Claude Levi-Strauss: The Poet in the Laboratory (27 page)
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BOOK: Claude Levi-Strauss: The Poet in the Laboratory
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Against this often byzantine backdrop, Lévi-Strauss proposed a series of simple, all-binding principles. The “elementary structures” in question had a linguistics-like rigor to them. Defined in the very first sentence of the book’s preface, they were either systems that “prescribe marriage with a certain type of relative or . . . which divide them into two categories, viz., possible spouses or prohibited spouses.”
39
The key was incest avoidance. For Lévi-Strauss, the incest taboo was
the
social rule, from which all kin systems flowed. It distinguished humanity’s rule-bound existence from nature’s promiscuity; it marked the passage from nature to culture. In a mysterious way, the incest taboo was “at once on the threshold of culture, in culture, and in one sense . . . culture itself.”
40
39
The key was incest avoidance. For Lévi-Strauss, the incest taboo was
the
social rule, from which all kin systems flowed. It distinguished humanity’s rule-bound existence from nature’s promiscuity; it marked the passage from nature to culture. In a mysterious way, the incest taboo was “at once on the threshold of culture, in culture, and in one sense . . . culture itself.”
40
Lévi-Strauss took his second principle from Marcel Mauss’s influential
Essai sur le don
(
The Gift
), which argued that reciprocity was a central feature of all “primitive” societies. According to Mauss, there were no truly free or pointless gifts. Drawing from the ethnographic record, he showed that all gifts were really social symbols, imbued with a power that bound groups together in mutual obligation and solidarity. “Things create bonds between souls,” wrote Mauss, “for the thing itself has a soul, is part of the soul.” Sometimes gifts were simply swapped between clans; in more complex societies, they traveled along elaborate chains of givers and receivers. The drive toward reciprocity was not merely custom, it was deep-rooted and intuitive. Observing gift-giving was “to catch the fleeting moment when the society and its members take emotional stock of themselves and their situation as regards others.”
41
Essai sur le don
(
The Gift
), which argued that reciprocity was a central feature of all “primitive” societies. According to Mauss, there were no truly free or pointless gifts. Drawing from the ethnographic record, he showed that all gifts were really social symbols, imbued with a power that bound groups together in mutual obligation and solidarity. “Things create bonds between souls,” wrote Mauss, “for the thing itself has a soul, is part of the soul.” Sometimes gifts were simply swapped between clans; in more complex societies, they traveled along elaborate chains of givers and receivers. The drive toward reciprocity was not merely custom, it was deep-rooted and intuitive. Observing gift-giving was “to catch the fleeting moment when the society and its members take emotional stock of themselves and their situation as regards others.”
41
Reworking this idea, Lévi-Strauss argued that, in kin systems, women operated as gifts. The incest taboo stimulated their constant circulation between groups; reciprocity structured their movements. In mathematical terms, incest was the limit of reciprocity, “the point at which it cancels itself out.”
42
Observance of the prohibition set up a displacement effect, which rippled through the system: “As soon as I am forbidden a woman, she thereby becomes available to another man, and somewhere else a man renounces a woman who thereby becomes available to me.”
43
It was, therefore, a positive rule, driving out-marriage, forcing groups into complex alliances. What resulted was a finely equilibrated machine that seesawed between groups, rotating women down the generations.
42
Observance of the prohibition set up a displacement effect, which rippled through the system: “As soon as I am forbidden a woman, she thereby becomes available to another man, and somewhere else a man renounces a woman who thereby becomes available to me.”
43
It was, therefore, a positive rule, driving out-marriage, forcing groups into complex alliances. What resulted was a finely equilibrated machine that seesawed between groups, rotating women down the generations.
Focusing on a subset of ideal types, taken from Granet’s divisions between
chassé-croisé
(restricted exchange, or a more-or-less straight swap) and
échanges différés
(generalized exchange, or a longer chain), Lévi-Strauss took on a wholesale reinterpretation of the anthropological data he had patiently sifted through in the New York Public Library. What had been traditionally conceived of vertically, in terms of descent through the nuclear family, was upended. Placing exchange at the heart of the system gave Lévi-Strauss a panoramic view across interlocking kinship structures.
chassé-croisé
(restricted exchange, or a more-or-less straight swap) and
échanges différés
(generalized exchange, or a longer chain), Lévi-Strauss took on a wholesale reinterpretation of the anthropological data he had patiently sifted through in the New York Public Library. What had been traditionally conceived of vertically, in terms of descent through the nuclear family, was upended. Placing exchange at the heart of the system gave Lévi-Strauss a panoramic view across interlocking kinship structures.
In the more restricted system, the dualism that Lévi-Strauss had already noticed in Northwest Coast masks, Maori tattooing and Caduveo face painting seemed to be infused through whole social setups. As he had observed firsthand among the Bororo, the two halves of the village choreographed their reciprocal duties in an intricate interplay of give and take. In other societies the circuit was longer, more complicated and risky, involving four, eight or even sixteen groups in circuits of exchange. But it was also potentially more profitable, widening circles of alliances. The resulting structures were naturalized in indigenous sayings, appropriate unions likened in one instance to “a leech rolling toward a wound,” inappropriate ones to “water flowing up to its source.” Whole systems of symbolic relationships echoed kin structures, from the way a buffalo was carved up and distributed among relatives in Burma to the prevalence of twins in the native mythologies of tribes organized around moieties.
Just as the structural linguistic models had switched emphasis from terms to relations, so Lévi-Strauss performed the same shift for the social sciences. “The relationship of reciprocity which is the basis of marriage,” he wrote after a discussion of an apparent anomaly from the Trobriand Islands, “is not between men and women, but between men by means of women, who are merely the occasion of this relationship.”
44
Men, as both “the takers of wives and the givers of sisters,” “the authors and the victims of their exchanges,” were nodal points in a web of exchange; women an aspect of its workings. (Much later, when under attack from feminists for the apparent male-centric character of his kinship models, Lévi-Strauss casually inverted his terms: “One could just as well say that women exchange men; all you have to do is replace the plus sign with the minus sign and vice-versa—the structure of the system would not change.”)
45
44
Men, as both “the takers of wives and the givers of sisters,” “the authors and the victims of their exchanges,” were nodal points in a web of exchange; women an aspect of its workings. (Much later, when under attack from feminists for the apparent male-centric character of his kinship models, Lévi-Strauss casually inverted his terms: “One could just as well say that women exchange men; all you have to do is replace the plus sign with the minus sign and vice-versa—the structure of the system would not change.”)
45
As the book progressed, the analyses thickened. There are pages of kin diagrams—obscure repeat patterns, as if lifted from a native design, undulating in diagonals across the page. Rotating obligations and exchanges of women run clockwise and counterclockwise around circular diagrams, sometimes shifting into three dimensions, spinning on the equator of a sphere. Systems are subdivided into “harmonic” and “disharmonic,” according to the convergence or otherwise of residence and descent. In among colorful ethnographic examples, Lévi-Strauss illustrates native kin systems by drawing analogies to the Duponts of Paris and the Durands of Bordeaux—the only two families in a fictitious France. The principle of reciprocity is evoked both by the exchange of coconuts and dried fish in Polynesia and by an old Marseille café tradition whereby peasants swap their tumblers of wine before drinking.
The buildup of evidence is numbing, as is the language, twisting and turning through kinship conundrums of increasing complexity. At times examples read like a riddle: “In the great majority of cases there is marriage with the father’s sister’s daughter who is
at the same time
the mother’s brother’s daughter (where the father’s sister has married the mother’s brother).”
46
In other parts, kinship is pared down to a biblical simplicity: “All told, two men and two women; one man creditor, one man debtor; one woman received and one given.”
47
at the same time
the mother’s brother’s daughter (where the father’s sister has married the mother’s brother).”
46
In other parts, kinship is pared down to a biblical simplicity: “All told, two men and two women; one man creditor, one man debtor; one woman received and one given.”
47
In the end, Lévi-Strauss had mapped out a vast area, covering the Asian subcontinent, Siberia and Oceania, where elementary systems predominated. The geographical extent was supposedly arrived at “without prior design or foreknowledge,” although it was in effect a reinterpretation of previous research done by Frazer, William Rivers, Radcliffe-Brown and Granet, who had looked at distributions of the phenomenon of cross-cousin marriage. In the final pages he likened his analysis to that of the phonologist, drawing parallels between exchange and communication, women and words. For Lévi-Strauss, the properties of these structural systems were ingrained in a whole way of thinking. Kinship, as a rule-bound system operating below the threshold of consciousness, held up a mirror to the inner workings of the human mind.
Lévi-Strauss had sketched a world of rules and obligations, of imposed collaboration, of compulsory to-ing and fro-ing. Depending on which way you looked at it, this was either an expression of a long-lost instinct for community or a necessary but claustrophobic web of responsibilities. Lévi-Strauss left it to a final, mischievous paragraph of a five-hundred-page book to hint at the latter: “To this very day, mankind has always dreamed of seizing and fixing that fleeting moment when it was permissible to believe that the law of exchange could be evaded, that one could gain without losing, enjoy without sharing.” It was a perennial dream “eternally denied to man, of a world in which one might
keep to oneself
.”
48
keep to oneself
.”
48
For the appendix, Lévi-Strauss asked the mathematician André Weil, brother of the philosopher and writer Simone, to analyze a particularly convoluted Australian kinship system. The resulting rows of mathematical notation seemed a long way from actual human relations—the easy intimacy of the ashen-faced Nambikwara, rolling in the dust of their campsites—but, as the logical end point of Lévi-Strauss’s quest for abstraction, it was a fitting way to close out his first full-length book.
LES STRUCTURES ÉLÉMENTAIRES
created an impact well beyond academic circles. No doubt this was due to the book’s own structure—the broad, more accessible opening chapters on incest and reciprocity, adapted from lectures he had given in New York, gave the book a lofty intellectual flavor, before the descent into technical kinship analyses blotted out the narrative for all but a handful of specialists. But it was also due to Simone de Beauvoir’s early interest in the project. She had heard about
Les Structures élémentaires
even before it was published, through Leiris, who was working with Lévi-Strauss at the Musée de L’Homme. At the time de Beauvoir was finishing off writing
Le Deuxième sexe
(
The Second Sex
) and she wanted an overview of the latest anthropological research, so she arranged to spend a few days at Lévi-Strauss’s apartment going through the manuscript. It is unclear how useful
Les Structures élémentaires
was for de Beauvoir’s own book, since sections on anthropology in
Le Deuxième sexe
rely on an outdated nineteenth-century evolutionary scheme. But much later her thank-you note, in the form of a long, glowing review in
Les Temps modernes
—the highly influential journal of politics and philosophy founded by Jean-Paul Sartre in late 1945—would launch Lévi-Strauss’s ideas on the Parisian intellectual stage.
created an impact well beyond academic circles. No doubt this was due to the book’s own structure—the broad, more accessible opening chapters on incest and reciprocity, adapted from lectures he had given in New York, gave the book a lofty intellectual flavor, before the descent into technical kinship analyses blotted out the narrative for all but a handful of specialists. But it was also due to Simone de Beauvoir’s early interest in the project. She had heard about
Les Structures élémentaires
even before it was published, through Leiris, who was working with Lévi-Strauss at the Musée de L’Homme. At the time de Beauvoir was finishing off writing
Le Deuxième sexe
(
The Second Sex
) and she wanted an overview of the latest anthropological research, so she arranged to spend a few days at Lévi-Strauss’s apartment going through the manuscript. It is unclear how useful
Les Structures élémentaires
was for de Beauvoir’s own book, since sections on anthropology in
Le Deuxième sexe
rely on an outdated nineteenth-century evolutionary scheme. But much later her thank-you note, in the form of a long, glowing review in
Les Temps modernes
—the highly influential journal of politics and philosophy founded by Jean-Paul Sartre in late 1945—would launch Lévi-Strauss’s ideas on the Parisian intellectual stage.
The oft-quoted opening line set the tone: “For a long time French sociology has been slumbering; Lévi-Strauss’s book, which marks its dazzlingly awakening, must be hailed as a major event.”
49
This is not just a book for specialists, wrote de Beauvoir. Beyond the baffling diagrams lies the “mystery of society as a whole, the mystery of mankind itself.” No adulation was too great—the book was reminiscent of a young Marx; it reconciled Engels and Hegel. Strangely, de Beauvoir located Lévi-Strauss’s thought “in that great humanist mainstream, that considers human existence bearing within itself its own justification,” even claiming that it echoed certain existential arguments. Lévi-Strauss’s long battle against both humanism and existentialism had not yet begun, but was surely implicit in a text in which human lives dissolved into models, their most intimate decisions an epiphenomenon of the system. Philosophical contradictions notwithstanding, de Beauvoir was impressed. The final sentence of the review was a simple, unambiguous endorsement: “
Il faut la lire
” (It has to be read).
50
49
This is not just a book for specialists, wrote de Beauvoir. Beyond the baffling diagrams lies the “mystery of society as a whole, the mystery of mankind itself.” No adulation was too great—the book was reminiscent of a young Marx; it reconciled Engels and Hegel. Strangely, de Beauvoir located Lévi-Strauss’s thought “in that great humanist mainstream, that considers human existence bearing within itself its own justification,” even claiming that it echoed certain existential arguments. Lévi-Strauss’s long battle against both humanism and existentialism had not yet begun, but was surely implicit in a text in which human lives dissolved into models, their most intimate decisions an epiphenomenon of the system. Philosophical contradictions notwithstanding, de Beauvoir was impressed. The final sentence of the review was a simple, unambiguous endorsement: “
Il faut la lire
” (It has to be read).
50
Soon afterward, Georges Bataille wrote another long piece on
Les Structures élémentaires
, the incest taboo and eroticism, titled “The Enigma of Incest,” in the literary-philosophical review-journal
Critique
, which he had founded. In a largely positive review, Bataille included some uncharacteristic honesty when dealing with dense but supposedly great intellectual work:
Les Structures élémentaires
, the incest taboo and eroticism, titled “The Enigma of Incest,” in the literary-philosophical review-journal
Critique
, which he had founded. In a largely positive review, Bataille included some uncharacteristic honesty when dealing with dense but supposedly great intellectual work:
A dogged patience is called for, able to take in its stride the tangled data . . . It goes on and on and alas, it is desperately tedious: roughly two-thirds of Lévi-Strauss’s big volume are devoted to the detailed examination of the multiple permutations and combinations thought up by primitive humanity to resolve one problem, the problem of the distribution of women . . . Regrettably, I myself am obliged to enter this maze; for a clear conception of eroticism we must struggle out of the darkness that has made its significance so hard to assess.
51
A kind of aura developed around
Les Structures élémentaires
, aided by the fact that very few copies of the first edition were printed.
52
Looking back, French scholars remember it as a landmark publication, a parting of the waters for the humanities as a whole. Decades later, the French anthropologist Marc Augé recalled being impressed by the book’s “will to scientificity” and its “quest for the most encompassing model to account for phenomena that do not appear, initially, to be a part of the same categories of analysis.” “This was an important, decisive moment,” remembered the philosopher Olivier Revault d’Allonnes. “At the time I saw a confirmation of Marx in
Les Structures élémentaires de la parenté
.” Much later, after copies of the first edition had dried up, the anthropologist Emmanuel Terray remembered borrowing a friend’s first edition and transcribing the first hundred pages of the book by hand. For Terray,
Les Structures élémentaires
was as important as Freud’s
Interpretation of Dreams
and Marx’s
Das Kapital
.
53
Les Structures élémentaires
, aided by the fact that very few copies of the first edition were printed.
52
Looking back, French scholars remember it as a landmark publication, a parting of the waters for the humanities as a whole. Decades later, the French anthropologist Marc Augé recalled being impressed by the book’s “will to scientificity” and its “quest for the most encompassing model to account for phenomena that do not appear, initially, to be a part of the same categories of analysis.” “This was an important, decisive moment,” remembered the philosopher Olivier Revault d’Allonnes. “At the time I saw a confirmation of Marx in
Les Structures élémentaires de la parenté
.” Much later, after copies of the first edition had dried up, the anthropologist Emmanuel Terray remembered borrowing a friend’s first edition and transcribing the first hundred pages of the book by hand. For Terray,
Les Structures élémentaires
was as important as Freud’s
Interpretation of Dreams
and Marx’s
Das Kapital
.
53
Although much of
Les Structures élémentaires
was written in the United States and was based on American sources compiled in the New York Public Library, it took almost twenty years for the book to appear in English.
54
In the meantime, two French-speaking British anthropologists, Rodney Needham at Oxford and Edmund Leach at Cambridge, were reading the book in the original.
Les Structures élémentaires
was written in the United States and was based on American sources compiled in the New York Public Library, it took almost twenty years for the book to appear in English.
54
In the meantime, two French-speaking British anthropologists, Rodney Needham at Oxford and Edmund Leach at Cambridge, were reading the book in the original.
Needham had come across a copy of
Les Structures élémentaires
in Blackwell’s bookshop in Oxford and took it with him on his fieldwork among the Penan forest nomads of Sarawak in Borneo. “At that time the scene was arid in the humanities, staid, unexciting, dry,” he told me, sipping on a pint of ale at the Turf, the famous, low-beamed seventeenth-century tavern hidden down a series of meter-wide passageways in the heart of the Oxford colleges. “Suddenly there was this new wave—Lévi-Strauss, Dumézil, McLuhan, Borges—who breathed life into a flat postwar intellectual world.” To this meticulously tidy man, who kept cross-indexed scrapbooks of all his notes and publications, Lévi-Strauss’s formal modeling must have been immediately attractive. Needham recalled being “seduced” by Lévi-Strauss—a word that crops up repeatedly in intellectuals’ reminiscences of first coming across his work—and began developing his own brand of structuralist analysis in Britain.
Les Structures élémentaires
in Blackwell’s bookshop in Oxford and took it with him on his fieldwork among the Penan forest nomads of Sarawak in Borneo. “At that time the scene was arid in the humanities, staid, unexciting, dry,” he told me, sipping on a pint of ale at the Turf, the famous, low-beamed seventeenth-century tavern hidden down a series of meter-wide passageways in the heart of the Oxford colleges. “Suddenly there was this new wave—Lévi-Strauss, Dumézil, McLuhan, Borges—who breathed life into a flat postwar intellectual world.” To this meticulously tidy man, who kept cross-indexed scrapbooks of all his notes and publications, Lévi-Strauss’s formal modeling must have been immediately attractive. Needham recalled being “seduced” by Lévi-Strauss—a word that crops up repeatedly in intellectuals’ reminiscences of first coming across his work—and began developing his own brand of structuralist analysis in Britain.
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