Claude Levi-Strauss: The Poet in the Laboratory (18 page)

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Authors: Patrick Wilcken

Tags: #Biographies & Memoirs, #Professionals & Academics, #Social Scientists & Psychologists, #History, #Americas, #South America, #Brazil, #Politics & Social Sciences, #Anthropology, #Cultural

BOOK: Claude Levi-Strauss: The Poet in the Laboratory
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The visit climaxed with the performance of what Lévi-Strauss described as a kind of operetta, “an exotic version of
Les Noces
.” The chief, becoming possessed, began impersonating a series of different characters in what Lévi-Strauss likened to alternating arias, leitmotifs and brooding melodies reminiscent of Gregorian chants. Through an interpreter, Lévi-Strauss apparently followed the convoluted plot—which involved the
japim
bird, various forest animals, and “a stick, a pestle and a bow”—sufficiently difficult to test the most proficient native linguist, working through Portuguese, a language in which Lévi-Strauss was never comfortable. Nevertheless, he managed to fill twenty pages of his notebook with the plot, and also jotted down more than forty airs, corresponding to different characters.
62
The performance was Wagnerian in scale, lasting eight hours over two nights. At the end, the chief, exhausted and in a deep possession, rushed at his wife with a knife and had to be restrained as she fled into the forest.
63
The chief’s near-homicidal finale marked the end of the ethnographic part of Lévi-Strauss’s journey. The return trip took them through a string of rubber-tapping villages. At Urupá, as they waited for a motorboat to take them to the Madeira River, Vellard threatened to leave early and make his own way overland. “This will completely disrupt our plans—it amounts to absurd and condemnable obstinacy,” wrote Castro Faria in his diary.
64
In the event, they talked Vellard around and made their way by boat to Jacaré. Once on the Madeira, they were back on a steamship, which transported them up to Porto Velho. It was the end of the line for Castro Faria, who took a steamer down the Amazon to Belém, from where he traveled back to Rio. Lévi-Strauss and Vellard boarded an amphibious plane for Cochabamba in Bolivia. In a light aircraft filled with peasants tending chickens, hens and ducks, they braved Bolivia’s domestic services before recrossing the border at Corumbá and heading back up to Cuiabá. By January 1939, Lévi-Strauss was back in Utiariti, where the Nambikwara were building huts for the rainy season. It was time to wind up the expedition. Laden with his ethnographic collections, his truck heaved its way back to Cuiabá, from where he freighted crates of indigenous artifacts down to São Paulo. Lévi-Strauss would never again return to the field.
65
 
 
“THE TRIP WAS LONG AND DIFFICULT,” wrote Lévi-Strauss to Mário de Andrade back in São Paulo, “but I will never forget these eight months; they were full of fascinating experiences. In scientific terms I think we brought back good material, a lot of it new—material that will profoundly change current thinking. I sincerely believe that the expedition will make its mark.”
66
From a professional perspective, though, Lévi-Strauss’s fieldwork fell well short of the standards of the time. It had been considerably shorter than he had originally planned. One year had shrunk to eight months—two of which were spent in Cuiabá preparing the mule train and equipment. Illness, accidents and logistical problems had pared contact time down even further. He spent a large amount of the remaining time describing and collecting indigenous artifacts, something he later regretted. When he had been preparing his expedition at the Musée de l’Homme, Marcel Mauss had instilled in him “a truly mystic reverence for the cultural object”; in the field he had felt duty-bound to focus on material culture, hampering his work on beliefs and institutions.
67
Even among the Nambikwara, on whom he would subsequently base one of his theses, practical problems prejudiced the research. A few snatched months of observation, captured through an interpreter via Portuguese, could hardly measure up to the kind of in-depth ethnography that was already being produced by British and American anthropologists.
As the discipline of anthropology matured through the twentieth century, Lévi-Strauss’s enterprise aged rapidly. By the 1950s no serious anthropologist could have gotten away with such a whimsical journey, dotted with brief periods of contact with a series of indigenous groups. In the intimate settings of the ethnographic encounter, the expedition’s sheer scale militated against the collection of data. Much later, in an interview he gave to the BBC in the mid-1960s, Lévi-Strauss was at pains to claim that he had worked in a very different way. Asked if the very presence of ethnographers changed the culture they studied, Lévi-Strauss responded:
Of course if you send an enormous anthropological team into a small tribe with photographers, cameraman, tape recorders and the like, you would alter the culture. I’ve never worked that way and I don’t believe in working that way. I think that the anthropologist, and I am still Malinowskian in that respect, should work alone with as little apparatus as possible, just a notebook and a pencil and make himself as unobtrusive as possible.
68
 
But after retirement, he responded to his critics with disarming frankness. “I don’t want to overemphasize the importance of my fieldwork,” he said in an interview at the end of the 1990s. “I did more than certain critics allege, but I am the first to admit that in total my work is still modest.” He described the paucity of material that he came away with on the Nambikwara as “fieldwork taken to its negative limit” and likened his experiences in the field to self-analysis undertaken as a part of psychoanalytic training.
69
The months spent traveling through the Brazilian interior took him into the discipline’s subconscious; it gave him insights into the process of writing ethnography and expertise in evaluating the work of others. It would aid his subsequent modus operandi—a kind of meta-ethnography, based not so much on his own fieldwork as on large-scale comparisons, pooling data on indigenous peoples from around the world and synthesizing the findings. “Finally, why not admit it?” he concluded to Didier Eribon in the late 1980s. “I realised early on that I was a library man, not a fieldworker.”
70
Interview-based research was indeed never ideal for his more traditional, academic sensibility. He found the whole process of ethnography intrusive, involving “an embarrassing degree of indiscretion.”
71
Of those involved in the expedition, Castro Faria left the fullest impressions of Lévi-Strauss in the field. In a late interview he characterized Lévi-Strauss as a philosopher, a man of ideas who had stoically endured the fieldwork experience as a kind of unpleasant induction into the profession. “It was the price Lévi-Strauss paid to be recognized as a real anthropologist,” Castro Faria explained to a journalist with the French newspaper
Libération
.
As the saying goes, he wasn’t cut out for the job. He had difficulties communicating, and that made it boring for him to be so far from civilization, from his own comforts . . . The expedition was actually more like traveling than doing fieldwork: there were months of preparation for very brief periods with indigenous groups . . . For Lévi-Strauss, it was difficult to accept such uncomfortable conditions. Camps were set up and dismantled all the time, it was too much for him. He was truly a “philosopher among the Indians.”
72
 
Castro Faria eulogized the Brazilian doctor and anthropologist Roquette-Pinto, who had traveled with Rondon through Mato Grosso and had written what is still considered a classic ethnography of the region. He was also impressed with Lévi-Strauss’s wife—“Our findings would have been very different had Dina Lévi-Strauss stayed with us”—and said that the expedition suffered greatly when she was forced to return to São Paulo. I put this to Lévi-Strauss, seated on a modern black leather sofa in the study of his sixteenth-arrondissement apartment. His response was unequivocal: “Dina had no interest in ethnology. In her heart of hearts she was a philosopher, not an ethnologist.” Her active role at the University of São Paulo and then in the field was more a question of strategy than passion. “São Paulo and Brazil were virgin territory,” Lévi-Strauss explained.
“
To be cynical, we were occupying the terrain. She took on folklore and physical anthropology; I took on sociology.”
73
By far his most trenchant critic, though, was Vellard. He had disliked the general disorganization of the voyage, had never gotten along with Castro Faria and had fallen ill with malaria in the latter stages of the expedition. His assessment was blunt: “The expedition was a complete failure,” he told Alfred Métraux.
 
 
LÉVI-STRAUSS’S FIELDWORK was indeed limited—but it added up to far more than the mere stamping of his anthropological papers. He had explored Brazil, traveling thousands of kilometers by rail, car and mule train, traversing jungles on horseback, in canoes and on foot, in an era when backland travel was difficult and dangerous. He was a gifted writer and photographer who, with scant materials, produced iconic portraits of a range of Brazilian tribes. Unlike the fixation on the minutiae of a single group that often makes ethnography virtually unreadable outside specialist circles, Lévi-Strauss’s vivid descriptions of the Caduveo, Bororo, Nambikwara, Mundé and Tupi-Kawahib revealed the richness and variation of Brazilian indigenous culture, which he likened to “a kind of Middle Ages which lacked a Rome: a confused mass that emerged from a long-established, doubtless very loosely textured syncretism.”
74
Much has been made of the brevity of his contact time, but as the French anthropologist Alban Bensa wryly remarked, “Anthropologists can spend ten years in the field and end up with nothing interesting to say.” In contrast, Lévi-Strauss was “a good observer, and more importantly an intelligent analyzer of his own observations.”
75
 
ON THE EVE of his return to Europe, Lévi-Strauss went down to Santos to meet fellow Americanist Alfred Métraux, who was stopping off in Brazil for a few hours on the way to Argentina. They had exchanged letters, but this was the first time they would meet in person—the beginning of what was to become a long, close friendship. They left behind a ramshackle port teeming with prostitutes and strolled along the sweeping sands of Santos’s beachfront. Métraux’s first impressions were lukewarm:
Lévi-Strauss arrived. He looked like a Jew who had stepped out of an Egyptian painting: the same nose and a beard trimmed
à la sémite
. I found him cold, stilted, in the French academic style . . . Lévi-Strauss hated Brazil. He thought Vargas was an unprincipled dictator who just wanted to cling on to power. His dictatorship was essentially a police state. Lévi-Strauss saw no hope in South America. He was almost inclined to see in this failure a kind of cosmic curse. He had decided to leave Brazil, where all work seemed impossible.
76
 
Lévi-Strauss had had his fill. President Vargas’s Estado Novo (1937-45), modeled on Salazar’s dictatorship in Portugal, had seen Brazil turn into a country of secret police, informants and phone tapping. The regime had banned political parties and begun jailing left-wing dissidents. There was suspicion about foreigners, who had to register with the police, justifying their presence in the country. Censors went though their letters, some of which were mysteriously “lost” in the post. Although it lacked the aggression and energy of Mussolini’s Italy or Nazi Germany, Brazilian fascism was nevertheless stultifying and toxic to a young left-leaning intellectual like Lévi-Strauss.
All that remained for him to do was to pack up and leave for France. This was easier said than done. In a farcical coda to the bureaucratic wrangles with the Museu Nacional, when he tried to board the ship for Europe, Lévi-Strauss was arrested and confined to his cabin by a Brazilian naval officer, accompanied by two officers carrying rifles with fixed bayonets. The dispute was over export licenses for the ethnographic materials Lévi-Strauss was taking out of the country. In the hold lay the fruits of his research—irreplaceable artifacts, books and field notes—now in danger of being seized and left behind on the docks. The matter was eventually settled when he explained that, as agreed, he had left half the expedition’s artifacts with a scientific institute in São Paulo .
77
Part of Vellard’s collection, however, including indigenous bones, native hummingbirds and a selection of invertebrates, was impounded.
The ship set sail, stopping off in Rio de Janeiro, Vitória and Salvador, where Lévi-Strauss disembarked and strolled the famous streets of the city’s historic center, the Pelourinho. Outside one of the hundreds of baroque churches that spread out through the upper quarter of the port of Salvador, he stopped to take pictures, followed by a group of “half-naked negro boys” begging him to have their photo taken. He took a few snaps, only to be arrested and briefly detained again for defaming Brazil. “The photograph, if used in Europe, might possibly give credence to the legend that there were black-skinned Brazilians, and that urchins of Bahia went about barefoot,” Lévi-Strauss later wrote in his memoir.
78

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