bulletin of Latin American Research, vol. 22, no. 3, 2003, p. 345.
60 Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, Picador, p. 21.
61 France Antarctique was an attempt to establish a French Protestant colony in Rio de Janeiro’s Guanabara Bay in 1555. The colony collapsed in religious acrimony before being routed by the Portuguese in 1560.
62 Bertholet, Claude Lévi-Strauss, p. 100.
63 Lévi-Strauss in Eribon, Conversations, p. 12.
64 Claude Lévi-Strauss, Myth and Meaning (London: Routledge, 2006), p. 47.
2: ARABESQUE
1 Lévi-Strauss, “Postscript to Chapter XV,” Structural Anthropology, Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf, trans. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), p. 332.
2 Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, Picador, p. 75.
3 Ibid., p. 87.
4 Maugüé, Les Dents agacées, p. 81.
5 Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, Picador, pp. 77-84.
6 Ibid., p. 96.
7 Ibid., p. 106.
8 Lévi-Strauss, interview with the author, March 2005.
9 Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, Picador, p. 104.
10 Ibid., p. 113.
11 Claude Lévi-Strauss, Saudades de São Paulo (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1996), p. 18.
12 Ibid., p. 43.
13 Oscar Niemeyer, The Curves of Time: The Memoirs of Oscar Niemeyer (London: Phaidon, 2000), p. 62.
14 “A Frenchman feels at home in Brazil,” wrote Louis Mouralis, a French travel writer who visited the northeast and São Paulo in the early 1930s; the “language is spoken widely; culture, assimilated unevenly but often well, is topic of conversation; customs and everyday opinions similar, with a more marked Iberian accent.” In Brazilian Mosaic: Portraits of a Diverse People and Culture, ed. G. Harvey Summ (Wilmington, Del.: SR Books, 1995), p. 102.
15 Lévi-Strauss, interview with L’Express, trans. Peter B. Kussell, in Diacritics, vol. 1, no. 1, Autumn 1971, p. 45.
16 Peter Fleming, Brazilian Adventure (London: World Books, 1940), p. 71.
17 Lévi-Strauss, Saudades do Brasil, p. 22.
18 Lévi-Strauss, Saudades de São Paulo, pp. 25, 51, 71, 80.
19 Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, Picador, p. 138; Lévi-Strauss, Saudades do Brasil, p. 20.
20 Maugüé, Les Dents agacées, p. 102.
21 Lévi-Strauss in Eribon, Conversations, p. 23.
22 Fournier, Marcel Mauss, p. 291.
23 Lévi-Strauss in Eribon, Conversations, p. 20.
24 Fernanda Peixoto, “Lévi-Strauss no Brasil: a formação do etnólogo,” Mana, vol. 4, no. 1, 1998, pp. 90-91.
25 Ibid., pp. 88-89.
26 Lévi-Strauss, interview with L’ Express, in Diacritics, p. 45.
27 Braudel cited in Thomas E. Skidmore, “Lévi-Strauss, Braudel and Brazil,” p. 345.
28 These included Sérgio Milliet, Rubens Borba de Moraes, Paulo Duarte and Mário de Andrade.
29 Dina was also the driving force behind the founding, with Andrade, of the Ethnographic and Folklore Society.
30 Cited in Dorothea Voegeli Passetti, Lévi-Strauss, Antropologia e arte: minúsculo- incomensurável (São Paulo: Editora da Universidade de São Paulo, 2008), pp. 85, 93.
31 Ibid., p. 82.
32 Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, Picador, p. 150.
33 Ibid., pp. 150-54.
34 Lévi-Strauss in Eribon, Conversations, p. 21.
35 Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, Picador, p. 197.
36 Ibid., p. 200.
37 Ibid., pp. 200-202.
38 Ibid., pp. 204-5.
39 Lévi-Strauss, Saudades do Brasil, p. 21.
40 Variously spelled Caduveu, Kaduveu, Kaduveo; I use Lévi-Strauss’s spellings for indigenous names throughout.
41 Dina Lévi-Strauss, “Tristes Tropiques: Docs préparatoires 2/10, récit du voyage São Paulo-Porto Esperança par Dina Lévi-Strauss,” Archives de Lévi-Strauss, Bibliothèque nationale de France, p. 2.
42 Ibid., p. 1.
43 Lévi-Strauss, Oeuvres, p. 1724.
44 Now a separate state, Mato Grosso do Sul.
45 Dina Lévi-Strauss, “Tristes Tropiques: Docs préparatoires,” p. 3.
Claude Levi-Strauss: The Poet in the Laboratory Page 39