Claude Levi-Strauss: The Poet in the Laboratory (31 page)
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Authors: Patrick Wilcken
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BOOK: Claude Levi-Strauss: The Poet in the Laboratory
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In his concluding remarks at the symposium, Lévi-Strauss was asked to sketch anthropology’s progress so far and its prospects for the future, a task that he warmed to with an interesting take on the discipline’s formation. In the past, anthropology had fed off the scraps, the garbage left over by the established disciplines. In the Middle Ages virtually anything outside Europe was considered, in a philosophical sense, anthropological. With the rise of classical studies, mainstream scholars commandeered Indian and Chinese thought, restricting anthropology to Africa, Oceania and South America. In the modern setting, professional anthropology has been pushed further to the fringes, scavenging in the dustbins of academia. Paradoxically, the “ragpickers” had found gold. Driven to the extremes of human culture, anthropology was now on the point of making profound intellectual discoveries. (Margaret Mead took immediate exception to what she saw as Lévi-Strauss’s equation between indigenous culture and garbage, but his analogy was innocent. It was meant only in the sense that anthropologists were rummaging through the offcuts of other disciplines, as he subsequently explained, “picking up odds and ends.”)
Kant had envisaged the world as a division between the “starry skies” (Newtonian physics) and “moral law” (Kant’s own philosophy); anthropology, via linguistics, Lévi-Strauss concluded, was poised to unite these realms into a federated union of diverse, but related, disciplines:
Linguists have already told us that inside our mind there are phonemes and morphemes revolving, one around the other, in more or less the same way as planets go around the solar system; and it is in the expectation that this unification may take place that I feel anthropology may really have a meaningful and important function not only in the development of modern society but also in the development of science at large.
32
By the early 1950s, Lévi-Strauss’s vision was filling out. He believed that he was living in an era of massive theoretical convergence. In Paris he was meeting regularly with Jacques Lacan, the mathematician Georges Guilbaud and the linguist Émile Benveniste in cross-disciplinary discussions around the concept of structures and how principles in mathematics could be carried over into the human sciences.
33
His seminar course at the École had become a magnet for a new generation of thinkers exploring crossover ideas and soaking up findings from ethnography. Discussions ranged from linguistics to psychoanalysis, mathematics to atomic physics, but the core remained anthropology. Through structural analysis, Lévi-Strauss believed anthropology could become a kind of meta-science, capable of discovering not just the foundations of human cultural exchange, but deep laws that resonated through nature. In spite of career setbacks, he had a research program; it now even had a name. “If you had to pick a date for the birth of Lévi-Straussian structuralism,” wrote his Swiss biographer, Denis Bertholet, “it would be 1952: the articles of that year, in the universal ambition that they bring, mark the moment when the suffix ‘-ism’ can be legitimately added, in the history of thought, to the adjective ‘structural.’”
34
33
His seminar course at the École had become a magnet for a new generation of thinkers exploring crossover ideas and soaking up findings from ethnography. Discussions ranged from linguistics to psychoanalysis, mathematics to atomic physics, but the core remained anthropology. Through structural analysis, Lévi-Strauss believed anthropology could become a kind of meta-science, capable of discovering not just the foundations of human cultural exchange, but deep laws that resonated through nature. In spite of career setbacks, he had a research program; it now even had a name. “If you had to pick a date for the birth of Lévi-Straussian structuralism,” wrote his Swiss biographer, Denis Bertholet, “it would be 1952: the articles of that year, in the universal ambition that they bring, mark the moment when the suffix ‘-ism’ can be legitimately added, in the history of thought, to the adjective ‘structural.’”
34
HIS GRAYING HAIR RECEDING, Lévi-Strauss was now in his mid-forties, hitting the middle-aged plateau. His youth had been disjointed, but ambitious. He had led the largest anthropological expedition of its time across Brazil and had lectured in São Paulo, New York and Paris. His kinship thesis had been published to wide acclaim. After a period of instability, his life was coming together again. From 1952, Lévi-Strauss mixed academic work with a new job, akin to his posting as cultural attaché in New York. Through Métraux, he was nominated as secretary-general of the International Social Science Council at UNESCO. The work was an empty ritual: “I tried to give the impression that an organization without goal or function had a reason for existing,” Lévi-Strauss remembered, a task made more difficult by the generous budgets, which “had to be justified with a semblance of activity.” After the breakup of his marriage to Rose-Marie Ullmo, Lévi-Strauss had begun a relationship with Monique Roman, whom he had met at Jacques Lacan’s house. Born of an American mother and a Belgian father, she was in her late twenties—eighteen years his junior—and was attending his course at the Sorbonne.
Reintegrated into Parisian intellectual life, Lévi-Strauss was becoming well known in certain circles—a relatively small set of interested specialists who attended his courses and spoke at his seminars. A solid, if unspectacular, career beckoned, as a middle-ranking academic surrounded by a coterie of disciples. His way forward would be unconventional for its times. In a sense Lévi-Strauss was forced to circumvent the university system in order finally to dominate it.
TWO KEY PUBLICATIONS enabled Lévi-Strauss to reach beyond the academy and find a new audience for his ideas: the short pamphlet
Race et histoire
(1952) and, far more important, his memoir,
Tristes Tropiques
(1955). Together they gave a layman’s version of what had been an involved, technical argument relayed largely in specialist journals. While
Race et histoire
drew Lévi-Strauss into a fiery and very public debate around some of the central tenets of anthropological orthodoxy,
Tristes Tropiques
fleshed out Lévi-Strauss’s public persona, transforming him from a promising academic into a revered intellectual figure.
Race et histoire
(1952) and, far more important, his memoir,
Tristes Tropiques
(1955). Together they gave a layman’s version of what had been an involved, technical argument relayed largely in specialist journals. While
Race et histoire
drew Lévi-Strauss into a fiery and very public debate around some of the central tenets of anthropological orthodoxy,
Tristes Tropiques
fleshed out Lévi-Strauss’s public persona, transforming him from a promising academic into a revered intellectual figure.
Race et histoire
, commissioned by Alfred Métraux at UNESCO, was one of a series of pamphlets that formed a part of the UN’s project to combat racism. It was a cultural relativist manifesto outlining positions that had been well rehearsed for many years in professional anthropological circles, but which were less known to the general public. Lévi-Strauss’s main target was the nineteenth-century notion of cultural evolution, which had survived into the 1950s as the commonsense understanding of human history. This was the story of steady progression from primitive hunter-gatherer bands, through to more sophisticated agricultural settlements, then on to classical empires, culminating in the great European civilizations.
, commissioned by Alfred Métraux at UNESCO, was one of a series of pamphlets that formed a part of the UN’s project to combat racism. It was a cultural relativist manifesto outlining positions that had been well rehearsed for many years in professional anthropological circles, but which were less known to the general public. Lévi-Strauss’s main target was the nineteenth-century notion of cultural evolution, which had survived into the 1950s as the commonsense understanding of human history. This was the story of steady progression from primitive hunter-gatherer bands, through to more sophisticated agricultural settlements, then on to classical empires, culminating in the great European civilizations.
Aside from being highly conjectural, this version of events was merely a trick of perspective, argued Lévi-Strauss, the product of a distorted, ethnocentric vision. It was impossible to compare cultures, as each had specialized in different areas, working for solutions to different problems. Lévi-Strauss likened the process to the spin of a roulette wheel in a casino. The same numbers brought different yields, depending on the bets laid. Working their own systems, many cultures had succeeded where the West had failed. Inuits and the Bedouin had excelled at life in inhospitable climates; other cultures were thousands of years ahead of the West in terms of integrating the physical and the mental, with yoga, Chinese “breath-techniques” and “the visceral control of the ancient Maoris.” Australian Aborigines, traditionally seen as at the bottom of the evolutionary ladder, had one of the most sophisticated kinship systems in existence. Polynesians had specialized in soilless agriculture and transoceanic navigation; philosophy, art and music had flourished in different ways around the globe.
35
35
The counterattack came from Roger Caillois, a writer, sociologist and founding editor of the interdisciplinary journal
Diogène
. Superficially, Caillois’s life had closely paralleled Lévi-Strauss’s. In the interwar years he had mixed academia with surrealism, joining Bataille and Leiris in the short-lived experiment of the Collège de sociologie, set up to pursue Mauss’s research into the sociology of the sacred, which combined surrealism and anthropology.
36
On the outbreak of the Second World War, Caillois found himself stranded in Argentina, where he taught and wrote. Like Lévi-Strauss, he had headed into the backlands, roving as far afield as Patagonia, subsequently writing eloquent accounts of his journeys. They met after the war in New York, when Lévi-Strauss, then cultural attaché, invited Caillois to give a talk. Both became acolytes of Dumézil; both developed a fascination for mythology. Their paths crossed again when they went head-to-head for Marcel Mauss’s old chair, which Lévi-Strauss had ended up securing. Erudite, cultured, an intense thinker and poetic writer, Caillois could have been Lévi-Strauss’s alter ego. “We ought to have got along,” recalled Lévi-Strauss.
37
Diogène
. Superficially, Caillois’s life had closely paralleled Lévi-Strauss’s. In the interwar years he had mixed academia with surrealism, joining Bataille and Leiris in the short-lived experiment of the Collège de sociologie, set up to pursue Mauss’s research into the sociology of the sacred, which combined surrealism and anthropology.
36
On the outbreak of the Second World War, Caillois found himself stranded in Argentina, where he taught and wrote. Like Lévi-Strauss, he had headed into the backlands, roving as far afield as Patagonia, subsequently writing eloquent accounts of his journeys. They met after the war in New York, when Lévi-Strauss, then cultural attaché, invited Caillois to give a talk. Both became acolytes of Dumézil; both developed a fascination for mythology. Their paths crossed again when they went head-to-head for Marcel Mauss’s old chair, which Lévi-Strauss had ended up securing. Erudite, cultured, an intense thinker and poetic writer, Caillois could have been Lévi-Strauss’s alter ego. “We ought to have got along,” recalled Lévi-Strauss.
37
But despite their similar formations, Caillois had come to radically different conclusions than Lévi-Strauss, which he explored in a critical review of
Race et histoire
, published in two parts in
La Nouvelle revue française
.
38
By the 1950s Caillois had cast off his youthful infatuation with surrealism, the irrational, the primitive, and was beginning to reassess his own sympathies. Surrealists and anthropologists like Lévi-Strauss saw their own society as sullied and hypocritical, and had naïvely sought purity, “safe at the opposite ends of the geographical spectrum.”
39
For Caillois, Lévi-Strauss’s veneration of preliterate cultures at the expense of the West was a question of inverse ethnocentrism—a twentieth-century disease of decadence and cultural malaise. Lévi-Strauss had perversely exaggerated the achievements of primitive societies. The complexities of aboriginal kinship systems said nothing about the aboriginal cultures themselves. What
was
an achievement, argued Caillois, was anthropology’s attempts to model them. The West’s openness to other cultures, the very existence of a discipline such as anthropology, was, for Caillois, a clear sign of superiority.
40
Race et histoire
, published in two parts in
La Nouvelle revue française
.
38
By the 1950s Caillois had cast off his youthful infatuation with surrealism, the irrational, the primitive, and was beginning to reassess his own sympathies. Surrealists and anthropologists like Lévi-Strauss saw their own society as sullied and hypocritical, and had naïvely sought purity, “safe at the opposite ends of the geographical spectrum.”
39
For Caillois, Lévi-Strauss’s veneration of preliterate cultures at the expense of the West was a question of inverse ethnocentrism—a twentieth-century disease of decadence and cultural malaise. Lévi-Strauss had perversely exaggerated the achievements of primitive societies. The complexities of aboriginal kinship systems said nothing about the aboriginal cultures themselves. What
was
an achievement, argued Caillois, was anthropology’s attempts to model them. The West’s openness to other cultures, the very existence of a discipline such as anthropology, was, for Caillois, a clear sign of superiority.
40
In “Diogène couché,” published in
Les Temps modernes
, Lévi-Strauss responded, launching a violent, thirty-three-page assault on Caillois. He reiterated his position, charging Caillois with crude ethnocentrism, accusing him of underestimating the mental efforts that went into constructing and sustaining so-called primitive cultures. Referring to his opponent as “M. Caillois” throughout, Lévi-Strauss pulled no punches. “America had its McCarthy and we have our McCaillois,”
41
he wrote, portraying Caillois as a dangerously paranoid apologist for the West. The debate—a classic progressive-conservative battle in the culture wars of 1950s France—rumbled on in the following issue, which published an exchange of letters between Caillois and Lévi-Strauss. “The Caillois-Lévi-Strauss controversy has been the big event in Parisian literary circles,” Métraux wrote in a letter to the photographer and self-taught ethnographer Pierre Verger. “Lévi-Strauss’s response is a masterpiece of reasoning, language and cruelty.”
42
Les Temps modernes
, Lévi-Strauss responded, launching a violent, thirty-three-page assault on Caillois. He reiterated his position, charging Caillois with crude ethnocentrism, accusing him of underestimating the mental efforts that went into constructing and sustaining so-called primitive cultures. Referring to his opponent as “M. Caillois” throughout, Lévi-Strauss pulled no punches. “America had its McCarthy and we have our McCaillois,”
41
he wrote, portraying Caillois as a dangerously paranoid apologist for the West. The debate—a classic progressive-conservative battle in the culture wars of 1950s France—rumbled on in the following issue, which published an exchange of letters between Caillois and Lévi-Strauss. “The Caillois-Lévi-Strauss controversy has been the big event in Parisian literary circles,” Métraux wrote in a letter to the photographer and self-taught ethnographer Pierre Verger. “Lévi-Strauss’s response is a masterpiece of reasoning, language and cruelty.”
42
Caillois’s piece had clearly hit a nerve. “It made me very angry,” Lévi-Strauss recalled.
43
Years later, Caillois remembered being shocked, rendered speechless by the vehemence of the counterattack. The aggressiveness was, indeed, out of character for Lévi-Strauss, but an undercurrent of defensiveness ran beneath the rhetoric. Perhaps the most wounding of all Caillois’s criticisms was the accusation that Lévi-Strauss had been part of a group that was surrealist before being ethnographic. The implication was that Lévi-Strauss was an intellectual lightweight, following a poorly thought-out avant-garde vogue for the exotic, rather than a solid anthropological position.
43
Years later, Caillois remembered being shocked, rendered speechless by the vehemence of the counterattack. The aggressiveness was, indeed, out of character for Lévi-Strauss, but an undercurrent of defensiveness ran beneath the rhetoric. Perhaps the most wounding of all Caillois’s criticisms was the accusation that Lévi-Strauss had been part of a group that was surrealist before being ethnographic. The implication was that Lévi-Strauss was an intellectual lightweight, following a poorly thought-out avant-garde vogue for the exotic, rather than a solid anthropological position.
Lévi-Strauss conceded that he was an “autodidact” where fieldwork was concerned, but distanced himself from the surrealists. He admitted to contributing articles to their magazines, but said that he had never really collaborated with them; he knew Breton, but their ideas were “completely different.”
Maneuvering himself away from the avant-garde, Lévi-Strauss repositioned himself in far less controversial territory—back to the very French tradition of using primitive cultures as “tuning forks” in philosophical debates. His intellectual interest in the “primitive” was more classical, a part of a genealogy running from Montaigne and Rabelais and passing through Swift, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Voltaire and Diderot, “a tradition of Western thought that presses an exoticism, real or imaginary, into service for a social criticism.” Contemporary fascination for the primitive was not merely a symptom of a twentieth-century
crise de conscience
, as Caillois had argued, but one that had produced classics such as
Essais
,
Discours sur l’origine de l’inégalité
and
Candide
. “I am not the person Caillois thinks I am,” Lévi-Strauss concluded with a rhetorical flourish, writing that perhaps this person, “a wavering surrealist, an amateur ethnographer, a muddleheaded radical”—
surréaliste velléitaire, ethnographe amateur, agitateur brouillon
—was closer to Caillois himself.
44
crise de conscience
, as Caillois had argued, but one that had produced classics such as
Essais
,
Discours sur l’origine de l’inégalité
and
Candide
. “I am not the person Caillois thinks I am,” Lévi-Strauss concluded with a rhetorical flourish, writing that perhaps this person, “a wavering surrealist, an amateur ethnographer, a muddleheaded radical”—
surréaliste velléitaire, ethnographe amateur, agitateur brouillon
—was closer to Caillois himself.
44
Lévi-Strauss was fighting for credibility, for gravitas in a small academic world that had already rebuffed him. He was trying to build his reputation as a serious academic, steering anthropology in a more rigorous, scientific direction. In this context, Caillois’s charge of being a dilettante was wounding. But Lévi-Strauss would soon find that it was Caillois who was out of step with the mood of the nation. Its confidence destroyed by the years of occupation, France was about to suffer a further string of defeats, as the age of empire sped toward its conclusion.
7
Memoir
A man lives two existences. Until the age of forty-five he absorbs the elements surrounding him. Then, all of a sudden, it’s over; he doesn’t absorb anything more. Thereafter he lives the duplicate of his first existence, and tries to tally the succeeding days with the rhythms and the odours of his earlier active life.
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