55 Claude Lévi-Strauss, “Souvenir of Malinowsky [sic],” VVV, no. 1, 1942, p. 45.
56 Lévi-Strauss in Eribon, Conversations, p. 36.
57 Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Scope of Anthropology, (London: Jonathan Cape, 1967), p. 44.
58 Lévi-Strauss in Eribon, Conversations, p. 38.
59 Ibid., p. 30.
60 Peter M. Rutkoff and William B. Scott, New School: a History of the New School for Social Research (New York: Free Press, 1986); Claus-Deiter Krohn, Intellectuals in Exile: Refugee Scholars and the New School for Social Research (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993); Emmanuelle Loyer, Paris à New York: intellectuels et artistes français en exil (1940-1947), (Paris : Grasset, 2005).
61 Isabelle Waldberg in Patrick Waldberg, Un amour acéphale: correspondance 1940- 1949 (Paris: Éditions de La Différance, 1992), pp. 184-85.
62 Lévi-Strauss, The View from Afar, p. 102.
63 The Marx comparison is taken from Robert Parkin, “Structuralism and Marxism,” in One Discipline, Four Ways: British, German, French and American Anthropology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), p. 209.
64 Lévi-Strauss in Eribon, Conversations, p. 43.
65 Lévi-Strauss, The View from Afar, p. 267.
66 See, for instance, Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini, What Darwin Got Wrong (London: Profile Books, 2010).
67 Lévi-Strauss in Eribon, Conversations, p. 41.
68 François Dosse, History of Structuralism, vol. 1, The Rising Sign, 1945-1966 (Minneapolis, Minn., and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), p. 53.
69 Bengt Jangfeldt, “Roman Jacobson in Sweden 1940-41,” Cahiers de l’ILSL, no. 9, pp. 141-49; Andrew Lass, “Poetry and Reality: Roman O. Jakobson and Claude Lévi-Strauss,” in Artists, Intellectuals and World War II: The Pontigny Encounters at Mount Holyoke College, 1942-1944, ed. Christopher Benfey and Karen Remmler (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2006), pp. 173-84.
70 Lévi-Strauss, “Cahiers du terrain,” Archives de Lévi-Strauss, Bibliothèque nationale de France, boxes 4-6; “langue semble différente”: “Cahiers du terrain,” Campos Novos (2e quinzaine août 1938), box 6.
71 Lévi-Strauss, interview for L’Express, in Diacritics, p. 47.
72 Lévi-Strauss in Eribon, Conversations, p. 114.
73 Roman Jakobson, Six Lectures on Sound and Meaning (Hassocks: Harvester Press, 1978), p. 19.
74 Ibid., p. 20.
75 Ibid., p. 66.
76 Lévi-Strauss in ibid., “Preface,” p. xiii.
5 : ELEMENTARY STRUCTURES
1 Lévi-Strauss, “The family,” in Man, Culture and Society, Harry L. Shapiro, ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), p. 357.
2 Fournier, Marcel Mauss, p. 345.
3 Lévi-Strauss in Jean-Marie Benoît, “Claude Lévi-Strauss Reconsiders: From Rousseau to Burke,” Encounter, no. 53, July 1979, p. 20.
4 Denis de Rougemont, Journal des deux mondes (Paris: Gallimard, 1948), pp. 151-53.
5 Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, vol. 1, pp. 226, 257.
6 Ibid., p. 261.
7 Lévi-Strauss in Le Magazine littéraire, no. 223, October 1985, p. 23.
8 Mehlman, Emigré New York, p. 133.
9 Lévi-Strauss in Eribon, Conversations, p. 5.
10 Lévi-Strauss, Oeuvres, p. 1689.
11 Ibid., p. 46.
12 Lévi-Strauss, “Autoportrait,” p. 13.
13 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962), pp. 91-93.
14 Mehlman, Emigré New York, p. 184.
15 Ibid., p. 181.
16 Lévi-Strauss in Eribon, Conversations, p. 45.
17 Claude Lévi-Strauss, “L’Analyse structurale en linguistique et en anthropologie,” Word: Journal of the Linguistic Circle of New York, vol. 1, no. 2, August 1945, pp. 1-21, reprinted in Structural Anthropology, vol. 1, pp. 31-54.
18 Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, vol. 1, pp. 34, 46.
19 That is, societies in which descent is traced through the mother.
20 For Lévi-Strauss, the maternal uncle was a structural shorthand for a “wife-giver”—a role that could fall to others in the group. See his clarification of this point in Claude Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, vol. 2, Monique Layton, trans. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978), p. 83.
21 Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, vol. 1, p. 42.
22 Thanks go to my brother Hugo for this sentence.
23 Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, vol. 1, p. 50.
24 Annie Cohen-Solal, “Claude L. Strauss in the United States,” Partisan Review, vol. 67, no. 2, 2000, p. 258.
25 Lévi-Strauss, The Way of the Masks, p. 10.
26 Lévi-Strauss in Eribon, Conversations, p. 48.
27 Lévi-Strauss in Bertholet, Claude Lévi-Strauss, p. 162.
28 Claude Lévi-Strauss, “The Use of Wild Plants in Tropical South America,” Handbook of South American Indians: Physical Anthropology, Linguistics and Cultural Geography of the South American Indians, vol. 6, ed. Julian Steward (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1963), pp. 465-86.
29 Cohen-Solal, “Claude L. Strauss in the United States,” pp. 258-59.
30 Lévi-Strauss, The View from Afar, p. 266.
31 Entry dated March 13, 1947, in Métraux, Itinéraires 1, p. 171.
32 Lévi-Strauss in Eribon, Conversations, p. 56.
33 Cited in James Atlas, Bellow: A Biography (London: Faber & Faber, 2000), p. 138.
34 Michel Foucault in David Macey, The Lives of Michel Foucault (London: Hutchinson, 1993), p. 33.
35 Lévi-Strauss cited in Bertholet, Claude Lévi-Strauss, p. 180.
36 In Fournier, Marcel Mauss, pp. 349, 423.
37 Le Magazine littéraire, no. 223, October 1985, p. 23.
38 Lévi-Strauss, The Elementary Structures of Kinship, James Harle Bell, John Richard von Sturmer, and Rodney Needham, trans. (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1969), p. 125. Lévi-Strauss cites Australian anthropologist W. E. H. Stanner, though selectively. When Stanner began fieldwork in the Daly River settlement in the Northern Territory in 1932, he wrote: “I was impressed by their genuine bewilderment and the comical expressions they wore when they found, after a vain attempt to work out the terms by clear marks in the soil, that they could not remember.” See Melinda Hinkson, “The Intercultural Challenge of W. E. H. Stanner’s First Fieldwork,” Oceania, vol. 75, no. 3, March-June 2005, p. 198.
39 Lévi-Strauss, Elementary Structures, p. xxiii.
40 Ibid., p. 12. Or, as he later put it: “The incest prohibition is thus the basis of human society; in a sense it is the society,” in “The Scope of Anthropology,” Structural Anthropology, vol. 2, p. 19.
41 Mauss, The Gift, pp. 77-78.
42 Lévi-Strauss, Elementary Structures, p. 454.
43 Ibid., p. 51.
44 Subsequently rephrased by Lacan as, “It’s not the women, but the phalluses that are exchanged,” in Dosse, History of Structuralism, vol. 1, p. 118.
45 Lévi-Strauss in Eribon, Conversations, p. 105. Cf. a clear statement to the contrary in Lévi-Strauss’s early piece for the linguistic journal Word (“L’Analyse structurale”): “In human society, it is the men who exchange women, and not vice versa,” in Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, vol. 1, p. 47.
46 Lévi-Strauss, Elementary Structures, p. 124.
47 Ibid., p. 443.
48 Ibid., p. 497.
49 Simone de Beauvoir, “L’être et la parenté,” cited in Le Magazine littéraire, hors-série no. 5, 4e trimestre, 2003, p. 60.
50 Ibid., p. 63. The la refers to oeuvre.
51 Georges Bataille, Eroticism, Mary Dalwood, trans. (London: Penguin, 2001), pp. 200-201.
52 According to American anthropologist Robert F. Murphy, “Les Structures was issued in a printing so limited that it was soon exhausted. Those in libraries either fell apart (the work was miserably manufactured) or were stolen, and the few remaining copies were treasured by
their owners the way bootlegged copies of Henry Miller used to be,” in “Connaissez-vous Lévi-Strauss?” Saturday Review, May 17, 1969, pp. 52-53, reprinted in The Anthropologist as Hero, ed. E. Nelson Hayes and Tanya Hayes (Cambridge, Mass., and London: MIT Press, 1970), p. 165.
53 Dosse, History of Structuralism, vol. 1, pp. 18-19.
54 Non-French-speaking anthropologists did, however, have an English summary of Elementary Structures, written by the Dutch anthropologist Josselin de Jong, who, independently of Lévi-Strauss, had been toying with the same ideas in relation to ethnographic data in Indonesia.
55 In Stanley J. Tambiah, Edmund Leach: An Anthropological Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 114-15.
56 From Cambridge University Anthropological Ancestors interviews at http://www.dspace.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/25. The specifics of the argument are highly complex. See Leach’s original article, “The Structural Implications of Matrilineal Cross-Cousin Marriage,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, vol. 81, 1951, pp. 166-67; and Tambiah’s summary in Edmund Leach, p. 117.
57 Edmond Leach, “Claude Lévi-Strauss—Anthropologist and Philosopher,” New Left Review, vol. I/34, November-December 1965, p. 20.
58 Lévi-Strauss, Elementary Structures, p. 49, footnote 5. Lévi-Strauss was responding to a similar criticism made by David Maybury-Lewis.
59 See Arthur P. Wolf and William H. Durham, eds., Inbreeding, Incest, and the Incest Taboo (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), p. 5.
60 See Maurice Godelier’s Métamorphoses de la parenté (Paris: Fayard, 2004); and Jack Goody’s review, “The Labyrinth of Kinship,” New Left Review, vol. I/36, November- December 2005.
61 Claude Lévi-Strauss, “Entretien par Raymond Bellour,” in Lévi-Strauss, Oeuvres, p. 1659.
62 Lévi-Strauss, Elementary Structures, p. xxvii.
63 See, for instance, Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked, p. 10: “In Les Structures , behind what seemed the superficial contingency and incoherent diversity of the laws governing marriage, I discerned a small number of simple principles, thanks to which a very complex mass of customs and practices . . . could be reduced to a meaningful system.”
6: ON THE SHAMAN’S COUCH
1 Claude Lévi-Strauss, “Witch-doctors and psychoanalysis,” UNESCO Courier, no. 5, 2008, pp. 31-32.
2 “Claude Lévi-Strauss: A Confrontation,” New Left Review, vol. I/62, July-August 1970, originally published as “Réponse à quelques questions,” Esprit, no. 322, November 1963.
3 Claude Lévi-Strauss, “The Sorcerer and His Magic,” in Structural Anthropology, vol. 1, pp. 167-85.
4 Claude Lévi-Strauss, “The Effectiveness of Symbols,” in ibid., pp. 186-205.
5 Lévi-Strauss, “Witch-doctors and Psychoanalysis,” pp. 31-32.
6 Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, vol. 1, p. 204.
7 Claude Lévi-Strauss, An Introduction to the Work of Marcel Maus, Felicty Baker, trans. (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987), p. 45.
8 Claude Lefort, “L’Échange et la lutte des hommes,” Les Formes de l’histoire (Paris: Gallimard, 1978), p. 17; originally published in Les Temps modernes, no. 64, February 1951, pp.1400-17.
9 Lévi-Strauss, The Scope of Anthropology, p. 50.
10 Lévi-Strauss in Eribon, Conversations, p. 49.
11 Jonathan Judaken, Jean-Paul Sartre and the Jewish Question (Lincoln, Neb.; Chesham: University of Nebraska Press, 2006), p. 69.
12 Lévi-Strauss in Eribon, Conversations, p. 50.
13 Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, Picador, p. 165.
14 Ibid., p. 166.
15 Ibid., pp. 175, 176.
16 Claude Lévi-Strauss, “Kinship Systems of the Chittagong Hill Tribes (Pakistan),” Southwestern Journal of Anthropology, vol. 8, no. 1, Spring 1952, pp. 40-51; “Miscellaneous Notes on the Kuki of the Chittagong Hill Tracts, Pakistan,” Man, vol. 51, December 1951, pp. 167-69.
17 Lévi-Strauss, Oeuvres, p. 1689.
18 Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, Picador, p. 169.
19 Ibid., pp. 161-62.
20 Ibid., p. 179.
21 Lévi-Strauss in Eribon, Conversations, p. 50.
22 Ibid., p. 102.
23 Claude Lévi-Strauss, Anthropology and Myth: Lectures 1951-1982, Roy Willis, trans. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984), p. 2.
24 For an account of Descola’s ordeal, see Philippe Descola, The Spears of Twilight: Life and Death in the Amazon Jungle, Janet Lloyd, trans. (London: HarperCollins, 1996), pp. 22-23.
25 Philippe Descola, interview with the author, February 2007.
26 Lévi-Strauss, Anthropology and Myth, p. 199.
27 Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, vol. 1, p. 71. The notion that the brain might be made up of separate, semi-independent functions has in fact gained adherents since Lévi-Strauss ridiculed the idea in the 1950s; see Jerry Fodor’s The Modularity of Mind: An Essay on Faculty Psychology (Cambridge, Mass.; London: MIT Press, 1983).
28 Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, vol. 1, p. 70.
29 For tools, for instance, he proposed a scheme of analysis that involved three layers of differences: the way the tool was used (to strike, rub or cut); its leading edge (sharp, blunt or serrated); and how it was manipulated (with perpendicular, oblique or circular movements). Lévi-Strauss, in An Appraisal of Anthropology Today, Sol Tax et al., eds. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), p. 293.
30 Ibid., p. 294.
31 Ibid., p. 321.
32 Ibid., pp. 349-52.
33 Elisabeth Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan & Co: A History of Psychoanalysis in France, 1925-1985, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), p. 560.
34 Bertholet, Claude Lévi-Strauss, p. 209.
35 Claude Lévi-Strauss, Race et histoire (Paris: Gonthier, 1968), pp. 46-50.
36 At the Collège, the sacred had been conceived not so much in religious terms, but as anything that inspired a heightened sensitivity, whether it was awe, fear or fascination. In keeping with Bataille’s own intellectual obsessions, eroticism and death were thematic. The group was dedicated to resacralizing society, fusing it with the human energies that modernity had bleached out. Caillois became obsessed with the image of the female praying mantis, twisting her head back to devour her mate, an image he likened to the femme fatale in fiction—a woman luring her partner to his death.
37 Lévi-Strauss in Eribon, Conversations, p. 85.
38 Roger Caillois, “Illusion à rebours,” La Nouvelle revue française, no. 24, December 1954, pp. 1010-24; and no. 25, January 1955, pp. 58-70.
39 In Claudine Frank, ed., The Edge of Surrealism: A Roger Caillois Reader (Durham, N.C., and London: Duke, 2003), p. 48.
40 Caillois, “Illusion à rebours,” pp. 67-70.
41 Claude Lévi-Strauss, “Diogène couché,” Les Temps modernes, no. 110, 1955, p. 1214.
42 Alfred Métraux in Bertholet, Claude Lévi-Strauss, p. 219.
43 Lévi-Strauss in Eribon, Conversations, p. 85.
44 Lévi-Strauss, “Diogène couché,” pp. 1218-19.
7: MEMOIR
1 Pierre Mac Orlan, La Vénus Internationale (Paris: La Nouvelle Revue Française, 1923), pp. 236-37.
2 Jan Borm, Jean Malaurie: un homme singulier (Paris: Éditions du Chêne, 2005), pp. 53, 56.
3 Vincent Debaene, “Atelier de théorie littéraire: La collection Terre humaine: dans et hors de la literature,” Fabula, March 1, 2007: http://www.fabula.org/atelier.php?La_collection_Terre_humaine%3A_dans_et_hors_de_la_litt%26eacute%3Brature.
4 Lévi-Strauss, Le Magazine littéraire, no. 223, October 1985, p. 24.
5 Dosse, History of Structuralism, vol. 1, p. 130.
6 “Auto-portrait de Claude Lévi-Strauss,” in Claude Lévi-Strauss, éditions inculte, 2006, p. 183; originally published in a special edition of the journal L’Arc dedicated to the work of Lévi-Strauss, see L’Arc, no. 26, 1965.
7 Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, Picador, p. 543.
8 “Voyages =
même chose et contraire d’une psychoanalyse”: “Tristes Tropiques: Docs préparatoires 10/10 carnet vert,” Archives de Lévi-Strauss, Bibliothèque national de France, p. 56.
9 Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, Picador, p. 256: “In this charming civilisation, the female beauties trace the outlines of the collective dream with their make-up; their patterns are hieroglyphics describing an inaccessible golden age, which they extol in their ornamentation, since they have no code in which to express it, and whose mysteries they disclose as they reveal their nudity.”
Claude Levi-Strauss: The Poet in the Laboratory Page 41