10: THE NEBULA OF MYTH
1 Lévi-Strauss in Eribon, Conversations, p. 35.
2 Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, vol. 1, pp. 228-29.
3 Claude Lévi-Strauss in Boutang and Chevallay, Claude Lévi-Strauss in His Own Words, 1:15:00.
4 Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Origin of Table Manners: Introduction to a Science of Mythology 3, John and Doreen Weightman, trans. (London: Jonathan Cape, 1978), p. 102.
5 Lévi-Strauss, “Entretien par Raymond Bellour,” in Oeuvres, p. 1657.
6 Lévi-Strauss in Eribon, Conversations, p. 132.
7 Ibid., p. 36.
8 Sebag had been undergoing psychoanalysis with Lacan when he fell in love with Lacan’s daughter Judith. After Lacan ended the sessions, Sebag shot himself in the face.
9 Lévi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked, p. 1.
10 Sanche de Gramont (aka Ted Morgan), “There Are No Superior Societies,” in The Anthropologist as Hero, ed. Hayes and Hayes, p. 16; originally published in the New York Times Magazine, January 28, 1968.
11 Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Naked Man: Introduction to a Science of Mythology 4, John and Doreen Weightman, trans. (London: Jonathan Cape, 1981), p. 25; De Gramont, “There Are No Superior Societies,” p. 17.
12 Lévi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked, p. 31.
13 Lévi-Strauss, “Entretien par Raymond Bellour,” in Oeuvres, p. 1664.
14 “Claude Lévi-Strauss in Conversation with George Steiner,” BBC Third Programme. In this interview with the BBC in 1965, Lévi-Strauss made this link explicit, telling Steiner that while mythic structures recurred, there might be “several species” of myths.
15 Lévi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked, pp. 3-6.
16 “Claude Lévi-Strauss in Conversation with George Steiner,” BBC Third Programme.
17 Lévi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked, p. 15.
18 Lévi-Strauss, The View from Afar, p. 219.
19 Lévi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked, p. 27.
20 Ibid., pp. 31-32.
21 Lévi-Strauss in Boutang and Chevallay, Claude Lévi-Strauss in His Own Words, 20:10.
22 D. Antonio Colbacchini, I Bororos Orientali: “Orarimugudoge” del Matto Grosso (Brasile), Torino, 1925. Just as Lévi-Strauss was finishing the final draft of Le Cru et le cuit, another important Salesian source became available, the first volume of the Enciclopédia Boróro, forcing him to delay publication until he had had a chance to read it and incorporate it into his analyses.
23 Lévi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked, p. 37.
24 Ibid., pp. 59, 64.
25 Claude Lévi-Strauss, From Honey to Ashes: Introduction to a Science of Mythology 2, John and Doreen Weightman, trans. (London: Jonathan Cape, 1973), p. 469.
26 Lévi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked, 1970, p. 335.
27 Ibid., p. 340.
28 Now collected in “Claude Lévi-Strauss: The View from Afar,” UNESCO Courier, no. 5, 2005, http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0016/001627/162711e.pdf.
29 See Boris Wiseman’s interesting discussion on this point, linking this idea with similar sentiments expressed by the symbolist poets Stéphane Mallarmé and Paul Valéry, in Lévi-Strauss, Anthropology and Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 202-3.
30 Merquior, From Prague to Paris, p. 128.
31 Also important was the work of Christian Metz, who introduced a Lacanian semiotic approach to film studies.
32 Anne-Christine Taylor, interview with the author, February 2007.
33 Dosse, History of Structuralism, vol. 2, p. xiii.
34 Ibid., pp. xiii-xiv.
35 Murphy, “Connaissez-vous Lévi-Strauss?” p. 165.
36 Lévi-Strauss in Eribon, Conversations, p. 76.
37 Bertholet, Claude Lévi-Strauss, p. 291.
38 Guy Sorman, “Lévi-Strauss, New Yorker,” City Journal, vol. 19, no. 4, November 6, 2009.
39 Lévi-Strauss, “Entretien par Raymond Bellour,” in Oeuvres, p. 1662.
40 De Gramont, “There Are No Superior Societies,” pp. 9-10. Lévi-Strauss would later question the quality of Foucault’s scholarship and would even go on to vote against Foucault’s entry into the Collège.
41 This, according to a letter he sent to Catherine Backès-Clément on May 30, 1970; see Bertholet, Claude Lévi-Strauss, p. 316.
42 Psychoanalyst Didier Anzieu expressed it well in relation to Lacan, who he felt was trapping students in an “unending dependence on an idol, a logic or a language, by holding out the promise of fundamental truths to be revealed but always at some further point, and only to those who continue to travel with him,” in a review of Jacques Lacan by Elisabeth Roudinesco (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1997), by Richard Webster, “Lacan Goes to the Opera” New Statesman (1996), vol. 126, November 7, 1997, p. 44(2).
43 Cited in Dosse, History of Structuralism, vol. 1, p. 271.
44 De Gramont, “There Are No Superior Societies,” p. 18.
45 François Furet, “Les Intellectuels français et le structuralisme,” L’Atelier de l’histoire, Flammarion, 1982, pp. 37-52; originally published in Preuves, no. 92, February 1967.
46 Dosse, History of Structuralism, vol. 1, p. 325.
47 Boris Wiseman and Judy Groves, Introducing Lévi-Strauss and Structural Anthropology (Cambridge: Icon Books, 2000), p. 132.
48 Lévi-Strauss in Eribon, Conversations, p. 133.
49 Ibid., p. viii.
50 See David Maybury-Lewis, “The Analysis of Dual Organizations: A Methodological Critique,” Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde, vol. 116, no. 1, 1960, pp. 17-44; Claude Lévi-Strauss, “On Manipulated Sociological Models,” in ibid., pp. 45-54. Both are available online at http://www.kitlv-journals.nl/.
51 David Maybury-Lewis, “Science or Bricolage?” in The Anthropologist as Hero, ed. Hayes and Hayes, pp. 162, 154-55.
52 This was in relation to a review of the following volume, The Origin of Table Manners , in the New Yorker, July 30, 1979, p. 85.
53 Maybury-Lewis, “Science or Bricolage?,” pp. 161-62.
54 Needham, interview with the author, February 2006.
55 Needham puts it more strongly: “Professor Lévi-Strauss formally declined to examine the translation before it went to press, and has likewise abstained from reading the proofs,” The Elementary Structures, 1969, p. xviii.
56 Needham, interview with the author, February 2006. The last-minute preface was compounded by other perceived slights—Needham said that when he wrote to Lévi-Strauss to let him know that he had burned all their correspondence, Lévi-Strauss wrote back saying that was fine, since there was nothing of any value there anyway. Needham said that, in person, he found Lévi-Strauss cold and not very forthcoming. When Lévi-Strauss came to Oxford to receive an honorary degree, Needham said, he never thanked anybody; he simply arrived, collected the degree and left—a description that does not tally with other people’s (including my) experiences with Lévi-Strauss. He was reserved and could be taciturn, depending on the circumstances, but he always made a point of being courteous.
57 Jeremy MacClancy, “Obituary: Rodney Needham, Oxford Social Anthropologist and Champion of Structuralism,” Independent, December 13, 2006. Part of the problem was Needham’s own extreme sensitivity and eccentricities, which produced many rifts in his working life. After a dispute with colleagues, he moved his library out of the anthropology department and never set foot there again, teaching instead out of All Souls and relaying messages into the department via the porter.
58 Lévi-Strauss, interview with the author, February 2007.
59 Ibid.
60 Lévi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked, p. 13.
61 Dosse, History of Structuralism, vol. 2, p. 15.
62 Sperber, On Anthropological Knowledge, p. 69.
63 Viveiros de Castro, “Entrevista: Lévi-Strauss nos 90,” p. 120.
64 Lévi-Strauss, From Honey to Ashes, p. 473.
65 Lévi-Strauss, The Naked Man, p. 291.
66 Ibid., p. 51
5.
67 Lévi-Strauss, The Origin of Table Manners, pp. 474-75.
68 Claude Lévi-Strauss, “Le triangle culinaire,” L’Arc, no. 26, 1965, pp. 19-29.
69 Lévi-Strauss, The Origin of Table Manners, p. 484.
70 Ibid., pp. 15-16.
71 Ibid., p. 469.
72 Ibid., p. 131.
73 Lévi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked, p. 26.
11: CONVERGENCE
1 Claude Lévi-Strauss in Eribon, Conversations, p. 142.
2 Cited in Dosse, History of Structuralism, vol. 2, p. 144.
3 “Man’s New Dialogue with Man,” Time.
4 Although Foucault was not in Paris during the May ’68 protests (he was working at the University of Tunis), on his return he would become actively involved in the protest movement, siding with students at the newly established university, Paris VIII at Vincennes, where he was head of the philosophy department.
5 Calvet, Roland Barthes, pp. 163-70.
6 “Le structuralisme, a-t-il été tué par Mai ’68?” Le Monde, November 30, 1968.
7 Georges Balandier cited in François Dosse, History of Structuralism, vol. 2, p. 152.
8 Lévi-Strauss, interview for L’Express, in Diacritics, p. 45.
9 Bertholet, Claude Lévi-Strauss, p. 283.
10 Except for lectures given over the 1968-69 academic year, in which Lévi-Strauss examined Salish mythological themes involving fire/water and fog/wind, which he would cover later in Histoire de Lynx (1991).
11 Lévi-Strauss, The Naked Man, p. 35.
12 Ibid., p. 624.
13 Ibid., p. 510; “nous comprenons pourquoi c’est lui, entre tous les mythes américains disponibles, qui s’est imposé à nous avant même que nous en sachions la raison,” L’Homme nu (Paris: Plon, 1971), p. 458.
14 Lévi-Strauss in Eribon, Conversations, pp. 136-37.
15 The reason he gave for having used nous was to reduce the subject to “the insubstantial place or space where anonymous thought can develop, stand back from itself, find and fulfill its true tendencies and achieve organisation, while coming to terms with the constraints inherent in its very nature,” in Lévi-Strauss, The Naked Man, p. 625.
16 Lévi-Strauss was drawing on the work of American scientist J. E. Amoore in the 1950s. In fact Amoore argued that only the first five smells were based on the molecule shape-receptor model; the last two, putrid and pungent, were recognized by their electrical charge. Other models of the perception of smell have since been proposed, including Luca Turin’s vibration theory, which forms the basis of Chandler Burr’s popular nonfiction book The Emperor of Scent (Random House, 2003).
17 Lévi-Strauss, The Naked Man, p. 692.
18 Lévi-Strauss in Boutang and Chevallay, Claude Lévi-Strauss in His Own Words, 1:24:00.
19 Lévi-Strauss in Eribon, Conversations, p. 84.
20 Pierre Maranda, “Une fervente amitié,” in Claude Lévi-Strauss, ed. Michel Izard, p. 56.
21 “Réponse de M. Roger Caillois au discours de M. Claude Lévi-Strauss,” Académie française, June 27, 1974, http://www.academie-francaise.fr/immortels/discours_reponses/caillois.html.
22 Ibid.
23 See Maranda, “Une fervente amitié,” p. 55; Bertholet, Claude Lévi-Strauss, pp. 397-98.
24 Claude Lévi-Strauss letter to Denis Kambouchner, cited in “Lévi-Strauss and the Question of Humanism,” in The Cambridge Companion to Lévi-Strauss, ed. Boris Wiseman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 37.
25 Bertholet, Claude Lévi-Strauss, p. 369.
26 Cited in Pace, Claude Lévi-Strauss: The Bearer of Ashes, p.193.
27 Count Gobineau was a thinker whom Lévi-Strauss greatly admired and whose ideas he had used in both La Pensée sauvage and L’Homme nu. Lévi-Strauss believed that Gobineau had been wrongly overlooked for holding views that, although unacceptable today, were commonplace in his own time. See Lévi-Strauss’s discussion in Didier Eribon, Conversations, pp. 145-63.
28 Cited in Pace, Claude Lévi-Strauss, pp. 193-94.
29 Lévi-Strauss, “Reflections on Liberty,” The View from Afar, p. 280.
30 Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, p. 106; Eribon, Conversations, p. 3.
31 According to Maranda, in “Une fervente amitié,” p. 54.
32 Lévi-Strauss in Eribon, Conversations, p. 165, translation modified.
33 “Claude Lévi-Strauss in Conversation with George Steiner,” BBC Third Programme.
34 Lévi-Strauss, The Way of the Masks, pp. 5-8.
35 Pierre Maranda, an anthropologist interested in the structural approach, had met Lévi-Strauss several times in the 1960s, and in 1968 ended up working at Lévi-Strauss’s invitation as an associate director of studies at the École pratique des hautes études en sciences sociales; see his homage to his long friendship with Lévi-Strauss in Maranda, “Une fervente amitié,” pp. 52-75.
36 Lévi-Strauss, Saudades do Brasil, p. 17.
37 For a brief and lucid demonstration of this, see Lévi-Strauss’s discussion of a comparison between the Salish and the Kwakiutl masks and myths in Tom Shandel, Behind the Masks, National Film Board of Canada, 1973.
38 Maranda, “Une fervente amitié,” p. 57.
39 Lévi-Strauss in Didier Eribon, Conversations, p. 95.
40 Lévi-Strauss, The View from Afar, p. 235.
41 Claude Lévi-Strauss, Myth and Meaning (London: Routledge, 2006), pp. 7, 9.
42 Lévi-Strauss in Didier Eribon, Conversations, p. 91.
43 “Bernadette Bucher with Claude Lévi-Strauss, 30 June 1982,” American Ethnologist, vol. 12, no. 2, 1985, pp. 365-66.
44 Lévi-Strauss, interview with the author, March 2005.
45 Lévi-Strauss in Tom Shandel, Behind the Masks.
46 Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Jealous Potter (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 190.
47 Ibid., p. 186.
48 Ibid., p. 206.
49 Lévi-Strauss, “Le Coucher de soleil,” p. 12. In an earlier interview, Lévi-Strauss was more direct: “I am by temperament somewhat of a misanthrope”; see A. A. Akoun, F. Morin and J. Mousseau, “A Conversation with Claude Lévi-Strauss,” p. 82.
50 Lévi-Strauss in Augé, “Ten Questions Put to Claude Lévi-Strauss,” p. 85.
51 Lévi-Strauss in Eribon, Conversations, pp. 87, 151.
52 Ibid., pp. 156-57.
53 Ibid., p. 151.
54 Ibid., p. 94.
55 See Lévi-Strauss, “Do Dual Organizations Exist?” Structural Anthropology, vol. 1, pp. 132-63. In a complex analysis he found that features previously dismissed as anomalies in so-called dual-organization societies were integral to their structure. He went on to argue that there were really two different types of dualism, diametric and concentric, mediated by a ternary structure.
56 Rodney Needham, “The birth of the meaningful,” Times Literary Supplement, April 13, 1984.
57 Cited in Tambiah, Edmund Leach, p. 253.
58 Lévi-Strauss in Boutang and Chevallay, Claude Lévi-Strauss in His Own Words, 1:15:00.
59 Lévi-Strauss, Oeuvres, pp. 1572-73.
60 Merquior, From Prague to Paris, p. 191.
61 Cited in Didier Eribon, Michel Foucault (London: Faber and Faber, 1992), p. 161.
62 Lévi-Strauss, Myth and Meaning, p. 47.
63 Claude Lévi-Strauss, “Entretien,” Le Monde, February 22, 2005.
64 Lévi-Strauss, Saudades do Brasil, p. 142.
65 Ibid., p. 9.
66 Clifford Geertz, Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988), pp. 25-26.
EPILOGUE
1 Lévi-Strauss cited in Paul Hendrickson, “Claude-Lévi Strauss: Behemoth from the Ivory Tower,” Washington Post, February 24, 1978.
2 Claude Lévi-Strauss in Didier Eribon, “Visite à Lévi-Strauss,” Le Nouvel Observateur, no. 1979, October 10, 2002: http://tempsreel.nouvelobs.com/actualite/opinion/00030882.EDI0001 /visite-a-levi-strauss.html.
3 James M. Ma
rkham, “Paris Journal: A French Thinker Who Declines a Guru Mantle,” New York Times, December 21, 1987.
Claude Levi-Strauss: The Poet in the Laboratory Page 43